TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #536: Living On Principles with Anthony Constantino

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Marty sits down with Anthony Constantino to discuss Sticker Mule, the dehumanization of Trump supporters, and poisonous social media. Anthony on Twitter: https://x.com/ac132 0:00 - Intro 1:22 - The story of Sticker Mule 8:27 - Manufacturing in the US 13:41 - Media control during Covid 16:09 - River & Bitkey 17:25 - 2020 was an alien world 20:14 - Demonization of Trump and his supporters 24:29 - Impotent cancellation 28:00 - Gradually, Then Suddenly & Bitkey 29:37 - Bringing civility back 32:24 - Assumptions and narrative vs real people 34:08 - Trump haters punching down 37:15 - Failure of ESG and "woke capitalism" 41:55 - Sticker Mule's plans 45:50 - A earlier era's perspective on social media 50:48 - Sticker Mule's structure and principles 55:00 - Advice for starting a business Shoutout to our sponsors: River https://river.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Gradually, Then Suddenly https://thesaifhouse.com/gradually TFTC Merch is Available Shop Now: https://merch.tftc.io Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://tftc.io/podcasts/

we get constant requests for people to add bitcoin at checkout and i think it'll be great for our store owners right to get additional conversion boost i had the fortunate experience of getting canceled i was one of the first people to get canceled in 2016. i don't particularly you know have a lot of respect for jack dorsey twitter really pushed a really inaccurate perspective on life when they say like trump's wrong like these are the types of errors he'll make where he'll be 99.9 right and then like they'll find like the one exception to what he said and they'll be like oh he lied about this so what advice would you give to anybody out there thinking about starting a business uh you know number one principle is

this rip of tftc was brought to you by river it's the best place to buy bitcoin go to river.com slash tftc and enjoy this episode you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Anthony, thank you for joining us, sir. Happy to be here. well uh i'm a happy customer like i was saying it's uh we got put in touch by uh somebody's been on the show and and thought that i have should have you on after uh the saga that you've been on since uh july of this year vocalizing your support of donald trump uh after somebody tried to take his life in the beginning of july but uh i was happy that this individual put us in touch um saying this individual because i'm not sure if he wants to uh be public that we're

introduce he introduced us but um i'm sticking real customer we had like i was telling you we had a boxing tape that we that we used to send out tftc merch and i think before we dive into what the last couple of months have been like for you individually i'm really fascinated to learn what's what it's been like building sticker mule a highly successful private business over the last 14 years you guys are everywhere yeah i got a little bit of a different background um i say like i'm old-fashioned because uh you know first of all i'm privately owned which i guess is an old-fashioned way of doing things like not too many people do it that way anymore but uh you know the other thing my co-founder is in his 80s now and he was in his 70s when we started and you

know we had a crazy story where he actually got through his whole career without ever using a computer and then uh just before christmas 2010 he had his first computer he was asking me for help on it and i just started bsing about starting an internet company and he said to me what the people even do on the internet and so uh you know i showed him a few websites one was called cafe press another one's called zazzle both of them are still alive today and uh he said good night and i thought nothing was going to come of it but he came and saw me the next day at nine in the morning with a notepad in his hand and he said we got to start an internet company and we were launched we launched three months later and it's been a wild ride ever since we got like 14 or i

don't know we got 15 or 20 orders the first day and uh yeah it just took off right away and it's been crazy ever since and now we're uh 1200 people in 39 countries and uh it's been it's been a fun time how did you decide on sticker mule that particular product that particular internet company yeah so like i got from my co-founder but i guess like one of my principles we got we run the company on principles i guess i run my life on principles but like one of my number one principles is uh move quickly and so i just said internet company um he had a manufacturing background i i like you know i grew up in a manufacturing town i had a bit of a manufacturing background myself so we wanted to do some sort of manufactured product but uh believe it or not

you know the internet was yeah it was different back then like we we hired um a firm that was uh they were building an open source version of shopify i don't know how technically oriented your audience but we were building an open source version of shopify and believe it or not they had their phone number on our website so i called them and said you know we want your help to build an internet company and they said what do you want to sell we said we have no idea and he said what's your budget? Yeah. He said, what's your budget? And I had a, you know, I had a 70 some year old co-founder who interjected and you can tell he's older on the phone. And he said something along the lines of, uh, we've never done anything on the internet before. We were hoping you could

advise us as to what cost expectations would be, you know, so you can tell right away it's an older person because you know, it's an older way of speaking. And, and so he said, uh, geez, I gotta be honest. Like, you know, the internet tech world's hot right now. And, um, a lot of, you know, weirdos are calling us and you guys sound like a bunch of weirdos. I don't think I want to work with you. And before I could hang up the call, my co-founder looked at me and, you know, he gave me a nod and I said, well, we could spend a hundred thousand dollars. And, um, the guy said, you know, I'm free next week. Why don't you come down to DC and meet with me? So we went and met with him and, uh, he said, uh, I gotta be honest. I really like you guys. I still think you're

weirdos, but, uh, I really like you guys. And, uh, you know, I want to get started right away. Could you please go home and decide what the hell you want to sell? So we went back and we had a few things around. I want to do, uh, you know, if I like, you know, humor and I thought animal names were funny so we just you know we started matching products and animals and sticker mill sounded good so we went with that and um yeah we went with that and i give the guy a lot of credit to this day uh we we gave him a hundred thousand dollar number as a budget and he built the whole thing for 50 grand so um he ended up getting acquired by first data for i think a sizable amount of money so hopefully he's doing good still too but uh well yeah i give him a lot

of credit you know not that many people would hear 100 grand and only take 50 most people would hear 100 grand and take two or 300 all right i mean it's 2010 is like an incredible time to launch an internet business you had the really emergence of popular social media twitter facebook really getting their legs under them obviously instagram will come later uh and so what was it like scaling the business at that time and yes people were like how did you fund it and how did you grow it we never accepted VC you know we never accepted venture money in fact my my co-founder exited so my co-founders exited I ended up being the uh sole owner and um people asked how do we do it and I I don't like particularly I haven't particularly liked uh Jack Dorsey ended up

not really liking Twitter um you know because it really morphed into something that was pretty nasty like people appropriately called it a a weapon and until like Elon stepped in I guess you know it was it really was a weapon to uh that was used to attack people particularly people that uh didn't agree with way and the way people in san francisco think but um anyways i got to give a lot of credit to twitter because we were about i don't know it was our first year in business and somebody that was running a startup went on twitter and said i'm looking for a vendor and and uh we wrote them and they wrote back i think i think the tweet was uh sticker sticker mill wins our business fastest response and best website and so um we ended up getting uh this uh a company

called get glue and um they were trying to compete with nielsen's and they were giving away stickers to fund um to get people to use the app so like you would check in to admit you were watching shows and you would win a sticker for that show and uh they ended up spending like oh you know about a million dollars a year in stickers without so they you know so anyways they uh they they funded all of our you know right off the bat we got this in fact the other account we got which was crazy before we even launched um the guy that built our website for 50 grand put me in touch with the uh tom from from github and we ended up acquiring github as an account so yeah right off the bat we got you know two major accounts github and this one called get glue who uh i think they

spent all their vc money with us so um uh yeah i owe twitter and jack dorsey a debt of gratitude even though i don't particularly you know have a lot of respect for jack dorsey jack is a personal friend i think uh if you two sat down and talked he'd uh uh get to understand him a bit better but no i think that's like the the whole timing of this the time that you launched and then you had like the vc funded startups like merch is like a big part of like if you i'm in a bitcoin co-working space right now if you go outside i bet there's more than a thousand stickers that were most likely bought from sticker mule just hanging around different companies trying to show where i have a bag here yeah i know i have a bag of uh stickers here most likely from sticker muse

as well like sticker mule excuse me but uh the uh you know like digging into this dude like what was it like like getting these these partnerships within these like distribution avenues building that out you said you're in 39 countries 1200 employees countries what i mean is um people think like what i mean is we got 30 we got employees in 39 countries so it's kind of funny related to the trump thing like we started the company i'm from a small town upstate new york called amsterdam new york and uh there's not a lot of talent here you know technical talent particularly so our first developer was from england and then i just you know i was like before the word remote like people call it like remote first or whatever like whatever before

this was a thing i just started hiring people and um you know we quickly got up to like people from six or seven countries and then it just sort of became fun to uh just be like well you know we would joke we already got somebody in ireland we can't hire another person there so we just kept you know hiring talent from all different countries and uh you know we're up to employees in 39 countries now but um yeah distribution is worldwide so we ship worldwide and we we do manufacturing actually in italy so we got manufacturing upstate new york south carolina and uh in italy and i think other than other than really elon i think you know i'm probably the only um which also makes me a little bit different i see the world a little differently

it's um you know probably the only manufacturing person manufacturing guy intact there's not too many um manufacturing oriented tech tech ceos so we got a team of 100 engineers that build the you know technical infrastructure for us and then we got um yeah a sizable manufacturing operation yeah the uh it's manufacturing something that desperately needs to be brought back to this country i mean that's something we talk a lot about on this podcast being bitcoin focused that is um i feel like we have it right outside of the studio here fix the money fix the world if you like dig into the hollowing out of the manufacturing base in this country it's really because we need the flood the global markets with dollars and um to do that he needs to go to china

and say hey why don't you make stuff for us we'll give you dollars um to drive demand for dollars meanwhile of kicking out all the manufacturers and in in the rust belt and has led us into a very precarious situation so it's great to see that you're principled and building in america Yeah. So believe it or not, it's actually like advantageous to do manufacturing American. It's not that hard. You know, I don't know why more people don't do it, but I think like I said, most of the technical talent, most of the technical talent is going towards the software world. You know, there's not many people like that are technically oriented thinking about manufacturing situations. But if you know, if you throw technical talent

at manufacturing, believe it or not, people don't like, you know, I just recently started sharing this, but we got technical people working, you know, software people working and automate our backend systems. We also have a sizable hardware engineering team. And when you get to a significant scale in manufacturing, you kind of have to go out and buy your own or build your own equipment. Like this isn't something many people do.

I mean, the only other person sort of doing this to my knowledge is, I'm sure Elon's building a lot of his own equipment for what he does. I think he had built probably, yeah, probably had to build all of his own equipment to do something totally new. But yeah, in manufacturing in general,

most people are buying equipment off the shelf and trying to make it work. but if people put more technical brainpower behind manufacturing, we could easily bring it back to the United States. You just need to invest in automation so that you can do it here. But even though we invested heavily in automation,

we still got almost a thousand manufacturing employees in the United States. Yeah, that's massive. Just as a quick example, just quickly, we brought a product called, we call them transfer stickers, and people call them vinyl lettering transfer stickers, And that product was completely made overseas and it was done by hand with

tweezers. And it's, it's crazy. We got a fully robotic system that does it and you know, you need people to operate the machines, but yeah, it's much better to have, you know, robots run by humans or managed by humans than you know, people with tweezers and it's better for everybody because you can only pay a person with tweezers so much money to to make a product, right? If it takes like an hour to make, to pull apart a sticker with tweezers,

you know, you can only pay the person so much money. Whereas if you're operating a robot or, you know, one person can operate four robots, you know, they can make a significant, you know, significant income. So, yeah, you know, I think a lot more manufacturing could come to America, but you got people got to put their technical brainpower behind it and not just, yeah, they got, you know, they got to put, you know, not just behind software, software, software, all like all tech goes after software because it's very easy to scale software businesses. You know, you just, it's just servers, but, you know, manufacturing businesses are totally different. like uh i think like that's why i i think uh you know people like elon and trump and myself are somewhat aligned uh ideologically because you know we're on factory floor dealing with people we understand there's there's um i don't we just understand we understand things that most of the tech world doesn't really understand yeah we've gotten away from the world of adams physical

things that were yeah the bits yeah i see myself like that you know there's a thing going like most technical people are poisoned with you know whatever you want to call it they're very with a particular worldview and a lot of it comes from just not a lot not enough interaction i suspect you know because um yeah i don't know it's just like when you're on the factory floor you're talking to people all day you see a totally different you know world than if you're you know i mean especially with the remote work it's it's great remote work but you know some people get very isolated with remote work and and like socialization and they and in fact like you know i don't want to whatever if he's your friend i don't want to get in too much trouble with the

guy but no i mean i saw it with people like with my own with my own staff like during the pandemic um you know where people were sitting in front of their computers all day reading twitter and their brains were getting you know poisoned um unfortunately we lost you know we lost a few people during the pandemic is there whatever yeah no it was tweet you know twitter was really poisoning minds during the pandemic i don't know i would like to talk to jack and i think jack should you know come forward and explain to the people like what he was thinking during that whole period because i saw people sitting behind computers during during the pandemic and reading all sorts of horrible tweets in it like they really started believing the world is totally

different than it was whereas you know i was still in a manufacturing environment i was still socializing with people but um yeah particularly for people that didn't socialize and just were on twitter all day twitter really pushed a a really uh an inaccurate inaccurate perspective on life yeah it was it was bad i mean that was like we've got we got demonetized on youtube um i mean not just twitter i think he had twitter youtube all these guys right no it wasn't saying like the disinformation misinformation which is which are marxist terms in my my belief i don't think there's any such accurate worldview is an inaccurate lens into reality like because it's weird like i because i would see people that would just be

on their computers all day like using you know just reading this stuff and then you would like leave that world and i lived in i live in mexico and so i live in mexico i spent part of the pandemic in mexico i spent part of the pandemic in um in uh dominican republic as well and like you'd go to places where it was like people are still totally normal and then but then you'd be dealing with other people it was like that was it was a total i mean a totally different world for you completely it depends depending upon you know in the beginning even myself like i got sucked into the the the you know stay home in front of your computer and I spent like um you know a good portion of the pandemic in a town called Cuernavaca and I didn't leave my Airbnb and then one day I

left the Airbnb to go to uh go hiking in the mountains and I was shocked I got there like the mountains were so full of hikers I was like you know am I gonna die of uh COVID out here I was like I couldn't believe there's like a whole world of people that like we're still living totally normal lives and you know and like you know and but then there was another world of people that were cooped up in their houses reading Twitter all day and thinking totally different things. This episode was presented by River. River is the best, most secure place to buy Bitcoin in the United States. Go to river.com slash TFTC, set up an account today. You'll be able to DCA into Bitcoin without paying any fees. You'll be able to give people Bitcoin via River

links. You'll be able to send and receive Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, and you'll be able to set limit orders. If you want to buy Bitcoin at a particular price below or above where it is now, you can set orders to buy Bitcoin when it hits that price. Go to river.com slash TFTC and set up your account today. This rep was also brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Unchained is building a financial services platform for a Bitcoin standard. They have over 7,000 clients that are securing over 90,000 Bitcoin with 12,000 keys on their platform. Their platform leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties. Their cornerstone product is their Volt product, a two or three multi-sig Volt, which allows you to hold two of three keys

in a multi-sig quorum. That gives you full control over your Bitcoin. They also have an IRA product, a lending desk, and they're rolling out a bunch of other products, including an inheritance protocol and sound advisory. So go to unchained.com, set up a call with our concierge onboarding team today, tell them that TFTC sent you and use the promo code TFTC at checkout, unchained.com. similarly like 2020 november we were in the new york area at the time we escaped to south jersey i'm originally from philadelphia so we escaped brooklyn south jersey and like a less populated town and down there was like mass mandates and people were getting crazy at the quarantining and we went to saint john um down in the virgin islands for the month of november we're supposed

to go for two weeks and we were two weeks in and everybody was acting normal we're like we're not leaving so we stayed for a month and it was insane particularly coming back from saint john to the united or to the mainland united states is the u.s virgin island um it was like holy shit like we were just there for a month people are going to the beach drinking no mask mandates and then you come back and everybody's like six feet can't go to christmas dinner with anybody it was insane it's an unpopular opinion i shouldn't even say it's like people will misconstrue it i'm misconstrue what i'm saying but i almost like missed the pandemic because it was just such an interesting time to be alive particularly if you were traveling and and like yeah being in

situations where you're like one day you can do nothing you know in this place you can do nothing and in this place you know like like i said like i was in i had myself sheltered in in this airbnb in carnavaca and i left and i went to go hiking in the mountains and i was in this like mountain town in mexico and and everybody was out and about like it was nothing or when i was in the dominican republic particularly like um it was great the closer you got to the hotels where all the americans were going it was very locked down because they wanted to do a show for people and as far as far as we got away from hotels it was like not locked down at all and then i stayed in punta cana so like yeah as you got far away from hotels it was not locked down at

all or it was like a lot more relaxed and then like if you went to a city that wasn't touristy and you just like punta cana as a touristy town it was just nothing there was nothing like there is like nothing and then you know you can now i'm from new york then i come to new york and new york was like the apocalypse had hit it was like you know the world had totally come to an end i don't know then i would go to florida my mom was living in florida i visited my mom and you know i was yelling i heard a lockdown but then i'd go visit her in florida and uh and uh you know i was like the nightclubs were raging i was like what the heck weird um it was just an interesting uh life experience to go through it and uh i gotta

gotta admit i reconnected with a childhood friend during during that time i hadn't talked to in 12 years because he went through a tough time in life and he kind of disappeared and he showed up in my life just before he moved in with me too and uh i had three months just playing video games i was like i was like this is great i was like cooking food and reconnecting with the childhood plan i didn't play video games in like eight years i was like so it was just like it was an interesting i don't know there's so many interesting things happened during the uh during that period but uh yeah not a good time we don't want to go back through we don't want to go through that ever again so i don't get in trouble for saying what i said no you're not gonna get in trouble but it

does highlight that we had this like two three year period and some people are still stuck in it this mass psychosis and i think it applies to why we're talking today which is i mean similarly with like trump derangement syndrome um we've gotten to a point particularly here in the united states where the divisiveness and the vitriol has gotten to such a point where it's insane to the point where you had uh an attempt on the life of a former president and a front runner for president heading into this election and i think i had a very similar reaction to you you know personally have voted for trump won't vote for him again and it was like people what are we doing here it's getting to the point where they're trying to kill this man in high def 4k live tv and a lot of the

mass psychosis which i think is behind trump derangement syndrome which has been aided and abetted by whether social media platforms or mainstream media outlets sort of putting out these false narratives um that really got the country to a point of fervor where um he had an attempt on his life and some people were celebrating that and actively saying oh i can't believe the guy didn't have a better better shot and then you running a successful company and sticker mule sticking your neck out there sending an email to your customers and a tweet out to the broader world um saying let's look at what we're doing here let's take a step back and try to quell this political violence and bullying that's out there because it's obviously driving us to a bad place

why did you feel compelled to stand up and speak out i mean obviously there's a problem i tell people like i got like my one principle to move fast my other principles like solve the biggest problems you can solve and like there's been a problem there for a long time but you know unfortunately people like myself have kept quiet so uh i just said look this you know when it gets to a point where a guy's almost like losing his life in order to do what he thinks is right i think other people should uh stand up and do the right thing too and i you know i think a lot of credit goes to other people like elon and um you know there's other people beyond me snoop dog saying great things about trump and 50 cents saying good things about trump and there's a lot

of other people doing the same thing too but yeah it's like when it gets to a point where a guy's almost losing his life to do what he thinks is right i thought it was right to do to speak up And if you read my message, you know, most people actually read it. In fact, I got friends that don't like Trump at all that called me and they said, you know, I heard about your message and I thought you must have wrote this terrible thing. And then I read it and I said, no, I said people at Stickerman, you know, Stickerman, we got people that support Trump, people that got Biden and they like Biden, too. And we all get along, we all get together and like this hate needs to stop. And there's a lot of great people that support Trump. Unfortunately, you know, for whatever reason, it's been acceptable to demonize Trump supporters is something they're not.

and there's all sorts of nasty slurs used to uh defame them and slander them and slur them and whatever so um yeah it just it's a big problem i think it's a problem that i could particularly help with because i run a company where it's it's it's a you know it talks to both sides i think anyone that's in a situation where they talk to both sides can probably help with the problem but it's a big problem i think it's a problem that i could try to help resolve and um i also think like i said when it gets to a situation where somebody's almost giving their life up to to do what they think's right other people should consider doing the same agreed i mean it's it's it's insane when you make uh your political affiliation

your whole personality not only that like let it dictate who you interact with and how you treat them it's it's not the way the world is supposed to work like you should be able to be friends with people who have different political persuasions um and like i said earlier it's gotten to the point where it's just completely insane like it's and i think if you um like people are afraid to subject and that's another important area i think a lot of people um were emboldened to speak up because of the assassination attempt like hey guys this is getting fucking insane but before that like people are self-censoring because they think um if they voice their support of one candidate over the other goes both ways some people will see biden or kamala uh supporters and say i don't want

to interact with you at all i don't think that should be the case either um but people are self-censoring because they think particularly if you're a business owner or somebody that has a lot of skin in the game from a financial perspective that if you do put your neck out there it will harm you financially um and hurt your business but you sent a video out on twitter a few days ago or x a few days ago basically saying that it's all it's all hot air it's all um yeah i'll bark no bite in terms of how it affects businesses at the end of the day yeah i mean for sure people you know some people are going to take action but uh you know by and large it's like the idea for the amount of if you saw the attack that hit us it was crazy i mean

it was all the internet talked about for a few days it seemed like like i was joking to before it seemed like like threads i went on there and i thought like i was like i must have been like watching like my own feed but i was on the general stream it was just like everyone hating on sticker mill for a day and people making instagram reels bashing us and doing everything and we got some hit pieces came out when i actually got a lot of positive press too for what we did but um yeah i mean yeah for what happened um you know yeah it's a lot of talk very little action i think if you're running a similar company where you're curious about what's going to happen like the uh yeah the internet backlash it's mostly talk very little action um but yeah what was it

like for you personally uh putting up with that backlash um i had the fortunate experience of getting canceled i was one of the first people to get canceled in 2016 before like he even became president like because i gave him a five dollar donation and so i was a much smaller company at the time and i didn't even know what cancellation was somebody discovered that i had made a 500 donation and we got inundated with hate mail or hate mail back then and uh it you know to be honest like we were smaller i was like you know i wasn't as you know and i was it was a more tragic it was traumatic then to be honest because i didn't see it coming and so just to wake up one day and all of a sudden you're getting in day with hate mail the employees were panicking i didn't

have the same like leadership skills i have now and whatnot and i just didn't have as much experience so that ended up being a great experience for me because uh you know it gave me a front row seat to what what this like cancellation stuff's like um you know going back eight years and so it was you know scary back then but nothing ended up happening then and you know very little is happening this time so uh it ended up being an interesting experience i'm i shouldn't say this like i'm sort of enjoying the experience i'm enjoying the uh opportunity to try to like do good and i like i like solving problems i like doing interesting things and i think even within the company like we've had we've maintained a sense of calm and i think even you know i'm sure

some people disagree with me but i got a good enough rep of people that people are you know within the company all are all in generally uh you know tolerant even if they disagree disagree in me but um i think there's a lot of people that stick with my view this is uh interesting just sort of an interesting thing to go through it's it's if you know if i if i could uh avoid doing it i wouldn't avoid doing it's an interesting experience it's an interesting life experience and hopefully it's doing something you know doing something good to stop this problem i think it is but not just me but i think you're you know you're seeing even elton john recently was saying nice things about trump you're seeing so many people are coming out and saying nice things

about trump and i think we're all kind of like collectively hopefully fixing the problem i think I think we are, we are going to fix the problem, but I think we're all collectively fixing the problem. Whether it's me or Alan Elton, John or Elon Musk or Snoop Dogg or 50 cent or, uh, on wild AA from Puerto Rico or any of these people that are, you know, raising their hand and just like politely saying it, I think that's the important thing, like say it politely, but there's a lot of people. It's not just me. And so I think we're all kind of collectively fixing the problem. Quick break here, freaks. This rip is brought to you by gradually than suddenly a Framework for Understanding Bitcoin as Money by Parker Lewis. I wrote the forward to the book.

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to get 40 off their annual subscription zap right.com slash tftc 40 off well that's a really important point is like approaching it politely and like bringing civility back to the conversation it's just like have proper manners just hear somebody out don't scream at them don't jump down their throat um yeah should be all we should all be adults here um able to have a conversation see somebody's viewpoint react to that calm cool and collected civilly and and have an actual conversation instead of just throwing proverbial shit at each other i think one thing people on the other side particularly you know the strong anti-trump haters don't particularly understand is that most uh you know most people like me that support trump like we still want to maintain our

friendships with people that don't like them you know i think they don't know that because by and large we stay quiet but uh you know i got a lot of friends that don't like trump i know some people that are very strong anti-trump people in the past i've been scared to talk to my nose like this is a phenomenon that goes on but i think to the extent that people like me don't speak up like it's really just we're doing a disservice to people that are you know afflicted with trump hate because um they don't realize like you know the people that like them they don't realize like still want to be their friends and uh you know we're not looking to sever friendships i mean if you look at it really like it's really more the other way like a lot of people that are the strong

you know really afflicted with anti-trump hate you know want to sever friendships already been and i don't think it's really their fault i think they've been indoctrinated into thinking this way um where they they have to sever friendships or whatnot but most trump supporters don't want to lose their friends over uh over this topic they you know they want to have a conversation and uh you know have a country that's unified and maintain their friendships or family relationships or whatever they may be or business relationships you know a lot of people were canceling me and saying i'm never gonna buy from uh stickermill again but uh i happen to be a big fan of a company ran by a guy named duscan moskowitz who uh is a huge you know huge donor to the other side

and uh you know he sees the world completely differently than me but he built a great company called asana we we love his company we're one you know and uh he did a great job and i think the reality is like uh people from all walks of life do interesting things in life and just be you know i happen to think that you know trump's the best choice for for for happiness in this country and really worldwide and i got a lot of reasons why i think then i think other people do too but just like i built an interesting company people on the you know people on the other side build interesting companies too and do interesting things too but the tragic thing is you know i would bet uh you know i don't know hopefully dustin sees the world similar to me and he doesn't

want to excommunicate people that um that uh support trump but yeah i think you see a lot of like people on the anti-trump side that just they want nothing to do with trump supporters and it's really uh tragic and they don't understand the extent to which people that do like trump don't don't feel the same they don't want to they don't want to kick their their uh whatever they don't want to kick people out of their life just because they see the world different differently politically yeah that's like the big problem with the mainstream media particularly as they've taken soundbites and quotes out of context and really driven on this vitriolic rhetoric in terms of if you're a trump supporter you're white supremacist if you're a trump supporter you're

racist you're um uh anti-woman you're anti-choice whatever it may be and like if you actually go and find the primary sources from which they're trying to pull these soundbites and um project this framing onto the world like nine times out of ten it's completely miscombobulated uh discombobulated misconstrued and like i'm not sure if you saw it but last night the all-in podcast guys they had their summit that they're doing and they had jd vance come and i've never heard jd vance speak outside of a couple of podcast interviews or senate hearings that he's been on um in the past as his tenure as senator but they sat down with him for 45 minutes it was like really the first time i was able to hear him speak at length on on multiple topics and like the narrative that

the media is putting out there is that he's weird he's this weirdo this corrupt vc guy and like he's actually very articulate and thoughtful in terms of how he was responding to the questions that they were throwing his way um he took on some hard questions and made a lot of sense to in terms of what he thinks the world should do in terms of policy if Trump gets reelected and he's the VP. It's just insane to see what is projected, the framing that's put forth, and the reality, if you actually take the time to dig into things

and go do the research yourself. Yeah, I got a good friend of mine, someone really close who's highly educated, and he says, and I see the same thing. it's like by and large you know because people like me and maybe yourself and you know whatever we've kept quiet um you know we seem like you know seem like a reasonable guy i think i seem like a reasonable guy and we keep quiet like the media's going out and they find like six or really six or seven and it's maybe not the right thing to say but they find six or seven people that are

you know fairly uneducated and they use them to defame all trump supporters so they find people that are you know whatever not the most articulate people and they use those people to defame all Trump supporters. But the real tragedy is if you look at the other side, it's not the uneducated people that are leading the charge with the anti-Trump hate. It's really the highly educated people. And if you look at the people that are severely, like I said, hate afflicted or afflicted with anti-Trump hate, these are by and large, like highly educated people. So, you know, I got a lot of empathy. You know, I wasn't even like a politically motivated guy. I just got a lot of empathy for the Trump side of the equation. They get bullied by the media. They get bullied by a

of people and you know by and large they're getting attacked over you know look if you know the people that get that that whatever get branded or they're using as the examples of take the whoever these weirdos are you know from uh i don't know some of these groups that they find they they find like six guys in the woods somewhere and they use them to defame all trump supporters just think in a certain way but if you really take a look you know take a step back and look at who's leading the charge and who are most severely hate afflicted people with you know the anti-trump hate it's like it's highly educated people people that run tech companies academics journalists people that probably have you know at least one or two degrees you know maybe a

master's degree or something like that and they should know better but for some reason you know i think that's you know that's that's a big problem that that doesn't seem to be discussed enough is that you know by and large you got highly educated people picking on people that are you know not so educated which you know really is uh you know that's it's in my opinion inappropriate and cruel to do and i don't know if people should take an inward look and say Like, geez, if I got one or two or three degrees or whatever a lot of these people have, or if I'm bright enough to run a tech company and make all this money, maybe I should also be bright enough to take a step back and question my perspective

and it really makes sense to hate 100 million or so people. I throw out the number that hundreds of millions of people like Trump and people argue with me because they say, geez, he only got 70 million so votes or 70, 80 million votes. But like I said, I live in Mexico. I got an company in 39 countries and there's people that like Trump all over the world. I mean, just in South America alone, he might have a few hundred million supporters. He's got a massive fan base in South America. I speak Spanish and I hang out with a lot of people in Mexico and a lot of, you know, I got friends, a lot of Mexican friends, a lot of South American friends.

And he's really well liked in South America. He's really well liked throughout the entire world. So, you know, hopefully people listening to this, you know, if people that are smart enough to build companies and do other interesting things and accumulate degrees, like they should also be smart enough to uh you know hear what i got to say and what other people got to say and and help calm the uh anti-trump hate and stop all the craziness that's going on so people can live happier really on both sides yeah and from like the business perspective do you think the pendulum swinging back towards sanity because obviously we had a streak there esg policies dei um woke capitalism the broader term encompassing all that stuff was a big theme

in the mid 2010s arguably into the middle of covid but it feels like uh number one whether it's esg or dei i think inarguably at this point have proven to be detrimental to successful businesses if you're trying to just do things because you want to project that you're environmentally friendly socially just you have good governance structures or you have diversity equity and inclusion in your business that actually doesn't uh result in uh returns for investors or a viable business at the end of the day because you're not hiring on meritocracy and you're allocating capital in a way that turns out to be uh not efficient and leaves lower returns for for your company and the funds that are investing you um but now it feels like the

pendulum could be swinging backwards like hey i'm running a business here uh and like your message i think was a perfect embodiment of this pendulum swinging back it's like there's people on both sides of the aisle that work for our business and that buy our products and use our products and we're just gonna we're providing a good and a service to the market and that's what we're here to do i don't care what you do with politics keep that out out of business do you think that's a trend that'll continue to get stronger yeah i think so and you know beyond it like not being ineffective it's also like very disrespectful you know this stuff the dei stuff's very disrespectful to you know people that come from multicultural backgrounds and deserve the jobster and you know

because it makes people question why they got it but you know i don't even like talking about this topic in particular because i just find it's a very disrespectful it was a very disrespectful movement there's a lot of talented people that come from you know different backgrounds that that that genuinely are great at what they do and and this whole movement that you got to put people there and you gotta force things that shouldn't be forced it's very disrespectful to the people that that uh come from interesting cultural backgrounds and deserve the jobs and um to be i don't even like talking about the topic like i could say it but i i like i almost wonder if i gotta ask permission for my team but um you know people saw the team not even say exactly but if people saw

the uh the management team that surrounds me in stickermule they would be shocked at the uh the people i got in management sticker mill but i don't even like talking about stuff like that because um i think it's disrespectful to them to uh to say geez i got people from this background of that background that worked for me and are in management it just is very disrespectful to people because uh you know people that work for me all got it because they earned it and they're good at what they do and there's lots of people that got the jobs and they earned it because they're good at what they do and um you had to force it it really uh you know it diminishes everyone when they do that so they you know not only is it bad for investors that's been proven it was a silly

movement um with the whatever you want to call it i guess you know the virtue signaling word whatever but uh it was moving but i think people just take a step back and look at it and say like it's not just bad for businesses what you're doing is very disrespectful because there are talented people you know they're talented people that got because they deserve it and they don't deserve to be uh belittled and diminished with like dei movements yeah i completely agree it's um paradoxically uh inherently racist to uh it runs with a lot of assumptions that prove not to be true at the end of the day as you're proving it sticker mule um which is again the like driving to the insanity of where we are at in terms of the broader the conversation happening not only

at the political level but the social level it's like we need just get back to doing things like treat everybody as an individual um hire based on merit uh and provide goods and services that are needed at the market and then if your business do it profitably like this is the way we should view all these things like there's demand in the market for a good or service if you can provide it you produce it at a low cost and sell it with some margin uh everybody everybody makes out at the end of the day i will say this i think people like working in diverse companies in general so it's like you know i mean we got diversity it's different but it's because it makes sense not because it's forced um and i think people should do that like they should

realize that you know people like working with people from different backgrounds nobody wants to go and work in a company where it's all dudes in charge nobody wants to be in that situation like nobody wants you know people like diversity um most people do at least so you got to do it but you got to make sense you do it and you and you announce we got a dei director what you're doing really is insulting people yeah so what uh what do you think is the big trend um that you guys are looking to attack sticker mule moving back to like the business side of things what are you seeing out there uh i mean i like solving big problems so i think like the anti-trump hate's a big problem i'm working at my person working on that in my personal life and you know something

like i guess whatever time i would be spending at work but like the big problem we're solving at sticker mule is uh you know we grew to 1200 people selling products that people buy where we just launched the storage platform so uh anything you buy from us you can now sell to us and uh i think there's nothing you know there's no bigger problem like one of the biggest problems in the world is really how to help people earn a living there's you know it's one of the most important things you can do for people so um yeah all my focus at work i just had a call this morning with people looking on it and uh our whole focus at sticker mill this year and you know into the future is uh building our stores platform and helping people make money it's still in it's

still in beta we already got without even talking about it we barely told people but we already got 9 000 people signed up including we got uh don jr on the platform now um one of my favorites is a named ricky berwick who's a incredible incredible comedian out of canada very inspirational guy too if you don't know who he is he's he's very funny but he's you know he's a big inspiration to people too that you can really do anything in life if you try hard and um he's a really hard-working guy and very funny and so yeah that's our big platform help you know that's our big that's my big push right now is you know solve the problem like in the uh you know the new internet economy like how can other people easily spin up businesses and and make money and uh and yeah if

if you check us out you can you can get a store launched in in seconds already 9 000 people are on our platform selling we got uh 20 or 30 developers working on it full time and yeah we're going full steam ahead to make it the best way to sell stuff and and make money and monetize on the internet i think it's going to grow faster than any other e-commerce platform but beyond that we're going to be you know the best way really for uh influencers to monetize what they're doing probably better than youtube or you know once we get once we get things going the way we want we'll be better than anything else out there in terms of helping people monetize oh yeah what are some of the biggest headwinds that you see i mean obviously covid create a lot of supply chain

disruptions like that affect you guys at all like what are like economically inflation's been high well like when covid hit you know we got shut down completely because i'm in new york and we only had one facility in new york now we got two facilities in the united states one in new york and one south one south carolina i didn't ever see that happening that they would shut us down completely whereas like other states stayed open so um you know we're by far the base in our space but like you know our competitors got to stay open we got shut down um i never saw that happening but we know we got redundancy now you know other headwinds like yeah the inflation thing's a problem like people only want to place pay so much for for for stickers and t-shirts and we

like to keep the prices as low as possible but uh you know well so we also want to invest in innovation r&d and stuff like that so um yeah the inflationary pressure that like eats eats up stuff you know hurts in that regard um aside from that you know we got to see what happens with the election i'm not really a big um you know i don't know i don't really i try what i don't really worry too much about headwinds per se because uh you know aside from code where it was like we got shut down other people got to stay open i thought that was really unfair but um you know as long as we're all in the same boat and we're all like playing by the same rules i i really don't care i'll operate and succeed in whatever situation we have you know like so whatever is happening

in the economy whether it's you know my co-founder actually in a earlier in his career ran a you know ran a company in brazil where they had inflation out of control and it's like as long as everybody's playing by the same rules you know i'll be you know we'll be fine we'll succeed uh the covid situation where new york shut down and you know other states are open and and that was a really unfair um you know unfair situation but yeah we'll we'll survive any with no no matter what the headwinds are you know unless they come in and start censoring what stickers i can print and how to get in a battle over free speech over stickers or something like that and shut completely but uh you know hopefully that doesn't have it doesn't go that far yeah and i had to ask since

this is a bitcoin podcast have you been uh following the trend of companies both large and small using bitcoin as a as a treasury asset no i'm not i'm not and you know i don't know anything about that except we get constant requests for people to add Bitcoin at checkout. And I was telling you, you know, we're looking strongly at using Bitcoin at checkout. I think it'll be great for our store owners, right. To get an additional conversion boost. And so, you know, I don't have any Bitcoin. I don't hold any Bitcoin, but we get constant requests for people to pay with Bitcoin on Sticker Mill. We're strongly considering that. Some of our guys are huge enthusiasts with Bitcoin, but I personally, I'm, I'm actually, I'm always slow on everything. I didn't even know

use social media until recently i didn't want a twitter account i didn't you know i stayed off social media in fact i grew most of business through email marketing and i don't know yeah i i i don't even i just created my i just started using my personal twitter i don't have an instagram and so yeah bitcoin is probably something i'll learn about in five years or so i don't know i'll be i'll be waiting in fact when facebook came out i was in uh college and people were like you got to get on facebook and i was like that's okay i got i've never touched facebook either i didn't know why would people do this they can just call each other i don't even like the text message i like making phone calls a rare breed these days and i'm slow to uh yeah i know

maybe because like i said my co-founder's in his 80s and uh my dad had me late in life if he was around today he'd be over 100 so yeah i'm like from another from another era completely even though you know i'm not that old but i guess you know i'm sort of from that era i guess and maybe that's another reason why i like you know i like uh president trump is um i don't know i'm from a different era that you know most people my age don't aren't particularly uh familiar with you know most people weren't raised by you know don't have a father that'd be over 100 years old if you were around still and don't have a co-founder that's in his 80s so yeah yeah i'm from a generation that doesn't exist anymore i guess yeah yeah that's fascinating because i mean

i don't know how old you are exactly but i'm like 33 like i grew up i was in high school when facebook came out and um yeah i've been i haven't had facebook in years but i definitely did get on when it first came out i was younger and uh it is insane to um to think of how much that drives a lot of people's lives these days particularly interaction with social media whether it's x tiktok facebook instagram whatever it may be and to find the rare breed that is barely using x it's funny it's refreshing yeah it's like my whole frustration with like twitter like came about i didn't even want to use twitter like we we went through all the years like except in the beginning i did acquire that account but then we had like 10 or 20 000 followers i thought twitter

was you know i was like we don't need that we're fine you know growth is good who cares and i hired this kid out of high school and he was like we got to do more on twitter we got to do more on twitter and so i said to him um well i don't want to use unless we have a million followers we had like 20 or 30,000 this is actually funny story too i was like i don't want me i'm like it's not worth that i don't think i'm not sure of a million followers because i was i was like the only people that anyone cared about on twitter years ago was like elon musk connie west jack dorsey i'm like i was like there's six people that benefit from this and the rest of us are just like pissing in the wind for lack of a better way to say it and so i said you know i want a million

followers and so um he was like well i don't know how to do that and i so i took over the account and i started growing it and i was growing like 30 or 40,000 followers a month and we were getting like insane engagement and that's when i we were getting like 500 000 to a million impressions per tweet um this was like just before the pandemic leading into the pandemic it was blowing up going crazy and uh yeah me and this kid were growing the account and um i just got so fed up with like it was just so like that's when i started seeing all the negativity on there and i got really frustrated and i actually i just closed the account down for quite a while um and just stopped using it completely and killed all our engagement but uh i had this i didn't realize you know now

like 500,000 to a million impressions per post another quote not called tweets anymore but it was like one of the top performing accounts on the platform i guess but um but yeah i got i got so frustrated but yeah i was also very late to the party and using twitter i didn't i didn't want to touch it at all and so we're back on there now having fun but we're we're uh trying to be you know i guess we're doing some you know some of the stuff that i'm doing related to like talking about trump and trying to like calm things down there and then we're also like uh looping in a lot of comedy we're working with ricky and ricky and doing comedy there and we're gonna maybe hopefully order some other people uh like having fun like being funny too i got a little bit of a

comedy background so um you know i like i like making people laugh although yeah depending upon the day of the week like i'm either serious or funny depends on what's going on usually i'm in a really goofy mood but uh i don't know i feel like you got me in a serious mood today maybe just got off yeah the airplane uh de-stress will do that but uh now that i mean that's the other thing on the business side everybody's like you need a social strategy like the fact that you've scaled the way you have to be email marketing is predominantly email and seo or yeah we were email seo and and uh google ads that was all it is you know and and doing a great job for customers i mean making people happy um like one of the biggest drivers for us which was just making

people happy and then people talk about us yeah so um yeah i mean the one thing you can't reproduce is you know your ability to make people happy and yeah we were really good at that what are the uh internal principles and the structure of your business there so you know well i ran every department you know i started the company so i i feel like i did all the customer service for the first two or three years and we hired one customer service guy and was like just me and him for a few more years and now we have i think 100 people in customer service or so i don't even know how i don't pay attention to exact numbers but around 100 people in customer service or something like that but uh you know what i did is i handed off different point i ran manufacturing

and uh that was my favorite that was the hardest thing for me to give up because i really like manufacturing but as i handed off to different departments i would like write like a set of 10 principles i would use to run every department so we got overall principles one of the biggest ones moves fast but then i got principles for every um you know every department um Um, one of the biggest ones in manufacturing, I think that people don't get is, uh, you know, like one of our big, is something along the lines of, um, like, uh, judge people, judge people primarily on the basis of attendance and that it's like, so it's our job to make people make it's like, it's our job.

It's management's job, the engineering team's job to make the job so easy that like all the workers need to do is show up and it's, you know, we don't want bosses to run around like criticizing people and saying your productivity is low, your productivity is high. don't look at individual productivity we just look at attendance if you show up and you're pleasant you're fine i think that's a really important principle in manufacturing in general that like if more manufacturers adopted they'd be good because yeah i don't like um i don't like making workers responsible for productivity and make management responsible for productivity like productivity is resolved via um you know engineering improvements whether software

or hardware based but you know but productivity is resolved via engineering not via uh you know it's a really old way of thinking even it's not even you know the smartest manufacturers never thought this way but it's really uh primitive way of thinking to think that you run manufacturing by putting the burden of productivity on the workers i guess amazon does this a little bit i was just going to say it's like a stark juxtaposition to amazon which is yeah i don't have quasi slave labor no we don't do that it just as long as you show up and if productivity is like low for a particular apartment we look at how we can um innovate through engineering to make productivity eyes and we don't look at individual productivity and say this guy's person this girl's fast this

girl's slow this guy's fast this guy's slow we don't look at that yeah that's fascinating you know if you show up and then your pay is based on the job you're doing and how many years you've been here we don't we don't do performance pay yeah and i imagine that makes your your employees very happy they stick around yeah yeah oh yeah we got you know we have great great retention in fact i like to say among salaried people i don't think we've ever lost anyone although i'm sure somebody will pop up um i mean i've let people go but i don't think anyone's ever quit sticking although i'm sure somebody will pop up and say you know he's wrong this is like when they say like trump's wrong like these are the types of errors he'll make where he'll be 99.9 right and then like

they'll find like the one exception to what he said and they'll be like oh he lied about this so you know i've been around for 14 years and um yeah i think i created i create a low pressure environment in general for people that's what i tried to do and uh yeah i don't think we've ever lost you know we've never lost a salary person uh manufacturing people you know that they they're you know they i don't mean to you know they some people like it and they don't like it and they change jobs younger people in general um you know they don't they might stay with a job they might not they they kind of try different things out until they find what they like and you know some people work in manufacturing for a period and they want to go to college and do something else so

in the factory we have you know we don't have 100 retention people will leave but um in salary i think near 100 retention that's awesome what uh to end it uh because i know we only have an hour here but uh what advice would you give to anybody out there thinking about starting a business uh uh you know number one principle is just like move quickly and like if you do more things you can make more mistakes and so you know that's been the biggest i learned Just move quickly and just keep doing things and doing things and doing things. And then the other thing is be like really metrics driven. Like don't get stressed out about minutia. I mean,

in the beginning you got to, but, uh, but yeah, don't get stressed out about, you know, don't get stressed out about minutia. But yeah, nothing beats moving quickly. Nothing beats that. Um, you know, and beyond, you know, nothing beats moving quickly. Get it, get it out there. Get it fast. This was a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you coming on and, um, sticking your neck out there and um standing up for sanity in a world that seems to be getting crazier and crazier i think um individual actions like yours do add up over time like you mentioned

there's many other people that are standing up that's what i think is most needed today is more sane successful and confident individuals to step out and say hey guys this is getting a little crazy you don't need to go in this direction because there's a lot there's a lot of white pills out there we have a lot of potential here as a country um to do things that we're able to unify and and not let political differences get in the way of um civility at the end of the day for sure for sure that was a great comment talking to you it was a lot of fun and you know very interesting for me as well especially tend to hear from you know i haven't talked to anyone's ever said oh by the way i know jack dorsey so uh you know i suspect you might be

right maybe i like them you know i like most people once i that's the other crazy thing about whole political thing it's like people get mad at each other on the internet but mostly when they meet each other in a bar they like each other you know i rarely run into people i don't like and people i think that meet me rarely you know dislike me so well i suspect i'd like him although you know i don't like what happened with twitter yeah but i don't think as i'll say i don't think he does either and i didn't i didn't to be clear i didn't do not either um i did not like what happen uh and uh yeah i think um we can talk about it offline thank you for sure definitely i think everybody liked each other a lot more than they realize and like hopefully

people that heard me make the statement i make realize you know it's like yeah the hate's crazy i need a direction like once people get to know each other like the hate goes right really quickly and you know yeah and so yeah hopefully it was an interesting conversation i certainly enjoyed it and i learned a lot too it's like those videos of the two dogs barking at each other with the fence and then the fence comes by and they're like oh we're not parking at each other it's like once you uh remove that digital fence and you're forced to talk in person things uh it's okay we're people yeah all right thank you that's all we got today peace and love freaks