My First Million - MFM Goes Viral on TikTok, Solana Billionaires, Right to Be Forgotten, and More

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamParr) discuss how they were able to get more than 10M views on TikTok, why Solana billionaires are giving them FOMO, the right to be forgotten and companies that are helping people achieve it, and much more.  _____ * 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) - How MFM went viral on TikTok (07:55) - Right to be forgotten and Reputation.com (21:20) - Making billions from Solana (39:50) - Moving to Silicon Valley with nothing (45:50) - Reflections on eComm (01:00:00) - SOS and OpenSea ----- 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

It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have these cases. It's actually going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent, spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it. All right. We're live. What's going on?

I'm self-conscious now because we're blown up on TikTok. I just look at myself. I'm like, I should have shaved. And now that I have to see myself and I see people. And also the TikTok comments are brutal. they're good, but they, you know, they're like, just want to argue with every point that gets made. So let's talk about this. Now when I see myself, I'm like, shit, this is going on TikTok.

I better, I need to shave for the next one. So basically 10 days ago or 15 days ago, something like that. Like not long ago, we told everyone that we're going to do this contest. We're going to give $5,000 to like three people who take our clips and turn them into videos. The best people are on TikTok. So I actually posted the tags down there for you. So I must have made a mistake. I told people to say to use the hashtag MFM Clips.

But then I also, I must have said clip as well without the S. And so people are using two hashtag clips and Clip. MFN Clip and MFN Clips. And some aren't using both. But if you use those links, I showed you, we have in the ballpark of around 15-ish million impressions from these videos. And it's mostly young folks who created these TikTok handles from scratch. batch, took our content, and some videos have over a million. Some of them have hundreds of

thousands of likes. They're great. And do you read the comments? No. What do they say? Do they make fun of us? Any content creator, you go through the cycle of like you get excited and you read the comment. The early comments are good. And then the more popular you get, the comments start to turn mean. And then you just, everybody reaches a point where they, oh no, then the third phase is you say, you don't read the comments, but you secretly do. And then finally, you know, whatever, these are the seven stages of grief or something, social media grief, you finally stop reading the comments because you're like, this is just too toxic.

So yeah, they basically just shit on us for whatever we say. Like if we say you put down 20% to buy a house, then all the comments are about ways that you can also not put down 20% if you do this, this and this. It's like, all right, okay, TikTok commenter, you got me. You are smarter than us. you are going to constantly find some like edge case loophole or, you know, mistake in what was said. Do they make fun of how we look or talk or anything? Like they insult us?

No, they don't really. They're either like, these guys are annoying. Like they'll be like, let's say somebody cuts a clip of one of us breaking down, you know, our monthly expenses or something like that. And then the comment would just, but they don't know like the vibe of the pod. They don't know why someone would just say that out of the blue, right? It's not something people normally talk about. So they're just like, why did he feel the.

need to tell us how much he's spending on eggs or like, why is he telling us his body fat percentage, whatever. They're just like, there's that kind, which is, dude, what a douche. Nobody asked, you know, why are you doing that? Then there's the comments that are like, you know, actually, actually, it's this other thing. And then there's some comments which are like, bro, I don't, I don't want that future. No, no thanks, you know, because we'll be like, here's how things are changing. It'll be like, dude, companies just only think about money and, like, you know, comments like that.

So those are the three flavors of hateer we get so far. Luckily, so far, nobody's just shitting on our, like, face and body. Oh, that's good. That's a surprise. That's a win as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I, and in general, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words about my appearance do hurt me. Yeah, just like, don't make fun of my teeth or, like, hair. You can make fun of my brain.

They, this promotion has been a home run. Like, I thought it was going to be pretty good. I didn't think it was going to be this good. And so what we'll have to do is there's like a couple people who I'm recognizing because I watch them that are killing it. We're going to have to have them on the pot and explain how they got so many views. It's pretty amazing. Right.

And let's talk about this for a second because I think there's something interesting to learn here. So you have said many times, I've grown a lot of things. I've grown an email newsletter to multi-millions. I've grown a subscription business to multi-millions. I've grown whatever. you're like a podcast is the hardest thing I've ever had to grow. And you say that. I think it's just kind of a cool thing to say in general.

Do you agree with that? I agree with it in the sense of it has, there's no like easy growth hacks to growing a podcast. There's no just like button you can push. Paid ads don't really work. Nothing really works like that. The good news is once somebody actually subscribed to your podcast, they become like a really loyal fan and they like feel like they know you.

So it's got a lot of value. But it's hard to get that easy growth. This is the first. And we tried a bunch of shit. We've tried, we did nothing initially. Then we tried placing it in our email newsletters. We tried bringing on big name guests. We tried paid ads.

We tried a bunch of different things, none of which really, like, kind of felt like it was really working, but the pod kept growing organically. This is the first thing. Oh, by the way, we also tried making her own clips, paying an agency tens of thousands of dollars a month to be making really awesome animated clips of our content. And they were great.

And they were high quality clips, but it didn't lead to this. This was different. This was, hey, anybody, open playing field, just go for it. And we'll give out prizes to the people who are actually good at it, merit-based, right? And what they're good at is they understood TikTok, whereas, like, we suck at TikTok. We don't know how to create content there. They pull the right clips because they're actually listeners and fans of the show. So they know which clip is actually going to be interesting versus like, you know, some

random employee at our company being like, uh, you know, at the 42 minute mark, let's use that one for the clip. These guys will put like 10 that they think are interesting and put them out there. And, um,

and they're motivated because they're like, shit. If I do this good, I can get a million views on this and I can go, you know, I can get five grand from these guys. Like that's a pretty sweet deal for, for doing something,

you know, pretty fun. So this has actually worked. Yeah. It's pretty wild. And like some, there's one guy who basically took our Rob Deerdick episode. And,

And I looked at his feed and he, I'm not, I don't think I'm exaggerating. It's 50 clips in a row of like, he basically just took it and just divided it up. And like three of the 50. All he did was he just took our talking out and just, every time Rob talks, he grabs a clip, which is smart. Yeah. And his whole feed, I looked at his feet. It was all that one episode. And like three of them had like 500,000 views.

Yeah, so go go follow them. I think MFM cuts is one on, on TikTok and Twitter. there's MFM clips, then there's a bunch of other variations of that name. All right, I want to tell you about something interesting. I got a few interesting things

to talk to you about, okay? So let me tell you about something that I was thinking about this weekend. So I've got a buddy. You kind of know them. And I'm not going to name them.

But a few years ago, he did something, he was accused of doing a crime that was a horrible crime. One of the worst crimes you could commit. And he was an executive at a company. and it made the news.

So six months later, after he went to court and went to trial, the government dropped the case because it was a horrible misunderstanding. He didn't do what he was accused of doing. And they exonerated him and they go, we're sorry, we were wrong. We called this one wrong. And the first time the story went out, it made all the headlines. And if you Google this person's name, it came up on top. But what didn't come up on top was like six months later, it said,

charges dropped. The misunderstanding came about for this reason. This person lost their job because of that and lost obviously a lot of money. And I've always thought about this. And I listened to a podcast this weekend. And it was called The Right to Be Forgotten. And it was by Radio Lab.

And so it's this idea of the right to be forgotten. And it's in Europe. It's actually a law. I don't know exactly what the law says, but it says like if something isn't particularly newsworthy, but you're writing about it anyway and it really hurts that person more than that provides value

to the comment or to like a reader. You have to take it down. And there's a couple of newspapers like the Boston Globe as well as in this particular podcast they looked at this company, this newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. And there's stories of like a cop

emailing them. And he's like, look, you wrote about this time that I lied about some paperwork and ended up getting fired. I didn't hurt anyone. And now I can't get a job at another as a police officer anywhere else.

By the way, can I fill in the the gap on the right to be forgotten for you here? Yeah. So basically it's a law that says search engines should have to remove links about your past if under certain circumstances. And it came about because there was a woman, an actress who was in a movie and then it got dubbed. So there was that the film was called The Innocence of Muslims.

And then her original line got dubbed over. And then it made it made it so that it looked like she was saying, is your, is your Muhammad a child molester, right? So that was the clip. And she starts getting death threats and like people go crazy about this. And she's like, what is this? Like, why, like, okay, this thing got dubbed. Now this clip got onto into the search engine.

And it comes up if you search my name or certain things. And it's causing, you know, like harm to me in my personal life. And so she sued Google in 2014. And ultimately they upheld it, which was, you know, like she would like to have it have the film forgotten and strip from YouTube. Unfortunately, the right to be forgotten, which is recognizing the EU is not recognized in the U.S. And so the EU does respect this as they're tighter on privacy with GDPR

and things like that and the U.S. does not. So yeah, and so in the U.S., we don't have that. But it's kind of interesting because I personally have seen this hurt people. But you think like right now, like let's say that you're at a bar and you're drunk and you call someone like a really bad word. and it's on Reddit and they find your name, you're screwed. To the point of like your life is going to be hurt meaningfully for like the next decade.

And like you should suffer some consequences for someone calling something something rude, but not like that serious, you know. And so I've been thinking a lot about this business, about this reputation management business. Have you ever researched it? Yeah, my former co-founder used to work there. So he used to tell me stories all the time. Great. I want to hear all about it.

And I know a little bit about this because, Listen to this. So one of the companies is called Reputation.com. So there's this porn star named Sasha Gray. So do me a favor. Type in Sasha Gray on your Google and click images. Sasha Gray doesn't, she's not an actress anymore or not a porn actress anymore, but she was like a very prolific porn actress.

When you clicked images, what do you see? Here we go. I'm here. Okay, so I see a bunch of headshots of her. I see no real porn. Well, I guess I guess some scandalous stuff. But mostly porn. Yeah, mostly just pictures of her.

fully clothed or like in a bikini. So one time at The Hustle, right when we first launched, I helped write this article about Sasha Gray and she hired this firm called Reputation.com and she basically wanted to retire from pornography and become like an actor and whatever else, something different. And she hired Reputation.com to hide or like basically blog a bunch and write a bunch in order to get the porn images to go down. And I remember when we wrote this article, Reputation.com did something kind of funny. And if I would go on my Google Analytics at night, I would look at real time.

And there would be thousands of people reading this article. And I saw that they searched Sasha Gray. And so Reputation.com manipulated it. So the article that we wrote about Reputation.com and Sasha Gray came up, number one, if you Googled Sasha Gray. And at night, when people were going to look at porn, they Googled Sasha Gray and they landed on our article. It was pretty wild.

I would see it at night every week or every night it would go up. And so I got crazy fascinated about Reputation.com. And so for this segment, I wanted to talk about Reputation.com. I think there's Yext and there's sprinkler. And these are businesses that do like $4,500 million a year. And all they do is reputation management. What do you know about Reputation.com? So you used to tell me stories like, you know, I asked him.

I was like, oh, would you do before this? What was your job before that? And eventually he said Reputation.com and I got fascinated like you. I was like, what is that? So he told me he's like, you know, here's a. a scenario, you're a senator and your son who has the same, you know, John Chambers Jr. Sorry to any John Chambers out there. It's a hypothetical.

So your son who has the same name as you basically gets a DUI or gets arrested for battery or something like that. So now, anytime somebody searches John Chambers, this mugshot's going to come up or this bad news story's going to come up. And basically they go to Reputation.com and they say, I would like this to disappear off the front page. of, I would like this to disappear. A Repetion.com says, I can't make it disappear.

The internet sort of is uncontrollable, but I can get you off the front page of Google. And they're like, that would be amazing. And they say, for the low, low price of $120,000, $75,000, whatever it is. It's expensive. Expensive, because they know people are, by the time you're at Reputation.com, you're bent over the barrel. They can charge pretty much whatever they can get away with. So like, you know, a NASCAR driver, a politician, whoever, people of interest, people who wanted their names or their kids' names to get out of the bad news. And so they

had a team of engineers that were just, it's a constant cat and mouse game to figure out how to beat Google. So like, he might go founder told me, he's like one of the biggest days at the company was when we figured out, you know, Google has the auto-complete, right? So you go, you type Sampar, it's going to be Sampar the hustle. Sampar net worth, Sampar wife, Sampar is gay. It'll be like all these like the same 10 queries for everybody, right? And what he figured out was that when you type, you know, Sam Parr, if it used to say felony, like F would now say friend instead of felony. Like they would figure out how to even finish the auto complete because even when they were good at getting you off the front page by blogging, by promoting other articles, whatever, getting them

higher ranked. If the auto complete was still always suggesting felony, then people would click it and they would search for felony. It would be reinforcing. and Google would search for it more. So they needed to clear that. So there was just constant cat and mouse game to understand how is Google doing, how is Google deciding what goes where? And then how do we content farm or manipulate this in some way that will change what the first page results are?

Because 98% of people don't go past the first page or something like that. Yeah. And so it's amazing to hear about that. And then there's a company called Yext, Y-E-X-T. They're publicly traded. And they do, I think that they are just a direct comparison. competitor reputation.com. They're publicly traded. They did $390 million, I think, last year in revenue. Their market cap is not very good. It's like four or five times revenue. Are you looking at it?

I'm on reputation. I went to Reputation.com. I just wanted to see the latest. Like you wouldn't even know when you go to this what they do because it says, this is their headline. First, it looks like a hospital website, like a nice health tech website or something like that. Then it says, a world of interactions demands a platform of action. It's like, we're a fixer is what it should say. So, but here's the problem. By the way, maybe they change what they do. I don't know.

I think they still do it. I think they offer like a smaller package. Like when we wrote the Sasha Gray article, that was in 2016. They have like a $13,000 package. But the problem is there's kind of two problems with us. The first is that the results aren't guaranteed. Like you can't guarantee that it's going to work, which is, I guess it's not a problem. But that's just how it works.

You know, when someone calls you, I get these calls all the time because I own domain names and I forgot to hide my name. It's like, hey, we'll put you on the first page of Google. That's a scam. You can't just promise that. But the second thing is that if you're an individual, if you're just someone who like said some stupid drunken thing to someone one day and now your names all over the place, you, you, it's really, really hard to, like, unless you're going to pay $100,000, which is what a lot of this stuff costs. It's incredibly challenged to manage your reputation if you're just like a person. And so I was thinking about, like, is there anything interesting in that space? I actually think that there could be something. I like this company called Do Not Pay.

Do Not Pay is? Yeah, I love Do Not Pay. The guy is the guy behind that's awesome and it's a great idea. So do not pay. It started by this guy, and I actually didn't research this. I just all the top of my head. It started by this guy named Josh Browder, I think, Bouter. And he's young.

Like when he started it, I think it was like 21. Oh, 25. Okay. Well, no, now I think he's like 25. When he started, he was even younger. Yeah, he was obviously. And he was like a prodigy type of thing. And originally the business existed to help you fight parking tickets automatically.

But now they have a bunch of features like it's basically all sticking it to the man. So another feature is like we will sue, we will sue cold callers on your behalf or something like that. They'll also do like, you know, we will unsubscribe you from stuff that you're not using that you pay for. You know, just ways to save you, ways that you do not pay, which is why it's a great aim and a great idea. And I think there's a world where, like, a do not, you could use a do not pay service like this to help manage your reputation online. And this is a need that I think we're actually going to see more and more and more of it. It's like a very, like, exponential thing where it's like more and more people are going to be written about and more and more people are going to need this. And I don't know.

It's just something I'm thinking about. Do you have any, do you have an opinion on? I don't know where the new opportunity is in this one because I think it really depends on it's kind of like, you need Google to, exist for Reputation.com to exist. And so really it's about thinking, okay, there was a version of of this on social networks that people were doing. Like, I remember this one guy came to me and he was a great entrepreneur. He ended up not doing this idea, but like I always thought it was a great idea. Others have done it, which is when you, everybody has social media where they post stupid stuff when you're younger, when you're just drunk or whatever. And so what they do is they go to

companies and they say, hey, we ran a check on all your employees. And we found these red flags. And you should be aware of who you're hiring as well as what they're saying and representing your company, how they represent your company elsewhere. So they end up getting contracts with companies to monitor and clean up. And they're not like tattletailing. They're sort of like, hey, like an insider helping you out saying, hey, you have this employee who's saying this. You may want to take action. But the action might just be letting the employee know that we flagged this as potentially controversial and maybe they want to delete it. And so it's a monitoring service for social media reputations

and social media controversies, which I think is a great, great idea. It just sucks. You got to do that. Well, it sucks at the world is the way it is. It sucks. Well, some people think, oh, it's good. You hold you accountable.

But in reality, it's just a bunch of like, you know, don't say what you really feel is really the result of most of this because people just get afraid to say anything because they're worried about getting canceled. So, and your buddy liked working at Reputation.com, but they were by the book? He was like, technically, it was super interesting to figure how we do all this stuff.

He always says this thing. At one point, we had indexed every person on the web. And we had them and their cluster and their reputation. And so, you know, I think it was technically very interesting, but obviously like sort of soul-sucking and boring as well. So he, you know, bounce. Yeah, I think I can see that. But it is an interesting problem I've been thinking about.

All right, let me tell you about one more thing. All right. So I was reading the information, the information.com. And they had an article about Solano. So I told you about this on Slack. Salana. Sorry. I don't know anything about it really, other than...

Don't out yourself here as a crypto and nobody. Yeah, I don't want to act like I'm an expert here. I'm not. I just, I've read a lot about it, though, but news articles. So Chris McCann. I knew this guy named Chris McCann because he had this thing called Startup Digest. And that's one of the reasons why HustlCon became popular is because I would email Chris and I would say, hey, can you please put this in the email?

And he had this email called Startup Digest. It started in San Francisco. And he would email each week different events happening in San Francisco, different startup events. This was when the startup community was much smaller and everyone wanted to go to events. And it was just, here's a roundup of cool events happening. He eventually expanded it to different cities. He sold it, not for a lot of money, probably six figures, I bet.

But he kind of worked his way into benchmark where he was just an employee there. And somehow or another invested $250. $50,000 into, what's it called? Is it Salana or Salana? Salana. I'm a fucking new. He invested $250,000 into Salana. And the information wrote an article about how that $250 turned into a billion.

Is that crazy? In probably, I think, three years, maybe four years, Max. Yeah, it's insane. I sent you somebody else who also has made multiple billions of dollars from their Salana investment. I sent that last week to you. but basically Solana has gone. Oh, like the fund?

Yeah. So Solana has gone from, let's see. I mean, it was like sub a dollar not long ago. And now it's $200 per coin. And it's basically it's, what is Solana. Salana is a competitor to Ethereum. If you know what Ethereum is. If you don't know what Ethereum is, just fast forward this segment.

You probably don't care. So Salon is like a competitor to Ethereum. And as recently is, okay, so this time last year, Solana was $1.54. and when it launched, when it did its ICO, it was just under a dollar, I think it was. And so, and that was only, that was, you know, a couple years ago, two years ago or something like that. So basically, even to just take last year, $1.54, you put $100,000 into that, and now you have, I think, $20 million or something like that. I'm actually going to do some public math here for everybody. Yeah, $20 million.

dollars. So Salana's had this insane run-up and it sounds like he, I think through, he's in this fund called Red Something, Red Circle or something. Race. A race, yeah, race something. They were like the seed investors in Solana. And, you know, that's the right project to be a seed investor and is a crypto project that becomes a, you know, multi-billion dollar crypto asset. And sure enough, you could turn $250K into a billion that's kind of insane. I don't think it was his personal

$2505 necessarily, but even if it was the fun. The article made it sound like it was, but even if it's not, that doesn't change much. The insanity. Yeah, it doesn't change much because he still is going to walk away

with over $100 million, some figure like there. But this article, I was reading about it, and they're basically like saying there's like a lot of really high profile tech folks at traditional tech companies

giving up amazing things in order to like flee to this crypto thing. And I want to ask you a question about that. But example, like this woman Sandy Carter VP of Amazon's cloud computing, she left to join unstoppable domains. Brian Roberts, who was the CFO of Lyft, he left to join OpenC. And he said, I've seen enough cycles and paradigm chips to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging and that we're only at the beginning and it's just going to get bigger.

We had David Marcus. He basically led Facebook. book's cryptocurrency thing. He bounced to start his own thing. This one dude left Google in order to become Coinbase's cheap product officer. And when it went public, his stake was worth $600 million. And then, of course, Jack Dorsey bounced from Twitter in order to work at Square. And it's like, definitely involves crypto. They renamed to Block because they're focusing on blockchain. But it's crazy. And my question to you is this. Have you ever seen someone, create that much wealth that fast? And do you have any stories of people who you know or know of

that are doing this and like what their stories are? Because this is crazy. Well, I'll say the first thing is that you're right that there's basically a giant black hole that's sucking up all the talent in the world and it's called crypto. And it's almost a self, there's a lot of people who don't believe that crypto is a thing or they think it's massively overhyped and they say, you know, give me one example of a real use case of this thing. Nobody's actually using it for payments or Web 3. There's no real Web 3 products. And it's sort of there, there's some truth to what they're saying. I wouldn't say that they're completely off base. It's like a valid critique. I don't think it's true, but it's a valid criticism. But the, it's almost a self-fulfilling

prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have these cases. It's actually going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent, spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it. That's like the biggest like takeaway for me of like even if you're the biggest cryptoskeptic, there's a self-fulfilling prophecy here, which is that it's sucked up all the dev talent, sucked up all the smartest people. It sucked up like 20 billion dollars of venture capital every year now. And all that funding, all that talent is going to create things that actually do work and do hit beyond what's already there today. So there's that. Now to your question,

have I seen somebody get rich this quick. I want to have my buddy on. I have a friend who used to work with me and I caught up with them. And his story, he basically went from like an average, like an average job. Like you wouldn't look at this person and say, oh, that's a star career. And they were good. They were doing well, obviously, but they were doing like normal person well. And they went from normal person well to making like to personally making like 15 million dollars in the last year just by the, the, they basically quit their job and they went down a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in defy. And they started playing with all the defy projects, investing their money in defy.

And they didn't have a huge base of capital. They had, you know, call it half a million dollars that they put in. And to turn a half million dollars, and if you have no path in your career to being like, you know, a deca millionaire, right? Like if you don't have a path where you're like, yeah, I'm going to have fuck you money, to go from no path, no, no like reasonable storyline that makes sense there. You have a job at a company that pays you good salary and that's that. To that is amazing to me and awesome and like, you know, just like blew my mind more so than these guys who become multi-billionaires who were like prodigies and like invented the protocol or invested $250K in a random token. It's like this is somebody who just took their own money out of the stock market

and was like, instead of investing in Apple, Google, and Facebook, I'm going to invest in like crypto and turned a normal amount, a normal like life. savings amount of money into a life-changing amount of money. And I want to have him on to tell his full story because it actually has a bunch of twists and turns that are like kind of amazing. So I'm going to ask him if you'll come on and share it. Do I know them? Will you're willing to?

Yeah, you know them. I don't know if they're willing to share, but if they are, it's going to make for an amazing episode. I'll ask him if you do it next week. Did they, um, did they earn the, did they sell, do they have USD or like some type of stable currency? Um, no. they're still in crypto like 100 or 100 plus percent because they you know but but is it stable like a

like a popular thing uh it's a mix of popular things and like something they can sell least stuff everything's liquid if they wanted to cash out and say i'm done i'm going to malibu and i'm going to chill and i'm going to pretend that this year never existed and i basically won a lottery they could do that because we have a buddy in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin but he's like i can't sell it so it's like that's different That's like, those are like either illiquid, like, oh, there's this coin, but it's not listed yet. Or it's liquid, but there's like no trading volume whatsoever on this coin. And so like, yeah, if you have $10 million and you go to sell even $100,000, it'll crash the price of the coin.

That's not what this is. That's a different thing. That's a, what that is is I make a million coins. I keep $9,9,000 for myself. And then I sell one of them for a dollar. And oh, now the total value. value of my thing is a million dollars. And it's like, no, it's not really. There's such a little, such a small amount of the supply out there being sold. It's not indicative of the true price.

This is what I'm talking about is not that situation. Is there any other person? All right. So you have a story of someone who did 500,000 to 15 million. I just told you about this guy who in like two or three years. This person, non-technical, never was a trader or a financial person. Like they would own like a index fund or mutual fund before that. Didn't know how to spell blockchain. You know, like This person is, that's why this blows my mind. It's not just this. I know that amount is not the craziest amount of money. It's an awesome amount of money for anybody.

But what's crazy is the point A to point B, it makes no sense. It's like how could those two points connect in that amount of time? It's mind blowing to me. So I told you a story about this dude, Chris, who did 250,000 up to a billion. You just said 500,000 to 15 million. Do we know anyone else that has this like crazy, crazy journey? personally you've talked about this guy you talked about somebody right that you're yeah I had a friend that that they did one million to a hundred million yeah so at its peak

when bitcoin was 60,000 so I don't whatever it's that discount it okay I have another one there is a kid who I call him a kid because he was actually a kid he I built this a product called Blab back in the day is like kind of like club housey you could basically go hang out and chat with people and this kid used to come home every day from school he used to get on in chat and he didn't chat in the other rooms that had 13 year olds he came to our rooms because he loved technology startups he wanted to be in the startup scene and um i think he was maybe 13 at the time okay so fast forward it's been like six years since then so now he's like let's say 21 or something like that it's been it's been a while and um he created some but he was he's a technical guy but he created a

protocol like i was like oh what you've been up to like how is your startup going and he's like uh yeah startup's okay we we I haven't been focusing on it for the last few months. I was like, I know, man, it's tough. Just hang in there, buddy. You know, just pivot.

He's like, actually, like, we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random, like side chains. And it was like, blah,

blah, blah, some bunch of terms I don't even understand. You know, it's a, it's a derivative's perpetual contract for, you know, adding liquidity to this blah, blah, blah.

I'm like, okay, I don't even understand what you're saying. And he's like, yeah, the market cap of it, like, you know,

basically like the market cap of it is like, 900 million right now. And, you know, I think he cashed out $10 million in this. He's like, he's like, dude, it's been insane. The market cap went up like crazy. Now it's at 200 million. And he's like, I was able to like take out like a life changing amount of money. I took out 10 million. He was like, he was asking me because he goes, I heard you guys talking about charities in charity water. You told the charity water store was really moved. Like I've set aside seven figures to donate. You're like what? I was like, you've set aside seven figures. Like, are you seven years old? How did this happen?

Where? What has happened in this amount of time? Like, I used to talk to you when you would come home from eighth grade and get online. Like, you're donating millions of dollars to charity now? Like, what is, again,

A and B, it broke my brain. And I don't mean this as an insult to them. Like, if they were only 15 then, so they're still only like 19? Yeah, I think they're 20 now,

21, something like that. It's been like seven years since we've made that thing. So, you know, it's not mind blowing to me that this person is successful. in both cases. I really like this person.

That's why I used to hang out with them. That's why I used to work with one of them. I think they're really smart and we're going to be a normal person successful. It's like when, you know, oh, I went like my sister went to high school with this girl Lily Galichi who's like this super famous Instagram star now. She's like has her own TV show on Bravo.

And it's like, wait, that's the Lily girl who used to come to our house after school. Like she was just like a normal girl. Like, wait, that's her? Like that doesn't even look like her anymore. Yeah, she's had some work done, right? it's like just mind-blowing to know a normal person who's like yeah that's a cool normal they'll do well in life to be like no actually they're like one of those crazy outlier stories and in a way that you wouldn't

have otherwise predicted you know it didn't make any sense like you know it's not it's not that that was their skill set and they tried tried tried that thing for 10 years and finally hit it's like just out of nowhere they just did this thing and it hit and crypto is this amazing thing like that so we um i'm gonna say something when i first talked to my friend i caught up with my friend I felt insanely jealous. I was like so, I was happy for him and I like him and all that. But I was also like,

I was like, in my head, I was just like, what the fuck have I been doing with my life? Wait, with the friend that used to work for you? Both of them. Both the same reaction. Yeah, because it feels weird

because you're like, oh wait, you kind of looked up to me and I was the master. Now I'm like, you know, way less successful than you. And I said like, what just happened? You just like catapulted really crazy.

Like between the last time we caught up and now. There is jealousy there. It's easy. And I just want to say, like, you know, an interesting thing to observe is what is your reaction to hearing stories like this? There's a part of me that I'm not proud of, which gets jealous of it. But that used to be like, it used to be I would feel that. I wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what I was feeling.

And I would kind of find reasons why it was like, ah, that's just luck or like, you know, well, they probably are taking a bunch of risk and they might lose it all. And I'm kind of secretly rooting for it to not not all work out just so perfectly as it has. That's gone. but I still got a little bit of that, like, jealousy pang left. And I'd say the interesting thing is, my coach said this to me, he goes, you know, you'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure. And they're not focused on your success. They're focused on their failure.

Your success has reminded them of their failure or your abundance has reminded them of their lack. And if you notice that in yourself, you want to be aware of that and change that. And if you find other people and they're like, oh, these people are haters, like, you know, just understand what's coming on. They don't actually hate you. It's, your success has reminded them of some failing that they have in themselves,

and that's where their attention has gone. And so, yeah, I wanted to share that, because I definitely felt this, like, crazy feeling that I hadn't felt a long time, but these stories were so mind-blowing that I could,

I was like, wow, I don't even know what to say. I feel lucky to know who I know, which we have the same group, basically, that I've, like,

these stories that sound unbelievably true, I'm like, yeah, I know that person. I saw it. It was wild. So, like, an example is Moise Ali selling native deodorant for $100 million, two years after starting it. I was in, we shared an office when he was starting it. And I saw him try to learn Facebook ads.

Like, I saw the thing come to fruition. I saw it right in front of my eyes every single day for like six or 10 months. And that was almost half the journey. It's actually pretty amazing, you know, and I think about like, this isn't like a one-to-one correlation because there's other components here. but like I was thinking about this. I'm like, Jamaica is a very small country.

There's not a lot of people there, but they just dominate the 100 meter dash. And obviously there's some genetic, there's a lot of genetic factors going there, but it can't be significantly different than America. And, and I was thinking like, man,

one of the reasons being is they just are just surrounded by, like, it's just normal to be great at something. And that makes it normal to work hard. And you're like, well, I should be running these times in practice. And you don't, like, freak out.

You just get it done because that's what's expected. And I kind of feel that way in terms of making money because of our friends are who they are. It's like, well, you just want to spend something up. And if, yeah, if you're willing to dedicate three years, like, you definitely can add eight figures of net worth to your, like, for sure. Like, it's easy. It's not easy, but it's simple. And it's kind of cool to, like, be around people where you start seeing like, yeah, look, it's really simple.

You just do this, this and this. Of course, you've got to dedicate every, you have to dedicate tens of hours, you know, 50, 60 hours a week for like many years. But yeah, it's very simple. straightforward. Well, the first example you gave with Moyes was starting it literally at the table. I think he sat at the table next to you, right? Like in the founders dojo or whatever those hacker doja, founder dojo? Founder's dojo. Like I think he was interested at first, if I remember correctly, he was like, what should I sell? Should I do mattresses? And he was like ordering mattresses and like measuring them and like seeing like, oh, that's too much work. Metters are too big.

What else is there? By the way, the public story is like, my sister was pregnant and she couldn't find a deodorant that didn't have chemicals, which might harm her baby. So I wanted to create that product. It's like, dude, I know you. You were like, all right, how do I build it? I want to make a business. I want to sell some shit. What do people want?

Oh, people like Kleenexes, mattresses. Too big to ship. Okay. Scratch that off the list. Deodorant, small, under one pound. Ships easily. People use it every month. It's a renewable.

And there's a niche. And there is a genuine problem for it. But like, I know you, dude. There's a real story. And then there's the narrative. It's like, I like stories, not narratives. It's not bad. He was just like seeking problems to solve.

was like boom, bound it. And I respect that. I like that. And that's how I think. So, you know, it's normal to me. There's something to, when you see it being built day by day, brick by brick, you're like, there's just a respect. And for me, like total joy.

I never feel the jealousy in that case. Like, for example, I remember when you started the hustle. I remember when you were doing just the event. And then you were like, I'm going to do this thing. And then I came to your office with you and John. And it was like, like, it was like, we went into a room that was like a conference room that was like the size of a bath. bathroom and like you had a presentation and like I listened to it and I was like okay this is cool but like what about this this is and this and you guys are like I don't know we'll figure it out and then you like you're like you're original thing was long form stories and then you're like kind of was working but not really you're like I'm thinking about switching to this like newsletter thing just daily news skim is doing it's working these guys are doing it I think we could do it in our niche and I think it'll be even better and so seeing that then it's like cool seven years later Sam whatever I don't know how long's been seven years

Was it seven? We sold it about five. Okay, five years in, Sam sells the thing and it's successful. Nothing but props, respect and joy of like, wow, that was so cool. I got to sit there on the journey with you. There's a difference of that watching somebody build it brick by brick. And a difference of actually this happened in 12 months. You didn't get to see the hard work that was obviously going in and the risks that were being taken.

So all you hear is like, I tried this thing in it. It just hit 100. 200x, 200x, like what? You know, it feels more like a lot of reading. It feels less like the hard work thing. I think that happens a lot in crypto. That's a little difference there. The second part is I remember when I moved, so I moved from Australia to Silicon Valley

without having a game plan. I think you were kind of the same way. Didn't you just like come to Silicon Valley? Just showed up. Just showed up. I did the same thing. I was sitting in Australia. I remember specifically I went to a meetup and they asked me to speak about the, about

lean startups about startups and I went and I spoke and everybody at the end was like yay you know great talk people afterwards like wow that was really great talk and in my head my buddy was like what's wrong because he could see I was just like kind of upset he's like what's wrong he didn't like I was like I don't know anything about startups and I'm like the thought leader here this is like I'm doing something wrong like this is like I feel like not imposter syndrome I feel like idiot syndrome it's a blind leading to blind it's like these guys know zero about startups I know point. one about startups. But if I'm the smart guy here, then that, where are the actual smart guys? They're not here. And I asked, I was like, yeah, what are the success stories in Brisbane about

like startups? You guys are the startup scene. They're like, yeah, these guys do they great. Oh, where are they? They don't come to these events. No, they moved to San Francisco. These guys moved. These guys moved. And I was like, oh, all the smart people move. Okay, maybe I should move. So I changed my phone number first, just to mentally be like, all right, I have a Silicon Valley area code. I don't know why. For me, that was just like a, I think could just do it like over the like I did it in one night before I could move. It was like faster than moving was just to change my phone number, it's make a statement. And then I remember being like, all right, I'm going to move there. I'll figure it out. And I quit my job, you know, on the spot.

And I was like, I'm just going to move there. I play poker for three months to hold myself over while I applied for a job, literally one job. And they didn't hire me. They were like, kept stringing me along. And I was like, this was the one I ended up working at Monkey Inferno. There was like a slow process, two-month process. So finally, I was just like, all right, fuck it, I'm just gonna move there. And if this doesn't work, I think I'll get this job,

but if it doesn't work, I'll get some, I'll do something else. What was the title? Just product manager. Like, I was, first PM there. So I,

I finally came. And when I came, they were like, all, why'd you move, like, why'd you come here? And I was like, well, you know,

I wanted to see what's in the water here, right? Like, if this is where all the smart people are, this is what are the little startups are. Like, what do you guys know that I don't, I don't know. And I was thinking it's about tactics. It's about operations.

Maybe people are just like literally this is the cream of the crop. These are just the smartest people. And there's certainly some of that. But I'll tell you what to me was the actual, this was the actual difference. The thing that made coming to Silicon Valley work. I went to this coffee shop. You remember the creamery or this like a,

it's like this like coffee and ice cream or whatever. It was at South Park. Second and Brandon, I think. Yeah, exactly. So this place called the creamery. It's kind of famous for. where people take meetings. And I went there and I just sat there for like half a day. I was just eating. I didn't, I didn't have anywhere to go. I didn't have an office. I didn't have an

apartment. So I was like, well, we'll sit here and then I'll go search for apartments later. And I remember just seeing table after table next to me. Somebody would come in and they'd be like just pitching their idea to either an investor or a buddy, like trying to make a co-founder or two friends catching up or an investment pitch. And it was always like these like hairbrained ideas. It's like, oh, you know, LinkedIn, but for, you know, cat doctors or whatever. This stupid ideas. And I remember just sitting there thinking, oh, that's a stupid idea. That's a stupid idea. And then I was sort of realizing like, oh, that's actually kind of cool. Like the normal conversation here, the coffee shop conversation here is I got this idea. I'm going to change

the world. I got this idea. It's going to be huge. I was like, everybody kind of has bought into this. And like if you go to Hollywood, that's what happens. Like the waiters and waitresses, I'm going to be a star. And New York is a different thing. And it's Silicon Valley. It's basically, I got this idea. It's going to be big. And that's normal. Whereas before, everywhere I lived, if you were the guy

who's got an idea and you're going to quit your job to go do it, you're crazy. You're the crazy guy. Here, you're the normal guy. Here, in Silicon Valley,

if you're like, I work at JP Morgan, you basically have to like, bow your head in shame. You have to like come up with some excuse. It's like, you know, because my wife is pregnant

with twins and I really got to pay the mortgage. But as soon as that's over, you know, like I'm back in the game. I'm going to go back into the startup game. Like, if you work for McKinsey, anywhere else,

that's great. If you work for, you know, McKinsey or Deloitte in San Francisco, you're like the low class person. You're not the high class person because the high class person is the founder with the idea or the angel investor who's betting on ideas. So just that culture where that's normal and possible to just constantly quit your job, have an idea, throw everything into it and maybe get rich. That's what makes it look in Valley so awesome or that's what it did.

And what you're talking about where like if your friends group has these types of success stories and is doing this type of shit, your brain will just automatically change into thinking, that's possible, that's normal, that's super doable for me too. And that, you can't underestimate that. I think for some people, that's what this show is. It's like, if you hear us three times a week, at least that's like part of your friend group that talks that way, thinks that way, and will make it feel normal to have ideas, to bet on ideas, to make a bunch of money, to make huge investments. whereas in your geography may not be people around you and your neighbors and so like that may not think that way.

Yeah. And it basically changed my perspective from like this only happens to other people to obviously this is obviously I'm going to. It's a matter of time. Yeah, I'm going to achieve the desired outcome. It's just A, like for on which swing am I going to get my hit? And B, which thing do I want to dedicate five or 10 years on? Right.

Because if you like work. eight years on something and you're around the right people and you've been like going like I felt like living there. I was like I was in school. So it's like, well, I'm in school. I know like, I know it when I see it. And I can just keep working on something. And then I'll see right away that it's working. And then I just spend time on it and just give it time. And it works. It will always work. That's kind of like the attitude. There's, um, uh, I think I've told the story. I haven't told like why I did the e-commerce thing and why I think it worked. No. So I was sitting with our mutual friend. I think I could say his name.

Maybe we'll bleed this out later, but I was sitting with him and his backyard. He had this, you know, he has that awesome. And when he lived in California, he had this awesome backyard with the basketball court and like a pudding green and pool and chickens, stuff like that. And we were just chilling for the day and his dogs are running around. And we were talking. And while we were talking, the Shopify ch Ching kept going off on his phone. And he would have that thing all the time.

I used to yell at him. I go turn that shit off. Yeah. So it was like, ching. And then like two minutes said to be like, ching. And then I was like, I was like, what is that? He's like, oh, oh, my bad. He's like, I, sorry, I totally spaced.

I didn't even realize. I didn't even realize that was happening. Like, that's obnoxious. My bad. I go, no, no, no, leave that on. What is that? He goes, that's the Shopify. Like, every time we get a sale, it does that.

I said, I leave that on. I said, I'll leave that on. It went on the whole time. It goes off the whole time. By the end of the, I, we were talking about some other shit completely. We're talking about dogs and family and kids and like, whatever. By the end of the hour, I was like, all right, man, I got to get, you know, whatever, I got to go.

But I'm definitely starting. And it's Shopify thing. I want my phone to do that. He's like, he's like, yeah, you totally should. I was like, just literally that experience. If I did not have that and the jealousy worked to my favor, right? The jealousy was a signal of if I want that more than what I have, maybe I need to make a change, right?

Because I was like, I'm going to go back to the office where I earn a fixed salary. It's a great. I was making great money, but like it is capped. I will make the same amount whether I do a good job or a bad job. Whereas for him, it was like he got to chill. It was making money passively. And if he did a better job, he was going to make more money. So that was the first thing.

It made me maybe decide, I'm going to do this. And then I started like, Moise, I was like, what can I sell? What can I sell? All right, all right. What can I sell? What were the other options? Of other ideas I had to sell? Yeah.

I remember going through candles. Candles are kind of an amazing business, but very competitive. Candles are the same thing as deodorant. You use them and they burn out. They literally melt away and you have to buy another one. I just bought a $100 can't candle. Yeah, they're high A.OV. They're super high margin.

So they're not expensive to make. They're just really, you can charge a lot for them. You can have a whole bunch of skews very easily that are all the same. They're all just different scents. There are the high end, middle end, low end. There's candles that are like, you know, oh, this smells like your hometown of Missouri. There's like a bunch of gimmicks you can do. There's whatever.

So candles was definitely one that was on my mind. I told you about the Crystal story. I was basically like, because I was asked, my buddy, so I asked that friend and I asked others, said, how do you think about this? Hey, they gave me some frameworks of how to think about it, right? Like, look, you're going to, the reason this whole thing works is Facebook ads. So that means you're going to acquire customers. So something like this dollar amount. All right. So you need to. How much was that dollar amount? So like 20 bucks? At the time, it was like 20 or 25 bucks, something like that. But now it'd be higher.

Now it's higher. Now it's like 40, 45 bucks, something like that. But it's like, all right, let's just say, in a best case scenario, you're going to break even on the first purchase. So you want a product that's going to have 65 to 70% gross margins. So that means the actual, let's say, I don't forget public math, but like let's just round numbers here. A candle, let's say the cost of goods is $5. You want to make sure that you could sell that thing for $30 or whatever to have that type of gross margin. So, and then you're going to have, you know, let's call it 15% to 20% is your cost of fulfillment. So that's like packaging it, you know, picking it in your warehouse and then shipping it to the customer and customer.

And, okay, cool. So then you take all that out. So basically you end up with a break even. And the question is, if you can break even on the first purchase, meaning it costs you $25, let's say in Facebook to get a customer, then you want that to be your net profit on a single order. Then you're basically, that's like the, that's like a great position to be in because you're breaking even on day one.

And then every repurchase. You build up your customer base by recycling that cash flow on this, you know, every month. You're not going deeper and deeper in debt. And then as you build your customer base, when they come back and repeat purchase and you want that repeat purchase rate to be high. So like, you know, one of our friends has a thing that doesn't have high people repeat purchase rate.

The other one has like Deodorant has amazing repeat purchase rate. So if they repeat purchase, that means your lifetime value will be higher for your customer and all that. Every next purchase will be much more profitable. All right. And the business would be more valuable. And then little things like, hey, the way that the shipping works in the country is like, you know, things that are under one pound.

they ship at this low rate. Once it's over a pound, shipping is like much more expensive. Like there's like a normal USPS, USPS like whatever, priority mail. That if it's under a pound, it's like whatever, five bucks or four bucks or whatever. So there's like certain little things that help. And so like if you talk to Moyes, Moyes used to like change his packaging so that he would be at 0.99 pounds. Right. Like he was like, I want to be just under one pound.

And that was like his like key, one of the key things that help control cost. So anyways, there's a whole bunch of frameworks. I went through a bunch of product ideas to figure it out. And what were the other ones? You're going to, like, you know, the easiest thing to sell on Facebook is stuff that appeals to, like, white women in middle America. So, like, how do you sell to a 35 to 65-year-old woman that lives in Texas? And, like, that's the persona that's, like, the most easy to fish for on Facebook.

You can not obviously sell anything to anybody. Facebook's huge. But, like, if you can get one for white women in middle America, like, your gold. Is that who the majority of your customers are? Yeah. Ours are a little younger than that, but like, yeah, that's like the thing. For white ladies. Why women in middle America is like a great market to sell to.

And most of Silicon Valley makes a mistake. They go for what is L.A., New York, and San Francisco, single millennials like me want? And that's such a expensive customer. It's an expensive customer. Then their lifestyle changes very quickly and they don't need your shit anymore. And it's just too limited. Because you're competing with like Uber and Lyft and shit.

Like the ad spent, it's just too hard. Everything is very competitive. It's just like, I guess the way to think about it is not that necessarily that one is that much better than the other. I wouldn't actually say that. It's just more like, don't narrow your scope to your single lifestyle as like a 25-year-old dude in San Francisco who like orders, you know, every meal on postmates. It's like you're not representative of the world. So, you know, like don't limit yourself to just that. Because like, you know, it might be truckers in middle America that love, you know, that buy X, Z or whatever.

just like a different market that that's really lucrative that you're not really paying attention to right now. So pay attention to other groups. So anyways, the second thing that happened was I asked them, I asked, so we had two buddies that were doing the same thing. Two was enough where I was like, oh, if he can do it, he can do it. I could do it. I could do it. No problem. And so I was like, I asked them, I was like, what are your sales? And it shocked me, right? It was like, oh, you know, the business, we did $7 million our first year, $21 million our second year, and $41 million our third year. I was like, what the fuck is going on? I was like, and they're like, oh, yeah, we didn't raise any money. It's just profitable. You know, I just take a dividend out. I'm like, what, like, what are these words,

profit? You know, like where I come from, Silicon Valley, we don't, we don't say that word. Yeah, what's that? What's that P word? Yeah. Like, you know, the prophet like Jesus? Like, what are you talking about? So, so when I heard that, I was like, all right. And then that became my normal. Like, I was like, okay, I'm going to do seven million my first year. I'm going to do $20 million my second year. I'm going to do $4. Like that became my, what I thought was achievable and normal. If I hadn't heard that from them, I would have never scaled as fast. And sure enough, we did, you know, $7 million the first year now. In our second year, hopefully we'll get to 20. Like, I hit this exact, I hit the exact thing to the point

where I'm like, maybe I should have shot higher. Maybe, maybe just hearing their number created like an artificial ceiling. But are you, but are you, how many people work there full time at yours? Um, let's call it. Yeah, like four or five. Are you happy with e-commerce? I've asked you this like every quarter. Are you happy with it now? It's a great business in one way and it's a terrible pain in the ass in the other way.

You know, like, you know, whatever. Like right now, everything is, it's a lot of headwinds are going against e-commerce. So Facebook's getting more expensive. Shipping anything around the world is getting super expensive and slower. So those are the, the two core costs, right? Getting a customer and then fulfilling your product. All the material, you're doing physical products.

And guess what? With inflation, everything gets more expensive. So, like, there's a lot of headwinds against e-commerce right now. And it's very competitive. So, you know, there's a bunch of reasons why it's bad. Then again, it's working. And, like, you know, I'm happy with our business. So, you know, it's good.

But what I recommend is to the next person, not necessarily. I think if you can do software, do software. If you don't really want to, like, do real work. work. Don't do e-commerce because e-commerce has real work. Like we have a warehouse. You know, it's annoying. Let me tell you something really quick before we are up. I just invested in, I don't ever do DTC companies like these consumer shipping companies, but this guy listening to our podcast, I bet you he reached out to you too. It's called the Good Crisp Company. Yeah. So he sent me, like I guess on the podcast, I mentioned that I love snacks or something. I don't know.

Well, we were talking about better for you snacks, right? So junk food, that's like keto, keto cookies, whatever. So he's got Pringles that are like better for you than Pringles. But they taste like pengles. Yeah. They're awesome. I ate this entire box of like and it was like a lot of chips. Like it was kind of messed up.

It's a can of Pringles. Yeah. And I was like, dude, this is awesome. The valuation was like two times sales. I ended up investing in it. I really wanted to invest. I'm just too. I told the guy I was like,

you have amazing. You have a great business. I would totally invest in this. I'm just completely upset. with crypto and like every dollar every extra dollar that I could put into something speculative I just want to put into crypto I don't want to put into anything else what's your crypto stuff that you're that you're doing now then do I bought Luna Luna has just been like on fire I don't know if you follow Luna how much it'd go up by well it depends what's time horizon but mine is basically I don't

know up 40% in like two months or something right it's like amazing but and and I think it has like a long way to go still not again not financial advice I'm just like gambling So imagine me saying here's what number I'm betting on in roulette. Just take it as that. Don't take it as like, you know, my word. But I think there's a lot of interesting things about it. I'd heard about it from a few interesting people. And then I was like, all right, what is this thing actually?

And I can explain it if you want. But basically, I'll refrain for now. That's the thing I've been interested in. And you did you do good, Chris? It's a cool company, man. The problem with all e-commerce, so our mutual friend has this great phrase, which is e-commerce businesses are great to own, horrible to invest in. Now, I wouldn't say not horrible, but it's like, it's great for the owner of the business.

It's not great for the investors. And that's only because the upside is somewhat limited. So even Native, which sold for $100 million, it's like these almost never go for multiple billions. But they're often valued at the same valuations as like a software company, which can't can become a multi-billion dollar company. And so, like, you know, you invested, I think, you know, I don't know about that one, but I was looking at another good deal that was an e-commerce that I liked.

And it's like, oh, we have, you know, we're doing 10 or $20 million in revenue. You know, 20% of that is profits or EBITA, you know, we're valued at 50 billion or 60 million. It's like, it was a good company. It was definitely going to work. Like the business was working and was going to probably keep working. And, you know, the reality is that that it's unlikely that that will ever even sell for 600 million, let alone 6 billion, right? So it's like you get these like 2x, 3x, 4x of revenue like sales, or, sorry, evaluation sales. And that's just not super compelling

when you have better options. Like if you can invest in software, do it, you know? And in a couple weeks, we're going to have this guy on. I lined it up A.J. Patel from high key cookie and zesty paws. That guy's amazing. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever read about. And he was an owner of one of those businesses. And by the way, I should say two other things. There's obviously exceptions to every rule. So, you know, I'm like there are definitely some e-commerce investments that are going to do awesome. Like Native did awesome because it sold for $100 million, but he had only raised, I think, $2 million or something like that, a million dollars. So, you know, he was super capital efficient, whereas most of these are not, they burn a fuck ton of money on marketing

and inventory. Second thing, the only other bad thing about e-commerce is like, even when I say, oh, we did $7 million, $10 million, whatever this year. That doesn't mean, A, that's revenue not profits. And B, almost, whatever you do have for profits gets reinvested back into the business because you're buying inventory for the next four months. So you're buying ads for the next month. And like, so you're always cash poor until you finally turned the corner. And there is a corner that you turn when you're a good business.

But early on, you don't get that. Have you turned it? We have not turned that. No, because we're like, we are like, oh, great, we need to buy. double or triple the inventory for the next season and for the next season and after that. And so, you know, it's going to stressful as fuck. Yeah, like, you know, but it's cool. Like, it works, but it works if you don't need a bunch of cash to pull out.

And you're okay being cash poor for a while. Real estate's like this often too. You could be cash poor in real estate, but be like, you know, have a lot of value. Yeah, but it's not going to go to zero. Yes. Real estate is slow, way slow, but it's more liquid. and it's not going to grow fast, but it won't go away. So it's a little different, whereas your thing,

ecom can go away in the sense that if the valuation drops, then you don't make a profit. It's not that it goes to zero, but what you owe the bank is now the value of the company, and so your equity can go down, right? Yes, but an e-com business can double or triple in a year. Real estate likely will never do that. But that e-com business, let's say that like something's made illegal or there's an embargo.

Who knows? Like there's a world where it can go out of business. Yeah, for sure. I have a couple more. I don't know if you want to just stay on. We could just split these into, you know, we talked about just like releasing these as like segments instead of our long episodes. Do you have time or no? Yeah.

All right. Have you seen this thing that happened called SOS? SOS token? No, what is it? All right. I got to tell you about this. This is genius. Okay.

So there's a, there's a, there's a app called OpenC, or a website called OpenC. You've heard of OpenC? It's basically like eBay. It's eBay for NFTs. So it's a place where you go and buy and sell NFTs. And OpenC is, it's in crypto, but it doesn't do some of the things that crypto people like. So it's like, it's not fully open source, you know, all the code is not open source. Like the website, the way the website works, I think it's, you know, proprietary.

It's a that you can't just fork that code and just put your own name on it. The second thing is that they don't have a token involved with it. And the third is that, you know, they raised a bunch of money from private, from traditional venture capitalists. And in the crypto world, that's like a sellout type of move. So Andres and Horowitz, I think put money in. It's a multi-billion dollar marketplace. And I think it's going to be like, it's going to be huge.

I think they did like, Ben, you can look this up, but they did like, I don't know, $8 billion of transaction. volume in like one month this year. So it's been growing like crazy. It is one of the best startups you can invest in right now would be OpenC. Now, what happened? So they, they're CFO. They hire this hot shot CFO. CFO goes on some show and some, some, some either podcast or some talk show. And he says, you know, we're looking at potentially going public. And he's saying it because that's a good thing for the company. And immediately the users are like, oh, you're using the old route of like getting liquidity that's going to make you guys.

rich, but all of us users who have built this into the most popular NFT marketplace, we're going to get nothing from that. Like, we don't own stock in your company. So you go public, we don't get anything. We built this thing. And again, that's against the, that's against the core, the ethos of your thing. Yeah, Ben just found it. 10 billion in trading volume in August alone.

So that's insane, same numbers. So, or sorry, I think it's, yeah, I don't know, whatever. So basically, so what happens? So this group of people got together. I think the guy, the guy who was behind it, his handle is like 9x, 9x, 9x, 9x or something like that, right? So this guy comes, they create something called the Open Dow. If you go to the OpenDow.com and they created a token called SOS. So OpenC is the name of the platform.

So this is like SOS, like save our ship. He creates this token called SOS. He creates 100 trillion tokens, and he gives them out. And what they did was kind of genius. So on like two days ago, anybody who was in crypto Twitter, anybody who buys NFTs started saying, oh, there was an air drop, which means if I look in my wallet, I'm going to have tokens. It's like finding 20 bucks in your wallet.

And so they did an air drop to all the users of OpenC based on how much you use OpenC. So how did they get that information? It's the, it's on, that's the beauty. It's like, this can only happen in crypto. So because I know, but I would have thought that. I guess you could just scrape the website and just get a list of everyone's wallet. No, no, no, it's not the website.

OpenC is just like a website that accesses the Ethereum blockchain. So all the transaction happened on the Ethereum blockchain. Got it. The buying and selling of the NFT, the minting of the NFT is on the blockchain. The buying and selling is all there. And the blockchain, again, is this open source, public record basically that you can go access.

You can go, I can go type in your wallet address, like your public wallet address. And I can just go see how much money is in your account right now if I just go into EtherScan. And so, you might have multiple wallet. but like that's one thing you can do. So what they did was they went and they looked at every, every transaction on OpenC, all the wallets and they said, okay, Sean's wallet has spent 10 eth.

He's done five transactions. So he should get X percentage of it. So they took of the $100 trillion. They said half of it, we're just going to drop to all the users of OpenC. So I woke up and I had 58 billion of these tokens in there at a point, oh, whatever price. My total was whatever, like $300, whatever. It was like $500 because I don't use OpenC a ton.

I didn't do too many transactions. But if you're one of these people who's like an NFT collector or flipper who is very active on the platform, who buys and sells, you know, board apes and things like that, people made like $3,000, $5,000, $15,000. So it's like finding $5,000 in your wallet. And you're like, what is this? Ah, I got this free money. And it's money that they minted. And they basically, it was almost like, it's a marketing stamp, but it's almost like a hostile takeover.

So they basically went out there. were saying was, here's what OpenCC should have done. They should have given all the users some tokens proportionate to their usage. Based on how much you've been using the platform, you get some of the OpenC token and then the OpenC token will be publicly tradable. So you get to benefit and the core team will keep some of the OpenC token, like the company will keep 20% of this. That's how, that's like the normal way in crypto. So the genius part of this is that some third party just did this on their behalf. And it's like, and now what and they, so now there's a liquid. market of like hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it was like $300 million.

The group, okay, so here's how they did it. They said 50% goes to the users, 10% goes to the stakers and the liquidity pool, 30% goes to the stakers and the liquidity pool and 20% will stay with the treasury of our foundation. And we are going to build an open source version of OpenC. We're going to build a competitor to OpenC. And all you users who are power users of OpenC you now have a stake in our new OpenC that's to come. That's going to do things the right way. But they've got to build.

I mean, building an open city is fucking hard. I mean, how many people work there? 500 people? No, no, no. Dude, these things can be built by like, you know, four motivated developers if you needed to. Then why the hell does Airbnb meet 5,000 people? It'll take a lot to maintain it and do customer support and all those things.

Yes, that will take time. But just building the actual product that will start to get people to shift off of OpenC to do this. A team of five to ten contributors can actually do this if they're great developers that are focused. Now that's TBD. It's like a Kickstarter. It's like, hey, we give your money in a Kickstarter. Are they ever going to build a thing? Well, it kind of depends. Are they honest and are they going to work hard? I don't know. We'll see. But these guys basically, they essentially raised, it's like they hijacked OpenC and they raised their share was 20 trillion out of the 100, 20%. They have $130 million now in their treasury that they can pay their development team to

You can build the open source competitor to this. Who's the guy behind it, the people behind it? This 9x, 9x, 9x, 9x, and then someone else who's X. Dot XYZ. That's his handle. I think that's who's behind it. And so they, I think it's, look, I don't know if this is going to work, but I think it's something that's only possible in the crypto world because, again, this is one of,

this is one of the reasons why people are like, you know, decentralization is cool. It's cool because the users can always pick up their ball and leave. go to another court. And so OpenC does not own their wallets. It does not own their NFTs. They have no lock-in to keep the users there except for behaving well and treating them well. And if somebody else says, I'm going to treat you better over here, it is very easy for me to take my wallet, take my NFTs and go over here and even better, that other group can incentivize me to come over here and try it out by saying, hey, here's some free tokens that we minted out of thin air. So I think this is a hustle takeover. It's like a hustle takeover. It reminds me of I had a buddy. I had a

who was going to do this to a company called Ripple. Have you ever heard of Ripple? Yeah, but they, they're shady, right? Okay, so Ripple was this thing kind of like started pretty early on. And they had this like, you know, honestly not a bad idea. They were like, look, you know, the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the Swift standard. Ripple was like, we're going to be a bank to bank communication layer that uses blockchain. Right?

So they were like, we're going to use technology with a real use case, which is banks sending money back forth to each other. So that was their idea. They got a bunch of funding from Founders Fund and others. And they released this thing called XRP. That's the name of their token. All right. So whatever. Nobody cares about that.

How it works. Nobody cares. But the interesting part is XRP has like, was worth a lot. The founders of Ripple became billionaires overnight before like, that's the thing with crypto. You can get rich before like this Open Dow has $130 million before they have a product. In Ripple, those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really fucked up incentive and which is why sometimes shit doesn't actually

get built in crypto because, hey, I already got the millions. I could just run away. I could just do a half-ass job. It doesn't really matter at this point. I went public on day one. So, Ripple has a market cap right now of $94.44 billion. Is this right? $94 billion. I think I'm reading this right? $94 billion. $44 billion. That's like the market cap of like, you know, Bank of America or some shit like that. So obviously Ripple's not actually value. at that. But Ripple had believers, and they had early momentum. They were very early in the crypto games. They had a lot of PR. And the CEO would go on CNBC and talk about how this is going to change the game. So what happened? In the crypto community, people were kind of like poo-pooing

Ripple. They're like, this is like centralized. They took way too much share for themselves. They didn't give enough to users. That's why these guys are billionaires. Their product kind of sucks and they're kind of shady, whatever. So the reputation was Ripple. Anybody who was in the known crypto, pretty much the general consent. was, Ripple is full of shit. And so my buddy had this idea. He was like, I'm going to do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network. And I was like, what do you mean?

He goes, look, I can see every single person's wallet who owns Ripple. I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. He go, I go, but you don't know their name and all like. He goes, I don't need their name. I was like, you don't have their email address. He goes, I don't need their email address. I could just put something in their wallet. And they'll wake up and they'll open their wallet and they'll see that they have

something in it. I was like, okay. So I'm going to go out there. I'm going to say, XRP is stupid for these five reasons. Number one, the founders took... Can you message these people, anything? You can include a message in the transaction of giving them the memo.

In the memo of the thing. But like the way you do it is you first drop the token. You tell people, hey, if you held ripple, you got this token today. And then you write your manifest on your Twitter or your website about what this is all about. So it's kind of like somebody put a $50 check in your wallet. You're like, what's this all about? It says, go to this website to explain why you just got this $50. So that's how this.

that's how this marketing mechanism works. So he was like, I'm going to put some money in there. I'm going to put my currency in all the Ripple holders wallet. And then I'm going to tell them, ripple is stupid for these five reasons. The founders took too much. This other problem, this other problem.

The token is inflationary, blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to change all that. We only take 10%. We are not inflationary. We do not do this sketchy shit, blah, blah, blah. My five point plan of how to make Ripple better. And we're calling it our own thing. And here's the deal.

If you own ripple, if you send your ripple to my wallet, I will send you back five times your value of this. If you're in the first, for the first thousand people that do this, then for the next 10,000 people that do this, you're going to get four times your ripple back. And for the next 10,000 people, you're going to get three times your ripple back. So basically there's this urgency of like,

okay, if this is going to become the next ripple, if I send my money in now, I'm going to get five, I'm going to get a five X multiplier my money. And what he was going to do was just, he goes, when you send it to this wallet, we're going to just dump it. We're just going to sell it. And we're going to put so much sell pressure.

We're going to crash the price of ripple. So if you do it early... Do they do this? Let me finish the story. He goes, if you do this early, you're going to get five times your amount. And you're not going to sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing. It's like a prisoner's dilemma game through. It was so genius.

He's like, here's the math if you're holding this thing. You have to assess. Are other people going to take them up on this offer? If they do, then the ripple I'm holding is going to. to go down like crazy. I'm going to go down like five to 10x. If I jump, if I jump ship, I get a 5x multiplier on my money and I don't sit there holding the sinking ship. And the game theory of this, I think was going to work. So he has this plan. And he starts and he starts, and so he's like, okay, well, he needs to be credible. So he went to some very, very wealthy

people. And he got about $50 million lined up to do this hostile takeover. And he was like, he needed did it to be like 200 million. And so he's like, I need to create this huge war chest. So I can tell people, look, we have this much money. So it's backed by something. Come on board. And he's like, dude, I, he's like, basically I'm going to these investors. I'm saying, if you give me 200 million dollars, I'm going to take down this project. I'm going to absorb all the value of this project that's currently worth 40 billion. Right. So he's like, it's a huge return for those investors. And they, and they also don't even believe in Ripple. So it was this high stakes fucking James Bond shit. And what the problem was, one of the investors that he had went to for this leaked the plan

to a journalist. This guy, Dan Primac or whatever, he's like pretty famous journalist. Yeah, from Axios. Axios writes the story ahead of time. He says, hey, there's somebody planning a hostile takeover XRP and here's how it's going to work. And XRP, the ripple team obviously sees this and they're like, okay, just in case, so they sold some amount of their ripple. to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer so that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price, they had enough liquidity to buy back the tokens and keep the price high. So it kind of foiled his plan where they, the only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise and he could have done it in like a two-day period, he could have tanked the price of ripple

and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side. But because they had heads up, they could create enough liquidity and they could be able to like support their price before somebody could do this. to them. But how crazy is that, dude? This is like some barbarians at the gate shit. Like, this is like 1980s like Drexel like hustle takeover where they like were like, what's it called? Like green mailing.

Have you ever read like these like 1980s finance? I have the book, Barbarian, I haven't read it yet. Yeah, that's basically what they did. Like it was like, it was like warfare. I was like this is some George Soros shit. You know, George Soros shit broke the bank of England. I was like, this is some George Soros shit. That was actually what he was telling me.

me, he goes, this is some George Soros shit. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, George Soros broke the Bank of England by doing something very similar to this. And as he was explaining, I was like, there's no way this works. He's like, well, you know, it's risky, but like, if it works. Who did it? And so he didn't, he didn't end up doing it. But I mean, who, who's the, it's an article?

Is it public? I don't know if it's public, but I'll tell you, it's our friend who, remember we went to dinner after our live show in Miami? It's our friend. Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah. Um, that's crazy. I thought, uh, if, if Dan would have wrote about it, he would have named him. Yeah, I think he didn't know the name or he, I don't think he included the name of the thing,

but how fucking nuts is that? That's crazy. If you get, if that person could have pulled it off, that's wild. This is Barbarians at the gate shit. Hustle takeover stuff. Yeah. I love it. Um, all right.

I have a couple more topics if we want to do them or if we want to go. We can go. All right. I got, I can do 15 more minutes. All right. Let's do one more. Um, okay. I got,

two random ideas for you. Okay, here's the, here's the first idea. All right, this idea is my gift to the chief marketing officer of Gucci. You know, you're welcome. Courtesy of shoppery. Okay. I see this headline. All right. So I was thinking the other day, I was sitting there sitting at a restaurant. And as I do, I'm just watching, I'm just people watch. I'm just watching these crazy creatures called humans. What the fuck are they doing? And I saw all these people that had fancy bags, Gucci bags, Louis Vuitton bags. It's very different from my world. I don't, I don't give a shit about that, but they obviously do. And I was watching this. And then I came home, I'm watching this show, selling sunset. Funny show on Netflix about real estate team.

Dude, I watched it too, man. You know I watched all that shit. Yeah. So, so, you know, I dabble. And if you notice, every day they come to work, they're wearing like the craziest, like what nobody wears to work. They're wearing like $5,000. $5,000 dress with like a $5,000 bag and they put the bag right on the middle of the desk. It's like there's no laptop. There's no computer. It's like a desk with a chair and their purse on top. And then they just gloss up with each other.

That's where the show is at this point. So I was thinking about this like luxury thing. And luxury has just caught my eye. And I said, what else? What else could you do? And I don't know how this came to mind. But here's a crazy idea. It's really a marketing stunt.

It's not a business idea. It's a marketing stunt for Gucci. So here's what you're going to do. Every year there are over a million joint replacements in America. So people getting hip replacements, knee replacements, people getting, you know, they fracture their foot, they get a steel rod put in. There are over a million people a year that get this done.

I got it done. You got that done? What did you get done? I've got screws. I broke my leg. I've got screws and a little, I got metal on my feet. Now, you're not the right person to ask. But is there a version of Sam that might have paid an extra 500 bucks to have that be a Gucci

nail on your foot? Yeah. Of course. The answer is yeah. The answer is yeah. So we're talking about, I thought you were going to go with like Gucci prosthetic legs. Yes, dude. But you're talking about like.

Just Brandon. On the inside. That's actually a cool idea. And you only see it on the x-ray. Only see it. You have the picture before it goes into your body. Right. So you get the Instagram porn of, oh, hey guys, I'm doing well post-surgery.

Here's my picks. And as you're swiping, it's an awesome flex. It's a fucking Louis V hip that's coming in. to your body. It's an awesome flex. This an LV knee. Dude, how good is that?

And then they do something so that, exactly, in X-ray, you'll always see an emblem on the thing. Now, I don't know how doctors will figure out the science of how this works about fucking up your system.

That's good. How good is that, dude? That's good. That is amazing. It's just an extra little revenue line, tons of news because everyone's going to say this is what's wrong with the world. You're going to take over

and guess what? There's going to be a bunch of people out there who are going and getting surgeries done that are going to say, Yeah, okay, it's the average knee replacement is like $25, $30,000, like, all win. I think that, you know, maybe it can be as low as $12,000 to $15,000. You tell him, and the actual part itself that goes in, I think is a $5,000 part that the hospital orders. You're telling me, I wouldn't get the $7,500 Supreme fucking, you know, knee with the Nike logo.

The Nike, the just do it hip. Come on. Yeah. Come on. That's just licensing revenue for them. It's marketing. It's influencer candy. dude, if people get grills, if rappers go get diamond grills, if they're, if, you know,

somebody out there like me, some guy like me out there was like, yo, diamond braces. What? Yeah, diamond braces. Actually, fuck it. Not even for braces. Just diamond teeth. Diamond teeth worked. If diamond teeth worked, the Louis V.

Hip can work. Dude, this is a good idea. This is pretty funny. This is brilliant. This is actually a good one. That one was for TikTok. That's for you TikTokers out there. That was my TikTok segment.

That's actually, this is actually a fun idea. Wait, who, who, did you research this? Is that even possible? I have no idea if it's possible. I've got like, I don't think you could, I don't think you could see stuff like that. I've got x-rays of my screws and like you can like look at them. But I don't think, I don't know how that would work. It might have to be a striping.

It might have to be a dots, pocodots. It might have to be something that will show up there. It might be an emblem that's just on it, a tiny emblem. But you know, like the red bottom shoes for. what's it called? You know, like, yeah,

I don't know. Yeah, we're fucking nerds. But the black, or the red bottom shoes, they wrap about them. Yeah, exactly,

whatever. People will find a way to see the shit. And you just, if that's the only problem with this idea, we got a good problem to have. So,

and also, by the way, tattoos. I think you could also do this with tattoo parlors. I think you could drop branded official licensed designs

of tattoos for brands. And be like, yeah, if you get this one, it's actually, that's like actually the brand. Because like, you, people get tattoos of brands. Yeah, like a Louis Vuitton tattoo. Like, I think Jake Paul has a Nike swoosh where his like sock would be on his, on his calf.

I've seen that. That's hilarious, actually. And I was like, that's funny. He got a brand tattooed on him. And I think I was also like, you know, why wouldn't brands actually drop tattoo designs, just like they drop bag and shoe designs? Like, I feel like that should happen. That's interesting.

That's another interesting idea. All right. Two for two. All right. I have one more. for you. Okay, this one's less fun, but I think it's still good. Do you remember glamour shots? Love them. Did you, your mom have glamor shots? Do you know anybody who had glamour shots? No, but I didn't do it, but like my sister did. It's hilarious. It's like Napoleon Dynamite shit where you go to the mall and you wear a stupid makeup and a bad haircut and you take these awesome pictures. Of course. Do you know the business behind glamor shots? No. Okay, so. Is that the name of a brand, glamour?

Glamour Shots was the name of the company, I think. Okay, so here's the quick backstory. I did like, you know, two seconds of research on this. So could be wrong. Started by a frat party photographer who was like, you know, taking picks at frats. And I was like, all right, what else I got? So initially starts it calls it party picks. Then when they were like kind of looking at trends, they were like, oh, people are

liking this like high glamour style, like big hair, loud, loud clothes, certain backdrops. And so they were like, all right. so he renames it to glamour shots and its physical locations and within first year it already starts working by year three, seven million in revenue and copycats popping up everywhere

Hollywood head shots freeze frame you name it there's different portrait shops pop it up at one point he expands through the franchising model expands to 380 stores

Taiwan, Japan everybody wants a piece of glamor shots and the trick the thing that like really made it work was most the great name Most professional photographers, you would go, well, there's a couple things I made

to wear. One was the style, it was iconic. The second was, so it wasn't just come, I'll take a picture of you, it was come. I'll make you look like a Hollywood star with the hair, the makeup, the clothes. And it was only like, you know, top half up. So you would be wearing your jeans underneath. And then your top would be like this denim studded jacket or whatever with the collar popped or whatever.

So backdrops with the colors. Everybody knows the look. Fan blowing your hair, that whole thing. So that was one innovation. The other was instant gratification. So you would take the photo and for most photographers, they're like, great, I'll go, you know, get these exposed. Then I'll, I'll, I'll, whatever, touch them. I'll pick the best ones and I'll get, I'll get you, you know, some options in a few days, a few weeks.

Glamour shots, they used a special, like, kind of camera technique or whatever. So it was actually taking a video, I think, and then it would grab an image and you could see it right there on the screen in real time. And you could pick and be like, oh, I want that one. That one's so good. They got you in the heat of the moment when you were. in peak state when you were already caught up in the frenzy and people were dropping 300, 400, 500, $500 inflation adjusted on their glamour shots, average customer spend. So it was like highly lucrative is that's basically like, you know, for like a 30 minute shoot. You're making, you know,

huge profits. And they had these like six categories of styles that you got to pick from. The names are hilarious. One is can't wait to be touched. Another, spontaneous, tailored, elegant, Bold, and that's where these like classic looks come from. So there was some genius behind the person who really understood what the customer wants behind it. Whatever happened to the company. So it gets to 100 million in sales by 1994. By 2001, it's now dropped back down to 93 stores. Now there's like 40 stores left.

It's basically withered away and dying. Didn't last. Didn't keep up with the times. Here's the idea. We're rebooting glamour shots. And we're reboot and glamour shots. Everything nostalgic from the 90s is crushing. Oh, you're rebooting Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men.

You're rebooting Home Alone. Home-alone's getting rebooted. We're rebooting glamour shots. That's what I'm telling you. I'm on board. So there's, I'm looking at it now. There's only five, so there's only five of these locations left. Yeah, we're down to the last, you know, remember the Alamo.

We're down to the last stand. So the question is, how would you actually reboot glamour shots? So I wanted to brainstorm with you for two minutes. how would you reboot glamor shots? I got a couple ideas. I don't know if you have one off top of your head. Otherwise, I'll go. You got to do it in person, I think.

I think that's part of it. What do you need to do that's different? I mean, you just do an accampaign with really cool celebrities or some celebrities and you'd be like, here's what they would have looked like, like, you know, a modern person what they would have looked like with a glamour shot? What would you do?

So I'm going to reboot it. I'm not, okay, so nostalgia is one one angle you could go. You could just say this look would come back. But I think that's that short-sided. I think what you got to do is you got to work backwards. So my mom had glamour shots on the wall. The end product was a framed picture on the wall of her looking like an 80-soap opera, 90-soap opera person, basically with the hair blown out and crazy lighting and crazy dress.

Well, what is the, what's the end product people want today? Instagram, baby. They want epic Instagram content. So we've talked about museum of ice cream. We've talked about some of these. I think those are secretly glamour shots reboots. I think you got to go all in on the Glamour shots reboot. So you're going to make somebody look fucking amazing for social media.

I know what people out there are throwing up in their mouth. They're like, oh, this is everything that's wrong with. Well, guess what? People care what they look like, how they come across on social media. If you hate that fact, cool, delete Instagram. But if you still got Instagram, you're still in on this idea. Okay, so how are we going to do it? One idea was, could you get Airbnbs, convert them to it, like, basically like dope

lifestyle-looking Airbnbs? and just rent them out for shoots. Instead of, you know, renting it out for $700 a night, you're renting it out for $100 an hour and you're doing, or $200 an hour and you're doing shoots for people where they get to look like they live in a dope lifestyle. They look like they're living in a... But that's different than a glamour shot.

A glamour shot is like supposed to be funny. It's not supposed to be funny, dude. It looks funny now when we look back, like look back at your dad with an afro or whatever. Actually, you had an afro in high school. So they look back at your own high school. That's supposed to be funny. At the time, I don't know if you were trying to be funny,

but for glamour shots. But they are they trying to be glamour. But that's different. With these Instagram things, you're talking about being like lying. You're talking about looking cool. Yeah. So that's one angle to it.

I think you can, you're lying. You don't live in that fancy ass house. Yeah, but you're not saying I live here. You're just posing a picture. Like people do. So we're going to have like a, like a people rent fancy cars and they take pictures with it.

And then they've returned the car. Do you know anyone who does that? Personally, thank God. No. Have I seen the people who do that on Instagram? Yes, some people would do that on Instagram. Tons of people do that on Instagram.

It's like, what you would need is just like... People rent dresses for the day. Dude, you would just need like one airline seat and like what looks like an airline. Dude, you've seen that, right? The half private jet, it's like a movie set. It's like a jet. It's like where they film pornos. Exactly.

So there's that. I think, okay, but that's a little capital intensive to get Airbnb's. Maybe you do it with a green screen. So I think one way you can do this is you could just have someone come take pictures with a green screen and you just do it where once they take the picture there's once in one of your locations with the green screen, very cheap to do.

Then you CGI them into like a whole bunch of different looks that becomes their collection of like they could be power suit, they could be boss mode, they could be party mode, they could be whatever. But you just have green screen props

and scenarios and you show them exactly how to pose to look good. Most people don't even know how to pose, myself included. When you meet somebody who knows how to pose, you're like, oh, like that's fucking half of it. The other half is like lighting and fucking props.

but like an editing, right? Like, but do you remember when the guy came to take photos of us at the Miami thing? He was like, all right, stand here, half squint your eye. You're like, why? Yeah, I was like, I was like, dude, this is stupid. What do you mean? He's like, no, trust me, kind of squint your eye. He's like then, you know, like protrude your neck forward.

I was like, no, this looks like a turtle. He's like, no, look, watch. I got rid of your double chin. You know, you look like sharper and like more powerful. Okay, look at this angle. This gives you confidence. Look from this angle specifically. Whereas for me, I'm like the fucking nutcracker.

If I take a photo, it's like, stand straight, look straight, hands with my side, smile, cheese. Like, that's how I take all my photos, right? But there is an art to posing and most of people don't know how to do it. So I think there's a version of glamour shots that somebody could reboot that just gives you an end product that you want for social media. I don't know exactly what it is. I would just say bring back the classics. I think that you could just do it as is. What happened to the company?

So did it? Dude, you could just do this with like dating profiles and stuff? Whatever. I don't know. What happened to it? but I think it's kind of like just gotten down the drain. I don't know. I don't know the ending of that story.

I wonder what happened to the founders. Does he have like some, his name's Bob? Does he have like some huge like mansion down in LA? Like that glamour shop money? 1,000% he's going to have a huge mansion. Yeah, take two seconds to just Google that. I bet you,

I bet you this guy's got to have a thing in LA. If he doesn't, we're just going to edit this part out. I can't see, but is it actually Bob? Ooh, he lives in Texas. in Dripping Springs, Texas, which is near Austin. And it's where like, it's like where moms who get Glamor shots live. It's like the suburbs of Texas.

By the way, that's the, Glamor shots is still thriving in Texas. I think that's the only place where it's still like a thriving business. I think I read that. Dude, this guy's awesome. All right. That's all I got. Those are my topics.

This is awesome. We got to get Bob on here. All right, that's the pod.