My First Million - Newsletter Schemes, Copywriting Scams and Chaotic Singles

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Episode 484: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk about a questionable newsletter growth hack called co-reg, try to figure out how Bobbi Althoff became an overnight success, explore the wild world of Chaotic Singles Parties & DateMe Docs, go through a list of things our grandkids will think are insane and discuss the greatest copywriting scam ever written. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter: https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (4:05) Newsletter growth scheme (16:25) Laird Hamilton interview recap (18:10) Why is Bobbi Althoff famous? (24:30) Chaotic Singles Party (30:00) DateMe Docs (43:50) Things our grandkids will think are insane (1:01:55) The greatest copywriting scam ever written — Links: • Bobbi Althoff - https://www.instagram.com/bobbialthoff/ • Chaos Singles Parties - https://tinyurl.com/mpuedh9h  • DateMe Docs - https://dateme.directory/#4b549b56a88049da98be378370125912 • The League - https://www.theleague.com/ • Raya - https://www.rayatheapp.com/ • Copywriting Scam - https://thewalrus.ca/the-greatest-scam-ever-written/ • Boron Letters - https://morgancrozier.com/boron-letters/ • Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. — 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. — Other 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

We sent him an email. We said, hey, just wanted to follow blah. Like, you know, if you read the Milk Road, you like it, like, just respond with like, whatever. Hello. Tell me where you're like, hey, you're a subscriber to the Milk Road. Where do you live? Guess how many replies we got?

I have no idea. I think we literally got three replies. Out of how many cents. There was maybe like, I don't know, I want to say, like 20,000 or something like that. 20,000 in three replied. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in.

Dude, according to the YouTube data, by the end of this sentence, half the audience will have dropped off. That's how content goes nowadays. You have like 4.2 seconds to look everybody. Is that true? Is it really that short? I thought it was like.

But it is like that. I mean, like after somebody clicks play, you just see the curve start to go space mountain downwards and then it flattens out. Are you looking at the data? Like, I rarely log in. You just let it flash the camera in the first five seconds every time.

So there you know how like there's a joke about news anchors wearing like shorts with me? It's the sleeveless t-shirt. I'm going jacket sleeveless tea, baby. How's that for flashing? I mean, I don't even know what you're prepared for. you're like, I can go outside. It can rain. I can be him a doctor for a minute.

I can work out. I can climb a mountain. Well, it's, it's 107 degrees in Austin today. And so I'm either shirtless or sleeveless team most of the time. When I record, I got to put the jacket on.

So I look a little professional. Dude, I've been trying to convince Ben to move to California from Austin. I originally pegged it at a 15% chance. What's it at now? Oh, I think we're like up to 50. I think we've made serious headway.

Now, I put in all this work. What I needed to do was just wait for summer. Just smoke them out, right? All I had to do is just smoke them out. I don't know if I ever told you this. I once was doing a deal that required us to negotiate with a company called PetroChina. PetroChina is basically like Exxon Mobil, but it's owned by the government in China. And so we go to this and they're like the big, they're like, you know, a huge company,

but it's owned by the government. So nobody knows how much it's worth, all that stuff. But it's mega powerful oil and gas company in China. So we go and we're supposed to negotiate this deal. And I kid you not, they just, they did the opposite of smoking us out or sweating us out. They just froze us out. They put us in a room that was like just cold as hell. And there was no way out.

Like first getting to the room was like a 20 minute walk like a like a passage, like going through this labyrinth of doors. And we get to this room. We're in. They'll be with you soon. And then they leave. And seven hours pass. And we're sitting in this room.

And I'm like, hey, I think they forgot about us. And we got to go talk to somebody. And then I tried to stand up. And immediately an arm puts me back in the chair. They're like, no, no, no. This is part of things. To freeze you? Yeah, just to make it uncomfortable.

And they're like, you show no weakness here. We just sit. There's this urban myth. I don't know if it's sure or not. Or Steve Cohen, you know, one of the guys who apparently is based off of his billions characters based off of him. Steve Cohen, rich guy owns the Mets, where the reason

why Patagonia vests are popular on Wall Street is he used to make his office freezing. So when the SEC regulators would come in, they were really uncomfortable and everyone knew. They didn't want to stay. Yeah, they didn't want to stay. But so apparently it works. Dude, I mean, my Costco

has a walk-in freezer where you go get like our walk-in fridge where you, but it's a room. It's a giant room where you go get vegetables. That thing is so uncomfortable. I mean, it's like, whatever's the nearest vegetable, that's all I'm getting, and then I'm getting out of there. So I definitely believe it. If I was the SEC, I would get the fuck out of there.

I forgot to ask you this. So, and right now, so basically in 2017, I wrote this ad for The Hustle, and it was, my boss thinks I'm smart, parentheses. I'm not. It's because I read the hustle, and he has no idea that it exists, dash, a reader of the hustle. And that was like our ad on Facebook. On Twitter, I see that ad everywhere for every newsletter, for every like AI where it was like my boss thinks I know about AI. I don't. The reason I-

Well, what happened is you did it. Morning Brew then did it. Did they do it? That's funny. Yeah, morning bruce been running an ad like that for a long time. So if you've seen those ads, you're like, oh, good idea. I'll copy that. Then the other thing was Facebook launched the ad library.

So now you can go see other companies ad. so you can just go and look what ads are they running. Google launched an ad library. TikTok now launched an ad library. So you can go see anyone's TikTok ads too. Then you've talked about that ad on the podcast. And I noticed after you said it on the podcast, then people started running it.

Then there's also a guy who worked for you, worked for us at Milk Road, who then goes in, he's pitching up. He's basically going and telling every newsletter company, I'm the key to the growth of the hustle, of Milk Road, of every fucking newsletter company.

I did it. I'm the best. I could tell you, exactly what they did. And I don't know about you for the hustle, but for us, I'm like, this guy is massively overstating what he did,

but like, whatever, I mean, I guess. We were already in the, we already had a million subscribers, but yeah, I mean,

I didn't work closer with him, but I'm, I'm sure he's great. I just, we were a bit, I'm not saying he's bad at his job, but he is definitely overselling and he is, people will come to me and they'll be like,

um, hey, I just wanted to get a quick reference check. This guy basically, like he has a presentation, sales, deck that just says like I did everything for Milk Road like I figured it all out I did all these things and like is that legit and I'm like no and actually the funny thing is I think in the short

term that helped him is a long term that heard him because two very big names have come to me and they said hey I'm thinking about hiring this guy sounds like you did great work for you guys just want to do a quick pulse check like um thumbs up thumbs down would you recommend and I was like I wish I could say yes but like no for these two reasons one he's overstating what he did. If he just said what he did, they would have been fine. Two, when we sold the company,

he went and put up a Twitter thread saying like, Hey, Milk Road sold and here's all the things that they do to grow. And we asked him, we were like, hey, man, can you take that down? Like, we're still running as a business. Like, you can't just, you shouldn't just like, you're a service provider.

You're a contractor for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're a client of yours. We never said, and you want some confidentiality. You should never go publish all of your client's things. It's not actually all, but like we don't want any of this stuff out there.

Right. And he's like, no, I got to get mine too from the sale. And I'm like, what? Like, dude, I'm asking you to take this down.

Are you really going to, like your client? So it was never deleted? And he was, he tried to say no again. And I was like, wow, like,

Jesus, that is like insanely unprofessional to do that. Um, in my opinion, at least. And, uh, you know,

so whatever, he did delete it after that after I was like, wow, are you like, are you serious? This is actually the stance you're going to take. that's an insane stance to take. Yeah, I don't like when people talk about two really big names that I think would have been

like way bigger than the hustle, way bigger than Milk Road. We're going to work with them. Have asked me. And I'm like, I can't, I'm just going to tell you what my experience was. You decide. And they're like, oh, no, we would not want to work with somebody who does that. And I was like, damn, like the short term. Yeah, that hurts.

Leads to long term loss, unfortunately. Like, you know, that's the irony of doing stuff like. And I've done stuff like that too, where I make a short term, short term good decision. that actually cost me in the long run, but it's hard to see in the moment. Yeah, that's an expensive lesson. But my question was,

were you running this ad and did it still work? Up until we sold, it was still working. We didn't run that ad. We didn't run my boss things on whatever. We did, I think, try a version of like,

my friends think I'm, uh, you know, like whatever. My friends think I, I know everything about crypto. What they don't know is that I just read the milk road every morning. Um,

something like that. I think we ran that. But those weren't high, like that wasn't the highest performer. We had other stuff that was better performers, but, that was our best one. More than 50% of our subscribers were organic.

So it does like, you know, you know, the, if more than 50% of your growth comes organic, then that means it's the content. That's the content, the brand.

Dude, I've talked to so many of these new newsletter guys and they're all doing, so when we, when we started the hustle, like up until, hundreds of thousands were organic. And then we learned, I didn't know what paid marketing was.

Then we learned about it. And then we started doing this thing called co-registration, which it would typically only scammy marketer type of people would do that. Like people selling like sex pills and shit. And we were like, well, that's interesting. Like in theory,

let's actually figure out what it means in a non-skimmy way. And so we like, well, explain it. So you go to a site. So for example, you go to, I'll try to find a real life example. If you go to bold.

dot org, it's a website where you can apply, you can enter in your information and it automatically applies you to tons and tons of different scholarships. And what it says was, great, if you want, somehow they have a point system where it's like, it's free to use, but you have to sign up for like these newsletters in order to be able to, in order to be able to apply to even more scholarships. And so we would pay bold.org some money. I don't remember the money, $1, let's say, for every college kid who entered their email and sent them to the hustle, and then they would go and subscribe to more stuff, more scholarships. And so that's what co-redge is.

So you're registering for one thing, but then you are asked to register for another thing in exchange for some type of perk. Typically, that's an internet marketing hack that's done with scammie stuff, really scammy people. But we went to product hunt and we were like, hey, have you guys thought about doing co-redge? And they're like, yeah, we're working on it. We're like, well, that would be great. We would be your first customer. And so that's how we started growing really quickly. We were already growing quickly.

But once you, you know, we're adding like, we're adding like 5,000 people a day. We have to reinvent at every stage, right? At the beginning you do friends and family. Then you do your own social media. Then you do posts that are really good content that's going to go viral. That's going to get you now to the next level of organic. Then you start layering on some paid. Then you have to diversify your paid because not one source is going to work as well as the others.

And they, you know, they don't all scale, right? And when you're adding 100,000 people a month, you have like 50% or some amount. It's still organic. But then that's still like 80,000 customers that you need to sign up. So some will be Facebook. Some of this, some of that, some co-redge. So co-rege worked really well. The problem with it is that it's a very low-intent reader.

So like the scholarship person is like, the highest is like, hey, Sean, sign up for Milk Road. It's awesome. That's high intent. Less high, but still high is like, oh, I saw this ad on Facebook saying there's this newsletter. That sounds cool. I'm interested. the lowest intent is

I'm trying to buy a I'm trying to get a coupon for Target but I have to get entering the I have to get my email and yeah in order that's the lowest intent or I'm trying to win this free prize and I get more entries if I just sign up for this fucking newsletter whatever I'll sign up for it that's the lowest intent

now I talked to but that but the thing is is that you grow quickly so for a quarter you can get an email subscriber but for every 10 email subscribers only one will actually be of high quality and so the problem is you get addicted to this. And so I was talking to all these other newsletter guys.

And they're like, I got to 100,000 in like six months. I'm like, oh, sick, how? They go, oh, this thing called Co-Redge. And I'm like, oh, you're fucked. This is a horrible newsletter. You're fucked. This is a,

your business is dog shit. There's other versions of this. So substack has a thing where you subscribe to someone's substack. And then they're like, here's five other substacks. You might like auto-checked. And you're just trying to continue. And now you're subscribed to five newsletters.

And you see people who's curve on substack looks flat, like normal growth, normal good growth, normal good growth and then like hockey stick. It's like, yes, I crossed 300,000, 500,000 subscribers. And it's like, yeah, but these aren't people who actually want to read your thing. And then the other thing is that they think the open rate is high, but open rates nowadays because of the way that they've changed with Apple.

Apple and cookie stuff works. It's not reliable. So for example, yeah, when we started 40% was good. When we started 40% was good. That was considered the best. And then 50%, we would get 50% and we're like, we're the greatest there is. Now everyone is 50%. Right. And it's because they're not actually 50%. It's because open rates cannot be measured the same way they used to be able to be measured where it was more more reliable. Now you have to use click the rate or whatever. Are people actually clicking your ads, your content, that sort of thing. And so this guy that I was talking about for the Milk Road, he was the one who was like, oh, yeah, co-redge, we should do this. We were like, okay, let's try it. Let's see how it goes. We tried it. Sure enough. Sure enough, you get good growth out of it. And you get addicted to it. But it's the quality. So after.

we sold, we were like, hey, let's, you know, like some point we were like, okay, let's look at all these sources. We're getting this organic. We're getting this from here, this from here. We did an analysis. And we were like, all right, let's test this co-regs thing. The open rates look good. Let's just, how do we figure it off these are high quality or not?

Like, I don't know. Open rates are good. The cost is good. Should be fine, right? We send them in email. He said, hey, just wanted to, all of a lot. Like, you know, if you read the milk road, like, just respond with like, whatever. Hello.

Tell me where you're like, hey, you're a subscriber to the milk road. Where do you live? Yeah, exactly. We want to know where you live. If somebody actually reads your daily newsletter 50% of the time, they're so excited to get an email from the founder that says, you know, hey,

I'm just reaching out to say whatever. They'll give a very high reply rate. Guess how many replies we got? I have no idea. I think we literally got three replies. I don't know how many cents. There was maybe like, I don't know,

I want to say 20,000 or something like that. 20,000 and three replied? It was like a big number. Yeah. I don't know the exact, but like I know that the reply number was, something like three replies that day. Maybe more trickled in, but like, doesn't matter.

That day, three people replied and we were like, oh, cut this off immediately. And that same guy goes and he pedals that to all the other newsletters. It's like, yeah, this is what the hustle did. This is what Bill Crowe did. It does. It's like, we did it with a small percentage of what we were doing. And as soon as we were able to test it, we were like, oh, screw this. Why would we want a subscriber number?

Like, unless you're trying to dupe somebody, you don't want a subscriber number that's not real, right? Like, real subscribers is the only way to build a real. business. And, you know, I talked to the morning brew guys and I think they're, they're also very, like, they, I think just straight measure on like, what does this lead to in terms of clicks on our ads? Yeah. Or like conversions even, you know, from how many people buy our advertising stuff? How many of buying something, right? Like, if, if I'm, if I'm getting you as a customer, that's the right way to do it, right? That's the sustainable way to do it. But I don't think people, you know, kids these days, they're doing it differently than, then back in our day, one, one year ago.

Yeah, I remember way back then six months ago. No, that's how they have to do it. And they also, another thing is, I talked to another guy, and I was like, well, of your list, if you said that you're hosting an AI event that was free, how many people are going to show up? He's like, oh, we'd sell out immediately. I'm like, great.

Then you're doing, that sounds like you're doing it correctly. And then I talked to another guy, I'm like, well, how many people would show up to this event? And they're like, well, no one. I'm like, well, then this business sucks. Like, they're not real. You should bail and quit or start over. But yeah, the co-redge thing.

It's mostly nonsense. It doesn't always have to be. Or you could, it's kind of a pain in the ass. If you make money through advertising, it's like you need to hit a top line number. And that's why I hate advertising is because there's very, there's inverse incentives.

So like not everyone's aligned for the same thing. And so I think that's why I fucking hate advertising. It could be done well. But when you have like a team to support and you want Katie to hit her quota and get paid, I'm like, ah, fuck. You got to like make sacrifices. And I hate that.

But anyway, I wanted to bring up this ad because we were talking about copyrighting. On Friday, I interviewed Laird Hamilton. How did it go? So it went really bad. It went very... Not what I think you could say. It went bad. Like what?

Well, he's not a business guy, for one. But I'm like a fitness. I'm into fitness and stuff. But I wanted to ask him all the fitness stuff. But I was like, I watched so many hours of him leading up to it. And I was like, I don't want to just ask the same questions. Like, I just watched so much of yours stuff that all the questions that I thought I was going to have, you've already answered them. Yeah, you've answered it.

And so there was like that, that there. But also, dude, I just think it's a bummer to meet your heroes because he's amazing. But I just want him to be this, like, idea rather than this reality. Do you know what I mean? I like, I like him. So, like, I remember, I just, I've been very lucky to meet a bunch of my. heroes. And once you meet them, they're a little bit less of a hero. And I think I just prefer them being a hero. Not to say that he didn't live up to my expectations. He did. It was just that

I don't want to be even remotely a peer of his. I want him to be like, you know, my great grandpa, who I've heard stories about. If you're a fan of this podcast, if you consider me a Sam, you know, somebody that you look up to in any way, prepare to be disappointed, all right? We're just very average people. When you meet us, we will destroy, we will ruin this podcast for you. But I was super self-conscious about it. So if you guys hear the pod, let me know like in the YouTube comments what you think. But it was, it was only okay. I think it was, maybe it was only okay for me as, because I was in interviewing him, but I just learned so much about him. And I'm like, oh, I already know everything. There's nothing new to know about you. Or I'm just not unique

enough to ask a question. You should have shifted gears and gone Bobby Altaf on him. what's that? Oh, like that awkward interview girl and just act like you don't care. She has shot up. So basically I saw her on TikTok and I,

the thing about TikTok and Instagram is you don't know who else knows what you're watching, right? Like it's hard, like there's no like chart or there's no like greatest hits. And so I was just like,

who is this random chick popping up interviewing these, these guys when she's like in her bed? Interviewing like Drake. Like not just like, But then I saw Drake and I'm like, what the hell? What is going on with this? How is this like just this 21 year old woman who's like rude to her guest talking to Drake?

And then on the podcast charts, I think she was number one for a few days. Yeah, she's been in the top five. She went from I've never heard of this person and she didn't have a podcast to a top five podcast in like two weeks. So we're doing something wrong. Well, yeah, for sure. She has this ad for Seatkeek. Seekkeek advertised on her podcast with Drake and she was like, so today's sponsor is Seekkeek

which makes sense because Drake apparently hosts events and I think Seatgeek lets you buy tickets for events. So if you like events and Drake Yeah. Yeah, and she goes and they gave you $20. Cool. That's her ad. No, no, the call to action was the best.

She said something like, she was like, to go um you can use seekic if you want i guess it's so funny she's pretty good i don't want to listen to 60 minutes of that interview but like she's interviewing drake so she's interviewing drake which is like i think her first podcast that came out and she's like in the middle of it she's like i don't i don't know any other questions do you have any other questions and he's like uh not really like weren't they in bed under the covers during the interview? Yeah, they're in a bed, which is just, I mean, she's a genius, clearly.

So she's a genius. So I think her story is she was like a mom, she was like a mommy TikToker. But I don't really understand how she went from mommy TikToker to podcaster interviewing Drake with like a really clear brand that's amazing. like a very distinct style that's amazing because if you watch her TikToks she doesn't talk like that it's just a character she's or she doesn't I mean it's not like

I don't think her TikTok is mainly like that like I'm going to pull one up right now but like no some of it is like normal or her joking around with her friends but no it's it's like Stephen Colbert but instead of this conservative guy it's the I don't give a shit type of person so she I watched

like an hour straight of one of these podcasts I've rarely listened to like if you tell me, hey, there's a new podcast. Like, I need 10 people to recommend a podcast before I go try it. You know what I mean?

Like, it's not like an easy ask. But, um, yeah, I got hooked on her shit really quickly and watched a hour long, awkward interview with her and Mark Cuban and her with Rick Glassman. I don't know if you saw this, but she did one with Rick Glassman. And it didn't seem like he was in on the joke.

Who's Rick Glassman? I think he was actually the first one that she recorded. Rick Glassman's a comedian Oh, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He might have been in on the joke because he's like a very talented guy. Like he could

he could find that line where it looks like he's not in on the joke, but he is. But she was just like, I mean, she's just awkwardly interviewing him and at some point he's just like, what is this?

Why are you doing this? And she's like, why am I doing what? I'm interviewing you. And he's like, no, but you're, he's like, you're saying that you're interviewing me, but everything I say,

you just say as a lie. Why would I lie? Why would I come to your podcast and lie? And she's like, I don't know. Why are you lying? And then he's like, I'm not lying. Is this your bit? Is this what you do?

And he's like, he just can't figure it out. He's like, I'm sorry. I was frustrated and defensive because I felt like you were trolling me or something. I didn't understand what was happening. I still don't really understand what's happening, but I'm going to do better to try to answer your questions.

And she's like, thank you. You were being mean. And he's like, I wasn't being mean. I was reacting. I want to know. what happens before and after the interview. Because after, like, so you and I have done some stuff in person with people and, like,

you're really cool and friendly enough to people, but I don't know what you do afterwards. Like, particularly with like a Tucker Carlson interview where he's like getting mean with people and like, do you shake hands afterwards and say, thanks for coming? You know what I mean? Or does like, does it end?

That was terrible. Thank you. That was that. Yeah. Like, oh, we dislike each other strongly. Yeah. So I'm curious to see what like the performance where she's like, and seen.

And does she like be friendly and like, give him a hug. I would like to see what that before and after is like. Yeah, I don't know. She's a mystery to me. Somebody explained this to me. I just don't understand who she is, how she landed such big guess, why she immediately is so popular. I mean, like, I get her brand, but like, how did she even break out? That's kind of what I don't get. But whatever, Bobby Altuff. Good for you, Bobby Altaf. 25 years old, I think, 25, 26 years old. And like, clearly going to be one of the most famous podcasters. already.

Yeah, fuck us. Yeah, I mean, that's the third time that's happened or the second time it happened

with the caller daddy woman where like, it was like episode two she shot up there. That's pretty rare. I mean, it's more common

with YouTube with podcasts that that doesn't happen often at all. Right. Now someone's going to do that obnoxious tweet where it's like,

everybody thinks Bobby Altuff is an overnight success. Here's how it was 10 years in the making. And then it's just going to be like, you know, some stupid origin story that like really wasn't like she actually is kind of an overnight success.

Yeah, which is cool. I like those. There should be some, right? There should be some. People talk about like they don't exist. I'm like, well, Instagram was only two years old. I mean, like those are real. Like it's real.

Which one of these things you want to go to? All right. Dating. So you and I both happily married off the dating market, but shit's getting crazy in the dating world. I don't know if you've seen these two things I'm going to tell you about. The first one is called Chaos Singles Party. Have you ever heard of this? No.

Do you download the dating apps now just to like check it out and see what it's about? If my wife has, this is just for science. Of course, no, I'd about all these. But I read the, this is in the New York Times. So I heard, I read this story in the New York Times and I was like, what? This sounds fascinating. So here's the story. This woman, Cassidy Davis, is on the dating app.

She's just a normal person. And it's Valentine's Day 2020. So last year, Valentine's Day, she's frustrated. She doesn't have anything to do on Valentine's. So she just basically, she's like, hey, here's what we should do. We should throw like a singles party on Valentine's Day. So if you're single on Valentine's Day, come to this. She tells every one of her girlfriends who's also struggling with online dating.

Hey, match with someone on Tinder and then invite them to this party, invite them to a house party. And they're like, what? And she's like, yeah, just match with one person and invite them as you. plus one to this house party, but everybody's going to do it. So it would be just a bunch of single people at this party. And she's like, all right. So they try to do it.

She at the last minute is like, I don't know if anyone's going to come. So she invites 65 guys from Tinder to be like, come. And they're like, what is happening? Is this real? Are you like catfish me? She's like, dude,

just either come or don't come. All right. That's it. And so she has this house party. And you can see the video on her, on her TikTok, but it's like a very, which city.

I'm not sure where this one was. But it's a small, it was like a small thing. It looked like maybe there was like 20 people there, but they were kind of having fun. So it was like a bunch of single young people playing like drinking games or whatever. She records, she makes a TikTok out of it,

stitches it together like just the highlights of the party basically, posted on TikTok and says what she did. She goes, she's like, I did the most chaotic thing possible for Valentine's Day. I invited, I told I have all my girlfriends to match with someone on Tinder and invite them to my house for this house party. And it was awesome.

And then people, that thing explodes. That video gets like, whatever, tons of views. And the concept, people really like this concept. And so she's like, I'm going to do another one. So she posts an update. She's like, I'm going to do another one in two or three weeks. It puts a link up for the chaos singles party. Same rules.

Is it free? I think it might have been free. Maybe there's a cover charge. I'm not sure. 500 people show up to that one. And since then, for the last year and a half of this woman's life, She's just been going on the road, traveling city to city. She partnered up with Tinder.

They like promote this thing now. In the app, they'll even promote her parties. And she gets paid to basically host these things. And now 200 or 300 people a night come to these singles parties. Same rules. Match with one. That's your plus one. Come to this event.

You can mix and mingle. You can stick with the person you invited or just whatever. It's all just people on Tinder who want to like have this chaos singles party. I love this idea. This is awesome. I'm looking at her TikTok now. So well done by her. And now these things are like big.

Like they're partnering with like legit venues. It like looks like a lot of fun. It looks like a whole whole scene now. This is awesome. I'm looking at her TikTok. This woman's talented. Did I tell you about the or did you ever see the Twitter things that I used to do for dating sometimes? Yeah, those were great.

They were great. They were great. My friend, right? It was basically like, it was Thanksgiving. And we were having friends over and some of them are single. and I'm like, they were like, hey, can you post me on your Twitter? I want, uh, they asked or you said it? Because that's crazy ask.

One of the people made a joke. They're like, dude, just post me on your Twitter. I need to meet a guy. Or some of it was like, when a Sarah's friends was like, I need a meet a nice, a nice guy who's successful. Can you like, introduce me? I was like, I'm just going to post you on Twitter. And then I was like, well, I don't want to make you the only person.

Like, I'm your Pint. So I'm going to get 10 friends. And the Twitter said, the tweet said, um, um, hope you're hungry on Thanksgiving day. you know, like here's 10 people, 10 of my buds. Yeah, I was like, hope you're hungry. Meet my friend, Jessica. Yeah.

Here's 10, here's 10 of my friends who are single. And I said like a little bit about what they do for work. And I just went on their Instagram and took a picture. And it got viewed like two million times. And I got DMed by a lot of brands. Like, hey, you want to make this a thing? We'll sponsor it. I was like, no, that's not going to be my thing.

I don't want that. No, I was just fucking around. And I think that that could potentially work. We actually turned it into like a like where it's like an affluent crowd dating app or something like that. I think I did it with Jonathan. And Jonathan actually met a girl who he went out with, I think, like a handful of times. Like so for Jonathan, I think it was successful. Is this true?

What happened after you got posted on this thing? Well, one of the girls who applied, shout out to Connor Ann, she came to the South by meetup that we did. So I got to meet her there, hung out a little bit. but in terms of like my DMs like I got hit up by a gay dude and this nice Indian woman who I decided not to reply to so super successful yeah but for her and for for the women I'm sure

it crushed are you still seeing that girl Connor are you guys just buddies now no not really she lives in Florida but it kind of worked yeah we're grasping for straws I mean pretty successful, sounds like. These guerrilla things, I love, by the way.

I love these like guerrilla dating. Yes. So here's another one. Date me docs. Have you heard about this trend? So it's date me dot directory. Is that the URL? That's the directory of them.

But date me docs is like basically you take, instead of going on a dating app, you create a Google Doc. And you just write in long form all about you. Your story, what you want, who you are, what you're into, what you're not. into where your boundaries are, all that stuff. You just make a very detailed Google Doc. And that's your profile. And then somebody created the directory that links all the people.

It's like an air table table. So it'd be like, you know, here's, you know, Christina. She's a female. She's interested in men. She's age 42. And it's just literally an air table. Dude, they're all poly. They put mono and poly.

They're like, it looks like almost half of them are poly. I mean they want to have an open relationship or they're not serious kids these days. I think it's like, I think they want to like be dating a bunch of people at once or something. It's like half of them are poly. That's wild to me. Yeah, yeah. That's

I think, you know, that's something that's changed, I think, since we were like, when I was dating 10 years ago, I never met anybody who was like, yeah, I'm polyamorous. No, it was like you see it on a TV show. It was like, it was like,

Like, yeah, the only people who did that are like, are like, it's like a guy who's got like 10 wives and it's on the TLC channel. It comes on after John and Kate Plus 8. Yeah. Yeah, this is, I think that's new. So anyways, these docs, if you look at these, click into some of these docs. They put photos and stuff in like a huge bio. This is wild.

I click this one. That's by Misha. It's the fourth one down. So Misha is a male. And it takes to, to a way. website that there's just like these torches like you're entering a dungeon probably not the vibe misha that you want but here we go and then the title is just romance i am currently single looking for our primary partner hot that's hot how you said that primary partner like that um only been in

other relationships just about a house blah blah blah um and then it's like here's a bunch of my favorite blog post here's some of my first dates you can chat with me on discord here's my Spotify here's some pictures of me, a bunch of pictures, boom, boom, boom. All right, so that's, that's me,

shit. But, like, one of the things I noticed, I click through a bunch of these is how intellectual all of these are. So they'll be like, you know, things you don't normally put on a dating profile,

it'd be like, like, here's one. I'm on this woman's page, uh, Shreda. She says, um,

I'm not ideologically monogamous, meaning I don't think monogamy is innately superior to polyamory. I hold romantic feelings for more than one person at once, but also struggle with jealousy, blah, blah, blah. It's like very, is this therapy? What is this? This is like a whole, like, open book style of letting somebody into your brain, which I can definitely see working for some people.

And I can see it totally not working for the type of person who they don't want out. So I actually think this is a really great idea because I think it attracts in a lot of the same type of person, the kind of like a little bit overly intellectual, very open-minded. type of crowd that would be a track, you know, it's kind of tech tech focused crowd here. Oh my gosh. This is wild. Sam was just smiling. Sam was just literally

he's looking at his screen and he's just smirking. I'm looking at a lot of this. There's one guy he's got a 15 page user manual and he like documents his whole life to explain how to like

and he talks about like ethical stuff. He's like the correct answer to the trolley problem is to kill one person to save five. There is a correct thing. This is wild. And on some regard, I'm like, well, if you're like a single woman who's like 30 and you're like, look, I just need to meet like a competent man

who's like thoughtful, I guess this is the way to go. Unfortunately, these aren't the type of guys that typically like can woo a woman. I'm on a doc right now and it just, there's a whole subsection called child rearing plans. and then it's seven paragraphs of their plans for child rearing. This is pre-first date, which is kind of amazing. So have you heard of, this reminds me of two things.

One, there's this guy named Christian Rudder, I think his name is. He founded OKCupid. He was one of the three or four co-founders. And he had a blog on all the data that OKCupid had. And then he eventually turned it into a book. And the thing was basically like, you say one thing, but your actions on our dating app, say, another thing. Like you say you want X, Y, and Z. And I think one of the big takeaways was you say

you want this, this, and this, you really just go after people's photos. So like, you say you don't want to, you say you don't want a smoker, but if they're hot enough, you'll, you'll go with a smoker. You say you don't want an animal lover, but if they, like, fit your, like, your physical wants, you're going to, you're going to want to be with them. And like, that always intrigued me. And that's why I don't think some of these, like, long form things will actually work. I think they want it to work, but it won't. The other thing is, have you. Have you You heard about the league? Do you remember the dating app the league? Yeah, she came on the pod once.

Yeah, her name was Amanda Brerford. She's a buddy of mine. She sold the league. You know they sold the league? I didn't know they sold it. Yes, I believe it was a very good sale. They sold it to match. I think match.com or one of the big ones. And I asked why they bought it. And she was like, well, basically, we only had like five or ten employees or something at the league. It was a really small team. But the league originally, I don't know if it started out as the phrase, Ivy, league, but it was basically like high end to meet a high end partner. And you had to like apply and stuff like that. And she was like one day, I just said, I went to, she's a developer. And she goes, I logged into like our app store account.

And I was like, we're charging 20 bucks a month right now. How high does the app store let me charge? Like what's the highest amount for subscription revenue? And I think, I think it was like $99 a week. She's like, that's the highest. I go, fuck it. That's what we're going to do. We're just going to do $99 a week.

And she was like, everyone at my company and everyone outside said it's not going to work. She's like, it crushed it. Our revenue went up like crazy. And one of the biggest reasons why Match bought us is they're like, we need to figure out how to sell products that are hundreds of dollars a month. And no one knows how. And she's like, oh, I'll teach you how. All you do is you go to the app store and you just delete the number that you put in

and you just put the higher number. And guess what? People are still going to do it. And that was like her thing was that it was a really, really, really, expensive dating app and it totally worked for for higher end people and so I still think that could be cool what what you and I didn't have when we were younger when we were dating we probably wouldn't have qualified then and we are and unfortunately we're not uh we can't use it now but basically have you heard of raya yeah it's like a celebrity it's like you got to be hot and famous to be in or

something like that yeah I think they just look at your Instagram like if you're verified on Instagram you're allowed to do it so raya is like everyone who's single is like Like saying like, oh, of course, we know all about it. But Raya is cool. But I like these, like, exclusive dating apps and these expensive ones. I think it's way better. I've got friends that run Tinder competitors, and it sounds like a horrible business. It's one of the very few businesses where you can't be, like, number three or number four.

Like, there's basically number one and number two, and that's it. At least that's what it appears like if you're going for mass market. What's the quote? It's like, you know, I don't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member. That's sort of what you want when it comes to dating or cool things. Um, you know, this date me docs thing, I think is a really fun idea. I'm glad, uh, whoever, I don't know who created this, but kind of kind of like a cool, cool idea. And obviously like things like this have been around for a long time, right?

Like Indian people famously like this is how my parents got married, for example. You write in the newspaper like your, you're, you're, they call it biodata. It's like your name, your age, your job, your whatever. And you just create this profile that's like text only and people are like, cool. married, let's do it. And that's basically how things work. So, you know, something this actually can work. The funny thing is, this is actually, you know what I'm actually doing?

I'm actually just going to recruit on here. I think this is a great recruiting platform. I think these people are probably all really smart, thoughtful individuals who are tech savvy, a lot of developers on here. They put their GitHub profile. Yeah, fucking LinkedIn. I'm scraping this for leads to hire from. This is amazing.

Dude, this one guy on here says 16 years old. That's a trap, Jack. I'm not clicking that. You think I'm clicking out? I've seen way too many episodes of Chris Hanson. I'm not clicking that. I know we're going to straight to the FBI website, bro. The next phrase you here is come on in.

Check yourself in. To the Fulsome prison. Dude, one of my first internet companies was called Bunk. And the premise was we would put these ads. We would put these ads. So close to the next. Airbnb? Well, it should have been Airbnb and it should have been just Tinder for Tinder, but basically the way it started was we would go and find online three and four bedroom

apartments and we would like, if it was a four bedroom apartment for four grand, we would say, we have one bedroom available for $1,000 and we would get 500 people to apply. And then we would host a party and team up people to get that place as well as a bunch of other places because we're like, oh, you guys are all looking for similar budgets apparently. So just like come and team up and get your own apartment. And it worked. It worked quite well. And then a bunch of the people at the parties started like hooking up with each other. And we didn't catch the clue that we should have just made this a dating thing.

And then we launched this app. We called it roommates. And it was basically Tinder for roommates. And again, we didn't catch a clue that people like I actually met a girl, two different girls on that app that I ended up dating in 2013 or 14. And again, we didn't catch a clue. We should have just done this for dating. It would have worked a lot better. Yeah.

The dating game is changing. You know, one thing that dating is always going to be a problem. Like it will never not be a pain point for people. Like no, and there's no such thing as sort of like solving dating. And anytime one thing gets popular, it creates the need for another.

So like, you know, Tinder created the need for something like Hinge. And now when you have sort of like Tinder and Hinge generation, I talk to people who are dating now and they're like, oh, you know what? Two worst things about those, like,

like Tinder and Hinge is like, you get either on Tinder, you just get bots. Like basically it's just girls trying to get you to like subscribe to their only fans like oh this really hot girl match with me and she's interested in me she tells me to just click this link and then like follow that oh man this is just an upsell like this is a bot and this upselling me basically the other one is people that um uh like because like we were joking about the polly thing but like people have a lot of different

like i don't know preferences and kind of different situations there's like a lot more configurations than like i'm a boy who likes girls i'm a boy who likes boys right like that's kind of what we knew was like, you know, we were checkers, not chess when it came to dating, right? There was only so many moves you could make. You can move forward and backwards.

That was it. And so you're red or black. That's the game. Now it's like, you know, multicolored chess. And so the way that my friend was telling me, he's like,

oh, there's just one app. I think it was called Field or something like that. Maybe I got that wrong, but I think it's called Field. And he's like, I like it because people just super straight up. It's like the culture on that app

is you've got to be ultra direct. It's like, I am looking for, And you say the exact thing you're looking for and what you're into and what you're not into so that like people know like they're not going to meet somebody, oh, this person's really cool, but they want a completely different type of relationship configuration, gender configuration that I'm into. And so I think, you know, there's always a new need. You know how when you and I do meetups and every once in a while, a line will form to like say hi.

It's like, hey, how are you? I was joking with my friend and she's like, you know, that's what it feels like to be a hot chick all the time. Like, you know, like, when you and I will have, like, an MFF meetup and we walk in, and you'll see, like, oh, people, like, are staring at us. Like, this guy's giving me energy. Like, he wants to, like, me to open. I'll turn my hips a little bit and let him, like, and give him, like, the, you know, like, I'll open my hips.

That's what it is. It's like, wherever you point your junk. It's like, you'll be at a thing and you're like, one on one with this other guy, but you feel this. It's all dudes. And you feel this other. You feel this other. You feel this other guy hovering.

You're like, all right, I'll turn my hips a little so this guy could get in on the combo. And that's basically what it feels like To be like a six out of ten woman like all the time Or maybe even lower Like just to be a woman all the time It's just you just whatever you want It's yours Dude just last thing of this

Do you remember like when I was in college The game was like you would go to a bar Or a club or whatever And literally it was like a physical version of Tinder It was like you just go up You guys just go behind the girl and just grind And if the girl like accepts the grind Then you're in

It's like national geographic, man. You're like a bird inflecting its feathers. That's the craziest thing that used to be normal. I don't know if that's still normal. That's the craziest thing that, like, I experienced in my life. Did you do that? I never did that. That was so uncomfortable.

That was all anybody around me even knew. Just get run burn on your junk. No, not a chance. I was too uncomfortable for that. You had a question on here that I actually was. thinking about the other day. You have a question on here. And I originally thought I wrote this, but I guess you did. What's an example of things today that are grandkids in 50 years will think is absolutely insane? I've been thinking about this because on TikTok and Instagram, the kids now.

Grinding is my example. Grinding at the club is my first example. I don't know if they do that anymore or not. It didn't even take 50 years. It took me 15 and I already realized that was batch of crazy then. Well, you'll see these videos and they'll be of high school. So like the kids now will be like check this out. This is a home video of the class of 2008 in high school. And you like see them walking around and like you see like the stuff that we used to wear and you see like our razor flip phones. And then like the kids reminisce like I can't believe they did this or that was so much better or this was so much worse. You had a cool question on here about what do you think will be crazy. Yeah, I think about this a lot. What are things that 50 years from now like our grandkids will

look at the way we live today and be like, what the hell were you thinking? right like um you know there's past example like if you go way past it's like slavery wow i can't believe that was just like the way you guys did things or whatever right like you know riding horseback that's crazy that's how people got around or just like people just dying of like everything you know like early on early age like that's crazy that was so risky to have a kid like you know one out of what four or five kids would just die before they even hit 10 like that's that's really really rough I was reading this Lewis and Clark book and whenever they get sick on the trail

they like give each other pills and they're like, we're just going to give you diarrhea and you're going to shit out the sickness. They call it a rush pill. They go, we're going to give you these pills and you're going to get tons of diarrhea and you're going to be healed. And that was like the thing. It was just we're just going to make you poop a ton. Yeah, yeah. We did that

with four loco. It was great. It just changes shape. All right. So you wrote some on here of more recent history. So you said driving to places without Google Maps. Yeah, these are things that we experienced the before and after, right? Like, we're at that age where we experienced the paper map era, the asking people for directions era, just knowing how the interstate system of the United States works.

Like, my dad just kind of knew roughly what you do to Google Maps. Dude, I don't even know the highway. I live in Austin. I don't even know the highway, the big highway one mile away. I can't even tell you the name of it. Same. I don't even look up when I drive. I was staring at the map.

Go by feel. All right. Then you had landlines versus cell, like landlines being the only way to contact someone versus cell phones. We both experienced that. You wrote unsafe cars. What did you mean by unsafe cars? Dude, my first car was in 1992 Mazda protege. And we bought it for, I got it for $900 for my mailman.

And when you look at that, yeah, but I was trying to my mailman. You're like, I'll take it. Well, sometimes we'd have to wear, we'd have to wear ties on, we'd have to wear ties to school. every once in a while. And if, like, my dad went to work too early and he wasn't there, my mailman would tie my tie. So, like, I got to know the mailman a little bit. Kind of weird. Bought it from, bought my car from $900. And if you see that car to a new, brand new, like, Honda Civic, if you ever watch the videos of them running into each other, it's insane. It's absolutely insane, like the safety. It's pretty wild, how dangerous they are. So, yeah,

I think, like, these, like, when we look at cars, when I look at cars from, like, the 80s and 90s, it's ridiculous how shitty they are. Yeah, that's crazy. So what are the ones that you think 50 years from now? So we got a couple on here. Let's just go back and forth. You do one. I'll do one. The first one is having, and I've said this for a while, but having like a growth on you, having something growing in your body that's going to kill you that you could have figured out had you you just gotten some type of scan a year earlier. So I think that's going to, we're going to look back of like, dude, so you just had this thing in your body and you didn't even know. It'll be like, so how, how did you know?

It's like, well, if you, if you would feel a lump, then you would just go to the doctor. It's like, feel a lump. Yeah, like if there was like a golf ball in you, eh, that's new. All right, let me go get a checked out. That's literally state of the art. Like, I just described state of the art procedure.

And half the time you're like, that fuck, it, it'll go away. You know what I mean? Maybe it was that burger ate earlier. Yeah, like, it'll go away. It's probably a lifeoma. It'll go away. And so, yeah, I think that will be a thing.

How about yours? Okay, easy one. I'll start easy mode. Driving yourself. It's pretty clear self-driving cars are like on the horizon. The idea that like, yeah, back in my day, we used to get a license when we were 16 years old. And then, yeah, I just used to drive.

I used to just have a steering wheel in the car. You just have to look where you're going. And all the other cars were also holding steer wheels looking where they were going. We tried not to crash. And if you're on a two lane road, it's 80 miles an hour, the opposite way with three feet of distance. Yeah, yeah, you just, well, they painted these lines. You just had to stay in the middle. And you just had to keep awake and stay in the middle.

Let's keep looking. And they'll be like, what? Like, that will sound completely barbaric, right? Like, it's like, did people not crash? Yeah, they sure did. Did they die? There's a leading cause of death. Yeah.

Some people get drunk before they did it. Like, it'll sound just like, what were you guys thinking? And it was like, well, we just didn't have the tech at the time. But like, when you have self-driving cars, cars are going to drive perfectly without you need it there won't even be a steering wheel in the car cars will become like entertainment pods

just play video games or you'll sleep or you'll watch movies or you'll work like cars will become a whole different thing very soon and there's a clear before and after another one is so different diets like we still debate we're like the Atkins diet that's a thing oh no no no you want to do the other thing where you got to eat lots of carbs

you know car whole grains that's that's what you have to do. And to this day, we're like, well, which one do you feel good on? I don't know. Like, just do whatever. I've alternated carnivore and vegan twice. Yeah. You are vegan to your, you'll only consume vegans. It's just constantly changed. And like, we don't know which one necessarily is better. You know, there's like really good arguments for both and we aren't sure. And I think that that's pretty insane that, uh, who knows? You know, I don't know. Right. By the way, have you ever, do you know a lot of doctors? Do you know how? many classes they take on nutrition typically. It's like a class. Like they don't, doctors don't

study nutrition, which is pretty insane. Or at least like your average like. Yeah, or exercise. Yeah, your average doctor doesn't exactly is, doesn't really know too much about exercise and nutrition. And so I think that that's like something we're going to be like, I don't know, you just kind of like try a bunch of different stuff and like you'd read a bunch of blog posts on it and listen to podcasts and like you just kind of guessed a little bit. Right. I think eating meat. So killing animals to eat their meat, I think will be seen like a genocide, like a slavery. I think it will be seen as completely barbaric and immoral 50 years from now. When we have the alternative, there will be an alternative, which is basically lab grown meat or synthetic food that will solve the kind of protein problems and taste, get the taste right and the cost right.

And when that happens, as that shift happens, we'll just be like, yeah, people just take the thing and you slaughter it. You just kill it. And then you eat it. And they'd be like, you do it yourself? Like, no, no, no, gross. I would never do that. They do it. And then they'd do it.

And then we eat it. And they're like, what? Like, didn't you have a dog? It's like, yeah, I would never do that to a dog. It's like, but you would do it to this other animal? It's like, yeah. It's like, how did you guys decide? It's like, well, I guess I don't know what cuteness?

I don't know. I don't really know how we decided what was completely illegal and immoral and would get you canceled versus like you eat it two times a day. Like, you know, the line is very thin between like cow and chicken and dog, right? Like it's not that, it's not that clear why one, yes, versus the other, no. So I think that eating meat will become, will be seen as basically like our generations were just committed genocide on animals. I have 20 cows at my ranch. You knew that, right? Are that cows out there?

They're not yours, right? They're just stray or they're yours? They're, my neighbor, my neighbor owns them and they are allowed to use my land to graze. And I don't pay taxes because of that or I pay less taxes. But basically, uh, you, I get to know them. So like,

I know who they are. Like, I know which ones are which. I know whose mom is who. And like, this fucking sucked. Our first week there that we bought the place, like a four month year old calf died.

Or it was, but a four month year old cap is still like 600 pounds. or whatever it was. It was like a 600 pound baby. And apparently it like swalled a golf ball. So my neighbor was like, hey, were you hitting golf balls? I was like, no, dude. I was like, I just moved here. It wasn't me. I don't know. Um, like it's on Instagram. It falls at the new Hithny Ranch. Yeah. And I was like, dude, once you get to know me, you'll, you'll, you'll understand neither of us to golf. I'm not a golfer. You know what I'm. And so and I was like, hey, uh, Jeff, this guy was like, what? Do I go and get like a shovel or

something. He goes, oh, no, that's some bitch. He's going to be gone in three days. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, you'll see. And so I come back in three days, and the whole body and carcass, everything was gone. All the animals, like the birds and hogs, they just ate it. It was completely gone. And the mother would go back to the spot

where that calf was and would like mourn. And I was like, my heart was broken. I was like, I don't know if I could eat meat in the same way now. So I felt like devastated. And so since then, I basically, I only eat red meat like, once a month because the cows, I get to know them. And I'm like, I feel too sad. I can't do it.

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not that manly of a man. I can't do it. But you think that childbirthing manually is going to be a thing of the past? Yeah. So when I was in LA, we had dinner with a person named Jessica Ma. You know she is? Yeah, she's very impressive. She's super impressive.

I think she did a company called In De Niro. I don't know her very well. She was at the dinner, but she was on the other side of table. So I didn't get to know her too much. She seemed very interesting. In De Niro was like an accounting company that's still very successful. But I think it's so successful now that she just has tons of money and does more stuff. Yeah, it's a big one.

I think she's out of that business now from what it sounded like. And we were like, what do you do? She's like, oh, I basically invest and incubate like hard science businesses. And I think she's still only like 29. Yeah. Yeah. She was very, very impressive. We should actually have her on.

Sometimes you could just tell that people are playing a different game at a different level. So there's like same game, different level, different game, same level. And then there's different game, different level. I would put her in different game, different level. Yeah, you could talk to her. She's pretty brilliant. Within five minutes, you're like, oh, okay. I think she was, I think her, she started in De Niro, an accounting software company at 19.

I don't know much about her, but she started her, I just went to her LinkedIn, by the way, started her first six figure business when she was in middle school. God damn. Different game, different level. Yeah. I was, I was, I hadn't even grind it yet at that point. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. Anyways, so she's,

she's doing this thing. One of the things we, so we were talking to her, but we were like, what are some of the crazy science things that you're funding? And then she would say things that were like, her thing was like novel, like she's trying to fund like a novel approach at like an existing thing.

I don't want to butcher it, but something like that, which basically like what you called a bold, a bold, a bold, uh, bold science. So it's like basically like someone taking a new scientific approach at an

existing problem. So she'll go to universities and she'll find, um, research labs where they'll be like, this is the one researcher who's trying to do this thing, but this like completely other way than the general field is going. And she's like, cool.

I want to fund that because those bold approaches when they work, work in a really big way. And, um, so one of the things we talked about just somehow in the conversation, came up was like, like, birthing a child is like the natural way or whatever.

Like, you know, woman carries baby nine months. It goes to labor, delivers his baby. Um, you know, dad snips the abyllical cord.

Like, that's the process as we know it today. Wait, does the dad do it? They, they're like, dad, you want to do it?

You got to be ready. Is that what, is that whatever to be offered? I'm not doing that. On them, in the moment, they're going to be like, dad,

come do this. And you're going to be like, what? no, I'm good. I'm holding her hand over here. I'm busy and they'll be like, no, no, no, come, come do it. And then you're going to be like, oh, and then you're going to hold the thing and be like, I don't want to hurt this.

This is going to hurt? What is this? I'm not doing that, man. I don't even want to, I wouldn't even trim her toenails. I'm not going to touch that thing. I don't want to touch that thing. Did you do it? I did it, yeah.

Oh, man. The peer pressure of six doctors and your wife who just, like did a modern miracle, did a like act of human bravery and courage? And then you're like, I don't feel comfortable doing this. Dude, I am not doing that. Wimp of the year. Like, I've already told my wife,

I think I'm about to pass out. I'm taking a couple of Xanaxes in the room. This is on. No, that's too much for me, man. I don't know if I can do that. I'm not one of that guys.

I'm not that guy. I don't think I can do that. My brother-in-law, where my sister was, having, having birth, giving birth, whatever.

Yeah. He, like, yawned at some point. And she just turned and looked at him like, oh, are you tired? He was like, no, sorry, it's just been like 70 hours. He's like, no, it's just boring. Yeah, it is honestly kind of boring. But, yeah, anyways, yeah, you better be prepared. You're going to have to do it.

So anyway, birth a good child. So she was like, yeah, I think that's going to be seen as like, unnecessary sort of barbaric not like as like scientifically sound as like eventually we'll be able to kind of like almost like incubate the baby and just like deliver the baby through

like essentially a machine a baby will be sort of like grown and delivered that way have you met someone who's had a surrogate? Yeah, many people have a med surrogate. I have and they've acknowledged that they don't feel, they didn't love the kid the same as the other one. Really?

First of all, did you ask? Of course I asked. Of course. Is that not the, that's obviously the first thing you're going to ask when you're about it. Well, there's like a handful of questions. There's a handful of questions, which is a, like, obviously, how much is that cost? You're going to run.

Yeah. Yeah. Where'd you find them? And then, like, what did you do? What was the relationship like? And then my fourth question is like, did they ever try to hold the baby hostage? Dude,

I could still imagine you being the worst possible surrogate because you would micromanage their lifestyle. Like, hey, it's my baby in there. You better get up here on this treadmill right now. But the surrogate can basically hold you hostage, right? Because you'll do anything. You'll do like, well, yeah, whatever you want. Like, I have to give you what you want

because I will do anything for that kid. But then the last, the fifth question was like, All right, but like, did you love the kid as much as the other ones? And the answer was at first, no, definitely not. I definitely didn't. They got honest with me. And so I don't know if I believe this is going to be a thing. But yeah, I feel like if there's the option, it's kind of like the epidural.

Like, so I think when we were in the hospital, so my wife's insane and wants to only do natural birth and like feel all the pain for no reason. But she's like, you know, she's like, that's like, that's. I get down. I'm like, oh, wow, oh my God. We are so, I guess opposites to do attract. I've taken the life version of epidural to avoid pain. You took the epidural. Yeah, exactly. I sat down as well. Strap me here. Doc, you got your leftovers, I'll take it. We're not going to waste that thing. Get out of here. Yeah. Do you already open it up? So, but the doctor had said 90 percent, she's like 85 to 90 percent. She's like 85 to 90

percent of the patients in their hospital do the epidural because like you know makes sense like if you can you know not feel that level of pain it's it's easy to see why somebody would choose that so um you know if you just sort of extrapolate from there you're like cool would you like to also not have the nine months of pregnancy like going on in your body um if there was that option like you really think people wouldn't take it i think people would yeah i think some people would i just don't i don't know if it's you look at the ozempic thing dude if you give people the magic pill the way out, like people take that shit. Like, if you get the cost right, that's a good point.

I do love people are going to avoid pain, right? They're going to avoid discomfort and pain where they can. I order DoorDash three times a day. Like, you think that people aren't going to do this? They're going to do this. You're right. Actually, I love magic pills. Whenever I hear someone who's selling like a magical cure or a magic pill, I'm, I'm in.

Probably won't work, but tell me everything. OZempic is a little bit of a magic pill. when I was taking it was quite magical. Did you take it? No, no, I haven't taken it. You should. It's awesome. I guess I'm also kind of crazy in that way where I'm like, well, then it wouldn't be as satisfying.

Like, I want to do this on my own. Yeah, yeah, but having abs is pretty sick. Yeah, totally. I totally agree. Two or three failed diets away from breaking and going on a Zemik. All right, what else we got? I want to tell you about this thing that when people, read it. They probably didn't have the same reaction as I did, but I think they should. So there's

this guy. It's called The Greatest Scam Ever Written. And it's about a copywriter who ran this scam. His name was Patrice Runner. And so it started basically in the 90s where he originally saw this ad. Have you ever heard of this book called The Lazy Man's Way to Riches? Yes. So I don't remember when that originally came out, I think in the 60s, but the lazy man's way to riches is a really famous ad. It sold like three or four million copies of this book. And the ad is famous amongst copywriters because it was really successful. And a lot of the copywriting that we use now for the internet, they kind of originated from that ad. And this guy, Patrice Runner, he saw this ad and he was poor and he was like, I don't want to be poor anymore. It's pretty amazing that this guy just

convinced me to buy this book based off of just like, you know, 20 paragraphs of text. That's amazing. I want to learn how to do that. And so he did. And so he starts studying copywriting. And he reads a newspaper about this lady name like Madame Duval, Maria Duval was her name. And basically, there was a story about her and how there was a murder in the Caribbean and how they couldn't find where the body is. And she was a psychic and she led the people to where the body was. And I don't know if that's actually true. If she actually did that, but it was in the newspaper that that happened. And so he contacted her. It was like, look, I want to create this psychic company, and I want you to be the face, and I'm going to

give you 5% of profits forever, and you really don't even need to do anything other than, like, let me use your face occasionally, and that's it. So she signs up for it. And he starts creating these ads where he would mail people these letters that looked like it was typed out, and it was from Maria Duvall. And it would use these amazing bits of copy. So the thing would say, like the opening line was, if you've got a special bottle of bubbly that you've been saving for celebrating great news, now is the time to open it up.

And that would be like the opening line. And it was a nine page letter that he would send to people. And he would say like, you know, send me $40 or $50 and we will like, you'll have good luck. It was basically like you send money and you get nothing. And then eventually it was like, oh, you sent $40. We're going to keep sending you more letters. and they would send like two letters a day sometimes.

So someone would sometimes would receive two letters and they would send like an ad for some vitamin that you would need to take. And recipients basically had said, the recipients were urged to reply and enclose a check or money order for $50 to receive a mysterious bit of power and luck in order to attract money. And then also they would, after they accepted the money, they would get a document called a guide to my new life

that included winning lottery numbers. And so this guy did this, and he did it for so well that he was making $20 million a year doing this. And eventually the thing ran for 10 years, and it made $250 million. And then the government swoops in, and they're like, dude, this is fraud. And so now he's in jail, and he's waiting, sentencing, but he might get up to life in prison. So, like, he's looking at least, like, 20 years of prison for this. And they were like, why did you do this? He's like, I was just so attracted to copywriting.

And with writing, he told the reporter, this is all from an article called The Walrus. It was a great article. And they show you like what the ads look like. But we'll talk about that a second. But he goes, with writing, you could get the attention of someone. And at the end, after just a few minutes, that person sends you a check to get a product, to get a product to an address or company that they've never heard of.

And when I read stories like this, that should be the takeaway, which is not like this criminal is bad. but how do I use this amazing copywriting stuff actually for good? And if you click on the article, you'll see the envelopes would have these amazing things. We're on the back of the envelope. It would say something like, after you've sealed this envelope, we will be the only one to have ever opened it. And it says, please leave the following blank. And it says, here's the day we received it. Here's the time that we received it.

And the recipient, who's supposed to be Maria Duvall, would have to check the box in order to say, like, yep, I've opened it. And they put all these little, like, strange, like, tactics of getting someone to convince and believe what they were saying. It's incredibly fascinating. So it's called the publication they did an article on this guy. It's called the Walrus. It's really good because you should read this and think, like, copyrighting is amazing. This guy was a fraud, obviously, so that's bad.

But whatever he did, do that for good shit. And it's awesome. It's a really fascinating article about this guy. But, yeah, now he's going to get sentenced to, like, it looks like 20 years. of prison. And you know who else did this? This great copywriter, great copywriter Gary Halbert. You remember Gary Halbert?

Yeah, why did he go to jail? I didn't actually know it was tax something? Yeah, tax. I think tax and also, basically, he would sell this product. I think it was called a family, what is it called a suit of arms? What's it called? A crest, like a family crest.

He would sell this product, whereas, like, you mail in, like, par and then you get mailed back, like, a crest. I don't know if it's like a graphic, but he just didn't fulfill the orders. He just took the money and like bounced. It was just like, I'm just easy to do that too, to just give him a crest. Yeah, he just took the money. He just needed fiverer. He was just too early. Yeah. And so he went to prison, I think for like 10 years. And that's where he wrote this really good book where it's like, he wrote letters to his son on copywriting. And that's called the letters from Boron. I guess Boron was

the name of the prison that he was in. But these copywriters, it's really cool how, you're able to pull this shit off. And by the way, people act like you can't do this anymore because people are smarter. That's not true. 100% can still pull off all this. But it's very fascinating.

I'm with you. I think this is one way that we are very, very similar where we both read these things. I have the same sort of like unexpected reaction, which is some blend of like excitement and admiration. Not for the crime, but for the tools that led to the like, you know,

it's the same way I love. It took skill. It definitely took, It's like robbing a bank. I like it. I like what goes in to robbing that bank, right? It's like you shouldn't like the criminal in this case, but you are attracted to the skill,

to the cleverness, to the guile that goes into doing something like that. Well, every guy who saw Lino DiCaprio and Wolfel Wall Street or Catch Me if you can, was like, hey, bomb, can you give me one of your checks? I want to see if I can actually change the numbers on it. Like everyone, like, you know what I mean? Like, everyone who saw that was do the same thing.

or like everyone looked up like, you know, Shrapford, Oakmont, Jordan Belford's thing after they, well, Wall Street movie, like everyone that tried to do it. Counting cards or whatever, right? Yeah, right. They're like, oh, I could, how can't that work? I could do that. You had a great bit of copy that I read on Facebook the other day. You go, the more shirtless pictures I post, the more free protein I'm sent.

Some asked me to, some asked to pay me to post. I've never done that, and I don't intend to. But here's some brands that I use, blah, blah, blah. You go. That's right. We may be whores in the par household, but we're certainly not. It's so good. Where did you get that?

I stole that from Ari Gold. So Ari Gold, that TV show Entourage. So every great copywriter does the same thing where you do this too. You hear phrases. You hear phrases and you store them. And you just store them. And so every single person who's, good at writing, you have a bank

that you just, we called a swipe file, but I remember even when I was in sixth grade watching Entourage at Sunday night at 9th m. on HBO, I remember hearing that, I go, that's mine. I'm stealing that one. And you just wait for that perfect opportunity to use those lines.

I have my, it's literally called, you said phrases, literally my sheet is called, my note is called phrases. And I just have so many good ones here. I love it. Because what people don't know is like phrases are really important. So I'm working on this with Hampton actually,

where we're trying to create like our mantra or like with every type of community. It's basically a cult or a sorority where you like, you need like a phrase that summarizes it. You need a crest. You need a crest. I need a crest. Like I need something. And I've been like tinkering with phrases and it's so important to like nail a phrase. And like there's so many like really good phrases.

Like for example, I'm reading this book about Martin Luther King's assassination and he was assassinated while well basically he was at this protest for garbage workers, black garbage workers, were, uh, wanted to be treated better. And their phrase was just,

I am. And it was underlined, I am a man. And like that, like that one phrase is let's treat me like a, you know, I'm not, I'm not a slave anymore.

I'm a man. Treat me like a man. And so I just, I just like, all these phrases. And I just like, well, see a phrase,

even though I remember writing that I am a man. We are mostly men. I'm looking for more people of supply. That's too. touchy of a subject. That's a whole another thing. But anyway, I love these beautiful phrases. I love these beautiful phrases. You got to collect them. Are you

workshop in a couple right now? You want to do a little live workshop? So one that has gotten shut down, but I love it, which is CTC, confidentiality, transparency, and commitment. So CTC and just you got a CTC.

So you miss one meeting, you're banned. We've actually kicked three people out already because we've heard that they've communicated with outsiders of like some confidential information. But CTC is what I'm trying to, which is what I'm trying to get stuck. Make a thing. It's not becoming a thing as of late.

But yeah. What else we got? Well, that's it. That's the only one that's the. Hard at work over there at Hampton. I see. Dude, it's hard. The process can't be rushed.

It's hard coming up with a phrase. Like, what are these phrases? What are some ones that you're inspired by? So you said the I am one. What are some? some other ones that you think are well done. Well, this other one is, they're calling it core,

which is like commitment, openness, respect, and one other thing. I don't know what the E stands for, but core. And core is not sticking with me. But I'm trying to be open mind. Core's not sticking with me because four things to remember is a lot harder than three. These are more like values then. It's not like your, it's values. Yeah, it's not like your slogan.

So one thing I've been thinking about is no one, nothing, no one, never. Where I was like, nothing, no one ever, never, which is like, is this confidential? Nothing, no one never, dude. Like, yes. Like everything. Everything. It's nothing, no one, never. You can never talk about what's going on.

So I'm pulling around with nothing, no one never. I like that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. That one, that one did a little something for me. I like that. Yeah, did it get you going? It got me going a little.

What are some other interesting ones? There's not like that many that are intriguing to me, to be honest. but I'm trying to figure out how to do it. It's really hard. Just creating that shit from scratch, it's way harder than it looks. Or I'm just not talented. Are there any good ones that you like?

The one thing I heard on the value side that always stuck with me was a value is useless without acknowledging the tradeoff. So like, most companies, when they do their kind of values, they'll be like respect, honor, integrity. Which is stupid because like what's the opposite? Of course. Yeah, like you said, nothing that's of interest.

You've acknowledged no, like, sacrifice in that. And it's just generic. And so it's not memorable. It's not memorable. It's not useful because it's like, it's just an of course type of statement. Whereas, you know,

Facebook did one that stuck, which was move fast and break things. It's beautiful. And move fast and break things was so good. And the reason why was because it acknowledged the downside of moving fast. And sometimes you're going to break shit. And like, they said, yeah, yes, we take that.

We will, we'll err on the side of that. We will take that trade off. And so I think that values are only useful when you acknowledge, when it bake into it, the opinionated tradeoff, right? Like the fact that, yep, there are pros and cons to this. And our opinion is that this is the pro that matters. Right. And that we're down, we will live with this downside because that big,

because that's what shows you what you value. Like, for example, if you're somebody who's really high integrity, you're going to, you're going to, let's say there's an opportunity to take. You're going to not take. You're going to have to sacrifice things that could go your way

because you're high integrity. This is like Michelle Obama had one that kind of was. Yes, it's got to be like painfully truthful. Painfully true. Exactly. So she did that when they go low, we go high, of acknowledges that like you all they go low it hurts you want to hit them back but no we go high right

when they go low we go high that's another example of one that's like i like i don't know when she said that but that's like more than five years ago i still remember that a lot of people repeated that kind of like to make fun of her but it was politics people make fun of everything but like i do think there was something in that that was like more real than just like we stand for respect it's like okay cool doesn't mean anything to anybody when you say that it's like we're all to those sorts of things. Like, Subway, eat fresh, and we print grill marks onto our chicken because it's not really grilled. Like, you know, it's like, all right, well, that's what they should really say.

It's like, looks fresh, but it ain't. We, uh, my high school had a great one that I've always remembered. It was men, we were in all boys school and it was meant for others. And they just did such a good job of like nailing that into our brains. Just you got to be a man for others. There's like, that could be a dating app too. Yeah. you're right

so I remember meant for others I like that but it's been really challenging so I guess I got to go fight some more phrases but but yeah I gotta

I gotta make that better do you have any that you use for any of your companies you know any of your what was Milk Roads did Milk Road have one no but I don't think you need one

at the beginning by the way at the beginning I don't think you need I think you do need certain North Stars like you know sure you started the hustle you were like I call it bull bullshit free news

yeah you were like this is like your no nonsense or no bullshit your your your smart friend telling you what happened in a no bullshit way that was a really good like North Star guiding principle that you could just say okay cool so like we stole a version of that for the

Bilt Road because what would what ended up happening here's like a tactical way that that started a drift the top story and all the news news things would have been about like some arbitrary bullshit, like some maybe it was like a regulatory thing or maybe it was like a kind of a boring regulatory thing

or it was like some layer two blockchain on, on like some layer two protocol on top of some like obscure blockchain did this thing. And we would write about it and I would read it because at this point I was like the editor. I really never was the writer from Oak Road. But I would read it and I would just call Ben and I'd be like dude, what like are you interested in

this, he's like, well, not really, but I mean, it seemed to be like, I mean, it's the top story. That's by other news outlets. I was like, cool, but like, if you weren't into it, like, I was like, here's the test. Would you text me. Yeah. Would you text me and tell me about this? Like, would you text me and tell me about this? And would I be interested?

It's already baked into you wouldn't even text me if you didn't know, if you, you would only text me if you knew I'd be interested. So I was like, let's just use that as the test, like the litmus test is basically, would you text me about this thing that happened? Um, if I was like, yeah, what's new in. in crypto right now. Like, if that's not the thing, then don't put it in the newsletter, even if other people are writing about it.

And when we made that shift, all of the like metrics kind of went up because people just naturally would resonate with that better because we had like a guiding principle for what, what goes in and what goes out. And I think that's the other thing that goes, that's really useful is it's really easy to talk about what goes in. What's important is to say what goes out. And I do this with like strategy planning documents too. Like I wrote up a strategy for our e-com business.

I think everybody should do something like this, by the way. I wrote it down and I wrote, here's the six bets that we have made this year. We're making this year. And I write them down. So for example, I wrote the things called Big Betts and I shared this document with everyone. I said,

Big Bet number one was we didn't have anybody in like demand planning or inventory forecasting. I was like, it's pretty stupid that we don't have anybody doing this. Because of that, I think we have a ton of waste. we're miss like sometimes we're way under on products that people want sometimes we're way over and it just sits there and just ties up our cash i think that if we hire somebody who's got experience doing this we will get 20 30 percent improvement on the bottom line literally just from

that one hire that's bet number one and then we hire that person now we're seeing how it plays out that number two was like that's smart um let's say like uh whatever without giving too much away let me say like this type of partnership we're trying to go for this type of partnership with this other big entity we believe that if we do that it's going to have this effect that's the bet we're making we'll know if it's successful if x happens i just wrote that wrote this down and so the whole company strategy for the year is one page long and it's just six like sentences it's like here's the situation here's the bet here's the situation here's the bet and i just wrote that out and then with that at the bottom I wrote and here's the bets we are not making that we

otherwise reasonably could have. So for example, we're not launching on Amazon because if you're, because even though that would clearly add to the bottom line, but if we're launching on Amazon, that's going to take resources away and see those other six bets. That's going to take all of our attention this year. So we're saying no to that. We're saying no to this other thing. We're saying no to this other thing, all of which were totally reasonable. You could make a case for, but we decided not to do them because we don't want to spread ourselves too thin. And it was actually that not doing section, like the first part was useful, but the second part was even more useful.

And I think that people should highlight those like, you know, it's not focus is not what you say yes to. Focus is the hundred good ideas you say no to. And so I think when you take that principle and you apply it, that, that's where you find the interesting stuff, like whether it's your company marketing or whatever. What are you calling that in e-commerce playbook? Oh, I just like the bets, like big bets. What are the big bets that we're making this year?

And we'll see. And I also wrote at the top. Like we don't think that all of these are going to pan out the way we expect. Are they? Where do you right now? I wrote one or two are going to either fail or we won't even execute on because one or two winners will suck up a bunch of our energy. I expect that to happen.

I expect the middle for to work maybe, you know, plus or minus 20% on how well we think they should work. So like some will slightly underperform our expectations. Some will slightly overperform. One or two of the six bets will either fail completely or we won't execute well enough because our attention got sucked away by the other ones. And one or two should have a huge payoff. That's the distribution.

If they all just work as expected, we didn't really bet wildly enough, right? It's like kind of like the goals thing that you don't want to hit 100% of your goals. You want to hit maybe like 70% of your goals. That shows that you stretched far enough without overstretching. All right. We're out of here. Sam hit him with the line That is the pod

I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off On the road let's travel never looking back