My First Million - #96 - The Entrepreneur Betting Billions On American Passenger Trains

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

Today's episode is brought to you by Lemon.io. They are offering an exclusive 15% discount for the first 6 weeks of work for all the MFM fans. Go to Lemon.io/mfm to claim your offer today. On today's episode, Shaan and Sam talk: (5:52) Charter cities and planned communities, (12:34) Wed Edens, the man investing billions in American trains, (30:41) SPACs and the world of financial engineers, (46:18) building for the creator economy. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What's up? How are you? I'm okay. I'm packing up all my stuff and I had all my trash, which include garbage as well as furniture, packed outside my house really nicely for the garbage people to come. And I just got into a big argument with these crazies that were like digging through it and throwing it all over the place. And I was like, can you guys not do that, please?

And they're like, this is what we do. We destroy trash and we throw it all over the place. I was like, don't do that. It put me in a horrible mood. So where did you net out? Did you just walk away or did they stop? No, we got into a little pushing match and eventually. A pushing match?

What? Oh my God. That's amazing. You pushed the guy? Yeah. It got into a fighter flight mode, man. It pissed me off. You were so easily triggered.

It's amazing to me. I'm on edge. I think that with Corona and the economy, Like I said, I'm in fight or flight mode. And like, I think something changed. This will, I imagine this happened to you already. But like something changed when I got married. I was like, I'm in like I got to protect.

Dude, I'm the exact opposite. I thought that would kick in. I had a kid. I thought it would kick it. I'll tell you, my first date with my wife, now Sonia, first date, we go out. We get sushi. It's great. We go back to her place.

And we're hanging out. And the doorbell rings. And I'm like, it's pretty late at night. It's 11 or 12. Who's at the door? so she just kind of like ignores it for a second. She's like, that was weird. And then the doorbell rings again.

She's like, okay, wait. There's actually somebody there. So she's like, just wait here. I don't know where that well. So I'm like, okay, whatever. I wait there. She goes downstairs. She opens up the door.

I hear like a brief conversation for a second. Door closes. She comes like upstairs. She's like, sorry about that. And I was like, what happened? Who was it? And she's like, oh, it's nothing. And like, it's like a, you know, like a doorbell ditch.

And I was like odd. Okay. Kids, doing pranks. No problem. we sit we sit down for a minute with doorbell rings again she doesn't move i'm like are you gonna get that and then she's like no and then the doorbell starts ringing like just nonstop like ding ding ding ding ding and i was like okay you gotta go get that and so she's like okay hold on stay here and so she goes downstairs anyways i hear a voice i hear a guy's voice to be he's like he's like who's here

and I hear this guy coming up the stairs, and it's an ex-boyfriend who has shown up on our first date. You know what he had done? He was out. He had come by the house to try to pitch to get back with her. And he saw through the window that we were watching a TV show, Niptuck. And he's like, we've already seen that show. You wouldn't be watching that show alone.

He's like, somebody must be here. And so he was like, somebody's here. I know it. And so he comes up the stairs. And I don't know who this guy is. I'm also not that invested in her at this point. So I'm just like, look, I'm not trying to. I was like, I'm not trying to, you know, getting any drama here.

This is already kind of messy. So he comes downstairs and he doesn't know what he's supposed to do. He's like, he's here now and he's standing there facing me. And so I just think of my hand to shake his hand. I was like, hey, I'm Shod, what's up? Because I don't fully know what's going on, but I definitely know that something's up. No, so he shakes my hand. And then I can see he gets angry at himself for shaking my hand.

She's just like, oh, horrified. He's like, oh, my God, you need to leave. Why are you here? And he's like, oh, my God, I knew this would happen. Oh, my, this is the worst. And then I start laughing because I'm like, this is a comical situation. First date, ex-boyfriend shows up, angry little Indian guy. And I was just like, okay, I start laughing.

And then this tilts him like crazy. So she's in between me and him. He swings, punches me in the face. But he punches me with his left hand. So it was like kind of like a, you know, like a doodily kind of punch. he didn't really do anything. And so, and I again, I start laughing. So no fight or flight.

I'm literally in a fight and there's no fighter flight. So I start laughing again. He gets really bad. So then he's embarrassed and he starts to come towards me. And Sonia just like body slams him while he's walking towards me. She just grabs him and throws him down. Now he's really embarrassed at this whole situation because he kind of got tripped up by a girl. And I just, I just like, I grabbed him by the shirt and I was like, you need to leave.

and then he like whatever came to and he was like what the hell am I doing and so he like got all anger and he left and then so for five minutes we're both sitting there go back to watching niptuck like nothing happened and then I was like yes I'm gonna go I'm gonna go home now like I'm done and she was like I can't even speak I'm so sorry I don't know what the hell just happened wait I would have thought that like you'd like just totally get it on and like it would love it was love your adrenaline was going In my head, I was like, oh, this girl's shady. She probably is trying to get with that guy. I had me at the same time, forget all this.

And I was like, I'm not trying to be involved in any of this. I'm going to go home now. And now she's the mother of your children. Yeah, exactly. So we ended up making it. But long story short, I don't even have to fight or flight even when I'm in a fight. So, you know, there's something wrong with me. That's a great story.

Yeah, so I don't think most people even know that story. But now, you know, hundreds of thousands of listeners know that one. My family doesn't know. That is a good story. Mama bear took care of it, sounds like. Yeah, she, you know, snapped into gear in a way that I did not. So we both kind of don't talk too much about that. But we both know if a situation goes down, she's much more likely to react than me.

I'm just sort of like easygoing. Like, oh, this is interesting. What the hell's going on here? Okay. Well, at least you know your strength. Yeah, all this is. Okay, so let's talk about some things. It's been a little while since we hopped on without a game.

guest. What's been interesting you? Let me bring this up. And this is incredibly half-baked. We have a lot of topics here that seem like they have a lot more research. But I met this guy named Ryan Beagleman, I think his name is. Do you know who that is? No, never heard of him. I met him in the trends group. So Ryan started BizNow Media. Biznow Media was a, it was basically what we do. I mean, we are what they are. They were first for real estate. And it was a newsletter business. He sold it for like $50 million. And then he went or in congruently, he started Summit Series, which is, dude, everybody fucking started Summit Series. I've met nine creators of Summit Series. How many of these guys are

there? Well, they all worked at Biz Now. And so I think him and Elliot, I believe were the guys. This guy, Ryan was the CEO of it. So I believe he was the guy. Elliot's last name is BizNow as in BizNow media. I believe, I think they were the two guys and everyone else was Also a guy, but not be a guy. And so he started Summit Series. For those of you who don't know, it's like, I don't know what, it's kind of a party. It's like a party. Southwest kind of thing.

And they'll rent like a cruise ship and people go, it kind of turns into like an orgy, it sounds like. We're just people party. You pay three grand. It's not that good of a business, but I think it's okay. Like, I think it just affords a lifestyle. They created a sweet life for them. They bought the mountain that they did the Summit Series on and now they own the mountain. Here's what they did is they bought a mountain.

So they raised money from people and investors and rich people who went to some of the series. Attendees basically. Yeah. Yeah, would put in a million dollars and you bought a plot of land on this mountain. And they're trying to build this city, this town. It's called Powder Mountain. I met him in our trends group. And so I'm going to go and stay with him for a week on Thursday.

And he's got this big, yeah, in Utah. He's got this big house that he's going to let me crash at. Really interesting guy. and I'll do a podcast with him and we could do a threesome, do it all together or we could do it, I can do it just with him. But really interesting guy. And I also talked to Joe Lonsdale. Did I tell you about him?

I know about him loosely. I've heard, I've heard his name before. He's with 8VC. So what was your conversation with him about? I met him on Twitter and then we did a phone call. He's the guy, he was like an employee number 12 or something or some early thing at PayPal as an intern. Then eventually partnered with Peter Thiel and started Palantir, which is going to go public for like $50 billion, some crazy stuff.

And anyway, what I'm getting at, what we are all discussing, and I talk to Joe, about new cities. This is something that we've discussed a little bit. And it's something I'm very fascinated about. And what I'm noticing is, and I can't tell it's because I've got a lot of, like, affluent friends who make a lot of money. But many of them are saying that they want to spend six months in one part of the country and six months in another part of the country.

And I can't decide if this is like one of those things where you learn, what's it called like the yellow taxi thing? where you know that taxis are yellow and then you start seeing them out all over the place. Or this is like actual like trending. And so anyway, something that I'm fascinated about is like these new planned cities. And it's so interesting to me. So was this the one? Because I just saw one recently.

And we might be talking about the same thing. The five minute city. Is this that? So five minute city. So somebody's creating a little city and the core premise. Might not even be a whole city. Might just be like kind of a living community like a smaller version of town. Bigger than a neighborhood, smaller than a town.

But the idea is that everything is a five-minute walk. So everything you need, groceries, the gym, whatever, all the kind of basic things that people go do with regularity will be a five-minute walk from where you live. And they want to create a walking lifestyle city based around that one constraint. And they're going to build it out that way and they're going to try to find people who want to live in that manner. And I like that. I like all these experiments around new cities. There are some that are trying to do it around self-driving cars. So they're basically saying, hey, self-driving cars, the tech can actually work, but the tech is risky when you have a whole bunch of human-powered cars also on the road.

And so if you could just start with a blank slate and have roads that are designed a certain way that don't have pedestrian traffic and don't have human drivers on it, you could actually have autonomous vehicles zipping up and down these roads and transporting people back and forth. It could be awesome. And so some people are trying to start cities just around that. Some people are buying old ghost towns like in Nebraska and Wyoming where infrastructure all got built, got abandoned for one reason or another, and they picked it up on the cheap and they're trying to revitalize it. So I think these are awesome projects, like really, really awesome projects. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's really cool.

So a lot of times they call it a charter city. And a charter city is a city that's granted, I'm just reading the definition, a city that's granted special jurisdictions to create a new governance system. And this isn't like a new thing. I think that even San Francisco is considered a charter city where you can like make your own rules a little bit within some type of constraints. I know and then there's like planned communities. One of those is Steubenville in Ohio. It was started by two brothers in 1920s where they just bought a large plot of land and they started planning it out and they were very meticulous about what happened to what and people started buying homes there. Silicon Valley actually was a little bit like this. Mark and Dresen's father-in-law actually owned, is a bill. Mark Andreessen, the famous investor, his father-in-law is a billionaire real estate guy. And in the 40s, 50s and 60s, Silicon Valley was farmland.

And they like said, let's make this a town. And so anyway, it's kind of an interesting concept. And I've been reading a lot of history about it. So like the reason I like reading about Titans and Vanderbilt and all this stuff is you can see how they did stuff. And like a lot of towns in Staten Island and places like that were, because Vanderbilt was like, let's create a fairy to go there. And whole towns are built around it. So it's not like a new concept, but it's incredibly interesting right now because I can't tell if people are truly fed up with cities or if it's just something I'm fed up with. And I notice others are too.

Yeah. This is sort of like, you know, if you think about what are the coolest sort of, what are the sounds cool ideas? So a few years ago or many years ago, the sort of the sounds cool idea was I'm going to created a new school system. I'm going to create new university. So you had like old school and you have Lambda school. You have make school. And you have all these other schools. And that was sort of like, wait, that's a, that's a startup. That's not a startup. Right? Like that's different. And there's a whole bunch now that are in the like rockets space. So there's a whole bunch of rocketry and satellite startups that are like, yeah, we don't, we don't just do make apps. We like, you know, launch shit into the, into fucking orbit. And yeah, that's what we do. And I feel like the sounds cool ideas of

today, a lot of them are around cities, starting a new jurisdiction that's either going to be different on policy or like the kind of urban planning and design. And that doesn't mean it's not actually cool, but you do have to be careful because some people are going to go into it just because it sounds like a cool project to be working on. But I want to meet some of the people who are behind this. I know why Combinator had a project called New Cities that they were working on. I don't know. I haven't heard anything about it. So I'm like, I don't know what's actually, I don't if it failed or what, this was years ago. And we have a friend of a friend who I know has bought one of these. So I'd love to have him on and come talk about this. But it reminds me of a different

thing I wanted to talk to you about. And we can come back to the city's thing if you want. But do you know who Wes Edens is? No. So West Edens is a billionaire. So Wes Edens would be the billy of the week because he's doing something cool. So he owns the Milwaukee Bucks, but that's not obviously how he made his money. That's how he spent his money. And then he has a, I think his investment firm is called like Fortress Capital. I think he's a private, I think he's a private equity guy. I'd have to go confirm that. But yeah, I'm looking up Fortress is like a really big name hedge fund. I think SoftBank owns it. Right, right, right. Yeah, he sold, he sold a stake of it to So he's just a big billionaire rich guy who made his money to go. It goes with the finance world, right?

Yeah. So I saw this article a few weeks ago and, you know, somebody's going to know a lot more about this because I'm like, when you're just reading the Forbes article, you're not really getting much info. But the premise, I understand the premise. So what this guy's doing is he's trying to revitalize the passenger train system of America. So you have something like Amtrak. Amtrak has been like a money pit, like I don't know, like $50 billion of government money has gone into Amtrak. Amtrak has never turned to profit. The closest they ever got was 2019.

I think they were like 30 million operating loss. That was the closest they ever got to a profit. And also the user experience is not very great, right? Like Amtrak is kind of cool and kind of this nostalgic kind of interesting way, but it's not like great. It's not amazing. And so what this guy realized was he was like, A, it's a shame we don't have like an awesome passenger train system here in the U.S. to get from place to place. He goes, B, Amtrak is actually profitable on certain legs.

It's just that they operate all these other legs because they're non-for-profit. They're not profit. And so it's their other legs that are causing them. to be unprofitable. But if you just look at their best routes and like he's like, you know, look at this one route from New York down to Washington or whatever, it's actually extremely profitable because a lot of people want to go on that corridor. And so he's identified all, so he started this thing called Bright Line. And so he's got this train system that goes from, you know, South Florida to Central Florida. He wants to do from L.A. to Vegas in 85 minutes. And, and so, you know, these are

these are high traffic routes and he wants to build a for-profit train company. So recently, Richard Branson took a minority stake, so they just rebranded to Virgin Trains USA. But I love this idea for two reasons. One, I love the quote that he had in the article, which was the biggest ideas solve obvious problems. And I think that's that in many ways that's true. There's obviously tons of counter examples. But I think it's one way to brainstorm ideas is to say, what are the ideas that are so obvious, so in our face, so baked into the way we live, that we kind of just accept them at face value. we're not even trying to change them anymore.

Hey guys, I want to take a second to answer one of the most common questions I get, which is, hey, I got this great idea or, hey, my company's doing really well, and I just need a developer. I need somebody who knows that a code so that I can either bring this idea to life or I can grow faster. And, you know, I've been there before. I've dabbled in the no code tools trying to make it work. Sometimes that works most of the time it's not good enough.

I tried to learn programming myself. That was a waste of time. And, you know, I've looked at overseas platforms to say, hey, can I find an affordable developer? I can't afford somebody here in the States in California paying some Silicon Valley prices, but maybe I can afford a developer in the Philippines or in Eastern Europe. And the big challenge has always been finding somebody who's actually good, like they're vetted. Like I never know if somebody's going to just take my money and run,

if they're actually a good developer or a bad developer. And how do I know? If I knew how to code, I could judge their stuff, but I don't know how to code. So what I really like about this week's sponsor, Lemon.io, is that they have a vetted marketplace of remote developers from Eastern Europe. So I know the founder pretty well. His name's Alex. And what they do is they filter and they test and they basically have a reputation system of any developer that they have on their roster. So you know, if you go to Lemonio, you're getting a developer who is actually good. It's good quality who's going to get

the job done. And so the way it works is you go, you type what you need. Hey, I want to build this app or I need to add an extra fun and developer to my team and I don't want to hire. Within 24 hours, they'll match you with the right developer. If it's not the right developer, you just tell them and they'll switch it, you know, basically for free. It's a replacement guarantee. And they're actually cheaper than the other outsourcing platform. So, you know, you get one big savings when you just go outside the U.S. or outside of Europe and you get somebody in kind of in either Eastern Europe or in Philippine, Southeast Asia. You know you save money there. But lemon.com is actually half the price of the other platforms that try to do this. And so it's stupidly effective. I would just kind

of take advantage of this as long as they can offer these rates. It's pretty amazing. And Alex basically told me that for any my first million listener, they will offer a 15% discount on the first six weeks of work that you have done. So if you want that done, if you want a developer who is vetted, who can build your projects, go to lemon.io slash mfm. Again, that's lemon.com slash mfm, like my first million. All right, enjoy. Back to this week's episode. Cities is an example of this. Like, oh, this is how city works. These are the rules. This is how cities laid out. Well, it's like, well, what if you change that? What if people were sick and tired of that? And you could start a one. Elon, I think, did this great with, obviously, with Tesla, right? Like, electrifying cars or

the boring company, which was like, hey, too, traffic sucks. Like, why don't we just have underground high-speed tunnels? And so I think there's a set of ideas like this that are big, big problems that are so obvious that actually people have stopped tackling them or the rate of innovation is very low compared to how big the size of the prize is. And that's how I think about this train system. What do you think about this? I am you're getting me all hot and bothered I love this I'm I'm looking up um so I'm familiar with virgin trains I'm looking them up if you go to companieshouse gogub.uk you can actually look at and see what they've been operating in the UK for a long time

because Branson did this you know based Branson was like okay the government runs the trains that that probably means that they suck we can take over and we can run it here so this is virgin trains USA which is now the like USA version of that that he's trying to do. But he's just invested into Wes Edens' project as a minority investor. I think this is awesome. So I've actually considered doing this. There's a train. I think it's Amtrak. Do they call it the Zephyr route? I think they call it like a route that you can take where you take an Amtrak from California, I think to New York. And it takes a long time, like five or 10 days. It takes a while. But it's like $200. It's really cheap. Chicago to the Bay Area. And it goes via Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City and Reno. Yeah, so it sounds awesome. It's pretty cheap and affordable. 62 bucks. Amtrak, wow. Amtrak is something that I remember as a kid, we used to take it every once in a while.

And it was like something like poor people would take. Like I would take it when it's like what you do when you don't have any money. It was almost almost like a greyhound. Right. And it's so cool. I'm really into this. I think this is fantastic. But another place is like Europe. I know in India, I've done this a whole bunch. You go on the trains there. It's all. It's all. It's like a hotel on wheels. You know what I mean? Like it's so fun to go on. You get your cool little cabin and the food trollies come by and you're looking out the window and it's like a nice ride and you can go to sleep.

You can sleep overnight on it. And I know in Europe it's the same way. And I just don't, I never hear anyone doing that in the U.S. I'm sure people are doing it. But I don't think it's a big part of the travel culture here and how cool would it be if they made it happen. So how's it going with this guy? I'm just looking them up as you talk. Like he's making a lot of press because this is a really romantic idea.

romantic idea. Exactly. And he's doing a good job because he needs the press because, so the catch with this is like, oh, you need $5 billion to build out this track. And it's like, okay, well, where the hell am I going to $5 billion? And so the reality is that a lot of this money comes from public financing. It's a combination of public and private. And so one of the reasons to get so much press is because it really helps you raise the money and get access to capital that is in the public domain that's sort of like, like he has this tax-free bond that he released you know, for Florida. So they put, he floats out this tax-free bond, he raises a billion dollars or $1.5 billion on it. And, you know, this is like free money. And so it's in the same way that sort of,

you know, Elon will go and announce a car and everybody puts down a hundred bucks and he gets like a, you know, $5 billion loan, you know, interest-free loan from customers, essentially. And so there's an art to the, the trick of this business is really the financing, being good about the financing. And there's, the jury's out whether they'll be able to pull this off or if they'll just get buried under debt. So it looks like in 2017, they said in the first half of the year, they had about $10 million in sales and they had 400,000 riders. Virgin Trains projected by 2019, its ridership in South Florida with top 2.3 million riders a year and revenue would eclipse $112 million in revenue. And wow. So there's demand there. Wow, this is crazy. So over a million. Wow. This is pretty

crazy. And so this is cool. The cool thing about this is I think the most ambitious projects, the projects that are sort of frighteningly ambitious are awesome for talent. You can become a talent magnet if you're Elon and you're saying, hey, look, we're going to build hyper speed tunnels under L.A. to kill traffic. You can attract capital because people want to get involved with being audacious ideas that sound fun and sexy.

You can get free capital because, like right now, one of the big reasons people hate on Tesla's because a lot of their, you know, they were subsidized heavily by the government. Now, some would argue, hey, dude, it's good that the government subsidized this. It's the, you know, decarbonization of planet Earth through electrification and blah, blah, well, there's an argument for that that says they should get access to this. And other people are saying, hey, you know, why is, why is the government footing the bill for this private company? But my point is, these big audacious ideas attract the best capital, the best talent, and sort

the best press because they make for the best stories. And so in some ways, these sound like they're harder than other ideas. But in other ways, they're actually less hard because there's less competition and you get all these rewards for being so ambitious and audacious. I'm so into this. This is incredibly attractive to me. What's interesting, what I've learned as I've gotten older and seen people succeed is there's sometimes there's these ideas that appear as the one thing, but it takes an entirely

different expertise to do. So, for example, this guy, Wes, is that his name? West Edens, he is from Fortress, which their expertise is all about raising money from rich people and rich organizations like governments or families or whatever. And then his job is allocating that money. He's just like, to kind of be disrespectful to him, he's a spreadsheet monkey, right? Where he's like, well, if I change this by a little bit. And that's totally simplifying what this person does and I understand that. But you think like, well, when I think of a train, I think of like a Richard Brayton type where he's got to create this like amazing like your experience with the purple lights inside. It's like, nope, it doesn't matter. It's all about how you're going to

financially engineer the funding of this infrastructure. Yeah. And when you think about a business, you think I have to know something that other people don't know and or I have to be good. I have a skill set that other people don't have. And what's interesting and a little bit discouraging to me personally is when I see these things, I'm like, man, this isn't about having a good vision for a train. This is about being able to creatively finance something, which means coming up with interesting schemes and documents and strategies, not building a brand. I mean, it is also building a brand that people love. But the hard part is the admin stuff and the strategy around it.

But that's kind of neat too, it's just different. Yeah, yeah. I think it's really important to know what business are you. really in. So for example, Peter Thiel talks about this with universities. Universities are not in the education business. You can't beat Harvard by offering a better curriculum. Go try, right? Like, nobody would even care if you had the, even if, even if every expert on earth said, this is a better curriculum than Harvard's curriculum, you would not touch Harvard's status and any student would pick Harvard. Why? Because what business are they really in? They're in the credentialing

business during the insurance business of, hey, this. is insurance policy for your kid. If you get a degree, you're going to have a job. They're in the sort of like, you know, social, you know, either babysitting or social development business of like helping you grow up and, you know, become an adult. And so you got to know what business you're really in. And I made this mistake a lot. I remember starting a dating, we were building a dating app during the idea. And we thought we had this great idea for a dating app and it was all about dating. And we were like, look, this is the problem with dating apps. This is a way better user experience. And we might have even been right. But what I really.

realized six months in was, oh, dating apps are really in the business of local customer acquisition. You have to, in a small geography within a 20-mile radius, you need to acquire a whole bunch of males and a whole bunch of females. And success is not about what your dating app experience is like and the features of your app. It's about how well you can get enough males and females within a 20-mile radius over and over and over again. Do you have the acquisition chops to do that? Same with gaming. People are like I love video game. I love games. It's like, well, cool, but just so you know, like, you are, you have to, you're in the advertising business, though. And a beautifully designed product or a really novel product helps, right? Because Tinder was, was really novel and fun.

And so they acquired more customers because it was fun to talk about. It was buzzworthy. It was controversial in some ways to just swipe on people's faces. How, how shallow is this generation, whatever. So the product design definitely helps. And also, if it's sticky, if it's actually a really great product or a really great game. Cool. That gives you more budget to acquire customers for it because you know you keep them around for longer and you're going to make more money off them. But like you got to know what business you're in and you've got to know what the table stakes of success are.

If you're a game, the table stakes of success or customer acquisition. Same with dating. For this train thing, it's about the financing of massive infrastructure. And that's the business you're in, not the cool seats and entertainment system and the headrests. Have you seen the movie founder by a, uh, It's about McDonald's. I have. Yeah.

He goes, I don't think you know. So basically there's a scene where this business guy, I don't know who he is. Some sales guy comes in and talks to Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's. And he goes, tell me how your business operation works. Well, I do this. I flip the burgers and we hire, we release the restaurant to the person, yada, yada, yada. And the guy goes, wait a minute. I don't think you understand what business you're in.

And Ray Kroc goes, what are you talking about? I sell cheese burgers. He goes, no, no, no, you're not in the hamburger business. You're in the real estate business. And then he like his mind switches and then he goes oh my God, you're right. The hamburgers simply get people to come to real estate and I own all the real estate. That's the move. And so it's like that one packaging switch changed everything.

And by the way, sometimes you hear the opposite. This happens a lot in the startup world. It's like you roll your eyes. They're in some shitty business. And then they try to not be in the other. We're actually a tech company. It's like, no, you're not. You're a media company.

You just happen to use technology or whatever. Right. Like people love to say that they're not. in a shitty business and that they're in this great business. And just with as much or more frequency than people who happen to be in a great business and don't even realize it yet. And so you got to be wary. That's why I said you got to know what business you're really in.

And so you can't just make up that you're in the real estate business when you're fucking not. You're in this other business. And you just have to like, you have to see the truth for what it is because lying to yourself doesn't really work. Sometimes it does. I mean, sometimes there. Well, like we work out of way with it.

for a little while. Like, you could say like, well, it kind of fell flat, but they, it could have gone either way, maybe. Um, yeah, if it fell flat, I, I would count that as eventually the truth catches up with you, right? Like, or like this new company lemonade that went public. It's a, they're like, I want to get valued as a tech company, but it's like, well, you're insurance. You're, you're still just like an insurance business. Like, like, like, people are like, or like, I, I, I know that there was criticisms around flexport. So flexport is this huge company in Silicon Valley that everyone says the greatest thing ever. And, and the guy who, who runs it is awesome and it totally might be the greatest thing ever. And what they do is you order

a whole bunch of stuff from China and you've got to ship that to America. They help you track your shipment if you're a business. So you like can track your shipping container and help with licensing or customs and all this, whatever. Anyway, they're like, we're this revolutionary thing. And I've read a bunch of comments in the trades in like the shipping trades. And they're like, just so you guys know, we've been doing this forever. Right. Like we have all this technology already. Like these guys are just, what they're doing is just no different than what we're doing. But Flexport has been like, we're doing it new. And I don't know the, I don't know the truth, but I do know that.

I know the truth now. I've used other freight forwarders and now I've used Flexport. Flexport's fucking awesome and so much better than the others. It is so much better than the others. Well, there's a little bit of the answer. I vouch for it personally as a customer. From a customer. But these are the things that all the other people are saying.

They're like in the comment sections. I only know what the commenters are saying. And they're like, we've been doing this just so you know. It's true. They didn't invent the industry. But, yeah, it's so annoying. Like, for example, somebody's going to be like, oh, charter cities, trains. You know, these other guys have been doing this.

Or, you know, people have tried this for a long time. It's like, yeah, I know. Right. I said something about SPACs on Twitter. I was like, hey, I want to talk to somebody who really is super knowledgeable about SPACs, which are these special purpose acquisition companies. And I said, I feel like there's a growing trend towards this. I want to know, you know, why would I invest in one?

why wouldn't I invest in one? And, you know, how game changing is this trend? And, you know, 90% of the comments are great and helpful and inform me. And then 10% are like, dude, spak's nothing new. You've been around for a long time. Nothing new happening here. It's like, people are so excited to be like, nothing new here that they miss that there's actually new things. I'm not saying the whole fucking thing is new.

I'm saying maybe it's just more common now. Maybe it's back. I hear, I see people talking about it and I don't entirely understand what it is. example. So Chimoth, Palaapitia created a SPAC. What it is, it's a blank check acquisition company. He raises, like, let's say, $5 billion, $2 billion, something like that. I think he raised one or two. From private institutions or public? From institutional investors. That company is a public company. So it's a publicly listed entity that does nothing except for acquire companies. But he acquit. But he gets the money from private people. I believe initially he gets it from private, and then it's publicly listed, and then there's public shareholders as well. So you can buy into his SPAC. Okay.

Then it searches for a great private company that wants to fast track to IPO. So instead of doing the road show and all that, the SPAC says, look, I can just acquire a minority stake or a majority stake, depends. But let's say I can acquire 40% of this company, and you'll be public tomorrow, and the SPAC will be renamed as what you are. and then you'll be liquid and I'll take a fee, you know, sort of like an alternative to the IPO process. It is an alternative to the IPO process. So Chmott's company acquired Virgin Galactic and that it took Virgin Galactic public. And so they rebranded the SPAC as whatever, I forgot what the ticker is, but it's like space or something like that. And so now, now, do they have any revenue? The SPAC is no revenue.

No, it's just a holding company waiting to go buy a company. But Virgin Galactic, like, I'm looking up. Virgin Galactic has revenue because they have bookings for like pre-bought bookings for stuff. And I don't know if they do other kind of like industrial work to take satellites up or what. But so the other one is Bill Ackman. So Bill Ackman, the guy who runs Pershing Square, you know, famous kind of investor, you know, up and down history, but very well known. He does great on TV. So people love him.

He's the one who had that giant kind of like, you know, well, wasn't exactly a short, but he had basically the equivalent of a short bet right before coronavirus hit, and he made $2.6 billion in a month off that bet. So it was like one of the greatest sort of investments of all time. And so Bill Ackman has created the largest spec. So he's created a $5 billion spack. And what he says is, he goes, it's like a unicorn mating dance. He goes, we're a unicorn because we raised $5 billion. We have that money in our bank. And we're just looking for a unicorn to mate with. A private company who is really special, really defensible, has awesome revenues, long-term, but everything you would want in a company, right? Long-term

defensibility, rapid growth is the winner of its category and is a private company. And we will try to buy 30% of that company. So like, for example, they could go and try to buy $5 billion worth of Airbnb, for example, and take Airbnb public. And in doing so, one of the values is it's kind of like a Sequoia investing in your company. They would be signaling. to the market that this is the company. We could we analyzed, he said there's 127 eligible companies we believe this year that we could mate with that are these private companies that have satisfied these criteria. And we're going to find one and we're going to go hard on it. And when we find that one, it's a huge signal to the market that this is the company to buy. When I hear this, I think to myself,

this is stupid. This is a scam. And then I'm like, no, it's not a scam. This is awesome. They're winning. I mean, maybe some people think it's a scam, but it's like pretty cool. And I'm like down on myself that I'm not smart enough to entirely understand it. Well, I didn't understand it fully either. And I'm sure my description here has some holes. But this is why I tweeted about it. And this is why I'm going to bring a friend on to talk about specs because he knows a lot about it. But my brain immediately goes to like, A, how on earth are these people smart enough to come up with these plans?

B, how are they so bold to think that this is actually going to work? But, dude, people think of you that way. They're like, when I hear Sam talk about these, bring some of these ideas or talk about media or talk about whatever growth and, you know, how easy it is to make money? People are like, how is Sam so smart? I only understand, you know, 30% of the gibberish he's saying. How is he so bold that he just, you know, creates the hustle and, you know, buys his conference. It creates this media brand and creates trends and then invest in his friends companies and blah, blah, blah. Like, people think you're very bold too.

And it's just the same exact thing. but in a different field. So it's not even at a different level, I don't think, personally. I just think it's a different field. And it's like a new language. It's like when you don't know the language, you feel kind of dumb because you're not understanding all the terms. But like, that's okay. You've now known about it for one hour versus like, you know, the shit you know, you've figured out over 10 years.

And these guys have just done their 10 years on this. So I'm going to bring this back to history because I'm a history fan. I'm on a kick. And I know not everyone likes it, but I'll make it quick. So I'm reading about Jay Gould. Do you know who Jay Gould is? Nope. So he was one of the, if you look at like who are the richest people ever, he's like in the top 10 or 30. He was alive in the 1850s all the way up. He maybe died in 1890. He was like he ran

around with Vanderbilt and all these guys. And what he did was he found some loophole where this idea of watering down stock. And so what he did was he bought in to the Erie Railroad. And he somehow bought into the point where he didn't put up any money. Then what he did was he went down on like a Monday to the government in D.C. to some officials and he convinced them to change this law over three days that allowed him to issue new stock on a publicly traded company, but he didn't have to tell anyone. Somehow he got away with this. And so he issued all this new stock and Cornelius Vanderbilt bought $5 million worth of the stock, which back then, $5 million times 20. That's about what it's equivalent to now. and he took all the profits and then sold that.

Anyway, he just, like, made profits from thin air. And it's definitely shady and sleazy, but he got really rich doing it. And what you're describing is, like, what I just read about last night with Jay Gould. I'm like, these guys who find these weird loopholes. Part of me hates them because they're just, like, not creating true value for the world. Part of me is like, well, you got to, like, you got to, like, appreciate the hustle. And you got to respect the player who's just playing in the game. And it's just, I'm so fascinated by all these people.

Like, what's his name, Chammoth? Chmoth. Yeah. Chimath and Bill Ackman, who are bold enough to come up with these, like, ludicrous ideas that a simpleton like me is like, I don't understand. So what widget are you selling and how are you making a profit? It's just so fascinating to people who are bold like this. It is exciting and it is bold. I wouldn't say they invented it because, again, it's been happening.

But who, rather who chose it. It's different to do it at a different scale. Yeah, it's different to do. Most people in their industry, like Chmoth is from the tech world, right? Like, no venture capitalist was doing this. He did it. It's sort of like I really respect Chris Saka because what he did when he was like, you know, wrote an angel investment check of 25K into Twitter and was not like super wealthy.

Like he needed that 25K to like come back. Yeah. Give the full story. So Chris Saka is now this billionaire guy who's relatively young in his 40s. He's seen him on Shark Tank, you know, whatever for that. He wears like a Western shirt. He's probably worth two or three or met more billions. Right.

And he worked at Google for a long time and he didn't have that much money. He probably had like one or $200,000 to his name, which is a lot. His story's crazy. So he, before he goes to Google, he, and, you know, I'm telling his story second. We should just get him on. He's a cool guy. So he starts, he goes to law school, doesn't attend class, starts day trading in the stock market during the stock.com boom.

Do you know this total story? Yeah. I'll tell the short version of it. All right. Starts day trading runs up like a small amount of money, like let's call it, $20,000 into, to basically look like a million bucks. And he's, you know, so he's making these, he's doing day trading. He took some money from family and friends to kind of lever up even more.

And so stock market crashes and he swings from, you know, up a million or two million bucks to down four million dollars. He owes four million dollars and he's a law school student who's like got zero to his name and comes from a kind of a low to middle class family. And he's like, oh shit, like what the fuck? And, you know, conventional wisdom is like declare bankruptcy and sort of get away. And I'm not entirely clear why he didn't just do that. I don't know if it was pride or if it's it wouldn't have actually worked. I don't know the details. But what he, the way he tells it's sort of like, you know, no, I pulled up my boot traps and I decided to solve this problem.

So he does two things. First, he negotiates the total amount down to $2 million of what he owes. And then he sets about for the next few years to pay this off. And he starts off by doing, he's in Silicon Valley. He starts off by just doing like legal work. work on the side on Craigslist. Like, hey, I'm a lawyer. Like, I can do your, you know, startup documents and shit like that.

Like small deals, like hundreds of dollars. Yeah, hundreds of dollars a time. He's just hustling at night. And then he's going to meetups and he's like, so he, he, to get, to famously sort of get some credibility, he creates this name, this business card called like the Carlisle group or something like that. Yeah, or like, Saka, Saka and brothers or something. Yeah, it was the something group is like the Clybesdale group or something.

Carlisle or something like that. So he starts, and people would be like, oh, yeah, I've heard about you guys. You guys do good work. And so he starts, you know, like consulting under that banner and making thousands of dollars, but like, you know, it's a $2 million hill to climb. So then he gets a job at Google, pre-IPO, kind of like hustles his way around Google, ends up working on some cool projects at Google, like when they were buying all these data centers around the country under secret shell company names because they didn't want Microsoft to realize how fast that Google was actually growing. But they needed the data center. and so he gets to the point where Google IPOs, he makes a million or two bucks.

He ends up paying off his loans that he owed. He gets back to net worth zero. And he's like, you know, no better feeling in the world than when I had net worth zero. And so then he takes a little bit of the money that he has left over from his job at Google and decides to angel invest an ex-Google employee friend, Ev Williams, who's starting this thing called Odeo or Twitter or whatever. So anyways, he ends up as an angel investor in Twitter. he

I think he gave him I think he in I read he's like I had like $75,000 save he put 25 in and I gave

Twitter 25,000 right and so you know he and I love this because he's like most angel investors they already made it and so their money

doesn't matter to them he's like I needed this money to work so he starts working for the company in a way too so he's like hustling making introductions trying to get celebrities

to use Twitter he's helping them with their fundraising deck he's trying to get his 25K to grow into something And so, and in some ways was two hands-on. The company sort of was kicking him out of the office. They're like, dude, you don't work here.

And this happened to him with many companies, with Twitter, with Uber, where he sort of overstepped a little bit. But along the way, he realizes that the world has mispriced Twitter. They don't get it. He believes in it. He thinks Twitter is going to be a huge thing. People are writing Twitter off as this goofy little 140 characters, SMS toy where you talk about what you're eating for lunch.

So he's like, trying to get it. convince people to invest in Twitter and he's having a little bit of a hard time. So he's like, F it. I'm going to raise my own fund and just invest in Twitter. And so he starts creating these SPVs, special purpose vehicles, which really just means it's a fund just for one deal. It's not like an ongoing investment fund where we trust you, Chris Sok to invest in 25 companies. It's like, hey, I have access to this Twitter deal. Let's buy some Twitter stock. I need to raise money to buy Twitter stock. And he was just buying secondary. He was buying any employee wants to leave. They want to pay for their wedding, cool, Chris Socker will buy your stock. And so he accumulated by the time the

IPO happens, he accumulated, I think, the second largest or the first largest ownership stake in Twitter. I think he owned like 8 to 10 percent or something of Twitter stock by the time it IPOed. And that became like a billion dollar plus stake in Twitter. And along the way, he did, you know, also invested in Uber, Instagram. I forgot whatever else. It was like, is the greatest early stage fund ever created because he had Kickstarter in the, you know, there. He had a, it's like MongoDB or something like that. He had a whole bunch of, of winners, a billion dollar winners out of this tiny little seed stage fund. So to the point where it can't be replicated again. Even he couldn't do it ever again, but, you know,

really hustle. So it can be replicated again. So I'll tell you, I've known this guy name, well, I'm friends of a friend with this guy. And they have this thing called gigafund. If you go to gigafund.com, you can see it. What I'm going to say is all public. So I'm not like revealing anything. But from the looks of it, they only invest, they have this fund and they only invest in Elon Musk. So they basically put, they were one of the early monies into SpaceX. And I believe they're raising money just to invest into SpaceX. And it looks like on their portfolio, it says SpaceX and then it says the boring company. Right.

And so that's like all they're doing is like those, it looks like those two companies. and that's the horse they're picking. They're like, we think that SpaceX is going to be like the greatest thing ever and we're just going to raise money. So Luke is X founders fund. Well, he also, Luke is one of the co-founders of PayPal. So these aren't just like noobs. Yeah.

They're a big deal. But, and this actually says it on TechCrunch. According to the Axiostory, Gigafund will initially only focus on raising capital for SpaceX. So they just found a company they like and somehow they got in with Elon. well, they got in with them because they work with them. And all the money is for SpaceX. And that's kind of fun. That's kind of a funny thing.

Yeah, incredible. Okay, so by the way, so lowercase capital. So here's what they invested in. Uber, Docker, Optimizely, Style Seat, Instagram, Twitter. Let's see what else. I mean, those are all massive. So it looks like it's, so a good VC fund, like a great return would be like a 5x return of the fund. So if you invest in their fund, they five extra money over the like sort of seven to 10 years.

Sequoia's like kind of top funds might be like nine to 10x. So this one returned over 225x. So like, you know, you put in 100K, you got $22 million out. I like that. It's kind of incredible. Lance Armstrong, we had him on the podcast. And I think before or after the podcast, he was an investor in Chris Sackas fund. And he said that he gave him $100,000 and that saved his family from all.

He's like when I went through all my lawsuits, I like, it was almost going broke. And that saved. He's like, that pulls me through. Okay. Business ideas. So I saw Josh Constantine, the kind of ex-tech crunch guy. I saw him tweet this out. I thought it was a good prompt for startups.

This is what he said specifically. There's 50 million creators across like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, whatever. People whose job is to be a content creator. 50 million creators now, this is the fastest and largest growing. small business, what do they need? And I think this is a great prompt for startup ideas. So you wanted to quickly brainstorm what comes to mind here. So I'll start with one while you, I have the, and I have the thread up while you think about it. You know, for example, e-commerce has been on the rise. And one problem for any e-commerce startup was like, okay,

you need capital for inventory or to run ads. You don't really want to raise from traditional investors because, A, your e-commerce thing might not be like, might not fit a venture. scale return. Might not be a billion dollar company, but it could be an awesome e-commerce company doing 30 million a year. And the second thing is you don't want to give up equity just for this, just to buy Facebook ads and buy inventory with that. You really want some kind of debt. And so Clearbank stepped up and basically created a bank for e-commerce because traditional banks like the Wells Fargoes and chases of the world, they didn't really understand how to assess credit for an e-commerce company, whereas Clearbank was like, look, you connect your Shopify, and I'm

to look at your last six months of sales data, and I know if this is, I know, I know how likely you are to pay back your loan. And the traditional banks didn't know what the fuck, you know, that would even mean. I could print them out my Facebook ad history and my Shopify history, and they would never know what to do with it. And so Clearbank came in and was a bank for e-commerce. And so similarly, I think you could have sort of a clear bank for creators. So, and I think there's a YC company that's doing this. What else comes to mind? What would you do to serve this? This is, the segment. I mean, this is This is definitely a hard question. The boring one is that surely some smart people have figured this out.

I mean, what do these people do for healthcare, I wonder? Yeah, that's where my brain goes to. Like, what are all the boring but super lucrative businesses like healthcare, insurance, lending, and try to build those? Uprey you, are you a freelancer at your company or are you full-time? Freelancer now. I used to be full-time. What do you do for health care? right now I technically don't even have health care.

So I left like six months ago. I just took a bet like, hey, hopefully I don't get them in the next few months. So I start doing something else. So that works when you're 26 or 27 or whatever. But I wonder, that's what I, that's immediately where I went to. I'm like, what do you? Yeah, health care is immediately where I go.

So you're not on your parents anymore after 26. So yeah, that's like a big thing for people starting companies as well. You can't leave because you don't have health insurance. Yeah. So that's immediately shown where I go. I don't know. What else? I mean, it's a good question.

It is a pretty crazy stat. What I want to know is all these people, so like substack is filling this void. They're giving something for creators. It's my opinion that a lot of these people on substack are going to fizzle out in about a year when they're realizing, fuck, I got to do this shit. Like every fucking day. Most of them, I'm not saying there's 50 million successful creators. I'm saying there's 50 million people trying to live the dream of become the next whatever. on YouTube, on Twitch, on substack, on podcasting, whatever, you know.

I love thinking of the tools that they need to actually get their job done. Two of my favorite ones, ones, they're both obvious. Figma. When I see that, I'm like, oh, my God, someone totally should have thought about this. Like, I'm shocked that that's so late. And then another, like, one that's actually crazy simple is Canva. You know Canva? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love Canva. I use that all the time. And I'm like, I can't believe that this didn't. exist beforehand. This is such a blatantly obvious need. Right. And it's like not like a comp, it doesn't appear to be complicated. Yeah. The other, the version of that that I think needs to exist is in the video editing space. So YouTube doesn't have like the tool of YouTube to let you edit your videos. So people use, you know, something between I-Movie, the like kind of final cut pro.

Or if you're on Windows, there's like, I forgot the like name of that awful software. There's like Sony Vega. There's like all kinds of shit like that. And that's still the best today. And those were built pre- YouTube even existing as a thing. And so like even if you just took that as the premise, like, hey, I'm going to build the video editing software that's best for video for YouTubers. And I'm going to build it with YouTube in mind. YouTube is the output. And I'm going to build in all the things that everyone has to do for YouTube anyways.

I think that's a service you could charge for in a Figma style tool because there's enough people and the existing tools. you know, I think you pay for Final Cut. I think you pay for some of these things. The existing tools I think you pay for. So it's not a fun project to build because it's so, like, technical, but I think there's a, there's a Figma-type product there as well. But I would go for financial services or healthcare or something like that for the creator, for the set of creators. When these people, when you were starting your business, you have a thing that you're tinkering with a project. How did you file your LLC? Strait Atlas. Was that good? It's a bit slow. And I think it's a bit more.

expensive than it should be, but it's really easy. So yeah, I've done it. I've done three Stripe Atlas companies because it's just the most convenient way to do it. Hmm. I'm not sure. This is a great question that you actually need to like, I need to like think about, but it is incredibly interesting. I don't know. I feel, I kind of feel like a little bit of a bum because I can't think of anything, but it is a great question. One thing I've learned from you is asking interesting questions actually changes how you think. Yeah. Yeah, forget the answer. I'd take a great question over a great answer any day because a great question can yield many, many interesting answers to explore. Okay, here's another topic that I think is interesting.

Cool company, cool company I just saw today, daybreak health. So it's a company that launched today. What these guys are doing is pretty simple. It's a mental health and therapy app for teens. So, you know, anxiety, depression, and other sort of I don't even know how you would describe it. I don't know this is called mental health conditions or what. But I know for sure anxiety and depression are sort of the two big ones that they're trying to tackle. Extremely prevalent amongst teens. I think like reported is like 20% or 30% of teens experience it.

That's reported. So like, you know, let's say 40, 50% is the real number. 80% never get any help for it. And there's a stigma around it. And there's like all these like complications. And so these guys have kind of a telemedicine solution. So anyways, I think this is a good idea. Yeah.

I mean, put this on the list of things that it's obviously going to be successful. How successful, I don't know. Right. The thing that I think will happen, the thing of the trend that I think will happen is I've now seen that companies are willing to pay as a benefit for meditation apps. So, Com has a bunch of partnership, corporate enterprise partnerships that are like crushing it. There's another one called Ginger that's for mental health that companies are paying for, especially during COVID. know a lot of companies adopted it, but I think mental health is just this huge surging trend and topic that eventually companies will need to provide solutions for their employees for this,

and it will become a total fauxpaw to not have this as part of what you offer your employees. And I think the same thing will happen with schools. I think because of teen suicides and teen sort of mental health issues, school districts and schools will offer this as a free counselor, essentially, a digital counselor. for students. And I think it'll get subsidized by either the federal government, by the states, or in some other way. I am fairly confident that over time this will become part of what's offered, just what's offered as a health solution for schools. It's $365 a month, which comes out to be about $4,600 a year.

It's quite expensive. But that's how much this shit costs. Do you go to therapy? I don't. I have for a long time. I'm not right now, but normally it's where I go, and I don't think it's like a yuppie place. I think it's just like par for the course. It's $250 or $250 or $250 a session.

Yeah. Yeah, you got to have money for it. And, you know, right now these guys charge about half of what a in-person counselor would be. And they said that, you know, they're able to do that because the person doesn't need to have an office. The therapist doesn't need to have an office. And secondly, there's like a job. geographic arbitrage. The therapists live in low-cost areas, and then they serve clients in all over on the world. So you get this like, you know, if you're in New York City, you have to pay

New York City prices. But right now, with this digital thing, with this telemedicine thing, you know, your person might be in Arizona serving you in New York or whatever. So this isn't like a new thing. Like there's talk space has been there. And they claim talk space is they're, according to the articles, they're preparing for an IPO. It's just online therapy. They say they have 5,000 therapists on its platform and one million users. Wow, I didn't realize it preparing for IPO. I know Talkspace, there's seven cups of tea or some shit like that. This one, I know, just targets teens.

I don't know if the other guys specifically brand themselves that way. You know who Talkspace's spokesperson is, right? I think it's, is it them or is that better help? Is Mike Phelps, Michael Phelps. Oh, right, right, yeah, yeah, that's right. Because he kind of went through a dark period too. It's better help, I think, is Mike Phelps' thing. So these are big things.

I would wonder what the churn is for a customer. I think on the surface, I'm like, oh, they never churn. But then I'm like, I bet you they do actually a lot. Yeah, it's sort of like a dating app where in some ways the churn is a good thing. Like if you turn off a dating app, maybe just because you found somebody and you're not a dating app anymore. It could be that if you turn off of a therapy app, you feel like you don't need the therapy anymore because you've sort of turned the corner. Although, I'm not sure if that's how it works. Maybe it's an ongoing practice.

It never ends. This is fascinating. I mean, Better Help claims to have like $70 or $80 million in revenue. Yeah. So I'm not saying these guys are going to be the leader. I just like that they're focused on teens. And I think that I also, you know, the unproven part is will this become baked in as a perk for, as a service available to students that's funded by somebody else. Have you studied Gen Z at all?

Like, I went to, I sound like an old man. I went to conferences and they had discussions on Gen Z. And like the stats were that they're, to me, it was shockingly depressed. right shockingly and good for this business they're super open-minded so like like when i was a kid if you said you went to therapy like i mean to be crude someone be like what are you gay like uh like like you know what i mean like you're like fucking gay like that's what people would say right when you're 12 years old yeah exactly like 20 years ago um now i don't think that that's even close to a thing like i don't even think anyone would like you know i don't think they would say that shit to you yeah now

it's like a status symbol in Silicon Valley. If you're not going to therapy, like, oh, it's like not, you don't go to the gym? Interesting. Well, like, when we are a kid, like, that's what you say. You're like, dude, don't be gay. Like, that's what they say. And I was talking to some nephews. And I was like, do you guys ever, like, call each other gay?

They're like, well, if someone's gay, I'm like, yeah, but like, you make fun of someone and call someone gay, they're like, you mean because they, like, are homosexual? I'm like, yeah, they're like, why would we ever do that? And I was like, nice. You guys are different. I remember the first time. Yeah, when I was 10, 20. well, that was like just part of the slang.

I remember the first time I said it and somebody was like, hey, that's not, that's not cool. It was a, it was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was in middle school, I was in a movie. I was in two movies, actually. And they're like, these small, like, kind of like Indian American movies. They're like, in English, but they're like all Indian cast. They're about Indian, Indian stories or whatever. So the guy, Cal Penn, who ended up being, you know, Harold and Kumar, he's Kumar. So he was my older brother in the movies.

And so. No way. So we were hanging out and I was like, oh my God, that's so gay. And again, I'm 12 year old kid. And he was like, he's like, you know, that's not cool to say that. Like, you shouldn't, you shouldn't say that. Here's why. But why he started telling me.

And I just remember being like, what is this guy talking about? Like everybody says this. And he was like, you know, from L.A. I'm living in Texas at the time. So like it took like a decade for the message to get from New York in L.A. where people probably realized early on like this is, hey, this kind of messed up to like get to Texas where I was at. Because I remember literally it was 10 years. I remember that was one isolated incident.

And then it's like eight more years I said it. And then finally I was like, oh, oh, yeah, okay. I'm right. Yeah, my bad. Sorry about that. I didn't realize what I was doing. Yeah, that's what I had the, I had that feeling when I, when I was talking like our nephews. I was like, so you guys don't ever say that.

I'm like, that's crazy. You're so open-minded and like, health, like kind of healthy and more mature. So I definitely learned that. I'm like, wait, you don't, so like you won't make fun of him for like, why would you ever, like, what's wrong with being gay? I'm like, yeah, you're right. But that's just not how we, that's just we would say that word. Right. It's actually funny because it's not only that saying, calling something gay, when what you're really trying to say is that's weird, that's stupid, that's lame or something, whatever. It's not only that that phrase is like revealed to be really dumb and hurtful and all that stuff, but all the activities that you were talking about as gay also became totally normal. mainstream healthy good behaviors.

It's like, oh, therapy, meditating, yoga. Like being a vegetarian or vegan. It's like, what are you? A gay monk? Right, like sharing your feelings. It's like, well, having a good friendship. Yeah, I am a gay monk.

That's awesome. I guess we'll end there. Yeah, we'll spend the podcast on this. Cool.