Julian Dorey Podcast - #35 - John Rondi (AKA "Johnny Drinks")

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

John Rondi is a TikTok Influencer, Technologist, Alcohol Connoisseur, & Tech Entrepreneur. He is known for his TikTok Page, “Johnny Drinks,” (@johnrondi) and his app, Stunited.  John and his dad are behind the JD TikTok account, where they make extravagant cocktails, answer questions from fans about different drinks/alcohol, and promote fellow brands in the space. They also have their own line of bourbon called “Burning Chair Bourbon –– The Johnny Drinks Edition.” Back in 2017, John founded the Stunited app as a platform for college students to barter each other’s skills “under-the-table.” The app has had unprecedented active user growth over the past 6 months. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 5:27 - Discussion on the conversational podcast style; The Clubhouse app; Talking on the phone in 2021 21:01 - The Stunited app; The concept of “cheating” 38:39 -  Collaboration as innovation & Challenging traditional norms; “Nothing is ever used for 100% good” 44:44 - The danger Stunited was in when Corona hit and how John pivoted; Foreign Data Servers & TikTok 56:46 - Selling “Happiness”; Staying present in life and balancing it with optimizing your time as an entrepreneur 1:07:21 - TikTok in early 2019; TikTok’s brilliant marketing strategy; Snapchat Spotlight; Revisiting Vine; Paying creators; How the For You Page (FYP) on TikTok works; The TikTok Creator Fund 1:23:50 - The Johnny Drinks TikTok Page (@johnrondi on TikTok); How John and his dad launched the page and the first video that went viral; their line of Burning Chair Bourbon; How the TikTok algorithm works 1:41:58 - The Airbnb story and its parallels with John’s story; How Stunited has exploded in the wake of fresh funding; “People are great at pretending to be busy” 1:52:32 - Being honest with yourself about your value; Entrepreneurs vs. Intrepreneurs; Talking Anthony Fenu (from TRENDIFIER #30) , Riley Horvath, Justin Baker and their company Soar; the problem with only spending time around “like-minded individuals” 2:09:33 - How the entrepreneur term is now a dirty word; Why John always saw himself as “different”; The danger of wins turning into losses; The highs and lows of building a company 2:16:59 - Elon Musk’s recent quote on founding a startup; How to know who to listen to and who to ignore; The difference between “this is going to happen” and “this is happening” 2:27:56 - A business does not live inside of everyone; John’s mentality of always thinking there’s an easier way; The lack of empathy in society; Revisiting the early days of Stunited and how “it wasn’t ready”; Arrogance vs. Expertise 2:45:15 - The two sides of the phrase “fake it til you make it”; Discussing the podcast style of TRENDIFIER and true conversations; Being a true connector; What a true conviction sale looks like ~ YouTube EPISODES & ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over deliver. The feeling of, hey, this is going to happen versus, hey, this is happening are two different things. And I stared my, or I called my co-founder up one day and I was like, dude, holy shit, like it it's working like people are on the app and they're using it in the way that we expect them to like what the fuck's going on it's almost like a shock like you expected it to happen but it's here and and he looks at you and you're like yeah it's real like this is going on and it's still it's almost like a dream every time you look back and say we

achieved another milestone or it's progressing even more now and so once it starts to feel real for the outside world, because that's two different things, right? We mentioned about SOAR. Things are always happening in the background and nobody else sees that. And that's when the criticism comes and, hey, Johnny, you've been doing this for a while and nothing's really coming of it yet. And you haven't really progressed and that's okay. And I understand that they don't see that, But once they start to really see it, they're either going to say or they're going to stop saying it or their criticism doesn't make sense anymore. What's cooking, everybody?

I am joined in the bunker today by my buddy, Johnny Rondy. John Rondy is an entrepreneur, ladies and gentlemen. And no, he's not the kind of entrepreneur that Gary Vee says, grind, hustle, work hard, throw it in your Instagram bio, and poof, you're an entrepreneur. Not that kind. Not that kind at all. John Rondy is an entrepreneur who's been in the game with the same project since 2017 and that project that company is called Stunited I'm gonna let him tell you about Stunited today because I won't do

it justice but effectively it is an app that allows college students to save their time and some circles you know certain purists might say it's a cheating app but we won't go there actually we will today because that's exactly what it is. But it is very, very useful. And I guarantee you, if you went to college or if you are there, you did exactly what the app says it's going to do in an app now instead of actually having to do it yourself. I'll shut up. The second thing that John is known for is the Johnny Drinks TikTok page, which is a page that he stars on with his father. Now, the Johnny Drinks TikTok page is very, very interesting. And it's at John Rondi. It's not at Johnny Drinks. It's at J-O-H-N-R-O-N-D-I. But it's called Johnny Drinks. It's very, very

interesting, though, because great entrepreneurs, the best, are people who find a way to be as resourceful as possible to see their vision through. And the fact of the matter is, like many people around the world, when coronavirus hit, it hit at a very bad time for Stunited and threatened to potentially end the company. So John, great entrepreneur that he is, whipped out his camera and took a very nice video that he edited beautifully of his father doing what he loves to do most, which is make these unbelievable drinks and be very entertaining in the process of explaining how it happens. And such as such, the Johnny Drinks page was born. And that page effectively funded Stunited throughout 2020 to allow them to get to the next level. And now Stunited is starting to explode.

It's like the stars are aligning. I love this shit. But if you've ever heard the Airbnb story and how they kept the company alive, We talked about that today. And I was very happy to know that John was extremely familiar with that story because his story has a lot of Airbnb vibes to it. So I hope you enjoy the episode. This guy's awesome. I'm looking forward to having him in again. And it's a small world, by the way, because John was on my buddy Mitch and Mike's and Timo's podcast, Project Aeronaut, a couple months ago. And I got connected with John maybe a week or two after he was on that episode.

Didn't know who he was because I hadn't seen that episode, but looked at the name and I'm like, why do I know this name? And then boom, I was like, oh, my God, this is the guy that was just on their latest episode. So shout out to Mitch and Mike and the boys over there and shout out to John for coming through. I was very excited to bring him in, as I said, and this was a great conversation. Anyway, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. We are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, which if you're on YouTube right now, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell button, and leave a like and comment on the which if you're on YouTube right now, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell button, and leave a like and comment on the video if you would, please. And to all the people who have left five-star reviews with a comment on Apple Podcasts, thank you. They continue to roll in.

They're great. They're a huge help. So if you haven't had a chance to do that yet and you can take a minute to do so, I would really, really appreciate it. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory and this is Trendify. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where's the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts.

You feel me? Everyone understands this this but few seem to do it if you don't like the status quo start asking questions joe rogan i don't know if he started to do it more often but it seems like a lot of his podcasts now start like mid-combo like they were kind of just shooting the shit, having a conversation, and there you go. A lot of them do. Because it makes sense, bro.

Exactly what we're doing right now. Yeah. I mean, shit, when I did the one with Mitch, he came over and I was like sick, like just having a bad day. And so for like 40 minutes, I was like, uh-huh.

And then he said, I said, Queeby. Oh, shit oh shit they just ran it and then i like yeah we hit it and so we recorded for like four hours and the podcast was three because you know i picked it up an hour in right you know fucking podcast yeah yeah but that's the thing time in this place it like it doesn't exist well that's what we were talking about before it's almost like you get into this like flow state and when it's you're in the flow state time doesn't exist yeah when when giovanni was in here last week i was like dude we gotta stop like fuck yeah we're starting podcast too right now if we keep going really yo yeah because it was like we were so deep on i don't know there were like six heavy themes throughout that podcast that we kept on just like circling around too and i was like oh my god i love this we got to stop and

then um we went downstairs and got takeout and we were just talking about it for like four hours and at the end he's like dude we should just brought the mics down here yeah just done a second one but yeah i mean when i had a horo down here same thing he came down here and do one we were three and a half hours in i was like dude we're really hot right now we can't stop he's like oh no we're doing a second now do you notice from like a viewer standpoint which ones do better like do the longer ones do or perform the same or perform the same as the shorter ones doesn't have anything to do with it really because the the model i've gone to with the long form content it's consistent the shortest one i did was like two hours and 18 minutes and it was heavy wow it was heavy it was

with um adam herman who was in the peace corps for two years living out in the middle of nowhere in africa holy and just you know a unbelievable experience and everything and he really i just sat the hell back and let him go and it was it was really really good so it was almost like and it was also early in the morning when he got here to record so at the end i was like okay i don't even know what else we right like if we go down something else i don't know where this is going yeah so let's just let people take it there but yeah man i mean i did the solos at the beginning because i had to just to show people i was doing this when i launched and then i was thinking i'm probably gonna need to do like 30 before anyone

wants to come in but when i launched with 10 and I had two of them where I'd guess, and then people were hitting me up like, oh, I want to come in. I was like, let's do it. Dude, people love this. I mean, especially with somebody like you. And that's where I think the goal of a podcast is like to bring people into the flow state with you. Like I listened to Naval and Joe Rogan the other day, and that's like a long podcast, like three hours. And I was shoveling snow. So it was like two hours I was doing it. And I was so consumed with what they were talking about. I didn't care about the time.

Like that could have been a 10 hour podcast and I would have kept listening. So like, I think that's the objective. And it really doesn't matter how long it takes, you know, us to get people in there as long as we can get them in type of thing. Do you feel like when you're listening to stuff like that, whether it be Rogan or, I mean,

actually you can look at a lot of guys in his tree right so on the intellectual side on the comedy side it could be like lex friedman or whitney cummings do you feel like when you're listening to it it's almost like you're sitting at the table with them and they're just they're just chilling that's the thing like it's it's so conversational and it's conversations with people that are way smarter than i am like like i'll use a nabal again probably one of the smartest people that are way smarter than I am. Like I'll use Naval again, probably one of the smartest people that I've heard speak. And he dumbs everything down that I understand it. And people love feeling smarter than they are. So for me, I'm like, oh shit, I understand Naval. I must be a smart dude. You know? So like that sort of conversation is

definitely helpful for the flow thing. You know start talking, and like we talked about before, using verbiage that nobody else understands, I'm lost in 10 minutes, man. I don't want to hear you talk anymore. When it's canned, too. Yeah. I can't. When I was a kid, I did appreciate some good TV interviews and whatever.

And don't get me wrong. You listen to Diane Sawyer do that stuff. I mean, Oprah. These people were incredible at it and I respect the work a lot but the world's changed and that whole oh all the lights and cameras went on and and all these producers came in and now they're in there in your ear and telling you what to do and now you're going to ask this gotcha question and and go from there and and by the way we have 10 minutes before commercial that's dead yeah people don't want that they want that on demand they want to they want to almost like relax but they

don't mind getting worked up if the topic's right you know they want it they want to be in the room with you and that's why clubhouse is like such a big i think it's so hot right now because of that i can literally and that's that's as conversational as it gets like that's what a podcast should try to become is more so like like i've almost called myself almost interjecting into into a podcast conversation like me saying out that like right yep sure sure joe rogan gotcha yeah but like i'm not fucking there and that's like i said that's a really powerful thing to do clubhouse is clubhouse is the next frontier man i really really believe in that app i'm just so so curious, like, where it goes.

You know, like, from a monetization standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. You can start charging people to get into rooms. Like, that's a very feasible and understandable. Yeah, like, very, very understandable. But, like, I guess my question is, what does it then take over? Like, does now podcasts become obsolete? Does, you know, Twitter become obsolete because people want to hear people talk instead of write? I'm just very interested to see how the world adapts to it.

I don't want to say neither as my answer to that opinion. I almost want to say neither though. The podcast one, I see – I'm pretty confident in my prediction there. I see this one pretty clearly, but who the fuck knows? I could be totally wrong. I think that podcasting has the highest volume of dog shit of almost any medium you can find. You have a lot of people who think that you're just going to put up a mic and – or not even a mic sometimes and talk and like people are going to listen to it. Like they're going to devote that time to it and so stereotypically you just see a lot of podcasts

where it's like supporting your business it's named after your company or it's on a very specific niche and whatever if i were a niche podcaster right now and i had a big audience i'd be running the clubhouse running because they're not listening to you for escapism entertainment in all likelihood not everyone don't want to overgeneralize but they're they're going for strict value now add a platform that's only going to get better with its audio quality that allows you that potential interconnectivity where you can actually ask the question while you're thinking of this shit or doing whatever it's it's a threat yeah yeah and that's i mean that's the whole thing too like i think that's where you can really show your that you know your shit is on something like clubhouse

anybody can type up a nice little tweet or put together a pre-recorded podcast but to voice something live and it make a lot of sense that is very hard to do and that's where like I said the the fakers and the jokers of the world are gonna be caught like you're not gonna be able to fake that live and that's we've seen that already in podc and uh in clubhouse rooms they hit a really good middle ground too because it's not invasive video not one thing they've all tweeted I agree was like clubhouse has proven that video isn't the feature it's the bug spot on yeah spot on it's not like oh we're not going to do facetime or something this is different for that medium you wouldn't be going into these rooms if

they were zoom rooms no and you had to be on camera no No way. No. I'll be in clubhouse walking around the house naked. It's great. No one knows. It's this nice middle ground. And I know Giovanni and I were talking about this last week too, but when you look at Twitter, you can pick out that perfect tweet. I think you just said that yourself. You can write out that perfect thing in your mind perfect whatever and you're also you have the protection of literally being behind a keyboard yeah so there are a lot of people in this world that type in uppercase and speak in lowercase and so when you go on clubhouse guess what you can't hide if you're just like some trolls like i'm gonna fuck this guy yeah well now you go on clubhouse and saying sir i think you're just like some trolls, like, I'm going to fuck this guy up. Well, now you go on Clubhouse and say, sir, I think you're a fucking, well, fuck you. Get out of here.

It's not going to work. You almost wish like everyone would be called out the way they would be in Clubhouse if you tried to talk shit like that. And I noticed that like we were having a semi argument in the Clubhouse the other day and just a conversation that we disagreed upon with other people. Nobody got hostile because you're not going to when you're having a conversation but if that was a tweet battle people would get angry and i think that's another good point that nival brought up is like the the um the video is like the bug i don't think a live text chat like a twitter but now live would do as well as clubhouse like i wouldn't want to read live tweets coming in i think twitter is yeah

exactly um so i do i think they found like the perfect scenario here it's i forget the scientific term i think it's like bits they describe it but think about the bits and output whatever the term is i know elon uses it all the time that you have to use when you are typing using your fingers whether that be on the phone or if you're actually using the laptop to do it right versus when you're speaking and the ability to get out a high rate of words and free thought that also isn't grammatically held to what it would be held to in writing for yeah that's a good point and and actually i started now i used to back in the day like people would voice memo me stuff like in Instagram DMS Like try to sell me shit and I thought it was like the cheesiest thing to do

But I find myself doing it because like you said it's so much easier I want to get my point across in 30 seconds It would have taken me five minutes to type this thing out and make sure it's grammatically correct and looks proper like I know I'm just gonna send you a voice memo, you know, like I know what I want to say So here you go. Take a listen. Yeah, I think I'm still on the side of, if it's a text, keep it. Yeah. I'm not going to call you up and call you out too much there. But when I get a voice memo, I'm like, what the fuck? This isn't a voicemail box. Like, let's go. Just text it out. How are you, man? What's going on? I like, I like both though. I want one or the other. So

forget clubhouse for a second i love talking on the phone i love calling people people hate answering the phone now but then they end up talking to me for like an hour or two when they actually answer that i think is like a bad trait we have people are like no just text right i'm like but we gotta like talk right i i'm like like trying to type the sound like you know it's not working there's so much lost in that in that yeah i want to hear the tone of your voice yeah the flow of your emotions and everything like on on text it's this on demand kind of thing caps exclamation point exactly yeah like i have one of my best friends for years i think there was probably like a four year period where he never answered a phone call

and would routinely let it go and then immediately go hey what's up yeah can't talk can't talk what the fuck you do and so now like and he just later admitted like i just really don't like talking on the phone he's like he's like finicky like that yeah and so now he'll call me once in a while and every time he does i'm like i stop what i'm doing i'm like is everything okay whoa you good he's like no bro just just call and talk i'm like yeah okay all right nice hey what's up man you know but there's a lot of people like that in our generation that's that's a really good way to build a relationship quick like you just meet somebody and the first phone call, or I'm sorry, the first way they communicate with you is a phone call or a FaceTime. It's like, whoa, like,

all right, now we're sort of on a higher level automatically because we've already broken that sort of barrier of going through texts and then maybe a call and now FaceTime, like we're jumping right into it. And being able to voice your opinions properly and like real naturally, I think it's a huge skill. And most people don't have that right now. It's true and it's a skill that's gonna win. You and I, this is our first time together. Yeah. Like we've been best friends for like the last month

since we got connected. We just talk on the phone every day and we talk on Clubhouse sometimes. So it's like, we know each other well. Like when you walked up, it was like, hey, what's up man? Like I've known you. Known you my entire life.

Right, imagine if all we did was text before I got here today. It wouldn't work right it wouldn't work can't do that yeah you don't know who someone is when when they text you really don't there are and and i'll give people credit there are a lot of people who are like nasty on twitter just because they let all the neurons and stuff fire the wrong ways and just react who are really nice people in real life and you're like dude just put it away. Yes. Don't do it.

You got to see somebody get like, I think my opinion is you got to see somebody get really emotional to understand who they are. And that could be super excited, super upset, super drunk or whatever it may be. But like, that's how you really break down those walls of like the awkwardness and say, okay, this is who this person is.

And if you don't have that ever with somebody, I don't think you ever get to really form a relationship with them. Girl or guy, it doesn't matter. It's one of the many overlaps of business, friendships, and relationships. Yeah. It is all a part of the same circle. And it's true you need to be able to understand how people react when shit hits the fan because no matter what if you are in any kind of long-term friendship or relationship with somebody that's going to happen yeah and you better know how to deal with that when it does and when people

don't know that's coming i mean that that makes or breaks things yeah not just relationships it like let's go to business on that example it makes or breaks businesses that's coming. I mean, that, that makes or breaks things. Yeah. Not just relationships. Like let's go to business on that example. It makes or breaks businesses. That's, it's interesting. You brought a business. Cause I think, um, I went like a couple of years, I would say I went like a year and a half with my current co-founder of like never really arguing. And I like never thought we would, but we're very opposite. Like we mentioned before, like he's just such a different human being than I am. And that's sort of why it works out well. And the first time we like argued, it was almost like you were afraid to, and at the same time we needed to, like we needed to hash things out. There was points that I need to make. And there was points that he needed to make. And I couldn't just sit

back and sort of yeah him and ignore that. So it was like, no, look, if we want to make this thing work, we're going to get down and hash this out and now it's almost like it's very natural where i can get angry with him he can get angry with me and i don't feel bad about it and then we get over it and that's a really cool place to be with somebody yeah and some of the best businesses or relationships are when opposites attract too because there's this perfect offset where you have to have those moments and everything but you know when you each go there it's just entirely different so what's the point right you know whereas like when people are the same you know they see the same they get pissed off at the

same things and that's i was if i'm like dave i'm fucking pissing right now look what just happened and he's like you all you know you should look at from this perspective and like all right you're right if we're both just like feeding off each other's negative energy, like what's, I didn't learn anything from you because we're both seeing this thing the same way. So it doesn't make sense. You definitely need that. Well, I actually want to ask you about that business to start off here. This thing's pretty wild.

Yeah. So I met you through Fenu, who he's an advisor for your company. Yeah. So Fenu was on number 30, if you haven't watched that podcast very good one smart guy so he explained to me the app and said yeah you know it's basically like a bartering service for for students yeah i'm like okay so they're they're just cheating with each other he said yeah i don't know if I would say that, but basically, yeah. I'm like, okay, so tell me about Stu Knighted. Is that accurate? And how does this exactly work? Because you've been building this a while and it's pretty impressive. Thank you. And it's funny you brought up Fenyu because he actually has a pretty,

he doesn't realize how big of a role he has and had with just one conversation, right? So I started Student United, which is essentially, you know, an academic marketplace for students to barter assignments and skills with one another, right? Yeah, there we got, we got Student United fanboys in here. Yeah, I'm holding, I'm holding up my mug to the camera, if you're listening and not watching, but you know, continue. You know, so and the real premise behind the idea was I was always the kid that struggled to finish up papers and was pretty good at math and would offer up this barter to say look finish up this essay for me and in exchange i'll help you with your algebra homework right whatever it was soon realized i can make a business out of this where i was making money or i was finding help

inside and outside of school but the light bulb really went off when I realized that holy shit, I'm not the only student doing this, you know, I'm not the only student writing in group chats, knocking on my neighbors doors, doing what I need to do to find unique ways to either give help and make some cash or get help in a pinch. I'm not the only one cheating around, right? I can't be the only one trying to leverage my network and collaborate with other students. So I identified that pretty quickly. And that's not something

that's like a crazy thing to identify because it's very, it's very common. Yeah. So, you know, I saw, I saw it out and said, okay, why not create something like it? It's interesting because like I said, we went, honestly, I launched the first version of the app back in 17. So 2017, the, it was the, the framework is more of like a dating app for education. So we called ourselves like the Tinder for tutoring. Great catch line. You know, it was catchy. We had some buzz around us. And you were still in college. Still in college. And where I give myself and our team credit was we did a great job with brand awareness. So I was that kid who I was at a different college every week of my

college semester i was sent up a little table i'd have cute girls wear my t-shirts and i would hand out hot dogs for downloads right so we would cause a scene wherever we were and the idea was so fresh that people didn't mind seeing us there and so if you've ever dealt with a fraternity it's very hard to gain like their trust in a way so sure me coming in, they're like, who the fuck is this kid setting up a tent and handing out hot dogs to our girls? How many women you have with you? Right, yeah. Five to one ratio, you're not getting into it. Exactly.

So as long as we were on an even keel level, that was cool for me. But as we started to grow or attempt to grow, we always, you know, I was shying away from the whole cheating thing, right? And people would ask, well, isn't that just cheating? And I would say, no, you know, that is…ying away from the whole cheating thing, right? And people would ask, well, isn't that just cheating? And I would say, no, you know, that is academic. Right. I would say terms like that. I would say, look, we don't condone inappropriate behavior. That is an abuse of our technology. If you're caught cheating, you're subject to the same guidelines that you would be if you got caught in your classroom. Right. So that was a stance I took. I talked to Fendi one day about this and that was during when, I'm sorry,

we were attempting to become like a B2B company, selling it to schools and saying, look, this is a retention tool, right? So we can really learn the user behavior for students, what it looks like to succeed versus fail and how to start pattern matching and raise red flags. Oh, wow. Yeah.

It's a great sell. We didn't have the technology to really do any of it just yet, but I was painting that picture to a point where these schools were super interested. So that had to be my sell. March, 2020 comes, we get smacked in the face with COVID. We had all these contracts. I was flying out. I was flying out to Finland because we had contracts closed

in like late March, early April. So you were outside the US too. Well, so I was about to go, like had these contracts signed. And the, I think like the VP of the school was like, Hey, we just had our first case of COVID. Maybe it's not the best time for you to come. Let's let this die off. And I'm like, yeah, sure. That's fine. And then this happens, right? So we had to, it was a real smack in the face, but I realized, all right, look, I'm either going to stop doing this or get back to my roots here and create a platform for the students. And Fenya was really the first person to say to me, look, this is what you're building. This is your thesis. This is your value add into the market. Stop shying away from it. Like you have to identify and highlight this. And it's not like you're condoning inappropriate behavior. You're

highlighting what's going on. There is a root cause for why students feel the need to cheat. And there's a couple of reasons why. And the only way to really identify that and solve that problem is to allow people to act in ways they actually want to act and that's how we leverage this technology now right so it's a platform for students to behave in ways that are very organic but our attempt is to reshape what learning looks like in the future to include collaboration and to include this additional communication so he like i said i i love giving this kid credit because he's you know he's a special dude um he was the one that said to me, you have to do that. If you want to scale this thing, this is the way you go. And he was right. And here we are today. We've, you know, we're growing faster than we ever have. And was still battling with this whole, it was almost like a, what do you call it? Like a personality.

Like I didn't know who I was in terms of like the technology or what I wanted to be. And he's like, look, you look at all these technologies, this is what you're doing. So why not be very upfront about it? Like as a student, I want to know exactly what I can and cannot do on this platform. And so that, yeah, like I said,

that conversation was pretty pivotal for us. All right, let's back up for a second. Yeah. Because I'm trying to put a timeline together here too. So COVID hits March, 2020. You have been around for three years. Been around for about, yeah, like two and a half. The idea was concept like three years before

and then kind of born like two years before. Okay. So you were going campus to campus to like try to get one college at a time and you were going specifically to the departments there. So you were going to like the actual administration. So when I was doing the college tours, when I was a senior, I was still B, I was B2C. So I started out, I had no clue what I wanted to do in terms of like monetization and really, you know, grow a business. I was like, oh, we look like Tinder. We're going to monetize like Tinder.

And that was really the extent of what I really thought. And so I didn't put too much effort into that. I was like, I want to scale this platform and get users on it. It was only until we ran into almost like a brick wall and I pitched a fund who didn't really understand the business model and neither did I in the beginning. So I was like, I don't know what to tell you. Was, it was ads. It was, yeah, I was like, oh, we're going to, you know, don't worry. We're gonna have a million users and we'll have ads. And look, that is a lucrative, um, sounds good option when you get there and it should not be discredited because

it is, it is real. But until you have those users, there has to be a critical mass point that you achieve and you got to make money before that. So anyway, what do you mean by critical mass point? Like you don't want to sacrifice an apps UX or UI by flooding with ads. If you have 10,000 users, right, you have to treat those like they're babies and, and really cherish them. And so if you lose them early on, you may never get them back or gain their trust again. So, to make sure people understand ux ui is user experience and user interface so what you see yeah so it's it's what you see and sort of what you do and what you feel when you're on a platform so it's the buttons you click it's how they're laid out it's where they bring you um and like i said with an advertisement if it gets very cheesy and you see three posts and every other post is an ad, that's a problem.

So anyway, it's very spammy and you don't want to have that reputation early on. So I think what ended up happening was I was pitching and there was a judge in the room that really liked the idea, but nobody else did. And they were like, I wonder if there's a way for, oh no, I'm sorry. I approached them and said, hey, what if I pitched it like this? What if I pitched it like a technology that was a retention tool for the schools, and they could partner with us. And she paused and said, I wish you pitched that idea yesterday. And so for me, I was like, Alright, bam, that's the light bulb, I'm going to pursue this ended up not necessarily working. And that could just be because

I wasn't the person for the job. I think I identified that pretty well. When was this? This was 2019. Like I took about a year of solid b2b selling in a life site or the sales cycle of a school is fucking brutal, man. It is long. And you never really know when you reach the point like the point of actually closing one because you're talking to so many people. Do you know who the decision maker is?

The decision maker is different at every school and it depends sort of what you're trying to sell. Like, what do you want to blank? Like, cause there's different budgets in different sectors of the school, right? So where do you fall? And if you don't know where you fall, and honestly, we really didn't,

like we were pitching to VPs of enrollment or academic success. Nobody really knew who wanted to take us type of thing so it was a cool sell technology would have been great if we built it out but you know we we committed to something else so um and then i found fenny and we talked about it but yeah that was pretty much that uh that story so how many when corona hit how many active users did you have? So this is where it gets interesting, right? So I pretty much consider the app dead at a point, like there was a point in time, like June, or I'm sorry, the 2019, where my focus wasn't on users on the app, it was more so selling into the school. So I

wasn't putting any money into marketing, I really wasn't tracking app uses or app downloads, things like that, because it becomes an ego thing too. Like you don't want to look because you know it's bad. Yeah. So I sort of just like, all right, fuck it. It's not there. Well, you also weren't selling to them. You were, yeah, you were trying to change your partner. Right. So I was like, you know what? It's at zero. I'm going to call it zero. And then I had a conversation with somebody and they're like, look, you're not at zero. I mean, you've had 10,000 people download this app, reach back out to them, they

try to revive those users instead of calling them dead. So that's how do you do that? Because like, that's, that's easier said than done. That's now. So this is the benefit to having an app as opposed to a physical product, right? New drive a download, you, you get some information about them, right? You get their emails, you get their numbers. Now what you can do do it's actually like it's very rare for somebody to delete an app off their phone so you may stop using student united altogether because maybe you didn't find

any use of it or whatever the reason is i now have the ability to continuously market to you through push notifications through emails and so it may be a year down the road where you're like, you know what, fuck it, I'm gonna try this app out again. And the interface is completely different, the purpose is different, the app is flooded with people actually using it, you're back on. So the way you revive these users is consistently just dripping in campaigns.

And that could be email, it could be social media, it could be through the app itself. So I don't really consider anybody ever dead. But at the time I did, which was probably a huge mistake I was making. And sort of thank God I corrected that. And so beginning of Corona, you still hadn't corrected that though. You were still working directly with the school. So Corona hits, what's your reaction?

Corona hits and I immediately was like, shit, this isn't good. And then I was like, shit, this is really good. You know, because now students are so confused and they're frustrated and they're way more inclined to try newer technologies. So like they're, they're, they're almost in a desperate state so like you throw them a new technology and it sounds interesting sounds cool fuck it i'll try it out whereas a year or so ago they may not have so it was to our advantage i just didn't realize in the very beginning but that's really why i wanted to do this whole relaunch in july and essentially it was like our rebirth of student i did well yeah and the rebirth of it where you're focusing again on the student side and like actually getting them to use it, the whole concept of

getting one person's strength to barter with another person's strength when people left campuses and in some cases aren't even back on campus now, does some of that go out the window because they're literally like not together and not passing each other in the hallway? Or is it actually increased because they're talking to each other all the time on text and stuff like hey what are we doing about this class or whatever so a couple things about that right number one i think it increases communication right because there you don't have anything you don't sit in a classroom you have no option to talk to the person next to you so you rely on technology regardless it's almost like a it's an inevitability,

right? Whether it's ours or something else, technology is going to be at the forefront of education. And so we aim to sort of be at the top. But number two, and people have sort of confronted me with this, said, all right, well, look, you're growing in COVID, but what happens when people go back to school? They may not your technology and the reason why wouldn't they need your technology so my my point to that because they can talk in person right so they don't need to talk online or find people um to sort of barter with and yeah i understand the point but look at any other social media like like we want to talk through our phones nowadays that's just how it is i could easily sit in a coffee shop and find the girl to talk to but no i'd rather go on tinder because it's much easier i could i could talk to somebody about whatever the i'm doing

but no i'd rather post a facebook post or i'd rather read about it so so how many friends think about this how many average friends does the decently social regular average joe individual have like let's say there's five or six that they're comfortable like you know just going to them like hey what's up man i'm thinking about this thing or whatever right what are the chances that within there the strengths are going to be different or going to have something that offsets what they need i mean i a lot of times in my own college experience i remember i would go to people who i never talked to you know we just took a class together i'd be like, you're good at this.

You want to help me out or I'll help you with this? I did it all the time. So I get it. And it very often was not that first degree of separation, like your friends right there. So I think either way, it's true. But your point that, yeah, people want to just be like, all right, what does the data tell me is right there at my fingertips.

Bang, done. I'm sitting here eating my dinner and in between, you know, choose. I know that this dude is over in that building over there and he can help me out write this paper. Yep. And you have to realize also what you used to do in terms of just approaching a stranger and asking for help takes a lot of balls. And not a lot of people would do that. They would much rather hop on their phone and post a proposal on Sunited to say, hey, I need help with a writing assignment. These are the details. This is what I'm willing to give up in exchange. Bam, post. And what this also allows me to do as a user is it puts the burden of work

on somebody else. I posted, now it's somebody else's job to approach me and inquire about my proposal. So it makes you feel a lot better about yourself. Your job is complete by posting that. You don't have to find the help if the help's gonna come to you. And that's a relief. And I think that's where our big value add

is in terms of like the market. It's no different than how angie's list disrupted things or i mean look it's it's internet internet technology in that way things that create a community where people can go and find it easily and have their answer immediately and also have choice and choices that they wouldn't have if they didn't have to put tremendous effort into it themselves they're going to take every time right and it's not even just i know there's a piece of it where you know our generation is less likely to walk up to somebody in the coffee shop like you said or walk up to somebody in the bar or walk up to someone in a building and say what's up which is a little sad in some ways but

in other ways it's like it's because we've learned how to be more tactical about it there are two sides to it you know i always talk about the negative side, but the positive side is like, we have a higher expectation of what we're going to be able to get for the lowest amount of our effort. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it, man.

It's the way the world is sort of turning. And I was listening to a Clubhouse chat yesterday and they were actually talking about education and marketplaces. And I was like, I was, I was like, raising my hand, trying to get in. Yeah. I was like, Oh my God. And, and the point that the, the, the moderator brought up was like the greatest asset that we have on this earth isn't houses in terms of Airbnb. It isn't cars in terms of Uber, it's human intellect. And if we can start to learn how to leverage and barter intellectual skills, there's an infinite amount of that, right? So as long as you can capture it and put it into one platform or app, you have a sound

product. And that's really what our goal is. Every problem that you have, somebody can solve that on this earth, right? There's one person at least that knows how to do what you're struggling with very easily. And if we can sort of create that community, we have something going here. And that's, you know, that's what we're striving to do. And you're hitting a bigger point there too, that goes far beyond any one app or any one thing. This is really important. When we got this connectivity with the internet being invented it's not like social media was around right away and then social media comes with internet 2.0 and now everyone has these communities these set three four places where everyone goes to whether it be facebook instagram twitter whatever

and there's a lot of arguments around that because everyone puts their opinions on there and that goes from everything that doesn't matter or is funny all the way to the serious things that then people want to tear each other apart which is what we pay the most attention to yeah in reality though with all this conversation around about well how do you legislate some of these platforms if you're worried about deplatforming people and the power these companies have i think one of the things that needs to be talked about more i know we talked about on the last episode but you know when people talk about like the section 230 thing with the social media platforms which quite simply takes

away some of the protections they have now to be able to just do what they want and eliminate users or keep users whatever if you did this kind of stuff you would probably be counterintuitive to the community and what i mean by that is yeah would you eliminate some of the bad action that happens like whether people are being deplatformed or speech is being suppressed sure but you and would you also therefore then eliminate a lot of the negative tearing at each other's necks because people don't want to get kicked off because the platform has to protect themselves? Sure. But at the end of the day, you're going to eliminate so much of it that you're going to create less information spread there, good, bad, and indifferent.

It's like you take away the bad, but you rip a lot of good away with it too. So people exchange ideas less, and then maybe they go to those communities less and then over time those communities fade right so when even when you're talking about your app here you talk about the idea of like leaning in on something like oh well you're cheating or whatever okay that's what people are going there for yeah and it's not like i'm cheating on this test or mostly stuff like that. It's more like I am literally trying to figure out, okay, I'm strong here. I'm weak here. I'd like to help plug my weakness and increase my strength by helping out other people too. So I pay into the app and I can lean into

what's good about what I'm doing here. So you give it's, it's like, I guess the point I'm trying to make is you give people the freedom to go after the things that they want to and make their own personal moral decisions in that way. I mean, that's, I mean, that's exactly it too. It's also you give people the freedom to go after the things that they want to and make their own personal moral decisions in that way? I mean, that's, I mean, that's exactly it too. It's also like, it's like the opportunity cost, right? What should I be? What is better for me to do? Is it focus on the assignment that I have for my major, right? Am I a biology major and I have a biology assignment coming up or do I have to waste my time writing a nonsense paper for my writing intensive class? Or could I devote all of my time here and barter something else in exchange for that writing help? So I think

it's a great thing. And I think it's a reflection of like what happens in the real world. If I'm not good, say at technology, like I'm not, am I going to go struggle to try to learn it and not do it as well as somebody else? Or am I going to align myself with people that can and that's how great businesses are built you know so that's how you bet yours right exactly so i don't understand why there's such a negative connotation to students working together you know even if it's one student doing one thing and the other student doing another thing like that's where the strengths are so cater towards that you know could you imagine if steve jobs has spent 20 years trying to learn how to code like steve wasn't yet right there'd be no apple exactly yeah it just doesn't make sense to me so yeah i mean look to an extent

you don't want kids just ignoring all the assignments they don't want to do because in life you're going to have to do things you don't want to do but learning how to network and job allocate i think are huge skills that aren't honed in on enough. I don't know what the term is. People always talk about like zero-sum game and then there's other offshoots of that that describe like some and some or whatever. I don't know those. I don't want to get lost in the minutia. But overall, easy point is that whenever you are disrupting anything or creating something new,

just by the law of averages of numbers in society and people, it will never be 100% good. It's how it is. Now, is the number 10 bad? Or is it 30 bad? Or is it 70 bad? There's levels to it. And you have to have some of like measuring stick in your head towards that but there is a there is an optimal trade-off to where the good is outweighing the bad and I don't even know looking at yours because I haven't actually sat down and like been like well how

much is this cheating gonna hurt them or whatever but if you're I would imagine you doing long-term you know simulations on on your business model and on how people would use this if you had the most amount of downloads or number of downloads you could possibly get. You're looking at it like, okay, well, how much does this mean people are literally not going to do stuff in school

versus how much is it like people adding value into the app too because they are incentivized to do that. You're not just going to take on the app. You have to give. How much is that going to then over delta their strengths and then make them even better? Yeah.

And that's a huge point that we get across too. It's like the day that you know you truly know something is when you can teach it to somebody else. You know, so if you're forced to do that on a platform, you start to hone it. You're not only benefiting the person across the table, you're benefiting yourself. And if you think of it like a traditional tutoring situation where only one student is benefiting, right? I'm the student, I'm getting help from you,

you're not a student. For us, we're doubling that. We're helping two students where you're only helping one. I'm getting the help, you're giving the help, and you're honing in on your skills. Plus, you're making money doing it. So in terms of the economy of students, we are two times better than normal, um, you know, services or skill, uh, platforms like that. So, wow. Well, I want to get back to the timeline because we kind of went around in a circle there and we the the key mass here was march 2020 because that's where the shift happened so you had been thinking before then that in your mind the app was dead as you said because you weren't looking at it like how many users am i getting how much are they actually using it you were trying to partner with schools so you think back to that

conversation with venue you flip it over to okay okay, we're going to go straight to the students now. That happened in the summer. So I guess the whole spring semester was you just trying to figure it out? Spring semester as in? Like 2020. Spring 2020. So, yeah, I mean, that was still, we were still holding on to the B2B sale. Like we were still talking to these schools and saying,

well, look, maybe we'll sign these contracts in the fall. The app, the second version of the app still wasn't ready. So I wasn't selling directly to the students. And it's also like, it was like an embarrassment thing too. And this is something where as a founder, you have to let go of. Like I was like, oh shit, I've been doing this for three years. I'm still not where I want it to be.

I got to start pitching again to the same organizations and the frats and the sororities that I've already talked to three times. Like, I don't want to do that anymore. So I want to go to the schools because, wow, look at me now. I'm way better than I once was. And then you realize, all right, look, if I want to make this thing work, I'm going to have to humble myself. And so I finally had that conversation. And it was scary. Like when I did have the conversation with Fenyu, we're taking a very contrarian and bold stance in something that's really not talked about enough, which is the cheating.

So I was like, all right, well, how are people gonna, you know, perceive me as a person and the platform? Like, I don't wanna be known as just some scumbag that wants to advocate cheating, because that's not who I am. So it was a bit nerving, but it ended up working out. And now, like I said, we're doubling down on, you know, what we've seen. So you go into the fall, you go back to the students and how many active users are you at now? So we, if you can't

tell me that, no problem. No, no, it's fine. Yeah. I'm just trying to think. We hit a thousand actives in November, I think. So it took us a little bit of time. And then December we hit 2500. And then January, when we were supposed to have a down month because of winter break, so we expected actually a decrease in usage. We hit our all time high, which is 3000 actives right now. Wow. Yeah. And how many campuses approximately?

You know, I mean, we've probably had a couple hundred individual campuses on the app itself so well actually that's that's a really good point i can't believe i didn't even think of this it's not campus centric no it's not we've had people from actually a problem we're experiencing right now is we have people from other countries on the app and we don't have data servers over there so like we have people from india and china saying hey what's going on with my messages? They're not loading. And I've come back to my developers and they're like, we can't control that right now. Like unless you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in expansion, we're going to have to sort of let them slide right now.

And it's a hard thing to have to do, but you keep them in the loop. But yeah, it's exciting. I need to be dumb for a minute here. Go ahead, man. Because like this is just something I always take for granted and never ask about, but the whole server situation. We just don't think about it, right? You use Instagram. I use Instagram.

We use Twitter, whatever. We go on it. It's just like it's there. And then when it's down, it's like, what the fuck? But think about the biggest apps and the amount of computational power they have to have and the reach that has to have to deliver to people all over the world it's crazy crazy you can't just have and this is why i don't fully understand never research you can't just have that set up out of one place though i understand like you have to have hubs of it so that through the network it's actually connected so when you're

talking about the international students right you don't have set up physical networks over there. Is that what you're saying? I mean, look, it's relatively easy to do. It's just very expensive. Like to host data. I mean, we use AWS for data storage, but it's, again, that's just another step where I'm spending money. Is it worth it, right? If 0.01% of my users are on this app and they're in India, do I spend all this money to cater towards that one person? So it is going to have to happen eventually right now is not the time. And once we do pull that trigger, like I said, it's not a hard thing to do. It's just, it's just very expensive. It's expensive. Yeah. Cause you're saying you can do it all in the cloud pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much. All right. So – and I wasn't even sure about that because I know a lot gets done on AWS especially.

A lot. But still, like people think about it because you think about how big it could get. Like I think about Instagram and for me it's hard to concept that they could take care of all that in the cloud. But in reality, it's kind of more convenient that way and it's also probably a little bit better because whenever you're taking something out that's literally not in hardware, I mean, the number of problems you can run into decreases. Like that was the whole thing about TikTok, right? When everyone was so afraid about our data, our data for TikTok was being held and stored in AWS in America. I mean, that being said, look, ByteDance owns that technically, so they could have had the rights to see it. I want to talk about this.

Keep going. I mean, look, and yeah, we'll talk about it to the extent of what I know, but that's pretty much where the data, the data was held here and it's still held here. What is going to come of it? I don't know. And I think this is where the conversation

is probably going to go. If you think that TikTok is the only company selling quote unquote data to other countries, you're fairly mistaken. Oh yeah. You know what I mean? So that, that whole narrative just didn't make sense to me. You know, it's about what the data is, right? That's the thing. Yeah. What's interesting to me about TikTok because technologically you're correct there. And there's another term for it. Mike laxamana was going over it but it's like i forget what it is so i'm not going to say it but to be able to remove that data

undetected and take it to china pretty much which is what people talk about because bite dances owns tiktok and bite dance is a chinese company the amount of computational power you would need is ridiculous and it's like it's impossible some people say my whole thing is that there's also a lot of technology that we don't know about and there are a lot of you don't know what you don't know and obviously the chinese government is gung-ho on absolutely investing like crazy into technology. It's their priority. And they, very smartly, they use the systems to their advantages. They stole IP in that country from around the world for years and years and years,

still do to this day. They've been a little bit more held in check over the last five, six years, whatever on that, but it's still happening. So they've then taken that technology and built on top of it's still happening so they've then taken that technology and built on top of it so assuming that they can't get into it yeah it is held here the problem is if they if that government can get a hold of that the data you're giving on tiktok it's not just not to say like when you give your data of your name your address your god forbid your social security number like your you give your data of your name, your address, your – God forbid, your social security number or like your physical profile or whatever.

Great. Like that's not awesome too to get in the wrong hands. I'm not arguing that like that doesn't matter. What I'm saying is with TikTok, you can get a visual representation. You can build machine learning technology that reads for different geographies and gets intel through that through i'm talking through trillions of permutations throwing it at like different videos that come up there and i always use the example back in 2001 2002 when our government was hunting bin laden and they kept on bombing the i forget the name of the mountains out there

in afghanistan and pakistan but they kept on bombing those mountains in strategic places. The way that they were figuring out where he was is they were using technology. This fucking guy would take a video in front of a cave wall. And they would have – in 2001, 2002, they had technology that could read the elements in the cave wall and then use latitude and longitude to determine almost down to the exact spot where that cave might be and they kept on bombing them and supposedly coming close but if we had that technology then imagine what technology that reads for physical surroundings can do now it that's yeah and I heard that story too and it's pretty amazing like this is this is a long time after that like we're 20 years past 2001, which is fucking crazy.

There was an ad that this is, this is pretty creepy. There was a medium post and the guy that was like, this is this, this is the creepiest ad I've ever seen. And it was an advertisement for like a cat or like a, like a nightstand. The advertisement was in his room,

like his actual room. So they've been taking and collecting i guess images right through like um what does fen you call it uh oh my god the volumetric yeah so whatever they're taking think of like they're taking little itty bitty pictures of his room through his phone and they literally crafted up his entire fucking room and this guy was looking at it it's fucking crazy and he's he like showed the picture and he's like this is my room with a cat with a nightstand in it so is that is that freaky yeah i think so but what's also a little bit freaky is the thing with tiktok they are starting to know you better than you know yourself right they're showing you a video that if you were to pick it out out of a out of a collage of 10 you don't you wouldn't think you would like that but they're going to show it to you because they know if you were to pick it out out of a, out of a collage of 10,

you don't, you wouldn't think you would like that, but they're going to show it to you because they know you're going to like it. And then you end up liking it. So that when, when, when technology starts to learn you a little bit better than you know yourself, that's when it starts to get a little, a little freaky. So just be aware. I think at the end of the day, like people get too freaked out about this stuff. The only thing you do is just be very self-aware and understand what's going on and don't let things sort of take over um too too much you wonder what the future holds though that's the that is the great and it's an unknown so like you got to be blissfully maybe not blissfully but there's only so much you can control right but one of my buddies – I want to be careful how I say this. I'm not going to give away where he works or in what capacity for obvious reasons. So people are going to have to take this as a little bit of faith.

But one of my buddies who would know explained that there is a – not necessarily constitutionally like it wouldn't be used against you, you would think and hope, but there is a backdoor to all the data you have ever put out there. Meaning the government has an ability with each of these companies to get in and get that if they needed it. Now, could they actually use it in a court of law? No. get that if they needed it. Now, could they actually use it in a court of law? No, but you know, you think about the worst case scenarios and evil and people throw around words like tyranny and stuff. You don't know what the future holds. And there's a lot, there's, there are a lot of bells that have already been rung and they're not going to be unwrung, but you talk about awareness. I agree with you. People have to be more aware of what they're doing. And I also agree with you, sadly, that there's only, there is only so much you can do about it.

I mean, that's the thing too. Like, look, at the end of the day, a lot of this data right now, and look, I'm not saying that it can't ever happen. It's not being used maliciously, right? It's being used to make money. And what that looks like is selling you something that you're probably going to like. So it's throwing you an advertisement that they know is something you're going to buy, or it's, you know, persuading you to like something that you maybe didn't like a year ago. So then you buy it. And I think people get way too like caught up in they're

going to try to manipulate us to then take over in terms like a government takeover. But thinking like that, honestly, like you said, there's not much you can do about it. Like, so thinking like that, and like the worst case scenario mindset, what's really the point? Like, be very aware. But at the end of the day, what's the point of thinking everything is going to go to shit? I don't know. That's just not my mindset. So I don't get what people get so bent out of shape about it. Well, a step below that is your day-to-day as far as like how you feel yeah and looking at traditional marketing and advertising they've always been trying to sell people one thing I've been trying to sell them happiness see yourself in the product they sell you whatever it is so

you buy that thing which is what they want you to do the the psychology of it. You're going to be happier because of it because you're getting a utility. You're getting something you want, something you need, something that makes you feel good, something that could even define you a little bit. And I think one of the things that maybe people don't put their finger on

because we don't think about it, we just know how we feel, is that with all the constant in your face advertising that is then perfectly targeted at you and has these eerie representations of things that oh my god i was just talking about that yeah like with my mom 10 minutes ago and now here it is right on an ad and then the constant hamster wheel you're on and the quick ability to be able to make a buying decision bang bang done two clicks a lot of people get stuck in that cycle and it becomes that hamster wheel right i said yeah and then oh life keeps going on and suddenly six months

goes by a year goes by they're still on the same hamster wheel they're buying the same shit they're getting stuff thrown at them that they say i'm not gonna buy anything and then the then they do because it's thrown in their face even when they say i'm annoyed at this type of advertisement and what's happening is they continue to retreat from the world because in the phone they see everything that speaks to them already so who the fuck around you is going to speak to you better than that and then they're unhappy and that's a scary thing because we talk about unhappiness with social media and we talk about it because of how people talk on social media and how people act and like it's true 100 true but what about all the other things in there that keep us in those apps and keep us drawn to make

decisions or do things or feel things that then we don't want to yeah and i think that's a big a big big big thing that the advertising industry has to think about here. I don't think they're going to. But you're seeing a lot of people who may not be able to put their finger on it, but that's part of the reason they're so upset all the time. That's a huge – it's a great point. And aside from even advertisements, the fact that people get happier to see, for example, a post do well on a social media than actually get praise from somebody in person is a problem. Or the fact that I would rather have a conversation through Twitter or through even Clubhouse than talk to somebody one-on-one without thinking about my phone

is a problem. And we all experience it. So I think that addiction really takes us away from like what true peace and happiness is. And you got to get back to your roots and find that outside of the phone. And it's hard. It's very hard because even having a conversation, I'm 25 years old, having conversation with somebody else without thinking every 10 seconds or so, or what's going on on TikTok or what's going on on social media is hard to do. You know, like I look back and think about like this, sometimes I'll lay in bed at night, and I'll sort of like reflect on the day. And what are the big focus points? And it's sometimes like things I did on my phone. And I can't even remember conversations I had with my

parents or with other people or what I even did during that day, which is fucking scary, man. And even for myself, I've like admitted that. And I really want to get back to enjoying life outside of my phone. I'm glad you got self-awareness on that. Yeah, me too. And I hope I have a similar level of it, but your life is in there. Everything you do, it's how you're connected to people, which is what we inherently want to do all the time it is it is how we organize things it is it's an expectation i mean when when someone doesn't have a smartphone like forget just say an iphone it's like the fuck is wrong with you what's wrong seriously what's wrong with this person and it doesn't matter your socioeconomic status either it's like well no you must have that right like it's we've added these things over time so at the beginning it was you had to have food and then pretty quickly it turned to well you better have

shelter too yeah and then it well you had to have water and oxygen that was a prerequisite obviously so you have those four things and then at some, there's this long period of time where a bunch of little things got added. You know, you need the horse to get around. Oh, fuck, we made a wheel. Oh, my God, we have fire now. We need that to cook so we can have meat. All these little things got added that weren't necessarily like life or death, and then electricity got added. And electricity became a thing that once you got used to it, it was life or death.

Yeah. electricity became a thing that once you got used to it it was life or death yeah at some point here we took the next step and we added i don't know whether you want to call it wi-fi or mobile or both and probably both in one thing but we are now at a point where most people perhaps with the exception of people who are extremely old or who were you know raised in the amish community or something like that they don't understand how they can exist without having you know an actual access to a data oriented or wi-fi oriented mobile device that stores all of their information and keeps their day afloat and And like, I envy them, you know, like I envy my grandparents that can find true joy in having a nothing conversation. And like, that's something that I really have to get better at. Like I've always right now, especially I think

we're at an age where the only thing I want to focus on is bettering myself or doing something that can, you know, probably into a better financial situation, right? So if the conversation is going to be beneficial in terms of business or in terms of knowledge, I'll have that. But if we're talking about the movie we just saw or the color of this table, I don't give a shit. And that's a problem. Like, why can't I just enjoy sitting down and talking to you about nothing? And I see my grandparents do it. And I finally tried one day, like I threw my phone aside to the point where like, I'm so addicted. I can't even have it in arm's reach or else I'll reach for it. Um, and we just talked about nothing. And it was like a really blissful

time and conversation. And I'm like, wow, I can do this. That's the, the thing about the phone, I think is, is it sure it's definitely an addiction, but it's easy to quit. Like if I never start my day with my phone as in it's locked or's locked or I don't touch it till 12 o'clock, I feel fucking great. Whereas if I was addicted to a drug, I would need that or else I wouldn't be able to get out of bed. So there is hope, right? Like you can very easily detach yourself from the phone. Just set some standards and do it long enough to the point where you realize I don't need to be on it 24-7. I don't want to get off that phone point, but I do want to side note the example you were giving about your grandparents.

I think one place you could give yourself more credit is it also has to do with where you are in your life. You're in your 20s. You're an entrepreneur. You've been a builder for years. You are trying to explode something. You are in a constant state that you want to be in, paradoxically, of crisis, right? You are trying to get something off the ground. It's iteration, iteration, failure, iteration, iteration, failure, success, failure, success, failure, success, failure, all the way to where it's like, oh, my God, we did it, right? So you are – you're also trying to better yourself all the time. You're trying to know more information about things that are totally peripheral.

I don't know if I used that right, but to what – on the periphery of what you're trying to know more information about things that are totally peripheral i don't know if i use that right but to what on the periphery of what you're doing so in your mind that time transactionally and it's not to say like fuck you grandma i don't want to talk to you like that's not the point but transactionally in your head you're like well what what what am i getting out of this right like what am i learning right now if i'm talking about what the weather's doing outside what the fuck does i have to do with anything like that's that's 15 minutes of my day i could have studied like who's who where sequoia is investing next yeah you know and that's yeah i mean that's a great point and then also it's the same thing

we're like even if i am talking about business i want to talk to somebody that is benefiting me in terms of like can provide me some sort of knowledge that I didn't have. So if it's going to be a conversation, and again, it sounds so like arrogant, but if it's going to be a conversation about me, there's no value add after it, like they're just so either a they don't really care, or they're kind of just interested in hearing me talk, they're not gonna provide any sort of value. And it's like, Oh, how's the's the app like how many users are you getting more users and you know are you the like and it's just like a boring conversation i hate that and i would much rather talk about nothing or just not have a conversation at all which again is a shame like

if somebody is genuinely interested in hearing you speak about something have a conversation with them like i shoot i shoo away my parents all the time about it because i'm just like you're not going to get it so like what's the point of having this conversation I just say yo it's going well that's it I do that too and it is something I think about I got to work on and it sounds like you do too

but that's a lot of us it's a generational thing though we're admitting it though yeah exactly that's the first step it's like the 12 step process or whatever that's like AA or something. I think something like that, yeah. Something like that.

We don't need to go that deep. But either way, you at least have the self-awareness to know that sometimes you do have to disconnect with your phone. So do you plan that out ahead of time? Do you say like, all right, well, for three days next week, I'm not going to touch my phone. I'm not going to turn it on until 1 o'clock. Or are you more just like, sometimes it's like, all right, I'm just going to turn off and put it to the side. I used, so I have limits set on my apps and I used to be very strict with it. But again, I think that the crazy part about this addiction is like, once you start to slowly get back into it, you're, you're back in, you're logged. So, um,

now I start my day, like right back on my phone, I got to get back into that whole process of not touching any nonsense apps until 12 o'clock and then stopping that at eight o'clock. But the problem is like for me, especially being on TikTok, that is essentially my business now. Even if it's from understanding the platform a bit better, right? Understanding what works and what doesn't work. I'm always doing research, quote unquote, but you get so sucked into the nonsense for hours and then watching girls twerk their ass. And that does not help. You know what I mean? That's not beneficial to the business. And so I think the point – Makes you feel good though.

Yeah, look. There's a time and a place for it. That's for sure. You got to realize and I think have the conversation with yourself. Okay, am I on my phone for good reasons? And if it's a yes, I can continue. If it's no, throw it the fuck away and go do something else. I was on TikTok in like March 2019.

I was on there early. Early? At the time, at the time, like, I was working in the world. This was not the kind of place I could have an account, let alone do anything on it.

Right, right. But I love studying this stuff and I was kind of one foot in, one foot out. So I knew I was getting more towards a world where it was like I was going to have to look at that shit. Yeah.

So, found this app and I went in. I remember I had downloaded it and I said, all right, I'm going to go in for 20 minutes tonight. Like I got done all my shit. I'm like, I'm going to go to bed.

I looked up three hours and 10 minutes later. It's like three hours and nine minutes. Dude. And I went, oh, oh, wow. Yeah. And it was me and all the 14 to 16-year-olds on there, and what was legal at the time, a bunch of people on army bases, which then was discontinued by the army for data purposes, which is kind of what we talked about earlier.

Like, the U.S. government got a little scared about that, and I understand that. But, you know, they were all just lip-syncing, and it was like random shit. It was the first iteration out of the Musical.ly app, which they had taken and now changed the name to TikTok. But I looked at this and I said, holy shit, they built a perfect app. And I remember hitting up a bunch of people I knew, especially in the age range of like 20 to 22,

and saying, stop, who had a talent? Stop everything you're doing. Delete the other apps. Don't even stay on YouTube if you're doing delete the other apps don't even stay on youtube if you're doing a little bit of shit there we'll get back to that get on tiktok right now and they would all be like you're full of shit like this is so stupid it's for the kids i said what social and clubhouse is a different story we can talk about that later but what social media app has not been driven by 14 to 16 year olds? Even Facebook, which started specifically on college campuses.

When they opened that fucker up, the way it really went was all the 14 to 16 year olds who were young in high school ran to that app. Yeah, it was me. I remember being like an eighth grade and like not being cool enough or old enough to be on Facebook yet because that's where all the high schoolers were. And then I was like, shit, man, I got to get on Facebook because I want to be cool. I'm on MySpace right now, but I'm not there yet. I'm not at the level of Facebook yet, which sucks. Well, MySpace was the first example before Facebook that was like really heavy for like

eighth graders, like seventh and eighth grade. That was like the sweet spot. And then ninth and 10th grade loved it too. And I was too young for it i guess i was like fourth grade or whatever but i looked at this and i'm like the other thing is you don't leave yeah they designed and they designed an app where it is it's such the it's these small bites of oxytocin every video whatever the hormone is one serotonin one of them whatever the good one yeah both of them are good but whatever one is dopamine that's it that's it it's one of them yeah it's all these little bites of it that you're like oh i'll do one more oh do one more yeah i'll do one more it's like a slot machine and so i went to the wikipedia page and this is not there anymore at least last we checked but the wikipedia page back then was small for tick tock this is like a nascent app

yeah and one of the things that said there was that blank, blank studies, and it listed all this stuff conducted over the past year, have concluded that TikTok is one of the most highly addictive things ever created. And then it had quotes. That's crazy. Of like here. And so China had been, I think their app was called Douyin for TikTok instead. They had limited, they like mandated some limits on its use for certain ages. I don't remember the details. I don't want to say.

I hope I can still find that, but it's not there anymore. And I was like, oh man, this is, all the apps are addictive. They know what they're doing but i'm like this is going to take over because they also perfectly perfectly atoned for all the sins of vine and all the sins of instagram with sizing and not being convenient for a phone with video content yeah so they took vine who wanted to make no business model and had this very limited creativity of six seconds and said okay We're not gonna go crazy here, but we're gonna give people a little bit more range Yeah, we're gonna give them a nicer interface and by the way

You want to talk about the best marketing of all time the download thing where you can just download videos right into your role Yes that have the left to right bottom corner left left top corner right bottom corner name on it Greatest thing I've ever seen so So I want to, I want to talk about that. So that I think that's probably one of the greatest viral growth strategies that anyone has ever done. Right. So, and I, and I use this sort of tactic as something to mirror for myself, right? When somebody asks me as a founder of an app, what are your tactics for growth, right? Influencer marketing is great. Using and leveraging UACs is great. What's a UAC? A user acquisition channel. So like Google ads,

Apple search, whatever it is. But you need something a little bit different and stickier. PayPal has a great one, right? They say, get a friend on the app, pay you five bucks, easy, said and done. Robinhood will give you free stock. Like this is very simple, but what TikTok does is first of all, they don't have to pay for it. So that's, that's fantastic. And it makes it very easy for me. I'm increasing my value because now I can post more content on another page and you are automatically receiving clout from that. So from Stu Knighted standpoint, I want to be able to leverage that and say, okay, look,

you wrote a proposal in Stu Knighted. You click that share button. You can share it right to your LinkedIn or share it right to your Instagram. And every time you do it, like you mentioned, you're going to see a little Stu Knighted logo in that. And every time somebody sees that it sparks interest so yeah i think that's a genius tactic and i'm curious to know why other social medias don't do it and they almost go the opposite route where they sort of

they'll they'll shut down the ability for you to share a tweet somewhere else and it's a little weird um but also i know i i heard a podcast that like instagram for example or i think it was the opposite twitter shut down the ability to preview screen in instagram like you just see the link now um and there's like a reason for that i forget who did it first i think facebook might have done it to twitter first and then they sort of gave it right back to them and it crushes it it crushes the UI because now all you see is a bunch of links whereas you used to see a nice looking preview of the picture.

So it's an interesting tactic and more people should do it. All of the apps, like we said, are addictive inherently. We know this. But there is a way to make some more addictive than others. And I think that's where TikTok really doubled down and bet on themselves. Because you would think like, oh, they allow users to share on other places.

Doesn't that then drive attention to other apps and then allow those apps to then iterate and create their own like Instagram tried to with Reels and everything? Snapchat or... Sure. Exactly. Snapchat's got what the spotlight thing this is something that's cool if you want to talk about that let's go let's do it so instagram or snapchat spotlight essentially is the exact same thing as um tick tock right it's it's literally identical what they're doing right now is they are paying creators a million dollars a day, like literally a million dollars a day. That's a pool of money that they're going to give to the top, whatever videos, right? So think of it like a gigantic, wow. Okay. Think of it like a gigantic for you page. You have to submit a video to get in. You can submit a video every five minutes. You can

do it right now, every five minutes. And if you get selected and you're a top tier video, you could split in that pot. I know people that are literally just taking their TikTok content. Like they still have the watermark in it, throwing it on Snapchat and making millions of dollars. It's fucking nuts, dude. I know a 14 year old that put up a video and made 20 grand off it. I'm like, you're 14. I'm like, you're 14, dude. Like, what are you going to do with that money? You know, like like they just i think so it's a tactic where they have the money obviously is it gonna work because i think are you competing for likes in this case pretty much i think you're competing for influencer loyalty and that's the key to this if you can treat your no no i'm asking about snapchat specifically so like on spotlight

you said they have a million dollar pot per day. So that just means anyone can throw up a video. So the most viewed videos are the ones that get a certain percentage of the pot. You're a Spotlight winner, they call it. Yeah. Wow. Okay, continue.

Yeah, and I think so the tactic there is you're competing to achieve, like I said, influencer loyalty. So for me, as an example, on TikTok, I'm so devoted to the app because it's a way for me to make money. If I found another app that's identical, that pays me two X more, three X more, I'm going, I'm going. If it's as easy. That's what Vine had a problem with.

Right. And that's what TikTok's biggest problem is. They have their creator fund and they have the marketplace. They don't pay shit. And like, that's a problem. YouTube is so sticky because influencers are on there making millions and millions of dollars. If you want to make millions and millions of dollars on TikTok, you have to be very active and do it yourself. You have to cut the brand deals. You have to get an agent. It's not TikTok paying you. And so that's like very rarely. And I think that's the like the secret sauce slash the demise of some of these platforms. That's how Instagram did it though. To grow, right? You pretty much had to be your own agent. And I don't understand it. It's so easy. Like we're talking about Instagram, what they're doing

with their UI is disgusting right now. Become the marketplace, become the intermediary between me and a brand that you have identified as somebody that I could work with. Do it all for me. Take 50%. I don't give a shit. I'm still making money. You you're missing out on such an opportunity. And I don't realize or understand why they're not, you know, it would be so much. I mean, who, who wouldn't they be able to reach out to? Hey, Nike. Hey, so-and-so we have a great influencer for you that has a million followers use them right now okay then they can fact check the influencer personally because they're all right through instagram all the data it makes so much sense it almost like makes too much sense there has to be like a reason why they're not doing it i've never thought about

that deeply enough this is i like this topic though this is very interesting with with vine just to circle back on that why i was saying that their problem was i mean they got bought by twitter i guess like right away but their founding group was very utopitarian they never prioritized making money which honorable thing in some ways but it was more an arrogant thing where they were like oh it's great like money will come it was it was there was no plan with it so they didn't incentivize creators and then you had all these creators born on there like the paul brothers uh amanda cerny the what what did they call before sway house there was

like the the something eight or something like that justin roberts was yeah yeah forget i don't know if justin roberts i think he was on it once it moved to instagram but like some of the you know what i'm talking about so you had all these pods of great influencers that were born there and i don't know which ones did this at the end but there is a story that ran online at towards the end of vine where a bunch of the influencers banded together and met with vine's senior team and said look we love this app we want to stay here we want to do this here's the money you have to pay because all these other apps are coming to us and asking to pay us and youtube was really coming at him

big time and i believe actually now i'm remembering i think instagram did come and pay them so they never have that we'll get back to that intermediary thing. Like they've never done that. That's interesting. But I think they did pay for some influencers. I'll fact check that afterwards. But Vine was just like, yeah, no. And then they died.

Yeah, it's, it's, you have to realize, and this is, again, goes back to, and I'm not just trying to plug what I'm doing, but like, it goes back to me trying to scale mine. Who is your, who holds more value? Is it the person giving the help on the app or is the person getting? And for me, it's more so the giving because the getting is going to come, right? Like you'll find students that are holy shit in a pinch need help. If you don't have the supply when they get on the app, that's when you're fucked. But the demand is going to be there if you have the supply and that's sort of, um, it's easier to market to them. So you have to treat these helpers like they are special. And that could mean paying them. That could mean making

sure that they are satisfied with whatever is going on. If the UI has to be catered more towards them than it is on the other side, then so be it. And that's exactly how these social medias should treat their golden children, these influencers, the reason why people are on their app on a consistent basis. Now, you were saying that on TikTok, in order to make a lot of money, you have to be posting all the time and be on there. Why does that make a difference that you're going to make a lot of money there specifically? Well, so I, I mean, I'm a, I'm a big fan of like, they always say content is King, but it's really good content is king so if you're throwing a thousand videos out every month and there's

shitty videos you're not gonna go anywhere so like i i don't get this narrative of oh i'm just gonna keep posting and hope it sticks it's the gary v nerd right and i get it to an extent but also gary v you're putting out good content like you're not throwing out shit he wasn't but he was also doing it during a time when nobody else was posting so sure if he was gary v right now he would get lost in the wash right if he was who he was 20 years ago yeah because of how competitive it is yeah and i and i'll give him one there i mean different time too you know like he adjusted very well and and he realized that so anyway i think what ends up happening is the for you page on TikTok

or any sort of algorithm, think of it like a lottery, right? If you throw in more tickets, your chances of winning increase. And for the few people listening that haven't ever been on the app, the for you page is basically like the main newsfeed you go to that puts accounts from around the world in there based on how the videos are doing in the algorithm. Right. So the interface of TikTok is very simple. simple it's two feeds it's the for you page which is global and every video ever and your friends page the interesting part is the for you page is different for everybody it's based upon your interests and this is how they've learned who you are which is also interesting it's going to change for you on a consistent basis. I was so intrigued by this whole GameStop AMC bullshit that now the only thing that I see on

my feed is stock trading tips and how to trade and stocks one-on-one. So it's completely changed for me and it's going to change in another week. Getting back to what we were saying, the better your odds are and the more you throw at the For You page, the better your odds are, and the more you throw at the for you page, the greater your chances are of making money. So, um, how do you make money though? And that's what I was confused on. Were you talking about going out and getting your own brand deals? So there's a couple of ways I think on Tik TOK, right? So Tik TOK actually has a creator fund. And if you get into the fund, which is relatively simple, I think you need like 10 K followers and then you submit your page and you can get in, they'll start paying you per view.

And it's a little subjective isn't like a view of somebody, a view from somebody in the U S is more valuable than somebody in X company. So it's not a direct payout, like a thousand views gets you a dollar. It's sort of subjective in that sense. But what I noticed, and again, I'm not the only person that noticed this. As soon as I was in the creator fund, I saw my videos have a huge decrease in views. So like, what are you really trying to, are you really just trying to put this facade up that you want to take care of your influencers, but you don't really want to pay us? Or was my,

were my videos just not doing well? And so I got back out, my videos started doing well, again, I got back in, same thing happened. And so what I did was I posted a video. While I was in, I got out. And I posted the same video again. And it literally did 10x what it did when I was in. So not saying that I found out and expose them just didn't work for me. So how I make money is I have to start cutting my own brand deals. I reach out or I have people reaching out to me and saying, hey, John, I really like your page.

I want to promote a post with you. Okay, great. This is what I charge. This is the agreement. How would you like to move forward? Yeah. So if I wasn't active and not to say that I have millions and millions of followers, but if I wasn't active, I would make no money on this app.

Right. And a lot of people aren't. All right. There's a million things I want to touch there, but let's give context too, because what I really like about you is you find a way with stuff. You are very, very resourceful. You are constantly looking around at where attention is, where action is and how you can add value there. And that's not even just like buzzword speak. That's what you do. And so we still got to finish off. We got to where the active users are on Stunited and all that, which is great. And I still want to go back to a couple things there.

But one of the really interesting things you did to adjust when Corona hit while much of this was up in the air, because as you said, you still were selling the quote-unquote b2b going straight to the straight to the institutions until the summer you were like okay well i i need to figure out some shit here because obviously like we're in stagnation mode you went on to tiktok you started something entirely different and you become a tiktok influencer and it's and your page your page is also really fucking good like it's very energy like i could see myself killing a couple hours on there and then wanting to kill you afterwards but tell people what your page is called and what you do because it when when i tell you this has

nothing to do with stu knighted it has nothing absolutely nothing to do with stu knighted yeah sure so this is a funny story too so it's february of 2020 and my dad and i are about to go out to eat in the city with my cousins so we're all dressed pretty nice where were you going uh the first goes yeah it was gonna be a good night um he's making a manhattan like he would do any other time we were about to go out and he has a nice little setup in the basement i said let me film this on this app called tiktok that my sister told me to download it's going to the chinese government right whatever yeah just let me fucking film it and let me see what i got and so i filmed this little thing and he likes frank sinatra so i'm like all right let me throw a frank sinatra uh music song in the background that's the best part

of your page well that's so i'll get to that too we throw this video up we get to dinner it's like 10 o'clock i check my phone and I hit like 16,000 views, which at the time I was like, holy shit, like what the fuck? That's crazy. I text my sister. I'm like, this is so funny. I check again. It's at like 30,000 and it's at a hundred thousand. Then it's at a million. And today it's at like 8 million. So I got lucky in a sense with my first video, but I realized that this is what people want to see. So we kept doing it. And you mentioned Frank Sinatra. I throw Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, that sort of vibe music

in the background of every one of my videos. And it consistently does pretty well to the point where if I don't and I use like a modern day song or something like that, it fucking gets shut down. It does not do well at all. So we've, like I said, identified what works and what doesn't work

to now we have 670,000 followers and all we do is make drinks and it's, it's fun. And I think what separate business out of this too. Yeah. That's what I, that's what my point is. Like I identified pretty early that like, look, we have a huge opportunity to make a lot of money making fucking drinks. Right. And i told my dad that and we had this sit down conversation where this was fun but let's take this to the next level and let's come out with our own bourbon which we did and we sold out a barrel in like two days it was nuts how did you put your own bourbon together so like how fast did you it sounds like you did that in like a night like yeah let's make a fucking bourbon tonight. So again, man, I like to say that we got lucky with a lot of things with TikTok.

I had a video that we used the bourbon called Burning Chair. Burning Chair was made by a very well-known winemaker called Dave Finney. So this dude has a distillery out in California called Savage and Cook. Sold his wine company. You ever hear of the Prisoner Wine? No. called savage and cook sold his wine company ever hear the prisoner wine no so he sold it to a big time winery um gallo for a couple hundred million dollars like crazy crazy stuff he his son saw us make a drink with his dad's bourbon kids like 14 years old and it's like hey like you use my dad's bourbon he wants to send you some at the time i had no clue who the fuck this guy was i googled

him like right before our phone call and i'm like dude i'm sorry but like this is amazing that i'm talking to you right now long story short he sent us a bunch of stuff we like this bourbon and i approached him and said hey have you ever done this sort of thing where you worked with influencers and made like limited edition lines and he goes on to tell me how he's worked with athletes and and big time names and jeff epstein yeah yeah exactly we don't talk about it no no um but dude he he had like the chance to work with um pink whitney like barstow took it who pink whitney was the the new amsterdam pink uh vaca what's it called is that is it called pink whitney i have no idea it's like a barstool new amsterdam version i've probably seen it i have no idea what it is anyway yeah so he had a chance to do that and they didn't because like didn't really fit their brand anyway so he's like he

finds a couple paisans in new york making a few videos with frank sinatra like i like these guys so it was very in the beginning like all right let's just do it let's see how it goes i happen to be able to find a retailer that i work with a website that sells so they essentially bought it from c from savage cook and i sell it and so in in a barrel there's about 240 bottles of bourbon that's made oh so he produces the bourbon for you and you brand it and it's under his purview exactly so what we did was he was this was cool he sent us a bunch of samples what he does with his bourbon is he finishes them in wine barrels so he sent us a bunch of samples of different wine finished bourbon and we told his distill his master distiller which ones we liked which ones we didn't and we came up with our own blend so to speak so

now this is our limited edition blend of bourbon called you're not you're not getting anything like that no under his brand like it's going to taste you're going to notice that the taste is different oh it's different yeah for sure your dad's a huge bourbon guy obviously big time bourbon guy so you're also a big bourbon guy nope so can you tell i fucking hate bourbon that's like that's where it's kind of a problem i well that's a problem but it's also a great thing to to have in our corner because i love this bourbon. That's like, that's where kind of a problem. Well, that's a problem, but it's also a great thing to have in our corner because I love this bourbon. I wouldn't be able to sip on a bourbon if you paid me. Like I would never order a straight up bourbon. But they do pay you on this one. So I don't fucking believe you. But honestly speaking, man, I could honestly

say I sipped on this bourbon and was like, that was smooth. Like that went down really well. I can enjoy this. I don't have to pretend to like this. I really do. So even if you're not a bourbon drinker, you're going to like our bourbon. And he obviously loves it. So long story short, we sold our barrel out in like three days or so. And now we're scrambling to make a lot more. And we have a run coming out in a couple of days.

Yeah, I don't know if you can reveal this information but is this like you don't have to give me a percentage but is this like oh it's like a 50 50 split scenario like you sell and he gets he keeps half because he has the overhead and and you're the one creating the market or let me see here um so you can tell me so i guess you can see this. So I guess you can see this. Yeah, yeah, of course. You can see it as like both sides, right? So since I'm working with the retailer and the distillery, I am helping both, right? So I'm getting paid on both ends. I'm getting paid from the original sale. And then I'm getting paid from the end sale, right. So we're doing very well. That being said, there's more opportunities in the future to if we took control of everything, we may or may not be doing a lot better. So for right now, yes, we are getting taken care of super well from

both ends. But everyone's winning, like everyone is making good money off this stuff. Because we're able to push it on like we nobody would be able to do it alone in a sense right and what's your bourbon calling it it's it's it's burning chair bourbon but the johnny drinks edition so what's the smoke what's the smoke the glass thing so that'll pull that up yeah so that was our yeah just look up like johnny drinks but i'm actually curious to see what comes up when you search john drinks bourbon. Our claim to fame, and I guess the reason why. Google finished my search.

That was a little creepy. That's funny. Go ahead. So our big claim to fame, and I guess the reason our page blew up was my dad would smoke a smoke board, and he would cover the smoke with a glass, right? So he would then pour the bourbon in this smoky glass.

And the reason, you know, you could say it adds flavor or whatever, adds a smokiest flavor to the bourbon. It's really just for the experience. Like it looks really, really cool. And people are so amazed by it. So that was like our big, you know, smoke the glass was like our slogan, our tagline. And so this is a smokier bourbon that we're selling. Hmm.

And you've had that on TikTok videos. We actually have to get back to that because we haven't done it in a while and i've noticed that people are looking for it yeah yeah because it looks if you know nothing about this because i don't i didn't really know what you were doing when i was first looking at this i'm like all right well wow okay i just figured your dad's like like an artisanal alcohol guy like he just knows what the fuck's up but when you're actually putting that content out there the average person i mean we only know how wine works let alone bourbon so it's it's pretty amazing when you see it and now that i know that that's actually like a part of the thing

that's the product that you're literally selling out of this that's that's pretty cool yeah yeah so we got it up here is that so scroll down to that first link, the first link right there. Yeah. Oh, you got the SEO and everything. Look at you. That's crazy. You like this Bergen.

You like this bourbon. It goes down smooth because there's a price tag going down with it. I don't fucking believe you for one second. I don't, I don't promote anything that I don't believe. So I don't, I haven't liked bourbon my whole life, but I like this one.

Listen, this one's pretty fucking good. I'm being hard on you. It's okay. All okay all right so here it is is this what you're looking for that's that's it so that's the website we sell through so cw spirits you can you can purchase liquor and it gets shipped right to your door which is really cool 69.99 58.73 is going in john ronnie's pocket. I wish, bro. I'd be a happy, happy man. Yeah, you'd be doing okay. You know, I'd be committed to this and quit everything else.

I was going to say, that's a pretty, just bare bones looking at it, that's a pretty tight margin. I mean, that's a good price. Yeah. That's like, that is not a rip at all. No. No, it's, I mean, that's where you start to expand. You can decrease price or change price based upon the market, and that's the exciting part of what we're doing with this next batch.

And, and is this like your dad, like what's your dad's background? Was this just always a hobby for him or always a hobby? He's never been a bartender, never was in the alcohol industry, like not even back in the day. No, but I was a mortgage broker. Like that's, that's the funny part. No, but like in college or something, never or something never he saw somebody smoke a glass at a bar one time and was like i'm doing that he won't even like if he cracks a can of beer he won't drink it out of the can he pours it into a glass he's all about the experience of alcohol the aroma it really and you feel that through the videos you know what i mean we and it goes back to like the the topic of sort of getting into that flow state we make you feel like you're in the room with us and you feel that sort

of nostalgic wintertime vibe that you get with the frank sinatra video you know the music in the background and we're pouring up some bourbon and you feel good about it so dude i'm ready to party when i watch your dad make a drink let's fucking go baby going up to wayne saying what's up to the boys yeah man you gotta come by it's i i do like because by the way the bar is sick where he makes all this stuff the bars it's like this this nice wide open simple but like professional bar and you you're doing the whole thing with the camera like pulling up and down that's close and slow-mo and everything it's it's like you're watching it it is a show well it's so cool well you. What's interesting is like I started to change or attempt to change things up, right?

So I got or I tried to use a camera or I tried to use my phone lens as opposed to just TikTok. What I realized was that that actually does worse. And people have commented like, look, I don't want to see that. It feels way more natural and organic when you're just shooting from the hip with your phone and being very interactive with your dad. Like that's the stuff that does well. And I always thought that I have to expand and do better. And like, look, get back to your roots. It goes back to that.

Like figure out what is working and stick with it. There's a line between creativity and overthinking it. There is a really fine line there and i think one of the best parts about your page is how natural and relatable it is with your dad too because you'll just have a video and you're behind the camera on these ones where it's your dad and not you just like hey dad i got a thought and he's like hey son what's up it's just like i wonder how many times they had to do that first part and then the rest of it's just like all right make this for me all right step one step two all right cool bet let's go it's so you're almost like and then you got the sinatra in the background it's it's it's like a whole vibe

and your page is very unique so one of the great things about tiktok is people can relate all these different things across culture and take things that you and i would have never thought of or given half a shit about and suddenly it's like wow that's really cool that's a good right whereas there are a lot of people who blow up who do it also in spaces that are so crowded and then only a few blow up you know i think the most basic one the lip syncers right you got great lips great tits like it's gonna happen yeah you know if they're not perfect it might not happen maybe if they are perfect it still might not happen because there's so many. So when you create something where it's like, wait, I haven't seen that before. Even if people aren't into it, they don't give a fuck about bourbon.

They don't give a fuck about the aroma of alcohol. Maybe they're 12 years old and they don't even know what it is. It's in their dad's goddamn cabinet. They come by this page. They're like, holy shit, this guy's cool. Yeah. You mentioned culture and authenticity, right? So I love listening or watching other people from different cultures just behave and act like I was I was watching

people like they were Asian, and they were just talking about their cuisine. And I was so intrigued about that, because I don't know anything about it. So for us, I think we fit the bill of like the North Jersey vibes, and we have the Italian descent. And we don't try to pretend like we're something we're not. Like we're not off the boat Italians or we're not going to pretend to have the Italian accents. You don't have the greenhorn thing going on at all. Exactly. Yeah. We're not being douchebags about it.

We are who we are and that's what you're getting. And I think that's sort of the reason why we were able to grow, I guess, relatively quickly. And after the first video, did it do like a total of 16 000 views or did it keep going no i hit eight million holy shit the first one ended up going to eight yeah that's what i'm saying it's like our first i missed that i'm sorry yeah no no problem so the that was like our first bit i would not have continued to do this to be really honest if it didn't do well like that first video did the very first did eight yeah you can check my page yeah holy shit so how many followers you get out of that over that's what like so i had like 50k off the jump and like i didn't really realize like off the eight

yeah pretty i mean pretty much like i remember i remember like a week after maybe i was like 40 um and then i was like oh that's a lot and then realized that there really wasn't a lot and i just keep going and it's not when you think about, if you get 8 million views on a video like that, that means it went heavy on the for you page. And it's really that is grade a content. We should talk about how this goes down to that's pretty cool. Yeah. But 40 50,000 followers is pretty small percentage of that of the views. It's due. So that's the thing, right? Like, so there's a lot that goes into the Tiktok algorithm, right? So what keeps your video on the For You page? Is it likes? Is it follows? Is it shares? Is it comments? And from Clubhouse, what I'm learning from these bigger name TikTokers is it's driving traffic to your profile and eliciting or forming

a follow after that, right? So if my video can get you to follow my page, TikTok sees that and loves that and is going to keep your page on the i'm sorry keep your video on the for you page so what a lot of creators start to do is like tactics to just drive traffic to the page and so it may be something that leaves a little bit like a cliffhanger like part two yeah so those are big and the reason for that is i'm so interested that i have to learn more. I got to go to this guy's page and okay, wait, maybe that part two isn't out yet. So I have to follow him to wait for that part two. A lot of these guys give an effective action, follow and I'll do a part two.

If I get X amount of blank, I'll do a part two. So then people take that action. And it's sometimes cheesy, but if you do it the right way, it fucking works. So yeah, I think that's a big part of TikTok. It's also how long can somebody watch your video? If you can get somebody to watch the entire video and then watch it again and then again, I think that was the reason why we started to do so well was because you're not watching our video one time. You're saying, holy shit, I want to make that drink. Let me save it for later. I'm going to pull it back up later. And oh, wait, what was that part? I got to refresh and watch that video again. So those are the things that start to add up and the reason why these videos will stay or don't wait a second. Yeah. There's a second part there. Yeah. You're adding massive value. Yeah. You're a page that's

giving people instructions. They can then it's not just like they're getting entertainment. They can take that and then do it for themselves. Like, oh shit, this guy's teaching me how to make this drink. That's the guy I'm going to go to. So then they save your video too on their phone and they're pausing and playing you. And like, oh yeah. And then visually they're like, okay, I'm going to wait for the next video on this guy. Yeah. So, I mean, look, it's like you said, there's a difference between being creative and overthinking.

And I fell into the trap of sometimes overthinking it. And you just get back to your roots, bro. Like do what, do what works and juice the fuck out of it until you can't anymore. And then you start to pivot and identify different things you can start doing. So you started hitting this what on like a daily basis after that first video, or how did you build into it? Dude, I was wasn't like once a week, maybe in the beginning. And then I gotta be honest, right? So we hit it while it was hot. Quarantine really helped us grow. And you can look at right now,

a lot of bartenders on TikTok have millions of followers. And right now their engagement is terrible because they lost the sauce. Like they were cool when everyone was just sitting at home. If you're still doing the same thing and you're not relevant, nobody wants to watch your videos anymore.

TikTok doesn't care how many followers you have. They're not going to show your video to anybody, which is very interesting. You know what shouldn't get lost here either? And this is a total side note on this. You ever heard the Airbnb story? Hell yeah. Okay.

I think about that a lot because, because of your resourcefulness and everything and how you flip this. Cause I want to keep this going and see how you grew this page and how it grew out. But there's a, I think it's a relatively famous story now, but I still bring it up with people be like, wait, what's that? When Airbnb was trying to get off the ground back in the late 2000s. I'm so happy you're telling the story. Right. Well, do you want to tell it? I mean, okay. So mean okay so it's funny that you're about to tell the story because this is the i'll give the context after yeah because i i use this story as an analogy right so airbnb during the democratic election of 08 i believe right mccain obama yeah they were so resourceful that they had to start

selling cereal to make money to fund the app. So they started selling these democratic political cereal boxes. Obama owes. Yeah, Obama owes. Captain McCain. There you go. Exactly. So they were making these cereal boxes and selling them and making a shit ton of money off it.

Didn't they have actual cereal in it too? I think they had actual cereal and they would make the boxes themselves. Because they were going – I think at the like they didn't have much of a product i i gotta go look this up again to get the exact details but they didn't have much of a product they had like nothing at the time and none of the vcs were like small vcs they weren't touching them so what they were doing was like they realized that okay this democratic election was a great chance to market their app or their platform because the hotels in the area were all booked and nobody had places to stay for the election. So they leveraged that super well. I use the analogy

where like Airbnb sold cereal, I sell bourbon, right? So like I'm using these bourbon sales to fund student-nited. And I think it's a pretty cool comparison because I grew up or I read that book when I was very early and I was like, these dudes are people that I want to emulate. Like I love everything about their story. Brian Chesky wasn't the techie nerdy dude, just had a great idea and was so passionate about it. If he can make that concept work, as in you were letting strangers into your house to stay, anything can work. That was sort of always what I would tell myself. Well, you mimicked it.

And it's an ongoing story here. But you were staying power with this. And you're, I guess, adding a feather to your cap is not necessarily stopping. Like theirs was, it was a stopgap. It was like, okay, let's keep the lights on so we can keep our idea going. And it was like cute. was it was a stop gap it was like okay let's keep the lights on so we can keep our idea going and it was like cute and it was also timed it's time for that election they weren't selling captain mccain cereal in in february 2009 you know so they used

that resourcefulness to keep the lights on and then be able to go to the vcs as the idea was progressing to be able to say hey we're still. This is what we're trying to do. And basically like stay alive long enough to make it. You have added basically like a, like a separate business here too. That doesn't, I mean, from what you've explained to me, it doesn't take up too, too much of your time. It's definitely effort. Like you, you can't just be like, I'm going to post something quick. Like you do have to put effort into it. It is hours out of your week, but it's manageable. Yeah, for sure. And that's the thing too.

I never expected this to become what this is. And it's exciting, right? It goes back to seizing whatever opportunity comes your way and making something out of it. Where like I could have easily had this TikTok page, grown it, had fun with it, never really made a lot of money because I never thought it could. But my dad and I, I guess, quickly identified where this could go.

And now it's starting to take off to the point of like, what's the side hustle versus what's the main business? You know, that's the interesting part right now. Well, I don't even think you're going to lose sight of that because you're, you have such a, I don't know the word, this is not the word I want to say, but you have that technologist vibe at heart. Like you are all about, at least when I, this is the vibe I get from you when I talk to you, you are all about, I can't believe I'm going to say this, solving problems in a convenient way to make the world a better place. You know what I mean? What all the fucking venture capitalists say on their profile. But it's true.

You think about that from a very 30,000 foot in the air view. That's why I like listening to you talk about it. So I don't – from the outside, and you're you, like you know what the truth is in your head. I don't think you're losing that at all. I think you've just found a way to tap into your creativity more and make yourself more interesting and more well-rounded with this. And so you also shouldn't lose sight of the fact that similarly to Airbnb, where they did that at a very low moment. I mean, those screenshots of those denial emails, like, yeah, fuck you. I started saving mine because of that.

Dude, you did it at a time where the thing you were doing was kind of like sideways and inconvenient, like going to these schools to try to sell like to the schools and leaning away from what your app really was. And then it basically got shut down because the world stopped. So you did it at one of the worst possible moments you could have. And even if you fell into it, you then hit it. And so throughout that whole spring semester which i love how this whole podcast is like tied back into this timeline almost like a like a movie a little bit like we

go on all these side pieces and then we come back to tonight and how it went it's kind of cool i haven't done one like this just fell into it but like you you leverage it all throughout the spring and into the summer and build out this nice following that a you get this other business out of it and b you're also buying yourself time to figure out how to pivot with stu knighted and now here you are at a critical mass where you basically put 3 000 active users on this app let's call it what it is in about a semester yeah that's amazing well thank and i'm like getting chills over here like just getting super excited because when you're when you're in it you you never really take a step back and realize where you've come and what you've been able to do and i think it is like it's cool man and there if there's one thing i can sort of i guess um say about myself is i'm relentless right

like i'm not gonna stop especially, especially now. And people, investors or people in the space would be like, you're still here. Like, how are you still going? And you're progressing. I'm like, the analogy I use is like, look, there's plenty of ways to break down that wall. If I bang my head on it enough times, it's going to break. So I'm here for the long run. I'm going to make this thing work regardless of how I get it done. And that's what people are going to see. So I may not be the smartest. I may not have the tech background. I may not have the experience, but I'm going to get this thing done regardless of how it gets done. You know what though? You're missing something that you already said. And this is, I think this

might even be the most, well, the relentlessness is probably the most important part, but that relentlessness has to have something with it. It has to have, I guess it's like two little silos there. It has to have purpose and adaptation. You have to be willing to figure out, like being honest with yourself, like, all right, is this adding value or isn't it? How am I going to make it add value if it's not? Or how am I going to make it add more value than it is right now? And it also has to be like, is this really going to a space that needs it? Like that's the purpose.

Is it something I like to do? Yeah. You had that figured out. But you also, over time here, had those moments where it's like, well, fuck, this isn't doing anything. Yeah. So you had to figure out, like, not just be relentless and be like, I'm here, I'm doing the work. You know, like Gary Vee and all that. Yeah, exactly.

Just do the work, man. And like, that's just going to make it appear. It's more than that. You can't, like, you might have said to make it appear. It's more than that. You might have said this on this podcast. I can't tell because we've been talking and working all day. You can't just put out a thousand pieces of shit content and be like, oh, I put out a thousand pieces of shit content. That means that I must have X following because I deserve it, right? No.

It has to be entertaining or it has to add value or frankly both. Yeah. My dad always says this too is like people are very good at pretending to be busy. Right? Like if there's one thing I can say about my dad. I like your dad. If there's one thing I can say about him and we argue more than you could ever imagine. North Jersey, Italian father, son arguing. Come on.

It gets bad. but there's one thing i will say that is the hardest worker in any room and true hard work not sitting on your computer and pretending to answer emails or i'll use the another analogy of being in the gym and pretending to walk around like he busts his ass and doesn't say a word about it that dude will sit on his computer for 12 hours a day and get shit done and come upstairs like he did nothing. That to me, I see that and I'm like, fuck, I don't know if I'll ever be able to work that hard. And all I could do is just try. And it's just, it's reflective. It's reflective in the results. Like you talk to people that, oh, I'm trying to get in shape and I work out every day, but this and this and this and I have this problem.

No, you're just not working hard enough or you're doing something. You're making excuses. You're busting your head against a stone wall. Right. And the results aren't there for a reason. And his results are there for a reason. How old is your dad? 55.

That's even more evidence too because he's a mortgage broker. Yeah. He lived through that he went through times where he used two phones answering and answering like just did not put them down because there was so much seven oh eight oh nine i mean that's the number of guys i met in my career including like really successful guys who became successful at something else because they couldn't last in that business after that happened, which totally get it, right? Like it's insane. I mean that I don't have a percentage for you. I've never looked it up. I don't know if this data exists, but I'd love to do it. We should

do this afterwards. The number, the percentage decrease in mortgage brokers post-crisis. Interesting, man. And it's also like, it's something that not a lot of people understand the value that they provide. Like, why don't I just go to rocket mortgage? Like that's very simple. And it's really not like, so proving out that worth is sort of a challenge in itself. And he's been able to do that, I guess, over the years of just grinding, you know? So yeah, I give him that credit, but like you mentioned, I'm in a space where honestly speaking, hard work isn't enough, right? I can't just say I'm going to work really, really hard all day and never focus on pivoting or acknowledging what's really going on. You got to have a combination of both. So yeah,

that's just what I've been able to do. And I hit a point where I told myself there is no looking back. There is no getting a job or second option. I'm going to make this thing work. What that looks like, I don't know because I'm not God, but I'm going to see this thing through. Well, you just reminded me of something we were talking about earlier and we got cut off by a phone call that came in. I totally forgot about it, but I'm glad I just remembered this because I had never heard this before, but part of this self-awareness of working hard and building a project isn't just like, okay, well, or product, whatever it is. It isn't just, well, how good is the product or how hard am I working? It's also how fitting am I in my role? What am I doing? And does this make sense for the long-term viability of this? Am I in a spot where I am going to be most

advantageous so that for the people around me too, this thing goes. And I think a lot of people miss that. Like there are a lot of, I mean, the best example, there are a lot of CEOs out there who have no business being a CEO. And that's not even like, Hey, you're weak or you suck. It's just like, that's not who they are. And they don. And they don't have the self-awareness of that. And then they kind of hurt whatever the company or product is in the long term. And you brought up this thing. I've never heard this before. I don't know if you invented this.

If you did, you got to trademark this. But you were saying there's a difference between being an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. And you're an entrepreneur. I know that. But what's an intrapreneur? And what does this mean? Yeah. And so you brought up a great point, right? And I want to preface this by saying people think that being an entrepreneur is a step above and it's not. It's just it's different, right? Like just like somebody can be techie or great to work with their hands.

Other people are good to work with entrepreneurs. Not a good or bad thing. It's just that is what it is. Other people are good at becoming entrepreneurs. And what I mean by that is not necessarily starting something on your own, but joining a team early on that requires innovation and this sort of business structure. So you provide something very different than the CEO. You couldn't be in his shoes and he couldn't be in your shoes.

You're both critical to growing this company. And I think, honestly speaking, more CEOs and entrepreneurs should identify who these entrepreneurs are and surround themselves with them. Like I have, for example, Anthony D'Apolito, who is a fantastic, what I think is entrepreneur. I am, I love just bouncing ideas off of him to see his creative juices start to flow and

hear what he has to say and see what he comes up with and how he reacts instantly. I say something, he goes, bam, let's go do it. I need to create content. Bam, we're doing it right now. There is no pause and oh yeah,, great idea late, maybe later, maybe tomorrow. So those are key traits to have as an entrepreneur, things that I necessarily don't have, you know, and he's also like a wildly curious intellectual huge. And that's, I think that's part of it. And that Yeah, because and to give context, he does a lot of media work on guys you know and you as well. And he's very – he is a guy who in my opinion studies all types of entrepreneurs very, very closely. And he'll give commentary whether it be at the highest level talking about Steve Jobs down to like some dude I've never heard of that he just connected with and he does this thing and like here's why he's great at it and I think that's an awesome example because I don't know if I would see in that example Anthony founding a Silicon

Valley tech company yeah not that like tech is like his strong suit or whatever but let's say was like I don't know if he's that guy but is he the guy who understands what the what the message of the company is and how they're going to build that out internally and how they're going to create that so that as they grow, they don't lose who they are? Yeah. That's 100%. And that's what you mean by – Right, right. Not that it's a slight at all. It's just different.

And he identifies what my good values are, what my not so good values are. So how I could become a better CEO and a better entrepreneur or what I do super well, like he points these things out. And like you said, we'll then point to other entrepreneurs and say, Hey, you mirror so-and-so and you could mirror so-and-so and without him there, I would have never known that, you know? Yeah. And there's a, there's, there's historical precedence at the highest level for this over time jobs wasniak yeah i mean even at google you had larry page and sergey brin but they brought in eric schmidt to run the company yeah right like they recognized they weren't necessarily the day-to-day ceo who else here i'm blanking i think there's a ton you can give the example of krieger krieger and sistrom at instagram yeah yeah um i think you give the example of like even we talk

about sore a lot right that dynamic they're all very very different and i think none of them would be able to do it alone you know like they all just complete the puzzle super well and it's interesting right so where for context is anthony fen you and and riley's and i don't know baker's last name actually no baker's last name i i just met i just met baker that's his last name wait that's his last name it's justin baker oh that's a plot twist yeah have you met him yeah oh yeah i literally just met him he's hilarious he's the best man but that's their company just want to give the contact yeah and so again i think without knowing who they are or having to know who they are they all bring something different and and i think fenu is just a true entrepreneur at heart like that dude is just it's just different you know what i mean

you can and you can sense it when he when he talks riley has the same thing he has these these you know he reflects just being curious and being able to take control of a situation and i think honestly being an entrepreneur the biggest trait you can have is just pulling the you know taking action right like just going not that not having this constant decision making process sometimes you just got to go riley's got that it thing yeah he's got that it thing like and it's just that thing like when he walks in the room when i first met him he's got it he's just he is not in any way arrogant he is just completely understanding of what his world is and has the same level of curiosity, at least from what I've seen as his co-founders do. Yeah, I see a lot of similarities between me and him. Like we're both similar in that sense.

I agree with that. Because I don't think, I mean, I'm not overly, like I said, I'm not overly intelligent in terms of like knowing technology or VC space, but him and I are just very curious and know how to get things done and know how to present ourselves and the idea. And he couples that with having people around him that are just fantastic. He never saw a paragraph that he can't make a sentence. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Very,

very, like literally spending three hours with him one time. Like that's, that's really the longest extent I spent around him. And you listen to somebody talk and how they present their, their business when you're asking questions. And when you ask a question, he'll ask a clarification question right up front to know what he's dealing with. I've never that he did that. And I've heard him do it a couple of times. And I thought it was so interesting because I've never, it's very, it's very transparent and it's almost shocking but at the same time more people should do it yeah like why shouldn't we be able to understand who we're talking to for some context right let's get this conversation going and in the right direction especially if

you're dealing with complex exactly you don't know who the is gonna like you know with them you say compression to somebody like they're looking you know i'm sorry come again yeah exactly you know you want to know if you're talking to someone who actually is very into this world or has no fucking clue about it like how do you explain it and that's a very i mean that can sink companies when you don't know how to do it so that's why i think fen you having riley is fantastic because he dumbs things down for people like me whereas fen you will lose me in five minutes he'll talk and i'd be like dude i'm sorry but what the the did you just say you know what I mean like please dumb this down so I can understand he's he's like a very I can't put my finger on the word for it

I just I like listening to him talk because he's just he's also got that thing it's totally different it's a yin and a yang to riley like their worldviews are are they seem to be very similar and that's why they vibe well but their their styles so different oh my god and it's not like like for example like like i said me and my co-founder are very different yin and yang but he's like and he'll admit like he's just the nerdier person and he fits that bill very very well super smart fenu is doesn't give off that like nerdy-ish vibe but he's still extremely smart and it's just a yeah it's hard to pinpoint what that it really is everyone tries to put people in a box that's the problem to compare

them to someone else like when you're seeing someone come up lighten the world on fire and be like that guy's like this guy yeah like we do it in in sports all the time and i think it's applicable to everything when i say this i really stopped doing that with sports a lot because guys are different over time this guy's not like that guy like it's exactly it's it's there's nuance to it but then when you look in in the tech world i feel like you can do that more than you can with sports not that you should because i i think we really got to get away from that but with him there's nobody i can compare him to yeah just like when i look at silicon valley and the history of it and who was there i'm like no he's like way different than that guy or like he's way no no

no way different he's just him he's anthony fenu he's one of those people and this is again um like my co-founder too what when they talk it doesn't matter what they're talking about what they say you take as truth sort of regardless like fenny will have a point about something and my immediate thought is just agree like all right that made a lot of sense whatever you said i may not have agreed with it if somebody else said it, but because you said it, I'm like, yeah, sure. Which isn't always healthy on your end. No, it's not. And that's where like with David, like I said, my co-founder, I fell into that trap sometimes too often where I just, yeah, because I was like, look, that sounded great. You know, you're probably right. So like,

fuck it. Let's just keep going with it. So I had to force myself because he's so smart to, you know, bite back a little bit sometimes and say, well, maybe that's not right. Maybe we could argue about this for a little bit. Smart people with the right intentions want to be challenged. Yeah. And like sometimes it doesn't always manifest itself that way. They'll challenge you right back. Like, who the fuck are you?

But they want you to do it. They do love it. Because you get so stuck, especially when it's complex shit and that you know a lot about and the rest of the world doesn't you get so stuck in it that like you constantly wonder and come up for air if you're smart am i in tunnel vision do i yeah is this really what's happening or am i just so lost in this that like i lost the plot here yeah and and that's where i'll go back to as an entrepreneur, solo founder, or having a co-founder, it doesn't matter. Surround yourself with other startups.

Like Fenu and Riley and Baker at Soar have been able to help me. And I like to say that I've been able to help them just from having a different perspective. Like they were so tunnel visioned in on what they were building that you sort of miss something sometimes. And it's almost like for me, like, well, wait, why aren't you like, why are you thinking about this thing? That's so very obvious. And then when you bring it up to them, they're like, Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Right. And the same thing applies with me. Right. So find people that aren't necessarily in the same boat as you, but can give you a different perspective or like a fresh perspective.

This is another interesting thing I want to ask you about because there's another slippery slope to some of this. A common quote that people say all the time, now I say it too, it's just very common to say is, I'm looking to come to a place

where I see like-minded people who are motivated in the same way and all these things. And a danger that you fall into that and it's in the social media era where you can go find these people is that you get stuck in these echo chambers like when you say like-minded and this is something you hear think of any app any social platform you see this you read it you hear it everywhere when you think of like-minded you are trying to find people even if you don't know it, who are circle jerking you. And it's like, oh, yeah, who can out-agree with the last person?

And there is such an important trait, especially to me in the founder of tech companies because tech is what rewrites how the world operates. There is such an important trait of being a contrarian. And I think a danger that we've run into in Silicon Valley, and people like to bring it right to politics. And sure, that's a way of thinking that they think different to go create things but then once they do or while they're doing it everything else there's a certain way of doing it and a certain way of thinking and that's it and if you don't get the fuck out right that's dangerous and I think having guys like that in your corner they are not guys who are just gonna agree with you with what you say.

Even if like you're tempted to agree with them. And I, yeah, when you're talking to really smart guys, of course, it's a temptation and everything. But there are people who they kind of say it like it is and doesn't mean they're right. But they're not going to shy away from, yeah, no, that doesn't make sense. I think it's almost like a byproduct of being in the space that we're in, right? So I'm extremely transparent too because I've been knocked so many times. When you're a startup, you're expecting denial, right? Somebody's going to bash what you're doing because it's not ordinary.

It's not traditional. So I am transparent with everybody. If you're going to ask me a question, I don't necessarily care how you're going to react to my answer. And that's just, if it's a fault, it's a fault, but that's just who I am. And I think more people should be like that. Like I talked to a fund the other day and it was literally within 10 minutes, this lady said, Hey, look, we're not interested in what you're doing. Cause I think these are your flaws, but you know, I wish you the best.

And here is some follow-up points. We had a great conversation, but I was like, thank you for being so transparent because first of all, I need to see that from that perspective and it moves the conversation so well. Like I don't need to hear, hey, great idea.

Let's get back to you in a couple of days. And then you shoot me an email being dishonest saying, hey, not right timing or maybe next month. But- And she did this 10 minutes in, you said literally like she asked the question and respect. I answered it to my bet. Like I answered this thing very, very well. And she's like, Oh, fair enough. Great point. I don't see, you know, we're not in that space and it's hard for me to, I won't be able to provide a lot of value to you. Um, so it's going to be a no for us, but thank you. She didn't waste your time. And then she gave you value by still being able to speak on it and say like, okay, it

doesn't mean I'm right. But like, here's some things to think about. It's, it's, you got to realize that what you're doing just because somebody bashes it doesn't mean they're right. You know, like they just don't think the same way you think. And a lot of things are subjective, right? If you're not a coffee drinker and I'm trying to sell you coffee and you say, nah, man, I don't like coffee.

Why should I be offended? You just don't like fucking coffee. Let me go try to find somebody else that does. And that's just like, it goes back to selling anything. So you have to realize that and don't get so offended when people don't like what you're doing. And there's a big difference between busting balls to be funny on stuff that makes us different and actually being totally gung ho on like, wait, wait no that doesn't make sense yeah you need to do this because i do and some and sometimes like you need people to say look what you're doing doesn't make sense for xyz reason have you thought about this because if you haven't thought about that that's a problem right and maybe then you start to think about it and realize a that you

are wrong or b you have an answer to that you know you're open to it which is great oh yeah but does it still bother you sometimes because you're building it's not like it's not like and i'm not saying it wouldn't bother you if you were already a billionaire and doing the whole thing but there's pressure right so do you when is do you have that natural inclination when you hear it? Like, oh fuck, no, that here's why they might be wrong. Um, so I would say in the beginning, I definitely felt that, like I was afraid to get questions that I didn't know the answers to, and I would already prep which questions those would be. I'm in a place right now where conviction is, is, is really high, right? You're not going to ask me something or bring something up.

That's going to shut me down completely. That being said, there are things that I have to think about and like, shit, maybe I am delusional in my thought process, but here I am and I'm going to keep going. So, um, it does like, it does sting a little bit when you have the same concerns happening over and over and over again. But at the same time, you learn how to craft your response and you learn what works. Oh, wow. That's a really good point. a really good point or hey yeah still doesn't make sense so you need that especially in the early stages is this like being an entrepreneur is something it's it's a buzzword people toss around yeah fucking everyone's an entrepreneur it's so annoying bro it's it is so you know someone yeah someone could be

working and no disrespect they're working a nine to five job all week and you know they spend an hour a night doing something that's not going to go anywhere and they're a fucking entrepreneur and it's it it's like anything else when something gets popular it gets over dealt it in culture i get it but you you've been this you've been doing it like this this is you it's it's been that way since sophomore year junior year of college pretty much yeah so is this like when you were growing up were you thinking of yourself like just trying to make a lot of money going into a big company or doing your thing or were you open to stuff or were you thinking no i'm gonna go build something myself so So this is going to sound super interesting.

I always saw myself different, right? I always knew it was almost like an inevitability. Like something was going to be different about my life than everyone else's. I didn't know what that looked like. I damn well didn't think it was going to be fucking ed tech. But something was different, right? Is that a term, ed tech? Yeah, education technology. I love that. I didn't know that either until like fucking somebody ed tech. But something was different, right? Is that a term? Ed tech?

Yeah, education technology. I love that. I didn't know that either until like fucking somebody said it to me. I was like, what does that mean? That's great. And they're like, that's the space you're in. Dumbass. I'm like, oh, okay.

Cool. Yeah, sweet. Ed tech. So yeah, I always wanted to do something different and have a true impact on the world and all these good things. But it's crazy because I'm a big believer in sort of like fate and believing in what the future holds everything. For whatever reason, the number 25 always stood out to me, like, I'm going to make something happen. And it's going

to be at 25. And this is honestly what I've said to myself, since 18 and 19 and 2021, where at the time, I felt the feeling of okay, I'm going to be successful, but it always felt like it was here and not here. If that makes sense. Whereas right now at 25 years old, it's here. Things are happening, right? Things are taking off. This is my year. And you say that to yourself every single year, it feels different now. And so I've always had this vision. And again, I didn't know where it was going to go. But yeah, I just always kept it inside of me that I'm going to have an impact on this world.

What if it's not? What if it's not? What if it's not now? Does that... Because sometimes we get ourselves so hyped up for an expectation. And it could be anything. It doesn't just have to be some long-term vision of like your business or when it's going to go.

And people plot out when something's going to happen and when you look at society this is what they sell you too yeah and this really doesn't apply to you but they sell you that go to college get the get the major get out take this job rise up to this point marry at this age yada yada yada all the way to retirement go to a beach somewhere look up at the sun and fucking die yeah like that's what they tell you and get the 401k along the way plans don't work linearly linearly yeah linearly like that it's been it's been a long day man it has man do you set yourself up for that expectation of like hey i know i have like maybe these weird visions or like these thoughts like oh yeah some fate's gonna do it at that point but if it doesn't i'm gonna fucking keep going don't worry about it like like that's

just how it is yeah i'm a big obviously you got to be a big dreamer to be in my shoes as like an entrepreneur you have to be like you have to have over expectations but i never set like um objective goals and and that may be a bad thing or a good thing but i'll never say hey by 25 i'll make this much money or hey by because honestly i think that's limiting right if i say i'm gonna make a million well maybe i was set up to make two million but now i'm not even shooting for that so it's it's all perception too right like what does success feel like to you? And what does that really look like? Um, it could be, you know, helping out whatever, you know, it's being philanthropic, right? Or helping out a society, um, or your small little town. So you have to feel that in yourself. And you also have to feel like you're just on the journey, right? Maybe I'm not, maybe I don't

achieve my goal at 25, but I'm making huge strides. And at the end of the day, that's all how I feel about myself. Nobody else is going to be able to tell me you did what you wanted to do. You also got to be honest about that too. For sure. So when you're, when you're evaluating yourself, you don't fall into the trap of accidentally making excuses in place of a place where you you're telling yourself like, well no it just didn't happen because of this yeah you know and i don't really know how to say that but you know what i mean it's it the honesty thing is a big one and i'm overly honest right like i'm not shit yet you know and i'm not even close to where i want to be but part of me also you gotta sit back and smell the flower sometimes

like realize you've been able to do some cool things. And I don't ever give myself any acknowledgement because I don't ever want to pretend like I'm somewhere that I'm not, you know? So that's a tough one to deal with yourself. And I'm sure people all across the world experience that. And it's healthy because it's competitive and you want to keep striving for more. Yeah.

And it's also, you know, you have to keep your mental especially as an entrepreneur you know you're you're on the island even with your business if you have business partners you guys are on the island and and you're trying to even when you make it you're still trying to do the next thing right like what is making it that's right exactly and everyone's got a different definition of that yeah but you want to know that you give yourself credit so that you're not constantly living in a state of, I suck. Like that's not healthy, but you also don't want to rest on wins because wins become losses real quick when you sit there and enjoy them too much. That's a, that's a really good point. Yeah. And yeah, it's a stepping, it's, it's, it's stepping

blocks, right? Like, okay, you won one goal. It's great. Move on to the next one. Just keep moving forward. But what I used to say to myself in the very beginning of entrepreneurship and starting something, the highs are super high. The lows are 10 times lower where they'll crush you and you'll feel depressed about something that's not even fucking real. You're trying to start something. It doesn't exist yet. And it's causing you to feel so upset about yourself. It just

doesn't make sense, right? But what ends up happening on this road or this journey, for me, at least the highs still feel very high. The lows don't feel as low anymore. Like you're not going to make me feel low anymore. You're going to tell me my app sucks, that the idea is not going to make it. It doesn't really bother me. Something can go wrong with the technology. I sort of take it on the chin. But thankfully, the highs still feel so sweet. And it doesn't even have to be that high of a high. And I don't know if that's for everybody. That's just how I've experienced it, which is a great feeling. Well, do you worry about when you're not feeling those lows, the part of it is just

ignoring criticism where you want to hear it because we talked about that earlier but i'm tying it back in because you know that's a slippery slope you can fall into it is and i think honestly i see it more as an opportunity now right like i want to grow this thing so fucking badly that i'm almost happy when somebody tells me hey this is going wrong okay you take note of it i'm like oh that's the reason why we're not growing faster. Okay. Let's fix that. Now let's see what happens. Okay, great. Now we're scaling faster. Hey, somebody doesn't believe in what we're doing. Okay, great. Tell me why. So it's almost like your approach to these things as opposed to them, not existing on this show. I talk with a lot of different types of people yeah and that's that's something that i

i mean coming in that was the goal i if it were up to me i'd be talking to opposite day every day right you just like wait you did what it's just a cool thing because when when people ask me what this is i explain it's a long form podcast where i have conversations with people from all walks of life across culture and they're like huh so then I'll give them visuals and I'll say you know one episode I had a guy who lived in Africa with the Peace Corps for two years the next episode I had a technologist who runs a back end for fortune 500 companies so I try to keep it across the board but I do love talking with actual entrepreneurs and talking with people who are building shit because i get it and it's not like i get it i i've never built an app in that way i've never been a technologist like you are and

and stuff like that but i am on an island i what you see here i gotta do if i don't do it no one fucking does it and in a way in my career when I was first coming into it, working on Wall Street in the space I worked in there, they tell you you're an entrepreneur. You're not. You're not. If you are paid by somebody and you are paid by somebody who can fire you just for whatever reason, you're not an entrepreneur. You have a backstop. And it's no disrespect. No disrespect to those people.

And there's a lot of guys who work their balls off and get to the top of the it's it's no disrespect no disrespect to those people and there's a lot of guys who work their balls off and get to the top of the game there's no disrespect when you are out on your own with whatever it is could be something stupid like a podcast or it could be like trying to change the world with some disruptive technology it's up to you or if it's your team it's up to you and your team No one's going to help you without you asking for it and then providing value in return or giving them a reason to believe in you. And you're going to have lean times. You're in fact, while you're building, I think Elon said this the other night, it was a beautiful quote, Giovanni retweeted it, but it was like, or he tweeted out, there's

something like if you're starting a startup and you need positive reinforcement, you should not be starting a startup. And then he said, starting a startup is like chewing glass shards and staring into the abyss. It's going to be long and it's going to suck. And it's true because even the people close to you they have their lives man they got to worry about that whether they're an entrepreneur or just some guy working or doing whatever they have their lives they got to worry about their shit and so your problems like if you're in it and you've been working 24 7 all week and you're tired as fuck and like you're taking all these beats and whatever it's not that they don't fucking care though some of them don't they don't have time to worry about

it right you're alone you're the one that's got to deal with that it's not like you have a shrink on staff like a hedge fund that made it right you you are you are the you are your shrink you are your motivational speaker you are your person that also has to strategize the business and adapt over time and the reason i bring this up is because in my previous career, I did get to spend a lot of that. That's where I got a lot of exposure to true entrepreneurs and guys like you out there building it. And I always insisted on never assuming I understood things. If you don't do it, I always assumed I didn't. And over time, these I'd be close with a lot of these guys, and they would tell me how it was. And so there was a level to which when they would say look no disrespect but people who don't do this don't

fucking get it and there was a level to which at some point i started to say in my head and i was okay with this i get it like i understand where they're coming from with that maybe like i don't get that like they say but i understand where they're coming from and then i went to do it myself and now i get it because now i know what it's like where that that little thing that no one else notices but you spend all that time on doesn't fucking matter right the market's gonna do what the market's gonna do you are either great or you suck and get the fuck out. And while you're on that journey, the people around you, they may not even be able to give you the right feedback because they're not the people that understand what the market is or understand what

needs to happen here or even understand what the fuck you're doing. And that's a hard thing because some of those same people do want what's best for you. Like in their hearts, they do, right? And it could be family, it could family could be friends people entrepreneurs experience it across the spectrum every single one of them does but they have to know who to drown out and who to listen to and and not even just on a human to human basis what ideas from which humans to be honest with themselves that they're giving you that are right and what ideas actually like yeah they don't know what they're talking about there and that's not just my ego talking right so for you what you have on me is you got this bug way sooner in your life than i did i understood nothing about this i wasn't like you in college in college i was like all right what's the next thing what's the next class let

me throw on my hoodie all right oh i gotta go get a job now cool i'll go there that's where i'm supposed to get a job right you were out here thinking like damn i really fucking i hate writing oh my god oh my god i'm making fun of you but really though you were sitting there going i have a problem oh my god i can fix this problem yeah and not only can i fix it for myself i can fix it for a lot of other people so then you had to jump in and build it and so you've been on that island for way longer than i have and this is my question for you how much or how often do you have to reset yourself and just say like hey have the grace to know people don't get it it's not their fault take the criticism that you know is the honest criticism that is that is reliable take that and move it into your business but also know what to drown out so that's that's an interesting one right like i i feel like now and this is very different than

how it was three years ago or whatever the only criticism that I get now is from people that should be giving me criticism, right? That is people that are, you know, that I'm fundraising from or people that are in the space, like constructive criticism. The criticism that you used to get is from the traditional people that don't get it. And you know, like the, you know, hey, this is a great experience, but maybe she would try to get a job or Hey, why are you doing what you're doing? And nowadays, I think I've sort of shut that out so much

that nobody feels the need to say that to me anymore. Like nobody feels the need to try to bring me down because the more you're not going to, it's not going to work. And if it is coming from a good place, like from my parents and family and friends and people trying to say, hey, like protect me, they know I'm good. They know I got it. This kid's gonna be okay. Whatever he's doing, whatever John touches

is going to work out. And that could be an ego thing or it could be not, but I don't listen to any sort of negative feedback that doesn't make sense. If you're gonna tell me, hey, you should go get a job. Well, why? Well, because what you're doing isn't working yet. Well, how long have I been doing it for? Well, you know, you should probably be making this sort of money and have a secure job. And like,

if that's your reasoning, thank you, but no, thank you. You know? So I drown it out very, very quickly. And the people that are close enough to me sort of have seen it and say, okay, look, I'm going to support him and he's not stopping, you know? So I'm wasting my breath by trying to convince him to. How long did it take you to get there? It took a while, man. I mean, like it took a while where it took a while from the point of, Hey, this is a fun experience and great job, John. You're super great at what you're doing and have a lot of fun and to transitioning into, wow, this is a legitimized business and this is going to be something i would say like this year like really this year was like our turning point when people were actually on the app and and i wanted to bring this up to you it's the feeling of hey this is

going to happen versus hey this is happening are two different things and i stared my or i called my co-founder up one day and i was like dude holy shit like it's working like people are on the app and they're using it in the way that we expect them to like what the fuck's going on it's almost like a shock like you expected it to happen but it it's here and and he looks at you and you're like yeah it's real like this is going on and it's still it's almost like a dream. Every time you look back and say, we achieved another milestone or it's progressing even more now. And so once it starts to feel real for the outside world, because it's two different things, right? We mentioned about sore, things are always happening in the background and nobody else

sees that. And that's when the criticism comes and Hey, Johnny, been doing this for a while and nothing's really coming of it yet. And you haven't really progressed and that's okay and I understand that they don't see that but once they start to really see it they're either going to say or they're going to stop saying it or their criticism doesn't make sense anymore you know wow so it it did take you that long to get there though that's and and I love that answer i wanted you to give that whole thing but it's not like you know you were six months in or a year in and you're like oh i know the difference now like i i can drown out that i'll keep that like all right i'm good you you had to go through all these waves of your business good and bad for multiple cycles let's call it right over a period of four or five years before you had the wisdom

to be like okay i can judge this correctly now yeah i i think it's the conviction right like because you don't have conviction overnight and nobody doesn't and they're lying if they say they do right if i have a great idea and you bash it in the first coming months that sucks and you start to get me you convinced me me to reconsider what I was doing. There's no, there's no convincing me to reconsider what I'm doing now. I don't care who you are, what you tell me, it's not going to stop me, right? Because I have that conviction. Whereas, like I said, a year ago, I really didn't, you know, so it was easier for people to say that to me and actually have an impact on me. And you've also proven that you do what it takes though, publicly.

Yeah, for sure. Like I talk about the resourcefulness. I've known you for a month. I think about the people that have known you for years and they're looking at this like, damn, this fucking guy. Like I don't know what he's doing. He's coming back. Yeah, exactly.

You know what? He knows what he's doing. And that's the biggest thing. Like you don't even need people to get it, but you need people to get you and be like, Oh, like I couldn't do that. Or like, I wouldn't do that. Yeah. That's, that's exactly. I wouldn't do that. And that's where like, I don't, I don't put myself above anybody that has a nine to five or whatever it is because number one, I'm not in this position where I want to be just yet. Right. Even if I was making billions of dollars and had this well-established

company, I still wouldn't. Cause it's just different. Like you wouldn't do what I would do and I wouldn't do what you're doing. You know, like I think a lot of people work a lot harder than I do. Like people that work with their hands every day, you got to wake up at six in the morning, contractors and landscapers and irrigation like that's hard fucking work man i would never want to do that and i wouldn't be able to do that you know and like they wouldn't be able to do what i'm doing everyone's different and how they're wired for sure so what one person enjoys another person thinks is shit yeah and it can work in every which direction but i guess you hear these phrases like a business lives inside of everyone or whatever

and i don't think so man no like there and and that's no disrespect to people but people in this life want different things and it it it doesn't all come back to what is how much money am i putting in my bank account or how is it getting in there through what means it comes back to like what makes someone feel happy to be right here you know and and everyone's going for that the big even even the most psycho entrepreneurs of all time the elon musk of the world they don't even know it right and elon musk lives his life in this total crisis all the time because he's trying to fucking save the world six times over right so he's he's probably never going to get here but he's still in his life that's how he feels like that's what he feels like he has to do and all the things that come with it his whole public persona and and how he presents his companies and what projects they're working on specifically all

those things are this this way to get to this equilibrium where he's like okay i i know i i did my thing yeah i've done it you know whether that's when he's an old man taking his last breath which for him it probably will be he'll probably die at the goddamn desk definitely or you know at the hologram whatever yeah you know but you know there there is this he may be way different than you and or me or our parents or our friends but he's still the end result like it's the same wavelength yeah no and you brought up a good point about like the hard work thing like it's subjective in a sense right like me working landscape would be extremely hard work i would never want to do it ever but there are people that probably enjoy that right because they do it and they make a lot of money doing it. I think the goal in life is to find something that you can work super hard at and

enjoy it. Like where's your best effort put? Is it in something with your hands or is it something with your mind? And honestly speaking, I am always thinking there should be an easier way. Like there, this has to be easier. There has to be an easier way than me just doing this out of brunt or brute force you know um and it shows and reflects in like what you're doing like for example when i was a caddy at 15 16 years old i hated it i hated cat i hated everything about golf i hated being on that course and it reflected i was a shitty caddy right i was i was lazy i was behind i didn't care about what was going on. Oh, were you one of those like staring off to the right while they're teeing off? Dude, I would be in the, I would be in the woods taking a piss and the balls be flying around.

I would say like when I was, and then look, my, my thought process changed a bit when I was training for football or whatever it was, I treated it like a workout. So I didn't care if I was a good caddy or not, that ball was over there. Bam, I'm fucking sprinting to it because I just wanted to run, you know, like I was just so you you start to realize where to put your efforts. And I'll work hard in this sort of thing. Right. I would I would pitch for 10 hours a day. I'll talk to students. I'll reinvent the app. Like, I love this stuff.

This is what brings me, you know, like happiness, you know. And I think that's at the end of the day. That's the point of life find what makes you happy well it's empathy too and seeing that and recognizing that and seeing that other people have different things that get them up in the morning yeah and it makes you feel good like it doesn't make you feel like you sometimes I sometimes feel bad about myself when I see people working so hard because I think they're miserable but they could very well be happy about what they're doing. Yeah, appearances aren't always what they look like.

Yeah, like when I'm waking up at eight or whatever it is and I go outside because I'm going to my car to go to the gym and I see people mowing lawns, I'm like, damn, I'm a lazy piece of shit. And this dude is busting his ass working hard. But he could look at me on a computer and be like, wow, I would never want to do that i wish we could look at things this way as a society because most people don't and part of that's a part of that big part of that's the internet and just constant

putting thoughts and and quick quick hitters out there but empathy is i think what's lacking in how we see what makes us all similar versus what makes us different and attacking each other for it yeah so it's not just like oh well what makes this guy excited i get that and like this makes me excited it goes down to like our politics and why someone from this part of the country may think something different than this part of the country. And how now with the internet

where those people can fucking talk to each other and try to body bag each other online, it creates more and more tension. And we don't, too many of us, some of us do, but too many of us don't step outside of that and say, well, maybe this is why they think that. Or, you know what, they're going to think what they think.

If they vote, they're going to vote how they vote. If I vote, I'm going to vote how I vote. And, you know, may the best man win. That kind of thing. And I just wish that there was a way we could put the genie back in the bottle here where, you know, go pre the resource of the internet, the great thing that it is. Not that we didn't have the vision before that. We did.

But go to a time where it wasn't such life and death over everything. And I'm not saying it is, but that's how people treat it. And that's how they talk about it. And so I don't even mean to bring this straight to politics, which it comes up in everything. I mean just like in general. I mean people will fight over who their favorite basketball player is like it's World War III. It's not a healthy thing in society. I completely agree.

I think the empathy word like resonates super well with me. It's very hard for myself. And I think a lot of people to put themselves in other people's shoes. And when you're building something or trying to build something, that is a huge skill to have, right? Like, so for me, I want to put myself in the shoes of my users or in terms of my content, my viewers. And if I can't do that, that's where you run into a problem with longevity. Like if you just can't sustain or really understand what people wanna see or have in their hands,

you're gonna run into a problem. And so learning that skill is super important. And that comes with, I guess, surrounding yourself with different minded people and taking that criticism. I wanna take somebody completely out of my space and say, hey, how do you feel about what I'm doing? Do you like this content? Do you like this app? And if they say, Hey, yeah, that's great. Or no, for this reason, that's a fresh perspective that I never thought about.

Well, that's smart because not when you're seeking the contrarian opinion or the outside opinion, I guess you would say you're not just going to somebody who just thinks differently than you, potentially. You're also going to somebody who could very well be the end user. And it's useful because they're not stuck in the tunnel vision and minutia of your world that you just naturally get stuck in because you're worried about every little detail. You know your craft inside and out, and other people obviously don't know it like you do so they can give that honest high level answer and you had mentioned this earlier but my mind goes straight to like the ui and ux of things so when you're asking for opinions let's just say on on stonited in this case you're going to people and not just saying like okay what kind of value can you get out of this app you're asking questions like, how easy is this to use? What do you like about it? What do you like about the colors?

What do you like about the main page? How about the menu? Does it have the options you want? And when you're talking to somebody who, let's just use an example, someone entirely different. Let's just say someone who works on Wall Street. They're an investment banker. They don't fucking do this shit. They expect to take out their phone.

They already don't have enough hours in the day if they're using something to and they wouldn't be using your app but i'm just using the example here let's say they were in college too just go crazy like when they take it out they just quickly want to be able to go boom boom boom okay got it got what they need done so if they can't do that they're going to tell you why they can't and it's not like they, they know every little move you made. They just know, is it yes or no? Did it do what I wanted it to do? Yeah. And it goes back to like, it doesn't really matter what your input is matters, what the output is. Right. So if I could, I could, you don't care. It's very agnostic, right? As the end user, you don't give a shit what I look like, what color, you know, what color my skin is, how long it took me to create this product what

you care about is the end product um and so talking and having those conversations is crucial because you can get lost like you said in the minutiae of i worked so hard this week why didn't anything move forward and it could have been right in front of your face you just didn't look for it and you also have to be willing to have those moments where you're like oh shit i just everything i did the last two days doesn't work. And you have to brush it off. It doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter.

I busted my ass for two years and it didn't matter. What mattered was the last six months that really things started moving forward. And it's not a waste of time either. Right. Because you learn. You learned a lot and you realize like how you should be going about things. Yeah. It's very easy to get caught up and be like, oh, I should have done this or like, oh my God, if I had done that, I'd be here doing this.

But that – everyone's got the hindsight 20-20. There's no – you very often – you have to fuck up to figure things out. And people throw around the buzz phrase like, oh, failure is good because it teaches you to to do whatever and they'll use that as a crutch and then just fail at fucking everything it is still when it doesn't get overused it is a very important phrase though yeah for sure i always say and that's a good example i always say like if i had the app that i had today and i was in the situation that i was as a senior in college this this thing would have blew up. Like I was out there in front of thousands and thousands of students every day. And I had support from everyone. It was just like, Oh, it was almost like a revolution. Like people were wearing the shirts. I would go to a school and I would have 15 kids. Like we'd be walking to the bar and everyone would

have a student shirt on, or we would be at a party waving the flag. It was like a movement. Almost the problem was the fucking app wasn't there. Like would be at a party waving the flag. It was like a movement almost. The problem was the fucking app wasn't there. Like the app served no purpose at the time. So kids would get on it. How so? Like, so yeah, it was like, it was like a version one, it was pretty much think of like a card stack feature, you swipe right on people swipe left on on others. You can message those the the functionality or the logistics behind it just didn't really make

too much sense. Notifications didn't work. So the value wasn't there. Like I said, it wasn't serving much of a purpose. And so people, and I wasn't in the position, I liked riding on my high horse and not asking the questions. Well, great. You tell me you support me, but why aren't you using it? Right? Why is no one using this this app so i ignored those hard questions because i didn't want to accept that it wasn't going actually anywhere well let me paint the picture you're early on you're still a senior in college yeah you got the app you got the shiny new thing exactly it may even if people don't know the numbers because they don't like even if they don't use it because they get no use out of it you're that guy like oh that's that that's that's johnny apps yeah but that's you know my instagram name is johnny stew like that was my i wore that

on my shoulder and people would ask the questions like oh like how well is it going and how much money you making and you brush it off because you don't want anybody knowing you're like oh you know i'm doing well but you're not fucking doing well yeah things are yeah things are you know pretty good um so worry about it yeah exactly i'm way more honest now than i ever was and so if i had like you said the experience and the app that i have today and was in that situation that was like you're like we talk about tailwinds and we talk about opportunities that you'll never have again that was definitely one of them. And not to say that this won't work because we have other opportunities now,

but that one was a great one to seize. And it did help. And it helped us springboard into the next level. It sounds like you got caught up in something that I think at one point or another, in some way, if even for a moment, a lot of us get caught up. And maybe it's one post or maybe it's for a while a period of our life for whatever reason but you get caught up in this world where you feel like you're supposed to be this thing you're supposed to be this influencer you're going to curate your perfect content on your instagram feed to have you surrounded by beautiful

looking women selling your app with fucking you know water guns everywhere at a summer party showing that like oh there's a lot of students that like this app and you don't know what it is but i'm i'm johnny apps is that so it's and then you got to live up to that expectation so when people see you you can't tell them hey yeah you know we're just starting out and we only have a couple users right now we're pre-revenue we have no money in the bank but it's gonna go super well you have to perceive like oh he's the next he's the next zuckerberg right because that's how you don't understand how right but you know people you don't understand how high level these people think because they they aren't in your space and they don't know you know yeah it's not their fault you

know exactly like people people got different speeds but yeah you know they look outside they're like oh you're not driving a ferrari right what the fuck you doing what's what's that what's that little you know 2012 bmw doing there like what the fuck yeah where's your flashy clothes and where's that lifestyle you're living it's scary man the expectations we put on each other that's one of the downsides of social that's where you can tell now just by talking to me that okay he has it yeah because i do when i was trying to fake it i probably didn't realize but it was very easy to smell my bullshit you know do you think you were arrogant no i just think no i don't think i was i'm probably more arrogant now because now i know i have it yeah

because like look at some and only yeah you don't exude that at all well thank you the only times that it'll ever come out is if you try to call me out for not knowing something or or faking shit because there is no faking it anymore and i think i get almost insulted if you try to compare me to my old self you know like if you're like oh you're really that's okay and that's just how i am like no i'm gonna be arrogant in that i know what i know and and i know what i don't know so i don't well i want to push back on that i don't it's one thing if you say shut the fuck up what do you know that's arrogant you don't do so i don't well i want to push back on that i don't it's one thing if you say shut the fuck up what do you know that's arrogant you don't do that right i actually heard you in a clubhouse room where you had to be like this last week a little bit with someone who just kind of didn't

get it and none of that came off you're just there's a huge difference between being arrogant and treating people like shit versus demonstrating and defending yourself to be able to show going on the offense to show people that like this is your life doesn't mean you know everything but you fucking know your space and and you're gonna make sure people know that so that they don't underestimate you so uh i'm gonna retract my statement i do think that i was arrogant because arrogance comes from you're afraid you're insecure so you have to push back and say yeah okay bro you don't know what you're talking about i am who i think i am but at the same time i had nothing to back it up like if you gave me pushback on the idea or the app and it was two years ago more

often than not i didn't have an answer and i would be like yeah okay like all right i got it thanks but no thanks now i take your criticism because i welcome it and I want to hear how I can grow. Like I said, so yeah, I think, was I an arrogant person? I don't think so, but I'm sure I snapped and I would give poor responses to people's just general concerns or questions, you know? Yeah. And it's, it's, it's the pressure of it sometimes speaking. For sure. It's not who you are. And I try to remember that with some guys who are maybe going through it and are trying to show that they're not. I just feel bad that we've curated – I use that word purposely there – curated the society where that is the baseline. Like you have to show that you're – and's not look you have a choice i'm saying we create

these pressures on people and they don't realize that they're just responding to those pressures i've done it too we're like oh you have to be like this you have to do this thing you know you know what i think is super interesting and it just i i just realized because you said oh you don't come across as that you know john ron d right now i I know Julian right now. I didn't know Julian as a banker. I didn't know you as a college kid. You were probably very different. And just like I was, if you met me two years ago, three years ago, you wouldn't think the same thing as me, of me and not a good or bad, it's just different. And I think that's so interesting to sort of, you only met me a month ago. What do I put out to this world as a human

being today versus people that have known me for 25 years? What do they think of me? You know, and I think it's very interesting. And it's honestly, it's good and refreshing to ask those questions for you to tell me, hey, John, you come across professional. You're not arrogant. You know you're talking about, I need that sometimes because honestly, I struggle with imposter syndrome. And sometimes I'm like, I'm not as smart as I think I am. And I'm not as smart as the other people in my space. So you have to ask those questions sometimes. Okay. Here's an interesting one. Sure. You say imposter syndrome. The thing that goes hand in hand with that is the phrase,

fake it till you make it. Exactly. I have a very mixed relationship with this phrase. I think that there are two paths you can take in it, and I'm not so sure you can take a little bit of each. I think you're one or the other. And one is very negative, and then one is kind of positive. The very negative one, and this is one I see far too often,

is people say fake it till you make it and then they throw around every word like hustling and you know grinding and doing my thing and busting their head against the wall and thinking that just doing the work and putting it out there whatever it is is going to get the end result and it's because they're young or they're trying to start something new and they just got to get there right the other part of it is establishing confidence and slash credibility of fake it till you make it in the sense that when you are diving into something new and getting something off the ground you do have to exude like you know what you're talking about to an extent these people though the big difference

with them the positive fake it till you make it's in my book, how I define it, which is just totally subjective, is that they are thirsty to learn. They are thirsty to pick up fucking everything. And they'll be honest about it too. Maybe sometimes they'll come in and they have a great new opportunity and somebody looks them in the eyes and says, can you do this right now? And they may say to this person, as of this moment, no, I can't. But talk to me in 24 hours. I'm going to be the best motherfucker at can you do this right now and they may say to this person as of this moment no i can't but talk to me in 24 hours i'm gonna be the best at this you've ever seen yeah that's a little bit of faking it till you're making it but you're also honest about it i that's a a great point and i said it on this podcast i say it in almost every phone call that i have with you know an investor or somebody that i need to sort of convince is that one of my best skills

is that i know what i know and i know what i don't know right so i re-fucking tweet me like that it's just i just i'll never right now especially try to admit or try to um present myself like i know something when i don't because i know how fucking obvious it is if i'm talking to you as a early stage entrepreneur you could be 40 you can be 20 i don't care how old you are and you try to pretend like you know something I know when you're faking it because that's who I was I know when you're stuttering on your words And you're making something up and you're going on a tangent about something that has nothing to do with the conversation You're lying. So just stop tell me what you know to the extent of that's it And then tell me when you don't know like I don't need you to be everything right now.

Just be honest. And that carries over a lot. First of all, somewhere Alex Horowitz is sitting there right now, nodding his head and going, that's right, baby. That's right. That's, that's he, that's a simple thing that he said and other people have said it before, but he really, in that podcast, well, we did two podcasts because he was here all day. But in that – I forget if it was 17 or 18 where we were going through this really complex topic on the upsides and downsides of social media.

He just laid down the hammer and said, you don't know what you don't know and not enough people understand this yeah and it is such a powerful tool because we don't ever want to want to appear like we are not in the know and something that we think is going to be held against us but that's the thing some of the most powerful words in the english language provided you have effort behind what you do and you aren't just defaulting to it every time is i don't know yeah let me get back to you on that and having the balls to say that if someone i was gonna say having the balls to say it if somebody takes that the wrong way fuck them because they're they're and again you got to be honest like are you actually trying and you just don't fucking know anything because you're not really trying or like are you actually trying and you know you just don't know this one and you're actually going to work to be able to

say like i know that tomorrow or the next day or get there. There is this radical honesty you have to have with yourself where you're constantly evaluating, well, which one is it? Yeah. Yeah, man. And that's what comes from experience because you realize how much of a bullshitter you are and it's very easy to sniff that shit out. Yeah. There was a quote I saw, I don't know, years ago. It was floating on social media. So I don't know. It was on a picture and it says it was attributed to Jim Carrey. But I don't know if you really said it.

I should really check that out. It's like one of those bullshit Drake quotes. Right. But it's a dead ass quote. And the quote was, the older I get, the more I realize just how much people pretend. Yeah.

And God damn, it gets more and more true every single day because when when you're a kid or even when you're in college let's use that example and the people come in from the job fair from all these different companies and you know they're in their suits or whatever right and they're and you just think these people have it figured out you know from the 25 year olds who are there to the 65-year-olds. Like, damn, he must know fucking everything, man. Yeah, man.

And you're constantly in this state of, well, what don't I know? Oh, my God, I got to know that. I got to know that. Most of these people put their fucking underwear on backwards in the morning and don't realize it until their pants are on afterwards. And I'm exaggerating, but you know what i mean there are they they know that where their world is and many of them even the ones who who work to know outside of it and they deserve a lot of credit you know how much they still don't fucking know if they feel the same way you do like i and in that position and that's really funny i remember when i was a sophomore in college we had somebody to come

present their business or recruit us about something. And I was like, damn, like this dude's awesome at presenting. He knows everything he's talking about. He must feel great about this. He has no problems in the world. And then I would have to go do that, right? I've talked to, I can't even tell you

how many college classes where I would present myself and what we're doing. And I'm thinking the same thing that the college kids are thinking. Like, man, I hope I present myself well enough. Like I'm in my own head, whereas they're in their own heads. Like that never really changes.

So just having that perspective when you're talking to somebody, it levels the playing field. There's no reason why you can't be on the same level as anybody you're talking to. Well, the other important thing here is the bullshit meter and your inherent ability with it yeah think of and this is a mean way to put it but like think of someone relatively dumb who you

know you just by the law of averages we all know someone who's kind of dumb right sure even that person who may not be an intellectual or someone intellectually curious, whatever, even if they can't explain it, chances are they have, especially when they're watching people on TV and stuff like that, and it's not repackaged for them like the problems we see on social media where things can be manipulated. Those people, all of us have a very very good evolutionary built-in bullshit meter yeah maybe we can't in fact very smart people maybe they can't even explain it very not smart people maybe they can't even explain it but they know like uh that made sense we're like nope that guy's full of shit yeah and

there's just this thing and sometimes they willfully ignore it i mean depending on what your motives are you willfully ignore it but we forget that when we're communicating because we're so stuck in like well how do we sound and oh my god did that sound smart did that sound dumb let me put some more filler phrases in there. And it's everything, man. It's not just pitching your company. It's like how you have your closest relationships. It's refreshing to know that you don't have to bullshit anymore. You know, you've reached a point in your life that you're like,

I'm comfortable with what I know. And obviously, like we said, we admit that we don't know certain things. And that's okay. And you don't have to worry if somebody's gonna call you out for your because you're not bullshitting i'm gonna tell you how it is and i'm gonna tell you exactly how i feel and i have no problem i don't have to think about what you think of me because i'm just sitting here in this conversation what do cops do what do what do fbi agents do when they're in there with a suspect yeah Yeah. But what do they often do?

They try to act like they're their friend. Hey, we're just here to help. Like they give them a coffee. They order some pizza. Everything's recorded and they have to say that. They make the guy feel comfortable or whatever. But their goal is just get them talking and then see where they can get them stuck on a detail and then put in

filler words and they're you know they're like hawks they're trained that way and so they see like oh there's one right there okay so now they know like that was one hit spot so now we're going to get them way off that and then we're going to come back again to it and let's see what he fills it with this time it's no different in life it's no different in life in these conversations we're talking about we are when we when we talk about understanding where the other person's coming from that's that that's all it is there there's these little things where we're like well he's he's just kind of filling up space there especially like when people are using buzzwords all the time yeah that's why i avoid them like i don't i'm not

like i said i don't have the vocabulary as an intellect so i'm not going to pretend to use these words because number one if i use it wrong then you're fucked and then you're like all right well this kid's gotta get credibility's out the door so i talk the way i talk and that's it you know and and i think you mentioned comfort that's the biggest one if somebody can make you feel comfortable you're more likely to get their honest self and if it's a criminal or if it's somebody you're pitching, that's where, that's why I never understood the dynamic of making a pitch feel so uncomfortable. Having a room of 10 people, you're the only person talking, you have a screen in front of you and you got to go. And if you fuck up on a word, you fucked up. It should be, why can't it be, we're sitting down, having a cup of coffee, eating some food. I'm asking you questions.

You're answering questions. I want to learn more about you as a human being. That is when you're going to get the best version of that person. So I don't understand putting people under this immense pressure. I guess it's, you got to see how they perform. And I understand that to an extent, but at the end of the day, I want to get the best version of you. I don't want to get the worst version. Yeah, I agree with you. I think there's something fake about that. It's very fake.

And no disrespect. I have a lot of respect for Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary and Barbara Corcoran and all these people on Shark Tank. But I can't watch that show. I think it's like, to me, and I know there's an element of it is technically reality TV, but it is more real than a lot of shows. Like they actually give the money and stuff like that. To me, it's still very, it feels like 1990. It doesn't feel like today. And I don't know who it is, but maybe it was Sequoia, or Andreessen Horowitz, one of them, they do a

thing with projects that they're evaluating where they have dinner with them. And that's, and that's, oh my god, it's so smart. And so when COVID happened, they do the fucking I mean, this is like, kind of stupid. I make fun of this, but I get it. Like they do the dinner on zoom. Like they make sure everyone brings food and shit. Well, that did you know, and I didn't know this either food is like the, I forgot what they call it, but like, it's the most

comforting thing. So it automatically as soon as you start eating, you you you lessen the sort of anxiety that you once had. So putting food in front of somebody's mouth, it allows you to sort of relax. And now let's have a conversation. So that's why going out to eat like on a date is better than doing sort of, if you're going to stare at somebody from across the table with no food in front of you, things get fucking awkward pretty quickly. So at least that loosens that a little bit. Yeah. And the other problem is like, look, there are things called actors in this world. So if I'm just a great actor and I could present for

10 minutes, does that mean my company is sound or the idea is great? No, but I can script that. And I can't tell you how many times I've gotten up on stage or pitched to people and blacked out and literally memorized my script for 10 minutes. Whereas now I'm getting up there and I'm talking. And if you don't like what I'm saying, that's great. If I stutter on a word, it's fine, but it's organic and it's real. That's the beauty of what we're doing here. Yeah, exactly.

People ask me, people who were not my target market at all, you know, kind of like the ones we were talking about earlier, like people in your life who want what's best for you but have no fucking idea what they're talking about. At the beginning of this thing, they're like, well, shouldn't you just make your podcast five minutes or ten minutes and have set questions or whatever? I'm like, fuck no yeah because i'm trying to talk with people and talk about complex things and i want it to be just like where the people listening to this are like oh it's just a conversation at the table you can't get that in canned questions and for sure we mentioned this for something way earlier but you can can't get that in 10 questions or, you know, 10 minutes of, of, of sitting there and being like, all right, let's get to it. You know, there's none of that. There's such a flow and an ebb and a flow to these conversations. And that's

why I enjoy them so much because I never know what's going to get the other person just jumping out of their seat and they never know what's going to get me doing whatever the fuck I do. You know, it's so cool. Yeah. That's the thing too. Like, even if you were, and I don't, I don't think people are wrong in the sense of like short-term content is great, but you have the opportunity to split up a three-hour podcast into 20, five to 10 minute clips. And that is a better five to 10 minute clip that if I just sat down here for 10 minutes and you had a sheet of questions, you know, so you can turn this into shorter formed content and it's going to be a lot better. Yeah.

And, and the other, I think I've said this before, but I'm, I'm transparent about this. I don't like cutting within a podcast at all. Cause that takes away from like, it's supposed to, yeah, it's supposed to be a conversation, right? Like I, I hate that. And, and I want it to be honest. Like like when when we're like kind of fucking up and thinking about something that's that would happen in a normal conversation and people are listening to this in their earbuds i put it on youtube but that's for people who like to just when they

work at a desk throw it on another screen and glance over once in a while no one's fucking sitting there and watching it the whole way through so they're not like oh i'm gonna stop watching because they just paused there's there's an honesty to it the whole way through. So they're not like, oh, I'm going to stop watching because they just paused. There's an honesty to it. Yeah. You know? I think it's really interesting. A couple of things, right?

Like you mentioned how pausing in a conversation is natural. So if it's so natural, why do we feel so awkward when it happens, right? Like why do I now automatically, if I don't know what to say, I like turn and look away and okay, shit, fucking let me go to my phone. And all right, now I'm going to come back when I have what to say i like turn and look away and okay shit fucking let me go to my phone and all right now i'm going to come back when i have something to say no shit it this honestly it makes it easier i mean we just talked for three hours straight and it was engaging the entire time i didn't feel awkward one second of it and i don't know why we have this sort of gap when we try to have these conversations in real life

well real life is one thing on that first point though this one happened to start off where you know we were chilling and doing work today right so we were we were vibing for like three hours before this so the i already know this is a podcast is pretty much going to start off right at the top sometimes i'll even on the ones that start perfectly like i'll start at one sentence and because it flows right or whatever but you know this isn't one where it's like going to start 20 or 30 minutes in. Sure, sure, sure. But the one thing I will say is I've had podcasts before that are some of my best ones, probably about – there's been two like this where we are terrible for like 40 minutes.

Yeah. Like one was totally my fault and the other one was just, like, trying to get our cadence down or whatever. But, you know, for whatever reason it's happening, like, maybe you're not feeling good or whatever, and then suddenly that thing comes up and it clicks and boom. And now you just go down every rabbit hole and it goes where it goes. And so I'll pick up, like, one I'm thinking of in my head. That podcast was a three-hour podcast we were recording that one i picked up an hour in we were recording for an hour and we were terrible for the first 55 minutes and then a topic came up and i started to pick it up right in that

topic because i was like oh we we both lit the flames and it was great right that's honest though you know it's not like you're taking the best part from within. That's what clips are for. When you're doing this, this shit lives forever. If zero people are listening to it few, I guess, but you know, like I want them to see the range of people coming in here and where they come from and what kind of ideas they have to see where I'm fucking wrong. And those people are right or vice versa. It's to me, that's a special thing that is unique to this space. Yeah. And I think this is something that I heard Joe Rogan talk about, and this is pretty amazing. He's like, the best thing you can do is imagine your life was always getting recorded. Like imagine your life was a documentary and everything you did was getting documented and your future's children or your family and your friends are watching this.

You're going to act differently. And I think this sort of puts us on the spot in a good way. We got to perform. We got to step up. We have to, we understand that people a good way. We got to perform. We got to step up. We have to, we understand that people are watching us and we have to entertain. So for whatever reason, I think you don't realize how, you know, I guess like how great you could really be on the spot when you have conversations with somebody, when things get a little bit awkward or, you know,

you want to hesitate to say something you don't say to get on your phone like we just mentioned but we have to right like i have to have a great answer for what you just asked or i have to have a great follow-up to what you just said and we're forced to and your bodies do it and your mind does it and i think that's where you realize like in life some things you just have to do and in this podcast that's one of them i'll push back on that a little bit i i like where you're going with that but you're saying you have to i would say no you have to at least know you're giving the effort to meaning you have you have to know that you're present in this conversation that's it yes the beauty of this format is that you can't hide that's a great i i like the word use is present more often than than not, I'm in a

conversation and I'm not present. I have to be present because I have to say something back that makes sense. I can't be over here when you're talking to me. It forces me to be present and we should be forced to be present much more in our lives. We should just fucking pretend. Like Joe Rogan said, you got a camera on you right now. Be in this moment. And you can't entertain either. Yeah. Like you're using that word. I'll push back on that because you cannot put on a face for that long. Look, if Daniel Day-Lewis is sitting right there, he can pull it off. Like there are some people on this earth. There's a special kind of person.

I would leave him in here for 48 hours to try to see if he would break. Probably wouldn't. But there's a few people that can do that in this world. Very few. The truth comes out. And that doesn't just go for my guests that goes for me every time i'm on here when i'm when i'm recorded talking to someone for three hours like it is what it is man you can't i guess the beauty of it to me is that it's mortifying watching yourself especially when you got to edit yourself and whatever.

And now it's happened so much that I'm at a point where it's second nature. So thankfully I don't think about it as much. It is what it is. But you naturally think you suck and everything. One thing you do notice though is that in this kind of format, especially when I'm listening to the guest who I talk to a lot offline, it's the same as when we talk. I mean we're talking about whatever we're talking about that day.

The next day on the phone we might be talking about something different. But the cadence, the timing, the histrionics, the lack of histrionics, it's all the same. What gets you up? What kind of brings you here? It's not any different on this and i wonder i in fact i doubt if i was forced to compress this into 20 or 30 minutes and say like all right we need to go for the hitter there'd be a lot of acting going on man yeah yeah we would we'd be the motivational speakers and you know we'd be hitting these points so quick i uh even that to name names but you know you're just gonna do it man exactly but but but seriously

and that's why it comes off so cheesy at times you know but but it's it's he's he's forced and not just him he's forced to because that's the platform nobody wants to watch a three-hour podcast they want to watch a 30-second clip on Instagram so it's it's sort of like fake in a way but even like just you having the conversation to say hey i don't agree with what you just said this is how i feel if we were having a conversation and these mics weren't on you would have probably let it go you said yeah yeah sure you know that's cool and now we're done i wouldn't know if you're right though a lot of most people would have yes yeah yeah i'm i'm like i don't know but you're a rarity and that shameless sometimes. But that's why you are doing what you're doing

because you're a rarity. Most people don't have that skill of being in the conversation. And that's why you're a podcast host, right? Like that is your skill. And we talked about identifying what you're good at. You are fantastic at creating a conversation and then pulling the best out of me.

I feel comfortable saying and doing what I'm doing and saying because you've made me feel like that and that's a great dude and I'm serious like that is a great skill to have and it's fucking rare thank you and well I mean that's that's that's all you can ask for doing this because I I've said this before and I'll say this many times after this my goal here regardless of where this goes and what i'm looking to do when i bring someone in here yes sometimes it's someone i got connected to but like with you someone i got connected to i formed a very good relationship over the last month yeah before and we we took a few weeks to even schedule this on the calendar so if you sucked

after a week i might have just been like oh i'm gonna stop fucking i'll just be like hey another time yeah right you did with the people i bring in here i respect them a lot even if i disagree with with their viewpoints like i've had people from the left and right who are clearly on hard on one end in here and obviously like those are i'm kind of like a radical centrist at this point in my life like those are people that i'm going to have a lot of disagreements with but i understand where they come from and i love talking with them i've got a fuck ton of respect for them and they're people who i think exhibit the ones i've had in at least are people who i think exhibit leadership skills they're the kinds of people that i feel like hey if you gotta have a left and a right that are going to disagree on a lot of shit those are the kinds of people i'd love to see in dc and i don't think either

of those guys would ever do it that's what i'm thinking of because they're like above that but you know i look at these people whether it be them or anyone else i've had on here and i see them in a very special way through my eyes and all i want to do is have the give them a platform to have the rest of the world see them through their own eyes the way that i do that's what i want i want people to walk out of here after or take their earbuds out of their ear or you know take off the the the youtube on on the screen and say like yo i really fuck with this john ronnie kid in fact i'm not in college I don't give a fuck about that app but I'm following this kid

I'll fucking download the app myself just to see what the hell's going on on there that's what I want because they're seeing someone who's a game changer and the special part of starting a podcast like this and building at the beginning is I identify people who I'm like oh this person's special

I mean you're on point with everything. And I will say it, right? You, I mean, before this, this podcast, right? You're talking about your network and how you can help me. And everybody does that. Everybody says they're going to help one another. And it's great. You literally got your phone out, went through your contacts, found people that you think could be beneficial for me to know And you fucking called somebody like on the spot. And then what you did was You sold me Very well, and I always say it. I think I have a skill where I will sell somebody way better than they'll sell me It's just like the the trait that I have

And I think you have that as well. You are making sure that at the end of this podcast People see the best version of john ron de. And that's a great trait to have. And I saw it fucking live. And that in itself is like, wow, I can trust in this guy, Julian. I appreciate that, man. And the other thing I'd put on top of that is that since you're the guest on a podcast like this, you can't hide either. So there's no one who sells yourself better than how you present yourself.

And I don't shy away from sale or sell and and it has a negative connotation to it a lot but no there are things to sell that are honorable that you believe in and there are things to sell that aren't because you just want to sell and get gain out of it and so when we sell things we sell things we believe in so like me calling up jim and that was one of the guys we talked to i believe in you and i of course i believe in jim i've known him for years he's amazing and i'm like wait these two guys i don't know there might there might be something there let's see what that is it's not even a sale at that point but it is you know because you're like saying jim i know you don't know john but here's john we're on speaker phone so say what up and here's what he does and here's John. We're on speakerphone. So say what up. And here's what he does. And here's why I think it's really good. And then it gets him

interested. And I'm not fucking bullshitting. That's it. Like you could have easily said, hey, you know, Jim, I think you should talk to John. And hey, John, hey, by the way, here, grab the phone and talk. No, you took the initiative. And like I said, sold me and the idea well enough for Jim to to get interested and nobody is a better salesman in my opinion than somebody else vouching for you i'll sell myself and you'll believe in what i'm saying because i'm good at it over time but at the end of the day you talking to somebody else and convincing them to like me or listen into what i'm saying is usually going to be a better situation and It ties into everything, man.

Yeah. I mean, look at, let's just use one simple example at the highest level of culture and politics. When Obama ran both terms, he comes from a more gun control stance, right? And guess what? He sold that because he believed in it. And think what you want of it, he acted on it.

Now, personally, I'm more of a Second Amendment guy because I believe in the slippery slope. And think what you want of it. He acted on it. Now, personally, I'm more of a Second Amendment guy because I believe in the slippery slope. I think that's a problem. Okay. That's not how he sees it. He went out there and he made efforts to do gun control publicly, right? Then you have Trump come in. What does Trump run on? Trump runs on no gun control.

We're not taking your guns. I don't want the government doing that. And guess what? He acted on it. He protected it at every single level, including when it was unpopular to do so. So here's two people that people either love or hate or, I don't know, like whatever it is.

As far as like polar opposites go and polar viewpoints, it's still the same thing. They're not, like, they weren't selling that and both of those guys sold a lot of things that were bullshit. Let's get that straight. I'm using an example that they could actually back up with their actions. They sold those things because those were things that were near and dear to them and then they did exactly what they said. So it wasn't like this sleazy, you know, I'm going to call you up and sell you the greatest stock you've ever seen right now.

It's like, no, like Obama, I would like to control guns. I don't like mass shootings or whatever logic he puts behind it. And then Trump, like, all right, I don't want to control guns because I don't want the government taking them or whatever logic he puts behind it. And then what they did backed it up. So, you know, that's like one time we give a positive as far as like credit for, you know, two opposite politicians. But it's true, man. Like you have to get behind things you believe in and not just believe in them because you want them to be what you want them to be you have to believe in them

because they are what they're presenting themselves to be and you know what they're going to add value for other people and you're going to look good in the end as well right you gotta yeah you gotta believe and if you're going to sell somebody to somebody else you got to believe that they're going to act upon what you're sort of saying god damn right dude all right john we could go all night here. That's why I say, I haven't had a podcast that I haven't had to cut off. Yeah, look, man, I get it. Everything will go on.

I'm telling you, and again, I already hyped you up and I'll stop hyping you up, but it's because of you. Like you made this feel like it was 30 minutes and it's been fucking, what, four hours now? Because this is your gift, man. This is what God gave you, so fucking use it. I appreciate it, man. I was off my game today, too.

You kept me good. I was not feeling great. So I enjoyed the conversation. Love hearing about what you're building here. I love guys who, I said this three times today, I'll say it again, I love guys who get in the dirt and are willing to do it however they got to do it to get it done because they believe in something, and you do that. So looking forward to having you on again if you'll come back.

Oh, of course, man. All right, cool. That's it. And in the meantime, let's go get drunk. That's it. All right. Everyone else, everyone else, give it a thought. Get back to me.

Appreciate it. Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace.