This Week in Startups - Logan Paul & CryptoZoo’s alleged scam breakdown with Coffeezilla + Ok Boomer with Em Herrera | E1652

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Coffeezilla joins M+J to discuss the latest on the alleged Logan Paul and CryptoZoo scam. (1:21) Then Em Herrera joins Rachel for this year’s first edition of Ok Boomer to discuss 2023 predictions. (50:29) (0:00) Molly kicks off the show (1:11) Coffeezilla joins Molly and Jason to discuss the alleged CryptoZoo Scandal and his background (11:06) Supergut - Get 30% off with code TWIST at https://supergut.com (12:37) Coffeezilla’s main issue with the alleged grift + What is CryptoZoo? (19:58) MasterClass - Get 15% off an annual membership at https://masterclass.com/startups (21:30) Logan Paul’s response video (26:32) The red flags of CryptoZoo + What Logan should have done (41:51) Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast at https://www.founder.university/podcast (43:18) Overtime with Coffeezilla (50:29) Ok Boomer: 2023 predictions with Em Herrera FOLLOW Coffeezilla: https://twitter.com/coffeebreak_YT FOLLOW Em: https://twitter.com/emilyhxrrera FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, happy Friday the first Friday of 2023. We made it to the end of this short week. It is jam-packed with news so we can tell how this year is going to go. But we do have something special to cap off the week. Coffeezilla is joining us on the program, famed YouTuber and investigative independent journalist, CoffeeZilla, to discuss the alleged scam involving Crypto Zoo and Logan Paul. Yeah, we're up to a banger. And then we have M. Herrera of Night Ventures joining Rachel for this year's first edition of OK Boomer. It's going to be a fantastic show. Stick with us.

This week in startups is brought to you by SuperGut. It's the easiest and tastiest way clinically proven to regulate digestion, curb cravings, and boost energy. Get 30% off their delicious shakes, fires, and fibromics at supergut.com with code twist. And Masterclass. Learn from the world's best minds. Anytime, anywhere, and at your own face. Give 15% off an annual membership to Masterclass at masterclass.com slash startups. All right, everybody.

Welcome back to the program. It's this week in startups with us, Mr. First Name Coffee, last name Zilla. If you don't know who that is, Molly, I think you're aware. I do. You do. But some in our audience may not. Some in our audience might not be aware. I have a 16-year-old son who is losing his.

mind right now over what is happening, who actually was the first person before you, Coffeezilla, to alert me to the Crypto Zoo situation in progress that we're going to be discussing today. Oh, fantastic. Oh, wow. Your son is very much on the ball then. Yeah, yeah, but he's a big fan. Maybe I should hire him.

We have senior videos at my house many times. Coffeezilla is a YouTube channel where Mr. Coffee, or do you prefer Mr. Zilla? What should we call you? Mr. Coffey's my dad. Coffee's ill is fine or Stephen. It's cool. All right, Stephen. You are an individual who wears suspenders who is on YouTube with millions of subscribers now.

And your stated purpose of your channel is to undercover. You're a modern day Colombo who exposes scams in the world. Am I correct? Yeah. Uncover scams. deceptive marketing, people who prey on those who are sort of weaker for money. Yeah. We should say it seems like a particular focus on online scams, right?

Creators, especially lately. Yeah, particularly it's sort of my own ecosystem that I spend time on. And recently there's been sort of a crypto focus, but that was never really the goal. It's just cryptos where all the biggest grifts are right now. Got it. Now, before we get into the Logan Paul, grift here, or alleged, alleged, which is, We'll use alleged a couple of times here, so we don't get legal letters. May I ask you, what is at your core, your motivation for doing this?

We all can choose to do what we want on live. Here, Molly and I do this weekend startups. We're passionate about entrepreneurship and startups, but you're passionate about undercarving scams. Stephen, what makes you tick? Well, I always was sort of fascinated by scams, and I really didn't like them. I saw them people prey on a lot of people in my life. So like, I've told this story a lot, so I don't want to bore anyone who's heard this before.

But basically in high school, my mom got cancer. And she was like sort of preyed on by all these like alternative health people when what she needed was to have her thyroid taken out because she had thyroid cancer. It's very treatable disease. She's fine. Thank God, whatever. But I just saw the pain of that. And I like, our house would smell just like garlic sometimes because she was convinced that putting 60 clothes of garlic in a pot of stew was going to cure her cancer because some grifter told her that or colloidial silver or all these different

like sort of remedies. Then in college, I see my friends get swept up in MLM scams and they're telling me I can get rich just on the weekend, which it was always very strange because I'm like, you guys are working on the weekend. You're working harder than the people I know working nine to five. like anyways. So that sort of started at all was seeing that. And then when I started YouTube, I just started making YouTube videos. And I saw that there was sort of a new age grift going on where instead of selling MLMs,

it was sort of like, I'll teach you how to get rich quick. I'll give you the formula. And it's not a new thing. People have been doing this forever. But it was sort of reinvented with Facebook targeting and YouTube ad words targeting, because you could much more precisely go. after people in a certain demographic. We're watching certain types of videos.

So all of a sudden, this type of like selling a $2,000 course of how to get rich became a lot more lucrative with the rise of people like Tai Lopez, people like this. And there just wasn't a lot of people in mainstream media talking about this. I felt like someone needed to address it.

So I started to, was surprised by the response, felt like it was an important area to talk about because these prior experiences of my life. And I kind of went from there. It is weird to look at the channel now because it's kind of grown a lot, but like sometime, like two years ago, I had like 200,000 subscribers. So we've been small for a while, but then, yeah, things kind of blew up recently. You were on. The way, the way, we met Stephen and I, by the way, was we were on Clubhouse.

Well, yeah, I was to say he was on, right? And about Clubhouse. Well, there was a kind of like J.T. Fox or somebody. And then there was another one and they were trying. And then all these reports started coming into me and CoffeeZilla was on there. And we just started like, you know, during the pandemic, everyone was like talking on Clubhouse. Well, all these grifters came to Clubhouse and then I exposed them for being grifters and CoffeeZilla was in the process of exposing. So I was actually on an episode of CoffeeZella.

Enjoyed my time. That's right. Early, early days. You're an early startup investor in Coffee Zilla. There we go. All right. So Molly, maybe you could tee up the story here that we're dealing with. Yeah, let's talk about.

I'm just seeing a trend on Twitter and YouTube and it's exploding everywhere. I don't know what's going on. It really is. And it has been nothing. but fascinating and for some of us just delightful to watch. Like if 2023 can end the budding return of Logan Paul,

I'm cool with this year already. Okay, so what have, actually, I'm going to let you explain it. So basically your latest investigation has been into a game, a crypto-based game that was being championed by Logan Paul that has some more than three episodes worth of unsavory things going on, that's led to a Logan Paul response video and threats to sue you, which I can't imagine

it's the first time it's happened, but I wonder how you're feeling about it. And maybe the best place to start is if you can give us the kind of two to three minute overview on what is the deal with Crypto Zoo and how did it come to your attention that you should look into this game? Sure. So in 2021 was sort of the crypto hype season. Everyone was launching a project. Logan Paul just was off the backs of pushing a project he called Dink Doink, which went about as well as it might sound, went completely into the earth to never be heard from again, except people made money on it early.

I mean, I might, to interject, I might still buy a bumper sticker that says I heart Dink Doink, which was an actual tweet by Logan Paul, but only for comedy value. Yeah, he said he's all in, Dink Doink, and then he was all out just as quickly. So then Cryptozo launches, he talks about it, I think August 18th, 2021, launches September 1st. He calls it a fun blockchain game that will make you money. The idea is that you buy these NFTs. So you, there's like two parts of it. There's the NFT and there are these coins in the ecosystem called Zoocoins. And then you have the NFTs, which you buy.

If you, the only way to buy the NFTs is with the Zoocoins. And the NFTs are supposed to give you this yield of Zoocoins. So you have to buy the Zoocoins to get the NFTs, get you more Zoocoins. And then you use those. Zucoins, I guess, to buy more NFTs. I don't really know. So this all gets promised to people. And day one, I guess, or day two, like they sell three million dollars or $2.5 million worth of these NFTs. Then in the token itself, there's like tens of millions of dollars of volume a day. Over five days, first five days, there's a hundred million dollars in volume. Huge. Everyone's stoked.

Logan Paul is one of the biggest influencers in the world. Surely he won't let us down. at this point, nothing's been released yet. There's nothing out there. Over the course of a year and a half, nothing really does get released. This whole yield concept never works. The hatching is,

some of it hatches, some of the eggs don't hatch. They're having all these problems. The dev team gets switched several times. Logan Paul only basically disappears. He only puts two messages in their public community discord. until recently, after I made my video, he came back. So he basically ghosted the project only to respond to it when he was launching yet another

NFT project. He decided he hadn't had enough of the NFT, so he releases another NFT project. And when he does, he sort of asked about this and he says, oh, well, like, it's not my fault. The developer took the code of my game and ran away to Switzerland and blackmailed me for a million dollars. He held it ransom for a million dollars. So then I was like, well, that seems super interesting. I got to go talk to that developer.

So I talked to that developer. The developer is like, well, no, that didn't happen. I never got paid at all what I was supposed to get paid. So I go back to Logan Paul. I'm like, all right, well, this guy says he didn't get paid. And then, sorry, I got in contact with Logan's manager. Logan's manager says, no comment. So he's like, you have to verify truth.

Otherwise, we might, you know, we'll handle it the way we want to handle it. And I said, yeah, that's why I'm calling you to verify the truth. That's what you do. And he's like, yeah, well, I have no. You have to. So then I spent the next basically several months investigating talking to victims. Finally, I released my big story on it. And suddenly Logan Paul comes out and he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, you got the wrong guy.

I didn't. By the way, I should say the findings. Logan Paul hired a bunch of people who basically stole a bunch of money from the game, like millions of dollars. Logan Paul basically stayed silent on it. Although it's important to say Logan himself didn't sell. he just got everyone sort of into the project. And then now that it's all fallen apart, they were just kind of, in my opinion,

going to let it die and try to avoid talking about it. When this whole thing came out, Logan comes out and says, well, actually, I've been planning to come back to Cryptozo this entire time, revive it from the dead, and deliver on all these promises of a fun blockchain game that are too money.

So that kind of brings us up to speed where we are now. That was like an hour, some docu-series compressed into like two minutes. Look at me. Look how Schfeldt. Look at my energy level. You know why I feel so good? Because my bestie, David Freiburg, helped create a company called Super Gut, and it's a breakthrough nutrition company in the gut health space. It's the new year. You want to get slim like I did. I lost 30 pounds. How did I lose 30 pounds? I started exercising. I did some fasting. And I used Supergut. Chocolate brownie bar, their mocha mix. Supergut also has unflavored if you're a square and you want to keep it simple.

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who lost real money. So far, I guess. Right? Like, presumably if this thing starts to exist, maybe they could still make that money. Well, you can't steal millions of dollars without someone losing millions of dollars, right? Right. So on the blockchain, these guys on Logan's team,

uh, well, I mean, one of the guys Crypto King, who I interviewed says, I don't mind if you say I took a few, million. He said I didn't steal six million. He said, I only took a few million. So at the worst, he's on the record saying, I took a few million dollars, which I think is not that much better than six million. But anyways, whatever, we can split hairs. A few million here, a few million there. It was the most pernicious part about this that when Logan sells it to his fan base, he is selling this as an opportunity to get rich. If he had just said, hey, listen, I am releasing

a bunch of NFTs. If you think they're valuable, great, buy them. If you get joy from paying for them, buy them. And if you trade them with each other and you get enjoyment from that, feel free. It's just a piece of art. You know, in the same way maybe Beeple does, right? Here's my piece of art. If you want to own it, it's one of one. And that's it. But you're not going to make money from it. I don't care if you make money from it. You could delete it. You could throw it away. I make a piece every day. Is that the key part here for you that feels like it's an injustice here? And with the wider NFT space, because you do see people releasing NFT projects, whether it's Donald Trump or other celebrities. And if it's a piece of artwork,

do you have a problem with it? Or is it that this is, was presented as, hey, here's a way to make money. Yeah, it's totally the like, you're going to make money from this. It was delivered as they specifically said, this is not an NFT project. It's a game. It's a really fun game that will earn you money. And the earn you money is the big claim that you make that if that's not true, If the NFTs don't yield, that's a scam. So that was my big problem with it from the beginning. And then it kind of snowballs with all these people basically stealing money from each other. And like Logan tried to backstab one of his teammates by freezing him out of his wallets.

And then that teammate backstabbed Logan by then selling a bunch of tokens on the project. It was a big mess. But yeah, primarily that's the central kind of problem with this whole thing. And like you said, I mean, I feel kind of. that the NFT world has been completely co-opted by marketers and grifters who are trying to pitch what is basically just a digital version of buying art into this speculative casino of, oh, you're going to get rich. And the bottom line is, you know, if you're going to get rich with NFTs, it's probably

because you are either the guy minting the NFTs or you're the marketer selling the NFTs. Not by just being some random guy trading NFTs. That does not work. Or in my, from what I've seen. And I've seen a lot. Molly, there was some game. Wasn't there? We had them on the show.

Axi Infinity. Yeah. Similar concepts. You can, you buy these characters and then you can rent them. But this idea, because I believe you had people in your life who were like, hey, maybe this is an interesting idea because they also bought in-game items. But the ability to make money from a game seems far as because, as Stephen's saying, somebody has to lose money.

Now you're in the gambling territory. So how is there money being made here? right? Yeah, they all try to get around sort of the Ponzi element of it, which is in order for this whole ecosystem to work, you always need increasing numbers of people adopting the thing. But when that dries up, then the thing collapses because everyone starts selling at the same time. And it's just the classic Ponzi scheme. I mean, it's just there is sort of nothing there, unless the game is really fun. And the whole problem with all, like, it's not the core thing, but one of the most offensive things about all these games

is just how profoundly unfun that they are. I mean, just take aside anything else. The blockchain game of Cryptozu, I kept asking like, what is the game? Well, it's just, it's just hatching these eggs and then you breed an egg and then you hatch the egg. But there is no like game loop. It's just, it's just, you're like here.

No, there's no gameplay. That's like the other most offensive part. Where's the game? It's trashy looking. I mean, that was the other part of the video is you're like, okay, so supposedly tons of money has gone into this game. It's going to be this big reveal. It's going to entice you to buy these eggs and then make more zoo coin. And there's every reason to think that it's going to be spectacular.

And it was just mashed up Photoshop animals. Yeah, they said it. They said they handmade art. That's what Logan Paul said on his podcast. So I was expecting like, he's like, we had 10 different artists carefully designing the things. And then you look it up and it's like Adobe stock photos like of a shark and a penguin and they took the shark's like body and they put the penguins like face on it. It's like, a handmade art is a stretch for sure. Now, always a good thing to do when you're being

investigated by coffee zilla is to mock coffee zilla by wearing suspenders and going on a green screen. And he's an entertainer, Logan Paul, obviously. So he has now. kind of taken it to you and tried to amp this up. This to me seems Molly like a really bad strategy because a lot of what you've uncovered is actionable. And what does it mean actionable? It means people who suffered on the other side of this who lost money would be able to make a claim. And there are plenty of law firms that would love to take on a target that has money. My understanding is Logan Paul is loaded. He makes millions of dollars doing boxing matches. is. His YouTube channel makes millions of dollars or tens of millions, I assume. So he is a millionaire

many times over. So somebody who lost money could easily find an attorney who would probably take this case and sue Logan Paul. Is that the next shoe to drop here? Because this seems unwise to me for him to poke the tiger, tiger being used, Stephen. Yeah. I mean, I can't, I can't speculate too much. I don't want to get myself in there, especially since I have been personally threatened, you know, with some lawsuits. That's what he said in his big kind of like response video. But I do think it's probably likely. We'll see if it happens.

But I will say the response was strange. Because yeah, like when he's posturing on Twitter and he's he's posturing as me or he's going to own me, I really expected that he would come out with just the perfect piece of evidence. The perfect piece of proof that just showed that he had nothing to do with this project or something. And I lost money maybe, you know, like hey,

Listen, I put a million dollars into it. I lost it. I got, it was a fraud. I got, uh, Bilt too. Something. I was just shocked that when he came out, it was just like, you know, he tried to like assassinate my character. He tried to say I never reached out.

And then I was like, yeah, but I have all the evidence that I did though. So, so, uh, the response hasn't gone well for him primarily because, you know, A, most of it's just like personal attacks, but B, anything that he was saying, like was pretty easily debunkable. So, yeah, that's basically where we're at right now. It kind of blew up much bigger than I expected. Masterclass is the best way for you to learn from world class instructors. Legends like NCAA championship coach K.

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no-brainer masterclass.com slash startups 15% off the response video for those who have not watched it and it is something it mostly consists of like you said it's very angry it's a real hostile attack it's like you know i've done all this work on myself and i've tried to redeem myself in the public eye and here you come with this character assassination but also is seven-ish minutes of him effectively admitting, I put together a complete rogues gallery of con men and scammers to build this game without doing any diligence. And he never takes accountability. And he never apologized.

Like that was the most stunning thing is I thought that, you know, a large part of this would be like, look, I screwed up. But ultimately, you know, I never sold any tokens. So I look, whatever. That's fine. But I should have come out way ahead of time, told. you guys what was happening because he knew a lot of this was happening.

And, you know, that's kind of what the angle I was expecting. Like, you know, I didn't mean to disappoint my fans. I want to make people whole if they have lost money. Or sue the guys who stole the money. Like, that's the most shocking part of it. Instead of you. You're suing the guy who exposed the people

who stole from your fans rather than suing the people who stole from your fans. Explain that to me. I mean, I'm like still like in shock. I'm like, what is going on. Yeah. He threatened a defamation lawsuit and then also claimed that by recording a phone call with

your with his manager, you had broken, uh, eavesdropping laws. And I will say that as a long time journalist, I was delighted by that one because I immediately was like, what state do you live in? Is it a one or two party consent state?

Oh, it's a one party consent state. Yeah. And I know, done with that. Yeah. I mean, I believe Texas, New York,

there's a bunch that are one party states. You can record a phone call as a journalist or, as any individual. And then California is two-party. Yeah. And I'm from Texas. And here's the thing. I mean, I called him.

And the first thing I said to Jeff is like, hey, I'm coffee zilla. I'm calling about a story that I'm doing. And I'm calling for comment. Everyone knows you're on the record. You're on the record. This is an L.A. manager for Logan Paul. You're telling me this guy didn't know he was on the record. He then later says in that call, he's like, you're a reporter who reports news.

So you have to report facts. It's like, all right. So he's calling me a reporter. I'm telling him I'm a reporter. I'm telling him that I'm asking for comment. It just seems crazy to be like, yeah, we had no idea that you were you were taping that call. It's an amazing. It's an amazing phone call.

Is there a universe in which? Now, the one thing that Logan Paul did say in his rebuttal, was that, you know, I feel is of some note is that he said neither he nor his manager have made any money on this. Does that carry any water with you? Yeah. I mean, I said in the video, like, you have these four people who did very different things, right? the people who stole the money were not the people who got everyone in. So this is like what makes this thing so tragic. And then the people who got everyone in didn't sell.

The problem was is when you promise people, hey, I'm going to make you a blockchain game that earns you money, you sell millions of dollars of things. You don't deliver people steal money. And then you go radio silent for a year and a half. At some point, you start to carry some of that culpability because it was your job. Maybe it wasn't your fault that the money got. stolen, but it's your job to at that point say, guys, something's wrong. They had community managers that were telling people, hey, it's any day now. The marketing's coming any day now. So all the victims said, hey, like up till basically I started talking to them, we thought this

project was still on. We thought people were going to come back because they were telling us, you know, keep investing, keep investing. And so they kept investing in and in after Logan had realized like basically there are these bad people stealing money. So in my story at the end of the video, I said, look, I ultimately want to give it to the victims to talk. And I basically said, on a call, I was like, who do you think is to blame? And all of them basically said, look, I think all of them share the, share the burden here. Because how can you blame just the people who stole the money? Because they would have never gotten all the marks without someone bringing them in the door. What I think is pernicious about this, Molly, is somebody like Logan Paul is obviously,

obviously, very adept at creating media, creating projects, creating a brand. I mean, this is not somebody who is a slub who got taken by some NFT people. My understanding is like these fights, these pay-per-views are some of the biggest pay-per-views in the world. So you can't have a business over here. Like I'm talking about their boxing business, right? Because he's got a little brother, there's Jake and there's Logan. They both do boxing. And every time they do a boxing match, I see a trend. And I hear, I don't know if this is true, that these boxing matches generate tens of millions of dollars in pay-per-view, which means they make millions of dollars in pay-per-view if we're getting in the ring for a couple minutes. They're running a very sophisticated

business in boxing. Am I correct, Stephen? That's correct. I mean, to say that these guys had no idea what was happening and, oh, you know, I didn't know what was happening. The whole thing is there were red flags all the way down this project. There's this guy, Eddie Ibanez, who's this conman, is, you know, taking all these people for a ride. Well, they were actually approached before the project and basically warned, like, Logan, Jeff, Logan's manager was warned, like, hey, have you actually investigated that this guy that you think is this expert hacker from the CIA is who he says he is? And the guy's like, well, yeah, we kind of looked into it. And he's like, really, because I couldn't, I couldn't verify that. He said he won a Super Bowl for the Eagles. And then I contacted

the Eagles. And that was a lie. So they knew this guy was like this, like, shady character. and they went with him anyway. The other guy, Logan had a previous, like, scandal with. The guy, this guy, Crypto King, was previously known for being a trading card guy who Logan worked with, gotten a huge scandal because there was this, like, fake Pokemon box that was revealed. So everybody came out and said, oh, this guy's a scammer, whatever. He denied it.

But then he moved to crypto. So he moves. He gets so much cheat. He moves to crypto. And then Logan goes and hires the same guy. It's just, it's just bizarre. It's like, it's exactly what you said. For somebody so sophisticated.

He makes over 10 million a year. He's worth 30, 40, 50 million dollars according to the web. Who knows what the right number is? There's three or four million people who lost money in this. The right thing for Logan Pulte to do. And you tell me what you think here, Stephen and Molle. If he just says, listen, if you lost money on this, let me know, I'll try and make it right. I'm going to put together a fund.

My next fight, I'll dedicate, you know, half the money I make for my next fight for, what they call restitution fund. If you have any, if you lost money on this, I know it's not my responsibility. I know there's another person here. I'll try and sue them. I'll try to reclaim the money, but I'll make it right. Because I'm a rich person and I understand you're my fans. I will say, though, this is where I'm going to jump in and say, I'm your lawyer.

Uh-huh. And no way in hell am I letting you do that because you will have just admitted wrongdoing. Okay. So the only thing you can do, I would guess, if you're Logan Paul here, is either. And I would imagine, because I was trying, the thing I was trying to work out, is why come back and why say the project is going to be revived. And presumably, that's the only way to avoid the money being gone forever, right? Like, I would have meant, and again, I do not know.

I am not a lawyer. However, if Cryptozu just goes away and everybody has lost their money for real, no matter what, everybody who's invested in any way, then all of a sudden you can get sued and you've got a whole big fraud case. if the project has just been on hold because like some scammers got involved but now you're rebuilding it and it's all going to be fine you have not

you know you have not taken most people's money I assume it sounds like there was some money that's absconded with though that's never going to be recovered is that accurate yeah yeah a large chunk of it but I will say I mean I think that's a really insightful point but I'll say if your business is

social media and being a person of the people I think sometimes you need need to take the like public approach over the legal approach, even if it will cost you more money. So like what Jason said, I agree with. I mean, because yes, no lawyer is going to advise you to do this. But from the public's perspective, that is the right move to like actually take accountability. What you said is probably right, which is the reason he's probably not is because every lawyer under the sun is going to say, hey, don't say anything. Don't say you've done anything wrong.

but he knows he did do something wrong. So if you kind of man up and just kind of go the public route over the legal route, I think this is like a trap I think people fall into when they're a public-facing person. They take the advice of lawyers rather than responding like a human. And then to the public, it comes off very jaded, cynical and like honestly elitist because you are sort of just responding in a way that is just to kind of get yourself out of a situation. I mean, the other, the happy in between, Molly might be, hey, we're going to investigate this. I've hired an attorney.

If you were impacted, please fill out this form. Let us know how you were impacted. Then, behind the scenes, you say, oh, look, you know, I got 500 people here who paid $1,000 each for these things. That was the first flip of this. These are the people who uncovered themselves, gave us their real names, showed us the transaction on their bank or their credit card. Let's just try to quietly make these people whole. will do a non-disclosure agreement or something. You say, listen, there were people who were harmed,

or if there were people who were harmed, we worked with them to try to fix it, you know? Oh, I like, to be clear, I 100% agree that that is what he should do. That's what I would do. The reason I feel like there may be lawyers telling him not to do that is the, is that like, because of my teenage son, I haven't watched the G.D. Paul brothers for a decade. Yeah.

And Logan Paul has done so many apology videos. that it has become its own meme. It's like its own joke. How often Logan Paul does apology videos every time he does some dirtbag thing, whether it's the suicide forest or the tasering dead rats or the torturing the fish to death, right? He, this is why I started where I started. Like, let's not have, I would prefer for this comeback to be stopped in his tracks because I'm tired of these two. But he always apologizes.

Like Mark Zuckerberg, apologizes and then does it again. Like BP oil. And in this video, he doubles down and he comes for you. And that makes me think that there might be some real concern. Keep digging. Keep digging. Behind. That's what I would do.

The outcome of this. I absolutely, yeah, I think there is something behind it. And I think he realizes how kind of. You might be in real trouble. This is to his career. And I think he's just lashing out. But I want to bring this up to Jason. Because one thing that's interesting that I wasn't able to go too much into,

is that I think a large part of the blind spot here is almost probably applies to this week in startups more than any other podcast. Oh, okay, great. Which is that the main reason Logan basically abandoned this project is because from 2021, like a calendar year from like dink doink. He launched like four or five projects in a row. One year, four or five massive projects.

So he helped promote dink doink. He says he didn't, it's not his, but it's like his buddy's project that he's part of. Then he launches Cryptozoot. It's 100% his project, super ambitious blockchain game. Then he launches, I think that's around the time he does prime, prime energy. Then he launches liquid marketplace, which is a fractionalized NFT marketplace, which he becomes a co-owner of. And then he launches 99 originals, which is a whole other NFT that he has to push. It's like a dedicated marketing thing.

And I think one of the. of the one of the most like fundamental things that he did is like he's taking on so many projects they all probably if they were all dedicated to at any level could be successful except that every single time he hires the worst people throws them at it and just steam rolls on to the next thing and it just comes off like you just sold millions of dollars of this crypto zoo and then like a few months later you're launching another NFT project so yeah i can i can address that He's not a builder. When you're a successful influencer like this is you get a lot of inbound.

Because what do influencers solve? They solve for distribution. So if you're Mr. Beast, who I think is great, you know, and he makes chocolate bars pretty simple, or he does his burger shop or does his, you know, delivery burgers, you know, you're going to be able to deliver the customers. Now, distribution in like the old sense, we'd be like, hey, I'm NBC. I can put you on TV and you guarantee to get a couple million people to watch your show. That's what I think these influencers do.

So who would appreciate that? Well, a venture capitalist would appreciate that, but also another person who would appreciate that is a grifter. So now you're the influencer. Maybe you're not super sophisticated. Maybe you're on the younger side. Maybe you're 19 years old and you've got 100 million followers. These influencers have all of a sudden have this massive distribution.

They have the ability to point their fans and some percentage of those fans' wallets towards a project. And, you know, they may have like this like ADHD kind of approach to the fans. entrepreneurship where it's like, let's try this, let's try that. The problem is they kind of think about those fans, they got to think long term. I think some creators really do think about that. I don't think Kevin Rose, and I know he did an NFT project. Gary Vaynerchuk did one, and then I think Tim Ferriss did one. When they did theirs, they were very upfront, like, hey, this is the limitation of what I'm doing, you know, and here's my idea behind it. But they stuck with

one, right? They may have a lot watch. 50 of them to your point. And you've got to be thoughtful about this stuff because your whole reputation will rise and fall with it. That's exactly right. Because basically, every time you back one of these projects, you have to vet the whole team because you are subject to a bunch of grifters. And your audience, not only does your audience not want to be left in the hands of what

are essentially conmen. There's also just marketing fatigue that I see a lot of my fellow influencers, like sort of not appreciate, which is that. If you do one sponsorship, nobody really cares. If you have one product, nobody really cares. Once you start to get to like three, four, five, and these are projects that constantly need pitching, your audience just starts to feel like a checkbook.

Because fundamentally, that's what they are. You're checking a bunch of boxes, and then they're like a product. You product ties your entire life. And there's a level of that, which is suited for TV and not suited for the work of influencers, which is much more of like a parasycial relationship of, you know, we're sort of different than just your money to me.

So, I mean, Kim Kardashian is a great example here. She is passionate about skims. She's passionate about clothing. She's passionate about her fragrances. She goes to work every day. She makes those products great, yada, yada, yada. And she's really focused on it. And then, oh, yeah, she did a couple of crypto things

here and there on the margin where it was like an influencer. She gets paid. She promotes something. And then it was Kim Kardashian, correct? who got the big fine, Molly? Yep, it was. And then, Evangerville, not Mayfield, or Mayweather. Mayweather also got dinged.

I don't know if Paris Hilton got dinged for hers, but the SEC is now giving out speeding tickets. And the speeding tickets are not de minimis. You know, when you start seeing a half million million dollar speeding ticket, I don't care how rich you are, that stings a little bit. Seven figure, I think stings a little bit. And this is why I think, like you're saying, a small number of things, things you're passionate about, and you own the team.

I got offered to do a lot of crypto projects. I never did one because I was, like, I don't know what the value is that I'm providing. And if you don't know the value you're providing and you're not all in on it, it's kind of like fire festival. Just assume any project that you're not passionate about and you don't control becomes fire festival. And then you should proceed. And what's going to happen here is, now that based on your work, I bet you the SEC is going to look into this because we have a term for when you buy something like an NFT and you have an expectation that it's going to go up and yada yada. It's called securities. We call these things securities.

I think NFTs in a lot of their iterations are securities, especially when they're giving eggs and their, you know, there was a token attached to it too. It's not just the egg, right? There's a token attached to it. Dinkdoink was a coin. Sure. Every time I say dink doink, I wonder why I'm in this timeline.

Like, why am I in this timeline? I heart Dink. A key part of securities, too, is that it's a reasonable expectation of profit from the effort of others. And so the problem with a blockchain game, exactly. It's the Howie test. The problem with the blockchain game is it's something to be developed. The reason a lot of people can sell NFTs freely is because once you get the product,

you have the product. The product's done. You're not buying it with the expectation of future work. The problem with selling a blockchain game is you are buying with the expectation that Logan's got this killer, massive development team that's going to make you rich. And the fact is that it didn't exist. Or they weren't paid or whatever, whatever you want to bleep. What I will say about people who've done this successfully, people like Mr. Beast, is you find that they're exceptional

at building and scaling teams who are as ambitious and as driven and as capable as their vision. And when those things become misaligned, I mean, it's just like a total disaster. I will say, Jason, that Logan in his recent podcast,

he called me, speaking of Floyd Mayweather, he called me his most formidable opponent yet. Oh, okay, well, they have it. And he's a guy who fought Floyd Mayweather. So, well, there you have it. I think. to you. Congratulations on that. I keep doing your great work.

You make a living at this now? This is your full-time gig. You make enough off the YouTube views to do this. My wife works, so it's a combined income. But yeah, with both of us, we make it work. And I'm passionate about it. Honestly, at this point, I'm very careful that, you know, I'm just careful to make sure I have plenty of money in a lawsuit fund.

That's all I'll say. Do you have a Patreon or something that people can support? Because I think the work you do is worth somebody or substack that people can give you money, give you $10 a month to keep doing this? I finally started a Patreon because for the longest time I didn't keep it, but really I felt like my direction is more towards the high quality investigations that just take a long period of time. Yeah. And so I just don't want to be relying on any kind of ad model. And I don't take sponsorships either because that would feel weird. So yeah, Patreon's the only thing that I do.

And is something great is happening here in terms of investigative journalism. You're an investigative journalist, if you were at Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Barons, you know, they pay people to do what you do. And you would eventually win a Pulitzer based on like these incredible or many awards based on these investigations. So I highly encourage you keep doing it. Have they offered you a job yet, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times? Have they come to you and said, hey, you want to be a journalist? Don't do it, man. Don't do it. No, honestly, I'm always stunned because sometimes I'll, you know, break stories that I think are pretty interesting or by the numbers seem interesting and it's just usually dead silence from there's just a disconnect between the mainstream

media and and you know uh sort of the whatever you call the uh you know individual media i really think it used to be a whole gum shoe thing to uncover scams and nobody does it anymore it's a dead art in mainstream media so all right great yeah job you got it everybody uh do a search for coffee zella go over to patreon i'm going to do it right now and i'm going to support your work i love supporting independent artists, independent, writers, thinkers, bloggers, podcasters, you fall into some zone of that. Just to, like, if even if you just give a dollar or like five dollars, it just creates a little momentum.

So everybody go ahead and do a Google search, CoffeeZilla, Patreon, CoffeeZilla, YouTube, check out his work, subscribe, and keep up the great work, brother. I really think this is important work that you're doing in the world. Thank you so much, Jason. Appreciate it. All right. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.

Take care. Hey everyone, it's Molly Wood, co-host of this week in startups and managing director here at launch, where our mission is to back builders and help build founders. To do that, we're trying to create as many opportunities as we can for you to learn how to start a company. And now we've made that education a lot more portable. Founder University podcast is a short form video podcast for founders to learn tactical advice from other founders and operators. It is for you. It's for startup founders, startup executives and founding team members, and even aspiring founders with an idea or who are trying to build an MVP. The format is super consumable. It's 10 to 15 minute tactical talks with the goal of being

able to implement what you just learned right away. Along with the founder university podcast, we also have the founder university blog, founder.university slash blog, where you can get the same tactical advice in written form. Here's some of the content you can expect from the podcast. How to write investor updates? This is crucial. How to find a co-founder. How to design loved products.

How to acquire customers on social media. How to build an email campaign. I mean, we're talking the literal nuts and bolts of building and running a successful company. Learn more and subscribe at founder. At founder. You know what? I wanted to do an overtime.

I remember something about you talking to SB. app. Was that on a Twitter street, a Twitter spaces or something? We had three Twitter spaces together. And on the third one, I basically got him to admit that he had co-mingled funds during withdrawals, that there were generalized withdrawals, no distinction between margin trading accounts or regular accounts, which, to be clear, is fraud. And that's on FTX.

You can't use the like, oh, that was Caroline and Alameda. I mean, at this point now, because Caroline's rolling on them, I don't know if it'll be relevant, but my biggest dream is to testify in the SBF case. Well, you know, they just even play a clip. Yeah. In the Nikola case, remember Nicola, the car company, that's your car company, and he's going to jail. That kid, he was on my podcast, Trevor, Milton. And I asked him, like, why are you, you doing the Hydroger Mace cars? Why are you doing like this bad? EV pickup truck. You're going up against cyber truck with the millions of RCPs. You got the F-150's going to do an electric. And you got Rivian. Like you'll be like a distant number four, five, or six. Like he's like, oh, well, you know, there's, that's our way to reach consumers. And we really want to have consumer retail investors involved. And so that's our play to like get involved with Robin. They played that at the trial. Because this is the thing with people like SBF or Trevor at

Nicola or even perhaps Logan Paul in this case. They're so arrogant. and they're so reckless that they don't actually think about what they're saying. I can't believe you were played. I'm sitting in front of royalty here. Scam busting royalty. I mean, the scams are just crazy. Why do people, the other, this is the thing that's crazy for me. It's so easy in entrepreneurship to make money in the United States.

We have the most friendly environment, Stephen, of any environment in the world to start a company. And if you fail, you don't have to carry that loss with you for the rest of your life. In fact, it becomes a badge of honor. I tried, I failed. The company shut down. Yeah, people lost their jobs. You know, the lease where we rented our office, we broke the lease because we went out of business. All these kind of things happen.

And we're in the United States. We say, yeah, that's a cost of doing business. You know, we've got a vibrant business environment. So something like Logan Paul benefits from that. He's doing all these other businesses that work. Why do this? Why do this? Why do something that you just know is a scale?

where you just know is shady or you just know is on the gray area. There's always, to me, I think, some combination of mental illness or arrogance, right? Whether it's Elizabeth Home or Trevor Milton, they have a desire to be famous. They covet the power and the,

you know, and the money and the power, but it really has so much to do with their ego as well that they forget, oh, you know, if there are noes just did three tests instead of 150, and they said, yeah, we test for three things. And yet, we do a little microvile for these three things. They would have been fine because it probably would have worked for two or three small droplets of blood for two or three tests. And they could have been sitting here for 10 years and say, yeah, we're going to every year do a different thing. And maybe in 100 years,

we'll have 150 tests. But no, they had to go for it. Had to lie. It's just, it really is deranged. And SPF seems like a really deranged individual to me. I don't know what you're, you have a take on him since you know fraudster so well? What archetype or is it like a new archetype? Is he Lex Luthor or is he a speed freak? Is he a dope? What's your read on him if you had to have a read? I think he's one of the like one of the most,

in a way he's very cunning in that he was able to manipulate his image almost as well as anyone since Elizabeth Holmes. I think she had the same thing going on where she carefully cultivated a very special image. In both cases, once that image fell apart, they tried to kind of regain it and the manipulation continued, but once that mask sort of slips, most people, if you're not, you know,

at the New York Times, most people don't buy it. But I think it depends. I mean, I think what you said is true. It's not a one-size-fits-all problem. I think a lot of it has to do with ego and greed. I think you're right that when you get to a certain place, you sort of abound in opportunities. And there is a tendency to want to just grab everything at once. And a lot of these guys like in L.A., I mean, I'm speaking of influencers because that's who I've been focused on recently,

they get in this bubble in L.A. where it's like they don't really, they're not exposed to the fact that they're so far beyond the average person. their neighbors are people in million-dollar houses. Their neighbors have these crazy nice things. So even though by every conceivable, like, regular metric, they're living this out extraordinary life, they feel like they need to do something else. So they're on the phone with their buddy. And their buddy just did a crypto project in NFTs. And they go, hey, dude, I made 10 million.

They got a plane. They got a second home. Yeah. So they go, if that guy got 10 million, I could do 20 million because I double the subscribers. And it becomes an ego thing. And even on the Crypto Zoo launch project, Logan Paul says, Gary V had V friends. I have Crypto Zoo. So it was literally like, he did this.

Now I do this. This is my version of that because like these people, they just want to be. So I think a lot of it is an envy thing. And it's like you're chasing the next thing. It's really sad. You know, one of the great things to do in entrepreneurship is be good at one thing. And then just keep doing it and get better and better at it. For Logan Paul, if you're really that good of a fighter and fight promoter, why not just keep putting on fights?

And just stay away from the stuff that's going to be toxic. Or sell this energy drink. It's going crazy. Like, you can't find it in the UK. It's like, it's like you could start the next Gatorade. I mean, it is so strange to sort of risk it all on these strange side projects. I've heard a saying that you go like the worst enemy of a good idea is another good idea. Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. Distraction is what kills startups is what we say in our business. You know, like, they just, people get distracted. They've got one piece of their product that's product market fit, you know, Airbnb, renting an apartment. And then people are like, what about boats? What about planes? What about cars?

And it's like, yeah, there's other people who can do that idea. Let's stay focused on our idea. Scale it globally. And then we'll move on to the second idea. And they did. They did experiences in year 7, eight or nine, I think. But, you know, you want to be thoughtful about scaling these things. Listen, continue success.

I love what you do. Everybody again, one more time. We went over time. subscribe to CoffeeZilla. Go to your Patreon. Go to YouTube. I'm just happy to support Jason. I want to support Jason.

I'm doing okay. I'll see you next time. All right. Thanks, guys. Okay, next up, we have OK Boomer. Emily Herrera is on. She's an investor at Night Ventures, and she came on to give her 2023 predictions

with Rachel reporting on the latest OK Boomer. Enjoy. Thank you, Emily Herrera. As everybody else knows, for coming on another episode of OK Boomer. It has been a long time since you've been on. For people that are longtime listeners of this segment, Emily was actually one of the first people I've ever had on OK Boomer.

She was the first person that I ever met from the show in person, who I didn't know prior. And now she's one of my best friends. So this podcast, I have to say thank you a ton to everybody listening. Because without you guys, I probably wouldn't know M in my New York experience would be much different. And Emily, why did I ask you to be on today? So why did you ask me to be on today? Today, you wanted for me to talk about my 2023 predictions when it comes to new age consumer or Gen Z consumer. And you're the best person to ask about for these 2023 predictions because you are now

an investor at night, which is so cool because the last time I was talking to you, you were at a different fun doing something different. And a lot of the things that you focused on in Knight is Gen Z and consumer. And that's what you tweet about all day long. You're obviously really wanting to make a change. So what do you think is going to happen? What do you think is going to change in 2020 in that space? Yeah. I mean, like kind of for context also, people who don't know what Night Ventures is. So I'm an investor at a fun called Knight. And it is out of a holding company, which is called Night Media. It is a creator management company. And we manage 50 out of the top. 250 people on the internet on the planet. And kind of the insight there is it's a collection of

investors who really think that creator economy is the unlock for accurate kind of go-to-market strategy and being able to lower customer acquisition within any kind of company possible. And how we see that happening is not just working with the influential people that are in that industry, but also what we call kind of the creator go-to-market specialists under them. And that could be the part-time or full-time people who specialize in content, community, production, creator relations, really anything in the general virality space. So my largest interest going into that was being able to get to the zeitgeist of kind of what's going on, just both in the world and also what's going on online. And so that really drives me into 2023, kind of going into my first fresh year, now eight months working at this fun full-time. you know, what I'm thinking about is that this idea of consumer and consumer-oriented products really merging with creator and the concept of creator.

And what that looks like really is that the idea of individuals being able to see your direct competitors as a founder, seeing opinions about your product and opinions about your competitors, and just general information about every single thing that goes on within your company and within your products will be at their fingertips. within less than a second. And so the idea of influence and opinions and kind of the involvement of the end user is really now what is going to become the idea of creator, not just kind of individuals who just put on cameras on the internet. It's funny that you say that because one of my 2023 predictions is definitely not as technical

or as well-spoken as yours. But I was thinking how I almost never buy a product unless it's reviewed off the internet. So I'm never going to Amazon if it has no reviews, like anything. Like I need, I need to be reviewed. And so I go through, I go to TikTok, I go to Twitter, I go to Reddit, I go anywhere. And so that consumer is a creator because they're creating that review, which is in turn, like making it so. That's impacting my decisions as a buyer, right?

But back in the day, like when I was younger, I would watch commercials on, like Nickelodeon for all these different items. And those people, like those creators, like creating those commercials, where the people, influencing my buying decisions, not like the everyday person, that could be one of my roommates. And I totally going to get more prevalent in 2023. So one of my predictions is definitely garnering even more of that review power to influence a buyer. So like you're already seeing people in China, for example, I know we're really, really big into almost doing, I talked about this with Molly a little bit like infomercial style content where they're doing like those live shopping streams. I'm like, that's a really, for me, not my cup of tea, but it's obviously working for some demographics.

So interested to see how that goes. And like, have you bought anything on Amazon without it having a review like in the past year? No. I think the first thing when I go on Amazon is just to first look at the photos because I want to make sure that the quality is exactly what the provider is saying. And I think especially because all of these manufacturers and people who are selling, on Amazon, obviously understand SEO and understand what consumers are wanting. But I think just like every single person knows that that doesn't always line up with what they're paying for.

So I'll go first, probably to the photos. Second, we'll go to the comments and kind of seeing where the stars are and see if they're kind of relevant to what I'm looking for. So if I'm buying like a pack of pencils and I think that that's not necessarily going to be something that's going to impact me financially, maybe I'll just look at making sure that that product is exactly what it's supposed to be physically and that that provider and manufacturer is doing it the way that the brand was supposed to if I were just going to the store. But if it's something that's probably over $200 and it's going to be making sure that

people in general are having a good experience with the quality of the product. Okay, so now I actually have a question for you, if that's good. Oh, man, okay. Okay. So my question for you is when was the last time that you wanted to buy something online and you got so overwhelmed with all the options, or maybe nothing was really working, or maybe you found a cheaper alternative, whatever the reason was. But when was the last time that you saw something on Amazon and decided to not buy it on Amazon and instead try to pick it up in store? So I love ordering things straight to Whole Foods, which is Amazon's pickup, first thing,

because once I see the product right away, not only do I have a package theft, like issue, but when I see the product right away at Old Foods, I can return it right there. So it's instead I don't have to go somewhere to return it, which is really nice. But going in person, mostly it's for ski stuff. So that actually happened a day.

I went into REI because I feel like there are certain products that you just, I just can't really buy online without like really trying myself. And it was mittens. I really small hands and I have ski gloves. I want to ski mittens. So I went to RRII. but it's totally in candles.

I guess it's like another thing. You and I are both like that. Candles was the thing before that, which is like a not seasonal object. That is probably like, as you see, I'm showing off my candles right there, including the one of the time for my birthday.

Yeah, like I'm not going to buy that online. So there are certain items. Okay. Okay. And then kind of just going back to what you were talking about on like your decision of either deciding to create content

once you buy something. I think that that is something that, especially kind of founders or business owners, haven't really thought about until the past five years. So kind of the way that I like to think about that is it's really the death of passive consumption. I think passive consumption to active consumption is really a model that mostly individuals and media

mostly care about, especially on social media, how much time we're spending online, what you care about when you're online, and kind of like how active you are in the process of spending that time. And I think that you're going to see kind of the model of individuals putting their attention to creators and also to media companies blend into the way that they're purchasing products. And I think that the catalyst to that is basically going to be people seeing that these media individuals or people who have online public persona are kind of selling these products.

and now you have more of an active choice that you say, okay, not only am I consuming this content and giving attention and time to this individual, now I'm also choosing to support them financially. And I think that that mindset is really going to shift into a lot of the ways that individuals will purchase going forward. And part of that, too, is the idea of being both a consumer and a creator.

So one thing that I think kind of was crazy in the past couple of weeks, especially during the holiday season, is I have a bunch of little cousins. And whenever I ask them, you know, who are they looking at online? What do they care about? A lot of them do bring up that they spend a lot of time on the phone. And a lot of the fights that they have with their parents is how much time to spend on their phone and what they look at.

And I think one of the larger kind of trends going forward, especially when it comes to marketing to parents specifically, and you're to see a lot of millennials now are having children and being very active in the health and wellness of their children, with the birth of Gen Z and more importantly, Gen Alpha, it's the first generation that's really going to have

digital footprint without the individual putting the footprint themselves on. So you're seeing a rise of a lot of parents both posting online, which has been happening for decades,

but also buying up usernames and buying up online persona for their children to make sure that they have that ownership as they get older. That's already a really good prediction. Like more accounts for babies. Like I have a friend who,

you know what I mean? I have a friend who's an influencer and verified the whole nine yards, right? Influencer with an eye, she's killing it. And she has a baby. And her baby does have an Instagram username. And I think that's really interesting. And it kind of reminds me back in the day. And like, I'm sure I'm sure there are tech people out there that can speak on this like more than I can.

But it reminds me back in the day. I remember I was like thinking something about, I think the child's now like 12. and I saw that there was like a URL that was bought for her for her birthday. And like 12 years ago, it was like a URL that people were buying like after the kid was born and like gifting it to like family. And now you have people buying like families buying URLs when their kids are born or even like before they were even born. Like I bet you the Kardashians already have all their kids use your names.

But I guess in thinking of like your digital footprint, imagine like you're younger, right? when you start online shopping, I guess mine was college, because that's when I first, like, had to online shop. Like, I didn't have, like, the luxury of going to, to Target, like, before school, I didn't have a car. So that's when I first got an Amazon account. And I don't think I've really reviewed products when I was that young. But imagine, like, kids now, like, every product, like, that you bought in college having, like, a review and having that be public. Like, I feel like I bought some really, like, crazy Halloween costumes and, like, way too much Diet Coke.

over Amazon, which is like so sad even thinking about. Like, imagine everybody's seeing that. Like, that would suck. Well, okay, so that is a great point because not only, so now you're posting a lot younger than it used to be. I mean, I got my first phone. This is really embarrassing to say. My mom will get really mad at saying it.

But I got my first phone in first grade. And it was a flip phone. Yeah, that was sick. It was a flip phone. So it wasn't that crazy. And then I had the sidekick and I had the flip-ups. I had all that. Eventually got my first iPhone, I think, in maybe sixth grade.

So way earlier than I was supposed to. And thanks to whatever provider that was for giving my dad an extra line and him not knowing what to do about it and saying, whatever else, give it to my way too young daughter. That kind of like birthed me online. That coupled with pretty strict parents. But the idea of kind of personal cybersecurity. is probably going into this next year, one of the most important things I'm focusing on. And not to say that necessarily I'm a cyber genius,

but I've been spending so much time really understanding what consumers care about when they think about their privacy and their security. And so, yeah, the concept of consumer cyber. And so kind of what that framework looks like from the enterprise side, it's something that even though I've been an investor for a little bit, I didn't really understand because I think that cyber mostly is specified towards enterprises. Now you'll have kind of these providers

that have a suite of different products, also the service of knowing that there is someone who understands cyber attacks and can really work with the head of security within the cyber company. Basically, the end user would have like a first or second party authenticator that would go on, you'd go on to Slack or something.

It'll bring you to an alternative, like two-factor sign-on to make sure that it's you, usually on your work phone. and then it'll allow you to sign into whatever kind of SaaS product your boss is paying for. But really, the insight there is that a lot of people are not doing work just on these SaaS products anymore. It'll bleed into their social accounts. It'll bleed into a lot of personal emails just because that's the way that the world organizes itself or doesn't organize itself at that point. And I think also there are a lot of people who don't work at enterprise companies who still want the security of being able to know if their accounts have been hacked, what information's on the

internet, and their ability to take that information off of the internet. So I basically went around to a bunch of my friends and asked them what they really cared about if they thought about really personal security and information online. And it came down to really four things. It was, I want to make sure that I don't lose my account. If I lose my account, I want to know that I lost it and I want to be able to recover it. I want to make sure that there's information on the internet that I want and I have the ability to take it off if I don't want it. And the fourth one is a really interesting concept. But I think I only would have been able to be exposed to if I was working at night and working with a bunch of creators. But it's this idea of brand protection. And

if I think about just in my experience as a creator on the internet, not even just as a persona, but really being a younger individual, I've had people make accounts of me pretending to be someone who's had kind of some explicit content. I have, I do not. But that. That's been going on really for me for a number of years. Even when my account was private, someone would kind of request to follow me. Maybe one day I just wasn't paying attention and would accept them. Or maybe someone else's account would get hacked, do the same thing to them and then also have access to my information.

So as a younger woman, that's really been going on for me forever. But this idea of kind of this brand protection, also making for the other individuals, aren't kind of taking my brand or taking similar logos and impersonating me to get access to my users and individuals who trust me is something that's also blending into the mainstream tech scene, as you can see within kind of Twitter and almost like a two-factor authentication for just identity. So I think that concept of really consumer cybersecurity is just not enterprise. That could be creator, it could be small business, it could just be a normal everyday individual person. And then kind of the way to think about that going into from like an investment standpoint

is almost a similar way to the way that enterprise investing works for cyber and that looks like products that are before an attack, during an attack, and after an attack. So kind of what I think about for a consumer standpoint is what is the grading to which my security

is working for me as a person right now. So I'll put in kind of all of my accounts and see how stable those accounts are. If I have, let's say, old Twitter accounts I haven't been on within years or old emails, Yahoo, whatever really I've had throughout the years, throw them all in there and see what are the weak parts of that.

Kind of what is the, to what degree should I have two-factor authentication? I spoke with a bunch of professionals who are just like, if you remember anything, know that if there's a two-factor authentication, it's better than not. And I was like, okay, I can remember that. That is kind of a preemptive measure. That is the bar. The bar is so low when it comes to individuals and their personal

It's hilarious. It's kind of surprising that this hasn't already popped off. If you think about how big companies like IBM and Oracle are and Microsoft, especially with what they provide. I know IBM in particular has some great cybersecurity platforms. And I just had my first impersonator ever on Twitter. I've had the only fans impersonators on Instagram before, as every college age girl did in 2018. I feel like that was like a big thing.

people like faking accounts, taking people's like college photos and stuff like that at you have parties. And since being on Twitter so much, I guess, I've had my first Twitter fluencer scandal, which has felt very cool. But somebody from Twitter reached out to me and they were able to cover it, which was really nice. But if I ever messaged anybody grammatically correct asking for Bitcoin,

that's not me. Oh, yeah. If you have to give me any other prediction, I guess in the cybersecurity space. Yeah. What would they be in relation to consumers? Yeah. I mean, there's also going to be kind of, once this narrative goes out for consumers,

and I think people realize that there could be products that work with them that are not optimized for desktop, like all the Norton's and all the old things that have been around. I remember when your parents would have like PCs and go on and download a bunch of these CDs from Best Buy. Those things that really work for your phone. They also don't work specifically to your accounts. So most of these laptops, like obviously Apple has a great security layer. Microsoft also has updated theirs.

And it kind of, yeah, I mean, the stack is slimmer kind of on desktop. But mobile is really going to be the next focus, not just for accounts, but also just like is a point of access. So if you think about kind of, if you have an Android, like you know that you're probably hosed right now. And I feel bad. There's a lot of room to build companies in that space. but also just even if you have a regular Apple product, the way that a lot of the things that are around the idea of consumer cyber right now is that they will email you.

But I don't know about you, but whenever I have impersonators or if I have someone kind of leak into my accounts or if there's information that's been taken out of one of my accounts, I don't even know of an old account, I want to know immediately. And I want to make sure that I get a push notification because I'm on my phone the entire day. And I think something as small as that is really thinking about a new wave of consumers

because that that coupled almost like a citizen's app to really understand, you know, what level of security I'm at right now is kind of going to be the new wave. And then also kind of the last part of that is how do I make sure in the future that I can provide insurance if I have really, really important assets, like if I have copies of my tax returns or my social security on my phone, how do I make sure that I can get insurance on those assets going forward? And that's kind of where I'll cap my ran on personal cyber. I guess my last question for this topic is, you know, Apple has that feature where it's like these many passwords were already compromised, which is like, I guess, their example of like cybersecurity.

I was in my brother's settings trying to help them set up something over Thanksgiving break. And he had a bunch of those. And he just doesn't care. And I was with my other siblings. And they're like, yeah, we never, we never listen to those. How would you get people of that age? If they're already getting these push notifications, and it's made by Apple and their Apple junkies,

like my family has, iPads, MacBooks, iPhones. If they're not listening to Apple when it comes to, especially like password safety, what can we do to make consumers understand how big of an issue this is? Yeah, I think kind of the equivalent of the way that I think about it is like the VPN movement within the creator economy in the past year, you see all these advertisements and a bunch of different creators. And now I feel like everyone kind of knows what a VPN is, but not everyone uses it, but everyone kind of knows what it is.

There are maybe like six different categories of personal cybersecurity. I think the gate to unlock it there is seeing high profile creators really encourage the people that follow them and who also want to be like them when they get older, take initiative in the holistic idea of personal security and brand protection. I think brand protection is really just repackaging personal security. But I think it will be enough of a shift that younger people will be interested in that. Got you. So it's super excited to see 2023 and what it has for more people buying up their kids' usernames on social media and cybersecurity.

And thank you so much, Emily, for hopping on this segment of OK Boomer. And where can people find you if they don't follow you already, which is so silly to say, because I'm sure people probably already follow you. listening to the speaking startups. But if they don't know, where can they follow over you?

They can follow me on Twitter. My handle is Emily and then Herrera, but listen to how this is actually such a lap. The first E is an X because I used to be on Tumblr a lot. So got to change that at some point. Are you going to change it, you think? No,

no. I think it's kind of like, I don't know. It's been there for so many years. I've been on Twitter since I was 13, so I can't see myself really changing any of those things. Also, kind of on the trend of personal security and understanding that shift between passive consumption

and active consumption. I have started my own podcast that is going to be out next week. I haven't listened. I'm excited. Oh, it's coming out next week. It's coming out next week. And the idea is really, I know, I know. It's really going to be focusing on individuals who have their livelihood and relationships and work online. And what is the balance of wellness? I think you see a lot of emergence of holistic wellness, whether it's physical, whether it's mental, whether it's emotional, and really understanding what is that digital break between kind of all the different facets of wellness and personal relationships with technology. And it's something that I've struggled with for so long and really was the table conversation in the past

couple of holidays that I feel like I know enough people who have been online that we could actually explore like a real intimate conversation about what we feel about with our phones. I love that. I'm super pumped. This is the first time I'm hearing of it. You sent me a link earlier today and I was wondering what that was. I did. It was bad. So yeah, I'm very excited looking forward to hearing this conversation further over there.

Thanks, Emily. Thank you. Thank you. And that is it, everybody. I hope you have a great weekend. No Sunday show this week. We will be back with you on Monday. Bye bye.