My First Million - #144 - Shaan's Giving Away A Company, A Mysterious, Anonymous New App and The Most Gimmicky Marketing Thing The Guys Have Done

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

MFM Apex: https://joinapex.com/i/pwr8nk Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - DTC smelling salts? - A mysterious, anonymous new app - Should you hide your real opinions? - The amazing story of Katalin Kariko - Should you focus on legacy or fun? - MFM embraces the banter - Shaan's giving away a company - The world of affiliates links and adtech - Improving ad managers and the origin story of Wish - Jacked techies - What's the most gimmicky thing you've ever done? Thank you to our sponsor this episode, Flatfile! Spend less time on Excel and more time building your business by easily importing data using Flatfile. Check them out at flatfile.io/hustle. 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. Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan)  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right. Well, what do you want to talk about, Sam? Did you see I lined up? You have like a little crush on Mr. Beast, I think, right?

I do not have a little crush on Mr. Beast, but I think he's doing interesting stuff. So his manager's coming And I think we lined up Did we line up one or two more people? Yeah, his manager's coming Next next podcast The podcast that comes out Friday

And then That deep Senadale You know those guys They reached out to me I will hope to set something up with them But no more guests Or we don't have a lot of guest plan Our friend Sully's coming on

In a couple weeks Oh is he all right That's cool Sam you seem out of it Are you okay I'm tired I'm tired. That's all. Do I need to crack open a Topo Chico for you?

No, I'm good. I'm good, man. It snowed in Austin yesterday. I was freezing my ass off and I stayed inside and slept and didn't exercise that much and it still wore me out. So I'll give you, I'll do an idea that's based on the way you're feeling right now. So are you familiar with smelling salts? Yeah, I mean, originally they're meant for like waking someone up after an injury. Yeah, like after a knockout. Yeah, like Barstool Sports uses. them as a joke where they like go and find someone whose eyes are closed and they put them

under their nose to make them throw up. Yeah. So basically, I've been looking into smelling salts. And I originally wasn't going to even talk about this idea on here because I gave it to a friend of mine to execute. So nobody copy this idea. But if you can help out or you've got ideas, feel free to chime in. But I like this idea.

So smelling salts traditionally, I only knew them because, okay, a boxer gets knocked out. You wave the smelling salts in front of their nose. and they wake up. The other option is you, or the other people that use them are like weightlifters. So before a body, like any weightlifting competition, you'll see a lot of weightlifters, you know, crack a smelling salt open and basically just, you know, use it to get kind of amped up before they do their lift. And it's a stimulant. And so same thing with football players. There's a whole bunch of videos of Peyton Manning and a bunch of NFL players before games using smelling salts to sort of get amped up and get ready to go.

So I thought that's interesting. And I'm somebody who I never drink coffee. I don't drink any coffee. I don't drink any soda. So I basically never do like caffeine as stimulants. But I'm really into this idea of being able to quickly snap into like, I don't know, like a peak state of mind. All right.

I treat like I treat my workday like an athlete treats their pregame, you know, routine. Like, you know, I don't just get up and start working like in the same way. an athlete doesn't just kind of roll out of bed and go play a game. Like, they have a warm-up and they have a routine they do beforehand to get themselves ready to go. Do you take smelling salts? I don't. And I don't because smelling salts are not that good for you, right? Smelling salts have ammonia.

It's not terrible for you, but over a long-term basis, it's known to, like, irritate the lining of the nose and the skin, the interior of your nasal passageway. And it's not great for you. But it's effective. And so, and it's more effective than, like, coffee or, you know, like drinking a shitty energy drink. And so I thought, okay, what if I can create a smelling salt that's not bad for you? So a smelling salt that doesn't have the same harsh chemical but still has the same stimulating effect. And idea would be to sell this to two groups of people potentially. One is like the pre-workout crowd.

So pre-workout is a big supplement category. So like no explode was one. But there's a whole bunch of these pre-workout powders you take. Basically just something to get you amped up before you work out. And it's not a protein powder. it's a pre-workout powder. And then there's another group of people that I think would be good for this, which is just people who work at a desk who are kind of like productivity nerds.

And they want to optimize themselves. They want to do a little bit of biohacking slash productivity nerdery to make this happen. Have you looked up this stuff on Amazon? Yes. So I typed in smelling salt. So the leading company looks like it's called Atomic Rhino. And there's another one called something sport, ammonia sport. They all look like that on the cover is like a guy.

exploding with steroids, basically. It just looks like a meathead product, because it is a meathead product today. Oh, my God. This is crazy. I'm going to buy this. The reviews are really good. They're probably all fake, but it's how interesting. Now about this one, asylum smelling salts.

Right. So good, you go crazy. Yeah, exactly. So that's all the existing products in the market are branded like this. And then you have a whole other batch of like people that buy products that are, you know, like essential oils and whatnot. They're kind of like a different brand. And so what I, and so I,

And so I talked to my... Listen to this one. It's called nose torque. The most potent, long-lasting smelling salt available. Number one choice of power lifters worldwide. Exactly. I don't want nose torque, but I'm down to get, like, amped up and in the zone. So here's what I did.

So I called my friend. One of my best friends from college is this guy Tofiq, and he's a ear, nose and throat surgeon now. And he's like, you know, probably one of the smartest guys I know on balance. And I asked him, I said, hey, how bad are supposed to be? salt for you and like are there alternatives? And he basically said two things. He goes, well, you know, a smelling salt is just a really, really strong odor. In fact, it's ammonia. It basically smells like piss and like a really strong concentrated form of piss. It's a stimulant, yes. But it's not

like it makes you, you know, stronger in any way. It doesn't like actually do anything to you. But like, it's sort of like a placebo effect. Because if you do it all the time, so if you keep taking it, if you have a really strong odor before you do something and your body starts to act a certain way, it will anchor that connection. And so, like, if you want to get into that state of mind, that mood faster, the smell can just become an anchor for it. And so he's like, yeah, and he gave me a couple of compounds. He's like, these would be superior alternatives to the ammonia blend that, you know,

the ammonia formula that these guys use, use this. Instead, this won't have the damaging effects, but we'll still have the strong stimulant. And so I think this is a little, a fun little D to C idea. I'm going to do it. I have an operator now who's doing it for me because I don't have a little bit. the time and I can't wait to see where this goes because I think nose torque and you know like nasal blaster are not the way to do this. Yeah, I'm looking this up. This is something. I can't believe this. We'll be interesting to watch. I would never bet my money on it,

but I would love to pay the entry fee just to watch you fuck it up. So I'm going to build this one in public. So everything from sourcing to whatever. So I'm having the guy who's working on it. Who's working on it? blog about it. I'll announce that a little bit, you know, when he, when he writes his first thing, we'll kind of introduce anyone I know. Yeah, someone you know. Someone who, in fact, has even been on the podcast once in a small way.

So we'll leave it as a teaser for now. But, smell like salts. Are they the same ethnicity as you? They're not the same ethnicity as me. No. Hmm. Hmm. So that was one idea.

Let's do another idea. So actually, I'll tell you about something pretty interesting. Since you did really have too many topics, I'm just kind of kind of. a monologue half this podcast and you react to these things that are going on. All right. So I've been, what's the right way to introduce this? Okay, so something cool happened to me last week or two weeks ago where I got a DM from somebody. Can't say who, but it's like a very well-known person in the kind of like tech world,

somebody who I kind of like look up to consider like awesome. I don't know this person. So I was surprised to get a DM from them. And they basically said, hey, join this like kind of private community on Apex. I never heard of Apex, don't know what that is. So join this private community in Ipex. A bunch of us are on there. I think you'll like it.

And I just thought this was spam. I was like, oh, someone's account got hacked. And they're just trying to like, they're just spamming everybody using this person's account to try to grow their thing, I guess. So I wrote back like kind of actually kind of rudely, I was like, okay, like did you get hacked? Like, you know, what is this? And the person was like, no, did not get hacked. I don't know what you mean. I'm inviting you to this.

And I was like, but you don't even. know me. A person's like, well, actually, I've seen you on Twitter, you know, followed you kind of for a little while, you know, just Twitter respect. So I thought I'd invite you to this. And I was like, oh, shit, this might be real. Okay. So I go and click and I was like, what's Apex? So Apex is a new app. So anybody can create their own apex. They can create their own little island, right? So you can create an island. So this person had created one. You can invite whoever you want to it. You invite a real person, but once they join, you can make an anonymous or Saddam where you can pick a random username. So it's like a, I, I'd, I'd like, I'd

is like a digital masquerade party. So you invite all your friends, but everybody comes with a mask on. So nobody knows who's who, but everybody knows we're all kind of like, we've all been curated here. It's not just randos of the internet. What's it called? The app is called Apex. And it's out. It's not a test flight. So it's actually in the in the app store. And I really like this idea. I've actually, myself wanted to create something like this. I wanted to create a version of this that was like public. Like I wanted to invite a bunch of badass people. Let them all be anonymous, but everybody in the thing is badass. And so they feel free to say whatever they want, but it's not just like random anonymous egg accounts on Twitter or YouTube comments.

How would I find this? Private groups, Apex Private Groups. It's like two arrows up. Two arrows up. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. So, you know, like there's a bunch of Apexes, right? So I'm, you know, I'm in one. I just created another and I'm like, okay. So I created one. Oh my gosh, dude, this is so weird. Why would they do this? The, if you go to the APEC's, Apex screen, like the app screen. The App Store? Like the App Store preview. In their demo picture, the username is called Effery Jeppstein.

Yeah. Well, I don't know which one you're looking at. I see one that says Kill Blinton and Beth Jaisos. Those are the ones that I think. Effery Jeepsstein. And then the group is called the Illuminati. And so they're like leaning into, they're leaning into like, this is a place where you can say what you want, which is like timely, right?

Like, you know, the president just got de-platformed and banned off of like every social network. This has been a ongoing issue. Like, I've gotten in, you know, hot waters for this. You've gotten in hot waters for this where you say something on Twitter. It's associated with your real name. You get kind of like a lot of backlash for it. And then the next time you tweet, you sort of think twice before you do it because, hey, I, you know, I don't want to ruin my reputation just if people disagree with me or if I say something kind of without thinking about. it. Or I have employees. I got a company. I don't want, I don't want advertisers to pull out. If I say

something, that's just my personal opinion. So I like this. I think this is the way the world is going, which is a retreat away from social media to private media. I think people are leaving the town square and they're going to their favorite pub and they're going to close the door and they're going to basically, people are going to hang out in private groups more and more and more. It's already happening. And this is, I think, an app that is well designed to. Who made it? do well there. There's just two guys behind it that I've seen on Twitter. I'm a designer and a developer and it's very cool. So I created a new little one. I'm going to invite some people to it, let the masquerade go. And it's cool because I can invite people. And then to like to get in,

you have to like authorize your Twitter or your, I can set it where I can say they have to like prove they are who they say they are at the door. And then they create their account and their username and whatever else after that. And then you can. But who can verify that they are somebody? The creator of the group, of the private group, the host of the party, basically. So can I tell you my prediction on this? Yeah. It's going to get quite popular. Okay.

If it raises seed funding early on, it's ruined. Because what? If it stays independent for a while and gets a huge user base and then raises money, then there's a shot. Okay, got it. So it's not the raising that's going to, it's not the raising that kills them. You're saying it's a signal. Like, if they get a bunch of money before they get hot, I think I'm going to bet that they die. Is that it?

It's kind of like a what's ass. type of deal where like or something that like it's already successful and it's already big we're just going to make it bigger and more successful if you do like a a thing where they raise money early on and they get too much of the wrong hype i think it's going to die okay i can see that i can see like uh like you know there's three apps that i'm referring of that are the same thing like the secret thing so like okay here's what we'll do i will create one for listeners of this podcast we'll just try it out we'll see what happens so the way to get it is the app is called a pepac If you search the app or apex, private groups.

And the symbol is like two little arrows going up. And I created a group just now. I'm calling it platform nine and three quarters, just like Harry Potter. Oh, don't do that. I just called My First Million. How do you do my... I don't even know how to type in Three Quarters. It's $3.75.

I did .75. Okay, I can rename it. So I'll rename it to my first million. I'll put the link in the description of this podcast episode. That's the private link to join. and it's a masquerade party. Now, I don't know if that group particularly is going to be that interesting. I think this is interesting when you kind of like curate the set of people, but we'll try it.

And we'll see what you can see who they are. I can see when they join who they are. I don't think once they join, I don't think I know what they set their name to and who's who. I don't think that would be. You just know that this person is in the room and they're one of the five here. I just know at the door I can say yes or no to the person. And once they're in, I don't know who's saying what. who's who. I hope that's the way it works. If I can just always see everybody, that's kind of lame.

Let me see. Yeah, I don't think I could, yeah, I cannot see. Once you join, I don't know, I don't know. I can't tie your real identity to your, uh, to your username. I'm excited to try this. I don't have my phone on me, but I'll use it. And by the way, here's the other interesting thing. The group I'm in, you know, you have like what you see on Facebook and Twitter every day, like, okay, I go check social media. Everybody says X. Everybody's kind of an agreement. This is good. This is bad. These guys are evil. These guys are heroes. And then I'd go into the apex and it's like the, not the opposite opinions, but you hear people say things there that they're, that you just don't hear people saying in public social media. And that's why it's quite addictive to keep checking it

because it is interesting. There's this, there's this. And they're not idiots because like they were invited it. They were curated in. It's not just like Randos, you know. There's this firm who you and I know well. It started as a two person VC's. company. They were associated with me and they say they had this very public presence. And when they talk about stuff, I'm like, oh, okay, you feel that way. In private, one time I've brought a few things up and I'm like, well, you know, you believe this. And they've just been like, oh, no, that's, I mean, no. That's way too woke. We don't believe. Like, that's, no, just like, we want to get, we're just here to get rich. And like, they just, well, how do you feel about that? My opinion is that is the

week of the week and I want nothing to do with you. For people that are kind of two-faced, do you mean? Yeah, or, but another perspective on this is fair, which is like, yeah, but they're playing. So, like, you and I have a couple friends that maybe have this persona of being this nice person and in real life, they're just cut, throat ruthless and they'll destroy you. Maybe you could, one justification is, yeah, they're playing the game. I mean, this is just how it's played and they're just trying to get yours. You can't be mad at them.

But then the other side is like, no, you're a punk. You don't have any integrity. Just like sit caught like it like it is and be used. 24-7. Where do you come out on that of like people in this app not talking like that? I think two things. One is we're all guilty of it. So we are all guilty of, you know, signaling one thing to the public and, you know, there being a gap between like reality and what we signal. So like the innocent version of this is, you know, you go post on Instagram, pictures of yourself, you know, at a brunch cafe with avocado toast and a mimosa.

And you're saying how great life is, and then, you know, you go home and you're lonely and miserable, right? Like, we don't post that part of our lives. And so there's a silent, like, lie that happens there, which is, you know, you lie through omission, right? You only say the good things that make you look good, and you don't share any of the things that don't make you look good. And so there is sort of a false presentation of yourself. Then that's level one. Level two is what you talked about, where it's like, Or sorry, level two is you think something, but you decide not to say it because you don't know how other people are going to feel about it, right? You let their opinions of you matter. You care what other people think.

And so you censor yourself. You're afraid. That's level two. Yeah. Fear and self-censorship, you know, take it out. And then there's level three, which is what you talked about, which is just a straight up lie where you say one thing and you actually mean another or believe another. And yeah, if you're level three, I also consider you kind of like a punk. And, you know, you lose some respect points there.

And I, you know, I try not to do that ever myself, but maybe I've done it at some point in my life. I'm definitely guilty of levels one and two where like, you know, only post the good shit, leave out the bad shit and also think something, but don't know how other people are going to react to it. Might as well just like not say it. Don't cause a fuss. Well, that's different. That's a little different. Yeah.

Can we talk about this guy who you. you have listed the best segments that I get from you or the Billy of the Day. Yeah, which one do you want me to do? There's only one up there. The guy with such with a K, right? It's not a guy. That's a woman. So the woman's name is Catalan Carrico.

I have this person as Billy of the Week. In reality, not a billionaire, but just a fucking baller. And this story is incredible. So do you know who this person is? Did you know them before this? I didn't know them before this either. So Catalan Carrico, and I hope I'm saying the name, right. I've never heard it said. I've just read it. By the way, in one of the most recent reviews,

someone said that even though I butcher everyone's name, they're happy that I try really hard. A for ever. Because I do. All right. So this person is kind of the key person for why we have the COVID vaccine. So a little bit of science. So normal vaccine is you get injected with like a dead or weakened version of the virus, right? So you send in a version of the virus with its, you know, legs tied together and hands cuffed, it's dead, it's weak, and your body creates an immune response to the virus, right? Those take a long time to develop, and you can't always develop them for all different types of viruses. The reason we were able to get this vaccine done faster was,

obviously, A, the whole world decided this is a big problem, but B, they used a different technique, a technique called MRI vaccines. If you just take out all the science jargon, in simple terms, what it is is, MRI is a little messenger. The messenger has a little honest, envelope. The envelope is like, here's the genetic code of the protein that's on top of the virus, right? Like a virus is just like a little cell that has a protein on top. It's kind of like that's its face or its hat. If you want to recognize the virus, look at the protein. That'll tell you which one's the virus. So the messenger RNA goes in with the envelope. The envelope says, this is what the hat looks like. It goes into your cell. The cell opens up the envelope and says,

oh, this is what the protein looks like. Cool, let's make some of this protein. And your ribosomes make the protein, and the protein goes in your bloodstream. So you get the protein of the virus so your body can start to recognize it and fight it, but it's just the protein. It's not the actual virus, so you can't get sick from it. So that's the breakthrough in the way this vaccine works. And so this woman has been working on this technology for like, I don't know, 30 years or something like that. She's like, you know, came from, I don't know, somewhere in Eastern Europe, Germany, Ukraine, something like that. And she was working on this. And then everybody initially was really excited about MRI vaccines. It was like, like most things, it's like there's the

initial hype, like with VR or crypto or whatever. And then there's like the trough of sorrow where people give up on it. They're like, ah, this will never happen. And so in the 90s, everybody in the scientific community gave up on MRI vaccines. This woman basically like threw away her career because she believed in it. She was like, all right, I know there's no funding for this. Nobody will hire me to work on MRI vaccines. There's just no money in this space, but I believe. And so she just kept working on it and kept persisting all the way through the 90s, a decade plus. And eventually, she published a paper that kind of like showed that like what the power of MRNA can be for various use cases. And that paper was read by three different groups of people.

One was this guy at Stanford and he, he was like a kind of a postgraduate PhD person at Stanford. He reads this paper that she put out and goes, holy shit, this is going to be big and starts working on MRNA. He ends up inventing a company called Moderna. Now, Moderna is one of the vaccine creators, one of the people who, one of the companies that has the vaccine for COVID and is now looking. Wow, Moderna's only 10 years old. Exactly. So this guy leaves Stanford. He partners up with two scientists.

There's a guy, this badass guy. This guy is actually like, you know, somebody who should be Billy of the week. He is at like MIT or somewhere. And this guy's got like 250 kind of patents that he sold to pharmaceutical companies. So he's like the man when it comes to commercializing this stuff. And so these three guys co-found Moderna. and Moderna is now like a, I don't know how many, $10 billion-ish company off of this woman's work. They like, you know, they kind of license her work.

So another company gets started called Bio-Intech. They also read this paper. So imagine how cool this is. It's like Satoshi with the Bitcoin white paper. She just publishes this scientific paper. And then people all around the world are reading this. And the light bulb is going off simultaneously with three different companies at once to say, oh my God, this is going to change everything.

And so Biointech gets formed. They basically bring her on as like, they license. licensed her tech, so she got paid as a licensee of the technology, and then now she's like the vice president or whatever of their science division. So she's kind of like a co-founder of one of the companies. That's also doing very well. She looks exactly like I would expect her to look. She looks like a hardened person. A hardened Hungarian biochemist. This is correct. She looks like she... And her daughter is like an Olympian, like a gold medalist. Like she, you know, like this whole family is probably just badass. Yes. This woman looks like

she will solve like... She looks like the female version of James Bond. Yeah, like she's a badass. If you just read, like, kind of what she went through as an immigrant, working on this thing nobody believed in, and now she's going to win the Nobel Prize for this, like 20 years later the payoff happened. That, to me, is like so admirable to believe in your thing when everybody all stops believing, and you just say, fuck it, and you just keep going for two decades. That's, like, three decades.

That is badass. So she's 66 years old. So she's part of one of the companies. And then there's another company doing this. And now Pfizer and others are using this same thing. technique to cure COVID, but this is not just going to cure COVID. So like this idea of mRNA vaccines is actually the most promising path we have to curing cancer also. Now, I'm not saying it's going to because like there's a lot of false hope when it comes to these things.

But, you know, the way we try to cure cancer today is we're like, oh, you have cancer cells in your body. Let's just nuke your whole body with radiation. Let's kill the good cells, the bad cells. You'll lose your hair. You'll throw up. Like, let's just kill you. And like right when on the brink of death will stop giving you radiation and like hopefully we've killed the cancer cells in that time. And what this instead will do is it's going to allow for what's called like a designer vaccine for cancer, which is people are going to figure out what cancer you have. Oh, here's the cells that you have that are cancerous. What proteins do they have? And then let's create the vaccine just like we did for COVID with MRNA to get your body to produce those proteins

and start to build immunodefances for it. So it's like immunotherapy. When you hear these stories, do you think that, well, I'm working on this clothing company or I'm looking on this video game platform. And then you read this and you just, do you say yourself, I'm worthless? No, I say to myself, I'm going to tell everybody how awesome this person is so that, you know, the five people that listen to this that are capable of doing this are going to be inspired by this person. They're going to go do something like this themselves. Okay, that's such an easy out.

I'm the messenger, baby. Okay, that's a good answer. Yeah, correct. fine. You could say, yep. Honesty, my true answer is something like that. Like, when I took a step back after we sold and I was like, all right, what do I do with the next 10, 20 years of my life? Like, what do I want to work on?

I was lucky that the thing I like to do, which is like learn stuff and teach stuff through things like this podcast or whatever, I think genuinely that is the highest leverage thing any one person can do. Well, I think that's silly to compare, but it's undeniably interesting that if you can have a mad, a large audience and tell them of cool people who deserve to be well known. You're right. That's noble. I just tell them of cool people. I'm just saying in general, teaching, I believe, is like a multiply. It's a force multiplier. I agree with you. I go try to do something myself, right? I'm

one operator. I can be the greatest operator in the world. I'm Elon Musk or somebody like that. That's like the pinnacle of that. I agree with you. On the other hand, you could be a teacher. A teacher basically is going to now have an number of students. Right. So I could reach a million students. I could unlock them as operators to be better. And now that's leveraged what I have in my head. Okay, but think about it differently. We talk on here about boring businesses all the time. We talk about it.

The reason we talk about it is like, well, we haven't heard about it before. But also, they make a lot of money and it's easy and it's not a lot of work. Well, it's a lot of work, but it's simpler and it's a surefire way. At the end of the day, and this isn't an insult. At the end of the day, that's a very hedonistic way of viewing life. That's very much like, I'm going to, I don't care what I'm doing because I'm providing for me and my family, which, you know, supplying for giving your family good life, that's not quite hedonistic, but it's still like if you include your family and it's quite selfish. And again, nothing wrong

with that, but that's what it is. But we go, like, whenever I go and like get sick and meet a nurse practitioner who helps me or hear about this woman, I'm like, there is, you know how people say like, you know, just because you're rich doesn't mean you're like more valuable than someone else. I agree with that. But then I hear this woman, she could be poor. I have no idea. I'm like, oh, that one was more valuable than me and more valuable than a lot of others. Yes. The people who are like the Catalan Carricos and the Elon Musk's and the, forgot the guy who started microfinance or whatever microlending,

the people who go and someone who is going to go and fight climate change, let's be honest, they don't listen to this podcast for the most part. And if they do, the things they're hearing here are not really going to help them do that thing. Right. Like the great scientists, scientists entrepreneurs, essentially, they are motivated and inspired by different things altogether. There's a different teacher for them, right? There's a different person out there who gives them information and inspiration,

and it's not me, for the most part. If I do what I do, though, there's a different argument, right? There's the hero argument, which says, the world needs Elon Musk and Catalan Carricos to, like, solve the big problems and, like, make us all better. That's what I'll call the top-down hero solution. Superman flies in, saves the day. And then there's the bottoms up solution, which is like, well, if every single person got a little bit smarter, a little bit happier, a little bit healthier, a little bit more kind and a little bit more motivated and inspired every day rather than feeling that they're going through the motions, if you like solve it at the individual level for the masses, you make the world better in a different way, right? And so that's a bottom's up approach to doing the same, to sort of having a same level of impact. So if I was going to like be a little dreamy about what I'm doing or what not

feel like a piece of shit, I should say. It's like, well, if I can help a whole bunch of people be a little bit healthy, a little bit happier and a little bit like more free financially so that they can like spend their time doing what they want and not in some like kind of tedious, monotonous job every day, that's a different type of unlocked versus these people who are going to have these big breakthroughs and like solve big problems for humanity. People talk about legacy fighters a lot, you know, athletes, particularly at UFC guys. They're like, it's about legacy.

And then business people also say that as well. They say, like, all right, I have money. Now it's all about legacy. And I'm like, okay, yeah, your legacy is making your name known part of it. Your legacy is definitely leaving the world a better place. I think that's cool. But then I always try to look at the opposite of everything. And the opposite of that is like just live a quiet existence.

And this is like what I said about being hedonistic and selfish. Live a quiet existence. Have a ton of fun and take care of your family and just seek pleasure. And part of me is like, legacy's cool, but why the hell do I care? I'm dead. Screw it. I'm having fun now. Like when I think of like Steve Jobs, he was like, yeah, but how are you going to change

anything when you're like not working 80 hours a week? And I'm like, I'm not. Right. Yeah. I don't want to. Yeah. Those things bother me because I'm like, we value these Elon Musk of the world and I acknowledge they need to exist.

But then most of the time, I don't want to do that. Right. Fuck that guy. Yeah. Well, there's a question of like, do I need to change the world, right? How do I want to? live. That's fair. Like, okay, so I was listening to something interesting. I'll tell you about this conversation. So I don't know how randomly on YouTube, I got onto this video that was Scott Adams,

who's the creator of Dilbert and Naval Ravikant, who's like kind of the Silicon Valley, you know, the guy who created Angel List and a bunch of other cool things. They're at his house. They're at Scott Dilbert's house and they're just talking. They're doing a periscope and they just recorded the thing. And they agree about a bunch of things. And then one question came up, they go, what do we disagree on? Nival goes, you know, I think we disagree on, like, the importance of having kids. And Scott's like, what do you mean? I got kids.

He's like, well, yeah, but like you adopted or like, you know, biological kids. And he's like, and Scott's like, well, like, and then they kind of laugh. And it's like, no, look, look, look, I'm not saying adoption is bad. I'm not saying foster care is bad. I'm just saying, like, for me, it was really important to like biologically, I have my own biological kids and like reproduce, basically. Like, at his core, he's a scientist and he's basically like at an evolutionary, from an evolutionary point of view, you know, we are reproducing machines.

All that we're doing, those of us who made it this far, is because in our genes, there is a desire to replicate to reproduce, and that's how we stayed on. And other people who didn't care about reproducing didn't reproduce, and their genes are now dead. And so Scott goes, well, I would say I'm reproducing, but just in a more efficient way. He goes, I put out ideas into the world through my blog, through this, you know, live streams, through my comics with Dilbert. If my ideas go live on, they'll live on far longer than any child of mine will. Like an idea can live forever. An idea I can get into like thousands of people where I'm only getting able to have a couple of kids. So like for me, my replication is what I'll call memetic and not genetic.

And I thought that was interesting. I've always found this interesting. And I think I've brought this up before. But like part of your legacy, it doesn't have to be what you did. It can be like an idea or philosophy you put in the world that lives on far beyond your kind of like flesh and bones, you know, your little meat sack that you live in. And so, like, do you think about that? Like, forget about legacy. Like, oh, I'm the guy who built the railroads. But, like, do you care about your, about, like, your ideas spreading? I mean, to some extent, you do. Otherwise, why do this podcast? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I do.

But I ask myself why. And is that really important? Like, okay, so there's, like the fun factor of, like, yeah, it's awesome. You're powerful. You're rich. You do whatever you want. That's cool. What's the opposite look like where you're not that. Is it a significant difference in happiness and fulfillment? Right. Maybe not. I don't know. No, but I do question this. All right. So of those three paths that we just talked about, and maybe there's more. Path one, the point of your life, you're optimizing for enjoyment of your life.

Number two is you're optimizing for legacy or some kind of impact on the world. And then three is you're trying to have your kind of ideas spread and your ideas are your legacy, not your accomplishments. Which one resonates the most to you or none of them? As of now, I think I'm a three, either a three or a one. And then something... I thought for sure you'd say one. I think I'm more of a one of enjoyment. But in the future, I think I'll be a number two, an impact.

But as of today right now, I have a feeling. I don't know this yet. I have a feeling when I have children, it changes a little. Does it? Not really. I guess it changes, but like maybe for different people in different ways. When I'm with my daughter, like, I guess I'm in one of two modes. Either I'm like, oh, my God, I just want to go do something else.

This is so boring. I've read this book 45 times in a row. Like bubbles, bubbles, everywhere. bubbles, bubbles in my hair. Like, I'm just tired of this. I want to go do something more fun. Do you know how fun the internet is? I'm tired of, like, this babysitting that I'm doing right now. And then other times, I'm with her and I'm just like, dude, who cares about like success? Like, all I need to do is just hang out with her. She's awesome. And like, you know, I don't really need to go be like super ambitious. Like, what a waste of energy to go sit in my room on my computer. And I'm literally like in

one of those two camps at all times. I think this is normal, but maybe not. I think that for the people who are extremely successful, they don't waver. Right. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I have another idea for you because I think we got philosophical for a bit. So which idea I don't want to do. This kind of seem anticlimatic when we're talking about like, what's the purpose of your life?

And I'm like, oh, here's an idea. That's okay. By the way, Sean, people have been telling me they like listening to us because it's not always strictly business. They listen to us on a regular basis because they need someone was comparing us to all in, in that podcast, and then morning bruise thing. I don't know what it's called. apparently they both talk about politics a lot and someone was like oh I hate that I just want to like turn my like they say they want to turn their brain off but at the same time they turn it on with us but we don't ever talk about well it's an escape right like we yes it's a very good escape yeah and and like I always wanted to rename the podcast what was it like idea porn or something like that because porn itself is also kind of an escape it's just kind of a pleasure thing it's not like a long term commitment like I think a lot of people listen to these ideas not to go do them all but just because it's like interesting and entertaining and then they can

Embrace the... Be done with the podcast and be done with it. Embrace the banter. Embrace the escape. Are you going to talk about micro-biz? Yeah. All right. Did you see what I did with this?

This is funny. No. I like the sound of that, though. All right. So you actually missed this opportunity. I pounced before because you didn't reply. Wait, how did I not reply? Okay.

So this guy, Andrew, runs this company called microacquire.com. Yeah, he's in the trends group. Yeah. And so he emailed you and me. And he emailed us both and was just like, hey, kind of a fun idea. there's a bunch of small micro businesses, like a $5,000, a little business that's, you know, could buy for $5,000. What if we just gave it away to somebody like in the community? And then I guess like, you didn't reply or whatever.

And so he DM me, he was like, you know, what do you think? You want to do this? And I was like, yeah. And so then like literally I didn't even like really reply to him. I just tweeted it out. I was like, you know, people don't really know this. But like buying businesses is like most awesome ways to go as an entrepreneur. Like instead of building from scratch, you could buy.

and like, you know, if you want to just like learn about business, don't go to business school. Like, let me save you the time and money. I'll just give you one of these micro businesses and go like learn by doing. I'll just give you this $5,000 business. And I said, you know, Andrew, what do you say? You in on this? You know, you want to do this? And he was like, so I kind of made it public like what he was doing in the DM.

And he's like, hell yeah. Like I'm in. And I'll provide some coaching and we'll waive the fees of the transaction or whatever. And then other people started chiming in like, dude, this is awesome. I'll chip in 5K too for free. And so we ended up with $57,000 in the bank of people who are willing to just let us basically, now we have a $5,000 bankroll to go buy a business. Now it's a $57,000 bankroll to go buy a business because people were just like, yeah,

just pick a cool operator, let them like take one of these businesses and run with it and let them like build it in public and like talk about it as they go. Like this is a cool experiment for science. So who, who, what business are you guys going to get? So then I said, all right. So then a bunch of people replied as like, pick me as the operator. because like, hey, who doesn't want to just get a business gifted to them? We found a couple people, and I think we're just going to do like a 30-minute phone call

with the final two or three people and just pick one from there. Give it to Henry Johnson. Henry Johnson? Okay, I don't know if you replied to it, but I'll check. I know who you're talking about. He's very active in our community. And so then I went through all the businesses. I was like, okay, which one is good to buy?

And, you know, most of them, I would say like bad, like to the point where I was like, okay, if I gave someone this business, I'm giving them kind of a shitty job to go to. So, like, I want to avoid that. You know, this experiment will be fun if the business has enough potential where, like, this can actually, like, grow into something. So picking a good operator and a good business are important here. So anyways, I'm curious of what's going to happen. We're going to finalize the whole thing this week.

And I think what we're doing is going to finalize, we finalize the money. We finalize who the operator is this week. And then we're going to take a 60-day window and we're going to say, all right, in the next 60 days, it's like a little tiny micro-speck. It's like, you have 60 days to find a company to acquire with this blank check. And we're going to publish the whole thing on my newsletter about like, okay, here's what they're doing, here's how it's going, so on and so forth. So I'm excited.

How do you have time to do all that? Well, I'm not doing it. I'm just picking it. I just tweeted it out and I picked the operator. Yeah, but even like organizing that stuff is. Well, Andrew from Micro Require is like more of the guy who's going to like make it happen because for them, this is like the best fucking advertising. Like he was showing me the stats from the, just from the tweet alone.

I think he got like, you know, four or five thousand followers on Twitter, which like, I don't know, probably doubled his Twitter following. And then he showed me the Google. analytics of the site. And there was like, you know, a thousand plus concurrent users on the site at that very second. And so, you know, I'm sure he got, he already kind of like made his money back just in terms of people buying the membership or finding out about it. But it's, you know, credit to him of like, it was his idea to do something cool like this, like give away a business. That's a way better marketing push than just saying, hey, um, did you know? Like, I have my site

exists. Come, come visit it, right? Like, I think he deserves the additional traffic he's going to get out of it. But he's got to do the work now to like make it all go. I'm not going to do the work. Yeah, I'm looking at all up now. This is a, it's a great site. He's been doing it for a minute. And now it's, it was okay at first. Now it's really getting cool. I really like the concept of the site. I would say, like just in full transparency, most of the deals on there, I think, are very bad deals. But, you know, whatever. That's any marketplace has a bunch of junk and has some really good stuff. That's where all the value is. So don't be like, oh, Sean said microcar is great. I'm going to go buy some business on here. Like, I would not advise that as just like a, like, do your homework.

Okay, your shoulders. Are they tired? I'm carrying the weight this whole time. No, dude, I just get stronger as the hour goes on. Okay. Let's do one more. Last one, maybe. Eureka surveys. I want to save that one. The guys, so we talked about user testing, and these guys are doing something dope in that vein. And he DM me and he shared the numbers, but I think they wanted to like, like, they're just like, they want to push out of private beta into public data. So he's like, wait one week to talk about it. I was like, all right, fine, no problem. Well, you want to do one more? Yeah, let's do one more.

Okay, here's like, okay, I'll give you two really dumb, simple ideas. Maybe something like this exists, but I were going into these pain points and maybe somebody could build a simple tool that solves these. So the first one is Amazon affiliate links. So you, Sam, on your blog, you used to sell Amazon affiliate, right? I used to have his affiliate links. Yeah, I would make about four or five grand a month. And to do that, you have to become like official affiliate or something like that, correct?

Yeah, and I've been banned many times for doing stuff that I didn't think was banable. There's kind of a process you have to go through to do that. Because, like, for example, a bunch of people were asking me about, like, you know, my setup of, like, a podcast and stuff like that. I was like, okay, cool. Why don't I just publish this once? You have a blog. But, like, for example, I didn't know that you, so there's rules. You cannot.

There's like many rules. But one of the rules is you cannot email people a link. Yeah, which is crazy. That's what I was going to do it in a newsletter. And I was like, how do you do this? And they banned me. It's a big pain in the butt. Or the other day, it used to be like four and a half percent commission.

They just said, all right, for most of all these. categories, now it's 2%. Like, they just change it whenever. Okay, so this idea might not actually be viable. It might not work with the term of service. But basically, like a one-off, like, you know, like link shorteners, like bitly and shit like that. Like, why not just like a one-off way to generate an affiliate link for Amazon products? Because I don't want to go become a merchant and a long-term affiliate and become a

blogger, like none of that stuff. But like, why can't I just like affiliateize my link once? Well, there's this company called Skim Links. Have you heard of Skin Links? No. Is that what that is? It's an eke, yeah, a little bit. They, they're about 12 years old.

They, in 2017, they did a hundred, they did a billion dollars in gross, Marr, or what's it called? GMV, yeah. GMV. So let's say they took a 30 or 40% cut. That's $300 million, which I don't know if it's that high. Probably way less, is my guess.

What? Even 2% of a billion is not, not, nothing. Yeah, it's actually probably 30, 40 million they do. But that's what they do. And they've been around for a while, 12 years. It's a pretty reputable company, pretty big. They've raised tens of millions, maybe close to 100 million in revenue. And it is kind of similar, and it's quite effective.

You never heard of Skim Links? I've heard of it once before, but I didn't know if it works. Does it work for Amazon products or no? I don't know exactly how it works, but I know that they cold email me on a regular basis to sign up. But I guess you're saying something valid. Yeah. So basically, like, I just think there should be like a disposable, simple way to affiliateize my link to whatever product it is.

And somebody should make like a bitly that just does that easily. Maybe Skim Links is kind of already this. Yeah, and it's actually owned by another company. Have you ever studied like AdTech? I mean, not studied it, no, but. Man, these ad tech companies like, okay, so the company that owns Skim Links is called Contexity. The company that owns Contextity is called Symphony Tech Group, founded in 2012.

It's total portfolio includes $2.5 billion in revenue and $50. thousand employees. There's ad tech companies that you, unless you're in the world of ad tech, have no idea exists that are just massive, massive, massive, massive. It's amazing. Oh, wait, sorry, Symphony Tech Group is PE. I was wrong. But you get the idea. Like, some of these ad tech games or ad tech businesses are freaking nuts. Right. And I don't really understand how most of ad tech truly works because it's like such a complicated machine of like cookie swaps and data transfer. It's just all kinds of like, oh, the pixel is hashed, and then the hashed user is passed to here. It's like, what's going on?

Like, how do these businesses work? And who the hell thinks of this stuff? And, you know, obviously, you know, there's a lot of money to be made. So, so good on them. Okay, here's another kind of simple idea. I think I've kind of said this before, but Facebook advertising is like one of the, like, you know, big industry. You know, there's probably like 9 to 10 million advertisers on Facebook. Let's say even half of them are active or, you know, whatever.

Let's say 4 million active advertisers on Facebook. make up some round numbers. And the ad manager is just like such a pain in the ass to work with. It's a horrible thing. And one of the biggest problems with it is just visualized, just going and checking, how are my ads doing? And, you know, they present it in this like very, like, sterile table kind of way. And I think that somebody, I think that there should be this like somebody who just says,

all right, how do I build a layer on top of Facebook ads that is useful to some of the 4 to 10 million advertisers of Facebook. Like, what should they look at every morning? How do I make this presentation more visual, right? Like, how do I take all your ad creatives and then, like, layer on the data on top? Or how do I show you, you and your competitor's ads? And how, like, just layer on top of the Facebook ad manager is. Have you seen ad espresso?

Yes. So I've used aspresso before. And I found it, like, okay to use. It, like, kind of got outdated, right? It was like kitty shit. The problem I found that if you get really complex, if you learn how to operate ad manager, it's quite complex and you need it to be complex.

Right. I'm not saying replace ad manager. I'm saying build things using that as the data source. There is certainly going to be some value ad thing you can do that just uses that as the data source and people are going to be willing to pay you monthly to get extra value or alternative view or different, different level of insights. You want to hear a crazy story about this? So there was this company called

contextual or context logic. You know what that is? You ever heard of that? No. Chris Redlitz, one of my seed investors and a good friend and a mentor of mine, he was telling me about this company started 10 years ago in his office. He had a small fawn and he had a few extra offices and he let this young guy named Pete who formerly worked at Google and his partner, Dan, I think his name was, both worked at Google, both build up AdWords. And they started tinkering around and they built this thing called contextual logic, I think it was called. And it was a new ad network that was doing exactly what you've described, but for Facebook. And they started using it.

And they're like, well, we need to test it. Let's sell some stuff on it. And they started selling some stuff on it. And they just went to Alibaba and just sold crap. And they're like, wait a minute, we can't give this away. And so they pivoted and they started selling other people's stuff and then let merchants get on there. And they used their advertising prowess to do it. And they eventually renamed that company, Wish.

that is how wish.com started. It was started because they were creating exactly what you're describing, and it was so good, they say, no, this is our competitive advantage. And so now they're public, this is 10 years later, I think. They're publicly traded with a $12 billion market cap. So if you look up Wish,

you'll see that they raise money under context. It's either context or contextual logic. And the founder is Jack. Have you seen this guy? Mm-mm. Okay, I'm going to send you, uh, what Pete, the founder?

Yeah. Yeah, I have. I've chatted with him via email once or twice. He's an oddball. He's very quirky. You can see in his Instagram picture here. I love tech founders that are jacked, by the way. I find it hilarious.

I remember one time there was the Facebook F8, like the annual conference Facebook does. Facebook is run by some of the smartest people in the world, but they're not like the most, you know, like athletic or well-rounded or great public speakers. The door. Right? Yeah, there's a lot of dorks there. And for some reason, I was sitting there and I was watching this. And I was like, I noticed every single exec that got up there was jacked this year. I was like, what, what kind of, who is the personal trader?

What is the program that they all got on? You know, who's putting creatine in the milkshakes at, you know, at Menlo Park? What is going on? Because there was one year that literally everybody was jacked. I have nothing more to say in the story, but it was. They probably have like a doctor who lives with them. Yeah, don't they have like in San Francisco, don't they just like own one of the buildings? where they own all like all the all the execs have like apartments in the same building in s ff so that

when they do need to come to san francisco they kind of have like an apartment there because their office is not in no uh facebook the office is not in san francisco so like sherry and a bunch of the other execs i think have like a bunch of penthouse condos in this one tower so the tower is like 25% occupied by facebook executives who are not there except for like two days a month when they go to san francisco and then they use this as there and it has like a botox clinic and like a t rt clinic and like an H-G-H clinic. Did you ever watch this show on Netflix called Selling Sunset? I think it's called?

Oh, yeah. Those guys were the worst. Did you watch the show? Did you see the Botox thing that they did? Yes, the worst. I can't stand it. I thought that was so funny. That is everything I'm against.

People who haven't seen it. They're real estate agents. They try to sell these luxury properties. And they're always trying to drive foot traffic to their open houses. And their open house, their tactic, their marketing tactic. You know, most people, it's like, oh, it's an open house. okay we'll have wine maybe we'll put some cold cut sandwiches out

some cheese cheese board and this one girl's like fuck that I'm gonna make I'm gonna get all the real estate agents to come to this I'm gonna do Botox and burgers so she had a doctor that are giving Botox shots to the agents for free who wanted to get Botox at the at the showing

and I was like wow what a different world than I live in that this is even a thing I don't think I know a single person who has Botox maybe maybe I didn't I'm just oblivious to it but like I've never heard anyone in my social circle ever speak about getting plastic surgery or Botox. They don't talk about it.

I don't think they're going to talk about it. Do you know anyone that gets Botox? My sister had Bell's palsy where that paralyzes your face and so she had to get it. I almost had to get it. Not for that. I'm saying for like people who do it just for this like aesthetic, you know, just for the look. I don't know. They don't tell me about it.

No, I don't know anyone. What's the like most gimmicky marketing thing you've done that's like, you know, your equivalent of the burgers and Botom? marketing stunt. Well, when I ran Southern Sam's weaners as big as a baby's arm. If you put your baby's arm in a hot dog bun and put mustard on it and took a picture,

you got a free wiener. I love that one. I have one that's like that. When we were doing the sushi restaurant thing, it was a delivery only, so there was no storefront. It was a cloud kitchen. So how do you get people to hear about your restaurant

if there's no storefront? So I was like, all right, we got to make a splash. So we were based in downtown Denver, I was like, okay, and I was just tired. I used to go into a skyscraper building. I would just kind of sneak past the concierge guy. I would go in the elevator and hit one. I'd get out and I'd start talking to the front desk lady of every floor of like an 80

floor building or whatever. And I got tired of that. So I was like, okay, what's a better technique than me going door to door selling sushi essentially? And I was like, of course, I'm a huge idiot. Like, we didn't even try Facebook ads. This is like, Facebook was out. This is 2010, 2011.

Like we could have done Facebook ads. We just didn't even know. And so what I did was there was a nearby beauty school, you know, like where you learn to like cut hair and like do stuff like that, I guess. I forgot what they're called cosmetology schools. And I went in and I said, hey, do any of your girls like sushi? And they're like, oh my God, we love sushi. You know, it's like bringing candy to a four-year-old's birthday party. And I was like, I will give you guys free sushi for life if you put these shirts on of ours and you go downtown and you basically like, you know, the free hugs campaign.

do the free hugs campaign and then tell like just basically like while you're wearing our stuff. Did it work? And it worked. It was amazing. Like businessman would come out of the thing and they'd be like free hugs. And like they would give these guys a hug. The guy would like, you know, start blushing and be like, did I just cheat on my wife? And then he's like, no, it was just a hug.

What's the deal? And it's like, oh, we're doing this because we're part of this new sushi restaurant that's in town. You guys should totally order from it. The further away me and my ugly face got from that campaign, the better it worked. Like these girls were amazing. And we had like way more sales from that. That's a pretty good one. Thank God it work, though.

All right, we're at the hour. So, Abrae, how did we do? How did I do? Because I think I did that episode. I know, I'm sorry. Just be honest with me, Obringer. How did I do? Sam did as much as I did this episode.

Fuck, for real? I feel horrible. I'm just not, I just, I just, I just feel like I'm a little drunk, so tired. Sean, you were an A. But overall, the episode is like a B-ish. Fuck, that means I. That was a C, though. You coasted to a sea.

A C is a passing grade, man. You got through. All right. I'll bring the heat next time then. All right. Sounds good. I got to run. All right.

See you.