My First Million - Sahil Bloom: Left Private Equity To Make Millions As A Content Creator And 3 Profitable Businesses To Start Now

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Episode 384: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk with entrepreneur, creator, and investor Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) about three business ideas that will make money now, and why he left private equity to make millions as a content creator. Bonus: Shaan offers $2,000 to anyone who helps him develop his "uniform" for the pod. ----- Links: * Sahil Bloom * TweetPik * Sahil Bloom Instagram * Dakota Robertson (@WrongsToWrite) * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (03:45) - private equity jobs (07:30) - what is your current job? (10:25) - why did you leave PE and jump into something else? (20:45) - cool business ideas (Idea #1) (36:15) - newsletter (Idea #2) (55:45) - mobile podcast studios (Idea #3) (01:04:00) - Sahil's grand plan ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

mobile podcast and video studio. Buy a few vans, kit them out with like a pretty fire setup. Just in the back of like a normal size van, it doesn't even have to be an RV for like two to three people could fit. Deck it out with like a few good DSLR cameras that can do the recording, like dual camera set up so that you have like a few mics hanging off the sides. And basically go and post it up in a couple of major cities,

like one van in each major city and rent it out for like 500 bucks for two hours to do podcast recordings. or like, you know, a couple hundred bucks to do like people going in and filming Instagram shorts, TikToks, shit like that. Like, if you put one in L.A. and you put one in New York City, I bet you could kill it. What's going on? Who's the guest, Sean? We got Sahill here.

The man who answers the question, what would happen if Sean was better looking, smarter, harder working? Sawhal Bloom is here. Definitely not smarter. Yeah, but don't dispute those other two. I'm just screwing with you. So what's up, guys? Happy to be here. How often do you get your haircut?

Let's start with the most important question. You know, like every other week at this point. Now my wife is making fun of me for this because like it used to be that I'd go once a month, wasn't a big deal. And now I'm going like every other week because I like to keep it tight. And she keeps giving me shit because we have a little newborn at home. And I'm like, oh, I got to go. Got to go.

So yeah, it's become an issue. If you don't call it a hair appointment, that's the only thing you can't do. If you say I got a hair appointment, then you're out as a guy. The place just can't be called a salon. That's always been my rule. It's got to be a barber shop. You seem like a salon guy though. Look at you, man.

You're wearing like a, you got like a Werther sweater on. You look like you're getting ready for Christmas. It's like it's 85 degrees in Austin, Texas today. Yeah. Are we at your like book reading for your book right now, Sam? What are you doing? It actually does look like you should have a fireplace in the background

and you're going to be like reading us nice stories and a soothing voice. I'm definitely drinking tea right now. So basically like your bio is pretty easy. You were a nobody private equity guy. The pandemic hit. The pandemic hit. And you're like, I'm going to be somebody. In a matter of two years, you got famous on Twitter.

What do we have nine or 800,000 followers? So you got famous on Twitter and basically transformed your life all because of Twitter and COVID. Is that right? I mean, the nobody private equity guy designation is not unreasonable. I think that's totally fair. I mean, there's a lot of nobody like finance guys that are making. bank out there, though, right? Like, that would have, uh, that would have stung, but now you're like

famous and stuff. So now it's okay to, to laugh at it. I mean, I don't know. Like, do you, do you think it's things like the, if you're making pretty good money doing something like that? I mean, VP's in private equity at this point. If you're doing well, like, you're making seven figures as a VP in private equity. Name four of them. Yeah. What about, dude, I hung out with some P.E. guys the other day and I didn't know them well enough, but obviously I just, in the back of my head, how rich are you? And that's just what I wanted to keep asking. If you own a P.E. shop, is it safe to assume that you're just wealthy? And how much do they actually earn? Yeah, I mean, if you are a GP, so like one of the principal owners of a private equity fund,

and you've been doing it, like, across multiple funds that have performed well over a period of time, it's pretty safe to assume that you've got a net worth north of $50 million. Because, I mean, you just like simple math on it, right? Most of those funds are taking like one and a half, to 2% management fees on, you know, if you're running a big fund, 500 million plus, if it's like a real substantial fund. So there's, you know, 20 million plus coming in a year on a billion dollar fund. And realistically, most of them don't have that many employees. So they're not having to actually pay out a ton of that in terms of like, you know, operating costs. And then you have carry and they're taking, you know, 15, 20, 25% of profits above their hurdle rate,

whatever that is, 8%. So you're like, you know, you're talking about if they double the funds, there's $200 million plus of carry to go around. And so the principal owners of those are taking the lion's share of that, you know, how much. I mean, if there's 200 million and their principal owner owns 20, 30 percent of that, it's a shit ton of money. And I think that I've always, I can't decide if it's jealousy because I'm like, you guys are making a lot of money for what feels like not a lot of work. Or if it's actually, I dislike them because I feel as though they're just like Excel sheet monkeys and they're like not actually creating value. Where is the reality? No, I mean, they work crazy hard, man. I don't, I don't know anyone that is a long time GP in private equity that doesn't

work, you know, 70 plus hours a week of like stressful work. I mean, it's the type of thing Sean would absolutely hate. Like you think about like people that care about leverage on their time. It's like pretty piss poor leverage and it's high stress work because you're putting a bunch of debt on these companies typically. And, you know, during a downturn like right now, right, it's hugely because you're constantly dealing with like breaking covenants on the debt and having to restructure. And, you know, like basically what ends up happening is you spend 80% of your time on the like couple of losers in the portfolio. And the winners, you just like kind of get to set and forget it because they're growing. They're, you know, you're getting like a levered upside on them because you put, you know, 70% leverage to buy the company, 60% leverage to buy the company.

And you're just like eating off those couple of winners. But you're dealing constantly with the ones that are losers. So Sean and I have our hand in this world where like we've, we've. definitely sell and have sold courses and information stuff. We also have a podcast. And so that's like this like personality world. But then we also have built a nice size companies and we will continue to build very likely much bigger companies. And so we have our foot in that world. For you, you have your foot in like the PE world as well as the thing that we're in this information thing. Where do you think, do you think that one, do you think that the information world or whatever

we call this thing is actually a, is it an equal, uh, revenue or net worth driver as like some of the traditional company building or PE stuff. Yeah, I mean, like, I think you have to think about it in terms of like your, you know, profit potential multiplied by like the freedom and time freedom that comes with it, right, to like get to like kind of an adjusted profit that you can generate from something. Doing it in PE and like making $50 million in PE from a time adjusted standpoint is a, is a pretty grindy way to go do it. It's like high certainty.

If you're just on, if you're out of good fund and you're, rolling with a good fund and you're like going to be a partner there and you're going to get more and more carry across, you know, bigger and bigger funds. It's a pretty low beta way to go and generate that type of, you know, that type of net worth. But you're going to be working your ass off until you're like 60 years old doing it versus, you know, you go on the information side into the information economy and you're like doing newsletter, doing podcast courses, stuff that you guys are doing where you're like, you know, Sean might do his course and in a week make 300K and then be able to chill for, you know, two, three months if he wants to because who cares, right?

It's like, it's just a totally different time leverage. So I don't know. It's sort of depends on like what you want to do in that regard. Dude, what's your, what's your job now? I mean, I kind of do like 10 different things. I've got the fund, you know, like so I ended up raising the fund. I didn't do the rolling fund at Sean, but I've got a $10 million dollar venture fund that I raised from, you know, a handful of institutions and then a bunch of like the GPs at big

funds invested in it and basically like kind of share deal flow. I've got the newsletter which monetizes like, but we can talk about it. But like, you know, with newsletter sponsors now, it's 125ish thousand subs. And, you know, it makes anywhere from like three and a half to six thousand dollars per send right now. And I send it, you know, eight to ten times a month. So, you know, pretty nice just like business that scales to your point on like time leverage. I write the same two newsletters a week and it's a pretty nice business. And then I had this agency business that frankly, like started just because it was like something that I saw, you know, as an arbitrage opportunity early in like 2021. And it ended up scaling into like, you know, order of magnitude,

probably like close to six figures a month gross revenue business with super high margins. And so I kind of just like kept doing it and kept walking into different areas with it. And I don't know if you guys talked about this already, but you had come to us or you were kind of talking on our group chat about like the fork in the road moment you had. You were like, like we said before, no name private equity guy making good money. And you had started tweeting out stuff like pretty regularly, I would say, I don't know, six months or year before that. And it was clear you had momentum. It was clear you were good at that. You were getting followers, maybe had 100,000 or 200,000 followers, maybe at that time. I'm just rounding around. And,

but it wasn't, you didn't have all these other things like this clear. Like, I have a fund. I have a newsletter that makes money. I have an agency that makes money. So you didn't know exactly what was on the other side of that hill. And you were debating, what should I do? Should I, you know, the fork and there a lot of people have. Should I stay in my job? That's a good, cushy job. Or should I, uh, take this leap of faith into the unknown? Give us like the two minute story of like, you know, how did you think about that and how did you decide? And was that the right way to think about it? Yeah. I mean, I, um, like a lot of people had the like COVID moment of what the fuck am I doing with my life. Um, and, you know, am I happy doing it? Like, you know, all of a sudden for the first time in my life,

after I guess it had been six years working in in private equity, which at the time, you know, it was like 80 to 100 hour weeks, right? So you don't really have time to look up. You don't think about shit because you're just working and you're, you know, you're making more and more money. And so you're like patting yourself on the back. Things are good. You know, you're Indian,

Sean. Like Indian mother thinks it sounds impressive, you know, things are good. She probably wants you to go get an MD, but it sounds pretty good. Is that what your mother wanted you to do, Sean? My mom, yeah, yeah, yeah, all those things. She definitely was like, don't leave. a good paying job. That was just like a general rule or general rule of thumb. I mean, my mom to this day still asks me why I didn't go to medical school or why I didn't get a PhD in all seriousness.

Like the Indian mother thing is sort of a meme, but it's also very real. The like, you know, you should go work for McKinsey if you're going to work in professional services. That's the only place that is a, that's respectable. But yeah, man, I mean, I was doing that. COVID hit. All of a sudden And I was like, what am I doing with my life? Had time on my hands to actually like think about other stuff for the first time in my professional life. And so I started, I mean, the Twitter thing, I just like, I started writing. And I didn't ever think of it as a potential way to like go make money or get another job or do something else. But as it started to grow and as it started to spiral, you know, we were in this like group chat together.

Right. And I started seeing friends from the tech world, how they were leveraging, you know, platforms, Twitter, etc. To make money. I was like, huh, I wonder whether there's. a way that I can actually, you know, build like a little side hustle with this, you know, like whether it was courses or whether it was an agency business or like, whatever it was. I never really thought about the fund or investing side at the time. And then candidly, like, I had a conversation with you, Sean that I remember being really

impactful where I was like at a real crossroads and I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to kind of just like go join another type of investing firm. And we were going to move back to the East Coast to be closer family. I was going to do that. And I remember you saying to me, like, it sounds like you're just going to. going to go do the thing that kind of sounds like it sucks instead of doing the thing that you actually get a lot of energy from, which is all this new stuff and that feels scalable and that you're, you know, you're fired up about. So why are you making that decision? And until someone

just reframed it for me like that, I had never thought about it. I was just going to like continue down the path that felt safe. And so it was like a stupid conversation, frankly, but had a pretty big impact. You had described it. You were like, I'm thinking about path A or path B. But the way you described it, like path A sounded like shit, like sounded super hard. and not that much fun. And Path B sounded like a lot of fun with just like, you know, some unknowns, but like definitely good was going to come up with it. And I was like, how is this even a decision?

Like, it sounds like you're saying I'm choosing between a bad option and a good option. Go with the good one. Funny story about Path A. So at the time, that Path A, this is real, was to join like a crossover hedge fund, like a hedge fund that also does investments in private tech companies. And my final interview, my final interview, I had to pitch a stock. And the stock they gave me to pitch was Stitch Fix. And I had to decide, like I had a week, and I had to decide whether it was a buy, you know, or a short, like if it was a long or a short.

And I did like a week of research, like made this long deck, like did all this work. I mean, it was miserable, did all this thing. It was trading at the time at like $46. And it had come off, you know, it had gone up to like a hundred in the whole like archegos. You know, Bill Huang was like pumping up stocks by doing like buying the swaps, pumped all the way up. And then it came down to 46. And I pitched it as a buy, got rejected. because my pitch was shitty.

And now that stock is trading at $3.56 cents. So I would have taken Path A and I would have gotten fired within six months for sure. Dude, so something that's interesting is like I get, and I know Sean does too, I get asked maybe five times a week if someone can write tweets for me or like cut videos for me and all this stuff.

And it's pretty crazy. I don't know if it only happens like what the popularity level is where you start getting those inbounds. but I get, it's so often that I get this. And there's like this weird, I get people asking me all the time to go, are you in Sahel or are you in this person? Are you in that person? Is Sahel friends with this person?

Because there's this like weird circle jerk of a Twitter world. And it feels, feel as though that like you are connected to like many, many, many tens of millions of followers and reach. And like there's just like weird behind the scenes thing going on with your agent. see. It's the dark underground cabal that runs Twitter. No. No, I mean, Sean, you actually remember this, right? Didn't like some kid hit you up and say that he ghost wrote tweets for me? And then you just texted me and we're like, does this dude ghost write for you? And I was like, no, I've never heard of this kid in my life. He was just lying. And then I hit him up saying like, yo, why are you lying this person? And he completely panicked. But yeah, man, I mean, the like the world of ghost writing tweets has now become, again, like, it's become a meme. Because what was? that like Business Insider wrote an article about VCs getting, getting ghostwriters to write tweets for them. That wasn't at all how my agency thing started.

It started in like late 2020 because I had started to figure out that threads were the way that people were growing on Twitter. And keep in mind like, you know, Sean, you were around the group chat at the time, but that was like before threads had become the like threadboy meme that they are today. And so there was like legitimate arbitrage in writing quality threads. And I had all these startups that I had in. invested in the founders of which were like, wow, we see a ton of value in having a platform and a brand. Can you help us think through how to do this? Because you've done it. Like I had

at that point gotten to 75,000 followers or so. And so I was like, yeah, let me, you know, I basically like started an LLC, like an advisory business, basically. And I started giving like strategic support to these startups on how to think about content. And then like, how much would you charge them? I was charging five grand a month to a startup for basically like, you know, it was like texting and and maybe like one call every other week. And it was like so low because it was so low on time from what they needed for me. Because it was mostly like the founders didn't want to actually spend a ton of time on it. They just wanted to be able to like kind of understand it.

And then they would have people on their end that just like went off and did things with it. What was the high level like one, two, three bullet points that you would tell these founders so that they could just be better at this? It was basically like you need your two or three pillars of content that you're going to be able to talk about consistently. that are like valuable for you as a startup or as a founder. So if you're a founder, I mean, at the time, it was like, if you're a founder, talk about, you know, building companies and things you're learning along the way, which now is like ultra-saturated on Twitter, right?

There's like a million people that aren't necessarily credible writing about that. At the time, there weren't that many founders doing it. Like, I don't know if you guys have seen the like copy AI founder. I forget his name Paul. You might be an investor, Sean. You know that business. Sam is, not me. Okay.

Yeah. And he was like, first one sort of that was like really building in public, quote unquote, and like sharing about their journey and the things they were learning. So I was basically telling founders, you have to establish like what are your two or three pillars that you're going to be writing about. Maybe it's, you know, building in public. Maybe it's the industry you're in. You know, maybe it's like sharing else along the way and like vulnerability because people find that endearing. It's like, it's like, uh, it's called the Pratfall effect. Have you heard of that? It's like, uh, when,

when people who you perceive to be perfect show like chinks in their armor, we find it as humans very endearing and it actually makes us like them more. And so you're like, you know, playing on that, you're like sharing your L's along the way. But I was basically telling them, you know, versions of that on a regular basis and like helping, you know, kind of craft and advise them on the content they were putting out. And it was like five grand a month, probably had like five or so clients. I think they were all like startups. I either like the founders I knew or I had invested in the companies. And so I was kind of around and it was, you know, beneficial to me to like, see them continue to grow and do that. So you like invest in the companies and they give you that money

right back. I like that. Yeah, it was a good way to hedge the, I mean, this was personal investments at the time. So this was like, you know, I might invest like 25K in a company. And if I was making that back in five months, that was a pretty good cash on cash return on the original investment. But then like, you know, like after, you know, the ghost writing thing was interesting because basically like early mid-201, I had a few of those clients come and say like, uh, you know, the biggest struggle for us is that we don't have people that can write this content. Like, we don't want to build out a content team when we're focused on product and engineering and all that stuff. Like, do you have people that can write? And right at that time, I had done the course with Julian Shapiro, our friend, we did a Maven course on, like, how to build your audience.

And it was mainly how to build your audience on Twitter. And so half that course was about, like, how to write good threads and how to write for Twitter. And so I had this pool of like 400 students who had gone through the course, learned the principles of it, knew how to do. do it, that then I was just able to sort of be a connector between like freelance, you know, writing talent to then support these startups. And, you know, the kind of fundamental of any agency business for anyone that's starting one is effectively that you're like creating price arbitrage where you're like charging a client 10 grand for some or five grand for something that maybe costs you two. And like, you know, the reality for most of these people is you can pay a thousand to 2500 bucks a month maybe depending on the output. And you can easily charge, you know, a startup or a brand five for

that or you can charge like a you know a founder and entrepreneur who's doing really well and just made a bunch of money five for just like the fact that you're the connector between the two points so that was when it like I would say like really started to scale but it was never for vCs for me like I've never I mean I've never had a client that was a VC it's it's all been founders and it's all been like half tech founders and half just like nuts and bolts like meat and potato type founders like Sam's guys Yeah, you're guys. Wait, am I a meat-it-potto-guy or I'm not in-bott-boy?

No, you're a meat-and-potator guy. Sean's my tech guy. You're my meat-and-potatose guy. And if something's, like, cool or interesting, then it's kind of more of my thing. And if something's, like, really boring and, like, generally correlated with, like, obesity, it's your thing. Right? So, Sahel, I want to ask you a bunch about, like, kind of your big vision because you're going to be president someday. I don't know if people know this is a future president sitting with.

this. But before we do that, people always tell us, they're like, yo, you got to do ideas with the guests, meaning they want to hear, okay, you're Sahel, you see a bunch of different things. You see a bunch of different worlds. What opportunities do you see that you think somebody should be doing or a cool startup idea, a cool business idea, niche opportunity, something maybe you're not doing or whatever. Do you have any kind of ideas on your cheat sheet? Yeah, I've got three for you guys. Okay, let's go through them. So first on the agency side, just because I think there are two really obvious ones that like honestly anyone that's listening could probably go action on this if they wanted one is um like LinkedIn growth agency stuff um massive opportunity here i mean like you you

you guys know a couple of our friends me and a couple of friends are starting like a spin off agency that's just going to focus on LinkedIn because it's a massive arbitrage opportunity right now in audience growth Twitter has become a lot more saturated because of the like thread boy thing and how many people are going and doing it LinkedIn like you i mean you can go post a few things and immediately be like getting to 10K plus. And for founders and like business builders, there's so much business on those platforms. It's huge for recruiting.

So basically if you were to go start this, the way I would do it, I would go like go to someone who has a Twitter presence and you can go create like tweet pick. P-I-K is the like web service that I use for it. And you can basically just turn tweets that are like proven with social proof into these like carousels on LinkedIn

that are the big growth. on LinkedIn. And if you go do that for them and just say like, look, I'll take over your entire LinkedIn presence. You never have to open LinkedIn because people hate opening LinkedIn. And you just go and create carousels for them off of proven tweets and then go post it for them like two, three times a week. Off their tweets? Yeah, off their tweets. Or off of like other writing that exists that they've put out. Like say they've written blogs, like, I don't know. I mean, if you went and found, you know, say it's like Ryan Holiday and he's written a ton of blogs that are all over the place but doesn't have a massive LinkedIn presence. You can go like turn his blogs into just shorter form writing that you

put into posts on LinkedIn and say, hey, I'll post for you three times a week. You never have to log in. Don't even worry about it and we'll grow you to like 50K by the end of this year. Either pay as like, you know, charge as like a success fee. Like if you get to this level, you pay me this. Or you just say like pay me five grand a month and I'll do this for you, two and a half grand a month and I'll do this for you. And the amount of time it would take you is literally like, I mean, you could probably do like an hour a week to cover a single person to like, you know, call it four hours a month and make five grand. It's like an awesome, awesome arbitrage opportunity. So that's one. Any thoughts on that, Sam? I think it's awesome. Yeah. I'm writing doing a similar thing. So I hired this guy as a content

remixer for me. And basically it was take content from the pod or or Twitter and remix it into content on other platforms and I focused on link I focused him on LinkedIn because I thought the thing you just said I had kind of a hypothesis that that's true and uh I'm now at 38,000 followers on LinkedIn and I haven't opened LinkedIn once. So if you see something on LinkedIn, stop me writing it. It's me. I mean the same thing happened to me, but it's not me writing that. But hold on, Sean. So you got 38,000. Let's say that you post a product. And by the way, this is like in two months or something like that. Let's say you post a product that cost or your power writing thing. Let's say it's $1,000 and you sell a $1,000 thing to your 38,000 followers. How much revenue will you make from that?

I don't know. I haven't tested it. Sahel, you might know better, but I also haven't been doing it for long enough. I wouldn't expect to be able to get value because I don't think I've given enough yet. Like with Twitter, same thing. You know, like people see, oh, man, you guys just, you can sell a course. You can just like say you're doing this new thing. You get a bunch of signups. It's like, yeah, but doing this podcast for three years, do, you know, 300 episodes, you know, hundreds of hours. of content that somebody's listened to. So yeah, they trust you and they know they've come to a decision whether you're smart and interesting or whether you're full of shit.

And they've done, they've made that, that they've done all that work and I've done all that work beforehand. So then when you pick an offer, it's just a simple yes or no. It doesn't fit their life. Does it do they think it'll drive value? They already trust that you could do it. On LinkedIn, I wouldn't bet that that would happen yet because it's just been so recent. Yeah, I think you have to get.

I mean, there's like a, there's like a low. there's a bar that I think you have to get over from a follower account standpoint. If you use that as a proxy before you can conceivably harvest value, you got to like, you know, plant enough seeds over a period of time to Sean's point. I think like 100K is probably the point at which you can start harvesting value from LinkedIn. Justin Welsh is this guy that you might have seen on Twitter or LinkedIn. He was like kind of like godfather LinkedIn influencer. And I think that dude now is making like 100K plus on not even cohort based courses,

just like auto courses that he generally just. just promotes through LinkedIn. He like he has a newsletter now that he's built through LinkedIn, like built on the back of LinkedIn. And now he's bigger on Twitter because he's managed to like cross across all of those. But he's doing over 100k a month in in sales revenue on his on his courses, which are just like, you know, they're just they're not cohort based. So he's like putting in no no time. Dude, got them stood up. This is interesting. Sean, have you seen what Sahel's been doing on Instagram? On Instagram now. So basically your boy's blowing up. So listen to this. So around the same time...

Is it just dad content? No, listen. It's just hair. It's just mostly hair and shirtless and abs. There's traps. But around the same time, so Sahel and I both around the same time,

we're like, all right, let's take Instagram seriously. So I started doing it, and I was beating him nicely, adding 1,000 people today. I think I started with 5,000 people, and I got to like 48 or 50,000 in a very short amount of time.

And he was doing his thing. I was like, you need to post twice a day, I think. And he starts doing that. And then he just kind of like has rocketed past me. Now he's got to 62,000 followers in a very short amount of time, adding one or two thousand people a day. And he's doing this exact same thing where he's taking his tweets that do well and just posting them on his Instagram. And like, so two points here. One, there's a world where this is just total vanity nonsense and a complete distraction from people who have like their main thing.

On the other hand, what I'm curious about is how much revenue can this drive to people if their goal is not to be a famous person. person, their goal is just to sell more shit of whatever they own they own already. And so I'm curious, Sahel, is of you, if kids, well, does this actually drive revenue for things other than yeah. Yeah. I mean, right now, right now it's generating about a, so Instagram this past month, I think generated a thousand newsletter subs for me just through the link in my bio. And that's like, you know, on average, I probably had 35,000 followers during the month and it generated that many. So conceivably, as it continues to scale, it'll drive, you know, well north of that as it, as it moves. And if you think a newsletter subscriber for me is worth, you know, just off of my sponsor revenue, probably like

$3 to $4 per sub. And then if you take into account my book that's going to come where it's, like, extremely valuable to me if they buy a book, I mean, it's a bunch of money a month that's coming off this that scales over time, right? And that's just Instagram. And you think about LinkedIn, that's another big driver, you know, all of these platforms. So I'm like, I mean, There are ghostwriting agencies. There are people selling products mostly on Instagram without ever posting like their face. These guys are literally like making carousels of images and stuff. And they're doing 50 to 100K of revenue through it.

What's an example of that? There's this guy Dakota Robertson like wrongs to write. I think it says like Twitter handle and maybe that's his Instagram handle too. And he's got like, I don't know, 250,000 followers now on on Instagram and like blew up real fast. there just from posting his viral tweets over to over to Instagram like almost never shows his face. And dude has a thriving ghostwriting business through this. Gotcha. I'm torn because on one hand, you are like perfect execution of a strategy that I now hate. And so I'm like, respect to you, but I'm like, I don't even want to talk about this because I know what's going to happen is there's

now going to be 9,000 new people who go, this podcast is going to breed 9,000, 9,000. new people that are going to go be like, this is my thing. I'm going to do this. He said I can make, you know, X amount of money per month. And their execution is going to be nowhere near yours. And in general, this is like a, it's like a pathway that definitely

works. But it's like soul sucking. The soul sucking. It's like getting, it's closing. And it provides well, I think the window of opportunity is closing. That's an important point. I do think like, look, I mean, when I started writing the threats, I mean, Sean, you were the same way, right? like any thread you wrote would blow the hell up early on.

Because there just weren't that many of them. And so it was like, it's like a market. It wasn't saturated. And now it's pretty hard to get a thread to like really take off unless you're doing the like 10 YouTube channels that will change your life for free. Yeah, but that's his point,

which is the things that. It's like getting fit through power walking. Is power walking going to burn calories? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Are you probably not going to get injuries? Yeah.

But like you have to look like a doofist doing it in the process. Everyone in the neighborhood is going to know you is that weirdo power. You know what I mean? And I'm guilty of this too, right? Like I did this strategy as well of being like, oh, I'm going to create content for, for fun initially, this podcast, Twitter, that sort of thing. And then, oh, shit. Okay, if I kind of sell 5% of my soul or 10% of my soul to the algorithm, I think I can get

this bigger. Okay, I started doing that. And then it's like, oh, I can make good money doing this. And I, you know, make some money doing that. And that feels fun. But like, I just want to say as a public service announcement, there's some people who are going to go do this. But let's say you're somebody who's awesome.

I'm just going to say this now. This was awesome to do when it wasn't figured out. Now that it's figured out, this is certified official small boy stuff. And I do not recommend this to anybody else. And I myself have stopped doing this too. I haven't posed a thread. But if you are interested in this lame-ass shit, Sahil's the guy. Sawhill is perfect execution.

That's a difference though. Anything, like I tweeted this. I'm sitting in this house because of it. I tweeted this. It's a lovely house. It's a lovely house. I write tweets. You have to figure out what the area is where you're going to do it.

That's not crazy saturated and cringe. And to your point, like you've got to figure out what percent cringe are you willing to be. Like if writing a thread is 10% cringe, like what level above that just natural baseline? Are you going to figure that out? Are you talking? Me? What? No, I'm willing to accept that already like 10% of people just immediately see it and are like, oh, this is super.

cringe and then you just have to decide like what level you're willing to go above that if a hundred percent is like 10 chrome extensions that'll change your life and 50 percent is like uh you know here like the TED talks that changed my life what's like 20 percent is it some of the stuff i post probably and like if that helps a few people out there and like a bunch of people get pissed and think that it's not for them i don't really give a shit personally like if i help one person and you know someone hits me up and says like hey that changed my perspective on x y or z that's what Gary Vee's been doing for decades, man. That guy's a legend of putting out content that's like listicles and like, you know,

like motivational stuff. Tony Robbins, like Grant Cardo and these guys like, they get hate because it freaking works and it helps people, right? So I don't know. The thing I would say, like, have you ever been to a Tony Robbins event?

Yeah. And I'm sure if you went to like, you went to what, like an unleash the power within or something. Yeah. Great. I went to, loved it.

I thought it was amazing. I don't know if you liked it. You could give me your quick reaction, but I have a different point. Yeah. I love it. I mean, I love Tony Robin stuff.

Me too. And he gets on stage and he's doing all the things that you could criticize somebody for. He's clapping. He's saying get up and jump. He's saying what I say, you know, he's going to ask a very basic question. And the only answer is yes. But the whole crowd says yes like a cult. And you're like, oh, he's doing all the things.

But he's doing it at like an a plus plus level. He is probably in my opinion the best public speaker I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot. Next to like Obama. Yeah. Yeah. He is. I think he's even more powerful than Obama because Obama is smooth, but Obama doesn't get people, Tony Robbins will get you to walk across coals and like shout your greatest fear out loud.

I've never seen Obama control the crowd for 12 straight hours like Tony Robbins will do at an event. But here's what happens. You look around in the crowd and you're like, there's a whole spectrum of people. At the one I was in, it was like there were celebrities there. You know, the guy from 300, what's named Gerald Butler? He was there. He was like right two rows down from me. I was like, wow, this is interesting.

There's some interesting people here. And then in the hallways I would meet a. bunch of people that thought they were the next Tony Robbins. And they were life coaches and motivational speakers and they were, you know, change consultants and every cringe name you can think of. And then you go look at their stuff and it's the same concept, but not executed at that level. Because they didn't have the hard one life experiences that that guy had to actually, like, create this content. They didn't have 40 years of sharpening their craft and becoming the best. They didn't have the natural talents and charisma and, you know, larger than life presence.

And so you can look at the best. You can look at the Gary V's and the Tony Robbins. You can look at you on Twitter and say, that's dope. You know, I could do that. And some people, a very small amount of people can do that. For most people,

they will fall into the pit of cringe because they're not going to execute it at that same level. They didn't have those hard one lessons of actually knowing what they're talking about. And they're going to end up in this like weird middle ground. And I think that's the scary part. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CR. platform so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. I mean, that's kind of like, that's like any market though, right? Like, you know, someone starts a company and it's the A plus version of some, like a restaurant chain. Someone starts a restaurant chain. That's like the A plus of that thing. And then a bunch of people come in to try to mimic it. And it's like the B plus version and, you know, like whatever. Like say in and out is the A plus burger version. And then someone tries to come in and start the like five guys or whatever next. I'm probably going to get hate for

saying in and out it's better than five guys. But you know, whatever. Like you kind of have the deluded versions. And the question is like, A, do you care that you're the deluded version of Tony Robbins if you're making money doing it and taking care of your family? Because like, I know a lot of people that are just like, I don't give a shit. Like, you know, I grew my audience, super cringe stuff. And I'm making 25 grand a month. I was making five doing my prior job or 10 doing my prior job. I'm making this sitting at home and I I get spent time with my kids. What do I give a shit of a bunch of tech people think that I'm cringe? Like, I'm making money.

It is what it is. And so I kind of, I appreciate that too. The other thing I would say is like, what game are you playing? Like, what is the long term game you're playing? And for me, I was always thinking about like, what is the thing I'm trying to build long term? Like, I wasn't trying to be, you know, a Twitter thread, like a thread guy. Like, that's not my long term vision of what it was. It vaulted me from being a nobody private equity guy, as you said, to like, I signed a book

deal last month, like a big book deal last month. You know, like, I raised a fund. I never would have been able to raise a fund as like this nobody VP in private equity. And so to me, it's like, what are you actually parlaying that shit into as you continue to go? If you're able to find the thing that you think you're A plus at, even if it's for a short period of time, like, how are you using that to vault yourself into that next level where you're like, I'm not even in the same class as these other guys that are doing the thing I was doing previously because I moved into whatever that next, you know, that like upper echelon is. Dude, are you worried about Elon screwing it up for you? Not really. You know, it's funny. Well, did you see what he really quick? He, like,

said something. And then Steph, my old coworker said, like, does this mean that, like, the thread boys are going to go away? And actually forget his reply. What did he say? But it sounded like he was saying, yes. I think he did like a crying emoji. I mean, yeah, like, I think it was something about he said, you know, you could basically like put a long form text onto a tweet. So you don't have to, like, people were used to take a screenshot of like their notes app on their phone to post a long form thing. I think all that stuff is good. I mean, like, Look, I've already benefited from being early to a market. Like, I grew to a big level.

I built a brand that now extended into things that I own, like the newsletter, you know, that's gotten quite large and it's growing faster, like the fund or like the book, whatever it is. I would be more worried if I was like just starting out in any one of these things and like had dedicated all this time. You know, if you've rewound me a year and I was like just starting to get all these things going, I'd probably be a little more worried. But the reality is it's like eat or be eaten, man.

If you're not like figuring out the new way to, to, you know, be on the front of something and be building in these other areas, you're in for a tough time no matter what. Let's talk about this newsletter thing. So this is the second idea. Biggest issue I have with my newsletter is I want to write it. Like, I love writing. That's my number one thing that gives me a lot of energy. I freaking hate thinking about and dealing with any of the like business or growth side of the newsletter. The business side is very easy to outsource.

There's like, I mean, you know, there's ad agencies now. ConvertKit has an ad network where they'll manage the whole back end of your newsletter. They'll bring in sponsors for it. They'll send you the money. It's like super, super easy. It's amazing. Nathan crushed it, getting that thing out there. But the like growth side of newsletters is completely untouched.

There's no one out there that I've been able to find that is like a full sweet growth service for your newsletter. And when I say growth suite, I literally mean like I want someone thinking about my land. ending pages and optimizing that. I want someone thinking about referral networks, newsletter swaps. I want someone thinking about paid ads, SEO for my website to drive subs, how to optimize it across my different social channels, literally just someone that's sitting around thinking about growth for the newsletter so that I can just focus on writing. And I'd literally be willing to pay, I mean, my willingness to pay at the size of newsletter that I'm at now and given what newsletter

subs are worth to me is very high. Like, I would easily pay 10 grand a month to someone that could figure that out and do it in one place on top of whatever I would spend. on paid ads, etc. Do you think that that thing work week is going to do that? No, dude. I mean, like, I don't know how much you guys know about work. I don't know a whole ton about work week, but from what I can tell, it's mostly the like back end services of newsletters. And there's another one called smooth ops that I think spun out from Morning Brew. Didn't work week spun out of the hustle, didn't it? Not spun out. They worked for me. The guy was there. Yeah, same thing with the Morning Brew, Smooth Ops. Like my understanding of all of those is that they're

much more focused on like helping you monetize and, you know, managing your like business that you can focus on writing. I literally just want someone that just all they think about all day, like an absolute killer, that just all they think about is growth. I mean, Sean, did you have someone, or was Ben like that at Milk Road? My guy was, right, Sean? No. Ben was the guy who woke up every day, just said, how do we get more subscribers? And like, you know, that's, that was his mission and that's what he did. So, you know, that's the, but, you know, we needed, it's like, if you don't have a That was like more of a company, whereas like, you know, most people's personal things are not, like, you're at a size where there's just not that many newsletters that are at your size that can afford to pay for something like that. You know, how many people, how many people could afford to pay 10K per month to try to drive growth?

So I think a lot. So my hypothesis is, so I tweeted this and a bunch of people were like replying saying they would pay for it in different ways. my hypothesis is that there's a ton of like successful founders and entrepreneurs that want to build a newsletter, an owned list, or like an essay type thing like what Sam Waltman or Paul Graham have, where they have, you know, SEO and newsletter, you know, like emails that are coming to them. And they're willing to pay a lot because they actually have been successful and just have a bunch of money. They don't need it to be revenue generating outset at the outset. And I think you, I mean, I bet if you developed some sort of core competency and basically like partner, say someone partnered with

me and proved it out over like two, three months. Hey, I drove this. And then we're able to use me as a case study. Maybe I own a percentage of it, you know, on the upside. And so I'm insented to like bring them new referrals. I bet you could grow a pretty big business there quickly. Yeah. Do you only need like 20 clients basically to make this like, you know, worth your while? Yeah. I mean, if it's a personal business, you don't even need 20 clients. I mean, you can get 10 at 5 a a month or 10 at 10 a month. And you have like, you know, it's 80 plus percent margin, probably business. If you just running it simple. But are you having the head? But are you having the of having a service business?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's definitely not productized. Like, I've thought about starting an agency like maybe 20 times of a life and then literally five minutes later

every single time, I'm like, don't go in the service business. Don't go in the service business. Now, we have several friends that have done it, right? Like, you know, Andrew Wilkinson did it with Meta Lab.

Our buddy Greg is doing a great job with it with late checkout. You're doing it now with your thing. So, you know, maybe I have the wrong bias here. What do you think? I mean, what you have to do is hire a great operating.

If you want to be the owner of some percentage of it and not have the headaches, you got to just recruit a killer operator who's going to run all of it. I mean, that's what we're doing with the spin-out agency that we're doing now around LinkedIn stuff is like just going to hire someone exceptional and give them like 15% of the ups and just say, like you're a hustler, you're a killer. You can get a whole ton of what, man. That's my finance change, man. I've never heard that.

Really? That's the, that's the no-name PE guy coming out of me right there. I thought a earlier guy was a guy who likes to leave a dodgeball in recess. Like that's what PEE is to me. Earlier he was talking about beta and I was like, you're talking about nerds? I don't understand what the hell is beta.

It's a good thing. Yeah. You were talking about beta as like a good thing. I was like, I don't understand what that means. You're kind of a low beta guy actually, Sam. If I think about it. You're kind of like even key. Like I feel like I know within a band

what I'm going to get out of you any given day. I think you're kind of, complimenting me, but I don't understand. You know, you show up. You tweeted about that recently. You hate when people say they're going to do something and then not do it. Like, so you take pride in being low beta. Like, people know what they can expect from you on a given day.

By the way, what a stupid thing to tweet. Yeah, like I like long walks on the beach and movies. Like who likes somebody who says they're going to do something and doesn't do it? What an obvious tweet. Yeah. First of all, give me the clout that I deserve. Like, don't hate. What did Seahill say?

Don't hate. number two, I'm not saying, it's like people who say they're afraid of heights. It's like, yeah, everyone's afraid of heights. But like you just like some people that just like I, you know, it's like what's high on your list. I don't think that, I don't know. Like, like there's a lot of things that annoy you, Sean, that don't annoy me and vice versa. Like what's one thing that annoys you, Sean, that you don't think annoys Sam? I don't think anything annoys him.

Nothing annoys me. That's the beauty of it. Wait, really? You don't think anything bothers you? No, thank you. Now I want to dig into this. What bothers you? I guess what bothers me is only usually things with myself.

So like if I find myself in a bad mood or like getting annoyed with something or getting bothered by something or getting impatient with something, that's actually the thing that bothers me. I'm like, oh man, I let this get to me. Like for like that second, that's the thing that gets to me. Right. So usually it's not something that frustrates me or annoys me. It's usually either impatience or boredom or feeling cranky or tired or something like that.

You know, like, oh, no. I don't want to be that way. That bothers me. So for years, I used to say that Sean, I was like, I was like, I think I'm going to have a pretty steady path to wealth creation. And Sean, you either are going to, like, it's not going to be as extreme. I think we joked around with Mr. B's where, like, you know, six out of ten times if you were reborn, you would be a degenerate, like, gambler or drug addict. And like, four out of ten times you'd be successful with Sean, it's not that bad. But it's like, you know, you're the type of guy who can rolls the dice.

And like, you might actually hit it big. there's a good chance or you might like just be only okay for a long time. And now, so I was basically saying, yeah, your likelihood, I think of being a billionaire is actually higher than mine. But your likelihood of being like a degenerate is probably also higher. Yeah, high beta. Yeah. But here's the problem with Sean.

I've just realized over the past handful of months, he is too emotionally healthy to probably be incredibly successful. He has this problem that few people have, which is he's just happy. You know what I mean? He's got this, it's just this massive. It depends on your definition of success, man. I would argue that Sean is the most successful then, man. If he's like super happy.

Yeah, if you define success by these superficial things like happiness and well-being and all that bullshit. Stupid stuff. Yeah. I do. I will say that Sean has had more like high highs and low lows this year, at least for my like perceived view of Sean. But he's not upset by it. And like, and he's totally unfazed. Like Sean, I mean, flashback to like, you know, a.

like crypto crash, right? I'm like, yo, Sean's down bad. I'm texting Sam. I'm like, is Sean okay? Like, Sean's texting the group chat, totally fun. I'm like, yo, is Sean broke? Like, is Sean getting margin called right now? Like, I have no idea what's going on.

And then Sean's like, yo, I sold all my stock. And I was like, holy shit. Sean sold the bottom. Like, market's roaring in June. And then the market crashes again. And Sean's a genius trader that like sold the top of the market or something. Do you? This dude is just like.

Does that stuff bother you at all, Sean? Like, first of all, prior to selling a business recently, but was your network down just a significant amount? Yeah, probably, I mean, it's hard to calculate that sort of thing. So, but let's say, liquid, of the liquid stuff, so not counting equity in companies, you know, it's probably down 50% or something like that.

I mean, most of the investments, I didn't keep much cash. This was my investment strategy pre-22, right? So my investment strategy pre-22 was cash is trash and, you know, fist bumps all around to my boys. We thought cash was trash. Then, oh, dude, is there a safer investment than Amazon, this blue chipper, right? Like, that's my version of safety is, yeah, I'm going to put it in some boring tech companies, you know, the Amazon's, Googles, Facebooks of the world. What could go wrong?

And then lastly, you know, then, you know, a huge amount of startups that were, that were, you know, getting marked up like crazy, fist bumps all around, getting my ups, because my ups was going ups. And then the last thing was crypto. And I was like, oh, well, see, your boy's a genius and moved a huge percentage of net net worth into, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum. And, oh, and then this Luna shit, that's popping. I'm doing great. So, you know, that's, that was me before. So basically every single thing I had invested in has gone, you know, what's my, you know, that thing? Like my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Like, I was basically having that for this year in terms of investments. But, you know, whatever. Did it bother you? Well, I didn't like losing money. But, like, you know, did I let it bother me? No. like, you know, I basically took steps. No, I took steps.

I was like, okay, well, what matters here? Like, okay, let me just first get perspective. You know, am I in any kind of hardship? Is my family doing poor? No, they're fine, right? Secondly, what should I actually do? Do I need to make some adjustments? Was I wrong about certain things?

Or should I do some things to give myself more comfort? So why did I sell? I sold, I basically margin called myself. I was like, you know what? I think things are going to go lower. And I don't want to sweat this all the time. So I'm going to sell this amount here so that I don't have to worry about anything. I'm going to move more into cash and I'm going to book this loss because I think

that'll that'll offset against some gains that I have this year. And, you know, then I won't have to think about this stuff for a little while. I will focus on these other things that I want to be focusing on because I'm not a trader. I'm not a like investment genius. So that's not going to be my goal. And then, yeah, it'll just, I don't know, I, I never got my happiness from when it was going up. So why would I get my sadness from when it's going down? It didn't make sense to me. You must have felt good when Luna, like, I think you, you originally plugged Luna in Milk Road at like 40 and I like I bought some I was like yo Sean's pretty smart he knows this crypto shit hands down and so I like I bought a bag like I'm not like I'm not really a degenerate crypto guy but I like

bought a bag of Luna and that shit went up to like 118 and I was like yo Sean is my god like Sean what other what other ideas do you have and then I we were supposed to interview on our old pod we were supposed to interview Doquan like I'd hit him up on Twitter he's supposed to come on the pod on like a Thursday and on that Sunday like Luna had been way like it had come down to like 80 or something. And I get an email from his assistant that just says, uh, unfortunately,

uh, Doe will have to reschedule the interview for this Thursday. And I'm sitting in bed and I'm like, I got a little bit of the hebie-jeebies. Like I don't know what this is. So I go downstairs and I sell my entire bag at like, I don't know, a small game.

Like not, not good. I sell the whole thing. Next morning I wake up and that shit's at like five. Like the whole, the whole thing unraveled overnight. And then I get an email from his assistant saying like he's going to have to cancel the interview.

And I'm like, yeah, well, this dude has a red notice out for him. No shit, he's not coming on our podcast at this point. Yeah, that was, that was a bad day. I was on vacation. I was in Hawaii with my family and I'm watching my time. And I'm like, I don't even have my, I'm not even at my computer.

Like I can't even get to my crypto. Like, it's not like on my laptop or whatever. So I'm like, well, couldn't, couldn't make a move if I wanted to. So I guess I'll just like, you know, lose all this money here. And, you know, just enjoyed this vacation. There's nothing else I could do at this point. You were remarkably cool about it. I remember texting with you that day.

The framework you've talked about in the past that I love around this stuff is your local versus tourist thing. I think that's so good of like, you know, tourists like freak out when the seasons change and just bounce. Yeah. And locals are aware that there are seasons and that, you know, it comes in swings and they're aware of the environment so they can stick it out and be fine through it. I've always just thought there's a third one, which is the like stubborn local, like the dude that lives in the coastal village and it's like, oh, global one. warming's not real. And then he's fucking underwater and like drowning. And he's like,

global warming's not real as he drowns. And so I'm always just like, how do you make sure that you don't go from being the like the local and you're proud of being a local to the stubborn local that just sits there until you die? Yeah, that's the hardest thing. And I remember with startups, this was always the question because you'll hear a story like Pinterest had no traction for

over a year and then finally started to work because he walked into an Apple store and like started putting Pinterest as a default homepage on these, you know, he hustle. He was determined. And it's like, oh, okay, got it. So determination, just keep going, even when all the data is telling you that this ain't working. And then there's like the exact other advice, which is like, you've got to be super data-driven, feedback-oriented. You've got to listen to the market.

All that matters is are you making something people want? And if you have no users, you got to like, you know, make adjustments. You got to pivot. And so the hardest question as a founder is to know, am I being the right kind of stubborn, right? So am I being stubborn because I'm right and I need to, you know, just tweak. just make small adjustments and just stay at it, be determined and be persistent, or am I banging my head against the wall

and I need to listen to the signals and I need to be changing my mind. And nobody can give the generic advice about when to do what. It's super, it's like super context dependent, super circumstance dependent. Same thing with investing, right?

Like, you know, am I, should I, should I still believe in something? You know, do I believe in Facebook stock now that it's getting crushed? Right. And for me, I went and bought more recently because I was like, you know,

what do I buy? believe about this company and has that changed? So the tourist versus local, right, is you got to ask yourself, like, does the thing I believed about this has that changed? Do I have new information that makes me update my thinking here? Do I, am I, you know, am I holding on to this position just so that I don't feel like I'm wrong, right? Like, you know, am I willing to accept being wrong? You got to ask yourself all these questions and be able to be honest with yourself. And has that changed with crypto? Has what? Sorry. Has your opinion of crypto changed and your conviction? No, my opinions, my conviction has stayed the same, but that's about crypto as a whole, right?

Then on each specific maybe project or coin, you might have like a slightly different opinion. Well, what's one thing that you think is bullshit now that you didn't think was bullshit a year and a half ago? So I'll give you an example where that's not true. Then I'll give you example where that's true. So the not true one is like, let's take Luna, for example. The bet on Luna was always knowing that there's this, the way it was architected was this thing is going to rock it up because the sort of the, what they call the Ponzonomics, right? Like the game theory incentive.

Yeah, but people don't understand. Like basically it's just like economic, a series of economic incentives. And so the incentives were aligned such that this thing should go up during the, during, you know, when as certain participants behave a certain way. And from the beginning, there was always these blog posts out there about what does the death cycle look like? So what if this reversed course, would this not, because Luna's the collateral, would it not cause it to, you know, collapse really fast? And the question was like, will that have?

happen, won't that happen. So even when you invest in it at the beginning, we wrote our little investment memo to ourselves about like, here's our one pageer. Why we think this is a good idea and why we think this could go horribly wrong. When it crashed, it wasn't like something we never had never thought of. It was, oh yeah, that downside scenario we talked about. That's exactly what happened, right? Like basically there was a giant, you know, cell pressure that caused that cascading down cycle. Yep. That we always thought that could happen. We had hoped it wouldn't happen. We had thought that maybe there would be a way to put by pressure back against it, but nope, it wasn't going to work. And so this is a very fast example of basically just because it turned out bad doesn't mean that

the doesn't mean I changed my position because actually at the beginning we said, well, here's why I'm not putting my entire net worth into this, right? I put 250K into it. That's not like a massive bet for me. It's a solid size bet. So it's like, you know, I put an appropriately sized bet because I thought it had upside and I thought there was some some key. risks with it. The thing that I would say I've changed my opinion most on is I thought, man, if people start to worry about inflation and they look at, man, you know, I have the same 100K in my bank, but it just doesn't buy me the same amount it used to, right? They'll realize, like people will become more aware that the money they have is diminishing the cash they have,

the US dollars they have is diminishing in value, that they will probably look to go to a monetary system that doesn't have that problem. And so the idea that, Bitcoin will do well if people start to, if inflation becomes something that people are more and more worried about with the US dollar. And that hasn't happened. Inflation got as bad as it's ever been, but people's response was more conservative than aggressive. People did not make a change to the Bitcoin monetary system, which would not have that problem. They sort of, you know, stuck with it. And actually, the US dollars gained strength because other currencies got crushed even worse.

And so the dollars gained strength. So that was one that I had thought that this is what would happen. And it makes me reassess, was my logic incorrect or something else? You know, what did I get wrong about this idea that in a high inflation environment, Bitcoin should be something that people start moving more into? I mean, the Bitcoin one is actually pretty interesting, Sean, because I've thought about that a lot, too, of is there something just like in the segmentation of how the price went up that is impacting that? because I still think basically my assumption of why that didn't happen, like why that scenario of high inflation and people flood into this,

is that most of the price increase was actually just driven by this like number go up, you know, crazy, you know, loose monetary policy. People just pump into speculative, you know, high risk assets. And that it wasn't really driven by like believers like you who underlying were like, oh, there's really good fundamentals. The technology really makes sense driving it up. It was mostly just like my random friends who were like, ha ha, Bitcoin number go up, this is great.

And then they freaked out when it went the other direction and pulled out, you know, interest rates rise and you pull out. I wonder whether like if you segmented it somehow of like the true underlying technology believers, my guess would be that the picture would look different. Like people that really are like thinking about the technology and thinking about the underlying, you know, kind of like monetary policy that exists on the network, my guess would be those people think that this is a great time to be accumulating and buying. Yeah, I think you're right.

I think you're right. But basically it's just, in my mind, it was like a very simple picture. It was like, you're playing one game. And the rules of this game are that the bank gives you some money. It's a game of monopoly where the bank gives you some money. But every year, your money becomes worth a little bit less by design. They're trying to make a two or three percent worse per year. But sometimes, I mean, it's 10 percent worse per year, right?

Or nine percent worse per year, right? That's the game is set up that way. And hey, oh, yo, there's this other new addition of monopoly that came out or that doesn't happen to your money. My assumption was like, oh, people will. just start to move to the new edition because they're not going to like when their money becomes less valuable over time. But I don't think that's the message that's got across. It was basically Bitcoin's how you get rich or Bitcoin's how you lose your money. And that's the narrative that actually like played out because it was more, it was more aggressive. But Bitcoin will make you rich

was it easier sell to people. And it was also the reason why they'll start to sell their Bitcoin when they feel like, oh, Bitcoin's crashing. By the way, I've got one more non-agency business idea for you guys non-services, but maybe it's slightly served, not that much services, more product. Mobile, podcast and video studio. Yeah, man, dude, it's such a pain in the butt. Dude, huge pain in the ass. Buy, like, a few vans, kit them out with, like, a pretty fire setup. Just in the back of, like, a normal-sized van.

Doesn't even have to be an RV for, like, two to three people could fit. Deck it out with, like, a few good DSLR cameras that can do the recording, like, dual camera set up so that you have, like, a few mics hanging off the sides. and basically go and post it up in a couple of major cities, like one van at each major city. It has like dope backgrounds, cool lighting, like, you know, whatever. Do the neon signs and shit in there.

And rent it out for like 500 bucks for two hours to do podcast recordings or like, you know, a couple hundred bucks to do like people going in and filming Instagram shorts, TikToks, shit like that. Like if you put one in L.A. and you put one in New York City, I bet you could kill it on a cash on cash return on one of those. I just joined this gym called the Collective in Austin. And it's like this like fancy whatever.

Like, and everyone there looks like an Instagram model. And they have, like, co-working there as well. But they also have three studios for podcast and picture taking. Like, they just really know their audience. And I went there and everyone looks like they're the type of person who is like, if you follow a shirtless rip guy on Instagram and they live in Austin, they're probably a member here. I mean, if you catch them on bad lighting, they don't even look that good.

But, like, somehow in that lighting, you'd look unreal. I think you're making fun of me. I don't know. The lighting makes a huge difference with these like Instagram models, right? So like you just get good lighting on one of those things. I bet you could kill it. I do think these like mobile studio that you could crush it. Let me ask you a question.

I'm looking at these U-Hull box trucks. So how much of these cost to buy? So it looks like you could buy a used one of these for like 25 grand. Right? So 25 grand. And let's say. And you only have to put five down. Yeah.

You put five down. You're probably going to need to put another five into the kit, like to make the thing work. And you probably need a dude operating the thing. But maybe you could get rid of that. Probably not. You probably have to have an operator on site. So I think that's the tricky part where you got to sell it as a membership, basically. It's got to be a gym membership.

So it's like you can use the studio. You can just book it when it's free. But you got to be like a monthly member if you're, you know, if you're doing $500 a month or whatever and you have a studio on demand. That's a genius idea to do it as a membership. Because, dude, the thing that made me think of this is, like, in New York now, there's these couple of studios where people are doing all, like, in-person podcasts. Like, there's this, like, what the fuck media is one of them. Yeah, they go to that. And they're, like, they're solid.

They're not great. But they're having to pay New York City rent to, like, to do this. And so I can't imagine the economics are that great. And if you got a truck and you just bought it, you could go post this thing up in a parking lot and every two hours just moved to a different parking lot. And, like, you never have to pay rent. You're paying the, you know, like, carrying cost of the, of the truck. And you're paying the, whatever, five to, 10 grand it takes you to actually get the truck out. We're going to call it Moodyo, the mobile studio,

Mootio, the Mootio boys. We might get a branding agency to work on the name, but yeah. Wait, let me ask you something about branding. Our deafening silence as feedback on your name. But it's how hell, let me ask you a question. So, Sean and I are trying to get popular on YouTube right now with this thing. And one thing, that's kind of the elephant in the room when everyone talks to you. I mean, I know Sean talks about this constantly, is that you are just ridiculously good-looking. Do you think that this schick of yours of having good hair and being good-looking? Is that image working for you?

And what aesthetic schick should Sean and I have? First off, calling it a schick is pretty hilarious to me. You know, this stick you have. It's like, oh, I'm so hot. The whole face thing. Yeah, this whole look. Whatever you got in between your ears, like that stick. Like, let's talk about it.

The platforms that are visual, it obviously helps to, like, when people are scrolling through things for, like, people to stop and say, oh, the person is, like, attractive, right? Like, it just, when you're scrolling through TikTok and you see attractive girls, you're saying you're hot. It helps. Oh, so you agree. Was that a mean girl's reference to him? Do you just drop a mean girl's reference on there? I'm a millennial through it through. The fact that I knew that it was a mean girl's reference is just as telling.

You are a mean girl. No, look I mean for you guys You're both good looking dudes I'm not gonna sell you short Sam you've got like a little look With the like fake glasses I don't think those have a prescription on them

So it's like a little bit of your look Why does everyone think straight fake? They're definitely fake dude And then Sean Sean's got the like You know my favorite line that Sean ever had Is you know if you're not going to be good looking Be interesting looking

And I tell that to like everyone that I give advice to But Sean's not interesting looking right now It looks like a long hair interesting looking, man. Look at this beard. He's got the salt in the upper beard going. Dude, he looks like literally every single person who shops at like a generic grocery store in the suburbs.

What's wrong with that? That's a vibe a little bit of a little bit. But in the tech world, that's a little bit of a vibe. But that's not interesting. I don't know, man. I mean, I think you guys can play up the whole, like, your schick of these two guys

that look completely different that are like somehow friends. Like, you guys are like cat dog, man. You remember that show back in the day? You know what we're going for? We're going for like, why are these guys famous? That's what we need to do.

If we just get over the hump, people will be like, this, these guys, there's nothing special about them. But that's our thing, though. That there's nothing special about us. I don't think you have to be that good looking on YouTube, by the way.

Like, you guys don't need to be, like, models on YouTube. If you, like, look at the people that have crushed it on YouTube. It's not, like, hot dudes and hot chicks on YouTube necessarily. That's true. Not that you guys aren't hot.

I don't want you to come away. I don't want Sam, to text me later being like, hey man, what you said. That wasn't nice. Because I know I'm going to get that text later tonight from Sam. Wait, but you're wrong. Like, hot dudes do better on YouTube. I don't think they do better.

I don't think that's true. I mean, I'm not on YouTube yet. I'm going to get on YouTube here soon, and I'll let you know whether we think that's true. So you're saying you think you're hot. Yeah. You got this real burden you're carrying, my friend. Well, like Alex Formosie's got the thing where he wears like those stupid cutoff jeans now and he's just like yoked.

That nose strip and like the nose strip is a choice. The absurd level of being being muscular. That's a perfect example of you don't have to be great looking. You got to be interesting looking. Yeah, dude, he's peacock and hardcore and it's gorgeous. It's kind of just a look.

It's a look, man. And like each of you guys has a look and if you can just stick to a consistent, it's like Chris Saka with his cowboy shirts. Like you need your thing. Yeah, I've been actually, I've been thinking about this for a long time. I've been needing a uniform. I tweeted this out. I go, I'm looking for a uniform. I want to look the same every time I'm on this podcast.

So I need something that from here up, like a robe. It's got to be, yeah, maybe a robe. It's got to be signature. And I'm in the market. So I'm taking suggest. I'm going to put a bounty on this, actually. I'm going to give a $1,000 bounty to anybody who can help me develop my, the chest up look.

That's what I'm looking for. I kind of want to see you do like traditional Indian attire for it. Like it could be kind of fire if you were wearing like a dope like Corta. or like, you know, some sort of like Indian, you know, up top. I think that would be kind of fire. Sean Puri, it could be part of your whole, like, angle with the name and stuff. That's true. Okay.

You're eligible for the bounty. Right now, you're in first place. I might throw into it. I also might match it just because I think it's going to be funny to see whatever you're next thing. Two grand, baby. I'll throw in a thousand. I'll throw in a thousand on top of it. Sam's about to have any issues before he's on the hook for a thousand.

Yeah, no, I don't, I don't give it up here pressure. You're breaking up. I'll give me the peer pressure. What did you guys say? This is the stupidest thing ever. I'm not going to give someone a thousand dollars so they can tell Sean what t-shirt to wear. You have a signature look already,

so it's easier for you to say. Yeah, my muscles, you mean? You've got like the little like the pretty boy thing going with the like non-prescription glasses, like the grandfather who's like not a grandfather type of thing. Yeah, it's good.

Yeah. You are going to be like, you're going to be a quintessential father. You're going to have a lot of stern talks with your child. I already know what's coming. I don't know what to say to this. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. I want to hear this before you go. What is the grand plan? What is the grand vision for yourself? So you went from no name PE guy as we established to legendary Threadboy to now CNBC contributor, book deal guy, author. I think you're going to be president. I joke about that a lot, but I genuinely believe you could become the president someday if you wanted to. Do you have a grand plan for yourself?

What's the vision? I could see that being in the cards long term running for public office. I don't know if president is a role that you necessarily want. I think it's like probably one of the hardest and worst jobs in the world. Don't go to see how guys go in. Obama went in looking young and then he leaves all gray, like looking, you know, looking rough. It's like the highest stress job in the world. Running for governor would be, I don't know, that could be pretty fun to be a governor of a state.

Do you know anything about politics? I've never known you to be. I studied public policy. I did my master's in public policy, dude. Oh. Yeah. So? That was always like what I wanted to do. I mean, I took a class on basket weaving. Like that doesn't, like, what is? You think the people that are serving in public office today know a lot about politics? It's like what is, it's sort of like the Naval thing of like you don't read a business book to no business. Like there's no such thing as politics. It's like, you know, are you a reasonable thinker? Do you have the ability to change your mind? Which right now, politicians do not. And can you inspire people? Do you? Would you be? Which party would you be? I don't even know. I'm an independent, man. So I mean, I've voted. Democrat, I voted Republican in prior election. So I actually don't know what party I've got. I'm hoping that a third party rises over the next 20 years before I actually go do this

because I hate the direction that, you know, like polar politics has gone. You know, it's just like the loudest minority on each side. I could see you being a good politician because you pretty much never take a stand on anything, kind of like what you just did. You're like, I always call it. I'm like, you're a PC like the rock, man. You never say anything inappropriate. Like you, you are like.

Like the rock. Well, yes, but Sahel, he never takes a stand on anything. He's always, he hedges everything. He says, you could be beautiful for a politician. All right, well, I'm counting on your fundraising for support, Sam. I'll even introduce you as my hot friend, Sam, when you come up to give a speech at my future campaign. How about that?

You do it for me then? You're already lying. You're already lying. We're a good politician. Well, thanks for coming on. Do you want to promote something? Is that a thing? Do you have something to promote?

I don't know, man. people kind of know where to find me. I'm at Sahoe Bloom on everything, and my newsletter is at my website, sahoploom.com. Well, I'm happy we finally got you on. We'll have to do it again. We're going to get another guy.

I'm going to ask Austin Reef to come on. That'll be another group chat guy. We've asked Nikita to come on a few times, but he's, you know, weird. Nikita's busy right now, man. Nikita's busy, like, basking in the glory of his gas app fame. No, he just thinks it's cool to tell me no, I think. I mean, Nikita,

Nikita right now, like, Nikita's been that guy that's like, oh my God, guys, I hate running this app. This is so tough. And then, like, you'll see, like, on his Instagram, him, like, having a photo shoot is his house, like posing out, like, looking like this. It is girlfriend.

Behind the scene says, oh, my God, this looks like an album cover. Nikita's living his best life, man. More props to him because that dude had called his shot and has actually gone and done it. So we'll get him on. We've got to get him on. We've had humor on.

But, dude, thanks for coming and doing this. We appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Thank you.