My First Million - The Future of AI Art Generation And How Production Companies Are So Profitable

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Episode 358: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about how production companies are so profitable, incredible AI art and generation engines. ----- Links: * Mad Realities * Hello Sunshine (Reese Witherspoon Production Company) * Hartbeat Studios LA (Kevin Hart's Production Company) * Springhill Company (LeBron James' Production Company) * Mark Manson * Stable Diffusion * Github * 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: (02:15) - Why Sam is in a horrible mood (12:30) - Mad Realities - the successor to NYU Girls Roast Tech Guys (17:45) - Why production companies make so much money (41:10) - AI for Art & Generation Engines (52:15) - AI Copywriting ----- 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

All right, so what's going on? So basically there's streaming wars going on. Netflix, Disney, Hulu. Everybody's fighting for subscribers. Okay, well, how am I going to differentiate from, if I'm Netflix, how do I differentiate from Hulu and HBO and all this stuff? Basically, they need original content. Okay, so that's created this, like, huge imbalance.

There used to be a lot of content and a small amount of distribution. Now there's a lot of distribution fighting for a small amount of content. And all the distribution players have just decided, like, the prize is big. let's lose money for a lot of like several years and invest billions into content and like let's be the last person standing and so they're they're investing on what you call a j curve where the curve goes down you lose a bunch of money and then a j like a j it goes way up and you make money later what that means for these production companies is they'll overpay there is a bidding war and they're willing to overpay for my content all right in this episode we are talking about the latest industry that i am

totally completely obsessed with i almost can't think of anything else and i'm not sure why other people aren't freaking out about this. So I go on a rant about that. What else we got? We talked about Mark Manson and how he's got this amazing empire on this book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. I'll say F there. And how it started just as a blog post and turned into this amazing business that's making tens of millions of dollars for him. And then we also talked about production companies and how the breakdown is actually way better than we thought. The economics and how it works is far more fascinating than we anticipated. All right. Enjoy. All right, we're live.

Dude, I'm in a horrible mood. And the bad part about this job is like, you have to, like, immediately snap out of a horrible mood. And I can't exactly explain all the details about why I'm in a bad mood, but basically it involves like a real estate deal that I did and someone I feel is trying to take advantage of me. And here's what I think happens. And tell me if this happens to you.

I feel like I do a deal with someone or whether it's like a small deal or a big deal. And then they, like, learn about what our stupid podcast is named. Or they Google us, but it's mostly the fact that the podcast has such a horrible name. And then they like, you know, you get like in Hawaii where they got like the local price and then they got the other guy price. It's like I get the other guy price. You know what I mean? And even if it's just a little of another guy discrepancy, it pisses me off. That's hilarious.

Yeah, I don't think that happens to me. No one's ever referenced it. I've never got that feeling. In fact, I actually get a bunch of credit the other way. people are like, look, you know, I don't want to offend you with like a low ball offer on your, on whatever, whatever it is. I know this money doesn't matter to you. And I'm like, dude, like I'm showing up here.

The money matters. Like, you know, please don't not give me the money because you think it won't matter to me. Like, you know, I think it does, right? So I think that it goes, it cuts a little bit both ways. People like, I hate the thing where it's just like, dude, thanks so much for taking it. I know how busy you are. I'm like, dude, I just like sit around in my box. all day. Like, you know, I don't know what, I don't know what you think I'm doing, but like,

my son just threw up on me like two hours ago. This is awesome compared to that. Like, you know, what do you, what do you think my life is that is so, you know, so busy and interesting because it's really not. Yeah. It is funny when people say that. I'm like, well, I am busy. I'm talking to people all day, but like I don't think you understand that, like, talking is just like slack and back and forth and, like, having conversations. I remember when we first started the hustle, like, basically these like producers, and this happens all the time. These producers, they email just tons of people who are even remotely interesting and they're like, hey, can we make a TV show about you? And obviously, like,

they didn't know what they're getting into. Like, I'm not, we weren't even remotely interesting enough. But I'm like, you guys do realize we're just sitting in front of a computer all day, right? Like, it's like the most unfastinating, uninteresting thing. It's not interesting at all. But, uh, dude, I'm shocked you don't get like that, uh, that, that other guy pricing. It's, it, you have a B&W, right? Yeah. Is your house fancy, you think? Or just normal? Normal nice. My house is a house not fancy. My house isn't fancy either. And just like, I know when they like maybe when they see that like I'm at home during the day I don't know why but like I just I'm always nervous I'm like wait a minute my neighbor's paying only 150 a month for their

landscaping why am I got why are you telling me 250 you know what I mean I feel like that stuff happens he has a podcast get him get your get your get your wallet out boys he's got a podcast so whatever I'm past it I got to move past it that's so funny you said that thing about filming, by the way. I had that same idea back of the day at Monkey Inferno because we had this really nice office and I thought building startups was the coolest thing in the world. And I was like, why isn't there a documentary crew

here? Like, you know, the office but I'm the cool Michael Scott, right? Like, I'm awesome. And so, you know, I had watched Hard Knocks on HBO, which basically makes like NFL training camp look like so epic, so like you start rooting for these stories, all the stuff. And they have like mics on the players and you hear like,

huh, hey, get him, get them. Hey, man, what you do it? Like, you hear, like, them talking and, like, the pads hitting. You know what I mean? It's like, good. Yeah, but then it also extends into, it's like, what you do? And it's like, sorry, man, I'm just having a lot of trouble at home. And it's like, cue the music and they cut to the backstory of like, you know, what's going on at home.

And I was like, yeah, we got these stories, man. We're trying to make it in the rough and tumble world of social media. And I was like, you know, so it's like, I thought we were cool. And then this like filmmaker type person came to the office. They're like, wow, incredible place. Quiet day, huh? I was like, what do you mean? Like, normal day? He's like, everyone just sitting there with their headphones on like not talking to each other. I'm like, oh, that's what we do all day? He's like,

well, what would we film? And I was like, well, sometimes we have like a meeting where we look at the numbers. Yeah, I guess you're right. We're lame as hell. And so, yeah, that ended at that point. It's so lame. It's always embarrassing with people, like, sometimes our address in the daily email was in our email and people would stop by. And I'm like, yeah. Yeah, so this is the one room that we sit down in. There's the bathroom. You can go to the left side or the right side. You want to see what it looks like from this corner?

We just sit here and don't talk sometimes for three hours at a time. There's music playing in the background every once in a while. Your office was hilarious. It's like, why do the dogs sit in chairs and the people have to sit on the ground? You're like, I love dogs. It's like, what's going on here? Why is there only peanut butter in the kitchen? Yeah, dude.

I used to eat like a jar of peanut butter every two days. That was my schick. Then let me tell you this other interesting thing. So I don't know if you remember this, but there was a... That's so funny, by the way. You remember the peanut butter. I would eat so much peanut butter. We also used to do eating contests once a month as like a fun thing because like we are idiots and

we didn't have a lot of money to like go and do a family or like a team building thing. And we would just go and buy like 500 Burger King chicken McNuggets because that's only like 50 bucks. And we'd be like, the first person eat 100 wins, which is a horrible idea. for dozens of reasons. The first reason being everyone's sick afterwards, it can't work. The second reason being,

it's just stupid. And the third reason being like, no one does it and they just puke. And we would do a crispy cream eating contest, a Burger King Chicken McNugget contest,

White Castle. It was the worst. I was an idiot. I think these videos still exist online. When I was doing my very first startup straight out of college, which was like two buddies

doing this stupid sushi restaurant thing, living in one apartment. You know, like my buddy lived in my closet, My co-founder lived in my closet and like, you know, we all, we would basically buy air mattresses and like return them every 90 days to Target because we were like, oh, you could just like get your money back. Suckers. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Idiots. We're totally living the high life with this. And so basically we were like, I don't know why. We were like, you know, the way to make our restaurant, you know, a restaurant's not open yet. But what can we do that's like our scrappy market? I don't know why we even thought this was like remotely relevant.

we're like, let's get people invested in the journey of building this. To do that, let's create a YouTube channel. And we called it the duel. And it was me, and the opening clip is like a high noon, like a standoff. Like we both walked 15 paces away, turned around and looked at each other dramatically.

And it's like the music's on. And then we would take a challenge from anybody who'd comment it on the YouTube channel. We would do that thing. And so it was like, oh, you're doing a sushi restaurant? Brush your teeth with wasabi as toothpaste for one minute. And so we like did it. And then it's like,

you know, whatever. We did these really dumb things. You can just see they're like in this apartment. Yeah, I mean, crappy, ugly looking kitchen. And it was pretty big. I mean, you had literally dozens of subscribers. I remember we,

I went out to a casino one time and my sister was in town and this guy goes, you're the wasabi guy. And my sister was like, what? Are you famous? And I was like, what am I famous? And it was like the first hint of what was,

you know, fast forward 12 years of created the podcast. But in that moment, I was like, this feels nice. If I do dumb shit, people will then know me, and then it ends after that. Let me go for this. And all I tacked on later was like, and then I could sell cohort-based courses. That became the end point. But anyways, long story short, if you remember, when Clubhouse was popping off, there was

this group of also people in college, like people just graduated in college or in college, that created that show, shoot your shot. Do you remember this? Yeah, it was popular, like really popular for four weeks, basically. And if I remember correctly, it was like three good-looking women and they would call up a guy and the guy would hit on them or would the girls make fun of the guy, I forget. So they created a room that was called NYU Girls, NYU Girls on Clubhouse, which was already interesting because Clubhouse was just SF dudes. And so you go from SF dudes to NYU Girls. That's like a major, like, you know, walking into a room full of bears with a pocket full of honey.

It was like, well, what's going on? There's interesting people on this app. Just like, you just imagine a bunch of like good looking Soho women who hang out with James Fraco, write poetry and like, you know, don't wear bras. Like this like stereotype. Oh, NYU. There's not a. There's already no bras on Clubhouse. But now there's girls with no bras on Clubhouse, right?

So anyways, they created this show. And shoot your shot was basically, they would call up a. an awkward tech dude onto the stage. And he got to like shoot his shot, kind of like basically like a ultra budget version of the bachelor's like come on here and spit game at one of these girls and we're going to talk for 20 minutes and we can either boot you off or we like you and like you're in the group. You you kind of pass the right of passage thing, a little dating show. And so it started organically, but it got to be like the most popular show on Clubhouse,

which was, you know, the small pond syndrome, right? Like you were the best thing in a small little growing pond. And so anyways, it was embarrassed when I listened to. I was embarrassed. I was like, it wasn't bad, but I was like, oh, they're going to make fun of them. Oh, don't make fun of them. Or like, don't say something stupid guy, please. Like, I was rooting for the men.

Like, don't to, not to screw up. You know, they would get out to be like, hey, you know, my name is, you know, Akbar and, you know, typical SaaS guy. And they're like, sassy guy. And he's like, no, like SaaS. Like B2B sass. But what are you saying? What are these words, Akbar?

words. So anyways, do you know what they're doing now? So the fact that you said that phrase about them, I'm already on board, like in. Yeah. Yeah. I'm listening to this somewhere. He's just like, I can do it again. Yeah.

That's like a highlight of my life. So I met the main girl who was behind it. I think her name is Devin. And we did a Zoom call. You know, you know what you mean? She's like, what's up nerd? Yes, and guess what? Loved it.

Now, I did the Zoom call. You know when you beat a founder, like, sometimes within 60 seconds. You're like, all right, you're a star. So you're a star. That's established now. Now I just got to figure out, is this your dumb idea?

You're kind of dumb idea or you're a good idea? Because you're going to go through probably all three. And I just got to figure out where you're at in life. Have you met founders that are like this? For sure. And it's just like you're not, you're not there yet. But I still am interested in buying this stuff.

and getting in. I think that's why a lot of people invested in me at the hustle. Same thing with me. I'm like, God, people gave us this idea for our sushi restaurant. Like, you know, and they were helping us and they really liked us. Like, I thought that meant we have a good business idea. And actually what was happening? But now that I'm in that position, I'm like, they're just like, oh, this guy's going to do shit. I like this guy's mojo. This is his dumb idea. And like, you know, whatever. I'm on board to get to the good idea. Like, I'd like to start this relationship now. So that as he figures his shit out, you know, things, good things happen. That's how I felt about this girl. And so she, is she like an NYU woman?

Like is she like that age? Yeah, she was at NYU and then she graduated. And so now she's like, I don't know, shortly out of NYU. So she's raised six million dollars now to build her show mad reality. So the old thing was NYU girls roast tech guys. That's what the room was called on Clubhouse, which was great. And now it's called Mad realities. Mad realities is they have a, it's a, they went to like, went through. and like all the stuff, right? Like, you know, I don't know if you need to do that. They basically gave NFTs out to the audience.

Audience gets to vote. It's like The Bachelor, but the audience, like, votes on what's going to happen in the show. And so it's a reality show where the viewers kind of like, you know, they can kind of help fork the show and engage with the plot in some way. And fans vote them off or whatever. And so they created the show. You can be an NFT holder. You're a rose holder. Like, I don't know, like they've raised, I think, 172 ETH.

So what is that today? Like at today's prices, that's like 250 grand of sales of their NFT. So not huge, but, you know, not terrible. But like the A plus firm in crypto paradigm invested in it led the round, I think. Do they do, is there a reputation to do anything that's decent or are they selective? Paradigm. They're a little mix of both. Like, they're the smart guys in the room.

But I also think, like, part of being the smart guy, you know, like the smart guy starts to do weird and crazy shit. And you're like, you sure this makes sense? And they're like, no, it doesn't, but that's why it makes the most sense. Like,

all right. You know, like founders fund, you just invested in like, I don't know, like this plant that like only causes you to hallucinate in a bad way. They're like, hallucinogens have a bad rap.

And you're like, all right. Like in 30 years, hallucinogens will be your morning cup of coffee. And you're like, I don't think that's true, but you're so smart at, you're good at chess and math.

So like, I guess I'll just defer to you on everything in life. Yeah. You weren't at PayPal in 2011. You know what you're doing. You know. Exactly. Your hobby is cryptography and you created PayPal.

So like I guess I'll roll with you on this like, you know, kombucha that you're investing in, even though it doesn't really seem like that big of an idea. So anyways, that's kind of what I felt like was going on here. Like here's their investors. So paradigm led it. Paris Hilton. Pachy McCormick, you know, like Scott Belski, friend of the pod, you know, our homie who's super smart.

But I think, you know, when I met this woman, I was like, oh, there's like a bunch of names I don't recognize besides that. Like, you know, probably, you know, I don't know, EDM DJs or something. People I don't know. Or maybe. Yeah, you have to, like, leave your house to know these people and I'm out. You know, the, the, but I thought this was kind of interesting to like to create a show. And I've actually been, I don't think that this is, so two things getting in mind. One was when you're a star, you're going to get funded to do some dumb shit and that's okay.

I actually think it's a smart idea to like back these. star people because they're going to do amazing things in their life as long as they just keep taking attempts. I think this is probably not her best idea, but, you know, three years from now, whatever she's building is probably going to be amazing. I'm on their site and I'm just skimming through their videos. I don't know, man. It seems like they're executing kind of well on maybe a dumb idea. It seems like a dumb idea. But like my wife is a very smart, you know, techie woman. and she like is obsessed with the bachelor or the bachelor at whatever I don't even know what it is like we have to have we have it in the house I know it I think it's like Tuesday at 8 o'clock it's like on

and like way to throw people off your trail there say the wrong date yeah like you don't sit down every Monday with your with your glass of rosé with Sarah and you guys don't watch this together holding holding toes I can't stand it all I know is this season it's two women picking dudes. And I just don't like, I don't like the thing at all. But I know that it's a huge deal. It's still like a huge deal. And my wife Sarah is like talking to all of her friends about it consistently. So like, I don't know, man. This is kind of a cool idea. So it definitely does seem big. And I actually do think that you and I don't know about you, but I don't know anything about the movie business or Hollywood or entertainment. I don't know anything about that.

And when people talk to me about like a production company, I'm like, what the fuck is a production? company. Like, I don't know what that is. But I do know that Reese Witherspooned own one of them things. She owned one of that production company things. And it got acquired by Blackstone for like $500 million, like a few months ago. And I do know that one of the richest black men in America, I believe his name is Byron Allen. And when I was reading about on Wikipedia, I wanted to learn more about what this guy did. And it was like talking about his production company and all these shows that he made. And I'm like, damn, dude, whatever this is, it's actually much bigger and more organized than I ever even imagined. So,

It's funny you bring that up. I've been actually in the lab. It's not ready yet, but we're going to take it out for a spin right now, which is I've been in the lab learning about production companies. And I want to tell you kind of like, here's my, can I give you just like random rant? It's hard to understand, right? Normally I have to have like a packaged, like a take on it. That's what I like to be.

But you brought it up. So let me give you the unpackaged, unfiltered raw. Yeah. Give me that cookie dough. Yeah, exactly. Hey, turn the oven down. We don't eat it. We got a spoon in the dough.

I want this content extra gooey. So, all right, so what's going on? So basically there's streaming wars going on. Netflix, Disney, Hulu. Everybody's fighting for subscribers. Okay, well, how am I going to differentiate from, if I'm Netflix, how do I differentiate from Hulu and HBO and all this stuff? Basically, they need original content.

Okay, so that's created this, like, huge imbalance. There used to be a lot of content and a small amount of distribution. Now there's a lot of distribution fighting for a small amount of content. And all the distribution players have just decided, like, the prize is big. Let's lose money for a lot of, like, several years and invest billions into content. And like, let's be the last person standing. And so they're, they're investing on what you call a J curve, where the curve goes down.

You lose a bunch of money and then a J, like a J, it goes way up and you make money later. What that means for these production companies is they'll overpay. There is a bidding war and they're willing to overpay for my content. And so, so like just the last year, basically, Reith Witherspoon, LeBron, Will Smith, Kevin Hart, they have sold stakes in their production companies. So like, for example, Kevin Hart, he has something called Heartbeat. He raised $100 million from private equity for 15% of the company. Wow.

So $650 million valuation. Kevin Hart. Kevin Hart. 50% of their revenue comes from their studio arm, which they produce shows for peacock, for Netflix, and, you know, so they make movies and shows. Explain what that means. So they have writers on staff or writers come to them with an idea. They go, this is intriguing.

we're going to pay money. We're going to pay $100,000 or $500,000. We're going to get some actors and a set. We're going to make one or two episodes of this. We're going to shop it around and then someone will buy it and we make profit. Exactly. So I'm going to use a Hollywood term that I don't know how to use, but I'm going to just like, you know, whip it out here.

They option it. What does it mean when they option? It's like, you know, they basically like, it's like they take an option on the future of this thing and they basically take, you know, they create a sizzle reel, where it's like a two minute teaser or they create a pilot or they create nothing. They just have the pitch and the concept and you're Kevin Hart, you go walk into six studios. You say, it's a movie where, you know, me and a tall guy, you know, we, you know, we are coworkers that don't like each other, but then we get trapped in an elevator. And they're like,

we love it. We'll take it. You know, and you're like, you know, how much does it need? It's like, we're going to need $100 million to do this. Of that, you're going to pay the production company X millions of dollars to go produce this movie. There's some margin in that. And then, you know, they're going to, you know, whatever the revenue or the upside would be, you know, the project. We're going to have some, some split. And presumably it's like, it's like, it's like, you know, businesses that that produce. So 50% is coming from the studio arm. Well, what's the other 50%? It's a combination of other things like content licensing,

brand consulting work for companies like P&G, Lyft, Sam's Club, stuff like that. I don't know what he's doing, but like that's Kevin Hart's business. But the, and the value here is presumably Kevin Hart and team know about what type of content gets eyeballs and gets engagement. They presumably have connections with all the big players and they have some money that they'll finance things up front. And they're curators and operators. And they're the influencer. So it's like, you know, everybody kind of knew, hey, if you go get an A-list star,

you put Tom Cruise in the movie, more people are going to watch. Well, what these guys have realized, LeBron, Reitherspoon, Kevin Hart, The Rock, he has his own production company. What they do, what they realize is, oh, let's just go vertically integrated. Like, let's not just be the talent that helps sell the tickets at box office. it's also be the production company that creates the thing. And then what they don't do is the streaming platform part. They're like, okay, we'll partner on that,

but we're going to do these other components ourselves. So they're also, you know, the big part isn't just that Kevin Hart knows what people wants. It's like, one of the things people want is Kevin Hart. So he's like, cool, I'm going to own a little more of my upside if I do this. And you know who crushes it this way? Fucking Ryan Seacrest. I was reading about Ryan Seacrest and American Idol.

And this guy, that guy is a workhorse. And he has a production company that kills. it. Yeah, you know, you know our buddy Pomp is like the Ryan Seacrest of the crypto industry. Right? Like he's just everywhere. It's like, dude, you got a morning show and then an afternoon show. Then you're producing this thing. And then at night you do this. Like, wow, your output is unmatched. That's Ryan Cicris. Yeah. Output is crazy. He's like, I'm on 20 years. I'm on radio three hours of morning for 20 years. Then I do this. Then I put on my suit. Then I host this. Then I produced the, he produced the Kardashian show. Yeah. And then he's like, uh, then I go do

American Idol. And after American Idol, I go do this other things. Like, geez, man, like, like blink, you know, what's going on? He's grinding, man. Yeah, that guy kills it. Then there's Reese Witherspoon. She sold her company. They made the morning show, which was that big show on Apple TV Plus, big little lies for HBO. She sold that to Candle Media, which is basically like a bunch of Disney execs spun off and created with like Blackstone backed them for like a billion dollars or whatever. And so she sold her entertainment company to them, 900 million. She creates shows around women. That's like her shtick. And so she generated. She's awesome.

I'm a big Reese fan. Rees Witherspooned at Brad Pitt. If you're in it, I go to it. You called her Reese Witherspooned earlier and I just thought that was a nice like touch. I never heard that that rendition before. I liked your remix. So, so, you know, I call her Reese. Do you know how much money this? Just Reese. You know how much money her thing made? 120 million in 2021. In revenue or profit? And then they expect

Revenue. They expected to double it to 310 million in 2022. So Blackstone paid like roughly a 7x revenue of where they bought them. They bought. So it's kind of crazy. And so they basically, they don't own any ownership. They make the show for the streaming service. And then by the way, they also, when they bought the company,

she also has a book club that's like ridiculous. Do you know about her book club? Yeah. She also has a club. clothing brand. The clothing brand wasn't a part of it, but daper, James or draper, James or something like that. What's it called? I don't know. Dapper, maybe. Something like that. And then she has a book club. It's Sunshine, something like, Hello Sunshine Book Club. Is that what it's called? I think it's just called Reese's Book Club, but it has two million followers or members in it. I don't,

that's kind of a silly number. So what she does is she promotes her favorite books. And then what she does is she goes to those books. She's like, hey, I'm about to blow your ass up. But also, I want the option rights to make a show out of your book if I can get that. And so she's like, market tests the books with her book club, makes money there, uses that leverage to get the rights to that book to make a show out of it, then sells the show rights to the next. She's great, man. She's great. Okay, you know, like cutthroat, you know, like media mogul or, wow. Like, you know, Innocent Reese is just like, that's an amazing model.

So, yeah, I think that's kind of crazy. And also, she also sold, I think, the data. So, like, you know, like either like you can, like the people who bought it, I think they get like, you know, access to that membership of the book club and then the data around them of what they like, what they dislike. So long story short, this mad realities thing, you kind of just did the pitch for them where I'm like, okay, the macro thing, that's as an uneducated person, that's, that's mildly interesting. That's an interesting story. You, you kind of sold like this actually could be a huge thing. This could be as big as any other tech company almost. So that's interesting. This young woman doesn't have, you know, she doesn't have the clout or connections likely that Reese or whoever has. But like, she's got the charm. I buy it.

And the hustle. And I think if I was her, so here's my brainstorm for her. I think I might have told her this at some point. But whatever. I think if I was her, I would not be trying to create this like standalone show. So I would immediately have been shopping this. I would say, hey, here's the deal. I can make you the next too hot to handle.

Love Island. Love is blind. I'm going to make one of these shows. And what I would first do is I would build this. I would build the audience on TikTok or Snapchat. So I would first go and sell it to the social platforms that also want original cool content. For a small amount of money, I'd say, hey, I'm going to create cool dating. I'm going to create a dating show on top of TikTok.

What's that work to you guys? And they'll say, oh, like, we'll give you $300,000 or a million dollars out of our creator fund. because TikTok has, I think, a $200 million-dollar creator fund, right? So I'd go to them, I'd go get a million, million and a half dollars to create the TikTok dating show. And then I would just take that popularity and I would say, hey, Netflix, hey, whoever. We have the small cult following and we could build these that you're, you know, Bachelor, these speak to like, you know, 37-year-old women and up or whatever, you know, some random. Yeah, I just kind of pitch it as an older demographic. I'd say, you know, I can get you the sort of like 14 to 25-year-old.

dating show audience because they want this other thing. And like, you know, like, and basically create a production company that's creating dating shows aimed at my market and try to be the Reese Reese Rutherpoon of dating reality TV. But I'd be not like doing Web3 crypto and doing it on my own website. I'd be going and shopping it to where there's a whole bunch of buyers.

And I'm sure they've, they've had conversations. I know that that's not like new to them. But like, I think that path can work. And I would just go all in on that path. Because I think when you go, all in on a path, it's very different than just, we've thought about that or, yeah, we've had a

couple conversations, we've tried it. It's very different than, yes, I bet the whole thing on making that work and come hell or high water. I'm going to wake up every morning and figure out, how do I go get Hulu to buy this? How do I go get Peacock to buy this? How do I go get Netflix to buy this? And what product do I need to create that? That's my end customer, actually. So let me ask you a practical question on how easy this is to pull off.

So you know who Mark Manson is? Mark Manson wrote the book, the subtle art of, yeah, the subtle art, not giving a fuck. Basically, I was like, just like, I've hung out with them once or twice and, uh, it seems like a really nice guy. And I was just Googling like Mark Manson House. And it said, Mark Manson just sold this Tribeca condo for $15 million. And then I was last year, I was reading like the Wall Street Journal or News Corp or whatever the company that owns Penguin publishing, his publisher, I was reading all their annual report.

And they said, Mark Manson's book, like revolutionized our business. So like clearly this is a $50 billion company and they're referring to Mark constantly. So I'm like, wow, that's amazing. And I started researching his book and it all stemmed from a blog post. He launched one blog called this is the subtle art of not giving you a fuck. And that was a hit. And then he took it on and he made it into a book. Another guy, Naval, Naval had Angelus.

So he was already successful. So it's not exactly the same thing. He had a few interesting bits of content out there. but then he had this tweet called How to Get Rich, and it was long tweet storm, and it kind of was a hit. And if he were a little bit hungrier like Mark was, then he could easily parlay that into something bigger than what it was,

you know, whatever. When you, so you've done this before as well. You've written maybe three different tweets that, like, got read five or tens of millions of times. And I don't know if you would say it was career changing, but like it was like somewhat trajectory changing. I don't know how big that trajectory is.

But let's start at the root level of a tweet. and like with a TV show or a movie or a Broadway show being like the highest form, if you were given 10 shots and you had one to two weeks per shot for a tweet and then let's say maybe a blog post and then let's say a podcast and then let's say a YouTube video, how many of those 10 times if you had a week or so to prepare and to research do you think would become a hit? Well, there's two versions of a hit. A hit can be it does well and then there's a hit like the club.

house thread or the Metaverse thread or stuff like that where it gets to like 20 million people and like they're like those were hits those were like I don't know super hits or grand slaps so which one do you mean like the those like absolute bangers or just like this gets thousands of likes and gets shared maybe it gets read 10,000 times or 100,000 times a blog post that gets like 100,000 visits. So let's just say there's friends in Seinfeld and the Simpsons and then maybe there's like family guy and then maybe there's like the bachelorette or the bachelor and then like below that it. It's like famous threads. Yeah.

Below that, what's another TV show that's like, it's like, it's like a hit, but it's like, like the gold birds. There's like people busking on the street. And below that,

there's your thread. No, I mean, like, look, like, you know, your version of family guys so far

has been one or two things that you've written, but then you've had like a bunch of like mild hits. So I think if I, I think to answer your question, if I tried the way you said, I think seven out of 10 would like do very well. And then probably, one out of every 10 would be one out of every 10 maybe one out of every 20 yeah I'm going to say zero to

one probably to be like a banger yeah yeah okay so that's just like a tweet which is like easy ish to go viral to create um now let's go a step up a YouTube video how many YouTube videos if you had 10 tries you think or let's say 20 could be like a hit honestly I I don't know if I'm going to answer your question the way you want because I kind of think for YouTube videos it's a little easier I don't know why. I think maybe because we hung out with Mr. Beast and I was like, oh, okay, I get it. Like, I get it.

I get what goes into, like, I get what a viral concept would be that people would click and that they would share. I get what the hook would be. And I get, like, you know, I'll like have the big payoff, the big reveal. And also I haven't done it. So, you know, things seem easier

when you haven't done it, when you haven't, like, gone and tried, actually. But I actually think I could have higher hit rate with YouTube videos because you get editing. You get like, there's a whole bunch of things that go into it compared to, a Twitter thread, which is very intellectual.

Like a YouTube video, you can, like, lean on other things to make it interesting, like the visual, like the, like, just literally the fact that it's like a visual, it's a lean back experience versus like, hey, read these 15 tweets and like, I hope I've tickled you to like the smart part of your brain enough where you give a shit.

So I actually think a YouTube video, I think if I try it on YouTube, I think seven or eight out of ten I think would hit. All right. Like in a major way. Amped up. You have more time. You have a million plus money.

dollars, you have a little bit of a team. You have to make a hit show once a quarter or once every six months or once a year at most or at least. Do you think you could actually come up with a hit? Like how hard do you think coming up with a hit would be? You have more money. You've got more time. You have more resources. You have to have a hit show. And it doesn't have to be a friend, but it has to be a, we're happy that we gave you money for this and we're going to keep buying. How many times out of 10 do you think you can do that? I think that's lower than the YouTube video for me personally because I'll tell you the reason why. Because that's what we're talking about here.

Yeah. When you do a show, you're basically, you bet it all up front and then you find out way later, the feedback loop is extremely slow compared to YouTube. YouTube is like, I can go from concept to production to getting the feedback of is this good or bad within a week, two weeks, something like that. And so I'm going to get a bunch of reps. I can try a bunch of different things. And so during that process, I'll find a formula that works.

Whereas with the show, it's probably like I get one attempt at it ever in life. It'll take me like a year to produce, another year to distribute. By the time that's all done, whether I was right or wrong, I'm going to be like, I just hope that I got it right the first time. And so I actually think my hit rate on a show would be way lower. I think like two out of ten and three out of ten, something like that. That's crazy. Do I answer the way you thought or no?

Yeah, you did. And an interesting exercise, I didn't prepare for this, but an interesting exercise is to think how many games. game-changing pieces of content, like Mark's book. We'd have to think of a few more examples. We could probably think of a lot of books just started with like a really small thing. And they're like, oh, that's an interesting vein. Let's actually pursue that. And that's like an interesting exercise because his book created tens of millions of dollars with a value. And it basically kind of almost on the headline itself, it's kind of a winner. And then I'm sure the blog

post, which I haven't even read, I'm sure that was actually fire and amazing. But I wonder how many amazing bits of content have just started with a small little rinky ding thing. Right. I bet a ton. And also, I think for me, at least, the way I do things,

I'm that way where it's like, oh, cool, I want to write the book. Let's just tweet out one tweet. All right, now five tweets about that same topic. All right. Now let's tell them to subscribe to a newsletter,

right? Let's just see how much I got, what's resonating over, like, for example, I'll go look at any thread. It's 10 tweets. I'll go see which of these has the most likes that's like not, like normally a thread will just have like kind of like in descending order like the first people

have a lot of likes the last week have a lot of likes and then it'll just fall off from there but what you'll find is when you have a good joke or a good one liner or a good analogy or whatever that one tweet will get way more likes and so that's a great way to teach yourself how to speak better how to tweet better how to be more compelling when you do stuff it's like go look at that and you can do it with other people's threads too that's what i do i go look at other people's and I'm sort of looking at, oh, that's interesting. That one seem, people really like love that one liner. Okay, that's, that's cool.

I like how they did that. I can pick that up for my game. That's crazy. By the way, one other numbers here. So LeBron's production company, 45 million in 2020. Revenue or funding. Revenue. 100 million in 2021.

And they basically do the same thing where they do a bunch of stuff. So they have like uninterrupted, which is videos and like. It's good. I like it. They also have like, merchandise apparel. They have a clothing brand. Then they have the HBO series,

the shop, then they made the new Space Jam movie. And so his company, Spring Hill, uh, basically created a bunch of these and they did the same thing. They went and sold it to others. If I was these guys on,

if I'm, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm LeBron and I have so much income coming from other things, I would play a really long game because I think that going and selling the shop to HBO,

like the shop is actually a pretty dope show. It's like, it's barbershop and they get like, you know, whatever. whoever, big actors, NFL players, basketball players, just shooting the shit

in a barbershop setting and it's like really high quality. It's great. It's kind of like MFM, but famous people who are more interesting, better, and getting haircuts. Yeah, take what you see now.

Yeah. Trim my beard, first of all. Secondly, we're, you know, more athletic, more successful, funnier,

you know, like, cool, you know, so basically, that show is awesome, but how many of LeBron's, fans. LeBron's fans are like mostly younger people like, you know, that's like if you're an NBA star,

your fans go from like, you know, eight years old on up. They don't have HBO. And so it's like, if I'm him, why am I not playing the long game, Jeff Bezos style and just saying, I'm going to drop this dope premium content on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, whatever. And I'm going to put the whole thing here. I'm going to blow normal content out of the water here because I'm bringing production budgets to this. and actually I'm going to invest like what Michael Jordan did with his like the last dance legacy the last dance documentary it's like

I'm going to invest a lot of money but I'm not going to like put it like Netflix is okay because it's a paywall a lot of people have but I would just put it on YouTube and I would basically bet that if I grow my brand and my legacy through this content there's a bigger payoff than what the streaming

companies are going to pay me today and I would be willing to invest 20, 30, 50 million dollars in order to build like a billion dollar plus type of brand payoff at the end because you will just be like, you know, worshipped and adored even more than you already are. And so, you know, you want to go on one end of the spectrum or the other. You want to go like, I'm getting paid a stupid amount of money and it doesn't really matter how many people watch this. Or I want everybody to watch this and I'll pay money to get it there because there's a bigger payoff for me outside of that.

You know, like the Logan Paul method where it's like everything's free, everything's on YouTube. I'm in your face and then I'll launch my like energy drink and I think their energy drink does like some stupid number like it's doing really well like 100 million dollars a year or something like that I don't know the exact number I heard about on the pod they were talking about how they did 10

like I think it was around 10 million in month one of sales but I actually think that that drink business if like Mr. Bees has a $40 chocolate business I'm curious if some of these low ticket items can actually become like legitimately

great companies as opposed to just okay. I think it's hard to sell a $2 drink and make it work really well. So we'll see if they'll make it work. But dude, all these water companies do amazing. But many don't, obviously. I mean, many don't. But if you got the distribution, right, like, why is Mr. Beast not doing Beast water?

Because he can basically pair it with like, you know, like that boxed water thing where it's like, like this is better for the earth? Yeah, it's cute. Like Mr. Beast likes that shit where he's just like, oh, we're going to plant a billion trees. And the way we're going to plant a billion trees. is like not doing plastic water bottles. All right, everybody, join me. This is Mr. Beast, you know, aluminum cans, sparkling water.

Like, go fuck LaCroix up. All right. Like, go, go fuck these guys up. Like, Mr. Beast could destroy these guys, right? Like, you know, like beast water. Like, go into the things. Go make products that everybody on earth consumes. Because you're the mainstream, like, content maker, right?

So it's like, dude, when he had the chocolate, I was like, damn, dude, I want to, like, eat this chocolate because I want to, like, you know, show you like appreciation for, like, being here and you brought your item and like, yeah, sure, I'll eat some of it. But I felt so bad eating it because I don't like eating that type of stuff. I mean, I love it. Because I don't eat a chocolate bar. Yeah. Well, and I love it. And I'm so much eating it. I was like, I don't want to eat this, but I want to be respectful and kind. And because he brought this thing. And I was like,

dude, you need to make something different that I, that I, like, can consume guilt-free. I don't know that many people that just eat chocolate, like a Hershey's chocolate bar. You know what I mean? Correct. In fact, that's a filter I have. If I ever just see you just eating a chocolate bar on a Tuesday,

like I'm going to begin to distance myself. Right. I'm trying to be around a certain type of person that's a, you know, healthier. Come to think of it, I don't know anybody that does that. Actually, you know, funny story. When I joined Monkey Inferno,

I was like, So what was it like the last product manager? So I joined as a PM, product manager. The guy who was there before me was this guy, Alex, too, who created a million-dollar homepage back in the day. And now is the founder of Calm, like a multi-billion-dollar company. Wait, he was the boss of Monkey Inferno? Not the boss.

He was like the product manager. So he was the product manager there. He quit to go start Calm. And they were like, I was like, oh, how's Alex? Like, you know, I love that guy's work. Like, you know, a million-dollar homepage is dope, calm, interesting, like meditation. Is he just like super Zen or what? Like, is he huge on meditation?

They're like, you know, that's the funny thing. They're like, I think he needs calm. I wouldn't say he is calm. I was like, what do you mean? They're like, you know, Alex is a fun time, dude. He's like, he loves to hang out. He loves to have drinks. Like, you know, he's just like a young dude, like in his 20s in a big city.

Like, you know, he's not like waking up every morning going to his Japanese like, you know, garden and just like sitting there for eight hours, just, you know, contemplating, you know, the thoughts in his mind. And so I was like, what's the crazy? What's the most degenerate thing? I was like, give me a story. What's the most degenerate thing? The founder of Calm was down there.

I remember one time he came in and he just kind of hung over and he just got a bowl like, you know, for cereal, like his office had like a kitchen. He's like, but instead of cereal, he just went, put a bunch of M&Ms in there with a spoon and just ate it. I was like, I don't know if this story is true or false, but it's hilarious and I'm running with it. That's awesome. I remember thinking of that time, if Com ever becomes a thing, I'm always going to remember that, you know, like, you know, that story. There's like one of these like hilarious small small stories. He's a Dgen, just like us. Our software is the worst.

Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. When we had our office, I remember I was having a bad day. And when I have bad days, I like to like punish myself by eating poorly.

You know, it's like, that's like my version. I'm just like drinking a 12 pack. And I, it was me and my writer, Connor, we're still in the office at like 8 p.m. And I was like, Connor, today sucked. I was like, I looked at him. I go, bet you I can eat this whole jar of unopened, skippy in three bites.

And I did. And I did. And I felt so horrible for like three days. And so that was my, that was my D-Gen diet moment. It was just eating an entire jar of Skippy peanut butter in 30 seconds. That's crazy. All right.

Let me give you the thing I'm currently obsessed with. So the thing I'm currently obsessed is. I brought this up maybe three or four times. People may be sick of this by now. But I feel like no one is talking about it. I feel like not enough people are freaking out about what's going on with artificial intelligence for creating art. So we've talked about this before.

There's GPT3, which is basically AI that will write something for you. So you could just give it a prompt. It'll write the essay. There's Dali where you just, type in a thing, it'll generate images, like as if you searched it on Google. But I now have like a bigger picture view of this, which is, you know, like in the early days of the web,

the big winner was search engines. Yeah. So, you know, Google obviously was like a search engine because it's like, oh, the internet, basically, technology has now put a bunch of information out there, so we need a search engine to basically find the thing we want. Now what's happening is you have a generation engine, right?

a generative engine is you go search for the thing and it creates it for you, right? So it's like, it's, that's just like right there is like a mind-blowing concept. Instead of searching the internet for a thing that might be out there, what's the closest thing to what I want? It's just to say, I have basically the genie from Aladdin and I can go say, play me a song that mixes like kind of like Beethoven and Kanye, but it's about, you know, taking mushrooms. And literally AI will just create a song. and guess what, it doesn't suck.

And to me, this is so insane. This is so mind-blowing. Every demo I see, I'm just like, I drop immediately what I'm doing. I'm like, what I'm doing is stupid. Like, oh, like, cool, a podcast, you know, like, oh, what am I doing? Like, talking to my mother, who cares about my mother? There's AI that can create shit that you just, like, spit out of your mouth. And so I think I really just want to go down this rabbit hole and figure out what all is this

going to be going to be able to do. So now there's this new thing. called stable diffusion. Have you seen this one? No. Stable diffusions, the new demo that came out. Unlike Dali,

they basically, they didn't like kind of paywall it. And so anybody can go and use it. And you just type in a prompt. So you're like, like go to the subreddit, stable. So go to stable diffusion subreddit.

Just to see like what people create. So it's R slash stable diffusion. So just look at the top thing, right? So I look at like, Let me show you a good one. Okay, go to the one that says Wendy's. Do you see it? Like scroll down maybe...

Hot from one today, or it's hot? I just like normal sorting, so hot. And then go down five and just look at Wendy's. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. This is awesome. So how does this work? So basically, you just type in like the prompt, right?

So the prompt that he gave was a beautiful portrait of Wendy's mascot, intricate, elegant, and highly detailed. And then it just creates this like beautiful redheaded girl holding a burger with fries. And it's like it looks like this incredible art. And so you could just and then you could just, you could just hit the dream button. That was the button. Like you know, the Google button is like search or I'm feeling lucky. The one on this says dream.

And you hit dream and it just, it'll just morph it. It'll morph it. It'll morph it. It'll just keep making new ones instantaneously. It's like working with a designer. It's like, try again. Give me something else. No, not that.

Okay. make it blue and it'll just instantaneously recreate something incredible right then, right? So it's like, it's, and it's just mind blowing what it's creating and then you can see these videos.

So go down, just do like a control F and write the words, preview of next feature. And it's a picture of a duck. Yeah, it's a picture of a duck. And it's like a picture of a duck. It looks like a guy in Photoshop

or paint making a duck. Right. So he's in, I think, I think it's Photoshopped is the actual tool, but, It looks like a Microsoft paint duck. So it's just like a yellow blob with an orange little duck bill. All right.

So it's a two minute video. What he's showing is he created a Photoshop plugin using stable diffusion that lets you draw anything crappy. And then you just run the plugin and watch get to the end. So like go all the way to the end. And so he just adds a little blue. And so by the end you see this basically like this like fancy looking duck. What the hell?

And like a blue like tuxedo shirt. And it's like the sophisticated ass duck. Dude, if I'm a web designer. I'm freaking out right now. We thought AI would like, you know, oh, it's going to automate the shitty jobs. It's like, actually, it's coming for your throat, artists. Dude, so I've been, I followed this guy.

I've been looking for his name. I found him. His name is Lou Yah, so L-O-U-Y-A-H. And I follow him on TikTok. And what he does is every once in a while he'll have a post where he's a producer. And he'll be like, here's a rap country song that doesn't exist. And he makes a song. and they sound great.

And he's done this a bunch of times. And Martin Screlli, in one of his blog posts, he said when I was in prison, I had a lot of time to think, here's a bunch of predictions that I have for the next 100 years as well as timelines. So one of his predictions, he'll be like, we're going to land on Mars by 2050 or whatever. And another prediction is an artificially made song is going to be in the top 10 most played songs in the world. and on Billboard top 10 inside the next 18 months. Like you put a time limit on it. And I'm on board with that.

I 100% believe in that. I 100% believe in that. And I don't get why more people aren't freaking out. There are obviously pockets of people who really are really interested in this. People see the demo. But like it's kind of like we just passed up a purple unicorn while we were driving on a road trip. He's like, oh wow, purple unicorn. And we just like, okay, you guys want to stop at Wendy's?

And it's like, dude, wait, hold on. There was a purple unicorn next to the road. Like pull over. What are we doing? Like I think everybody needs to pull over and be like, what the hell is happening? This is going to, like, this is so insane to me. And I just feel like these ideas, like there's going to be a Google like company that's not a search engine.

It's a generation engine. It's a dream engine. You're going to go there. You're going to say what you wish. I think somebody's going to make this for kids. I was like, dude, I could make, you know, I told you before. I was like, I'm interested in creating like a Pixar like company. But it's like, why would I create one movie?

What if I created an app that my daughter could just talk? to no no text input she can't type she just could say a duck surfing you know with an ipad and like you know holding an ipad and like she could just say any words and this thing would create not only an image but it could create an animation it could create a set of animations it could create a whole story based on that she could create her own movie just by saying you know a boy who loves soccer but he's sad because he doesn't get enough chocolate and it would create you know a movie based on that it would create a portrait based on that. And like she could create art just with her imagination. Have you ever...

Have you ever heard this theory that your words shape your thoughts? And it's not just like positive thinking. It's like literally if that, if a word that doesn't describe a particular type of feeling exists in your language, then it's hard for you to have that feeling. So this particular example isn't exactly proven to be true. And a lot of people debate it. But there was a group of Africans who didn't have like the perfect word for square or like a 90 degree angle and all of their homes were in circles. They were like circled. And so they didn't, they, for some reason, like the idea of like square and 90 degrees, it just wasn't part of their language. And so everything, a lot of items in their in their culture were circles or, uh, there's like

terms for like, you know, I'm feeling depressed, but I'm not suicidal or something in like a different country. And like, that's like a better word sometimes than like depressed. And so people are like, well, you know, I'm just in this mood and they can explain it a little bit better. And they feel that way. And it's almost like explaining to a blind person. Like, hey, tell me what red looks like. It's like, I don't know. I can't explain what that is. It's too hard.

I don't have that in my vocabulary. With something like this, I wonder if it will unlock like a new way of storytelling or a new way of seeing art. And it will actually, could actually change our mindset and a lot of different things. Because like, if you, if you want to make a movie now, I mean, you're going to be influenced by everything that exists. And then occasionally someone's going to come and do something totally mind-changing. that one person is like kind of once in a generation type of person and they just like are really unique like a Steve Jobs. But when you have something that is collectively aggregating all of the data in the world that has ever existed and then coming up with something interesting, do you know what I mean? Like I wonder what like that that's how I've been thinking about it. Like man, well, the new stuff that this thing can come out with, I can't, I literally can't think of. You know what I mean?

Totally. Because what they do is they train it on like just, you know, they basically go scrape gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of. images from the web and they basically there's a big controversy around this. Some people are like that's unethical those people who put their

images up on the web they didn't know it was going to be it was going to be used to train AI that was going to then put them out of work like that's that's not so great but like and by the there's like a name for this

some people are trying to do vegan AI. You know what that is? No but that's awesome. Vegan AI is basically AI that's trained only on non-copywritten work so like it's like work that images that were like

intentionally said to be royalty-free, out there for public use, out there for use it however you want. It's like, if it was only trained on that, it's sort of like grass-fed. Well, what's like a perfect example of this and like is the ultimate villain move is GitHub, which is a website that developers postcode on.

It's almost like, it's part practicality. They post code so you could share it, but they also like, it's like a portfolio almost. And what GitHub is doing, which is owned by Microsoft at this point, I think, they are basically like using AI to scan, all the best code of all the code that has ever been uploaded. And you can kind of like, am I explained this right? You can, they've using AI to write new code based off of all the users who have input data.

And the users are like, oh, cool. So you're taking our portfolio. And you're going to use it to put us out of work. That's nice. Right. Yeah. And I think Nat Freeman, who is the, I think he was this, I feel like he was the CEO of GitHub for a period of time. I don't know if he still is, but he just tweeted out.

he goes, the $10 billion AI first product idea hiding in plain sight is GitHub co-pilot, which is the name of the thing you said, right, like the AI assistant that helps you write your code for customer support. You can fine tune it. Basically, you have this archive of all of your thousands and thousands of company like tickets that were like resolved, like resolved customer support issues. And your support rep who's just like, you know, random person sitting in, you know, I don't know, maybe the Philippines or something like that gets dramatically more productive and

your customers get better. like training becomes easier because you have any company with 20% support 20 or more support reps, he says, you know, would buy this. And, and so, you know, like that guy basically like, I think co-pilot is like a billion dollar a year add on to a billion more than a billion dollar a year add on now for GitHub because so many software developers opt into it because it makes them more productive. So it's like how many other areas is that going to happen to? Dude, when we did, when we discuss this, I'm like, this is a, this is the type of, like macro movement that it's like, dude, just quit what you're doing and just join, get in somehow.

You know, almost, I don't really like crypto, but almost like crypto in like 09 or 11 or something like that. It's like, I don't know, man. It's kind of hard to miss if you're just kind of in the, in the ballpark. 100%. 100%. That's how I feel about this. Like, that's, wait, we drove by a purple unicorn.

Pull over the car. Pull over the car in your career and basically go dive in and figure out what this is. And if people are already driven in, tell me because I'm trying to dive in. in. I want to learn as much as I can about this over the next six months because I find it fascinating. I'm going to, I can't show this graph, but I'm just going to tell you a graph real quick. All right. There is a company. I wonder if I could say the name. I'm going to say the name. Maybe we have to bleep this out later. So there's a company called, have you heard of this? Yeah. I don't exactly know what they do, but they're basically like an, I think they're just like an AI

copywriting solution. That's what I thought. Just see if it's out. Are they based out of Austin? I think I met the founder actually. So sounds cute, right? You know, AI helps you copyright. Copywriting is this little niche thing that you and I are in. We help people with copyrighting to. We both have like a copywriting course or product like that. Here's their annual recurring revenue of 2021. January, 2.5 million.

That's their annual recurring? This is their error rate that they were at. So January, January 2021, 2.5 million. That's pretty good. Like, congrats. Fast forward to April, 5.7 million. Oh, wow. You guys doubled in four months.

It's like really great progress. I'm super impressed. Like you guys, you guys are probably on to something. This could be like a $100 million company or something like that. Fast word to July, $20 million run rate. Oh, wow, what's going on?

It's one year you've gone from $2.5 to $20 million. Fast word to October, $40 million. It's like, what is happening? In one year, this went from $2.5 million to $40 million run rate. That is absolute insanity to me. I've never seen an ARR chart like that. Now, I don't know. How did you get that?

Is this super legit? Someone shared it with me. So, you know, I don't know how legit this is, but I don't think it's fake. You know, it's crazy to be. So, but it's just like a kind of a mind-blowing level of traction. God damn. Yeah, I'm on board with this stuff. This is pretty cool.

That's insane. I can't believe how big that is. Wow. It seems almost too good to be true. All right. Anything else that we wanted to cover? No, that's the pod.