My First Million - Creators Who Have Made $50M+, Multi-Million Car Businesses, and Sam Altman

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Episode 408: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about multi-million dollar car businesses, Shaan's business offer for a female listener, creators who have made $50M plus, and Billy of the Week Sam Altman. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. ----- Links: * Bring a Trailer * Shaan's tweet * More Plates More Dates * Gorilla Mind * Marek Health * Kayla Itsines * Mark Rober * Ben Shapiro * Jeremy's Razors * Chamberlain Coffee * Pat McAfee Show * Dani Austin * Divi * Mindy McKnight * Christian Guzman * Sam Altman * Suli quotes * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (03:00) - Bring a trailer (13:50) - Creators who have made more than $50M (31:10) - Billy of the Week: Sam Altman (49:50) - Suli quotes ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

So he's got, is it the Daily Wire? Is that what it's called? Daily Wire. So this is like a subscription media company that he created because they're just sort of like anti-mainstream media. That became a big thing like fake news and F the mainstream media. Well, why don't we create an alternative, the Daily Wire? And the Daily Wire does some insane numbers.

It's like only in year three or four or something like this. Very new. And it does over 100 million a year in subscription revenue. Yeah. And have you heard of their spin-off Jeremy's Razors? No. What is that? Dude, you've got to go to the.

Dude, I've had a hell of a of a day. I'm not going to say who, but check this out. Friend wanted to come skateboarding with me. So naturally, he got a concussion. So I took him to the hospital. By the way, did you even get like an hour of skateboarding in or was this like? I got an hour in. I got an hour in.

Yeah. And then he was getting hyped up seeing me do stuff. He fell, hit his head, take him to the hospital to get his concussion checked out. Turns out while we, while we were there, while they were getting the scan, their appendix ruptured, and they get rushed overnight, or they have to stay there overnight, get rushed to a different hospital, emergency appendix surgery.

So this head injury basically saved his life, and they were like, I don't know, like, this is just a gift from God, but you definitely could have died from this. Did the appendix get damaged in the skateboard fall, or just separately happened to be the same time? Separate. It's just a weird turn of events, very separate.

So that's where I've been. So I'm a little disshuffled. But I'm wearing my cool guy jacket now. That's my new thing. I'm going to be the token cool guy. You could be the nerd. Congrats. No, this is real leather, bro.

This ain't Tesla vegan leather. But I'm in my cool guy outfit, so I'm good to go. Yeah. Cool is what I would describe that as. So that's good. All right. Where shall we start? Where do you want to start?

Are we still? Is Sam still showing up? to the B-Y-O-B empty-handed, or is he bringing ideas to the table? Where are we at with this whole Sam does research thing? I know you started with a doctor's note there. So is that your excuse for why you don't have any topics? I just went over a lot of my topics. I was someone who did the topics. Oh, you want to talk about your new seed oil-only diet? And that what you told me that you're doing a seed oil only diet? All-oil diet? Dude, so like seed oils are all the rage right now. Is it just in my world?

We started talking about them, and now I'm seeing everywhere. People are so anti-seed oils. My friend Dennis was like, screw it. I'm only eating seed oils from now on. I looked yesterday at the bag of, I was like, you know what? I kind of want to have one of these little bag of this little pretzel thing for a second. Let me just check the stats on this. I was like, ah, it's not so bad, not too many calories, whatever.

And I looked at the ingredients. I saw canola oil on there or something like that, you know, sunflower oil, whatever these things are. and it was a Sam voice in my head that just told me, these things kill you. And so I decided to put it down. I drank a big tall glass of water instead. So pretty big net win there for me. Yeah, I don't know why it's bad for you,

but someone on Twitter told me it was, therefore it's true. If it's written down on Twitter or if it rhymes or if it's like a cute phrase, I automatically believe it. Alliterations, rhymes are four people I don't know. Any one of those three, and I'm in. Let me tell you. two things. One, you said something about like, oh, it's beautiful, it's well done. And it reminded me. Yesterday, I found what would be an amazing DDC product. Not amazing, like, hundreds of millions of dollars, but a DDC business that I know would just, it would work. It would work really well. It would be very profitable.

I'm looking. If somebody wants to operate it, I will just simply give you an idea and a playbook. And then I'll take my share. And we can, we can start company. But basically, it would require somebody who's good at things that are beautifully done. So this, I think, requires the feminine touch. So I'm sort of fishing in a dry pond here with this, with this podcast. But to our four female listeners, if any of the four of you, you got a 25% chance each here to step in and take it. Or to one of our male listeners, if you, I don't know, see a female today, let her know about this opportunity. I'm looking for somebody who could do something that is a product is beautifully done. It would be a successful DTC product.

I have no doubt in my mind. You would just need to be good at a couple of things, you know, an aesthetically beautiful brand and short form video content, TikToks or getting them made by other people if you don't do them yourself. But it's easier. All right. You have been the palm of your hand.

Tell me what it is. I can't tell you on air because I don't want everybody to copy it. I will tell you off air. Wait, really? Yes. Dude, this was the lamest segment. Is that really it? That's really what you want to do?

That's really what I'm going to do here. If it happens, then we can reveal it. And if it doesn't happen, then I'll also reveal it because I have nothing to lose at that point. So just not yet. I was going to remind people, this is usually a segment where I remind people of our gentleman's agreement where we work for you now. But all you have to do is go to our YouTube channel and subscribe. That's a gentleman's agreement. It's called the gentleman's agreement because I can't check to see if it's true.

So it's just based on trust. But after that lame. I just violated it. Yeah. That's late. So if you want to do the gentleman's agreement, we owe you now. All right. I'm in the penalty box, but I'm going to fight my way out.

Okay, so here we go. I tweeted something out the other day that I think is very interesting and reminds me of the Doug DeMorrow, a YouTube creator. Yeah. A YouTube creator who's not just going to make money off YouTube out of revenue, but has built a business that they built basically a $50 million plus empire off YouTube. Why did I ask this question? Well, your boy's going to start doing YouTube content. But your boy also wants to make more than $50 million doing this process. And so I wanted to see who has done this before because I'm not really interested in being a pioneer.

The pioneers get slaughtered, right? So I don't want to be a pioneer doing this. I want to be sort of a fast follower. So I was looking for examples and I got a bunch out of this tweet. I want to read some of them off to you and see what you think about these. First one. By the way, when you tweeted that, I don't know if it's because I know you well or if everyone could read through the lines here.

But it was very much like, tell me what to do at my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, hey, can you just, can you validate my parking pass here? Yeah. I need some, need something. So first one's right up your alley. More plates, more dates. Love it.

More plates, more dates. You probably know this story a little better than I do. I didn't know he was doing this because I watched his videos. He doesn't really pump product as much, or at least in the clips that I've seen. If you watch closely, he does. Not in an obnoxious way. Right. So this guy, Derek, super likable guy, puts out great content.

I'm not even really interested in, like, testosterone and, like, steroid usage. and occasionally I am with certain athletes, but usually not. But I find myself just watching this guy's videos because I like this guy a lot. Apparently he's got a brand or maybe two brands. One brand, you know the name of it? Yeah, one's called Merrick Health. And the other one is called Gorilla. What's it called?

Guerrilla Mind. Yeah. So Gorilla Mind, if you go to Gorilla Mind, guerrilla Mind is getting, I want to say, almost two million, between one and two million visits a month, right? So let's say a million visits a month. I think it's pretty safe that this brand is doing about a million dollars a month in revenue. So 12 million a year in revenue on his supplements brand.

I think more. I would take the more on that one. Yeah. Yeah. That's a conservative estimate. I wouldn't be surprised if it was as high as $4 million a month. And supplements are an amazing niche to be in, right? Like everybody wants to be in the supplements niche.

So that's great. Just gave you, by the way, two pronunciations of niche back to back, just to appeal to both sides of the aisle. You totally redeemed yourself. And then Merrick is this TRT clinic. So they basically do kind of like, you know, help men, you know, stay young. So hormone replacement, hair loss, sexual wellness, all this stuff. This thing's got to be doing pretty well, too. And I think they also do the semi-glutide stuff as well.

I don't, did he start this or what? Because it has like 200 employees on LinkedIn. Is he just a partner or he started it? I think he's an equity owner. I don't know if he's the guy, but I think he's so popular that it appears as though he's a main guy and he's definitely pulling his weight. I know a lot of people who use Merck Health. I don't know anyone who uses Gorillamine. I think Gorillamine's a horrible name for a supplement company.

But I trust Derek. I think the branding on this is wrong, but it's interesting. And what's really interesting is like he sells creatine. Do you anything about creatine? It's awesome for one. And number two, it's basically like a. It's been, it's amazing.

You ever heard of creatine? It's awesome. You have, but I'm Oz there. I'm almost positive that creatine is like a commodity. Like, it's almost like all the same. And he's selling it,

but he has an upset. He marked it up because it's Derek. But yeah, that's a good example of a creator killing it. And by the way, these examples I specifically said, I said, you get kicked out of the party.

If you come in here and you say Joe Rogan or Mr. Beast or like it has to be somebody else. Like, not the examples everybody always. talks about. So here's here's a couple others. Okay. So here's some that I'll go in order of the ones you know to the ones I think you don't know. So another one you know, Kayla Itzines. I don't know how you say her last name. Kayla Itzines, I think. No, I think it's like it's new or something. I think it's pronounced a little bit different. But if you're, if you're one of

the four of women listeners, they 100% know who she is. There's one time that I tried to pronounce like Hermes or something like that on this podcast or like Hermes. Yeah. I got a lot of shit for that. Yeah, one time I heard you pronounce the Tahi. You're not exactly good at pronouncing things. My mouth doesn't fully work. Yeah, I got a stick tongue. So she created this app.

So she's like a fitness influencer type person, ends up creating an app called the Sweat app. I believe they sold it for $400 million. So her and her husband or boyfriend and then they broke up, but they kept building the business together. I don't know what ended up happening there, but it sounded like there was some drama. $400 million on this exit.

I thought that was a great example of not just saying, cool, I'm going to hold up a detox tea and get paid $5,000 for a shoutout. I'm actually going to create a business off of my following. Mark Rober. So Mark Rober, he's a former NASA engineer. He makes like engineering videos like, oh, I built the world's biggest t-shirt canon. I love this guy. He built a cool.

Yeah, he's really likable guy. He's like, you know, the science teacher, everyone's favorite science teacher type of guy. He has a monthly subscription box. I think that does like, it's like a science kit and you're like, you get to build little products yourself. And that's a great idea, super on brand. It's 25, 30 bucks. This thing is, I think, doing millions of dollars a year pretty safely.

He's got a very, very big following. 23 million, I think, on YouTube. I mean, he's like one of the big guys. Yeah, he's been around for a long time. Okay, another one you probably know Ben Shapiro. So Ben Shapiro is, by the way, I'm going to make a little prediction. You don't agree with everything he says, but you kind of love this guy. Yeah.

Yeah. Lots up. Yeah. I'm projecting. I also feel the same way. Yeah. I like his nerd swagger. And he's just fast mouth.

He just like says things very distinctly and quickly. And I don't believe in most of the things he says. I believe in maybe some of them. He's pretty religious. And I'm not into, I'm not into religion. But he says a lot of stuff that I'm like, dude, just the fact that you came with that like pretty brutal reply so quickly, I respect you. Yeah. It's like a rap battle, right?

Like you just, at the end of the day, you know, whoever kind of insults the other person the fastest and the best wins. And he does not have a thick tongue like your boys do. So he's just that thin tongue. Yeah, he's good, man. So he's got, is it the Daily Wire? Is that what it's called? Daily Wire.

So this is like a subscription media company that he created because they're just sort of like anti-mainstream media. That became a big thing like fake news. F the mainstream media. Well, why don't we create an alternative? the Daily Wire. And the Daily Wire does some insane numbers. It's like only in year three or four or something like this. Very new. And it does over $100 million a year in subscription revenue. Yeah. And have you heard of their spinoff? Jeremy's Razors? No. What is that? Dude, you got to go to this. So go to, it's just Google like Daily Wire Razor company. But so basically, uh, Dollar Shay or Harry's Razor was one of their sponsor. So basically Ben Shapiro's conservative or he's right wing, whatever he's, you call him. And so naturally like,

the left hates him and the right loves him because they feel like they're being canceled all the time. And so Harry's Razors was one of their biggest or big advertisers. And they bailed. They, you know, said, you know, we're not going to associate with Ben. You know, you're screwed up. And so the founder or or one of the co-founders and CEO of the Daily Wire, his name is Jeremy. And so if you go to Jeremy's Razors, you'll see the website. And they made this crazy video where they just said like, it's actually pretty hilarious, regardless of you agree with them or not. But they created this video that's like a hype video and it was launched nine months ago and it has 22 million views and they're selling millions and millions of dollars. They basically just took the Harry's razors.

Genius. Their site is identical to Harry's razors, but they just call it Jeremy's razors. And it's like, and the picture is this guy who's, he's like smoking a cigar. It's basically a big middle finger to Harry's razors. On the about page, it says, Harry's and the Daily Wire had a deal. They paid us. We advertised their razors. But after we said that boys, our boys and girls are girls, they publicly condemned our views as inexcusable and misaligned. And you know what? You're damn right. Our values are misaligned. We value truth and the right to speak. We embrace masculinity and the courage to uphold it. And so that's like their whole schick. It's us versus them. Regardless of what you feel about that, if you think it's right or wrong, very, they capitalized

on something and it's doing well. This is so good. This is, wow, this is an amazing, amazing little case here. The video that's the like ad, the launch video for this, it starts with a, it's like professionally made and basically it starts with like you hear like a car and you're in a parking lot and it shows like the parking signs and it's like, you know, the daily wire. And then it says God King and a guy pulls up in a McLaren and he gets out with a blow torch. And he goes inside and just blow torches a bunch of like Harry's like merchandise and just sets it on fire. And it's like such a, such a smart thing to do to take this like great business model, right, the classic kind of Gillette, you know, razor cartridge model.

And then just be like, no, this is the one done by us, for us, right? Like, that is so smart. And I feel like that just opens the door for them to do this in five other categories. Yeah, it's a very, very intriguing case study of what these guys are doing. So, yeah, that's a good one. Can you write the word Jeremy on a stick of deodorant? Yes, you can. All right, great.

Can you write Jeremy on a tub of toothpaste? Great. Yep, you sure can. What else can I write the word Jeremy on? That's not, there's now a guy running. around grocery stores being like, we can write Jeremy on that. We can write Jeremy on this. Oh my God, guys.

The opportunities massive. Yeah, they're like, hey, Republicans like sunscreen. Let's do that. White people get sunburned. This is going to totally work. Yeah, interesting case study. All right, what else is there? All right.

So then there's kind of like the Emma Chamberlain, a lot of people talk about her coffee thing. People know that. Pat McAfee. Killing it. You know, he kind of did a four-year, a $120 million deal with Van Duel for his NFL show, which is pretty insane.

That's like an absolutely insane, like, brand deal to pull off. Okay, then there's some others that I hadn't even heard of. He's also the host of, like, WWE. Do you know that? He's like an announcer there. He's kind of crossed. I went down a very deep Pat McAfee rabbit hole one night because I was like, I think I love this guy.

He's amazing. And I was like, I'm doing this for the pod, this research. And then three hours in, I was like, this isn't for the pod. This is for my soul. I just enjoy this. watching this whole journey. And I was also like, I don't think there's even a story here for the podcast. I just think I really like this content.

And I never talked about it. I just did three hours one night and I just never brought it up. There was one time where I thought about our setup and I'm like, we should do it standing up because he stands up when he records and I love it. He also wears a tag top, which I know you love. Yeah. So win-win. All right.

So here's some others that I didn't even know who these people are. Danny Austin, have you ever heard this person? No. Okay. So she created a brand called Divy, and it's basically scalp care for women. So she basically took a problem in her life, which was, I think, maybe as she was aging or postpartum, maybe, she was struggling with hair loss, which is actually pretty common for women to struggle with hair loss.

Like, I know my wife, like, after we had every time, like, you go kind of like after you have a baby, like your body's just producing whatever different hormones. And there's like, they all like complain about like, you know, their hair thinning or hair loss. It's a very common thing. So anyways, she creates a brand. She first was just talking about the struggle. and then she stole the solution. So her content was,

everyone's like, oh my God, Danny, so vulnerable, so authentic. Oh, my God. So, like,

I'm so glad you're speaking up on these issues and like, you're a beautiful queen. You're so beautiful. This is like, don't worry about it. And then she sold a solution,

which was like the scalp care thing. And she did $20 million in the first like 10 months or something crazy. That's crazy. So it just like took off right away like a rocket. So I like that one. By the way, do you ever watch dandruff videos on TikTok? That's like my favorite type of content.

People just like flaking off dandruff. You ever do that? People like pop and zits too? Dude, because I got crazy dandruff. If I like itch my head, there's going to be a snow day. I'm always looking for like a good, a good dandruff shampoo. And I love watching dandruff videos on TikTok. It's a huge niche.

Don't wear black around Sam. Yeah. Not good. So this is this woman named Mindy McKnight. This is another cool example. So she started a brand called Cute Girl Hair, which she was, because she was just doing hairstyle. Love that name.

YouTube. Yeah, great name. Honestly, amazing name. Yeah. She was making YouTube content, just doing hairstyles for her girls. That's cool content.

Oh, here's how we do this hairstyle. Here's how we do this one. It's kind of like, you know, what your big sister should have taught you or something like that. And I think her story is like she has five kids. I might butcher the story because I just, I don't remember it. This was like a couple weeks ago when I saw this.

But like, I think she's got five kids or something like that. And they all have different hairstyles or textures that may have adopted or something like that. And so. She's like her content is showing like this wide range of like hairstyles and how you can make them all look cute no matter what your hair is. Right. That's great. She does a launch with Walmart.

And it's the second biggest launch with Walmart. She just, they're doing nine figures in sales. So over a hundred million in sales. And her YouTube channel has five and a half million subs. Her twin daughters have YouTube have a YouTube channel with seven million subs. Right. Like this is just kind of insane how big that launch can be when it's like total alignment between. creator, their personal story, their content, and then their product once they have the

distribution. And so that was pretty inspiring to me. I really like that. And now, now I have a good excuse to spend all day just making fun content for free and being like, don't worry, one day, this is all going to become actual, like, this will be real work. This is not just me getting to play around and like, you know, be on YouTube all day. All right.

Well, what else is there? I mean, cute girl harrow, great name. What else you got? Well, okay, I just gave you seven, but like we can keep going if we'd like. Oh, I thought you had a few. There's one guy that I find very fascinating that I saw someone mention on your thing. Guzman is his name Christian? I didn't know who this was.

A lot of people mentioned him. So Guzman, he's, I guess, a fitness influencer. He's got Affolete or something like that, Alphalit. Yeah, I don't know if his, I think his niche is like Texans. I think he's Hispanic. So I think he has like a huge Hispanic following. But basically he's like a rip guy. But he like has like weaved in his family.

into his content so you like know about his life and he's like a family guy he launched something like a 50,000 square foot gym called alpha land uh so probably not in your wheelhouse but it's called alpha land and uh they're like a sister branch for a made of dudes yeah we go there to watch what's going on in alpha land is there like a gymnastics like part of that uh we stretch and watch other men work out yeah it's called alpha land it's like a 50 000 square foot gym i figure it where it is san antonio or Houston or Dallas or one of those folks, one of those places where you'd expect an Alpha Land. And he also has a clothing line. And I think he's killing it. I think he's doing a big business. Right. I like how you acted like you hadn't been there or don't have a membership, but like we know.

Okay, yeah. So this is my, these are my $50 million creators. And all of these people, I think, have built off of their YouTube content, you know, an empire that's easily worth $50 million or more. You made fun of me for not preparing, and you prepared that list. I think I knew more about all of them than you did. Yeah, because you're like a real consumer of content. Right? Like, I'll be like, oh, they use this technology in this music video. You're like, yeah, I love that music video. And I'm like, I haven't watched a music video.

And it literally has been 17 years since I've watched a single music video. I went to your house and you just had music videos on TV on loop. I love music videos. I was like, this is what you watch? And you're like, I just leave it on. Yeah, I love music videos. I just, I ran out of questions because I was like, wow, this is just a different thing that just doesn't happen in my world. No, I watch music videos constantly.

So, yeah, that's one of the ways I know about stuff. Also, my wife is a little bit younger. So she just turned 30. So when we were dating, you know, only a couple years ago, she was like in her 20s. Yeah. Well, hey, I said younger than me. And she's got a younger sister. So I'm kind of, I got my toe in the cool kids market.

Yeah, you like, you see people, you leave the house, you take supplements, you watch music videos, you watch movies, you read biographies, you do a lot of things that like, you know, I simply don't do. I'm like a, I'm just like a heat seeking missile for like, what's the interesting story? And then my stories are typically like, did you know that there's this? And then for most normal people are like, yeah, I love that. I love their channel. You're watching Markover for years.

You're a potato. What you see is what you get. You can pull the skin back a little bit. It gets something new. I'm like an onion, bro. There's layers. There's lots of layers. It goes all the way to the core.

The layers don't stop. Yeah, but French fries are made out of me, and I think that that's kind of a win. Dude, all right, let me tell you something interesting. And this is more so I want to put this on record that I brought this up about two years ago. But remember when I told you about the company Bring a Trailer? Yeah, yeah. You said you were talking about car. companies or auction companies, something like that.

And you were like, dude, there's this thing. You've been told me, this is like a long time ago, four years ago. A long time ago. You were like, dude, there's this thing called bring a trailer. It's sick. You can just buy a car on this auction thing. I don't even know how it works exactly. You're like, it started by this guy, Doug DeMoy.

No, you're confusing two things. It was the guy from inbox or whatever, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was started, the main guy, I forget his name, Nathan, I think. The non-main guy, but also co-founder, I think his name is Gentry Underwood. And he started this, company called Mailbox, which is like an email thing that sold for reportedly $100 million to Dropbox, like before it even launched because it built up such a huge wait list. And it sounds like a cool product.

I don't even think it got launched. But anyway, it's this website called Bring a Trailer. And if you go to it, it just looks like almost like a blog. It's fairly unsophisticated. Honestly, I think it's a WordPress. And what they do is there's this neat niche of car enthusiasts who like things from like the 70s to like early 90s, which like my jacket yeah yeah exactly like my jacket and it started out small but it sold recently and it was recently-ish announced that they last year in the trailing 12 months sold something like $1.2 billion worth of cars in one year and they made something like $100 million in net revenue with like 80 employees and you go to their website and it's so basic and people love it and there's this guy named Doug DeMorrow who has a YouTube channel where he reviews all types of cars and he does it just with an

like an iPhone and he like always has like have you know like a bacon collar have you heard of a bacon collar it's like where you wear an undershirt on your on your shirt and your white shirt the collar is all like shuffled or like the the the white sleeves are like coming down below your polo you know I'm talking about okay so your undershirt is showing is that the idea yeah where you're like under like he's like it's like like where you're wearing like imagine a guy wearing cargo shorts and like an old navy t-shirt with like like a Hollister polo above it and like you have a bacon collar. Like he just looks totally disshuffled. It's incredibly unprofessional looking.

Okay. I got the definition. Shirts that have a wavy neck due to being stretched out or from improper care. Yeah. It's just like, the very typical. This is how all my shirts look. You're a bacon collar guy. So that's what this guy is.

Doug's a bacon collar guy. But he's hilarious and he's lovable and he's likable. And he's built this YouTube channel. like he'll review like a $2 million Ferrari as well as like a $30,000 Honda pilot. And it's right. Pretty hilarious. He's got three or four million subscribers on YouTube now. I told you about two years ago, maybe I forget when, maybe three years ago, he launched

this new company called Cars and Bids and it's very similar to bring a trailer. And so I predict that this is actually going to be a multi-hundred million dollar exit. And I want to make my prediction there now that that's going to happen. But what's really interesting here is curated auctions. I think that's very fascinating. because the reason it's fascinating is if you go to eBay, have you been to eBay in the last like five years? I have not.

Dude, no, like not a lot of people do. Of course, a lot of people do, but like not a lot of people do. And it's because it's one of those things. No one goes there anymore. Perfect description. It's got like 100 million visitors. You don't know any of them. Yeah, it's too crowded.

No one goes there anymore. And so it's one of those things where like you go to eBay and you like that one? Oh, smooth. It was really the timing that I enjoyed there. You go to eBay. Bay and you get overwhelmed with options. And there's a couple of businesses that I've been looking at where I'm trying to think of what a curated auction could be because I think it's like, I think it's cool and it feels

it's just a beautiful experience, you know? That's what we, that's our phrase. It's just like an auction, but it's just beautifully done. Yeah, it's beautifully done. It's just really well done. Anytime people can say like handcrafted or like ultra premium. That's what this is. And I really have been digging this.

I invested in a company that is doing this for home. Because I've been looking at, like, what are big ticket items that people will buy online that they previously didn't, but they will because it's more well curated? So, like, for example, we talked about, I can never say it right, but Hodinkie. We had Kevin Rose, the founder. They sell, like, you can buy like a $40,000 watch online, and they do a really good job of editorializing it. So I've been thinking, what are other categories where someone can buy something online that's $30 to $100,000, even a million dollars plus. but if you curate it nicely and you describe it nicely with beautiful photos. So in the same way that Airbnb, I don't know if you know this, but they used to send out photographers

to the really nice listings because they're like, well, you charge $1,000 a night with better pictures. You can charge $1,500 a night. So it's worth it to us to help you make your shit look better. What else is like that, these curated auctions can work at? Because I think they're really, really cool companies to run. And they're really hard to break once they work. Once they work, it's like the people working there, you guys are important.

but like the community has taken hold. You are just a, you're just there to help the community. It's no longer your business that you're pushing down people's throats. Golf equipment. Golf equipment? Golf equipment.

Really? How much is an expensive? Why do you say that? Well, you have an enthusiast market. You have kind of like a knowledge gap of which one should I get. What's better? What's worse?

Blah, blah. you have a super premium price point. And I think a golfer over the course of their lifetime is going to spend, you know, probably upwards of $10,000 on equipment. And I think that because I think the thing you want is like cars, you want a high ticket, right? You need a high ticket.

You need ability to drive high ticket customers to something. And so I think that's one where people will nerd out on the content and get there. But I have other, what you said, by the way, is a perfect lead into two things I want to talk about. Wait, let me say mine. Livestock. Livestock. Like animals? Hell yeah, dog.

Dude, my, my, so listen to this. My cousins, they're cowboys. So they buck bowl. Surprise. It's called, if you ask them what they do, they'll go, I buck bowls. Which means they live in rural Oklahoma. And when I went to their house once, and instead of, like, it was a Thursday night. And instead of going to, like, the community softball game, we went to the community

rodeo. And there was only like 20 people in the stands, but they are practicing their rodeo, which is basically you get on a bowl and bulls are mean. Bulls want to kill you even if you raised them. They're just like mean. And they get on these bowls and they buck them off. And the bull, the person who stays on the longest gets a prize, but the bull who bucks the hardest based off of like judging wins a prize. And some of these bowls cost 50 grand. My parents bought into a bowl for $50,000.

And they get a portion of the like the offspring, like the. the sperm that they sell, and they get a portion of the winnings from the bull. Is it a good investment? They make money off of it, yeah. And they, what kind of money are we talking here?

What did it do? The return's not like that great, but like, I don't know, you get a couple grand every once in a while. So it's like not that great. And like the bowl can like break its leg and you're screwed. But like,

should we go have these on a bull? It is pretty interesting to own a bull. But it's a, it's a huge sport in certain parts of the country. my cousin went to college on a scholarship for buck and bulls for being a rodeo guy. And all these folks, it's cash. So they'll come to the rodeo with like 10, 30, 40 grand in cash. And they're like playing right there on it.

It's very fascinating. You've never been to a livestock auction? Sure haven't. Dude, it's dope. It's awesome. I do think we should go have these on a bowl. If there's a bull dealer in the audience, hit us up. We are in the market for one.

and we'll live stream our bull purchase. Yeah, this is great. Okay, so livestock, that's one. Yeah, sure. I like that. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess,

but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. All right, I think I've kind of done this, but I went even deeper down this rabbit hole. So I got to bring him back. as a new billy of the week.

A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. The new billy of the week is an old billy of the week. It's Sam Altman. And you would think, Sam, you know, you got nothing new to say here. What is Sam Altman?

We all know Sam Altman. We've talked about Sam Altman. Dude, Sam Altman's, Sam Elton's onion status. He's got layers. Okay, so I want to read you some of the interesting, I went down to Sam Elton, a rabbit hole last night.

Here's why. He did an interview. and I was watching. You got to explain who he is for the nudes out there. For people who don't know Sam Altman is, he's like an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He created one company. He didn't go that far called Looped.

Sold it for $40 billion. Then he, but he went through Wycombinator, the big accelerator down here. When he was like 19. And the founder of Wycombiner, super impressed with him and kept him on his partner and eventually named him president of YC,

which is like one of like, it's like being named the dean of Harvard after being a Harvard student because the dean thought you were so special. And so that's literally what he did. He became the president of YC, grew YC. He then created the nonprofit OpenAI. He then left to go work on Open AI. Open AI is now behind ChatGPT, which is like one of the fastest growing tech waves that's out there,

basically an artificial intelligence platform that's, I think they launched ChatGPT and I think got 10 million users in like 10 days or something. ridiculous like that? It's worth $40 billion. The company's worth somewhere between $20, $40 billion now, and he's the leader of that thing, too. Plus, he's a prolific investor. It was an investment much of things. All right. So I got some of those facts coming. But that's, and most people know Sam Alman. I'm not bringing up a surprise. If you listen to this pod, you probably know who he is. Okay. But here's some of the things I didn't know. I was listening to this interview and they go, you invested in this fusion company.

And I'm thinking, okay, fusion. I still don't know what the hell that is, but I know smart people talk about it. Okay, great. And they go, you let you let you. the investment. Okay, that's fine. He led the investment. You wrote a $375 million check into Hewian. And I was like, what? You know, screw. Like, rewind. What, what do this person just say? And I literally went back and I re-listened to it. And I was like, oh, I didn't know Sam Altman has like a giant venture fund. Like, surely he's not writing a $375 million check himself. As far as I could tell, that is what he did. He wrote a $375 million. dollar check himself.

And that got me down the rabbit hole of where did, how did Sam Altman get so wealthy? Because I've heard several stories now. So for example, when he started Open AI or even when he was president of YC, he donated $10 million to a science research, like a project that he created, right? Like science research nonprofit.

To donate $10 million dollars means you got a lot more than $10 million. And at that time, I was like, how did he get $10 million? Because again, his first startup, which he was like, whatever, 18 or 19, sold for $41 million. Out of that, he said that he got $5 million. So somehow he parlayed $5 million.

And in a very short amount of time, about four or five years, was now donating $10 million. So that was the first thing. Oh, wow. It was that short. That didn't make sense. And I was like, okay, so this is now, you know, maybe six years, max later. Okay.

Then what else did he do? He also donated to, you know, when he started Open AI, but they didn't say how much. And then this $375 million check. So I started going back and trying to figure out what's going on. So starts looped, sells it, and that's about $5 million. From there, how old was he at that $5 million, like $22, 23? Yeah, something like that. I don't have the exact timeline, but I think he's in his young, early 20s is pretty safe to say there.

He then starts investing in startups. And so he's investing in startups. Second investment is, drum roll please, the best investment of the decade, Stripe. So he's one of the first investors in Stripe. That was his second investment. And there's this thing that I've noticed, which is in DTC brands, they call your first kind of like couple months, your golden cohort. It's like, I notice this about our customers and my ecom brand, but I noticed this across

many brands, which is your first, that first batch of customers you get. For some reason, their LTV is way higher. And it kind of makes sense because it's actually like the people who immediately get it with your message are willing to adopt your. thing before you're a big brand, they probably really have the problem or they're heavy enthusiasts. There's the equivalent thing in investing. For some reason, it's very common for people's first sort of five to ten investments to do extremely well in the world of angel investing.

When you're for great investors, often their best hits come early, like Chris Saka, who's one of the best early stage investors of all time, his, one of some of his earliest investments were basically, you know, the combination of Twitter, Uber, Instagram, you know, things like that. And they came in kind of the first 10, 15 deals that he did. And I feel like that's the only stuff he did. Like those were the hits and then everything. He did so well, he retired. Right. He became a billionaire and essentially retired from the game because he was like, well, my first fund was like a whatever, 6,000 X. I'm good. Sam said that in his first 40 deals, at that at that time, he had invested in 40 deals. He was two years in. And he said that five of the

companies were doing really good. And then it was like, what's really good mean? It was over 100x. So what's that mean? By the, that's not really good. That's ridiculously good. So what's a, $50,000? How big of it, maybe $25,000? What's 100 times a 25,000? Well, you're violating the no public math rule, but is that 2.5 or $25 million? So 50,000 turns into $5 million for 100x. Wow. Okay. And so you stack five of those. That says pretty good. That's like, okay, where do you get all this money? How was he doing all these deals? Was he just investing out of that $5 million? And the reality was, yes, he was investing personally. But I texted a friend. So I was like, yeah, I'm looking up Sam, I'm like, did he write this check personally? How did he get all this

money? And this is somebody else who's young, smart and friends with Sam and that crude. He's like, I think it was, I think this check was personal, this $375 million check. He's like, I think so, but it might have been an SPV. And I was like, I was like, dude, I feel like there's like some underground, you know, like team prodigy thing where like, there is. If you're, if you turn 18 years old and you're like a phenom, Peter Thiel just gives you $100 million. And I was like, I was laughing and I was like, you know, I think you're in that club too. He's just laughing.

He's like, yeah, Peter does actually back it. So I go and I Google it. Sure enough, Sam Alvin, right after he saw his first thing raises a $21 million fund from Peter Teal. There 100% is, dude. I know a few of these prodigies. There is a club. They exist.

So people talk about like, like, you know, oh, what do they say? You know, it's that boys club and I can't ever break into it. Unfortunately, that's true. It's real. They exist. You and I aren't in that club. Maybe we have our own club, but these type of like elite clubs, they're real. They're 100% real.

So somebody said something they were like, you know, Sam, they were asking Paul Graham, I think. They were like, what stood out to you about Sam? Because from the very beginning, I've talked about this before. From the very beginning, I think 2007, 2008, Paul Graham wrote a blog post about who are the five most impressive people he's met in Silicon Valley or who does he admire or look up to or whatever. And it was like Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey from Google and Sam Altman. And it was like, one of these does not belong. One guy invented Apple, another guy invented Google.

Who's this kid I've never heard of? And he was like, when I talked to Sam Altman, I think, oh, this is what it would have been like to talk to Bill Gates when he was 20 years old. And I was just like, what an epic call for a guy who's now gone on to do some pretty amazing things. There was a story I'd never heard, though, or two stories that I thought were. pretty remarkable. I think there was a situation where at his school, when he was in high school, there was a protest from like the Christian or Catholic, you know, some protesters that were like,

you know, protesting the, I forgot exactly what it was. He's from my hometown. He probably went to, he's from St. Louis, from. And he went to a Catholic school if I had to bet. I think it was a, I don't remember exactly what the, what the protest was, but it was like, you know, here we go. So basically a Christian group boycotted an assembly about sexuality. They're going to have an assembly about sexuality at his prep school, John Burroughs. Yeah, John Burroughs in St. Louis. And so Sam Altman basically takes the mic, announces that he's gay and then ask the school whether they want to be a repressive place or a place open to different ideas.

Baller. And then the baller, right? And then the college counselor goes, what Sam did changed the school. It felt like somebody opened up a big box. and then all the kids of all kinds got to be let out into the world. Like, you know, it just kind of like, he drew a line publicly. That's a really good way to describe it, by the way. And that is, that is just an amazing story.

I love that story. He also talked about like, okay, I want to read you some other amazing quotables because this guy's kind of remarkable. And we just respect people who kind of like, what you say, let their freak flag fly, that people who just like do life their way and their way happens to be different than like the conventional one. The craziest thing that he did was he did. a speech about announcing something big

and he wore two double pop collars that were pink and green. I love that guy. I remember seeing that. At the Apple conference, like a big deal, a life highlight for most people. There's all these amazing anecdotes

from these articles that I was reading. So one goes, so they got in a, him and his brothers, he's got brothers Jack and his other brand name. Max. And so they, one of them started this company called Lattice.

And like, he had some phrase about what lattice was doing. And so Sam invests in Asana, the different company. And he writes this blog post about like, you know, just quickly, you know, the morning of kind of writes this blog post where he goes, he goes, he goes, yeah, I invest in Asana because I think it's great. It's going to make people more productive because they do A, B, and C. And it turns out that A, B, and C were like the same marketing.

material that Jack, his brother was using for lattice. And so the article's talking about it's like, Jack's like super pissed. He's like, dude, you just invested in them for the exact, you know, that's our mission statement. Why are you saying they do it? And Sam's like, oh, dude, like I'm so, I totally, I must have just totally spaced. Like, I must have heard you say that so many times over the years that like it just kind of became like a set of words I know. I totally didn't intend that. And it's edit it. But Jack's mad, calls the mom. And it's like, you know, Sam did this. And there and And Sam's like, are you still mad at me or whatever? And they're fighting.

And then they're like, and then the end of the story goes like, and then Jack looks over at a board game called Samurai that's on their bookshelf in their home and says, you know, Sam won every single game of samurai when we were kids and always declared himself the samurai leader. Because he always has to win. He's always in charge of everything. And then says, Sam Wobman shot back. You want to play speed chess right now? I read this and I was like, that's literally like if Chad, I told, chat GPT to make up a story about like young Silicon Valley nerds who have a competitive streak,

you know, like, oh yeah, it's called Alpha Land. You're going to take this outside and play some speed chest and says he was the real man around here. Yeah, that's Alpha Land in Silicon Valley. Yeah, so I thought that was hilarious. There's another one that I thought was a kind of an amazing thing. So did you know that at some point, he basically sold, what did he do? He sold, yeah, so the story goes, he decided to get rid of all his, uh,

you know, comforts except for the, you know, three or four things. So he kept a four bedroom house in San Francisco. He kept his cars because he loves cars. It was like a McLaren, like a really race car. He has two McLarens and something else. He kept a property on Big Sur in case the world ends. And he has a reserve of $10 million. And he's like, the annual interest should cover my living expenses.

And I can just spend the rest of my money and the rest of my time trying to improve humanity. And so he's like, I just whittled it down to what are the things I really care about? Yeah. And what do I need? The essential. You know, my McLaren's like $10 million, you know, whatever. And it sounds a little like trite because it's like, oh, yeah, dude, like that's it. But in reality, like if you know people in Silicon Valley, like there's a never ending appetite for more, more fame, more money, more everything.

And I actually think that somebody who can sort of figure out, well, dude, just accruing these money points doesn't do anything past a certain score. So what am I going to do with this money and my time to like make sure I use my, you know, my time on this little blueberry called Earth to, to the best advantage, right? So I like that he had that. Another thing that he said about being a prepper that I think you'll like, let me read this quote to you. Dude, I think he like, didn't he like, wasn't he like saying, you know, in case there's like a pandemic or something like that,

I want a place to go to. Exactly. Exactly. So somebody goes like, he goes up to these, this story. He goes up to these guys at this conference or like whatever at this meetup or whatever. He's like, so what do you guys do? And they're like, we just kind of work and whatever.

They're like, what do you do for fun? He goes, well, I like racing cars. I got five cars. two McLaren's and old Tesla. I like to fly rented planes all around California. Oh, and one weird one, I like to prep for survival. And they're like, survival, what? He goes, he goes, yeah, I have a lot of friends that are constantly getting drunk

and telling us, telling me about all the way that the world, all the ways that the world's going to end. And I read that this Dutch lab had modified the H5N1 bird food virus five years ago. And it was super contagious. By the way, this is pre-pandemic, right? It's pre-COVID. So he goes, I read about this lab that was modifying this thing, making it really contagious. And I realized that the chance of a lethal, a lethal synthetic virus being released in the

next 20 years was, well, non-zero. Non-zero. That's such a, that, whenever I hear that phrase, that that's like, oh, you either are smart or you're trying to be smart. Either way, you've got my attention. Dude, I have another one that when I was reading this. He kept saying orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude. I love that one. I just decided that that's going to be the name of my gang. And so if you want to join my gang, it's called orders of magnitude. And we fuck shit up at levels that are 10x. 10x the previous level. Dude,

I'm going to have like the subcommittee on that. We're going to call it parabolic or something like that. Like, I'm just going to come up with like crazy names. Like, oh, you guys want to join the exponentials or not? Exactly.

Yeah, it's the orders of magnitude versus, that's the Crips and Bloods. We go against the exponentials. So then he also says, is before opening. The other one is that that AI might, you know,

get really powerful, it be used to attack us. Nations will use it. And then people were getting, he goes, he goes, you know, I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, a gas mask from the Israeli defense force and a big patch of land, a big sir that I can fly to if the world ever ends. That's crazy. What a baller.

There's also a story of him walking around with Brian Chesky. Brian Chesky was about to pitch at YC. And this is, Brian Cheskey started Airbnb. Airbnb was just getting going. And Brian was explaining the idea to Sam. He was, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool. I think it's great. Can I see your presentation? He shows them the presentation. He goes, yeah, I think we can make like $100 million a year doing this? He goes, Brian, do me a favor.

Can you add a zero to every single number that you have up there? I need to see a billion in revenue, not $100 million. He goes, change all your M's to B's. Yeah, change all your M's to B's. And that's, that's actually going to be my new. No small boys stuff as we say. Sam, you just needed our phrase. No small boys. Change all your M's to B's? When I was a fucking mic drop, I used to work at this office and they took the exit sign. You know how there's exit signs and offices above the door? They changed the exit sign to say, they like molded it in such a way. So it said IPO.

So the exit was an IPO. So it was the IPO side, the exit sign. And I always thought that was awesome. And we need a new sign. It says change the M's to B's. And that's what he did with Brian Chesky when he was like. Fire marshal would like a word. But yeah.

Yeah. Only nerds will survive. Only nerds will get that joke. So he had another, he had another, quote about that, the M's to B thing. He goes, he goes, he goes, look, I listened to your whole presentation and you need to change that. They're like, are you sure?

And he goes, look, either you don't believe what you told me or I'm dumb and I didn't understand what you told me or I don't know math. One of those three is what's true here. Like either you're ashamed to say it, you don't believe it or I'm dumb and I don't know math. That's great. That's a pretty baller way to say things. I want to read you some of the other little like, you know, isms. Okay, let me give you some more.

So here's some like quick chat advice. So I'm pretty into my meme of the year is that what I call the midwit meme. I mean, you throw this up on YouTube so you can see it. But it's basically like there's the dumb, the ignorant kind of beginner on one side. There's the Jedi master on the other. And every in between is the sort of like stressor type A personality that's like overanalyzing everything. And my goal for the year slash life is to live life like either the dumb beginner or the Jedi master. It doesn't matter. They think the same way. And so, and not be the stressor

achiever type A overanalyzer type person. And, and I'm just seeing that meme everywhere. When I meet people, I just classify them instantaneous. So are they being right now? What do you think you've been historically? I started off for sure as the dumb, the dumb troll. Like my first, my sushi restaurant started that thought was the greatest thing in the world. My, next thing, yes, even just when I applied for my job and moved to Silicon Valley and got a job with a billionaire. Like, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I was so dumb that I like, like, my approach was correct. I was like, well, I'll just, I'll just reach out to the guy and I'll just send him a letter saying why I'm the right guy for the job. And then I'm not really going to apply for other jobs.

I'm just going to prove to this guy, this is, I'm good at this job. And I just, that was my job search, right? Like, I didn't do any of the traditional things. I just did what to seem like the dumb thing to do. But that would also be the Jedi move too in that case. It's like, you know, find the thing. you really want and chase it with reckless abandon. Don't like just put a resume on 500 desks and see who calls you for the job.

So, you know. I'm still a mouth breather. I think I'm still pretty far left on that. I'm still pretty stupid. Yeah. I do it from time to time. I'll often do it with my econ biz. Suli is my like kind of like mentor coach on that side.

And I feel like he's the Jedi guy. I know he's the Jedi guy because he's like, he says something about frameworks. He goes, everyone in Silicon Valley talks about frameworks. I don't know what a framework is. And at first I used to think maybe I'm too dumb. Like should I learn this thing? I don't understand what everyone's talking about. And now I realize they're all dumb.

He's 100% right. Like I'd be like, you know, hey, should we do influencer marketing for the brand? Blah, blah, blah. He's like, remember I told you Facebook ads? Just write the word Facebook ads at your computer. And then every time you think about doing anything else besides Facebook ads, look at that sticky note again. That's hilarious.

And he'd be like, if you're going to call me and talk to me about another idea, you better be doing 500,000 a month. And don't call me about another idea until Facebook ads has got you to 500,000 a month. And it's like the Jedi simplicity is something I like, you know, revere now. So he had a few, a few Jedi quotes in this. I'm going to read you. He goes, founders will come to me and be like, oh, you know, what if, you know, I'm worried about saying this to my investors because then they're going to think this, that might affect our series B raised, blah, blah, he goes, just tell them. And then he goes, people are worried about, you know, you don't know.

how your customers are going to feel about this, just ask them. You're worried about competitors. Don't worry about them until they're beating you in the market. And he's like, oh, you want to do these five things? You're trying to decide? Like, just pick one and do it. Most people just simply do too many things, do a few things relentlessly. Another one, he goes, you need to every year you need to think about how you're going to add

one zero to what you're doing. But don't think beyond one zero. And I thought that's a good Jediism. It's like a way to think big without being kind of like just a delusional talker and like, you know, living in fantasy land. So you had a bunch of those as I was reading this that I thought was pretty dope. He's,

he's great, man. He, I always see a picture. There's that famous conference in Idaho, like the Sun Valley thing. And you'll see pictures of him. Oh, no,

the rich guy won. The rich guy won. It's like we're like, it's almost like a Davos, but something like that. But it's like all like the who's who. I think it's mostly media though, which includes everyone.

So like the Murdoch family and like the people who run CNN. And you see like, you know, there's, ex-presidents there. And then you see Sam Altman and he's wearing like cool running shoes with like cool sunglasses and like his hair is all dischuffled. He is a very, he's a very interesting character. Sam Altman's cool. He's kind of been like a little bit under the radar while he's been building his company. But he said something the other day. Someone was like, we're really hyped about GPT4. Can you tell us?

He goes, all I can say is like people are setting themselves up for a lot of disappointment. I don't think we're going to live up to your expectations or something like that. And I was like, oh, that's a pretty cool response. now I'm interested. Yeah, he goes with AI, there's people who think AI has changed the whole game and everything. Google search is dead. AI is going to change everything. GP4 is going to be like, you know, freaking sentient and whatever. It's going to be amazing.

He goes, that's wrong. And people who think, oh, chat GPT, this thing's overrated. It's a big nothing burger. It's, you know, look, it makes this mistake. It makes this mistake. You could trick it into saying this stupid thing. He goes, they're also wrong. They're also being dumb, but in a different way.

you know, they're being dumb because they're not realizing how fast is things going to improve. And the other guy's being dumb because they think it's already there, but it's not there yet. You know, the truth is like somewhere in the middle. And I thought that was like a, you know, a much better like reply. I also thought there was like a couple of kind of remarkable little things that I want to share as well, things that I didn't know about Sam Aldman. So that first fund that Peter Thiel gave him $21 million for in, I think three years or so, let's see, three years or so, the fund,

four years, the fund was up 10x already. So that's like what people want after, like, you know, a 10 year period. And in four years, he had done that.

The second thing was, how did he do it? He made like pretty ridiculous bets. So he was like, all right, if I want to, if I want to help create like, you know,

trillions of dollars of progress, that's going to come from science and technology, not just like the next random app. And so he's like, all right, I got to invest in more science and technology. So he goes to cruise, which was a self-driving car company that eventually got bought by GM for a billion dollars. But at the time, nobody was funding cruis.

Nobody was funding self-driving cars. It just seemed too hard. Like hardware. Seems like an obvious bet now looking back, right? I mean, that team was like A plus. Completely non-obvious back then. And they were struggling. He puts $3 million directly into that one company.

And the same thing with this $375 million check. The lady was like, most people can't write that big of a check. He goes, especially not into an extremely risky thing like nuclear fusion. And it's completely right. Like that's going to be like, you know, a zero or massive. And he's writing massive checks into it. And he did this several times. He puts like millions of dollars into single bets that he like had conviction on.

He then reflected on it. He goes, of all the biggest winners, he goes, I looked at the five biggest winners that I haven't had in that early portfolio. He goes, four of the five, nobody wanted to fund. They were not oversubscribed. People generally thought they were bad ideas. in fact, I almost got talked out of doing them because smart people were telling me why these are bad ideas. Only one, optimizely, was an idea. Everybody thought was a good idea that turned out to be a good idea.

It didn't even do that well, I think. Well, it did okay. I think optimizes did go public, I think, in the end. So, you know, it did make it. But maybe I'm wrong about that. But like, I thought it got bought by PE, but like it was, it compared to the other, oh, no, it says they have a thousand employees. I'm wrong. Yeah, it must have been a hit.

So, so the other ones, you know, Zenefits, crews, you know, things like that. basically he was like Stripe, he's like at the time, now Stripes everything, but he's like at the time, it was 18 year old kid saying we're going to like work with banks and change the payments industry and the everybody who's like, these guys don't know what they're getting into except for like, you know, a handful of people that believed in them. Same thing with Airbnb. He was an early investor in Airbnb. That was non-obvious.

So he kind of got really into this like non-obvious but correct mentality, which is the Peter Teal like school of thought too. Like he's like the investments that didn't work out, people also told me those were bad ideas. So it's not that all bad ideas are good ideas. It's that some bad ideas are actually great ideas and that that's where all the returns are. And so you need to be willing to go where it's unpopular. Which is so easy to like talk about and it sounds like, oh yeah, just do not obvious things. Therefore, any bad idea I see I should invest in. I get so many bad ideas. And I think I would say, no, these are actually all bad ideas. That's such a challenging thing to figure out. That's

that requires so much talent or skill. I don't know what it is, but it's really. really, really impressive and really hard. Because looking back, Airbnb, that sounds incredibly obvious. But it's just crazy that he was able to pull that off. Yeah, it's insane. So anyways, that's a giant, you know, Sam Altman-Gasm. But the guy's just really interesting. He's one of the more interesting characters, I think, that exists in the tech world.

So, yeah, I like some of those quotes. I think this was a 10 out of 10 pod. You know, so here's how I know it's a good pod. So it's 1230 in Texas where I'm recording this. Usually I go and take a nap until about 2 o'clock after we have a good pod. I require sleep and rest. And that's how I feel after this pod. I'm like, I need to take a nap.

And that's how I know it's good. All right, great. Glad to hear it. Oh, and by the way, I'm going to show my tax return on the YouTube channel. Go subscribe. And then you'll see it. Go. My first million on YouTube.

Go, go. If you want to see it. Yeah. And if you find the glitch, you might be able to see his social security number. It's somewhere in there. 10 out of 10.