My First Million - #62 - Lambda School for Secretaries, Billionaire of The Week, Deepfakes & More

Episode Date: April 4, 2020

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) talk trends, startups and your next million dollar idea. Today's topics: Deepfakes, good or evil? (5:00), The credentials business (15:13), Are sam and shaan unethical? (29:41), Studying evil leaders (34:47), IDEA: Lambda school for EA's (38:27) and Shaan's Billionaire of the Week: Xavier Niel (44:11).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Okay, we got friend of the show. Jordan Harbinger is here. Jordan, how are you doing, man? Thanks for having me on, man. I'm just chilling, self-isolating, you know, the euse. We are all isolating, but I appreciate you dropping in on the show, just parachuting in, just for a couple minutes. It's always fun to have you. You know, this is a crazy time.

2020's been a crazy year. We got coronavirus, and we also had, you know, the sad, tragic passing of Kobe Bryant, who was a guest on your show. How did that happen? How do you get Kobe? Yeah, you know what was funny is I was pitching. a publicity team for a different guest that I can't even remember now because he was about 1% as famous as Kobe Bryant. And they booked it and it was like some comedian, which I, of course, was really excited about. They booked it and they canceled it. And I got really annoyed. And they said, well, would you consider interviewing Kobe Bryant instead? And I said, yeah, of course I would consider that. Let's do that. So we set it up and I flew down to Kobe's office and went over there and hung out for a while and did the interview right there. And it was incredible.

It was a really interesting experience to be there with his team as well for that day. And honestly, it was probably September of 2019, so the timing was interesting. You know me. I asked him all kinds of questions that had nothing to do with basketball, including about creativity, business, hiring, and firing. Because you wonder how a guy like Kobe Bryant decides who to hire and how he lets people go. I don't know if I'd want to be on the wrong side of him. and I did end up asking him about his life and what he's going to do for his second act.

And if he ever, creepily, I asked him if he ever thinks about what he's going to do if he were gone because he has kids. And he was really, really honest in the interview. He was really, really straightforward. And I admire that. It was a really good interview in my opinion. Yeah, that is intense, high stakes interviewing, to say the least. And was he like an idol of yours before you did the interview? No, man.

Honestly, look, who doesn't love watching? basketball, but I wasn't even, I'm just not a fanboy of athletes in general. So it was a great unique opportunity, but I wasn't nervous because of that. I was more nervous because you just never know if your audio equipment's going to screw up. So I was more nervous, like, make sure it's recording than I was nervous to be sitting in front of Kobe Bryant. Honestly, he was so, he was so friendly and unassuming and not very loud. In fact, we even had audio issues recording it because we're like, hey, we got to turn him up really high. And I said, you're really close. And he goes, yeah, I'm just not a loud guy, man.

And I was like, oh, my God, can you be loud for like the next 45 minutes? So it was a really unique experience. I'll be thankful for that for a long time to come. That is amazing. You know, when we started this show, we were doing the interview style thing, and I made a bucket list, a wish list of all the guests that I would want. You know, Kobe was on there. And when I look at your show and I've been going, I've been plowing through the archive of episodes that you've got, you've had a bunch of them. So you've had Tony Hawk, you've had Kobe Bryant, who.

Who are some of the other awesome episodes that people should check out if they do binge your show like I'm doing? Sure, yeah. Howie Mandel was really good, the comedian. He was very open about things like mental illness and how he doesn't shake people's hands. I've had Dennis Rodman, Malcolm Gladwell. And I also had Frank Abagnale, which a lot of people haven't heard about or from. Is that the Catch Me If You Can guy? He is the Catch Me If You Can guy.

So he's the real guy that was played by Leo DiCaprio. And we talked about the psychology behind how he was able to trick. so many people. And now he teaches, of course, FBI and intelligence agencies how that's done as well. That is amazing. So if you're one of the listeners to the show who misses when we used to do the interviews and bring in guests, well, this is my recommendation for you. You should go check out the Jordan Harbinger show. He's got tons of interviews from guests that we were, you know, hoping to one day have on our show. He's already had them on. Check them out on iTunes, on Spotify, wherever you can find it. Jordan, appreciate you as always. Drop in another.

the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. Sam, how you doing, man? Why are you so angry? God, fucking shit. Nothing works. I hate everything. My Apple TV's not working. Quick time's out working. I hate Zoom. God, damn. I hate it. Your Mohawk's working. That didn't even work. I meant to shave the whole thing, and I just forgot that up there. You did not forget the top. Dude, I hate working from home. I hate it so much.

Don't worry. Just like, I don't know. six to eight more weeks of this, and then we're back. If we're lucky. If we're lucky. Okay, so let's do this. What do we got? Let's jump right in. Okay.

We were supposed to talk about why commenter stuff today, but I have found, I want to talk about something that I think is more interesting, but you want to talk about some lighthearted stuff, which is, what's the sway thing? Yeah, what is the sway thing? I saw you, I saw a video of you dancing. Was that the first time you'd seen this? Dance pretty well. No, I'd seen it.

Ryan Hoover had posted one of him dancing. And when he posted it, it looked very real to me. Yours did not look as real, I think, is where you were in your room. But when I saw that, I was like, holy shit, Ryan can dance. And then I saw the comments and everyone was like, nice app. Nice, how do we get the beta of this app? And I was like, oh, shit, there's an app that makes you dance. So you have this app.

I think it's pretty popular. It's called Sway. And what it does is you record. yourself for 10 or 20 seconds, you just stand there and you like walk around and move. And then it uses AI or I don't know what it is, but or not AI. It's called, um, is it augmented? Yeah, it would be AR. Yeah.

And it, um, makes it look like you're dancing like really good. And I send it to my family and some, I, I made it like 20 of them. They thought I was dancing. It was hilarious. Yeah. It looks pretty funny. If they actually just made it a little bit less good of dancing, it would look real. People would believe it.

But it's like so good that you're like, no way, no. It's pretty amazing. And so when I downloaded it, it was number 50 in the App Store. And like as I was playing with it, I saw it. It's been climbing up the charts. And did you just download it because you were browsing the App Store or you saw somebody do it? So I do. I browse the App Store and I like to see the fastest growing apps.

Yeah. And I like to figure out what's going. on. I do that with gaming all the time, so I have to figure out the gains that are growing fastest. So, yeah, I was just browsing. Gotcha. And, but it is viral. Like, when you see somebody post it, you're like, oh, this is great. I can, uh, I can, like, I should do that. So it has this kind of like monkey see, monkey do, monkey do virality that I like? Well, do you remember that app that, um, you, you would take a picture of your face and it would make you look older? Right. Didn't it turn out that that was owned by a Russian company and they were like doing funny stuff with your pictures?

I don't know if they were actually doing anything, but people were definitely sketched out by it. They're like, wait, I just gave my camera roll access to some random Russian developer. And so did like 50 million other people, like just to make this like old filter or baby filter on my face. Yeah. So download that app. It's called sway dance. Is it called sway? It's called sway for sure.

S-W-A-Y. It's a cool little app. It's good for little pranks. And actually, you know, that is a lighthearted way to start. because it's just funny and people should just go to your Twitter and they'll find the video of you doing it. But this is also like part of this deep fakes, like this deep fakes problem. And so if you don't know what a deep fake is, a deep fake is basically people can now use technology to make a video look real. You can make anything look. So for example, what they do

is they'll take Obama. Obama's talking. Yeah. But I can just say any sentence. I could just be like, hey my name's Barack and I'm the worst president of all time and it'll make it look like his lips are moving to my sentence because they basically feed in a bunch of footage of Obama talking normally and it basically the algorithm learns okay here's how Obama's face moves when he says certain things and then when I I can input any audio and it'll make it look like he's doing it now right now the technology is where it looks a little off but it's not that far off like if I showed it to not all of it looks that off right But it's just getting better month over month.

So they just showed a, like a paper just came out with a new one. And it's literally just taking a still photo. So they took the Mona Lisa and then they do the same thing. I can go say a sentence and it will make the Mona Lisa say it. The voice is that good. And so like it's pretty crazy that they can just do that off a still photo. You don't even need like hours and hours of raw footage of the person in order to do this now. But what do you think of this whole deep-fix thing?

because it's a big problem. Like your sister's a lawyer, and I think she was like a DA before, right? Yeah, well, she works in the DA. And then she's a public defender in the Bronx. And people now it's like if you can't trust what you see, right? If audio, like we already have photos that could be Photoshop. Audio now that can be like LiveBird, I think is the name of it,

where basically you just talk, you can train. you can train this system to where you can just type anything and it'll say it in your voice or it'll say it in a Donald Trump's voice. So if you can't believe what you see, what you hear, or what's in video, then how does that like mess up the world? Like fake news is going to become a bigger problem. Yeah, it's going to become a problem. But why are we defaulting to that?

Why are we worrying about, I mean, yeah, it's going to be a problem. But also, let's think about all the amazing things. Like, like, there's going to be fake actors. Like my dance video? Yeah, like it's going to make movies amazing. Like, Brad Pitt won't exist. It'll be, well, it will be. It'll be A.J. Pitt, and it will be some fake person.

And I think that's awesome. So here's a future world. You literally are just looking at your computer. And instead, like today, if you want to make a movie or an animation, you have to like be an animator or a movie editor or an artist to be able to draw. You're just going to be able to say things. And it's going to be able to create what you're, what you're saying.

So you're going to be able to say, okay, what if Donald Trump was talking to, you know, whatever, Barack Obama, and then Donald jumped in the air and he said this.

And then literally it's just going to be able to animate. That's how far this is going to go and that's going to unlock the ability to create stuff to people who don't have the technical skills to do it today. Yeah, I mean, but I'm not too worried about how they're going to regulate it because,

like, if you have a political ad now, It, like, anyone could run an ad on Facebook or on TV and it says, Donald Trump, I'm Donald Trump and I hate Mexicans. Anyone can do that now. But, I mean, like, literally, like, you could buy ads, but there are ways to say, like, well, no, that's not allowed. And it has to say, like, I'm Donald Trump and I support this. You know what I mean? Like, there are ways to, like, prevent.

Like, if you run a TV, a political TV ad right now, it has to say who pays for it. Sure. It has to say, is it. But it doesn't have to be. it doesn't have to be a political thing, right? This can go for anyone. Someone in high school can just bully somebody else. Like right now, the thing that deepfakes got famous

because people were putting other people's faces on porn actors and you could make it look like I could take a photo of your mom and I could put it on it, put it into a porno and it would look like your mom's in the porno. And people were doing this with celebrities, people were doing this with their classmates. And, you know, the Reddit, the subreddit for this got huge is R slash deepfakes, R slash deepfakes.

And so this is how it got popular because it was like this incredible bullying tool. Like forget about political ads. It's just like slander left and right. Did it get taken down that subreddit? No, I think it's still up. I don't know. I haven't been in a long time. But when it first blew up, you know, it got really popular because people were, you know,

oh yeah, it is banned from Reddit now because it was like it was becoming a problem. Oh, yeah. But that didn't stop the actual problem. That just stopped the subreddit where people were sharing it. So I think this is going to be a massive, massive problem for evidence. I think it's going to become a massive problem for just like slander and spin. Like I could take a video of you and make it say that you hate Mexican people. And it's not Donald Trump.

And people would believe it because they would see your face and they would say, I saw him say that, you know? Yeah, I don't know. And so I'll tell you what some people are trying to do to combat this. There's a whole bunch of programmers who, programmers in general have a high bar for the truth. They really want things to be true, logical, solvable, reliable. And so when you take away evidence, evidence, which used to be a source of truth, it's like, well, you're saying this, but I have video of you doing that thing. So that's evidence. But now it's like, well, this video

could be anything. This video could be fake. So they're trying to solve this in the way that they think it can be solved. So the theory is anything you make to sort of validate stuff, the con artist will always be one step ahead. And there's two big, of a payoff to be able to fake this stuff well. It's like a counterfeiter. And you're always a cat-and-mouse game, which is not a winning solution. So the solution that they believe is that the phone makers themselves,

the device makers themselves, will need to put a cryptographic seal on the video when it's taken. And it's like a tamper-proof seal like we have with medicine or whatever, where it's like if this seal is broken, that means this video has been edited in some way. And so at some point, people will only trust videos or photos that have this this cryptographic seal on them that says

this has not been edited because it's on the device itself from when it got captured, it gets instantly implemented on. And so... Who's working on that? Well, the problem is a startup can't do this, right? Because it's actually Apple that needs to implement it. It's actually Samsung that needs to implement this.

And so luckily, Apple's a pretty privacy conscious company and they know that like if their tools are being used for evil, they usually actually do stuff about it. So hopefully Apple is working on this. but I have a friend who was doing a startup trying to do this, and he was running into this problem, which is like,

look, the people who need to do this are all the camera makers. Like, you know, the security camera itself needs to do this. And that's the only, like, decent solution.

Now, some technical people will say, oh, there's nothing that's actually tamper-proof. You can still, you know, get around it. Sure, sure,

but it's better. And they are right, but there are still things where it mostly works. Right. Exactly. So I think that's the world, that's the way the world is going to work later, where you're going to need to see this little, you know, icon that says, it's like, you know,

it's the gluten-free icon. It's the organic icon. It's going to be, this is legitimate, and there's going to be a legitimacy icon on any photo or video that you show. The icon business, that's a good business. You know JD Power? No, I mean, I've heard of it, but I don't know what you're going to tell me right now. But you know what it is, though, right? It's like, all I know. 505 JD Power Awards. JD Power and Associates. That's all I know. What is that mean. Okay, so JD Power, the reason I looked into this, because I wanted to create a business like this, where I was like, because I was like, this is a fucking racket. And I'm like, it does sound, it does give a little, it does give value if they're, if you, but you have to be like a,

a benevolent dictator where like, you can like rule it, but you really got to be honest. Otherwise, trust as a service, right? Right. And JD Power, what they do is, it's a billion dollar company. JD Power is. And all, I mean, what they do is they test. different cars and they give it awards. But the way that they make money is the car companies are members of the organization. So if you're like, if, you know, if you only want the money, you don't give a fuck about like being ethical, you could be like, hey, Ford, like our new membership costs us much money. Are you guys in or out? And just so you know, if you're out, we can't give you

any awards. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah, if you could be in the business of being the rating agency, that is gold. In fact, you know, but one of the problems is, like, if people remember

during the subprime crisis, I believe what happened was these, these subprime mortgages, the bonds that were, the securitized housing bonds, mortgage bonds,

were rated AAA. And people were like, well, how is this rated AAA? This is like a junk bond. While I would have been rated triple A and I think, I believe this,

the companies, I think it was the banks that were funding standard and poor, right? So, So, Standard & Poor was the rating agency, and they were the one sort of funneling money. Exactly. It's the same thing. It's the same thing.

And so they lost their, they didn't actually lose it. They're still around. They're still one of the kind of main rating agencies. But like, that's a breach of trust when the only thing you're providing is trust as a service. Yeah, it's the same thing. So JD Power was sold to McGraw-Hill in 2005 for $400 million. And then it was sold again recently in 2019, I think for North Carolina. of a billion. Right. I've really been wanting to do the same thing. I look like you have, I've wanted to create a credentialing agency. So either in the standardized testing world, so like, you know, the way SAT, these things are a racket, because they can charge whatever the hell

they want because you need that credential to move forward. And these credentials were, you know, for the most part, all these credentials were just created at one point in time. And so I was looking into, like, is there another credential that I could create that literally all I'm providing is a stamp? And I just get paid for the stamp. Well, you know what I've always wanted to do that similar is a vendors list. So, like, Sean, if you're launching something, you're going to come to me because you think I know a little bit about copywriting and you're going to say, do you know any copywriters? And I'm going to be like, I know one or two, but like they're hard to find. And so in my head, I'm like, I just kind of create Sam's list where it just have like approved vendors.

And now this is the best. What? are you saying this is the best? Are you saying these are 10 that you should check out? Or are you saying this is the best one, like wire cutter? Well, I don't think you could do the best one, because if you have the best copywriter, that person will always be busy. But there are definitely like dozens or hundreds

that you can approve. I mean, I guess Angie's list was something similar, and that's huge. But like I've always wanted to do this for copywriters in particular. I almost bought Sam, or I almost did Sam's list. Right. Because people are always like, which copyrighters should I do? I'm like, I don't know, man.

I could post on my social media, but like, it's a lot of work for me to go and find them for you. Right. But like the same thing with law firms, the same thing with accountants. Right. I'm like, man, I got to just create like a vendor's list of people who I know and approve of. That's cool. The version of this I wanted to do was around either IQ. So I was like, oh, okay, like mensse IQ.

Like, can I basically create some bullshit test that, essentially labels people and if you're in the top 5% you get this extra little certificate and so people would pay to basically have that as a bragging right or I was also thinking about it for developers like is there a just an extra credential you can pay $39 to get that basically says yes I know X language or I am competent I have this level of competency at this thing and I'm really a big fan of if anyone's out there creating a credential you know credentialing agency or trust as a service I'm very very, very interested in those because I think those are beautiful, beautiful businesses.

Extremely easy to run, low cost, low risk. And the more you do it, the more powerful they become because the more times you see J.D. Power, even if you don't even fully know what it is, it's like, oh, we need to go get that. That's the standard. So I just looked up MENSA while you were talking. They have 150, they're a nonprofit. It's 150,000 members and they do about $4.8 million a year in sales. Interesting.

Not that big. I wonder the backstory. Yeah, but like as a nonprofit, you never know. know, like, what's the, what was their motive? How are they doing things? Well, but you do know, dude. You can go and look up at all their, they have to file a government form and you can see how much they pay themselves, how much revenue, and what their expenses are. Right. I guess what I'm saying is I haven't done that part. Like, the same thing can be done for athletes, by the way. Like, you know how NFL players go through the combine,

which is basically this battery of test? You'd run a 40-yard dash. You do this bench press of 185 pounds. you do a vertical leap test. And so I really want to, I really think that somebody could create a credentialing thing where you just have this facility in different cities and people pay to come in to get officially tested to get their scores. And it's like, here's how good I am as an athlete. And then they use that when they're trying to basically like get on AAU teams or get college scholarships or whatever it is.

It's like today we only offer that to NFL players right before they get drafted. But I think that this should be a sort of a standard service for athletes. to say, hey, what's my reaction time? What's my agility test? What's my vertical? I did that. When I was a kid, when I was in high school, I did the same thing. It was called Spark.

Spark, okay. S-P-A-R-Q. And the guy who created it was a ex, he was a very elite college runner in the 70s and 80s. I think his name was Rudy. Rudy Chappah. I'm remembering it at the top of my head. Rudy Chappapap, he was a two-miler from California. he had high school. I think he had the high school state record or high school national record for

the two mile at like 830 something. Right. And his name is Rudy Chappah. I think, am I right? Is his name? I'm on the website right now. I don't see you. I haven't looked at his name, but yeah, this looks interesting. And he was a Nike executive. And then he created the spark test. And what you did, it was very similar to a combine. And it was, and I did it. I crushed it. It was a 40-yard dash, a broad jump, a vertical jump, how far you can throw a medicine ball. Right. And maybe that's it. And they would give you a score.

And that score, and I went to this place called Velocity Sports. And Velocity Sports was created by the coach of LSU track and field, and it was a chain of gyms that you can go to for high school kids and run into shit like that. and the velocity sports must have paid Spark money to use it. And then when you applied to college, I would put my Spark score to get a scholarship. Yeah, dude, that's exactly what I'm thinking about. And I'm looking at their website now. It looks very basic.

But this is interesting. I think there's a lot of unused facilities like track and field that are unused so much of the time that you could do this without CAPEX probably. As long as you say, like, you know, when you run a race And it's like, as long as the wind conditions are under this, then it's an, this counts in the official thing. Right.

So I bet you could use, you know, in the summertime schools that are empty. You could use their track and field facilities and build a program like this. Because now people with sports are, parents with sports have become so crazy where people are doing travel sports at like age six, age seven. You're paying thousands of dollars for your seven-year-old to play baseball. And beyond this like elite team. and this is like a multi-billion dollar industry of the travel sports industry

and I think all those people would be people who would want to get their kid tested and you could drive Facebook ads to say hey get your kid tested here's your school, what's your score and then every year you want it upgraded because it's like oh I've gotten stronger and faster and taller

so I want my official measurements that are sort of ratified and here's another example of this is this is kind of funny we're kind of ranting on this I did zero research on this other than like I didn't prepare for this so me neither I just thought of this idea

while we were talking That's how fucking great we are, dude. Just take a minute to appreciate that. Do you know Gallup? I do know Gallup, yes. Okay, so wait, did my microphone? Are we, is it good? Okay, so Gallup is a polling service, right?

Polling company created by this guy named Joseph Gallup, I think. And another company, like a smaller company bought Gallup. and it was a family-owned business, and the founder of that company that bought Gallup, his name was, I forget his name exactly, but do you remember Strengths Finder? Yes. The guy who owned the family business that bought Gallup,

he is the author of Strengths Finder. I see. And so Strengths Finder, it's hard for me to say, they have a book that is popular, but even though it's popular, it doesn't make nearly the, amount of money that the company makes. The company makes about a billion or two billion dollars a year.

It's probably one of the largest privately owned companies in America, like top 200. And they have a quiz. So if you Google Strength Finder's quiz, it's a $29 or $49 quiz, and it tells you where you rank on Strengths Finder. Right. I've taken it because somebody sent it to me. Jim Clifton's the name of the guy you're talking about. Jim Clifton. Jim Clifton, his dad, Jim Clifton was the CEO of Gallup. Right. And was his thing. And so it was like a survey, they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year off that quiz. Yes, exactly. So I've taken trends finders and this is when I was like, oh, this is just bullshit. Okay, gotcha. Like, first of all, it's a test you cannot fail. It's just saying, which of these strengths do you have? So you're just going to get one of the, there's like 25

strengths or whatever. It's like, here's the five you get, leadership, determination and, you know, innovation and whatever. And then the other person gets like empathy and, you know, thoughtfulness and whatever else. So it's pretty genius. And they sell these two. companies who want to basically take these personality tests for leaders to say, hey, we want to understand our employees better, you want to understand your teammates better, and this will help you work together better. And I believe Strengths Finder was doing like 100 million plus in revenue. I'd have to go double check that.

But yeah, it's like a tremendously successful franchise. And the book is really just a, it's like a code. You get in the book that says, go take this quiz online. And then the book is like kind of useless beyond that. And that shit works really well using that book because, like I said, I've kind of talked about this. Me and Ramon, we own this software for to-do list. And we get all of our sign-ups practically because one guy who has a book mentioned our service. And it gets sign-ups.

And the book's not even popular. That's amazing. Also, like, we had talked about that person in our Facebook group, the My First Million Side Hustles Facebook group, basically, who is doing a chess tutoring service. Any niche sport or niche thing like chess, I don't know, there probably is already, because chess is so widely established,

but probably is already sort of benchmark or test you take. But if I was him, I would basically create my own anyways, which is like, oh, by the way, for all my students, like once a year we do this $100, you know, test and you get your chess cue score. And what your chess cue score tells you your adaptive, your, you know, recognition, cognition, whatever. And so it's not like total horseshit.

You actually are testing to see how good they are at certain things. But I think it's just a very simple way to make a lot of money off of kind of vaporware. There's nothing physical you're doing there. Vaporware in that it's real, but it's... It's lightweight. It's very simple to create. It's very simple to maintain. There's no like employees or assets you need to buy in order to do.

Because, Sean, someone in the reviews, our latest reviews, says that you and I are unethical and that you have to check your ethics at the door if you're going to listen to this podcast, which is totally bullshit. But I just want to make them aware that when you say Vaporware, you mean it's real, or it's substance, but. Yeah, Vapor is the wrong word for it. What I meant is a very lightweight thing to create and maintain and very low cost to create. Another example of this is Doug Score.

Do you know Doug Score? Never heard of it. Dude, it's just this guy named Doug DeMorrow. He's this nerd. Like, he's like the nerdiest guy ever, and he's got like four million subscribers on YouTube. And like he's the type of guy who wears like a collared shirt, but like you can see his white undershirt sticking out from like the sleeves.

He's like, I know exactly what you're like. It's like a sloppy, dirty guy. But he's amazing. He has a thing where he reviews cars and he creates a Doug score, which is based off of like, is this fun for a weekend car or is this fun for a daily driver? And now at this point, he's got a thousand cars that he's ranked. And when I'm buying my car now, I check it. I check the Doug score.

Ah, I like that. Okay, that's cool. Kelly Blue Book for value and then Doug score for sort of enjoyment. I like that. And Kelly Blue Book, great example. Play Blue Book is a multi-billion dollar company. Yeah, but they provide a little different thing. They have just like a data set that they're able to use to give you a price comparison.

which is like different than sort of an aptitude test. But nonetheless, I'm curious, do you think we are low ethics? Do you think you have sort of a looser ethical criteria than most people for business? I think that we have a looser attitude. Yes. By the way, I think it's significantly above the line of like good. Like, for example, most people are like, I can't pre-sell product that I know. don't have. And I'm like, in my head, I'm like, who cares? Just refund the people. And like,

you haven't, it's not like, I'm not saying steal money. I'm saying advertise something it doesn't exist so you can get demand, improve demand. And then you refund the money. I'm not saying you steal from them. But yeah, you are lying. And so I think that's ethical. Right. Yeah, I think we definitely have a looser definition than the average person, I would say, the average, maybe the average business person even. But there is, you know, I think the problem here is there's no standards, right? There's no definition for what's ethical, what's not. It's completely subjective and judgmental.

And so the hard part is, you know, for us, we think there's a line between right and wrong and we're on the right side. We think we have a safe margin of a buffer where we're in the right. But for other people, their line might be in a different spot. Yeah, but that's because most people aren't aggressive. but anything that I do, I would suggest to my mom that she'd buy whatever I'm promoting or like, it's like, do I want my family to use this or if I told them about what I'm doing, would I, like, do I want to hide this?

Right. And I don't, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, anything that I do, I'm not afraid to tell everyone. So I met this guy once. This guy had reached out to me about, we're building this product called Blab. And Blab was getting popular. This guy reached out. He said, hey, my name's Billy. I'm from, you know, I forgot where it was from, like, Santiago or from Mexico or somewhere in LaRam.

And he was like, I'm coming up to California, coming to San Francisco, I want to meet you, and I want to talk to you about this company. I was like, okay, I don't know about that. Like most of the people that are users of a product are not usually people I want to, like, do meetings with necessarily, but he said a bunch of stuff in his email that made him sound amazingly legit. He was like, my family started the first television station in Mexico. I own all these different music festivals

and he sounded like super legit but his email was written with blue text font and like different sizes of text Yeah, I was copy and paste Yeah, so I was well no no not like that Like it was like he had chose like no I'm gonna My emails are blue and not the like copy paste little purple thing It was like this was just his style

So I was like I don't know if this guy's a joker or not anyways We go out to dinner and I have very low hopes we go to a sushi place and I walk in and I see probably the most handsome guy I've ever seen and this guy Billy was extremely well put together he's like in a suit and tie um he looks legit we sit down on the table he orders the omacase which is basically chef's choice like $200 each sushi dinner and he's like I got this don't worry and I'm like okay I'm starting to believe but you know could be could still be someone who's faking it and he starts telling me a story and this guy is completely legit and he's probably the most charismatic guy I've ever met my whole life

I was like, you know, if I swung that way, I'd be in love right now. Like, this guy is amazing. So at the end of the dinner, I asked him a question. I said, hey, you know, you're a very persuasive guy. Like, this was, you clearly are good at this, right? You're clearly very persuasive, very charming. I said, I used to think I'm that way until I met you, basically. I used to think I was in the sort of top tier of that.

But I always sort of had this hesitation of like, you know, should I use my powers for good or evil type of thing? Like, where do you draw the line on using this? But this guy's legit? Completely legit, yes. And so he really was wealthy, very successful, very smart, very charming, all that good stuff. And so I asked him, I said, you know, what do you think? He goes, my rule is this. He goes, if your intentions are good, then it's all fair game.

And so he was like, he was like, all the matters is the intent. If you're trying to scam people, if you're trying to con people, if you're trying to not deliver value, if you're trying to just get something that's a good situation for you and not for the other person, then you shouldn't be doing it. You shouldn't be using all these powers of persuasion. But if you think you are genuinely going to help people, if you think you are generally in the right, if you think you're generally working for a good cause,

if your mission is pure, if your intent is good, then it's all fair game. You should use it to the max. And I was like, all, Billy, thank you very much for this incredible lesson. I completely agree with him.

And if you study, you know, like persuasion and charm, and I use it in the form of copywriting, that's all, some people are born better, but it's a teachable skill. always tell people like what I'm going to tell you it's going to sound like evil like I'm going to

teach you how to manipulate people but make sure you use it for good right because you can easily use this for bad and you know what here's a here's a weird counter to this and this is where you know people are going to be like okay this guy's actually evil okay so the other way of doing this so one way one thing is to say what you just said which is use these powers for good the other thing I've I've been able to do is the opposite which is when I see somebody do something for evil, but it works. I try to learn from it. And so, for example, I remember the first time I saw, I'll give you a recent example first. No, I completely agree. So Trump is somebody who I'm not a fan of. I think the guy is bad in all these different ways. But when I watch him, the guy is an

incredibly effective communicator. And he's not polished. He doesn't use fancy $15 words. He doesn't have a lot a substance behind what he's saying. But the guy is like a master of communication. The guy knows how to get his point across in a way that resonates with people. I completely agree. Scott Adams, who's the creator of Dilbert, was talking about this when Trump was running. If you haven't seen it, go read Scott Adams's blog. He's the creator of Dilbert. And he was early on when Trump first announced his candidacy, Scott Adams called it. He goes, this guy's going to win. And people were like, what? He goes, I've been studying persuasion for 20 years. I've been a communicator through cartoon. I know an effective communicator when I see one. This guy is a master. He goes, and so he would

come up with whenever Trump would say things like low energy Jeb or whatever, when he would like call Jeb Bush low energy, he was like, these are linguistic kill shots. These are, and or when he would talk about the wall, he'd be like, it's a great big wall, a huge wall. And he's like, he's painting a picture in people's minds, which is much better than talking about policy. And so you can learn from people that you think are using it for negative. And he called out that he was going to win. He called that he was going to win months before anybody even took him seriously. When 538 was like, this guy's got a 0% chance, Scott Adams was like this guy's going to win.

And of course, if he was wrong, nobody would ever even really pay attention to it because, you know, but when you're right on a contrary in prediction, you get all the credit. And the other example of this was Hitler. So Hitler, when Hitler was rising to power, I studied. how did this guy get so popular? What did this guy do? Because when you watch him speak, he's not a very compelling guy.

But they did a lot of things. So one thing I remember that stood out to me, I was in seventh grade, and I remember learning about this. And when Hitler was trying to rise to power, all the political campaign posters were all like full color, lots of text,

people trying to explain their position on things. And Hitler went the other way. Everything he did was black and white, which would be normally, it would not stand out. But he was like, well, I will come. contrast to everybody else who's using tons of color on their stuff, I'll go black and white.

The second thing was he would use only like big images and like really powerful images and not a bunch of text. And then he would use movies as propaganda and, you know, fill the cinema with people to watch a movie, but it was very much a propaganda thing behind it. So even though he used it for evil, those techniques and principles are interesting to learn from for me as somebody who wants to, you know, have a strong toolkit that I can use for good. I completely agree. I was reading, I've been going down so many Wikipedia holes now that I'm home so much. I was reading about, I read Hitler's Wikipedia because I was reading about World War II and it let me like, I was reading about the mafia and then World War II and then like

it's like his rise to power was because he like would speak at these, I don't know what the equivalent of is now, but just like halls where he right like bars like veteran halls. And I'm like, wait a minute. he started as a speaker. That's it? Right. It was kind of crazy. So, okay, a couple of things.

We'll switch topics because people now are like, what, these guys are saying Trump and Hillary are good, and I don't understand. Okay, so I have an idea for you. So I call this my new Lambda school idea. Have you ever, do you guys have like an office administrator or office admin? I don't know if you guys are. We have, yeah, I mean, we have someone who handles stuff, yes.

And do you have like an HR and things like that. Right. talking more like so admin work or like an executive assistant or secretary do you have anybody like that ever so recently um i'm uh at my work we're hiring an EA right so we had an EA she left we had to hire a new executive assistant and so um they put me on the hiring panel and i'm like okay i don't even know what questions i'm supposed to ask like i i don't really know what the background does you be looking for all that stuff so i started thinking about this started looking it up so it turns out that office administrators or secretaries or executive administrators, EAs, is one of the most popular

jobs in the country. And it's also something where, so there's about, you know, say, 600,000, I think, in the U.S. And they pay pretty well. So it doesn't require tons of specialized skill. It's pretty much anybody can learn to do this if you're, you know, somewhat competent. But you can make 50, 60, 70, 80K doing this. I thought, that's a pretty good paying job. And I know at our company, the EA is they're critical.

They do such an amazing job. They help, and all the senior leaders do what they do. And so I started thinking about this, and I said, could there be a Lambda school for EAs? Because I think this is something that in three months, you could teach people the core skills that you need around calendaring, booking travel, you know, note taking, all the different sort of core components that you need to do to do this job well.

You know, it's not rocket science. You just need to learn the tools and learn the sort of doze and don'ts. And then I think companies, you know, like us, when we're hiring for this, there's no like school or degree that you look at. We're like, oh, because you have this degree, you're going to do a good job? And so it's usually like, do you already have experience doing this or not? But that's a catch-22 because how do you break in if everyone wants to hire for somebody who already has experience doing it?

And so I'm thinking that you could create a program that offers people who says, hey, in three months, we can train you for a job that'll pay you 50, 60, or 70k a year. And it's a job that has good work-life balance and all this other characteristics of it. And you could use the Lambda school model where you take an income share agreement. You say, great, I'm training people for three months. It costs me $3,000 to do this remote virtual school. But I make back up to 15K, 17K per candidate that gets placed into a job over time. What do you think of this idea?

I fucking love it. And I'm looking it up right now. Now, orgorg.com. Have you heard of orgorg? No, that's a hilarious name, though. We use it. Let's see how big their team is. That can kind of tell us how big they are.

But, okay, what orgorg is, it's a community slash job board. It's like a, I don't know how you would describe it in one word. It's an org org is a 100% volunteer-run organization. We have jog board, blog, blog. resources, we have private groups in an email list and it's all for HR and executive assistants. Office manager, HR departments, and DIY

admin assistant. Like, you know, whatever. And so my, our old EA was on this and it was an email list and they would send out blasts like hey, I'm looking for the best IT person.

Our company's small. We only have a budget of $2,000. Who do you recommend? Or like when I wanted to hire a new EA, I had a friend post a listing on there and I got tons of applicants. What I would do with your idea is I would either buy this company, man, these, the lady who runs is, I forget her name, but she could be making millions off of this, but I don't think she is. I bet she's making hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I would buy that. I would buy that. Buy it or become the platinum sponsor for a fair rate and use it for the sort of the user acquisition. And there's this powerful thing because once you build the brand that, hey, yeah, it's like a staffing agency, right?

But it's a big internet version of a staffing agency. And once you place some people, two good things happen. The first is you get a reputation that says, hey, our EAs have been hired by company A, B, C, D, E, and we become a trustworthy source for good EAs. But then also right now, all the candidates in our current EA pipeline came from our existing EAs, people they knew from their network. And so your alumni become your hiring partners. And so the more alumni you place, the more opportunities you have for your own graduates. And so I think that's like the real power of the Lambda School model. And unlike developers, it's a big-

So the Lambda school model, you've got to break that shit down. Lambda school model, you're saying you train them for free and then you get a percentage of their salary. Yes. Do you love that model for everything? Not for everything necessarily, but I think when you have a low-cost. of training, it's a great model because it reduces the friction to join because you say, well, it's free. And so I only have to pay them if I get a high paying job out of this. So your incentives are aligned, right? Because we want you to get a high paying job,

but you came to us to get a high paying job. We only get paid if you get a high paying job. And if you get a high paying job, this is a reasonable payback for us providing that service to you. And so I think any place where you have a low cost of training, this is a very good mechanism. It's just a debt mechanism. It gets a lot of hype, but really it's just a debt vehicle. But I think it's a good debt vehicle for this. Oh, why don't you bring up this Xavier Neal story? Okay, yes.

All right. So Xavier Neal, I'm sorry. I feel like I've been talking most of this podcast. That's okay. It's really interesting. So Xavier Neal is my new favorite billionaire. So this is my segment of the show called My New Favorite Rich Guy. So this guy is essentially like an Elon Musk type of dude in France.

But instead of trying to send rockets to Mars, this guy just operates in his own style. But he's got the same kind of a local like no-fucks-given attitude, like a Branson or an Elon Musk. And I never heard of this guy. So I'll tell you how I discovered him. So I discovered him because he created this thing called 42. Have you ever heard of the school called 42? No. Wait, so he's in France?

He's in France. So I'll tell you his kind of life story. So age 19, he creates this business called Minitel. Minitel is essentially a sex hotline, a phone service. You know, you call it sort of a sex line. And at 19, he creates this thing, and it goes gangbusters. And so he's doing really well, makes a few million bucks off this. Then he either creates or invests and buys a stake in something called WorldNet,

sold a few years later for $50 million bucks, right before the dot-com crash. and then his big thing that he did was he created this thing called free and free was like a T-Mobile it's like a mobile carrier and at the time in France all like SMS phone plans are all very expensive so he created he undercut everybody he created the like lowest cost way to have you know cellular service and so free became this huge company and so his his net worth balloon to like 6.6 billion dollars I'm looking him up now this guy's my favorite person ever yeah and he's he's very legit and so he was like all right look um what do i want to do now i want to do more baller shit and so he was like okay i'm going to create this thing called 42 so he was like i'm going to create a computer science

school with no teachers and no staff so all he did was create this dope facility with a bunch of computers and if you get into 42 you just come and uh the computer is your lesson plan so it's like a video game there's like a challenge it's like hey you need to make a website that can do x y and z and you're like okay and it's like you have the internet and you have some people next to you and like you guys need to figure out how to get past this level. And so you start doing the program. So it's self-serve. You do it.

You do a bunch of like projects to level up. Plus you create your own, you know, like projects or ideas. So somebody created, I don't know, like somebody could create like a coronavirus tracker right now because that's a timely little website you can do. Yeah, I'm looking it up now. They have 2,500 students. Yeah. And it's actually closed right now because the physical facility closed here.

But it was a wild idea. I don't even know how successful it's been. I don't think it's been a wild success, but I love his bet. So he was like, yeah, I'm going to put $150 million into this. So he built one in France, and he built one here in Fremont for $100 million in California. And it was just like, so what a radical idea, what a way to bet your money and try to like change the world over and over and over again. And then he did this thing in France. He's like, okay, how do I build the like startup ecosystem here?

So he created this thing called Station F. And if you look at this thing, it's like the fucking NASA facility. It's like this huge, huge, like, I don't know how many football fields long office or hangar, co-working space. And he's like, all right, I'm going to make the dopest place for any investor to come when they're in Europe. Here, here's some space to go hang out. Entrepreneurs, you're starting companies.

Come over here and build your company. Here's an office space. Restaurants come here at the bottom, fill this place up, you know, gym, whatever. So he created his own little oasis, kind of like Tony Shea did in Vegas. This guy did in France. This guy's amazing. Station F. What I just love this guy's style.

So first of all, I've looked it up now. He's not perfect. In 2004, he was indicted and detained for a month for misuse of company assets, which occurred in several of his sex shops that he was a shareholder in. And he ended up getting a two years suspended prison sentence for misuse of company assets. So he's certainly not perfect. I don't know. I'm just reading out this one thing, though.

In addition to all this, he owns the rights of the song My Way by Frank Sinatra, which I love. You know, it's one of the largest newspapers in France. It was super interesting guy. When I'm curious about people like this, and Andrew Wilkinson is he going to be on the podcast? Is he going to be on this Tuesday? Yeah, the next episode, basically. So Andrew, not exactly,

but kind of does it in the same way as well. And so we have to ask him about this. What I want to know is how do these people manage so many freaking projects? Right. Because, like, I can't even manage what I have on my plate. and like right so this guy's prolific so they you know they hire they hire people to run their shit right so like i worked with the guy michael birch who's kind of like this like billionaire type of dude and he created this incubator with his totally different model or everybody owns all the equity in all the projects and you know he picked

me to run the show for him so he trusted me he's pretty hands off we checked in but like he let me run the show so i was looking at this guy Xavier neil and he's got somebody this woman from google who runs station F, the big facility. He's got somebody who runs his investment fund. And the guy was telling the story. He goes, you know, we don't have board meetings. But I was like, Xavier, don't you want to know what I'm doing with your fund? And he's like, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Tell me. And he's like, he goes, I told him, I said, hey, we invest in all these companies. I think we should double down on these winners and make, make less small investments and do more on the winning companies. And what do he say? Okay. He goes, he goes, I'm not doing this to make more money. I'm doing this to make more companies, invest in more companies.

And the guy was like, what? He's like, you could double down, but don't stop investing in new, and like new small companies. And then the other thing that they talked about in his thing, kind of like what you're saying, how do you manage this? They're showing like the guy showed his email inbox, all the emails from this guy. And I've noticed this.

A lot of wealthy, busy people, their emails look like text messages. So like this guy will write him a long email about like, hey, we're thinking about this plan. Here's what we could do. And there's like, okay, cool. Literally it's up to you All good It's like up the number two

The letter you And then all good Where do I see this screenshot There was a story I think it was like a Forbes or Bloomberg story Or something about this guy And they put that in there But I think this is a pretty common thing

Amongst the people who do a lot of stuff I guess it's kind of like if I buy like Like I've talked about how I'm gonna buy Like just a toy car Like a fun car I guess it'd be like the equivalent of me By me like a $10,000 car and like letting someone use it and it's like dude i don't care just make sure it comes back in one piece

right and so you know the thing i guess the thing i want to clarify because when andrew's coming on on tuesday i'm i like Andrew for the same reason i like this guy and they're totally different right andrews not gone to jail and didn't start a sex hotline and it's not a billionaire like well we don't know that for sure yeah well not public this guy are and this guy has about 20 years on Andrew so give him time but i guess like the thing the thing that stands out to me is i respect above all else, people who do shit their own way. People who have their own, they are original thinkers and decide to live life on their own terms.

That's kind of what I got out of this guy is I feel like this guy, Branson, Elon Musk, the thing I like about them and they definitely have lots of flaws and lots of messed up things that they do, but I just respect that they don't just follow a normal societal playbook. They live life on their own terms. They basically, you know, marshes the people on drum or whatever. that's what I like about them. That's what I like about Andrew. He's done it completely his way, which is very non-traditional.

Do you think this guy speaks good English? The French guy? Yeah. Let's... I bet he's all right. Let's fucking email. Yeah, let's do it. I'm looking at him now.

I mean, if you're French, I mean, if you're a magnet like this, I would imagine you you speak some English, but is he a... I don't know if he speaks good enough English to be on this. I'm sure he speaks. I'm sure he. We'll learn French, dude. We will make it happen if we need to. Yeah, it'll be like Yuel Romero on Joe Rogan

where he just has a translator on the podcast. I'm down. I would love to do this. And this guy is in cahoots with this other guy who, I don't want to say his name because it's too embarrassing if I try to say it because he's French, but it's Bernard Arnault. Do you know who that is?

He owns LBMH. I'll tell you really quick. He usually goes back and forth with Gates and a few of these other guys that's the richest guy in the world. He LVMH, it stands for Louis Vuitton, something. But they own Chanel, they own Louis Vuitton, they own, it's the largest luxury group in the world. They own Fent, what's the Rihanna?

Fenty, yeah. Yeah, they owned that. So the way he started it was his father was wealthy, and they owned a construction business. And it was big, but it wasn't, like billionaire big, but I think they sold it for like $20 million in the 60s, which is a lot of money. I mean, that's probably the equivalent of $20 million. That's probably the equivalent of $100 million now. So it's a lot of money. And so anyway, he convinced his father when this guy, Bernard

was in his 20s and he goes, dad, we got to divert, we got to sell our construction business and buy luxury goods because when I went to New York, they all knew what Chanel was, but that's not even a big company. And so he goes, let's, let's fucking buy Chanel. And so they bought Chanel for a small sum, millions of dollars, but not what it's worth now. And then he runs it and he starts buying more and more and more. So he turned a construction company into the owner of Louis Vuitton. Dude, they own a lot of shit. So let me just throw off some names. So they own Belvedere, they own Hennessy, they own Dior, they own Fendi, they own Fenty, they own tag, they own Hubello, they own, I mean, this is like a, this is like a,

Like, I don't know a luxury brand that's not on this list. Yeah, they own it all. Like, do they, but then like Gucci, I think Gucci's its own brand. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, like the A, B, and Bev where it's like, two companies own, like, all the other sub-companies. Yeah, well, this freaking guy did it, and he, it started as a construction business. Right. And this doesn't happen that much anymore.

But this is what I love about business before, for some reason, it seemed like this happened. this used to happen a lot more. The Chinese are notorious for doing this, where they diversify like crazy. So I don't think this doesn't happen more. I think this is just something that happens on like a 50-year horizon. And so it's just hard for us who, like,

we're just, for five years, we've just been furiously looking at this or 10 years to see these things that are playing out over 50 or 100-year arcs, right? I agree with you, but I've studied a handful of Chinese companies that were launched in the 90s and 2000s, and they are like crazy.

about doing that. Right. Where like they would start something and like two years later they own like apartment buildings. It's like what the heck? That's not even like. And the Japanese have done it as well. They have a name for it.

I don't want to pronounce it because I don't want to butcher. I don't even know how to say it. It starts with the K. Kazu I think. Okay. And it's basically, it's kind of like how do you know how Yamaha makes motorcycles, pianos and chainsaws and power blow?

It's kind of like that. Like they like are known for. doing that. And so what do you, okay, so I was saying what I respect the most. SoftBank did it too. Right. So what I was saying was what I respect the most is people who, who, you know, create their own playbook on how they want to live their life and I agree. What would be your, because like, I think you kind of like the like mogul types. You love researching. What do you think is like your highest, highest bit thing you respect? People who the same, you said it best. I agree with what you said. People who, people who,

people who look at the world and be like, yeah, I get it. The world's this way. I'm going to bend the world to make it my way, though. And have you, like, in your own small way, do you think, have you done that? Like, what's an example of where you've bent the world into working the way you want it to work? I think that I'm from Missouri. I think that some of my friends from Missouri think that I have done that. I do not think that I have done that.

Right. But I think give it time, and I will. I think some of the things you did with the hustle were like that. So, for example, you didn't go the VC route. In fact, you did some weird shit like crowdfunding and other stuff along the way. And from the beginning, I think you, I remember you distinctly saying, because I was like, why don't you do Facebook? Why don't you do video?

Why don't you Snapchat? This shit's hot. And you were like, no, I want to do email because that's my own little pirate ship that I can own. And I'm not dependent on any other platform. I want to make my own pirate ship. And I want to get my pirate chip to be a big fucking pirate ship. And I just never really heard anyone talk like that or think like that where they were so

specific around the like the path to victory. Dude, I have a video like I'm normally, I try not to brag on myself because I think I got a lot of flaws. But the way our company is shaping now, I made a video in 2015 and I outlined what was going to happen. And it is 100% happening exactly like that. Where is that video? It's on YouTube.

If you Google the hustle seed invests, I explain, I go, we're going to build a million people. We're going to profit from advertising. And we're going to use all that profit to build more stuff. And we're going to sell that stuff. And then we're going to build more media around it. And it is happening exactly. And do you know how you said pirate ship? Let me show you something.

Hold on. Let me show you something. Stay there. All right. So I'm off camera. So I'm going to show you why. You're going to see what I'm doing. All right.

So Sam just dropped his pants. and I'm looking at a giant pirate ship tattoo on his thigh. When did you get that? In 2000, like right around what I was telling you about the company, I got a pirate ship and it says bold, fast, fun. So you basically, you tattooed your business plan onto your thigh. Yes. I love it.

I tell everyone, I go, email list is our pirate ship, and every email is a little bit of winning our sales. I love it. That's great. Okay, we got to end on that. That's a classic. I should have taken a screenshot. of that one. Okay, so we will see you guys Tuesday. We're going to have Andrew on, when we say

that's when we record. These come out. I look like a freaking loose cannon right now with a mohawk and tattoos. I'm not actually like that. All right, man. I will, we'll catch you later.