My First Million - #132 - A Simple Email Hack That Generated Millions, The World's Cheapest Billionaire, and A Simple Startup Idea No One Has Done

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - The crazy story of J. Paul Getty (Billy of The Week) - The importance of acting the part and story telling in creating your personal brand - What do all successful people have in common? Can you not be intense and be successful? - Who will win the self-driving wars? - Elon Musk is polarizing -- is he always right? The story of how he got kicked out of PayPal - An incredible Brooklinen Black Friday sales hack - Why has no one created the landing page for ecomm? - AI generated stock photos is a million dollar idea Reference links: - How to Be Rich by J. Paul Getty https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Rich-Paul-Getty/dp/0515087378 - How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp/1591842719 - The PayPal Wars https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/1936488590 - Kyle Vogt video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sliYTyRpRB8 - 3D images marketplace https://sketchfab.com/ Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right. What up, Sam?

We got a Thanksgiving special episode. Other people would take the day off, but that's not how we roll. What's going on? To be honest, we were like one minute away from taking the day off. But Sam said he's got something big to discuss. So I'm excited. Ah, well, I don't know. I don't want to. It's a little different, but you can't unhyped the hype. I already, I already hyped it.

Okay. So, Sean doesn't know about what I'm going to talk about. It's not big, but we'll see if you have anything to say about it. I wanted to talk about a couple things. Okay. So I'm really interested in a few things. Family wealth. So there's a book called Family Wealth. Not that I'm even implying that I have family wealth. I'm just, it's just a topic that it, like the idea of how someone can have something and pass it down. Like anything that lasts 100 years. kind of interests me. Right, the Parr Dynasty. Yeah. And so, like, I like buildings that last a long time. I'm reading about wealth. I'm also interested in books written about business that are already from, like, crazy, successful people who don't care if you read it or not.

So, like, you know, not like people who get rich writing about getting rich. Yes. There's this one book that I came across, and it's by a guy that's incredibly fascinating to me, and it's called How to Be Rich, and it's by Jay Paul Getty. You know who that is? Well, Getty Images. Is that who that is? No, that was his grandfather.

So this is why it's, that's why it's interesting. It's because Getty Images is a, Getty Images, I don't know what they're worth. They could be worth like $20 billion. They do a billion a year in sales. I don't know what that's worth, but it's a, because it's a privately held company. And I think Getty Images is just a part of it, right? They have like kind of a broader empire.

That's why it's interesting. So let me tell you the background about the family. So Jay Paul Getty died in the 70s and in the 60s. and in the 60s, the 50s and 60s, officially in the 60s, he was the richest man in America. He wasn't quite like the Jeff Bezos, but kind of. He didn't have that same. The world didn't view him kind of in the same light. He was known as being a lot more stingy and a lot more greedy, whereas Bezos definitely gets that.

But a lot of people are like, yeah, he's so smart, he's brilliant, whatever. He was a little bit different. And it started because Jay Paul, I think people call him Jay Paul or John Paul. I don't actually know what they call him. I call him JP, but yeah. JP Getty, I think. I don't know what they called him back then. But anyway, his father was an insurance guy who somehow worked his way up and hit it big by buying an oil field for a relatively small amount of money.

And it worked out so where the father died with around the equivalent of $100 million. His father died with the net worth of like $10 million, which now is about $100 million. So incredibly wealthy. and before he died, he gave John Paul $10,000, which is about the equivalent of $150K,000. And John Paul bought an oil fuel, that age 21, which turned into multi-million dollars. And then what he did was he learned Arabic. And he was the first kind of American to go over to Saudi Arabia. You know, Saudi Arabia was founded, I think in the 30s, like the modern day Saudi Arabia,

founded in like the 30s, 40s, I believe it's brand new. And JP made buddies with the... with the king, I guess that's the proper title. The Sheikh, okay. I think he's a king. It's a monarchy. I don't know what they call it a king. Whatever. Sorry if you're from Saudi Arabia. I'm trying my best. And he spoke Arabic and they're like, oh, this white American speaks Arabic. So he's like trying to be respectful. Right. My dad.

Yeah. And so he went over and he made these amazing deals. And he's one of the first people to go into the Middle East and discover oil. And then he started buying oil companies and eventually bloomed into Getty Oil, which is now out of business, but at the time was like, it was one of the biggest companies in the world, and he owned 50% of it. So incredibly interesting, but let me explain a few more things. So he was known for being super frugal and a huge asshole. And growing up, he was, he partied. And the rest of his family, like his kids and his grandkids, if you look up what happened to him, like the reason I got interested in this is just the other day, like two days ago, his grandson just died. And like,

it's kind of like the Kennedys, but worse. All the grand, like so many, a dozen plus grandkids and sons have died from drug overdoses. They love getting fucked up and they love drugs. And JP's grandson was kidnapped in Italy and held for ransom for $17 million. They cut off the grandson's ear, sent it to him and goes, because they said 17 million. He goes, no, not a chance. So they cut off the ear and sent it to him. And he was like, fine, I'll do like, uh, 16, five.

I'll do like he like he goes, I'll do 2.2. And the reason he came up with that is that's like the tax deductible number for. Oh my God. I always think about that with ransoms. Like why 17 million? Why not like all the money? Because is there really any amount that the person's not going to pay? According. With him, yes. With him there was. So he like would hang up on the negotiators and he goes, nope, sorry. He was known for being so frugal. And he also had five wives with five kids in his home. He had huge mansions. He would collect art, but in the home, it was all fake art. And he would only buy shit that could make money. So he bought art, but he wouldn't keep it in the home. And he would not, he would launder his clothes by hand. He would reuse paper all the time.

So he was famous for sending you a letter and like only the backside was written for you because the front side was like his note taking for something else. And he had a pay phone in his house. And he would, yeah, one of his wives, he had a handicapped son, I think a blind son. and the wife, the mom would spoil the kid because she felt bad for him. And he would like yell at her, like, no, no, no, no, like you're spending way too much money on this kid. He was famous for that. A Brady just posted something, so I'm just going to read it out slower. It's what you said, but it's just the details.

So when the kidnappers finally reduced their demands of $3 million, Dedy agreed to pay no more than $2.2 million, which is the equivalent of $12 million today. This is the maximum debt is tax deductible. He then lent his son the remaining $800 grand to get to the $3 million at 4% interest. The grandson was found alive on December 15. It's crazy. Like he was like, this guy was nuts. I believe that every great man is also a bad man.

Like, in order to like be great, you're going to piss off a lot of people. This guy took that way too far. So I don't agree with a lot he said, but I still find him incredibly fascinating. Super interesting. Very mysterious, polarizing figure. Sounds like rich in money broke in wisdom. Like it sounds like this guy is like mentally destitute. Yeah.

He was a real piece of crap. But, you know, there's something you can learn from everyone. And he has this book on called How to Be Rich. And it's interesting because the Gettys, okay, and then the Gettie grandson started Gettie images. Right. So he was, the grandson was successful, but in general, a lot of- Planned with house money. Yeah, he was totally.

So yeah, I definitely started on third base and got a home run or whatever the phrase is. Have you heard that phrase? He's born on third base. Yeah, I've heard that one. I don't know about the... What's the phrase? Oh, no, he was born on third base, but thought he hit a triple. Stoll home.

Or something. Okay, yeah. That's a good one. Something like that. So, anyway... And I love your quote, by the way, the Every Great Man is also a bad man. I love that quote. That's like in my top five, like, lifeisms.

Like, if I was going to boil it down, like, what's the core philosophy? I think that would be in the top five of the core philosophy. Yeah, I don't think I made that up. I mean, someone has said it. I don't know if I... Sure. I think I've used that term. terminology on my own, but it's a very common idea, which is like, let's say you love Obama.

Like, he still had to kill some people, so they definitely didn't like him. So, like, everyone hates you. Although you got to do the 2020 remix to make it like politically correct. Because it's got to be like, every great they is also a bad day or something. I don't know how you're supposed to say it. Every great person is also a bad person. There you go. Much better. Anyway, this guy, John Paul, it's so fascinating. And I just wanted to bring it up because it's interesting to me, but also I wanted to get your opinion on a few things. Okay. So first, Billy of the Week, I suppose, then goes to John Paul. We should actually do the Billy of the Week. I think I enjoy, every time I learn about a new billionaire, I learn something

interesting. And so I think we should do it religiously. All right. We'll do it next week. Next week is going to be Bernie a Claystone. I think that's how you say his last name. The guy who started Formula One. Google that guy. Go ahead and Google that guy. Look at what he looks like. Okay, let me do it. He's 5 foot 5, I think, with a bull haircut. Eccles, I don't even know how to say his last name. I've read his biography. He's cool.

And he has six foot tall smoking hot wives who are 40. He looks like a G. He looks like Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter, but the man version of that. Yeah, you got to like look up this guy. If Dumbledore combined with her, this is what he would look like. So that's the one we'll do now. next week. But JP, what do you think about this guy? And you see what he looks like? He looks like scary and like he looks like a miser. Is that the word? Miser? He looks like a dork to me. He doesn't

like scary. But if I was sitting at a poker table, I would not want to get into hands with this guy. Like, I know this look. This look is the look of a person who knows, they know more than you about whatever you think you know. And so I definitely, I think it's fascinating. I didn't know this story. I only knew Getty images. I knew they had some family wealth, but I didn't know from what. So I find that interesting. What I really love is, it's actually kind of like, while you were talking,

I was like, okay, this guy just sounds ridiculous. Sounds like, you know, like I said, like wisdom, poor, money rich. But that's okay. I think there's still some interesting stuff in there. But the part that always stands out to me is I have this theory about like branding or especially personal branding,

which is like a lot of people want to be known as whatever, right? I want to be known as smart. I want to be known as bold. I want to be known as whatever. In this case, I want to be known as frugal. This guy is a great example of, you don't just say he's frugal. You say that, you know, when his grandson was put up for ransom, he only agreed to play, you know, he offered 10% of what the kidnappers wanted because that was the maximum

that was tax deductible that year, right? Like, it's the anecdote that gets for the person to think, man, this guy's cheap, man, this guy's frugal. And so this, what you told me was like 12 straight antidotes, that the anecdotes that, the anecdotes that painted such a vivid picture of this person about being both like really smart and clever, but also really frugal and also like a real asshole. You didn't even need to say any of those words, but like the stories just tell that story. So like Amazon does a great job of this too where they were like in the early days,

it'd be like, you know, they don't buy desks. They would go to the hardware store and get these like doors because they were cheaper than desks and they would just come in and they would, you know, so if you go into the Amazon office, every desk is a door. Which by the way, when we started our company, we did that. it's way more expensive to do. Doors cost more expensive than an IKEA table. Exactly, because it's a PR story, right?

So the lesson to learn from this is that you can manufacture these. So I'll just give people a little tip. I did this exercise. I have this exercise called the three-pillar exercise. I'll do a video on it sometime to explain how it goes. But the short version of it is you write these three words, three words that you want everybody to know you are and one word that you want them to all know you're not.

So Sean is blank, blank, blank and he is not blank. And then the test in the game is, can you just tell you write three little anecdotes under each one? And if you just said those anecdotes, would the person have this conclusion about you? Right? So like, for me, I wanted to say that I was bold, right? I was going to a job interview. And so I made this game up.

And I was like, all right, I'm going to make sure that I'm going to have five interviews lined up today with people in this company. When they go and debrief about me, I want them all to say the same things. That guy was blank, blank and blank, and he is not blank. And so I wrote bold as one of those blanks. And so I was like, all right, how do you make someone see that you're bold? How do you make someone believe that you're bold? And so I started looking into my past, like, are there stories of me being bold that I could drop in or, you know, mention during the interview that would make them think this, right?

And so the one I thought of was when we were doing this sushi restaurant, we had this idea for a sushi restaurant, never made a sushi role in my life. But I was watching TV, watching the Food Network, and I saw this sushi chef on TV. And right then and there, I googled him and I cold called him. and he's a chef in L.A., and I pitched him to join our company, right? And, like, people are like, whoa, that's like a bold action you took. And so I had, like, three under each. And so when you were telling this story, I was just, like, looking at these anecdotes.

And if you go to his Wikipedia, it's these same stories that you're talking about. Like, he washes all his clothes by hand, right? What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. It's probably a dumb thing to do. But, like, man, for the brand of, like, rich guy who washes all his clothes by hand himself, okay, frugal, like, emphasized, you know? And so once you start to realize that little hack, that little storytelling hack, like the branding hack, you'll see it everywhere.

Anytime a brand is trying to tell you some story, you know that they're just using an anecdote to build up some word that they're trying to like associate with themselves. I think that's a great exercise. I'm going to do that later. Like five guys does this, the burger, the burger chain. They say, we have no freezers. All our food is, you know, all our burgers are fresh. We don't even have freezers in the restaurant. And so they say this.

And, like, you know, in reality, they just, you know, their supply chain model is a little bit different. It's not that there's that much fresher than anybody else. But they say this so that you think that their burger tastes different than anybody else because it's fresher, right? And so we used to do this with our sushi restaurant. We used to say, you know, all of, we started off saying, our salmon is never flash frozen. And then, like, later, like, the chef was like, yeah, why do you guys say that? And we're like, because people want fresh fish for sushi. They want it to be, like, super fresh.

And he's like, you know that the freezing is, like, really critical for. salmon, like, kills the bacteria and stuff. Like, you should really not serve anything that's not flash frozen. And we're like, oh, shit, okay. So that's actually a famous copywriting technique. So there's this guy named Joe Sugarman. He's a great copywriter. He's real famous.

He's probably in the 70s now. And he wrote a really great ad for, was it Casio? I forget what it was for a watch company and like not an expensive watch, like a $59 watch. And I think he was one of the first people to use the phrasing, space age. metal is in this watch and then something like quartz movement. I think it was courts movement. I could be wrong, but something like this. And I'm almost positive that like that space grade like I don't think that means that not only does it not mean anything. I think all watches.

Like it's like that's like a very normal thing. Same with exactly. Same with I think was it courts movement. Something like that. It's like well like they all have that. And he was like yeah, but like the people don't know that. You know what I mean? Or like if someone's saying like, you know, this is. like polarized sunglasses it's like yeah but like every sunglasses polarized 16 hour aged pork or whatever right it's like they're all like that and so that's like a really good it's called um it's like based on this idea of the knowledge complex which is when you're trying to sell something you have to remember or you have to keep in mind that most people have no idea about the story or like the insight behind this and so because you know you think other people know and you

forget that this simple shit is not simple. Right. We had a mentor from college. This guy Dan Ariely, he wrote the book, predictably irrational. And so we went to him and we were like, hey, you're, you know, you're super smart. We're starting this sushi thing. What do you think are some things we can learn from your experiments that will teach us about, like, that will help us with our sushi chain.

He goes, well, first thing is you have fast food sushi, right? People may not want fast food version of sushi. They may look at that very differently than fast food. food, burgers and fries, you know? And so he goes, he goes, I would learn from the wine industry. And we said, what? He goes, he goes, wine is just grapes. He goes, but the wine industry will tell you that it's not just grapes. And he was basically saying, like, they built a whole dictionary of terminology. There's like, you know, like certifications you can get to be a Somalié. And there's like all this mystique into what the different types of wines are and why one's more expensive

than the other. It's like, how do you charge $6,000 for a bottle of grapes? Because you create this whole lexicon of words and knowledge around what is amazing versus good versus great versus outstanding versus, you know, you create all these like tiers and you have to educate the market first and then you decide which tier your brand is going to live in. I thought that was pretty fascinating. I like that. Yeah. And I buy into that as well.

So to wrap up Getty here, he was, I think of a lot of words to describe them, a lot of negative words, but the guy was crazy intense, like super intense. Do you think that these people who are. are the best. So in the field of business, that likely is correlated to who are the wealthiest. Do you know any examples of people who are not intense at all who are up there? Or does everyone who you know, we might have a couple billionaire friends amongst us, or at least they will be in the next 20 years just with compounding interest. But I think we probably do have someone in that range. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's a handful. So I would say, yes, all of them carry an intensity.

some are very vocal and some are some are not some have a lot of ethics and others are like ruthless fucking killers like so i think i've seen differences on that like i've definitely seen a difference in who's willing to like cut their partner's throat versus somebody who's like never i'll never do that that's not a different issue but the intensity and the like maniacal focus i have seen as like i have never seen one who's not in fact i've told you about about michael birch who i worked with at um the idea lab that he had started called monkey inferno and so michael had had made it rich. He sold his company for $850 million. So by the time I met him, this was like four years, five years after that sale. And I was like, this British dude is chill as hell.

Like he, you know, he's funny. He's really like engaging. He's really thoughtful. The work culture was like nine to four 30, you know, every day. And then Fridays we'd stop at three and kind of have our happy hour and like all the shit. And like he was traveling all the time and he was just very you're laid back. And so I thought, oh, this is a good example of someone who, you know, I guess you can make it while still being, you know, a good dude and not a workaholic and not a, not a super-uber-intense, demanding guy. And then our C-O is his sister-in-law, Lucinda. And she was also the C-O when he was doing Bebo, the startup that he had sold. And so I asked her, I was like, you know, the same way during that? She goes, oh, no. It was like a night and day

difference. Basically, she's like, we had to beg him to just come home at night. Like, he just wouldn't leave the office. He was a maniac. Like, he would just always be thinking about it, always be working on it. And, you know, he wasn't hiring people. He was just trying to do it all himself. Like, it was crazy. He worked crazy, crazy, crazy hard. And now I just don't think he does, I just don't think he wants to do that anymore. And to the point where, like, he had, like, a pretty serious surgery four months after they sold because of, like, the toll that the stress had put onto his body and, you know, and all that stuff. So, So even the one example I thought I had found of like a not uber intense person, turns out I was totally

wrong and he was just now he was in chill mode. So there's this, so I'll know what I'm about to say will tie exactly into that and it ties into the premise of this conversation, which is I like reading books of people who they don't really, they don't need to make money off the book. There's this great book called How to Get Rich. Again, it's a really poorly titled name, titled book because it's pretty tacky. but it's by this guy named Felix Dennis who started Maxim. Maxim Magazine, but before that, the Maxims and the music magazines of Britain,

you know, he was like a Richard Branson, but more vulgar type of person, where he's pretty eclectic and had his hands and a lot of stuff, probably worth $800 million, I think, what he died. He did drugs, a lot of drugs, and he died single. And he wrote that, he's like, if I could do it all over again, I would have worked my ass off until I was 35. hopefully I would have made enough money that I could last for a little while and live comfortably. But then, and then I would quit because I was like a boxer who was punch drunk.

I, like, I had to go back every single time. I'm like, he's like, I actually, this guy actually wrote a biography on Muhammad Ali. He was like, I was like that. I like, I should have retired, but I kept going fighting. And I just looked like an idiot. And I regret it all. And it hurt me. And he ended up dying from cancer because he was a big smoker and an alcoholic and drug guy.

Sometimes I wonder, like, what should you just grind as hard as you can starting at a young age and hope that you can get something relatively young? Or do you know just that you're going to be punched drunk and just keep going? You know, like I think about that sometimes. So there's a, what's it called? There's a, there's two like schools of thought. So one is that, which is like, you know, you hustle really hard at the beginning and then you sort of shift gears as you go. I see that. Like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, he has a phrase like this where he's like, in your 20s, you work hard for someone else. In your 30s, you work really hard for yourself and

your own company. In your 40s, you invest, and in your 50s, you give back or something like that. Like, I don't know the exact chain of events, but it's that idea. And so there's some people that definitely advocate for that. Definitely seeing a lot of people who just, you know, you get addicted to the medicine. You can't get off of it. And you just keep going and there's like a never-ending more. But it does seem like there's like another way, which I think you hear less about these people because they're not extreme athletes. So because they're not extreme, they're not in the news. Because they're not extreme, they don't go for the $8 billion or $80 billion outcome. They go for the like $8 to $18 million to $80 million, you know,

over time, get rich slow tactic. And so I think that there are some people who play the game a different way. And their way is basically they work on the stuff that they're interested in. They don't care too much about the money, but they work really hard at it. And because they're interested in it, they become some of the best, they become the best person at that thing or one of the best. And because we're one of the best, they make money. Even the best plumber in the world is a multimillionaire, right? So it doesn't matter which field you go if you can get to the top. Just a really good one in a local area. Right. I personally think that there's like the better method is not the not the like, let me work super, super hard until I'm 35 and then come to a cold stop and then figure out what I want

to do with the rest of my life. I think that's the extreme athlete path. That's like literally what most athletes do is like they were, they're, you know, Michael Phelps until they're 33 and then they retire or they're Kobe Bryant and they go until they're 37 and then they retire and they have to figure out what the hell life is after that. Personally, that's not the path for me. I've realized, but I do think that for extreme success, it does look like these Olympic-style athletes where you are, you devote your whole life, you sacrifice like crazy, you sacrifice your personal life, all that's good stuff. Like Elon Musk, he's got what, five, six kids, three, four wives, you know, like for all his,

like, for however much you idolize him in the business realm, for by most people's definition, he's totally failed in the family realm, right? You know, sleeps in the office 200 days a year. Like, I don't know if that's life, right? Doesn't seem to look like the healthiest guys. He's not winning in that front. So I just think that there's like. there's an extreme cost to extreme success, and I haven't personally seen outliers from that.

There's a Getty in his book, he said, I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give back all my millions for one lasting marital success. Right. And like, you know, I'm trying to think like even, like Warren Buffett, for example, seems like a very even keeled guy, you know, has had long, sustained success. I don't, I think he got divorced. I don't think his marriage ended up working out, which is okay. You know, no harm there, but that's not my goal.

My goal is different, so I don't want to follow a blueprint that seems to be leading to that. Doesn't seem like the healthiest dude in the world, but he's got good energy, so that's cool. He's lived a long time. He's got a lot of energy, so I think that's good. I don't know. I'm of the opinion that the extreme, extreme success takes a big toll out of the other areas of your life. It's kind of like the laws of physics. It's like energy is not created or to destroy it.

It's just transferred. And if you're going to transfer the energy it takes to become like mega, mega, mega, successful like that. I'm talking about like billions and up. I definitely know people that have $100 million that live a very balanced life and have been able to not like, they work hard, but they're not like, they're not working 10 times harder than anybody else. I do too. And I know a lot of people who, so like, well, you're kind of disproving your point. I'm just saying for the top, the absolute top. Like their company is the leader in an important category. They're in the billions in category on in terms of wealth. And they're, you know, they have that sort of like that that's the top to me.

Well, I want to also acknowledge that, like, I know people that are hardworking and smart. And I hate when, and I used to do this, but I don't anymore. Like, we have to acknowledge that there's definitely a lottery ticket type of luck thing there for some of them. For sure. For some. For sure. Like, there's a bunch of people who are like, they're going to crush it no matter what. But they had, they maybe had a little lot of ticket that in one of the, you know, they're playing a ton of different hands. And it's like, well, one of the hands, it just kind of worked in their favor. Like, they likely would have won something in all those hands. But that particular one, it just. It was kind of magical.

Yes, exactly. I always say the fact that they succeeded was not luck. The amount that they succeeded had a big degree of luck. Like, I sold my company, you're going to sell your company someday. Whatever that outcome is, we have friends like, I could just take Michael's example again, right? Like sold that company for $850 million. The timing was perfect. Social networking was at its absolute peak.

Facebook was too expensive for anyone to buy. Myspace had already sold for $500 million. So they were the only, you know, the only girl left to ask out to the day. And so they got like a very high bid from a big bidder. And that same company a year later might have sold for half the amount or less. And not to disrespect, Michael, that acquisition is considered that and Mark Cuban's acquisition are considered the two worst acquisitions of all time. Right.

That's not the fault of the seller. That's the fault of the buyer. Yeah. So. But I guess that's what I mean. But he would have been successful either way. And he already was actually had built multiple smaller successes, the first one for like single digit millions.

and the second one for a little bit more. And the third one, you know, like, it was going to always be successful. Now, was he always going to end up kind of in the 800 million category? Like, no, I can't say that that's true. Well, what do you want to talk about now? I blew. I don't have much. I have, okay, so I have a couple of random things.

That was my, that was what I had prepared. Okay, yeah, there's no problem. I saw something cool. I don't know if you saw this, but the guy who started Cruz, this guy, Kyle Vogue, put out this video. Did you watch this video that he put out, which is a video of 75 minutes of their cruise vehicle driving through San Francisco. And it's him talking to Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI right now and was kind of like the head of Wycombinator. And he's kind of like, probably the number one of Silicon Valley. Yeah, young being relative, like just like kind of like powerful people under 40. I think Sam Altman's probably number one in Silicon Valley. What do you think of that? Is that right? Yeah. Maybe Zuck. I don't know how old Zuck is. Oh, well, Zuck's like, you know, really Zuck's like 35. Yeah. So, so, okay, Sam Olman's maybe in the top five.

Well, he's like not the richest, but he's like got his hands and everything. But give the background of this Kyle guy, because he's actually more interesting, I think, than Sam Altman. So he actually was the co-founder of, or co-founder, I think he would be considered the co-founder. He's definitely the early engineer, the first engineer at Twitch. And so he helped start Twitter. which, and he is a brilliant guy. And actually, Emmett made a good point about this recently. So somebody said, somebody was saying this, like, kind of common startup wisdom, which

I think is actually true, but there are always exceptions. So some guy was like, hey, you know, sometimes when you want to disrupt an industry, you want to be an outsider, right? Like, you actually don't want to be from within the industry because then you think just like everybody else in the industry. Sometimes an outsider who doesn't know anything is the best person to disrupt it. I think the guy was kind of making a stance, not saying sometimes. He was like, that's usually who does it.

And then Emmett made a good point. He goes, you know, for technical products, I actually think so the exact opposite. I think for technical products, it's the person with deep domain expertise. That's actually the best person ability. He goes, Kyle have been trying to build self-driving cars since he was in high school. Like, Twitch was like a detour for him. And he's like, you know, the timing wasn't right back then. But he had been thinking about this and working on this, fiddling with this for a long time.

He was probably one of the five people on Earth who should have started a self-driving car company was Kyle. So he starts cruise, sells crews for a billion dollars to GM. Like 12 months or something into the journey. I think two years in, something like that. Yeah, before basically, there's no self-driving cars on the road, right? But, like, you know, sells the technology to GM because these big car companies, they're very worried, right? Like, a car company needs self-driving because once cars are self-driving, people don't need to own cars. Once you have self-driving cars everywhere, you know, just push a button.

A very cheap Uber will come to you, essentially, because there's no driver inside. So it's super cheap. And you just take it from wherever you want to go to the next spot. And then you hop out and it keeps driving around. Like, you're not going to need to have your car and park it. Cars are parked, I think, 95% of the time doing nothing, just like a depreciating asset that's just idle. So buying a car is a horrible idea. So that's why GM and others are trying to buy their way into self-driving.

So anyways, it's been multiple years now, seven years or something like that. I don't know how long since this company's been around. And so he just released this video. And it's a cool video because they're just like two absolute nerds nerding out. And if you want to look it up, the guy's name's Kyle, what he's, bought? Yeah, vote or vaught. I don't know. V-O-G-T.

So Kyle V-O-G-T and then type in the word Sam Altman. You'll see it. I'm watching it now. It's 75 minutes of autonomous driving with Kyle and Sam Altman. This company, I think, is worth like $20 billion under GM. It's worth a ton. Yeah, I don't know how that works. Like they raise funding as a subsidiary.

They've raised $7 billion or something like that now. By the way, this guy's like one of those total ultra-achiever nuts. Like he's the one who did that seven marathons and seven days on seven different countries or seven different continents or something crazy like that where you basically run a marathon during the day, then you hop on a plane and you fly to the next country and then you do it again and you do that for seven days straight. He did one of those recently, right? So like if you're trying to feel bad about your life, look this guy up. But anyways, I love this video and I only understood what, 15% of it because I don't know shit about machine learning. I don't know

shit about self-driving cars. Like, I don't know the difference between deep learning and, you know, like whatever the hell else, like ultra deep learning and any other technique that there is. And they're talking about stuff like that. But I just love watching people nerd out about shit. And self-driving is like one of those game changers. It's like a one-way door. Once we walk through it, we'll never go back. And so it's going to happen in our lifetime.

It's one of these like the internet happened in our lifetime. This is going to be, I think, like, I'd say the internet, cell phones and this. Those are the three big ones in our lifetime probably that we will see. I think check it out. It's crazy how good the car. and self-driving. Now, of course, these are all demos, and sometimes they kind of like, you know, like cheat a little bit in the demos to make it look good, but man, this thing is impressive. Do you know this guy, Kyle? I never met him, no. He has to be, like, I find him to be

one of the most interesting people there is because I think that, like, sometimes when I imagine, like, these, like, gritty, tough people, like, like, I think of, like a tough guy. I think of, like, a formidable person who I never, like, oh, I don't want to be enemies with. I think of, like, a tough looking person, right? Like tattoos or like, like, I think of like an MMA fighter or something. And then I see a little like, I mean, he's not like that dorky looking, but he's like a small kind looking. If you told me he sells insurance at a small company in the Midwest. I'd be like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, like he doesn't particularly look like a killer. I mean, like, you know. By the way, I'm surprised people don't make fun of us for this because we always judge when we hear about these

remarkable people, we have this like instinctual reaction to their looks and we talk about it. Everybody has it. But we talk about it. We're like, look at this. This guy looks like a fat rich guy. It's like this guy looks like a dork or whatever. But I'm surprised we don't get called out for this. Like have you ever seen the guy who created Ethereum? Oh, of course. Yeah.

When I see that guy, I'm like, yeah, you look like you created Ethereum. Like you look like the part. He looks the part. I literally bought a shit ton of Ethereum early on. Not super early, but early enough where right now I'm looking good because I saw this guy and I heard him talk and I was like, okay, I didn't understand pretty much any of that. But I'm pretty sure this is like the next suck. So I'm just going to place a bet.

You know, seems like this guy is, I have a hard time believing this guy's going to fail in life. I think this little super genius who's like really obsessive cryptocurrency is going to make some shit happen. Exactly. And it's like, and then when I see bros with abs and tattoos who are doing ICOs or whatever those crypto things are called, I'm like, oh, no, stay away from that. It doesn't matter what that person says. They should not look like that.

Exactly. And it doesn't take much. You can make money just doing that. Yes. But this guy, it's so funny because he kind of breaks. some mold of what we were talking about earlier of intense. I don't know if he's intense or not, probably. Yeah, of course he is. But he looks like just a gentle, nice person. And yet, I think the word genius is thrown out too much. A person like this definitely has to be genius IQ,

genius level at many different things. And I follow him on Instagram or something where he did his marathon in seven days. Yeah, seven days, seven, I'm like, seven X, seven. Yeah, seven seven. Wow. Like, how courageous and bold must this person be in order to do something? Like, who is crazy enough to think at the age of 28 or however old he was, or probably younger, to start a self-driving car. And now, like, the founders of GM or the CEOs of GM are like, well, Kyle, like, what do you think we should do? It's just like audacious. I think it's the right word.

I just, I really, I just love these audacious people. So he, exactly. I don't know anything about him. Might be smart. Might be, I mean, obviously he's smart. But I don't know if he's like a super genius. But what I will say is not knowing the person, you can learn a lot just by the fact that he took some very interesting swings.

Twitch early on was not like a sexy place to go work, right? Justin TV was not a sexy place to go work. It wasn't like a clear big market. It wasn't a big company. It wasn't making a ton of money. It wasn't like, you know, a smart person like this can go get any job they want. And to go work at Justin TV was because it was an interesting challenge, right? It was like doing what they were doing with live video at that time when the infrastructure

of the internet was what it was. That took some courage and it was an interesting swing. It was an interesting swing to be working on. Same thing with self-driving, right? Like, Cruise, there wasn't that many self-driving car companies at the time that he started Cruise. And that was an interesting swing. And so I got to give respect because I think that this guy took some really interesting swings. And if I want to do something more, like if I think about my own career, I want to take more interesting swings.

I think that's a lesson to learn from this dude. Yeah. So I have the video on. It's playing in the background. It's definitely amazing. I don't understand how a car can get all the data that. that this video has. It's pretty amazing. I guess they're using some type of radar or something. Yeah. So the car basically has a combination of camera sensors, LiDAR, which is a long distance

radar essentially, and then normal radar. And it has the combination of all three input sources to create essentially like a map of what's going on in the world. And so for self-driving, you need to create a map of what's around you. You need to predict what they call agents, What every other thing around you is going to do in the next five seconds. So you have to make a prediction. And then you have to make a plan for what you're going to do based on that prediction. And then you have to do it, do it. And so that's just constantly happening in a car.

And so like in the self-driving car world, there's like this religious holy war of like, do you need LIDAR or do you not? Everyone thought you needed LIDAR. And then Elon came out and was like, LIDAR is stupid. It's expensive. He don't need it. Cameras can do everything. And so that became a. big fork. Almost everybody took the LiDAR path and Tesla took the camera only path. And the

Lidar people said camera will never work. And the camera people said Lidar is a fool's errand. And they're all very vocal about it. And now we're going to see whose technical decision was correct, which is actually very interesting because if you ever read the book, I think it's called PayPal Wars. Have you ever read this book? I've heard of it. Great book. I really like this book. So it's a book about the founding story of PayPal from one of the guys who was like, I think, employee 15-ish at PayPal. So most people don't know this. but Elon was the CEO of PayPal. So he didn't start PayPal.

He started X.com. X.com was also trying to be what PayPal was doing, which was like an internet bank, basically. And they merged. When they merged, Elon became the CEO. Elon was the CEO for a while. And then when Elon went on vacation, he went on like a seven-day vacation,

had a coup, and they basically, like, kicked him out. They went to the board and they said, you know, you need to get rid of Elon now. And they got rid of Elon. Because I think he, he like didn't want to sell or something. No, no. Well, in the book, at least, they talk about it was a technical decision again like i'm sure there was many factors a lot of pressure

on the company in general but one of the big things was that there was a technical architecture decision he wanted to use dot net which is like this one type of infrastructure and they all wanted to use this other like in a modern thing and to this day they disagree about which was the right choice like they ended up doing the other one PayPal worked and Elon's still like no like that would have worked just fine and so him and max levchin kind of had like a huge budding of the heads about that And then Peter Thiel became the CEO. So who's right? Like with this Tesla stuff, I'm so uneducated with it.

But a lot of people who I speak with say that the self-driving Tesla stuff is pretty bad. There's two ways. Again, nobody knows. Nobody knows so you pull it off. Because what a lot of people will say is, yeah, this works in most cases. But most cases is not good enough for self-driving because you're going to kill people if you can't do all cases. And so they'll say, yeah, cameras work. except for in bad weather, because when it's rainy and your camera starts fogging up,

you need LiDAR, you need radar, to be able to detect stuff. And so that's like one of the arguments, for example, is that, yeah, camera's good enough most of the time, but most of the time is not good enough for this thing to really be autonomous. And Tesla says, no, we're going to do it. We're going to do it by the end of this year. Now, they didn't pull it off this year. You know, his timelines are kind of always wrong. So I have friends that are like always wrong.

They're always wrong. I have friends that are pretty deep in the space. And the opinion has shifted from most people thought. Tesla was on a dead man, dead end path, and now both people would agree that Tesla is the furthest ahead. I shouldn't say most people agree because there's just a bunch of random opinions. But from what I can tell, a bunch of smart people now agree that Tesla is ahead because they are the ones that have humans driving cars around everywhere, collecting all the data, all the map

data, all the city data, all the lanes data. And because a human is driving, they're getting trained, their system is getting trained by So they run in what's called shadow mode. So basically while you're driving a Tesla, self-driving is predicting what it would do. And then the driver's driving, the self-driving is checking based on what the human did. Like, oh, human did something different than I would have done, noted. And then the engineers can go look at that. And all those differences get noted.

And so a lot of people think Tesla's getting better because they have the most data. And then other people think that Tesla's reckless and that, you know, Waymo or whoever else has, you know, the better tech. But we'll see. somebody's got to show it i definitely want elan to be wrong some of the time he's right too often no person should be right that often yeah i i i could see that and he's become a little too smug for me oh he's he's super smug i like i think it's cool to be a shithead sometimes but he's kind of a i respect him a lot and i like him a lot i also think he's a douche he was also super wrong about coronavirus uh and i think that was like another one he was really really smug about and then

has proven to be completely wrong where he was like, oh, it'll be gone by April and, you know, very just Trumpian and like, you know, saying the worry about coronavirus is stupid and stuff like that and, you know, has been wrong on pretty much all fronts. And he got it. Yeah. We want to keep going? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do a Brooklyn. Okay, Brooklyn and tactic. This is just kind of a tactical one.

So this shout out to people who like operational tactics. So my guy Ben shows. me this thing that Brooklyn had done last year. It was Black Friday, right? Black Friday's in a couple days, biggest e-commerce day of the year. And he showed me this thing that Brooklyn had done, which I thought was pretty cool. And they basically emailed all of their customers. And they said, they basically emailed them a whoops email, basically. So it was like, it was a forwarded email from two people inside the company, like the head of marketing to like the junior marketing person. I was like, yeah, look, we like, we enabled the code, you know, Black Friday.

a 25 for 25% off, should be ready to go for Black Friday, but it's live now, but we'll announce it on Black Friday, or something like that. And they forward this, so there's a, they send an email to the whole user base,

and the email is basically the reply, the two, these two people replying, and it's kind of like, it looks like, and the subject lines like, you know, re, re, black Friday,

like as in regarding Black Friday. And so they sent, and then they were like, oh my God, they sent a follow up, like, oh my God, oops. So sorry that that, that was not supposed to be sent.

like, you know, whatever, we'll honor it. And they get this huge rush and this huge spike in sales because people feel like they got something that they didn't, you know, they weren't supposed to get. And they went and rushed and bought it before it got. And so we, so Ben was like, he shared it with me and we were like, let's try this. So we did this yesterday. And so we did it with my wife's e-commerce store. And so we sent out an email to all the customers.

Did it work? It worked like a charm, dude. Like it was the biggest sales day in the company's history. It was awesome. And basically what we did was the same idea. So sent out a code. to a, we did it a little bit differently. We sent it out to a small number of people, and then we went and said, and then they posted

it on Facebook. Like, oh, my God, guys, did anybody else get this email? And they screenshot it. And so then we commented on it like, hey, this is an error. Like, we told our developer to fix it. But, you know, with Black Friday, is really busy. Like, it'll get fixed soon. But like, hey, ladies, like, I guess in the meantime, you know, go crazy, go shopping.

And so people thought, oh, my God, this, I wasn't supposed to get this. And it's going to get fixed soon. So we like turbocharged it by adding that like this, we were going to fix this bug today. But like, you know, while it's up there, go ahead. And people just. I'm going to do that today. I'm going to do that today. Yeah, do it.

It's going to work. You know, they didn't make that up. The first time I saw that was Chubbies. Chubbies did that about four years ago. I remember Chubbies did it. Chubbies is like a short company. And it was like from their accountant, Dave. And their accountant Dave was like saying like, you guys, you cannot send this email to

everyone. This is going to bankrupt us. Right. That's a good one. I'm going to do that. I'm going to like literally right after this. I'm going to do it. Perfect.

So I said that's one tactic. Let's see how much time I got again. Where do I find that? Did someone? I'll send you an image of it. It's not like that well talked about it. I'm putting up a blog post about it. So I'm going to talk about it, but this would be great.

How did you format that in your mail provider? I'll show you. We just made it like a plain text email that has the, you know, like when you see a forward email, you can see the trailing email. So we just had the trailing email. and then our email and then it just got sent. But did you actually like send it to one of it?

Like did you and your wife talk to each other in Gmail? No, no, no. We just made it look like that. We just took an email like format and we could have actually emailed it but we didn't need to. We just like copy pastes and whatever. And so that must only took a few minutes. Few minutes, yeah, great.

Tens of thousands of dollars. Awesome. In a day. It was great. Here, a bray, you just linked to it. Yeah, Brooklyn. There it is. That's the one.

This is written up in Architectural Digest, which is probably why most people haven't heard of it. I like these little tactics that kind of work once and then they get saturated and then you got to move on to the next one. But I like doing them and sharing them with kind of people who like to use them before they get abused. Okay, I'll stick on.

God, I'm looking at this now. This is like the greatest thing I've ever seen. So I'll do another e-commerce thing. This is actually going to be kind of boring, but I think there's an opportunity. So here's a free idea for somebody. You know the website maker card? Card.com?

No. It's like a, or it makes like mobile-friendly websites. Yeah, it makes single page, kind of which are mobile-friendly. It's like a super simple website builder. So I really like it. I've used this for a bunch of my like random projects. If I want to make it on personal website, I use card. Like to me, it's simpler than Webflow. It's simpler than Squarespace. It's like faster and simpler. It can't do everything that everything can do, but I don't need everything. I just need the basics. And Card does the basics really, really well. So a couple things. So I met the founder of this, by the way. I think he's awesome. Yeah, just guy living in the Midwest. built this as a side project, started to make some side hustle money, and then it's just grown

over time, and it's pretty great business. And so I was looking at for e-commerce. So in e-commerce, you have these events, like, let's say, Black Friday, and you want to make a landing page. Or like, what do you use for your landing pages? You use like Adobe Spark or some shit like that, right? No, for landing pages, just WordPress or ClickFunnels. Yeah, WordPress, click funnels, exactly. So most marketers use, like, ClickFunnels or, you know, there's a whole bunch of different landing page tools out there. Unbalance. Unbalance.

Insta pages. There's a lot of good stuff. E-commerce, I think, somebody needs to build the click funnels for e-commerce. That is basically, it just connects with their Shopify. So, he uses Shopify as the backend. But on the front end, it lets you really, really easily spin up these one-page, mobile-optimized, basically card for e-commerce. And everyone's going to be like, oh, that already exists. No, trust me, I tried all of them.

They all suck. And there's a difference between something not existing and something not being done well. This is something is not done well yet. Hard. And see, it's two R's C-A-R-R-D.com. So the big ones in this space are like Shogun, Netlify, there's stuff like that that like is what they call headless commerce, which basically means your store is made in Shopify,

but your front end that the customer see, you can use a bunch of different, you can use a different tool. Dude, I've had this same exact problem. Yes. I've had this exact same problem. So often do I have a problem. I'm like, I just want to use Shopify for the back end, but I want to use ClickFunnels to design my pages.

quickly. Exactly. And like, even click on, like, but somebody needs to make the, the most user-friendly one. And if you want to see an example of what's a really user-friendly one, look at card. And like, I think somebody needs to make card for e-commerce. And I think that person will print money. Because every e-commerce site is constantly just trying to do two different things. Make ads, send e-mails. Send e-mails, make ads, and then make landing pages that actually convert the, the traffic into buyers. And you don't want to make new Shopify templates. It's like way, too much work to do that to like use a different theme and like switch your store it's like way too complicated and so you just need to be able to spin up offer pages deal pages sell certain inventory

that you're trying to move launch a new product line and just make that the focus of that page like it's so simple it's so simple i've had this same problem if somebody can truly say this dmee everything you see that does this and most of them will be like this is not simple this is not good but if if there actually is one please send it to me because i need it uh this problem is bad I've had this exact same problem. I dig it. I totally agree. I use Zapier or Zapier and like WooCommerce and it's like, it's all duct tape together.

Same thing. I agree. I would love to use. I don't know why there's no good solutions. I completely agree. Okay. Last thing that I wanted to do before we go. I don't really know where to go with this, but I'll just say it since we talked about Getty

images. So stock photo, stock sound, stock video websites have done pretty well historically. I just think they're great businesses because the people who use them keep coming back to them. They're like kind of designers or like professionals that like just keep needing the stock stuff. And like the bigger your kind of database and cert, the better your supply, the more defensible your business is essentially. Because you have the biggest repository of stuff. If I want to go find a certain sound or song, I got to go to Pond 5 because Pond 5 has just the most variety to choose from. So they become like the category leader.

AI has kind of changed this, right? So Artificial and changes. So there's all these little demo projects where it's like, look, this website plays songs that are generated by AI. Like, the song you hear when you refresh this page has never been created before and will never be created again. The AI is just making up songs. And they're actually like pretty good. What's it called? The song one, these are a little demo projects, but like here's another one for faces.

There's this person does not exist.com. Oh, I've seen that. That's great. It's basically like, hey, you need a stock photo of a person. Look, this is an AI generated person. This is not a real person, but it looks exactly like a real person. If you just go to this person does not exist.com. I love that, right?

But it got me thinking, like, dude, this means that somebody can basically disrupt all the stocks, the stock websites, because you can just programmatically generate anything, anybody searches for. You can create, you can have the computer basically make 500 variants of whatever they search for based on their keywords. And then they'll pick from them. And then you're like, cool, those are all saved. And like, you can create like a huge database of stock. whatever, images, icons, sounds, videos, whatever it is. And you can programmatically generate an AI-based stock website.

And you don't have to pay anything to the photographers. You don't have to pay anything to the video makers. So your margins are going to be way better because you have no supply-side fees to get the content. So I think there's something interesting there. I actually, I agree that it's awesome. But I actually think it would be a shit business because there's no. Now maybe because everybody can do it. Now there's no defensibility.

The only defensibility is like, do customers know you and are you high up in search? You know, like maybe that's the defensibility at this point. But there's, I don't know, there's something there. Like the technology can now do a thing it couldn't do before. So that means there's businesses to be made. I would totally not want to be. At first, it's like, yeah, it's awesome. I'm into it.

Now I'm like, oh, I would never want to start that because it's like starting outbrain. And when there's Tabula and they both do the same thing. It's a race to the bottom. He's just going to make prices the lowest and then they got to merge. Yeah. I think still the customer relationship matters the most. So, like, that is a problem. But I don't know.

I think there's something there. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I've been thinking about these stock websites a lot because I think they're very interesting. Well, we've always said I liked stock photos. We talked about getting images. In the past, we've talked about not Flickr, but what's that one? It started by a guy in New York who's like, high stock photo or? No, he like owns part of the Knicks now.

Or they like, I forget his name. John's, his name's John Oranger, I think. Right? Okay. I don't know what that is. It's a shutter stock. Shutters stock. Okay, yeah.

Yeah, so these have been great businesses historically. Maybe now they're not going to be as great because you can get disrupted by this sort of thing. I've also been thinking about like, where do you need stock stuff that's not this? So there was a recent one. Video. Well, video, there's a few, like, but I'm thinking like kind of even more on the edge. So let me find this company that I DM the founder. And I was like, yo, I got to invest in this.

So his name is Albon. And SketchFab is the name of the company. Have you seen Sketchfab? Yes. I've used it a bunch of times. So it's a platform where you can publish 3D models. So 3D, if you go to their website, the first thing you see is like this Nike shoe that's like you can rotate it in all directions. It looks awesome.

It looks realistic. And this is like a rendering. And so people can, 3D makers can upload their stuff like here. I've made a door. I made a table that you can use in your whatever. And you can buy and sell them. So it's a marketplace. And their traffic has been growing.

This is like a very good company. I believe. And so I'm trying to invest in this. But I think that this is like, and they're going to be the category leader of this. And there's the funny tweet was like somebody showed that Google tried to like compete with them and Amazon tried to compete with them. And like if you search for like common things like Tesla or a car on both of those engines, the Google one shows like zero results and the SketchFab one shows like 300. Right. They're just like dominating this market right now. And so I think there's there's some niche things. There's some niche things that are for. different types of stock items that are like not just photos and sounds but I don't know 3D objects is a good one so they've raised uh 8 million 9 million are they making any money I believe they're profitable as of as of now I believe that that was in the I think that was in the tweet I might be wrong that's a great one that's such a great one yeah that's great I'm 100% about to go do that email thing all right let me know how it goes and then uh yeah we'll swap notes okay we're out of here happy Thanksgiving everyone if you're not in America then

Happy Wednesday or Thursday, or whichever day you're looking for this. Thank you. Yeah, if you're not in America, go buy some macot cheese and mashed potatoes and eat them. It's allowed. Yes, it is. All right. See you all.