My First Million - The Startup Sins Of Uber, Why Scaling Is Overrated, and More

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Episode 362: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about businesses that don't scale well, but are still successful, the startup sins of Uber, how to make millions from a salaried position, and more. ----- Links: * Sundae Conversation * Product Hunt * Newspapers.com * Rahul Pandey / 5 Offers with FAANG * PreciTaste * WGSN * Grabr.io * jdnoc * 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: (01:25) - Custom rap tracks and why scaling is overrated (14:25) - The many startup sins of Uber (18:05) - Scott Belsky (31:45) - How to make millions from a salaried position (45:50) - The insanely high value of predicting things (55:55) - The surprisingly big opportunity of private security (01:02:30) - Writing a note to your spouse every day ----- 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

And what he was doing was every day, he would wake up at like whatever, five or six in the morning and he would go to Phil's coffee. And he would sit down on his laptop. He first he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day. And then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on product hunt or, hey, I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment or, hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours. I wonder if, you know, or like that's in your industry.

You should check this out. And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for product time. He was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it. I have a feeling you're coming with fire or something. You seem fiery today. I got some good stuff. Also, I just watched, do you ever watch Barstools interviews with people? Are you talking about the Caleb Presley one? I don't know who that is. Maybe that's his name. It's the one with Air, they interviewed Aaron Rogers. I watched it today, dude. His name's Caleb. Have you seen? So it's called it's called Sunday? It's called Sunday conversations.

It's like Sunday like ice cream. Yeah, it's like this like chubby guy named Glennie Balls who's sitting in the background. And then it's Caleb who's like a bro. But he's kind of, he's actually really funny. He's hilarious. He's quite smart. And he interviews these people. He asks the best questions.

He's so good. Have you seen the past ones? I've seen a few of them. This one is the first one I've watched like the whole thing. And God, he's good, man. That is amazing. So I watched that. And sometimes that's all it takes.

You just see someone being great at their thing and you're like, I'm going to be great today. That's it. I'm going to be great today. I saw great. Now I need to be great. He makes me self-conscious. Caleb Presley is very, very good at these funny, awesome interviews. He's great on the spot.

He's very good. Yeah, he delivers. All right. So let's do, can I tell you something? This is kind of amazing. All right, this is going to be a little hard to share on here, but I put this in to the dock so you can click the links. Ben, if you can, let's screen share some of this stuff that's going to them to tell you.

This is, I saw this ad on Instagram. And this is the most amazing marketing funnel I've ever seen, maybe ever, but definitely for a musician. So check this out. Stop scrolling. You have 24 hours. We're Carolanka, an independent hip-hop group. Last year, we had the honor of being placed on Brock Hampton's official community playlist, and we were also shouted out by Kenny Beeks.

Carolina go off. I bet you can do it. This year, we're trying to grow our fan base. So for the first 15 people who DM us on Instagram in the next 24 hours, we're going to send you a special gift. swipe up to DMS now. So the beginning of the audio didn't play there, but he goes, do you recognize these people?

And it's like Biggie, Pock, whoever, like just like a bunch of famous rappers. It goes, stop scrolling. And then he basically does this little thing. So I was like, so Ben Levy, Ben sent this to me. And I was like, what is this amazingness? Let me, I must swipe up. I must know what this free gift is. So I do it.

What does that lead you to? It opens up Facebook Messenger with a direct message already ready for their, like, to their team. It just says, it automatically sends them a message from you saying, send me the free gift. Okay, so that happens. And then they respond, yo, what's good? Immediately, right? So you're like, okay, I don't know what's happening here, but I'm intrigued.

The next thing that happens, I have screenshots of this stuff below some of your research. So they go, yo, Sean, what's good? So they use my name in the thing. They pull it from Facebook Messenger. And then it says, give us a little bit. We'll get back to you ASAP with your gift and some more details. Thanks for your patience. Okay, cool.

One day later, I get a message. It's an audio note from the guys who are the rap group. And it's basically like introducing themselves. And again, this is kind of mass produced, but it works. They go, yo, Sean. And then it's the audio, which is like, yo, here's our story. Where these guys, blah, blah, blah.

Here's what we're doing. And then they said, you know, for your gift, we wrote your own custom song. We personalized the lyrics just for you. And so, you know, let me know what you think. It links to their SoundCloud. And it says, Sean, king of the. first million. That's the name of the song. So then, So they send the homie Sean, he run it up ain't no underhand.

Got his dogs with him. Yeah, that's the gang. Hope you understand. I saw the homie on Twitter. Now he doesn't message us. Invest your funds with a fee out of E. Kyi get it done. But I can't afford it to keep a real shot. So they're in the song and I'm like, okay, well, I don't know what's happening right now, but like this has never happened before where you go from there's an Instagram ad about a band that you never heard of then you swipe up then they send you an audio note and a personal message then they send you a song the following day that's like got your name in it and then they followed up again and they're like yo I don't know if you're in New York I'm gonna pretend you are we're doing a show here's

the here's a link to a show here's the tickets and then they send like this automated graphic using Canva of you could see it there it's like me crowd surfing it's like I don't know what is going on, but this band is kind of genius in the way that they're promoting themselves. And they're still small. They're called Carolanka. They're still small. But when I saw this, I was like, I don't know, they may not, they may or may not be the best musician, but they are probably at the highest overlap of market, like kind of

marketing genius for a young band. And they play music, right? It's like, there's a lot of marketing genius out there, but they don't make music. There's a lot of musicians, but they don't know anything about marketing. These guys know enough about both to be very dangerous. I just thought this is amazing. Is this effective, you think? I don't understand.

So they're basically doing all this to get you to buy tickets to their New York show. Is that right? Well, it's not just that. Like, it's not just to buy tickets to a specific show. It's basically the way I think about it is every business, you got to find a way to get like your first 100 or first thousand customers who love you. And that's like a really specific thing. It's like, I just need a thousand customers who love us.

Whether it was for this podcast, like we needed a thousand people to listen who actually really love the show. And every business has this. And so the question is like, how do you actually do that? And at YC, they have this thing that they say, do things that don't scale. They talked about the early Airbnb guys, how they used to go. And they themselves would go and call all the hosts of their New York Airbns. They would go to their houses.

They would take professional looking photos so that the listings look better. And people were always laughing like, you know, that's not going to scale. And they're like, well, first of all, it doesn't even matter if it scales because right now, I don't need scale. I don't have scale. I just need something that's going to get a thousand people to really love us. And that's what these guys are doing. I thought this is just an amazing example of like actually betting on that strategy, which is that you need a small group of people to really love you and go to bat for you, not a bunch of people who just kind of sort of like you. Or, oh, yeah, I got, you know, we got 10,000 views on this thing. It's like, okay, but those views do they matter?

What are those views worth versus somebody who's got a story to tell like I'm doing right now? Or somebody who's really impressed by you or feels interested in you or is invested in your story actually goes and clicks and learns more about you and goes deeper down your funnel. So I think that this is amazing because they're brute forcing that thousand fans who really care about them. Dude, I always hated this thing of, well, it doesn't scale or you got to build the scale. I've always hated that conversation for a few reasons. Number one, most people aren't going to make it to the point where they ever have to worry about that. Number two, you can brute force it and just manually and by hand do things to a pretty large number.

I think the largest number that I've seen, let's see, I think Mr. Beast is his whole operation is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a pretty brute force. I don't know what it looks like, but just talking to him, fairly unsophisticated operation. I think when I talked to NerdWall, you know,

nerd wall, it was a blog that was at the time making like 30 million in revenue. And I think like 15 million in profit, it incredibly I like saw a little bit behind the scenes super unsophisticated. What are some other thing? And it was basically just them just blogging. What are some other examples of things that you've seen that are look like a tech or internet based company on the outside, but behind the scenes are like pretty rudimentary.

And not even like they've not even thought like, oh, we need to automate or scale or whatever. So our buddy Ryan Hoover built product hunt. And he listens to the pod. So he came on the pod as well and told the story. but I was there kind of like front row when he was building that thing, meaning like I think I'm user number 17 in product tense history or something like that, like very, very early. First dozen people or so that were on the platform.

And for some of us, he was sending like updates on like literally what he was doing to build it. And what he was doing was every day, he would wake up at like whatever five or six in the morning and he would go to Phil's coffee. And he would sit down on his laptop. First he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day. And then he would start just literally emailing

and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on product hunt or, hey, I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment or, hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours. I wonder if, you know, or like that's in your industry. You should check this out. And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for product hunt. He was the, he was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it.

And at the time, I was like, this guy is literally like sending out like hundreds of personal welcome emails a day, maybe 100 personalized tweets per day. And then he would like, yeah, sure enough, like 6 or 7 p.m., he'd close up his laptop. He'd go to the gym. He's a very like structured guy. And then he would like go home. He hits the bed early. He's not like going out and socializing or doing anything like that. He would wake up again the next day and he would do the same thing. And sure enough, that community that we were part of, I think that first group he sent it to was like maybe 25 people. And it didn't even have his own website. He was using this thing called linky-dink at the time. It's like some third party tool to go use.

And every day he would send out the email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted. And then he would tag each person with an individualized thing. Oh, Sean, I know you guys had once looked at building a product like this. What do you think about this? He'd get you to share your thoughts because he was asking in such a nice, personalized way that, okay, I'll go ahead and reply. But that generated all of the activity for that early community.

And why did product not work? Why did it sell for $20 million? Well, because at the beginning, he got the, the right people from Silicon Valley to actually participate in the thing. And the way he did that was like, it's like when you watch somebody build a fire, it's like first they're just like, you know, they're just hitting the flint or they're rubbing the two sticks together just to get the spark. And then when it's there, they're sort of covering it. They're just blowing on it gently. And then they're adding just the next little few pieces of sticks. And they know it could go out

at any moment. And that's how it feels to build a community. I saw you do the same thing with trends, basically, right? Like for trends, when you wanted to launch that, it was by no means going to be a slam dunk. And I think most of us who are in trends would say the research reports you guys sent out, which was the product, they were cool. But the real reason anybody liked trends, I think,

was the Facebook group. And all it was was a Facebook group. There was nothing, you didn't build that. You just literally went down there and typed a title in and hit enter. And then, but what made the Facebook group good was you picked, you handpicked who could get in.

And then every day I felt like you were sharing. like some super high quality stuff to get a conversation started in the group chat. Was that intentional when you do that? 100%. I was intentional. And so what I did two or three interesting things. So this, yeah, so trends right now is making many, many millions of dollars in subscription revenue. And it's pretty simple. And there's like, I think there's only five people who work on it. So it's like a pretty profitable thing. And we added these people to this Facebook group. And I would do a few things. The first thing I would do is even people who didn't pay who I thought were impressive, like you or some of our other friends, I'd be like, hey, I'm adding you to this group.

And I would just tell them. And I would manually add them. And I'd be like, oh, look who just joined. You know, it's Sean. Sean has done all these impressive things. Funny seeing you here. How cool. If you have any questions for Sean, just like ask them right here in the comments. And I would do that all the time. So I would add these people who did that work by the way, because I was like, oh, shit, this group has cool people. And it's in reality that you added 300 paid members that I've never heard of. And then you added one interesting person, but you made intro post, baller, you're like, you ever seen a plane fly? Yeah, that's because of this guy. You know, it was always the most like baller intro. You're like, um, you know, did you know,

did you know they didn't have $100 bills till this guy came around? It's like, wow. I did that all the time. And the other thing I would do is I would just write out all these long posts of like interesting things that I was thinking about. And then I would tag certain people who, A, either accomplish something like that and would talk about it. Or B, I would write comments for, smart people and message them and say, hey, will you do me favor? Post us on there. Or I would write post for other people and make them comment. One time, when HubSpot was looking to buy us, I saw that Brian Halligan, the then, he's the founder and then CEO of the company. He joined. And I messaged like 80 people. And I said, hey, reply to Brian. Here's the message to say to him.

And so many people commented and that he checked in like eight hours later. He's like, oh my God, I've been overwhelmed with replies and notifications. I can't believe how thriving this community is. And I remember thinking like, got them. Got them. But that interaction is how you make all, like, that's that feeling you want all community members to feel. And we used to do that all the time.

But yeah, Ryan Hoover is a good example of people who have grown without like really caring about scaling. We should have like a segment another time where we like actually think about like the most like thrown together duct tape shit that we've seen that has gotten quite large. I'm going to give you another angle towards this. So there's one which is the brute force do things that don't scale. And they almost do them even longer than that. They do it even past the point where you shouldn't be able to keep this up.

Like Airbnb still does that photographer thing, by the way. They turned that unscaleable thing of them going to people's apartments, taking photos for them and saying, hey, we'll improve your listing for you. And now they just have a fleet of photographers around the country that'll just come do this for your listing. It's like it's that they actually turned it into a scalable. And that's another thing when people talk about, well, that's not scalable.

It's like, yeah, it is. Like, they'll talk about like an ad agency and they're like, that's not scalable. It's like, what do you mean? Of course it's scalable. You just hire 5,000 employees. Like, that's scalable. Maybe that's not what you want to do. But like, yeah, everything, virtually everything is scalable.

Like, you just have to add a ton of people probably. Most things can scale past what most people think. Like, you know, this also happens in engineering all the time. you work with engineers and they're like, well, we're going to need to build it right before we launch, or we're going to need to build it right because this won't work in production. And so this won't work when it scales. It's like, then you hear these stories. It's like, yeah, Facebook was written in PHP.

Why? I don't know. That's just the language he knew at the time. And that's what he did. You know, it's like, and yeah, actually it still runs, you know, years later, it was still running in that, like way past where it was supposed to. Dude, I've got friends that are early at Uber and friends that are still at Uber. And a lot of people don't know this, but they might.

consider him a founder, but the first or second employee was this Mexican guy. And, you know, he, I think he was lived in America for a little while, but at the time, he was living in Mexico. And so the early versions of Uber were written with a ton of Spanish in the code. And so my friends who were earlier there, they told me, yeah, like, I forget this guy's name. Do you know who I'm talking about? I remember reading about it, but I don't know his name. Top of him. Yeah, he was, he was Mexican. And so they, and he had, you know, his friends in Mexico were like, yeah, well, well, my, I know a good agency. We're going to have them do it.

And they said it was kind of thrown together and kind of janky. And I've got friends now that still work there. And they say every once in a month, we'll find Spanish in the early code base because that is, you know, what these guys are writing. We'll find like Spanish notes and things like that. And that was the early version of Uber. And think about how many rules of Uber got violated of how many rules of startups

that Uber violated. So, for example, the Uber founders, Travis and Garrett, it, they didn't work on it full time. Uber was not a project they were willing to do. They just literally tweeted out, hey, we need a general manager. And random guy named Ryan Graves was like, I'm a hustler. I'll do it. And they're like, all right, cool.

It's like they literally like delegated the CEO job. Then did they have a super strong technical team, technical co-founder who could write the code and do this in house? Nope. Use the third party dev shop to build the first version of the app. They outsource the coding. Most investors who invested, in Uber would tell you, if you're a product guide, you go in and you say, yeah, I'm going to just use an agency to write the code for the app.

They'd be like, yeah, this is not, yeah, no go. Okay, then what's the next thing? Then they literally broke actual laws. It was like running and they got a cease and desist from San Francisco saying, hey, for every day you're operational, you owe us $5,000 per day. And they just kept going. Then the next, you know, they just violated rule. Another one at the time. I remember at the time when Uber first came out, Airbnb was popular at the time.

and I talked to our investor. I was like, should we be doing a product like this? He's like, ah, no, Bits, not Adams. That was like a common phrase in Silicon Valley, which is you want to do startups that are software based because they're the ones that can scale and have profit margins. All these things with real world cars and homes and t-shirts and stuff like that, like that stuff super hard to scale ends up being super low margin. And okay, some people say, oh, they're right.

You know, Uber's not that profitable. But the reality is that the founders and investors in Uber, did fantastically well, scaling this thing up. And it was kind of a narrative violation. There was all these narrative violations, all these general rules that were broken that like today, if you said,

yeah, I'm the founder of this thing. No, I'm not working on it full time. I found a guy on Twitter to be the CEO. And then we're using this agency in Mexico to build the app. Yeah, we're the next big thing. That doesn't fly. And guess what?

It worked. Dude, we got to go in a quick story tangent. That's kind of what this whole first half is going to be, I guess. But there's this guy named Scott Belski. I'm friends with them or I used to be a little friends with them. I haven't talked to him in a while, but do you know Scott? Yeah, I like him a lot.

I like to think of friends with them. The reality is I've talked to him twice. Yeah, friendly with him. He invested in my company and I'm hung out with him once or twice. He doesn't know this, but he's kind of like, I'm his secret admirer. Like, he's like this like good looking, handsome dude who dresses nice, is nice and seems like really wealthy and rich. And like, I like, and I see him, I'm like, dude, you are the best.

And I've talked to him. If you have $10 million at a jawline, Jess is all in. Sam is all in. Yeah. Yeah, definitely all in. So, like, I love this guy. And he's great. So basically, I got to tell you a quick Scott Belski story.

So right now, he's like an executive at Adobe, but not just like an executive. I'm pretty sure he's like in line to be CEO. And a lot of people don't realize this. Adobe is one of like the 30th largest companies in the world. I think their market cap is like $300, $400 billion. And Scott Belski is, he's pretty young. He's in his early 40s. And he, I cold email them to invest in the hustle.

And that's how I became friends with him. And I met with him one time. And he goes, yeah, so like when I was 26 years old, I was starting my company called Behance. So Behance is basically, it's Behance and Dribble are like the two companies where you go online and designers can host their portfolio and kind of talk to one another. And he was like, I was just starting this company. And in my head, I knew he worked at Goldman. And I knew that he was from like a wealthy, like Jewish family. I think his father started like Kaplan, you know, Kaplan University.

No way. Yeah. And so I was like stereotyping him as, oh, you guys just, you. you had everything handed to him. And like, you told me a few stories where I was like, oh, you actually, like, it's not exactly how it seems from the outside. And he said, I left Goldman and I was making 90 grand a year there. And when I left, I had like 50 or 60,000 saved. I started Behance. It didn't go very well. And we bootstrapped it. And I noticed that with Behance, we were getting a lot of traffic from two different websites. The first was called

Stumble upon. And people and designers would post school designs and we would get traffic from stumble upon. And the second was a small company called Pinterest. And I emailed both these guys, And this was, I forget what year, 2011, 2010. He goes, I emailed these guys. I go, hey, you guys are studying us like hundreds of people a day, which for us at the time was a lot of people. What are these websites? And this guy, Ben told me about this website called Pinterest. And then this guy named Garrett told me about Stumble upon.

And Ben was like, hey, I'm going to raise a little bit of money. Do you want to invest? It's a $3 million valuation. And Scott was like, dude, I only have like 50 grand. And but I don't want to look like a noob to this guy. Whatever, I'll invest $15,000. And that's a big deal to me. And then Garrett was like, hey, my friend and I,

are starting this other thing. None of us are going to work there because I'm too busy running some upon, but it's basically like a car service. And Scott was like, I don't want to invest in a limo company. Like, there's no way a limo company's going to take off. But like I don't want to look like an idiot. This guy's been sending me some traffic. And I kind of want to like appear a little bit like a big shot. And so he gave him $15,000, I think at a $3.5 million valuation. And he did both of these in the span, I think of about two weeks. So he's like, I basically had like 50 or 60 grand in my checking account at the time. My startup that I was bootchraping was only. doing okay. It wasn't making much profit. And I was doing consulting on the side to pay the bills.

But my wife was like angry at me. But I gave them each $15,000. Fast forward. However many years, they both went public around the sameish time. And I remember sending him something to his house. And he sent me his address. And I remember the address being this like really fancy town home. And I looked it up and I was like doing the math. And I'm pretty sure each of these $15,000 checks turned into around $50 to $100 million each inside a span of like, You all have to look up when they went public, but they almost went public right around the same time. And he gave them money each at the same time. And another thing a lot of people don't know is Behance, his company sold, I think, for $175 million. And I think he owned, he told me around 70% of it. He owned the majority of it. And so this guy has just knocked it out the park over it, over and over again. And a lot of it came because of Uber and Pinterest early on. And he was like, I don't think these are that good ideas, but I just, I don't want to look silly. that's an amazing story i love that story it reminds me i uh i just got a dm from this guy by the way this is nowhere near related i'm not trying to compare apples to apples here it's very hard to

have a story that compares to uber and pinterest but uh there's a guy who i don't know maybe six months ago or nine months ago something like that i was like getting kind of interested in the like a i stuff about like you know this is basically artificial intelligence i can create art and things like that. And I'd said something offhand on the pod. So somebody reached out and they were like, hey, you know, heard you're interested in this. I'm trying to make apps that will do this. We just released our first one.

I want to see what you think about it. And, you know, we're raising a little bit of money. We'd love to see if you want to invest. Never replied. I go, I get another DM or no, I see somebody mentioned this app and I go, I go click on the founder and I click the DM. I'm, oh, this guy DM me a while back saying, I invest. I should, I should see how it's going.

So I go, hey, how's the biz going? I'll share it to each other. Hey, how's the biz going? And he goes, good, man, good. Yeah, that app I really ended up releasing it's been downloaded 120 million times. And then I released another one. And it's also been downloaded like 100 million times. And, yeah, it's really, it's going really well, man.

How are you? Oh, my God. I'm currently walking off of a cliff because I never responded to that initial DM. You were, I was like, well, I recently switched from Trader Joe's to Whole Foods, I've been tickering with that. I just did by 401K match. Yeah. Fascinating. You shouldn't have probably not much, you.

That's crazy. I want to share one other story that's kind of related to the do things that don't scale. This is something I actually learned from those guys Dylan and Henry. So I'm a big fan of this, like, idea that. you have to find a way to learn from three groups of people. People that have done it before. So people have done it a bunch of times. So that's,

you know, people normally try to go learn from them, mentor type of people. People that are in the game, their peers just alongside you. That's kind of how we got to know each other. We were in a peer group, a mastermind group.

And no, we haven't made it, but like we're all trying to make it at the same time. And so we can learn a lot from each other. And then lastly is people who are just starting out in the game, am fresh, they don't know any better. And there is a certain tactic to like, A, spend time with each of those three groups. And then B, be humble enough and know how to ask the right question so that you know how to actually get advice from all three of those groups. Because if you ask

the same question to all three, you're not going to get valid information. You're not going to get the right answers from all three, right? Like the question you would ask to somebody who's been through it before and the things you should talk to them about are different than the ones that you should talk to your buddy who's going through it right now and the 19 year old who just, just graduated from college, you can't ask the same question. So I tell you something that the sort of the 19, 21 year old or whatever, I don't know how old they were at the time, maybe 21, 22. Dylan and Henry, they were fans of the pod.

Then they offered to come help us with our video setups at the time. Well, and previously they were fans of the pod and they would chop up clips for us and shared on social media and a lot of their videos were beautiful, awesome, and they just brute force their way to having a relationship with us. Exactly. And that became a full-on agency that does, pretty well. They did it for us. Then they did it for the All-In podcast. They did it for a bunch. And so people kind of know them now. But at the time, nobody really knew who they were. They were just guys who just graduated from college. They had their own podcast, which was kind of

like ours. But you can go look at the views. Nobody watches the thing. But that's okay. Like, you know, it's most podcasts nobody listens to, especially ones by guys who just graduated from college. But they flew out to our house there and they were installing the like kind of studio set up in my garage at the time. And, and I went out there as a Like, you guys need some water? You guys are like, you guys are right? You guys, have you guys eating anything? I was like kind of like parenting them.

I was like, you know, are you guys okay? What are you doing here? And so I went out there and I started shooting the shit with them. I was talking to them. And I was like, give me advice. Like if I was your friend and I'm like, you guys got a podcast, that's pretty cool. Like most people you're raised don't have a podcast. Like, what do you, what's y'all strategy?

What are you trying to do? Why are you trying to do it? What are you trying to do? And I was like, explain it to me like I was your buddy. And they're like, well, um, You know, we kind of, we like podcasting. It's fun. So that's why we do it.

The second thing is, um, we just think that like making content, like we don't have money to go advertise. We don't have like, we don't have connections that we could just go knock on a door and get into some, get distribution somewhere. So like content is our only chance. So we just wanted to get good at content.

The best way to get good is just doing a bunch. I was like, all right, it's another smart thing. And I go, but nobody's watching your shit, right? So like, is it even working? It's kind of like what you're saying about this band thing.

Like, does this even work? Like this is cool. it's interesting, but is this valuable? Like, is this actually going to work? Yeah. And he goes, oh, I'm just wait. He goes, nobody watches it today.

He goes, but someday, if we start to get people to watch, there is now a library. He goes, we call it our binge bank. It's a place where you can go and you can binge Dylan and Henry. And I was like, what? And he's like, yeah, basically we just want to have a rabbit hole for you to go down. Because if anybody ever gets, like today, nobody's interested. but if people ever get interested, I want to have this bank of content

that they can go binge and sure enough, after like, you know, 45 minutes down this rabbit hole, you're going to walk out being like, I think I love these guys. I feel like I know these guys

and I want to hang out or work with these guys. And I heard that. I was like, that's really fucking smart. I was like, that's the way to think about content. Because most content

doesn't just like immediately hit and blow up, but you want to have this. And I thought about it because I was like, there are several people who I've gone down that rabbit, whole with and I've come out with that same exact conclusion after a 45 minute dig. You do this all the time.

Like you discover somebody, you go read everything there is about them. You go read their old blog. You watch their old talks and you come out. You've been like, this guy is awesome. This girl is amazing. And they had to create that like library of themselves, that personal library to go and let you binge. And I thought about it because you know the band like the guy McElmore, the like the famous

rapper guy? I remember maybe 10 years ago now. me and my buddy Trevor, we started like, we like found his one of his songs. And we were like, oh, this guy's cool. Who is this guy? And he had a binge bank. He had these vlogs he was doing on YouTube of him like trying to make it as a rapper.

It'd be like, we're going to doing this show at this small college in Wichita. Oh, we like, we're wait every day right now. We're waking up at this time. We're trying to record in the studio because we suck it. Create the creative process. We're just trying to train ourselves, right? They were just like just kind of sharing along the way. And we watched this stuff.

And we were like, I remember these videos. had less than a thousand views. There were like 700 views on YouTube at the time. Like I just went back and looked at it. Now those have each like millions or like close to a million views each on those videos. At the time, less than a thousand. And we became super fans of this guy. Why?

Because it's fun to be early. We liked what they were all about. And we felt like the quality of content was like higher than the views. And so that made it for like an exciting. It's like we found a treasure. Dude, people say that in our comments on YouTube. Like, oh, I'm like I'm surprised. this bigger or like I'm happy to be here before. Yeah, they're like, they're like, I'm happy.

We're catching it. Yeah. And that definitely gives me encouragement. It makes me happy. But yeah, people say that and are you little do they know that like our podcast has like 10 times more downloads. So they're like, oh, this little shitty podcast only has 10,000 videos on this thing or 10,000 views on this thing. And I'm like, yeah, we suck. Sure. Please, sure, please. But I'm a big fan of this binge bank concept. Once I, once I, once I said that, clicked with me. I started think about our stuff that way. And then also I started remembering, yeah, there's actually a bunch of people who I've gone down there rabbit hole. And like, and actually there could be like a product that's like this. I know YouTube is kind of structured

this way, but I kind of wish that you could just have a thing, which is like your greatest hits. It's like, yo, if you, if you're kind of interested in me, this is the curated rabbit hole. So this is my tweet that went viral. This is this video. This was the first thing I ever made. This was, you know, this blog post I wrote back in the day. It was kind of stupid, but like, you know, It captured how I was thinking at the time. I have two tools that I use regularly, and I'm paying subscribers of. The first, do you read a lot of biographies? No, none.

So I read a ton of biographies. Yeah, I read a ton of biographies. So any biography that talks about a person who is a little bit pre-Internet era, I'm a subscriber of newspapers.com, which has aggregated like every newspaper ever. So, like, for example, I was reading a biography about Dan Gilbert or something about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Rocket Mortgage, I think it's called, the guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers or, I forget, he owns everything. And so, like, his company got, it was called Rock Financial originally. His company got popular in the 90s. And so I just Google rock financial,

Dan Gilbert set newspapers.com to 1985. I knew that's when he started to 1990. And then went public in 92. So I was like, I'm going to find everything. I read all of these articles about him before he was like, it was like really like he was in the making at that point. And so that's like my favorite tool is newspapers.com. The second one for anything that's internet related is web archive. So like whenever I talk to anyone who's like popular on the internet, I go and look back at right when they started, I like to look at their old websites. And you could like see the trend and you can see the trajectory. And that starts, that teaches me a little bit about patterns and like, all right, it's okay. And it also makes me feel like, all right, it's okay to be shitty even at this size. It's okay to be

only okay around this size. You know what I mean? Totally. Totally. Totally. Yeah. You go. look at early startup landing pages. I have a blog post about this actually, like 10 throwback landing pages. And it's like, go look at the first version of Airbnb, of Uber, of Snapchat, of all these things. And then you'll be like, oh, why are we trying to perfect this before

lunch? Like, if you could start there and end up where these guys did, like I can start wherever the hell I am now and launch it and then make it better over time. Do you, uh, you want to go to a, can I, let me, let me bring up one. So, yeah, this, this guy DM to me. and I found his YouTube video and it was really amazing.

So basically, this has got me thinking on this whole topic, but in 2014, this guy graduated from Stanford and he got five job offers. And he did this video that he goes, here's the offers that I got in 2014 and here's what happened. And here's like how like this story played out. So in the video, it's really great. So actually, it looks like someone's highlighting the video. What's his name?

How do people find this? His name's Rahul. So if you Google like Rahul, tech. Ponday, P-A-N-D-E-Y. Yeah, so you Google that or just like Rahul and then like tech jobs, and I bet you it will come up. So basically, I'm going to summarize it, but here, the video is great, but here's basically the offers that he got. So the offers that he got from Twitter with a combination of stock and salary was 190,000. With a combination of stock and cash, his Facebook offer was $200,000 a year.

His Microsoft one was around also $200,000 a year. his square one around $160,000 a year. And this is both a combination of stock equity and sign-up bonus. And his Google one was $250,000 a year. Now, fast forward, eight years, what would that stock plus cash be worth? So basically the stock, the cash is mostly stagnant. I think he added like an 8% annual growth. The stock, he looks at what it grew since then.

So his Twitter comp, fast forward, it would almost be the same because their stock hasn't grown. His Facebook stock, it actually, would have gone a lot higher, but right now Facebook's stock is down a ton. And so his Facebook's first year comp went from 200 to 220. His Microsoft comp, it started at 200. If you fast forward today, it would be worth around $300,000 a year. Now, here's where things get interesting. His square stuff, and he was only 22 when he graduated or something like that. And his first year's salary and comp back then would be $160,000. Fast forward, the stock is now worth $580,000. And his Google stuff was worth $250,000 a year, now worth almost $700,000 a year.

And keep in mind, so here's a few takeaways from this. The first takeaway. He said this funny thing in the video. He goes, Square offered me something that I didn't think was any good because the recruiter said, you know, if Square one day becomes a $7 billion company, the stock that we're offering you now, it's only worth $100,000 over four years. It could be worth $400,000. But he goes, I'm really doubtful that Square,

will ever be a $7 billion company. Now it's worth $50 billion and it's down right now. I think at its peak it was $70 billion. So the thing that is really hard to understand is that everything at the time, most things seem expensive. And the reason why things seem expensive is because exponential growth is incredibly challenging to understand. So if I tell you that something is going to grow at 7% a year every single year, that's actually kind of hard to understand. But what that means is going to double every 10 years. If it's going to grow, if it's going to grow at 30% a year, which a lot of these tech companies are, that means it's going to double, I think, every two or three years. And exponential growth is really hard to understand. Another thing that is really interesting is

leveraging offers and negotiating is very possible, even if you're a 22, 22, 23, 24-year-old. And so you always do better when you have another offer in hand and you play them off one another. And finally, the most important thing for people listening, employees at tech company, 100% can get meaningfully rich. And people don't talk about that enough because it's a fairly safe way if you are good enough. It's a high bar. If you are good enough to get, but it's still like a million plus jobs if you add together fang or around there. And they hire tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a year. So it's not like that coveted. But if you can get a job at one of these tech companies, and I'm talking about a tech company that's growing quickly and has at least

a thousand employees relatively safe. It is such a good way to build wealth in a low risk way. And the final, most important thing on top of that is now's the time. So you're talking about Square being worth like, you know, it might be worth $7 billion. I have a very small lens here, but I see what the private company valuations are. They have reset. And even better, the public companies have reset. So we have Square, Facebook, Twilio, maybe Robin Hood. I think like company like HubSpot or something like that, a coinbase, all these valuations are pretty low, if you ask me. And I think now is the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid $100,000, $300,000 a year in equity. And that could be worth potentially eight figures

in 10 years. That's really interesting and a great ad for HubSpot. Very well done. Very native. I enjoyed that one. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, Grow Better. When we were selling Bebo, we had a bunch of conversations, and then, you know, you sort of compare offers.

You're like, all right, we had, I think at the end, we ended up with three offers. We had a Facebook offer. We had the Twitch offer and we had a not papered but only because we turned it down early but he was interested in a Discord offer. And I did an exercise recently where I looked back and I said

what was I thinking then? Because I wrote it all down and how did it actually play out? And I'll be damned if I wasn't wrong on every single thing I believed. Yeah, let's walk through this. Yeah, let's go through each one. So for example, we'll start with the one that's relevant to what you're talking about, which is the stock. So basically Discord was like, look, we like you guys. We think this is cool, but there's no way we would come up with cash like

you're talking about. So it would need to be just a tiny bit of cash and then mostly stock. But like we think our stock is great. So what would, uh, let's say, let's say you walked away with a million dollars of Discord stock back then. And back then wasn't that long ago. That was four years ago. Yeah, less than four years ago, three years ago, something like that. So at the time, I went and talked to one of Discord investors. And I was like, what do you? you think about this? And they were like, well, it's real simple. Like today, let's say Discord is valued just around, you know, one and a half, two billion dollars. So let's say two billion. I think at the time Discord was valued at a billion.

And it was one billion then. And he goes, you're basically just betting that Discord can be worth five billion. If it was, if it gets to five, then this is the best offer. And if it's not going to get to five, then this is the worst offer. And so you just have to like, you know, make an educated decision about that. And I was like, in my head, I was like, like, well, I do, like, I was a big admirer of Discord. I was like, Discord is kind of amazing. The CEO at Discord Jason, he's kind of amazing. Of all the meetings that we took, I thought he was the,

he was actually the most impressive in there. And he cut straight to the chase and was like, yeah, I'll do this. No, you know, the cash is going to be small, maybe one, two, three million dollars. And then the rest will be stock. And so, you know, you guys have to, you know, is that interesting to you? And at the time, I was like, no, because that sounds really speculative and like illiquid and like I can't go buy anything cool and I can't like, the total number as valued today sounds way lower. Yeah. And in my head, I was just like, I can't do this.

Fast forward. Discord, I think, is worth about $15 billion now. So it would have been by far the best deal. So we had a million dollars. If they gave you a million dollars of stock and private valuations, that would be worth $15 million now in four years, right? Right. And we were getting more than a million dollars of stock if we had done that deal. Okay. So it was the worst deal. It would have turned out to be that. So now that there was one caveat, which is it was going to be vested. So, you know, I'd also have to spend, you know, three years earning that stock or four years earning that stock, which I didn't. I didn't. Yeah, you probably would have been fired way before that. Yeah. So, you know, one of the odds I was going to capture all that. I don't know. But like it just shows, you know, how our brain is not really like the idea of.

of Discord becoming worth $15 billion was not really, like it didn't seem very likely, but in actuality, the odds were probably in its favor, but it seemed like a very low probability thing because it just sounded big. It sounded like a big jump. It's like,

am I betting that discourse is going to become 15 times bigger than it is today? And actually, yeah, it did. Like the user base grew by two or three X, the monetization grew, the overall market grew. There's like all these different ways that you just multiply these things together

and you arrive at this private market valuation. Now, and also whatever, private markets have corrected. Maybe it's not worth as much now, but like, you know, it's hard to say. It's illiquid. Then the next one is the Facebook offer. And it's like, all right, well, Facebook's offer is higher in cash, higher in stock. But we don't know about this. We don't know exactly which stocks going to perform better.

Facebook or Amazon. They both seem like great stocks. And so then it came down to intangible factors. And we ended up ruling out Facebook for some intangible factors, which were, in retrospect, somewhat silly reasons to decide. The first was, like, Twitch was the leader in game streaming, and Facebook was like, nobody watches game streaming on Facebook at the time. And I was like, oh, man, this is just going to be like another startup.

Like, they're called Facebook, but like in this niche, they're at zero. And they're hoping that we can help them win. And like, oh, man, and we're going to be pushing a boulder up a hill. I was like, I just want to go join the Warriors and, like, go play on the winning team. Facebook just hadn't decided they were going to win yet. Yeah, exactly. And also, like, my mentor was like, that's such a stupid. way to think about this.

Like, you're going to walk into Facebook and they're going to be like, cool, game streaming's over here. And you're going to be like, actually, I'm going to wander around to this area over here. I'm going to go play in virtual reality. I'm going to go to AI. I'm going to go to, you know, news. I'm going to get, he's like, you can just walk into any other department you want and just go do that thing.

He's like, they'll forget you even exist after they hire you. Like, you're worried about what your day-to-day life is going to be like there. And like, like, you have no idea what your day-to-life is going to be like there. And he was absolutely right. By the way, have you ever been to the Facebook campus? Yeah. It's basically for those of you. Better college. The way that I describe it, it's like a mall where everything's free. So like they have like a food court and they don't have just one pizza place. They've got many pizza places. And it's one of my wife worked there and I would go and I'm like, well, this is the best thing ever. And they have restaurants like a sushi restaurant. Everything's free. They've got a ice cream place. Everything's free. They've got a woodworking shop. Everything's free. A laundry place. A barber. That's the biggest one. I was like food I expected. But when I I just saw you just walk over to this guy and get a haircut. I was like, damn, that was like, a big draw for me.

I was like, I could just, I don't have to go anywhere. It's just free. I just walk in and get a haircut. That's kind of amazing. Yeah, they're like, it's free. All you have to give us is your life. Deal? Yeah.

Did you say there's two pizza shops on games? So how much were the Facebook? So a million in Facebook back four years ago would be worth what? a million in Facebook stock would have been it's it's gone I think up 30% since then so it's like you know a million would have been 1.3 right so that's the like where the stock landed at its peak it was about double so at its peak it would have been double right so and so in that one we made the mistake of basically optimizing for really intangible things one one that seemed really tangible was like they weren't going to take our whole team and I was like oh I don't want to

like toast at the celebration party of this actually. acquisition and be like, but not you for. They didn't hire you guys. So like, uh, you know, it's been awesome. The rest of us, we're going to go. And you guys, you won't believe the recommendation letter. I'm going to write you. Right. Like that's, there's a cab money. Thanks for last night. Yeah. Exactly. So that wasn't going to feel good. Of course, as soon as we rejected them and they were like, why. And I was like, well, the team thing. They're like, dude, we would not just hired them a few months later. We just didn't have the head count yet. He's like, that's why.

And I was like, yeah, and the commute was really far down there. He's like, dude, we have an SF office. We could have got you in. I was like, also the commute, they have a bus, like a bus that basically has like a restaurant cafe like toilet, internet TV on the bus. It's not even a real commute anymore. Yeah. People on the bus complained. They're like, oh my God.

Like the line for the pedicure on the bus was so long this morning. It's like, I don't know what you're complaining about. Anyway, so we made a decision. We made it was we made a really hard decision. whatever, I ended up fine, but I guess like my point is it's really hard to forecast and predict these things and especially hard to forecast and predict what stock is going to be worth down the road. That's awesome.

So, so I have another topic that I want to go to. All right. Two quick ideas. One is around what I just talked about, predictions. So there's this company that Brandon sent me that's called Preciate taste. I don't even know what this is a horrible name. Pressy Taste. You go to presi taste.

Prci Taste.com. And it's some kind of like, basically it's a prediction engine. I don't even honestly know exactly how this works, but basically what it's doing is it's using data like cameras,

like historical trends, whatever. And what is trying to do is tell the person in the back, like how many burgers to put on the stove. Like how many fries to take out of the freezer? Because it's basically like, how can we help you predict demand?

And so this idea aside, I actually think that there's like a lot of different ways where this is really valuable. So for example, we own an e-commerce store. And we're always trying to predict like how much inventory should we order. We're ordering, you know, six to nine months in advance sometimes. And it's so hard to forecast. What's the world going to be like six months from now? It's like, oh, yeah. Turns out there was a pandemic, a war, a war, like, you know, stimmy checks that like caused everything to go up and then like everything to go down.

And then shipping broke. and like it was impossible to predict. But every better prediction saves us a lot of money. And so I actually think that there's like a whole bunch of business problems that entrepreneurs could go after that basically just help you predict how much demand there will be. There's a couple different ways you could go about this. So for example, for our ecom store, it'd be nice to know how other ecom stores are

trending. Are we all trending up, trending down by how much percent year over year in our category? Because that would kind of tell us like where the overall market demand is. Another prediction might be, you know, if I'm a restaurant, what is the foot traffic or the sort of drive-through traffic like this time of year, right? September or in this weather pattern, how much traffic should I expect today? That might tell me what I need for staffing and for, you know, food today versus any other day. And if you just think about like, if you can be smarter and cut waste like 10 to 15% in these types of businesses and these types of industries,

that's probably going to add up into like the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars per year of money saved. And so I think these businesses are very interesting. This whole like demand prediction industry is very interesting to me. Dude, I have done a ton of research in the trends predicting business. Obviously, like we have this thing called trends. And before launching that, I was like, what, what do we do? I think I told you about this years ago.

But everything I'm about to say is from years ago of research. And I'm doing it mostly off memories. I'm going to be a little bit off, but not totally off. But have you heard of this company called? WGSN. I think I told you about them. Yeah, they're the ones who like, they like say like, the color of the year is lavender and the smell of the year is like, you know, yeah, literally or whatever. But listen to this. So they're publicly traded. So these numbers are actually facts. So the 2001, sorry, 2012 revenue was 91 million pounds. It's British company. So 91 million pounds. So I don't

know what that would be. $130.30. Yeah. Yeah. Like I don't know the conversion of monopoly money to real money. But, no, 91 million pounds. Listen to their adjusted, or their EBITDA was 41 million. So basically for every dollar they made, 45 was like net income profit. And what they do is they tell you which colors are going to be popular. And I'm pretty sure the product, they only have 6,500 customers. So they're paying like 25 grand a year or something like that. And I think the product basically is a quarterly PDF that tells you what colors. they think might be popular. And I'm almost positive.

The way that they get this is they put like tablets at fashion schools and they just ask students like what they're feeling, what they're liking, things like that. So it's like they're asking fashion people. I guess the people who are like, I guess they like, like, are you a hipster? Are you a gay guy who lives in Fort Green Brooklyn? Like what like whatever you, the qualifications are for like you are, whatever you think is cool, the normies, you know, like me are going to like start wearing. You know what I'm saying? Like what I'm saying? months later. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, do you, are you an 18 year old who has 100,000 followers on TikTok?

Check. Oh, okay. So like, whatever they think there's going to be cool, that's what they, like, what they predict is going to be cool. And it's just a PDF. And a real life use case of this is like, Starbucks is going to like make a hundred thousand uniforms. Millennial pink is the new color. So therefore, let's make sure our name tags are this color. So it's a no brainer to spend $25,000 to get this like quarterly PDF as well as the ability to like DM someone who works at WG. yes, I didn't say like, which shade of green is like the thing that we should be using. And so that's an interesting business and this trend predicting space. I talked to somebody who does like a fashion company or whatever and they were like a fashion company or whatever. Yeah, as you can tell. I wear a blue shirt.

My fashion senses. It's frozen in like the third grade. I was writing cursive the last time I thought about fashion. And they were like lemons So in this year And I was like I didn't understand They were talking about

A lemon Like a fruit And they thought they were talking about like Literally like what you eat And they were like no As like a print or a pattern or a color And I was like Okay

I was like it sounds like you're just making things up They just pulled up their dashboard And they were like No like Look at the difference between like lemon And pineapple And it's like Yeah

Pipeas were everywhere recently, weren't they? It was. Pat up was a bad example, but it was like, you know, basically like you, you guys pick,

is apples hot right now? No, apples, apples are fucking out, dude. Apples are like, you know, they're so out right now. Lemons are so in.

Pineapples are so in. Lamas are so in. It's like, like a picture of a lemon on a shirt. Yeah, like a design with a lemon on it or a pattern or whatever, right?

All right. Or, or, you know, same thing with like scent and color palettes and things like that. And so, and I was like, there's no way.

I was like, this is all just like, you know, isn't this just, you know, ad agency fluff. They're just fluffing each other with these like, you know, random ass like things. And they're like, no, like this stuff is like the Bible to us. We, we need to know what people are caring about in order to do that. I don't know if it's this exact WSN or whatever. I don't know if that's the exact one. But they're like this could be concept of like knowing which colors, which sense, which, which, which styles, which, like, patterns are in. That's so exhausting.

Yeah, it sounds like a. horrible business to be in. Like, if I'm going to be in the fashion business, I'm going to be in the men's tuxedo business. That shit has not changed for literally a hundred years. Have you seen Jack and Titanic? No, not even bad, dude. I'm going straight, big and tall for men. Because literally the only criteria is like, do you fit?

Right. You fit? If you fit, you're in. If you don't fit, you're out. That's your only, I was like, that's what I like. I like a simple yes or no when it comes to fashion. It's just do you fit or not? Because I just can't find stuff that fits. Dude, fashion's exhausting. That's not a business I want to be in.

Although I do think, like, there are some brands. You know a brand freaking crushes it? And I never buy any of their stuff, though, because it's just too expensive. But a Louis Vuitton, they're like suitcases. Louis Bacon. Yeah. LP. Dude, they've crushed it for like 150, 200 years.

and it's the same-ass logo, the same colors, and it's just timeless. I do love those timeless things. They do kill it. There's like a little arbitrage going around. I don't know if you've seen this, but like a few months ago, somebody said this.

They're like, because the dollar and the euro like got to parity and the luxury stores hadn't changed the prices. So basically like things were always typically priced higher in dollars than in euros or whatever. I might get that backwards. But like you, the Louis Vuitton bag you if you were in Paris you could buy it in euros for a certain price

that same bag was selling for more that same day if you just sold it in US dollars to a US customer and in Paris you would also get the VAT refunds you'd get you basically met getting something like 30 to 35 percent under market and that was like your spread that you could then go and sell it in the United States it was like kind of crazy and so um there's like a whole businesses that are around these like the version of a drug mule so it's like you can just pay someone who's traveling to like stuff a louis Vuitton bag in their in their suitcase and bring it over for you across the border and um just because like you know going flying to europe to do this yourself it's kind of inconvenient but there's already people flying from europe to the u.s every day and so there's whole

businesses that are based around this like travel arbitrage and flippers like that i just did i just did research on one of these that i discovered it's called graber so the URL is G-R-A-B-R-D-R dot-io. So they went with like the misspelling and the dot-I-O. So you know they're really a startup. But it's a grabber.com. And their whole shick is shop anywhere, travel everywhere. I guess that's a really bad tagline.

But basically what it means is it connects you with people who are with these drug mules, these Louis Vuitton mules. It connects you with people who are going to overseas places and they'll buy shit for you and you'll give them the money. and it's like a marketplace for that. I've got the stupid example of that. There's this thing called a wicked laser because I'm like a grown-up.

I'm like... Is the wicked part just like yourself describing a standard laser or is it actually called that? I'm a 12-year-old with money. Basically, there's these... I found this laser online. This laser pointer online

that's so strong that they made it illegal in America. And if you shied something, like a piece of paper, it catches fire. And you can't have it because it reaches jets in the air. And it's a Chinese company. And obviously I saw this laser and it's a $300 laser, but you could only ship it to someone in Canada. And I'm like, I want a laser that can light shit on fire. Like, why do you not want that?

That will go perfect in my collection of like tasers, this one laser. I have a BB gun. A blazer. A blazer for Ben's Warehouse, a taser, and my laser. So I had to find someone who would buy this in China for me and get it from Canada to America for my $300 laser. Wow. You should go work at grabber.io. That's what you should go do.

Yeah. We're just going to sponsor. every in-cell, like, sub-reddit. Like, do you like lasers? Tired of not getting your laser? Tired of driving to Canada for your favorite lasers. Use grab her. Someone will grab it for you and bring it to you.

You're a 12-year-old with money. This is so stupid. I saw this TikTok, speaking of cool lasers. I saw this TikTok of a laser pointer that somebody was in their bed and they're pointing it at their light switch and they go, watch this. And they just held it on the light switch. go, and it applied just enough pressure to let's just turn it off.

And I'm like, this is not real. I was like, I don't know how this is edited. But I was like, the comments were like, bro, it's not real, but like, how does it work? Is it? Is it? How does that work, though? I know this one isn't real, but could it happen?

Because imagine not having to get out of your bed to turn your light off at night, just grabbing your laser pointer off the bedstand and turning your light off. That's, dude, so just imagine. an Instagram ad where you see a guy go, watch this, and he shines something across the room, and it lights it on fire. That's what I got called with these wicked lasers.

Wait, so how did the light switch go down? No, man, I never got to the bottom of it. I liked and followed to find out for Part 2. They got me. They said if I didn't forward that, that take back to 10 people, my family would die of lasers.

I had to do it. Oh, my God. stupid. I want to tell you about another thing that's kind of interesting. So, you know, like, I think you met up with this guy. I think his name, he's like strip mall guy on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. I know his real identity. I'm one of the few people. Yeah. No, well, strip ball guy is his fake name supposed to be Trent? No, there's another guy who's real street. Maybe they're two different guys. I think strip ball. Real estate Trent and strip mall and strip mall guy. Yeah, I met up with the strip mall guy and we became friends. And so I have to make sure I don't accidentally say his name.

so one of those guys i forgot which one now sorry uh tweeted about private security it caught my eye because he goes uh man private security is booming right now i know so many car like i've seen so many cops who retired and um are just doing this because it's better money and i was like what like okay tell me more and so um and so i started looking into this and basically very very very very briefly but do you know much about this like private security uh like you know like you know like trend or industry. I know that we used to hire them for our events because the insurance made you have one. And you and I had a buddy who we knew, or a friend of a friend who started a security business.

He started like an Uber for bodyguards, right? Did it work? No, that one failed, but he tried to make it like sexy. It's like he just needed to do it, not sexy. So basically, okay, so there's some big players in this thing. So private security, so there's companies like Securitas or if you just go to AUS.com, it's allied universal security, which I think is like. Those are multi-billion-dollar companies.

Yeah, so one's 11 billion. The other one's seven billion. I think they do everything from like mall cops to airports to events to whatever else. But like it goes like smaller and smaller and more niche like down as you go like corporate security. So for example, I remember when I was at working at a company, I saw on the CEO's calendar a meeting that was like with like the private security detail to go over like the latest updates to the private security. I was like, you got private security? It's like, well, yeah, like, you know, it's worth, rich, worth a lot. Like, you know, like, I'm worth a lot to this company.

So the company literally pays for private security for the executives to be able to, you know, to go out and do their thing and be safe. And so I found this kind of interesting. And it makes it like, it makes sense to me. And it makes sense to me that there's like a private world out there for kind of like retired either army, military or police. That might be higher paying and potentially, you know, an easier job than what they're doing today. Who are the executives that had security?

I don't want to say, but. But which company? Did you say the company? I didn't hear you. No, because that would be easy to figure out at that point. Yeah, I, you know, like Zuckerberg and Bezos, they release what their security budget is each year. And I think Bezos was $6 million, which is to me not a lot of money. money.

Right? For Facebook, they said last year, 26 million was spent on Zuckerberg and his family, which was 6% higher than in 2020. So that's kind of crazy, right? 26 million just on his personal security. You know how many people work for the Secret Service? No.

6,000. You know how many people they protect? Yeah, you know how many people they protect? 25, 25 people. Spoken like a man who owns a taser. and a laser to know. I met a secret service agent at a wedding this weekend. And I just asked them everything.

I go, tell me everything. And I, you know, they couldn't tell me anything, really. I was going to say pretty shitty secret service guy. He's like,

big fan of the pot. Happy to share. They just read out the Wikipedia to me. But like, it was pretty interesting. That's cool. No, I don't know anything about security,

but I think it's, but I think it's interesting. Speaking of TikTok, there was a TikTok of a guy who saw, Jeff Bezos on the corner in Seattle just like waiting to cross the street. And he's just like, hey, Jeff. And he like had his TikTok recording or whatever. And he's like, you know, how's it going today?

What he's like going fantastic? And he's like, you know, he's ready to like walk across street. And they go and somebody in the comments was like, the top comment was like, check out the hand of the security guy. And you look and he had basically a false, I think it was like a false hand. And his, basically his real hand is like in his pocket, like probably holding a gun or a taser or some kind of weapon. And he just had like a kind of a fake hand.

out. And I saw that. I was like, that's awesome. That's awesome. Dude, you know what's even weirder is there was a, I'm a UFC superfan. There was a fight backstage amongst the UFC fighters and security got involved. And I kept wondering, who the fuck is doing

UFC security that keep the UFC fighters from not fighting each other? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, what what that's that bad job are they getting him to? You know what I mean? Like, they just see like something happening and like, what are you going to do? Well, you saw the woman that Dana White hired, the Best Buy lady.

Did you see this? Yeah, she was a football player. She, like, kept the woman, or someone was trying to rob the Best Buy, and she, like, got down low in like an O line. Like, it was, like, pushing her out of the way. Yeah, the robber was trying to run out the store, and the security guard from Best Buy just starts blocking this person from getting this guy from getting out. And he's like, he's desperately trying to get out because he can't just be, like, stealing

and just get caught inside the store. And she just ends up tackling him into, like, a bunch of boxes. She gets fired from Best Buy because Best Buy is like, hey, liability, you attacked somebody in our store. And she's like, oh, my God, I'm doing my job. I'm a security guard at Best Buy. What did you want me to do? And Dana White was like, that's bullshit. Like, he went on Instagram, was like, who is this woman?

I want to hire her. And she's like, now he's like personal security guard or something like that. Like she works with them. Really? Yeah. Dude, I always see those guys. And I'm like, who, like, you need like an Israeli trained like secret service agent to like, I mean, who are you going to have? to protect a UFC fighter from hitting another UFC fighter.

It's all the ex-Jerry Springer security guards. They have years of experience breaking this up. This episode is really good enough of a tangent. But do you remember how, remember Steve, the security guard from Jerry Spinger? He was like, yeah, he has a TV show. Probably like the top earner on Cameo right now. Yeah. He's actually Kevin from the office or Gilbert Godfroid.

Oh, shoot. I think Gilbert just died actually. RIP, but whatever. I guess that Did you know that DMX died? Yeah, dude. I saw that. You treated out.

Why didn't you tell me? You knew this information. You went, held it? That reminds me of when Dave Chappelle. You know I don't leave my house. Dave Chappelle was talking about like celebrities and how it's weird. They talked to them during tragedies. And he's like, just imagine like 9-11 and Jha Rule was like being interviewed actually.

And they're like, what? You know, we need Jha right now to make sense of this tragedy. Where's Jha? Where's Jha? Someone go give me Jha. We need Jha to make sense of this strategy, this tragedy. That's like you're wondering like, why didn't anyone fill me in that the DMX had passed? But yeah, he's dead.

By the way, did you see this, this blog post? We'll close on this little last random thing. But check out this blog post. So this guy listened to the episode that we did with Rob Deerdeck, which is probably, I don't know, if not the most possible. episode we did, one of the most popular episodes we've done, people love that one of the things that Rob, one of the reasons people love it is because it turns out the kind of fun-loving skater guy from MTV, like, turns out he's like an absolute nut when it comes to personal productivity

and like personal efficiency. His quote on there was, I am human optimization. And one of the things he had said was that he writes his wife a handwritten note every day. And so this guy wrote this blog post. It was like the top post on Hacker News over the weekend. And it's called write a note to your spouse every day. A note a day keeps the divorce attorney away. And he goes, I was listening to my first million. And Rob Deerdeck was on there. He says that he writes a note to his wife every day because sometimes otherwise she would be the last person to hear from him at the end of the day about what he was working on, how he's feeling. He was usually tired by then and wasn't really giving it his A plus. So he goes, for the last six months, I wrote a note to my wife every single day.

He goes, all right, that's a lie. You know, I did it most days, but like whatever. here's how it went and he goes it's amazing like we're on the same page about like what's going on in our lives our kids our finances how we're spending our time we talk more than ever now um you know we have more trust we feel less stressed we're less aggravated with each other and like we're better parents because we're kind of like more in communication with ourselves um about parenting and he goes you know here's why writing is thinking so just writing helped me clear my mind it wasn't just me dumping my thoughts under her it was me like getting my own mind clear and he gives this outline. He goes, here's what I write. First, I write gratitude, like something about

her, you know, for her, for how hard she works, for her looks, whatever. Then what I'm working on today and like my goals or my deadlines, anything I'm excited about, anything that's bothering me, any ideas I have, just like random ideas on my head about parenting or fixing stuff around the house. Transactional stuff, like, oh, we need to remember to do this. We have to do this. Don't forget that. Questions like, hey, are we going to that thing? Or, hey, do we ever book that? you know, hey, do we have an event coming up? And lastly, again, gratitude for the life we have, the things we have, the time we have, the kids we have, etc. I don't do all these sections every day, but those are the general categories of things I try to write.

It takes me just about 30 minutes if I'm not distracted. And, you know, it's been a huge, like, win for me. Is it like a physical note or an email? I think it's a physical note. Not 100% sure. I guess I should start doing this. That sounds pretty cool, right? And then he did this YouTube video with his wife, like, where they both, like,

about afterwards because the post blew up on Hacker News. It got like probably 100,000 views or something like that. So then they like did an interview together like talking about this little habit. Pretty cool, right? Yeah, this is awesome. I just DM him while you're talking saying this is amazing. And this is a really good headline. Write a note to your spouse every day. A note a day keeps a divorce attorney away. This is a really good title. This is a beautiful fine. I think, I guess I'll start doing this, right? This is pretty simple. It sounds smart. Maybe I'll start by talking to her.

Then I'll start. No, that seems like a no-brainer. I'm like reading this and I'm like, huh, all upside. Pretty much no downside. Why am I not doing this? Right? Good for me. How can I wheeze a lot of doing this?

Sorry, my brain's not coming up with any valid reason not to do this. No, like the calculations are like going in my head. I'm like, huh. Yeah, I guess I'll... You seem like a good husband. You probably already do this. You probably leave a sticky note on her pillow every morning. No, not at all.

As I was reading it, same thing, I was like, why would I not do this? It seems really obvious, but apparently no one does it. Except Rob Bearder. Husbands, one episode at a time. I feel like we had to leave him with something useful because we definitely got off on, like, you know, a tangent's tangent during this episode. Dude, it worked for Rob. I mean, Rob is, like, successful. Have you seen his wife?

I mean, she's very beautiful. I'm pretty sure she was like a playmate. mate, like a, like a, I don't know what the word is, playboy model or something. I mean, she's like, uh, pretty seems pretty amazing. Yeah. I'm definitely doing this now. Yeah. I, yeah, I guess I'll do that.

Why this guy writes so many words? Put a picture up to be done. Well, anyhow, it's like, if you Google, here's one of the ways that I knew that Rob was like crazy rich. If you Google Rob Deerick home, there's like 13 different articles. and it's like all about like a different like 10 million dollar house. Did you mean homes?

Did you mean mansions? Yeah. And he buys all these houses. And he seems happy. He's got his act together. So yeah, I'm on board. I guess I guess I'll do this.

Fine. All right. We're out.