My First Million - EXTRA: Russian Oligarchs, Putin, and Sam and Shaan's Thoughts on Ukraine

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about the little known story of the Russian oligarchs, and discuss the current situation in Ukraine and how President Zelensky is leading his country through the invasion. ----- * 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: (00:30) - The story of the Russian oligarchs (13:30) - General reactions to the invasion and the news surrounding it (28:00) - Whether you should pay attention to the news or not (34:30) - Is it worth hearing the other side? ----- 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

This guy, this Ukrainian guy, their leader, this guy is badass. Have you seen him just wearing like green t-shirts, giving press conferences? Yeah. He's amazing. This guy's amazing. This guy's, I don't know much about him. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's like kind of media portrayal versus whatever else.

But the guy does come across like a goddamn hero. All right, let me tell you a quick story. I don't know if you're going to like this topic. So I want to get it out of the way. If you like it, we could spend the whole time on it. But I'm not sure if you're going to be into this. All right, I'm intrigued. Yeah, yeah.

So it's about the most popular thing going on right now, the Ukraine, Russian conflict. It's not exactly about Ukraine, but it's about Russia. So something that I've always been interested in is the Russian oligarchs. So have you ever studied those folks? Not studied, but, you know, okay, tell me about it. Okay, so this starts, I'm reading a thing, so you're going to see me look off. This starts on November 3, 1995, in a remote Siberian town called Surveh. got basically what happened in this small cabin. An auction took place for the right to lend

the cash strapped Russian government tens of millions of dollars. So basically in 95, the Russian government wasn't doing so hot and they needed money. And so they got these banks to come to this meeting and they said, we need some money. We need to borrow some money. And also as collateral, we're going to put up shares of some of the large state-owned companies. Because at this point, Russia was basically going from being a communist nation to being a private country. And so they still had some like state owned oil companies, mineral companies. Basically, like, if you think of ExxonMobil, they like, the government like owned that. And at this point, they were trying to figure out how do we make this so private individuals can do this.

And so at this meeting, basically only two bidders showed up. And if more bidders wanted to come, it was kind of a pain in the ass. Because conveniently, there were no more flights. The airport shut down, and you couldn't even book a flight to come into this small town. By the way, your camera's... Okay, you're there. And so basically, what happened at this small cabin is one company made a bid to loan money to the government. They loaned something like $500 million.

And that was like $100,000 above the opening bid. So people were bidding to loan money. And so this bank loaned money to the government. And then the government had to pay back the loan at a certain point, something like a year later. And if they didn't, the bank then was given the collateral, so the shares in this company, to auction off. And they could keep 30% of the profits. So obviously, the government didn't pay back the money. And there's like a lot of like wondering why they didn't pay back.

Basically, the idea is that the current president was like, obviously, this is all like, we're all planning this. So don't pay this back and give us a little bit of whatever. So they don't pay back. You're saying it's collusion. Basically, there was a handshake, wink, wink agreement, basically of what's going to happen here. Yes. And so the government doesn't pay back the loans. And so now this bank is basically now has a minority ownership and like 12 large state-owned corporations.

and they basically holler at eight to ten guys, guys who are already relatively successful, and they basically said, you want to make a bid on this company? I'm going to make sure no one else bids on this company, but I'll give it to you. You interested? And that's exactly what happened.

And why would they do that? Why would they hook up these individuals in that way? They did it for three different reasons. The first reason, and a lot of this is just like hearsay. The first reason is the person who is, the person who was president at the time, who was it, Ben, what was his name? It was the fat guy who had a heart attack. Boris Yeltsin.

Yes. He was basically said to these eight or ten businessmen, I'm going to hook you up. You guys hook me up. When I'm in office, hook it up. I'm going to hook you up, whatever. So that's one theory. The second theory is that they wanted experienced managers to run these companies. And the third theory basically is even though these eight to ten oligarchs put bids on these

companies and basically they bought the equivalent of ExxonMobil. So we're talking about like a company that's worth billions of dollars. They paid a hundred million dollars for this company. And so these managers, these oligarchs, these eight to ten folks, a lot of them were mildly successful, but they were all in on the government. They were all friends and friends. They're all homies. They basically, they did take on risk. So like these companies did have debt and like they had to go and like collude with other people and fire the rest of the managers of the company. So it was basically almost like a PE thing, but it was like pretty dirty. All right. And then I forgot to tell you this, but this is the most important thing.

I can't believe we didn't talk about this earlier, to be honest with you. Because if you're listening to this and you like what you're hearing right now and you haven't gone and subscribed to the My First Million podcast wherever you get your podcast, then that's the thing you've got to do. There's nothing more important than doing that right now. And don't do it because I said to do it. Do it because you want to do it. Do it because that's who you are.

And the government was like, yeah, we want these mercenaries to be in power because if they make these companies better, our government's going to be better. The Russia's going to be better. And so they basically, profits after this whole deal, profits to these companies grow by 50x, market caps go up by 100x. And so here's an example. The reason I got interested in this is there's this guy named Robin Abrano. What's his name? Ben, how do you say his last name? I think it's Abramovich.

We're going to call him Roman. So Roman even knows what the hell you're talking about right now is impressive. And he's like a part of your brain that's like outside of your body. And you're like, uh, brain, what's that name? Oh, yeah, here it is. Roman's famous. Roman owns, we're just going to call up Roman. He owns Chelsea, the soccer team.

So he's like a famous guy. And he owns like this like, you know, 200 foot yacht. He's like a big deal. And basically he paid $100 million, him and his partner, Boris, paid $100 million. And they've just. They came up a little bit of money and then they went and hollered at like other rich people and they said, hey, loan us some money. Let's buy this company. They paid $100 million for a company that is now like the eighth or tenth largest oil company in the world. So imagine paying in the mid-90s. Imagine paying $100 million for Exxon Mobil. Right. Insane. And so these companies explode. Now they explode partially because basically what these owners did, these eight to ten oligarchs. What they did was they purposely tanked the company. So it sucked from it. for a long time. And then they bought out the rest of the minority shareholders. So it was, again, cronyism there. And second, these were government-run companies. So they're a shit.

And so these private individuals, they did a pretty good job of making them better. And they became far more profitable. And this created like eight to 10 guys that were worth like up to $40 billion. So at one point, one of them was worth $83 billion. And, you know, things have changed. But it created so much wealth between these few folks. And it also like trickled down. So here's the craziest part. is that a bunch of the managers of the company. So basically there was like the minister of oil or something like that as a government official.

He becomes, he sets up one of these companies. He eventually becomes president of one of the companies. And now it's worth $8 billion, even though he was like a government official. So I thought it was interesting because I actually wanted to read a book about these folks. I'm like, oh, who's this like rich guy that owns Chelsea football? Let me like go and learn from him.

And when I realized it's like, I pretty much can't learn from him. I mean, I could maybe learn some stuff, but like his process is not like reputable. I can't replicate it because he was like 38 and Russia had just fallen and he basically turned zero dollars into he's worth now like $20 billion all through this cronyism. But I thought it was incredibly interested. Have you not heard about these folks? I've never heard any of that in my life. It's crazy.

It's like a, it's like the big bang for like Russian rich oligarchs. It's like there was this one meeting. And it kicked off this series of events that, like, you know, seems kind of unfathomable how that would be allowed to happen or just happen. But then they also consolidated power, right? Like, didn't Putin basically, like, take all their money and consolidate all their power? Here's the second interesting part of the story. And I actually learned this from Lassina Ben's podcast. So basically, Putin was considered, like, the anti-corrupt guy for a minute.

Like, when he was elected, he was like, you know, I'm not going to stand for that nonsense. And he made an example of one of the guys. One of the billionaires, his last name starts with the K, I'm not going to try to pronounce it. It's a challenge. He put this guy in jail for 14 years. And he literally put him in Russia for some reason. They put you in these like cages and you could like take pictures of these folks. Have you ever seen that like a Russian serial killer picture or anything?

So it's like visible from the outside, you mean? Yeah, it's like the mug shop. But it's like literally a cage that sits on you and people can come and like take pictures. It's weird. And anyway, this guy was worth. at the time, like $15 billion. And Putin arrested them for not paying taxes, things like that, and put him in jail for 14 years.

And he goes to the other guys, he goes, you want that to happen to you? No, all right, let's play. And so a lot of people think that Putin is the richest man in the world. And he owns one of the most expensive homes in Russia, in the world. It's like a billion dollar, two billion dollar house. And people were like, well, how'd you do that?

It was a billion dollar house? Yeah, Ben was telling me all about it. There is a billion dollar house. Wow, I didn't even realize that. It's like, it's got, skyscraper. Yeah, it is like this whole complex. It's got private beaches. It's got like pools on pools.

It's got guest houses. Basically got a hotel on it. It's like a house is maybe not the right way to think of it, but it is a house. It's a private residence for Putin. And but basically, like, there's no proof of this, but a lot of people, because even when the Panama papers released, they couldn't find Putin's accounts. But basically, a lot of people are like, well, so he made an example of, of this one guy.

And he went to the rest and goes, y'all want to play? Let's play. And now, Roman, by the way. I was really hoping you'd attempt a Putin accent. They're kind of disappointed. Not going to lie. The story is good, but it's just missing that little something. I think Ben could do it for not me.

Ben, I think you have a little bit of the Russian twings in your speaking. Yes, they say me, they tell me I speak good in Russian accent. I will, is this like racist? Can I do this? Is this okay? I don't know. It's borderline.

I don't think it's a race. We have the cancellation vaccination. You're allowed to do a funny, funny accent here. As long as it's Russian. If you're listening and you took that too seriously, just swipe over and delete the podcast and go on with your life. And to wrap this up, basically, the way that these guys all work now is a lot of these oligarchs

are part of like the peace keeping, like they're helping Putin like negotiate peace. So like the inner, the way that this shit's intertwined. is just bananas. It's crazy. And I was like trying to learn about these folks. And I was like, oh, well, like, there's nothing to learn here. I can't, I can't do this.

Like, this is just crazy. And these guys are so wealthy. And so it's trickled down. But if you basically, a lot of them when it happened were in their 30s, like 35, 38 years old. And that's why I got interested in this because I was, I remember years ago reading about these folks. I'm like, how does a 38 year old become worth $3 billion? What the hell?

How did a 38 year old become CEO of a, diamond mining company. And it was a stupid question. What does the word oligarch actually mean? I think it just means when there's a small group of people that are in power. But basically it's sort of like a cartel, basically. Yeah, not. Well, it's like, what do you say, Ben?

It's just like, typically the way that it is classically defined is over here you have a monarchy, which is ruled by a single man. Over here you have democracy, which is rule by everyone. Oligarchy sits in the middle of like rule by a few people. A handful. Right. Yeah. But when we talk about Russian oligarchies, a lot of times people will say that just means like Russian rich people, Russian wealthy rich people. The way that I'm using it is that there was literally like nine guys who were given like these 12 companies. And now amongst those nine guys, there was like dozens more where like Roman was like, hey, I need a homie. I need a cousin to come and run this thing. Hook it up. And so there's like it trickled down beyond that. And so now there's hundreds of them. Quick interruption. Do me a favor. scroll down and you're going to see a link to the hustle. So if you want to stay up to date on the tech and business news you need to know, check out the hustle.

It's a daily email. I used to help write it. I love it. So check it out. Scroll down below. I'm on a business insider news story about Putin's wealth right now just because I wanted to see the billion dollar house. So the house, 1.35 billion. It's a crazy palace with three helicopter landing pads and stuff like that.

But the thumbnail was Putin doing basically like a bowflex. So he's like, you know, he's basically saying he's got both cables. And he's like clearly about to do like a peck fly. And that was the thumbnail they chose not one of his palace or his cars or anything like that. That shows Putin wearing 3,000, no, wearing cashmere sweats that cost $1,400 and then a matching top, which just looks like a Haynes T-shirt for his workout outfit total, which was $3,200. And it's just like every picture is hilarious. It's like him choosing with a champagne.

It's like only power photos, which is really funny. And keep in mind, this is a guy who before this, he was in the KGB, so it's like the CIA of America. So this is a government salary person for the last 30 years. So, Ben, how did you feel? So you did the How to Take for the World episodes about Putin. And I called you up about this. I was like, Ben, re-released the episodes. A lot of people are curious about Putin right now.

Release the, like just re-upload them as new episodes. But you kind of researched this guy a lot. What, I mean, can we talk about this like Russia, Ukraine thing for a second? So like, what's y'all's reaction to this? And I guess like, you know, the disclaimers is we're not experts. We're just friends talking about like, yo, do you hear what's going on? What did you think about this? So, Ben, what did you think?

Because you've spent a lot of time reading about this guy. Yeah, my reaction is probably different from most people's. I think most people who listen to my podcast view it as like an anti-Pooten podcast, like think it's pretty hard on him. And I think in some ways it is, calls him out for some of the bad things he's done, including murdering people and, like, maybe doing a false flag domestic terror attack on the Russian people. So, like, it's not a pro-Pooten podcast. Having said that, I think a lot of people's reaction has just been like, Putin is Hitler. He's going to keep marching through countries until we stop him. Like, all he wants is more power, more territory.

He's a megalomaniac who's doing this just because he's tripping. And I think that what they're missing a lot of the psychology of Putin, of this is someone who was, as Sam said, a part of the KGB, right? So he's a part of the Soviet empire when it's a big empire. He watches it fall from grace. And then he watches his country get looted in the mid to late 90s and kind of says to him, himself, all right, well, America was supposed to come in and make this situation better. I'm never trusting these guys again, right? And so then he's watching Ukraine get pulled closer and closer into the European Union and NATO orbit and American orbit. And they're basically saying, okay, yeah,

they're aligning with us, but that's their prerogative and don't worry about it. This is not, we're not going to like invade Russia or anything. And he's basically saying, no, like, that's his red line. I will never trust you guys again. and that doesn't make what he's doing right, but I think it is important to understand where he's coming from, the motivation so that we can make the right decisions. And what do you mean by America was supposed to come in and fix?

What do you mean by that exactly? So you're saying post-World war or something? No, so it was essentially, as the Soviet Union is coming down, I can't remember the name of it, but there was some essentially like committee with a bunch of Harvard guys, who come into Moscow and are like,

hey, we're the experts. This is how you do capitalism, essentially. And initially there's like some optimism, right, of, okay, well, America seems pretty great. Soviet Union has not been great. And so we're excited about this capitalism stuff. Turns out they just wear the sweatshirts. Never went to Harvard.

Got them. That's right. They were pulling a bend. They were wearing the Georgetown Law sweatshirt, but they didn't go to Georgetown Law. And so things, the Russian economy really crashed during the 90s. And so that's what I'm talking about. Gotcha. Okay.

So he's like, I've, you know, fool me once. You know, shame on whoever the fuck. Okay. So that was your reaction to this as you were sort of thinking about that. Sam, what was your reaction as you kind of saw this all play out? My reaction, let's talk about this from a, I mean, first of all, I was like, you know, screw Putin, not a fan. But let's talk about from a business or like a management perspective.

When I saw, when I've seen all this go through or happen, I've been watching a lot of videos on Reddit. And admittedly, like, that's a USA, that's an American website. So I'm trying to figure out like what the truth is. I'm seeing these, I'm seeing two things. One, I'm seeing videos of like POWs, Russian P.O.Ws. And there's like, I didn't want to be here. They go, we don't want to be here. We were tricked.

We thought we were going to practice. We didn't know what was going on. And they also say, We thought you guys were going to open us, welcome us with open arms. We thought that you were going to love us. What are you doing? Like, why are you being angry at us? And so I see, and they also show the tanks.

And the tanks are shit. They're like from the 80s and 90s. They're bad. Like, and their weapons suck. And so I'm seeing A, I, like, they're just, and like, and like, and they were a little chubby. And, like, people don't have, like, nice haircuts like they do in the middle, like, in American, like, they're just, like, undisciplined. Like, it just doesn't seem like it's like a well-oiled machine.

That's what I'm seeing. And second. These are the most random observations about this whole thing. It's like, Reddit videos of guys being like, I thought this was a practice war. That's what they've been saying, dude. They've been saying. In 1980s tanks. Like what do you talk about?

I mean, look, like, when you see that, you're like, oh, this, you're like, I was afraid of you, but like maybe I shouldn't be. Like, you're out of shape. And the second thing is this guy, this Ukrainian guy, their leader, this guy is badass. Have you seen like him just wearing like green t-shirts giving press conferences? Yeah. He's amazing. This guy's amazing.

This guy's, I don't know much about him. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's like kind of media portrayal versus whatever else. But the guy does come across like a goddamn hero. When you think of the word of hero, what do you think of? It's like, you know, the president who says, you know, I'm not just ordering you to war. I'm going to the front lines. And by the way, this guy's the finance minister.

He's here. This guy's, you know, this is my press secretary. Here, hold this gun. You don't know how to do it. You have it backwards. It doesn't matter. Stand here. And like basically sending out a video being like, you know, hey Putin, you know, go fuck yourself.

Or like bring it on, basically. Like the only thing cooler he could have done is if he was like, Putin, meet me at the border. You and me, unarmed, hand-to-hand combat. You win. You get my country. I win. I get your country. That's the only one level up this guy could have done as far as being, you know, the real life macho man, Randy Savage,

which is kind of the way he was coming across as a, like a real hero, like very brave. incredibly. And what I'm learning, when I watch the news, I try to figure beyond like this is bad and I want to help. The thought is like how can I use this to improve? And my takeaway here is what Putin has done. They say like he's like, they showed him with giving a press conference and he was on this huge table. And his generals were like literally 20 feet down on this table. And he was kind of by himself. And that was kind of a representation of him being a little distant. And whereas this guy was. was like literally on the streets toasting coffee in the morning. And my takeaway is in order to get someone to do something, you have to make them want to do it. You can't force them to do it because if you force them to do it, it's a short-lived, short-term thing. And with the Ukrainians, there was a poll where 90% of them support this guy. And they are all in the streets. They're all like pouring styrofoam into bottles with gasoline because that's how you make napalm.

And they're using it for Molotov cocktails. And they like, it sounds weird, but it seems like they're happy in the sense of like they have a sense of purpose and they have a community and they have a mission. And maybe not happy is the right word, but like purpose driven. And that's the takeaway that I have from this is if I'm going to convince people to do stuff like run a work at a company or whatever, you need to make them want to do it, not force them to do it. Yeah, that's a great point. They definitely have like sort of the spirit right now and the morale. in the rally, it's sort of like a rally going on right now. And, you know, especially under these circumstances, you know,

it definitely like adversity is something that pulls people together. So, you know, it's definitely done that for them. Or it'll break you apart depending on what your sense of purpose is. So this guy's killing it, man. Yeah. This guy's, it's been really, it's been a, it's a really good. I don't think we've had that in America for a while. It's been, it's a really good example of wonderful leadership.

This guy is killing it. And he also uses really cute phrases. Like he says something like, at least sound bites. He's like, I don't need, he goes, he goes, America offered me a lift to get out of here. I don't need a lift. I need armor piercing bullets. Yeah.

That's what he said. And I'm like, oh my God, dude, you are Rambo. You are wonderful. He's saying all the great stuff. And that shit's important. And there's a reason why, like, have you ever heard about, where they describe old Roman emperors as orders, you know, people who could speak well? Like, now I understand why.

Yeah, totally. Dude, I've been, so I don't normally. read the news or watch the news at all. I like never, never turn it on. Don't read the newspaper. Don't go to CNN. I don't do any of it. And people sometimes like, I don't know, make fun of me or sort of tell me I'm an idiot for

that. Just yesterday some guy was like, you know, terrible life choice. You know, you got to be in tune with the world's realities. I actually think you don't. In my head, I'm like, if you think the news is the world's reality, like, you know, you're watching the world's worst reality show. And but, you know, I didn't say anything to him because, you know, let him do his thing. Obviously, you know, the news is making him a happy, cheerful person.

So, so I've always had this mindset, which is like, don't get pulled. Like, basically, I find that when people get really into government and politics, the phrase that my trainer said to me that makes more sense, he's like, these people can't govern themselves, but they want to talk about, you know, what the government can do. And it's like, most people fail to even govern themselves. You can't get yourself to do what you should do. Well, why are you so worried about what everybody else should do if you can't even get yourself to do it? And I've always sort of taken that as like a way to not get sucked into like 2016.

I had friends who were crying about Trump and all this stuff. And, you know, I said like I get it. It's not who I would have voted for. But I just don't worry about that. Like this is not. I don't worry about the government. I worry about government myself. The exceptions being, oh, there's a pandemic.

I should probably like figure out what's actually going on. What is the recommended course of action? Although that basically, you know, was not really paid off because we got a bunch of bad information, you know, at first. The second thing was, okay, there's a war going on, and this is my first experience really, like, watching a war break out. Like, there's been wars that have just been going on forever, like India and Pakistan at the border, like, you know, Israel, Palestine, there's just skirmishes all the time. And Afghanistan, like, you know, I didn't even realize we were in it until we pulled out, you know, like, as ignorant as that sounds, like, it just wasn't top of mind.

And I didn't, you didn't see it play out day by day. This is the first time I've really seen it play out day by day. So there's definitely like a kind of a crazy thing to see. I mean, just to see like, um, just to see people basically take a stand was like kind of like inspirational. Then to see like experts coming out like on the internet like being like,

hey, civilians. This is how you like do urban warfare from your, your bedroom window. And like there's this guy's like an urban warfare expert. He's like, you need to drag all your furniture out into the streets into this S pattern. Your goal is to make it to the,

that their vehicles cannot easily, like, roam your streets. They need to be making all these different turns. Everything, desks, lamps, toss it all into the middle of the street. Secondly, you know, drink water because, you know, you can't go three days without water. So make sure you're hydrating. Otherwise, you can't fight anybody. Third, here's how you make a Molotov cocktail. Fourth, and he just had this, like, checklist.

I was like, holy shit. Is this real life? And then you see, like, you know, there's, like, what you see in the news versus, I'm in these, like, telegram channels where people are posting videos from, like, on the ground. And so you see like totally different perspectives. How'd you get in those? Ben had linked me to two of them.

I was sharing some links to them. He's like, check this out. There's a telegram group where you could just get it. It's all in Ukrainian. Like I can't understand. I can't read the text. I can only watch the videos. Or just like the heartbreak.

Like there's a video that was going viral of this dad. Just like, because, you know, they did a conscription, right? Like everybody between the ages of 18 and 60, all men like you're now in the army. And there's a dad saying, by to his daughter, like knowing he may not, it may not ever see her again. And she doesn't understand. She's like a four-year-old kid. And like, I have a two-year-old daughter. So that was just like, you know, I was just like, you know, shattered by that. And just that was like, you see that and you're like, this is wrong. This is so wrong. What's going on? Like it just hit in a different

way. And I had heard on the All In podcast, they were talking about this. They go, they go, yeah, like, right now the U.S. sentiment is like, no, don't, don't go fight other people's wars. Like, don't send our human lives into that. And then the guy, Dave Freeberg had said something he was like, you know, I wonder how that'll change as the like sort of media starts to come out as you start to see videos of like atrocities and kids and women and people are going to have a different reaction when they see that. And that's exactly like literally the first video I saw that was such a heartbreak. I was like, we got to do something. I got to donate some money. I saw that same video. I got to do something here. And so it's just been crazy to see kind of how it's all playing out. Like crazy is really

the only way I can describe it. Like, it's crazy that this is happening. It's crazy the way it happens. It's crazy that like life gets turned upside down for people. Like all the things I care about on a day to day basis instantly would be out the window if something like this happened. Then you see the financial side. Like this is crazy that this war is like, I forgot somebody said this like banks, not tanks. It's like we're basically fighting Russia with financial warfare. It's crazy. It's way worse. Because I was telling Ben, I'm like, Putin has, is he's gonna, he's screwed up the only thing that really matters. Rule number one, don't fuck with the money. Yeah. Like if you mess with the money. Pets to people paper, Putin. Yeah, like, because,

because money is like the most important, money is more important than lives often, uh, or at least, you know, that's a perception. And so like, yeah, it's screwed up. And I want to tell you a point. I want to pump your ego. So do you, do you know who you, you said something, you didn't say as eloquently as I'm about to explain, but Nassim, how do you say his name? God, I'm so bad at names. Talib. Okay. So he tweeted something really good. So basically, He is the guy who, anti-fragile, I forget what else he did, Black Swan. Black Swan, yeah. And he's kind of an oddball, but he's eccentric, is a better word.

And he basically says, like, don't read the news. That's like what he has said that. He said that for a long time. And he's like, don't read things. He says, like, don't read the news. Only read things if it's like 50 years old. That's his whole point. And he tweeted out this yesterday.

He's like, except my book coming this March. Buy pre-order now. Yes. And he tweeted this out yesterday. And he goes, most days, 99.9% of the news is noise. The last few days, it's all signal. Newspaper reading is useless, except in crisis. And I actually totally agree with that. And that's what you said. I read the news every day. But I actually think it's kind of pointless until it's like an urgent, urgent thing. And that bar, the threshold of what's considered urgent, is actually really high. Yeah, and also there's a way to like, you can use the news to inform yourself to gather information to, like in my case, it's just like have empathy for what's going on and just not think about this intellectually. But the news can also use you and you have to like figure out where that line is. Are you are you using the news right now to gather what you want to gather or is the news using you as like eyeballs that they're going to drain for the like you bet your ass like, you know, Fox and CNN. And every news channel, like this is their, like, I'm not saying they don't care about what's going on, but this is their payday.

This is when they get their spikes. This is when they say, we have 24-7 news coverage. Stay here. Don't move. Don't change the channel. We are going to send you drip by drip, play-by-play updates. And it's like, that's actually not the healthiest, you know, like most productive way that you can live your life is by, like, getting hooked onto their 24-7, you know, play-by-play update of this war. So, you know, that's the kind of like caveat.

So this is the last point I'll make, but basically one of my heroes, he's on my wall here. You can't see him is Ted Turner. And Ted Turner started CNN. I think he started it in like 1981. But it was kind of a failure. It lost a lot of money until 1989, 1990 when America or sorry, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. And the reason why is he sent over a bunch of news stations, news reporters. And it was one of the first times that news reporters.

reporter could, because of technology, could film something and it be aired live. And so it was one of the first war that was viewed live. And it changed people's sentiment of the war. And it made CNN a huge company that one year. And that's kind of like what's going to happen now, except instead of a news, instead of like a publisher, it's going to be Facebook and Twitter. They're just going to crush for like the next couple years because we're glued to it. And dude, there's a, can I give you the kind of like the finance or crypto angle of what's going on here? So, so basically, The West is doing this like financial warfare. And they're like, okay, economic sanction.

So we're going to make it hard to trade. We're going to make it hard to buy and sell goods. And then they're doing a form of like, you know, they froze, they froze them out of Swift or kicked them off of Swift. Okay. So now you can't, now you can't do international transfers. And then they froze the central bank assets, which was like the craziest move. That was the financial nuke.

So that was where all of a sudden, you know, they had $650 billion of reserves. and they needed those reserves. Why? Because their local currency is crashing. So I think the ruble lost, what was it, like 40% in the last day? So, you know, the average citizen is the one who's paying the price, right? Putin basically attacked his own citizens here because the currency is crashing. Nobody wants to hold this currency anymore.

There's a bank, you know, people are lined up to get money out of the bank. So normally the way the government props up their currency to prevent it from spiraling to zero is they will buy it back using their reserve assets. They hold dollars. they hold euros, they hold gold, they hold some crypto, and they use that to buy back the ruble. But because he got frozen, they can't do that. And so that's going to cause the currency to go downfall.

So I think this time, crypto is not going to play as big of a story, but you kind of have to bet that any country out there who's watching this is probably going to say, well, we probably don't want the U.S. to be able to just freeze all our assets. So why are we holding the dollar as reserve? Why are we holding any currency that one country or an alliance can. can basically freeze our assets or cut us off or take us out of the banking system. So I think you're going to see a pretty big move first by, you know, the quote unquote bad guys, basically quote first by the folks that are afraid of the West to get out of the dollar and get

more, get more heavily into crypto because this is a wake up call. Oh, wow, they can just cut. They would do this. They'll cut us off completely. They'll freeze our accounts. And so I think in the next few years you're going to see different regimes like switch over to digital currencies that can't be controlled by any one country. For a bunch of uneducated dumbasses, I think we did pretty good with this one. Yeah, we probably just said one thing, or maybe it's Ben's Russian accent.

That'll be where everyone just decides, you know, we're assholes and cancels us, but other than that, you know, whatever, I think it's good. So I thought the Ukraine stuff was awesome. Did you agree, Ben? Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. I thought this is the most interesting news story. This is all I want to talk about.

So I thought it was interesting. And I think it's cool. it's cool that we actually talk about it on this channel. It's funny, dude, I, so, you know, people don't want it either way. So you, I didn't, if you don't talk about it, it's like, dude, how are you not talking about this? What do you, you know, why are you, uh, you think your thing is important? There's a war going on.

Like I tweeted something else out. I was like, oh, this is really cool how this is happening. Some tech thing. And some guy's like, bro, kind of insensitive, don't you think? There's a war happening. I was like, oh, am I just supposed to not speak about anything else? Okay. And then you talk about the war?

It's like, oh, now you're, now you're a war. expert. Well, you wrote something in the milk road that was great. You said, I think the opening line was, we're not going to mention the Bitcoin price today because it's not really that important. And I know what you guys are thinking, like, stay in your lane, milk road. And the truth is, we know our purpose. But we want to talk about, and I forget, you went into like the, a bunch of different stuff. But I thought that was a really good line. What did people say about the milk road writing about this? Let's see. I'll open up the, this thing is, the like feedback thing is so helpful, but also, you know, like daunting at the same time. Did you see, while you're pulling this up, I'll say something, did you see when I tweeted out, are there any pro-Putin people here? What is your opinion? I want to hear your perspective, because everyone I know is anti-Pooten. And a lot of people got pissed at me for asking that. And I thought that was crazy.

Yeah, I tweeted something else similar like that. I was like, hey, so, you know, just trying to like, you know, educate myself. Like, what would be, and I think I said it something like, I forgot exactly what I said about was basically asking like, what's the, what would be the most kind of like pro-Russian reason for the invasion? At first I was like, do the average people in Russia, does the average person in Russia support this, right? And then I was like, you know, second question is basically like, what would, what would be

the strongest justification for doing this, you know, or, you know, if you're, if you're, like, in Russia's camp. And, um, you know, I didn't get too much flag for it because I, like, had to, like, hedge it like crazy. But it's so crazy that you have to, like, really, um, like, soften everything so much. Yeah. I guess you don't have to. But, uh, if you don't, you know, you're definitely going to, like the discussion becomes about you, rather than just being able to be intellectually curious and say, yeah, I'm trying to understand, I'm trying to learn, I'm trying to think for myself, and I'm not saying I disagree with anything. I just want to actually, like, understand all the perspectives that, you know, that exist.

So I said, you know. Steel manning. Yeah, still manning. Steel man this shift. I wrote, what would be the most pro-Russian invasion reason? Basically, if you tried really hard to think about why this is justified, what would you come up with? And, you know, then I got a bunch of answers. I got 26 answers to that.

And I was like, okay, that's cool. That's helpful to hear. And what about the milk road? What were the replies? did anyone tell you to F off? I'm hoping it. What do they say to LeBron James? When LeBron James gave his opinion on some stuff,

everyone's like, just shut up and dribble, LeBron. What did anyway? They won't even know what's his, shut up in podcast? What are they going to tell me to do? Shut up and type shot or I don't know. I'm going to read the first,

I'm going to read the first three good, like good reviews. Like we have a system. It's like one milk cup, like the emoji. Like one milk is terrible. Three milks is average or five milks is great. So the tone. the analysis, the new war, insights humor. This has it all. That's five.

Another five one. I like the insight into the conflict going on right now. Another one, I think you wrote this, struck absolutely the right tone. Sam, is that you? Or is that a different sound? That's not me. I replied. I said this is really good. Okay, great. Great newsletter today. Way to have a perspective and a sense of humanity. I'm glad you avoided the business as usable and dove into how crypto is involved in this. And then they complained about one. Like, I made this analogy because I had said this thing, which was like, I love crypto when it's like helping the underdog, right?

Like when it banks the unbanked or when people's currency is inflating and they can move into this to preserve their wealth. But like there's an idea that, oh, Russia could use crypto to get around these sanctions. That sucks. And then I was like, oh, shit. How do I feel? It's a moral dilemma in a way. And I was like, then I realized, you know, like technology is neutral.

It's neither good nor evil. It's just used. I was like, you know, the example of a car. Like you can use a car to, you know, drop off your mother at the hospital when she needs help or you can use a car as a getaway vehicle to get away from the crime scene. It doesn't make a car good or evil in either case. It's sort of like amoral. And so some people work and some guys like disagreeing with that.

All right. Let me see if there's a one star review. Yeah. Was there any negativity? I literally, wow, this might be the highest rated one we've had. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Here's one.

You should effing stick to crypto and stay out of politics. Okay. Number one, awful. Shut up and dribble. This one. One milk. Awful. I can't miss the opportunity to suck on some political ass.

You think you're typically here. Someone would say you'd kiss it, but not suck on it. It's like, I don't even know what's kind of gross. I don't even know. I don't even know what to make it at. And they did the thing where every other letter is capitalized, you know.

Oh, my God. Oh, man. Reading your own comments. I'm not sure this is even useful. I might just leave this up so people have an outlet. But it's like, here, go yell into this shoebox. I'm not reading this stuff anymore. I check all of it.

We have a VA. Right now we check it all because it's new. But like we have VA who basically will just summarize the like, here was your score. And here's like the like kind of valid criticism and the valid like compliments. So I'm just going to read that from now on and not the like the raw stuff unless I really need to go hate my life. Yeah, there's a bunch of I'm actually for this maven thing I'm doing. I'm talking about feedback. I'm like, not all feedback is important.

Like, for example, if people complain about pricing, I'm like, I don't really listen to that. I don't care what they say about price because I'm not going to change. Another thing is like, if they say like, well, I wish you would have sent that email. This is what you see in the hustle. Like, send that email earlier. Sometimes I'm like, all right, we'll do it. But then once we started sending at 6 a.m. And I would get complaints.

I'm not listening to this anymore. I'm not, we're not doing it. And so it is hard to figure out what is actually important and what's not. And for a lot of feedback is actually not. important. Totally. It's all noise or it'll whiplash you. You do one thing and then they'll say one thing. You do the other. I remember at Twitch this happened. We went to an exec offsite and they're like, all right. So the feedback amongst the execs to the CEO and the CEO was like, you didn't listen to our input enough. Like we felt out of the loop. You guys just decided it was too

top down. And then the next offsite was three months. So they spent that whole offsite gathering like, what do you guys think? What are your opinions? What would you do? Like trying to get like the bottoms up. Three months later, it was like, okay, let's read out the feedback from last time, you know, what's happened in the last three months. Like, God, can you guys just make a decision already? You're the leader. You're supposed to just make a call. Like, why do you keep asking us? You're supposed to have the answers. It's like, wow. It's like this really extreme whiplash of like, you know, you never have you one way or the other. And the best answer I got was like, if you take 10 pieces of feedback, they're all informative. Nine will inform you.

They'll, like, they'll tell you about the person. It's not about you. It'll tell you about them. And then one will tell you something interesting or insightful about you. You have to figure out what's the one out of ten and what's the nine that's just about this person. Like some guy tweeted some feedback about my course like saying, oh, it's going great. Like, you know, it's been awesome. He was talking about like, I love the energy. Like Sean just, it's like a performance. It's not just like, here's some slides. And the guy and so some guy replies, he goes, oh, it's a performance. It's all about energy. Oh, so basically you, you know, nothing insightful, probably just a big motivational talk, huh? Stuff you could have just found on the internet.

And then the guy, the original guy responds, he's like, well, yeah, like, you know, 80% of anything. you can just go Google and find, but reality is most people are not going to know what to Google, even if they're not going to go take the time to Google. So it's great to like have it all packed in. And the guy's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, all I heard is I'm paying just, I'm paying $950 just to hear Sean pump me up. It's like, all right, so that's about him. That's not about the course. The biggest thing when the hustle, when we first, I remember we hired two, it was just me and another guy and we hired two or three interns. And so these weren't even full-time employees. And from the beginning, we did this thing where every, I think, Wednesday we would go out to lunch.

And I remember the first time we had other people in that office, I said, all right, well, what do you guys want to do for lunch? And I got three or four different answers. And I was like, oh, lesson learned, never ask. And so from that point on, it was. We're going here. And I said, here's what we'll do. Every week, someone else, there's a decision maker. But you can't ask.

You just decide. And I found that people are just half. happier that way and life's easier. And oftentimes it's like that with feedback. We're just like, I'll listen to sometimes, but most of the time I'm just doing what I want to do and I'm just going to deal with the consequences. Right. Can I ask you a random question about Milk Road is who designed the milk jar?

Who did that little graphic? I don't know. Ben got that made or he found that somewhere. I think he got it made from there's a guy who we featured their, their, their Dow, So it's pretty cool. There's a bunch of designers that got together in this Dow, I think it's called Vector Dow. And it's basically like high-level designers. And they basically created an ad hoc agency.

So companies come to them. They pay them. And then like anybody in the Dow can like take the project and like form a little guild, like a five people, a form a team. And they'll go design the thing. And basically it's like an agency that was like they don't have a hiring and firing process. You just sort of join and you can either contribute or not contribute at the end of the day. And so the thing is cool, but it's pretty expensive. It's pretty pricey.

So I think when we were featuring it, we talked to some guy, Ben met some guy. And then one of the people in VectorDow was like, yo, I just like, I like the milk road and your thing's so ugly. Like, I got to improve it. Are they Indian? I don't think they're Indian. No. And then Ben, what Ben does is he's like, he'll just post something. I'm like, hey, what do you?

I made this design. What do you think at this? And the guy's like, Ben, I know what you're doing. You just keep showing me stuff that's so ugly that I can't help myself, but go to fix it. Like, fine, I'll fix it again. And he's done that twice now. So I just did a reverse Google image search. And there's an article written in the India Times, and it's using your logo.

So maybe that one is, maybe that icon is one that had been found instead of the design. But the guy designed all the like banners and the breaks in the like in the email itself, like the format of the email. Wow. And look, why do you ask that thing? Because I really like the formatting and the design. And it's really simple. Like it's basically just that little milk jar. and like that color blue.

Yeah. And I find it really simple, but attractive and memorable. Oh, thank you. Wow. Flattered. Are you describing Sean or the logo? Why am I blushing right now?

Katie's got to watch out. She's got to watch her back. All right. That's the episode, I think, right? Yeah, we're 17. Sam's like, I got a hard stop at the hour. And then I'm like, we just keep talking about random, useless stuff.