My First Million: #114 with Steph Smith - The Head of Trends Talks Insider Trading and The Gen-Z Mafia

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now, HubSpot

just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell, and they break down why these pitches were

winners or losers, and each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find Another Bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

We are live.

My apologies, guys.

I was just saying I was late today.

Sean's normally the late one.

I've been late twice in a row now.

My apologies.

Sean, that was a dig at you, which-

I suppose a compliment.

I'm not late.

I thought that's how I took it.

You were not late.

It is me.

But we are with Steph Smith.

Steph Smith is my coworker.

Steph runs Trends and is just like a creator at our company.

We kind of just tell her to do stuff, and she does a great job.

I've met Steph.

How did I meet you, Steph, on Twitter?

I think so.

You reached out.

I wrote an article around a year ago, and you reached out based on that.

And Steph's article, it had one of the better headlines I've read.

I'm a big copyright or headline fan, and it was, to be great, just consistently be

good.

Right?

Yeah.

Something like that.

Exactly.

And it was a great headline.

So we're going to have Steph here.

But before we get into that, Sean, I did meet up with Ty Lopez, texted me last night,

and he goes, hey, I'm in New York.

Do you want to meet up?

Oh, shit.

I met up with him for about an hour, and we talked about how to hire, mostly how to

hire, and a bunch of great stuff.

He's cool, man.

Ty's a cool dude.

He's changed my perspective.

I've changed on him.

How swole was he?

He's big.

He is a buff dude.

His dad was a professional bodybuilder, he said.

So he definitely has those genetics.

Can he beat you up?

He's probably stronger than me, but no.

I think that I probably have 20 years younger than him.

So I haven't.

There's a feistiness inside you that he is not aware of.

You don't think he's aware?

I think people are.

I don't know.

Anyway, I don't need to talk about beating Ty up.

I like Ty.

He's my friend now.

Great.

What are we going to talk about today?

Steph came with like a list of ideas, which I always love when people do this.

It's a six page list.

So I think this is going to be like a 26 part episode.

All right, Steph.

So did we do you justice introducing you or did we leave out any important bits?

I think you did me justice.

I work on trends at Sam's company, the hustle, and I create stuff for fun.

I think that's a pretty quick summary of what I do.

She has a good personal website, Steph Smith.io.

And Steph is just like, you know, there's like this whole community, Sean, they're

called indie hackers.

You know what they are?

Yeah, of course.

Steph is like the definition of an indie hacker.

It's like this weird nerdy community of dorks who build awesome stuff.

She's better than 99% of the indie hackers I've ever met.

The most of the indie hackers I've met build stuff and they never get it to anyone.

Like there's like zero distribution muscle.

And so I got to give her credit because she actually like write stuff that people read,

build stuff that people see.

And I think that's like a pretty big separator.

That's a line in the sand.

Like there's one line in the sand, which is like, you make nothing or you make something.

All right, cool.

And then it's like, you make something and people see it and like it or nobody ever

hears about it.

You know, it's just a tree in the forest.

And so I got to give you credit.

But and also your website is awesome.

I just like five minutes, five minutes before this, I messaged her, I was like, Hey, who

made your website?

She's like, I made it.

I was like, what?

And then I just offered to buy the template.

I was like, I want, I want one of those.

Can I have that?

Like, can I have a website as cool as yours?

So it's definitely awesome.

You should check it out.

All right.

We need to stop.

I'm just like sucking up to stuff, sucking up to stuff.

No, I appreciate it.

And I'm super stoked to be here.

But yeah, happy to jump into some of these ideas if you guys want.

Yeah.

And what's the way you're showing, I think Steph listens to most episodes we do, which

is weird.

Definitely.

I've listened to every single one.

Great.

So you have a good taste too.

All right.

So what are some of the ideas that, that, you know, you're interested in right now?

Cool.

So the first one I'll start out with and throughout there is remote slash work from home stuff,

which I know I feel like everyone listening to this is doing a little eye roll because

it's like the most common thing that people bring up.

But I feel like most of the things that people are talking about in this space, they're either

like collaboration tools, the next zoom, they're just basically taking stuff that's already

out there and being like, how, how can I use my skills to create exactly this?

And I don't think that's, you know, there's a lot of room for that right now.

But what I do think there's room for is a lot of other niche ideas.

If you just kind of start from the fundamentals of what does like a remote worker need, what

are the new gaps that exist?

So let me talk about a couple of them.

The first one is just how benefits change for especially large companies.

So if you think about companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, they're known in the past

for having these like incredible offices.

This is, you know, perks in general are one of the things that they actually use as a

competitive edge to bring talent in.

And so with everyone remote, how do these companies still have an edge?

Well, you can't really, at least I think right now they don't, but they can start to develop

it and other companies can develop it as well.

So there's some cool companies that I found that a couple of them are Hoppier, hoppier.com,

June.io, another one's called comp.io, C-O-M-T-P-T.

And basically these companies are kind of identifying all of these new types of benefits

that remote companies can have.

So it's anything from like mental health support to, you know, at home fitness.

But I did a Twitter thread the other day and there was some really interesting ideas.

One of them was just, you know, a stipend so that people can spend on Upwork so that

they don't have to do all the shitty stuff that they don't want to do.

That was, I think the guy who came up with that, Sean, wasn't he on the pod?

I didn't see it.

What's his name?

Chris, was it Chris Back?

I saw it.

There was a guy that came up with that and it was really viral.

I think that was him.

And so basically stuff, his thing said, our perk towards employees is we give $500 a month

for Upwork.

Is that right?

Yeah.

I think it's basically like, okay, what are all the things that you hate doing in your

job?

How can we make those disappear for very little cost to us?

And that actually, you know, this is a net benefit to us because now you have this much

more time to be an awesome employee, do what we actually hired you to do.

And so that's one benefit.

But then there's all types of stuff like, you know, I've heard of people like buying

their employees like wine or beer subscriptions, anything from like companies actually starting

to pay.

They're like, what are the maids, pay for their internet, their utilities?

It's like, what are like all the things that you would normally pay for?

Like in an office, you're paying for utilities, you're paying for a maid, you're paying for

these things to make your employees' lives easier, better.

And how does that kind of switch so now that everyone's working from home?

And then as I mentioned, how do these big companies kind of get a competitive edge and

say, hey, we're going to make your lives awesome.

We're going to make you want to join this company because it's going to be, you know,

just so easy for you to work at home and you're going to love it.

And so I think there's a huge opportunity.

The examples you have are Hoppier, H-O-P-P-I-E-R.com and June.io.

Those two seem pretty much like the same exact thing, right?

How big do you think these are?

So I think they're just starting and I was researching some of these before this.

And I think Hoppier especially, that was actually a company that pivoted.

They used to do like in-office snacks, like they were actually targeting companies that

had offices and they're like, okay, well, that's gone, at least for now.

What do we do to like fill this gap?

And I think from what I saw, most of these companies operate where they actually, they

just give, they say, hey, the hustle, you want to give your employees like 50 bucks

every month to spend on whatever.

And there's this like assortment of things that you can spend that on.

And then, you know, the hustle pays, I think like five bucks a month per head extra to

have Hoppier like figure out the logistics and all this.

I think there's opportunity to extend this in a couple ways.

Like one, if you've ever, have you ever heard of this site, KeyValues, it's keyvalues.io.

So it's an awesome site and it's run by one person and it's just this site that basically

aggregates like the key values, the key things that an engineer looking for a company would

want and it kind of isolates, okay.

If you care about like lunches with your team, then like these companies do that.

If you care about remote before everyone was doing a remote, these companies do that.

Let me ask you, well, I'll ask you about this in a second, but is this, how big is this

KeyValues thing you think,.io or.com?

KeyValues.io, or sorry,.com, sorry, it's.com.

So I know, I don't know the exact run rate, but it's one person doing it and I know she

gets a couple thousand dollars from each of these companies per year to be on this website

because it's, again, it's kind of like this is a B2B site where companies are like, look,

I want our company to look good.

I want, you know, even if I get like one engineer from this, who's awesome, then it's worth

the like 3K I spend.

So I don't think this is like a venture scale business at all, but for an individual, they

could go do the same thing with this like remote benefits idea and I think they could

kill it.

So there's, there's two like interesting variations of this, right?

One is how do I use money to make my people more productive?

So obviously you can get great tools, but another thing might be, well, if I'm always

worried about, you know, my health benefits or if I have to clean my house because I'm

working at home and that's just a task I do, that's an hour I spend doing something that's

not work, right?

So this was like the Google thing, which is like, Hey, just come into work and stay here.

We'll feed you.

You don't have to worry about that.

We'll do your laundry.

You don't have to worry about that, right?

These really weren't like retention perks so much as they were more like what I'll call

productivity perks.

They knew they could squeeze an extra two hours out of each person's day by automating

away a bunch of the busy work that they had to do to run their lives.

And so there's, there's perks like that that exist.

And then there's the perks that are like, these perks say something about us.

These are our recruiting perks.

These are, you know, we're trying to make our people happier and feel like they're at a

company that's like aligned with them at their core.

And that's where, you know, you get something like key values or, you know, I know right

now at our company, there was a big like hoopla about like, are you going to match charitable

donations that we make?

And there was like a lot of like pushback of like, why isn't the company matching?

And I was like, dude, because the company doesn't have to match.

Like that's a crazy expectation that the company should just donate to your favorite cause

because you decided to donate.

They, you know, so it was crazy to me that it was so expected and anger was out there.

Right.

But this is, you know, I guess a thing that people care about and where they work.

And this is where me and Sam, both I think kind of agree where we're like, God, everybody's

so coddled and soft.

I got it, I somewhat at our, at our, at our company and that's cool.

If he's listening to this, that's great.

Continue sharing your opinion, but I'm going to disagree with it, but they shared their

opinion in our slack of saying, we should do a percentage of sales to this charity or

something.

And I was like, no, not a chance, not a chance.

Like we can give money away sometimes, but like to say a percentage of sales.

No.

Right.

And so, so I think, you know, the interesting thing about these tools is that they're arming

companies with different ways to either solve the productivity problem or solve the, you

know, what I'll call the values, the values opportunity with, with their employees.

And I like the, I like the Upwork example.

I like the cleaning, you know, how a cleaning person example.

I think those are some things that, that do make sense because I've seen the, the expenditure

of what, you know, what our company would, would spend on office, you know, just office

cleaners, power, insurance, like just the, the, the net money that goes into paying for

a commercial building.

You have a lot of, if you're not paying for that anymore, you have a lot of buffer to

go around that you can either drop to the bottom line or you can like stipend out in

some way.

So our lease in San Francisco was about 15 grand a year.

And then probably add another 3000 on top of that for just random stuff.

Yeah.

We're maybe 5000.

We're definitely saving probably close to quarter of a million and we're a 30 person

company.

Right.

Did you do any unusual perks like at the hustle or any company you've ever been at?

Have you ever done any unorthodox perks?

What would you do?

The one that people love that I don't think is that special, but people love it is unlimited

Amazon books.

That's a good one.

Unlimited is like half at five.

That's kind of like the values thing, right?

Cause you love books and you're like me, we just buy any book.

If somebody says it's good, you just immediately buy it.

Yeah. And another thing that we've done in the past and people are like, Oh, it's so

generous of you.

And I'm like, dude, I'm doing it because you're going to make me more money, which is if staff

or anyone wants to go to anything educational related, even if it's kind of related to her

job and it'll cost five grand, I'm like, yeah, go, I don't care.

That's cool.

And I'm like, and I tell them, I'm like, it's very selfish of me.

I want you to be better and more valuable and you'll make us more money.

So did these things matter to you or not, you know, they're nice to haves, but they

weren't like key decisions.

I mean, I think the, the learning one is definitely huge and Sam, like he, he puts his money where

his mouth is like, he's willing to, you know, if you come, he actually approached me one

day and he's like, Hey, here's this $3,000 course.

Like looks really good.

You want to do it.

And I actually done the course.

It was reforged, but he's definitely very keen on like helping people educate through

like rescaling.

So I think it's awesome to be fair to your point.

I don't know if it always moves the needle, but it is kind of like a signaling thing and

helps your, your employees stay happy.

We did one that was like, I think, I think people will emulate something like this where

we basically, we created a bonus pool that was tied to our KPI.

So it's tied to user growth.

So the more I said, this pool is going to start at $5,000 a month.

And as it grows, as, as our user, user base grows, this pool is going to grow.

And I showed kind of how it's going to grow.

And then I said, every month you're going to be voting, peers going to vote on who kicked

ass this month.

And I get a double vote because I get to see a lot more of what you guys are doing.

You guys don't all see each other's stuff.

So me and our CTO, we both got like two votes.

And this did two things.

One it was like, it forced all of our engineers who are, you know, totally allergic to emotions

to like exhibit some appreciation for each other.

Like they would, you'd have to write why, why this person kicked ass and we would read

them out.

And so people were like, it was like this forced kind of awkward thing, but people liked hearing

good things.

Was that effective, Sean, for motivating?

I felt it was effective.

But again, maybe I'm biased.

Maybe you'd have to ask one of the engineers how effective, but the, the, the, I know the

part that they really liked, which was you get the money.

And so we said, uh, there's a first and second place, so the first place got 4k, the second

place got 1k.

And the rule was this is not like money to live your life.

Like we pay you well enough.

You get, you know, you get a handsome salary as an engineer in Silicon Valley.

You don't need, you know, grocery money.

This goes towards something that you wouldn't otherwise buy for yourself, but you'd love

to have.

So it was only experiences, travel, uh, like learning opportunities.

So like Jason Hitchcock used it to get a stylist and he like read it as whole wardrobe.

And another person did it.

It's a first time traveling outside the country.

They didn't even have a passport before this.

And so they really liked those things.

And then our only rule was, you know, you got to tell the story to the team about what

you blew your money on, um, in an entertaining way when you're done.

And, uh, so that I thought was awesome, but like it was very tedious for me to set up.

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Can I let me bring something up that I want steps up and you know, this is the most interesting

thing that she said.

She brought this company and she said it's a one person operation.

She has shown me another company.

That's a one person operation and Sean, I think is interested in one people, one person,

people, operations, businesses.

Um, we could, we could extend that to three people, but, uh, what are the most interesting

one to three person operations you've ever seen?

Hmm.

That's a good one.

Let me think.

Uh, if you have one, start, I'm going to start thinking about this.

That has one.

I know she does.

Well, I mean, there's, there's so many these days, but I just, you know, I'll call it the

obvious one that I think a lot of people are familiar with this Peter levels.

It's a friend of mine, but he, he kind of started this like revolution.

I mean, he didn't start it, but he really kickstarted a lot of people getting into it.

And what I think I'd call out is, you know, years ago before a lot of people were like

indie hacking on their own, he did this thing called 12 startups in 12 months.

And a lot of people just tried to recreate it.

I wouldn't actually, you know, say that people should recreate that they should recreate

something that allows them to explore a bunch of things and then exploit them after.

But, um, basically he started with something called Nomad list.

And it was just, it was for a problem that he knew very well, you know, classic story.

He created, started with, uh, I think a spreadsheet, um, which he posted on hacker news.

And then, uh, he just knew exactly who his people were.

So he knew that he was looking for additional nomads, um, who were looking for places to

go.

And Nomad list has grown a ton.

Now it does probably, I think like half a million a year.

Then he expanded that to remote okay, which also does around half a million a year.

And it's all done, um, through him.

And then I think he, he contracts out his servers to one guy that he pays like, you

know, two grand a month for, for something.

And it's so funny.

Cause he's, he's also known for this, like, you know, a lot of people over complicate

things.

They're like, which framework do I use?

And he always, you know, if you follow him on Twitter, I think yesterday he was like,

Oh, like this business, which brings in X thousands of dollars every month runs off

of like one PHP script and all these people on hacker news are like, it's so funny.

Actually, if you went on hacker news, cause it trended there, someone was like, Oh, well,

I'm sure there's some like deep infrastructure behind this.

And he's like, Nope, it's, it's actually just more simple than you think.

So he's someone that I think a lot of people were inspired by and that I was inspired by

too.

Is that what you thought she was going to say, Sam?

Yeah.

She told me about it.

And, uh, it's fascinating.

I think it's cool.

I think it's a good website.

It's not like he's one of the, I always, I call these people nerds.

I say, I'm a nerd too.

So, but he, uh, his branding is pretty sick.

Like he's got these cool hype videos.

Like he's like a cool guy.

Like, so anyway, I like that.

Um, do you know of any, Sean?

Uh, the one I was going to say was sort of like in the, I think there's a lot of these

in the creator space or media space, right?

Like, I think, you know, Joe Rogan is a good example of this where it's basically him and

you know, powerful young Jamie and the two of them have built what's essentially a billion

dollar enterprise, um, just sitting in a room with a microphone and an internet connection.

And there's a bunch of examples of this, like Ben Thompson, uh, from Stratechery, right?

He's sitting in Taiwan, you know, writing about tech in an email newsletter.

And I think it's just him.

I don't even know if he has like sort of his young Jamie.

I, I, I've heard he's got, he has some people.

I think what ends up happening is that, cause I always say this too, right?

Like, um, like my next path, I think is going to be very solopreneur-ish.

And um, I think everybody either has, you know, an army of sort of, uh, outsourced contractors

who deal with, you know, customer service and social media and stuff like that.

Or they have like one right-hand man type person that, um, is happy to be behind the

scenes.

Like, uh, you know, I think I talked to the guy from Wait But Why and it's just the two

guys and one of them's really the public guy and then one of them's the behind the scenes

guy and they just, they write their blog, they do cool shit, they buy businesses that

are profitable and like that's their, that's their show.

And they just, they're happy to just be the two of them working on it.

Um, and so I think that there's quite a lot of people in the creator space that create

content or media companies like Joe, with Joe Ergon being, I would say the biggest example.

All right.

I'm going to give you a bigger example.

Do you know Matt Drudge?

Have you guys ever heard of Drudge Report?

Steph's Canadian.

So she maybe doesn't know what it is.

Yeah.

You've told me about it.

I've heard of it.

Okay, so Drudge Report, a conservative or right-wing, I don't know what you want to

call it, news aggregator.

It's drudgerport.com or org or I don't know what it is, but it says, Sean, it looks like

I could see in your glasses.

It looks like you're reading it right now.

If you scroll to the bottom right, it'll show you how many page views it has had in

the last 30 days.

Does it say?

Let me go see.

Last 30 days, $733 million, just a cool $730 million.

So $730 million, let's assume they get a $10 CPM across, probably $14 to be, it could

be.

So what's that?

So do $750 million divided by $1,000 equals $730 million.

So let's multiply that by, let's say $8 because he's conservative, so we probably, people

ban him all the time for advertisers, let's say $8.

So $6 million a month, I bet, is what this guy makes.

And the rumor is, is that he has, it's just him and one other person, and he's been doing

it since 1996.

For the record, not bigger than Joe Rogan, but.

Dude, what are you talking about?

That's revenue of $72 million a year.

Yeah, Joe Rogan's making more of that.

I'll Spotify now.

No, he has a deal that is potentially up to $100 million, I believe, over a few years.

I think it's per year.

And I would say, okay, yeah, Joe Rogan's great, his setup is great, but I think this guy's

set up is way better because anyone can be, anyone can add those links.

All it is is a lame ass website, which is random links.

Anyone can do that.

Also, this guy's been doing it since 1996, and it used to be even bigger than it is now.

He was the guy that broke the Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton scandal.

So this guy's been around doing this for a long ass time.

So I bet you he's made, if you told me he's made a billion dollars off this website over

the course of a lifetime, I wouldn't be surprised.

Buzzfeed News has him at $30 million in ad revenue per month.

There you go.

$30 million per month.

Wow.

Incredible.

Dude, it's nuts.

My favorite kind of like got rich, lucky story, by the way, which I think is a different

question, is I bumped into somebody who was, and their friend came over and started talking

to us.

And when the friend walked away, my friend goes, you know, that guy has a crazy story.

He's, you know, he has a successful company.

He's like, but he basically became a billionaire because when he was starting up, his office

was, you know, where the Google guys were starting, they were like right next door.

And so they needed server space when they were, I think they're still at Stanford at

this time.

And they needed, they needed more servers.

And so he was like, oh yeah, you can like rent some servers for me.

Like I'll just, you know, I'll host you.

And he started renting them servers and, you know, they just paid him in Google shares.

And so he became like a billionaire just renting a few servers to the Google guys super, super

early on.

Well, you heard the story about the guy who did that Facebook, right?

He, uh, the painter David Cho, they're like, Hey, can you paint, paint some graffiti on

our wall?

And he goes, yeah, it's like only 50 grand.

And they go, how about 50 grand in stock?

And he goes, oh yeah, okay.

And he made a hundred million dollars off of it.

Yeah.

Not all lottery tickets, you know, are printed.

So some of these are pretty amazing.

All right, Steph, you have a whole bunch more ideas we should, we should jump into them.

So you want to talk more remote work or you want to shift to a different kind of area?

I've got lots of remote work stuff, but let's move on just so we get more diversity.

I'm kind of tied to one of the, what we were just talking about how there's like, you know,

a lot of celebrities have their own digital space, but most of the time they're focusing

on social, they're focusing on deals with big companies like Spotify.

One of the opportunities we called out in the trends group recently is, uh, it's opportunity

to almost become like the agency for celebrity websites.

And if you actually go to many celebrity websites, like a shocking number of them, they're really,

really bad.

And so we called out a couple of them.

Drakes was like a one page site that went to like a broken link.

Uh, Roger Federer, who does, you know, his net worth is 450 million.

If you go to his page, it's like broken CSS, like completely unreadable.

Looks like it's from the nineties.

Um, David Copperfield, who like surprisingly has a net worth of 875 million.

His site doesn't have an SSL again.

Looks like it's like from the eighties even.

And so what's amazing is that these people have so much money, but because they're in

a particular industry, they're a little bit shielded from like the potential of creating

their own, you know, digital home.

A lot of them go to Instagram, a lot of them go to TikTok, um, or just don't really believe

in or really see the opportunity on these sites.

What's a website?

I like Google Drake and nothing comes up.

Yeah.

I can't.

I was doing so.

I don't even know if it's maybe it's not even his, his official website, but that's what

come up.

Like when I looked up Drake, it's like drakeofficial.com and now it's actually looks like it's even

more broken than before it looks like it might even be down.

I Google Drake official and it October's very own comes up.

Number one.

I don't even know what that is.

Interesting.

Well, there you go.

So, and then even in addition to Drake, I looked up a ton of celebrities.

Many of them don't even have a site at all.

Jennifer Garner, Ryan Reynolds, like just tons of famous people who don't have a site

at all.

And I think, you know, you probably wouldn't start with people of that size because one,

like they're doing pretty well on their own.

They clearly don't care about it.

And so it would be a little bit of an uphill battle to try to convince these people like,

Hey, I'm going to create a great site for you.

But I stumbled upon this spreadsheet of, I think we shared it at the hustle and it's

cameos highest earners.

And so what's interesting here is that cameo is, you know, anyone on cameo is like doing

well enough to be on cameo, but not doing well enough to like not be on cameo.

By the way, that's like the secret, that's how you see which celebrities are broke.

You go to cameo and then you sort by cheapest.

Right.

And so, yeah, you're like, okay, if you're, if you're doing well, you're not going to

create like a $30 tick tock video for someone.

And so if you go here, what I would do if I was someone just like who could build websites

really well, I would just go down this list and just go to each of these people's websites,

see if they even have a website and just be like, Hey, like this is how your website

could look.

This, you could even build it for them.

If you know how to build a website quickly, be like, I'll sell you this website for X,

you know, either X dollars or X shares of your products that you sell through it.

And I think you could just make a killing because so many of the people of people in,

in kind of like media entertainment have no idea how to do tech well.

And so I do think it's a little bit of an uphill battle, but I think if you're able

to get crack into this, like there's so much opportunity.

What do you think, Sean?

Yeah, I kind of love this one.

I wouldn't do it as an agency cause fuck agencies.

And I also wouldn't try to sell it back to them because you're selling to a one buyer

party so you have no leverage.

So I would instead, I would take advantage of the fact that you have really, really popular

names that get searched all the time that don't own the, you know, definitive domain

about that name.

And I would figure out a way to auto generate, you know, you know, news about Drake or Drake's

like biggest fans or whatever, like I would basically take their full name, you know,

dot com or, you know, official at the end or something like that.

And I would make it a kind of a fan page slash news site that just aggregates their Instagram

posts, their Twitter posts, puts information, you know, their wiki page, their net worth,

like all the things that people want to hear about, like who are they married to?

Is their wife hot?

You know, like if you just go look at what people Google about celebrities, like is this

person gay?

You know, I would try to rank number one on SEO for this person's name and all the questions

about this person.

And then I would just monetize through, you know, one of the following.

I would either, you know, just do AdSense and not bother ever selling this back to them.

Or I would create some kind of like paid text list to get some kind of like, you know, updates

and then I would potentially sell them that be like, Hey, anytime you want to sell something,

I have your most loyal fans.

I have like 3000 of your most loyal fans, whenever you have new tickets, new shows,

new merch, new, whatever, you know, you just tell me and I will text it to them.

And then, you know, we cut a deal of how much revenue share I get.

And I would start doing deals that way way later, but I would, I would just start totally

permissionless initially.

I love that.

Because when we, when we talked about that in the trans group, there was pushback with

people being like, yeah, you know, I think the biggest problem here is that some celebs

just don't care.

And I love that approach because it's just like, you know, it doesn't matter if they

don't care.

I'm going to go take all the search volume and people trying to look for something.

Take advantage of the fact that they don't care, right?

They clearly don't care.

So how can I, how can I benefit from them not caring?

Well, I'm going to sound like a broken record.

I'm going to make it, what I would do is make them make their landing page just an email

capture form mostly.

And so they would build a big email list.

I, I actually had an idea similar to this before I started the hustle.

I mocked up this business where I noticed that, um, so like it was, this was obvious

back then.

So it wasn't like crazy, but musicians only make their money basically off of concerts.

And I used to use this website called song kick in order to find, um, which concerts

were coming towards me to me.

And I was like, man, like if my favorite band had my email address and my zip code, they

should just email me when they're coming or they should just like talk to me on a regular

basis and get me to buy stuff from them on a regular basis.

And so I went and actually pitched a handful of bands where I was like, you guys, let me

build this website for you.

And the way it's going to work is that I'm going to ask people, there's a zip code and

they're going to be notified on a regular basis when you're going to be near and I'll teach

you how to sell stuff to them.

I didn't go through with it because I don't think musicians have enough money to pay what

I wanted to make, but it wasn't a similar vein.

And I think it's quite interesting.

All right.

I really like that one.

Steph, you're on a roll.

Give me another one.

All right.

Cool.

So it's kind of a compliance and it could be other kind of legal compliance things as

a service.

And so the reason I'm pulling this one up is because so a lot of people, if you don't

know what hip it is, it was started in 1996 under Bill Clinton, it's, it's has to do with

healthcare and making sure that certain details are, you know, kept appropriately and things

like that.

But there's all of, you know, as most legislation, like it's hard to understand, it impacts

different industries.

And a lot of people don't know how to become compliant.

And the reason I'm pulling this one up is because so I had a call with a coworker a

couple of months ago and he, his fiance, it works in, she's like a therapist or a psychologist.

And I'm just asking like, you know, during COVID houses changed, et cetera.

So obviously they're doing everything online and I was asking what tech they're using and

they're using zoom.

But one thing that was really interesting is he said, you know, they, they're actually

only allowed to use zoom zoom is the only HIPAA compliant solution on the market.

And so I just thought found that so interesting, like every single app out there literally

cannot sell to certain industries because they're not HIPAA compliant and they probably

don't even, they either don't know that they're not HIPAA compliant or they don't know how

to become HIPAA compliant.

So you can easily just create, you know, a service that says, Hey, you actually approached

these companies.

Hey, did you know that you're actually losing out on sales and all of these industries because

you're literally not allowed to sell to these individuals.

So I think that's one interesting thing, but you could also, you know, pass HIPAA do the

same thing where you basically hire a couple lawyers, you track what legislation is coming

to fruition in the next like three months, six months, whatever.

And then you are the first mover and you basically say, Hey, I know exactly what you're like,

you know, PPP recently, I know exactly what you need to do with PPP.

Here's the like three to one of what you need to do.

And you just create that as a service and you're just like the first mover on any new

legislation for companies.

Okay, those are two different ideas that are both pretty interesting.

The HIPAA compliant one is kind of cool.

That's a, that's pretty easy to do, right?

I mean, that's a very simple, this is a very simple business to pull off.

I would imagine, right?

Cause it's like a, it's like a checklist to become HIPAA compliant, right?

I think it's simpler than people think, but if you're not an expert, you're like, where

do I start?

That's pretty cool.

How do I know if I'm compliant, et cetera?

There's, um, when I had an alcohol business, you, there was a company that you pay money

and they make sure your online sales are compliant with laws regarding alcohol.

I don't know if they did well, but it's a similar idea.

What did Abreu just share?

I think he's sharing some examples of HIPAA compliance on service.

I've seen some startups that do this as well.

Um, so this is definitely an idea that is in motion.

And then there's other versions of this, like there's companies like work OS and others

that are providing for developers.

Uh, you know, if you develop a piece of software that you want to be enterprise ready, um, you

have to do, you know, sock to compliance and SSO sign on, you know, make that available.

And this is just like a bunch of repetitive grunt, grunt work that you, you know, a developer

would have to do just to be able to handle enterprises and pass their security audit.

And so, um, these companies are doing really, really well, basically just providing those

as, you know, services to any developer who wants to pass the enterprise security audit

and offer enterprise level features out of the box.

I love those businesses.

That company I linked is huge.

They just top think 5,000.

They have thousands of employees and they kind of do a similar thing to what you guys

were talking about, just like making, making sure companies are GDPR compliant, stuff like

that.

Yeah.

They raised $200 million at $1.3 billion valuation.

Holy moly.

One trust.

Okay.

Uh, I like it.

And what was the second one?

Wait, one trust.

Oh, wow.

One trust was the number one fastest growing company.

Oh, one trust was number one on ink 5,000.

Hmm.

Pretty cool.

Well, let me, let me throw out another idea is, is ink 5,000 like basically some bullshit

like Forbes 30 to 30, or is it like, what does number one mean?

Is that like actually on some objective way?

Or is it?

Yeah.

So, uh, ink 5,000, you might need to pay money to submit yourself, but it's all, you have

to submit yourself and you have to submit, uh, the trailing three years of financials.

So it's, it's not bullshit like Forbes or just like, who you know, it is entirely objective,

but it's bullshit in the sense of it's only for people who submit themselves.

One trust is not actually number one necessarily, but they are amongst the people who, who submitted

on some rank.

They ranked at the top.

Okay.

Yeah.

And it's like, it tells you their growth.

So in their cases, it's 48,000% three year growth and like they, so that's verified

by ink.

Sorry, Steph.

Go ahead.

No, it's okay.

We did an analysis bank and there's like a surprising number of people who are, who have

been on it for like 10 years and you're like, okay, there can't be this many companies

that are actually at the top of, you know, everything for that many years.

And so it is like Sam saying it, people have to submit to it.

It's not the top of everything.

Yeah.

Very few Silicon Valley companies too, which is interesting.

That's what I'm saying.

Like, how can this be the indicative list if it doesn't have most of, you know, the high

growth tech startups on there, uh, but it doesn't matter.

Okay.

You know, whatever, who cares about ink, ink 5,000, um, tell me about this, uh, subreddit,

uh, you know, what, what do you, what do you, what are you doing when you look around

reddit?

Because I think that's an area where there's a ton of signal and I know you guys look at

it for trends.

So stuff, tell me what you've been seeing on, on reddit.

Yeah.

So I specifically was calling out a tool.

It's called on Vaka.

We're going to have to link it in the, in the show notes because it's, it's a pretty

gnarly URL, but basically it's this amazing tool.

So I know there's tools like subreddit stats and other things that I'll say, like, Hey,

this subreddit has X number of people on it, or these are the keywords that are trending.

But this one I love because you enter any subreddit into it.

And so just like, you can start with anything super broad.

Like if you start with r slash digital nomad, you enter that into there and then it just

gives you this like mind map of like, of people interested in the subreddit, like what are

all of the notes, um, that are related to this and then of those notes, like what are

the like niche subreddits related to that?

And it's this amazing, just like, you know, mind map again of like where you can discover

ideas.

And I want to give you an example.

If you look up r slash longevity, you're like, okay, longevity is like, I understand what

that is, but like some of the things that come up as like related stuff, there's like

microbiome, new tropics, few dark futurology, transhumanism, singularity.

And you're like, whoa, like, okay, that's really interesting.

Like what are those things?

And you like double click on that.

And it's just like this wormhole where that I think is really interesting, not just to

like go get ideas.

But if for example, you're creating something to do with like, you know, longevity, you're

trying to understand your users, but are you're trying to understand like, who is this person

that I'm trying to attract?

And then you try, you get like a wider view of like your type of individual, your users,

not just this like niche thing, like they're interested in longevity, you're like, oh,

they're actually, you know, probably super technical and, you know, interested in things

like singularity and they're probably developers and they care about their health because they're

looking at stuff like fitness and new tropics.

And so I think it's just this amazing tool that I think more people should use.

I love this.

I think this is really neat.

I would use this if I was paying, buying advertising places.

So I typed in flexibility and there's another one called that I'd never heard of called

overcoming gravity.

There's another one called grip training.

And there's another one called the progress.

It's pretty funny.

Yeah.

It's great.

I just typed in, I just typed in, I'm not safe for work one.

And it's amazing.

A whole world I didn't even know about, there's some terms in here, I'm gonna have to Google

after this.

Wow, this is crazy.

Yeah.

I did one of those too.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy.

I like this.

What would you use this for immediately?

The first thing that came mind was if you're running Reddit ads, this tells you what other

niche subreddits you could target or post content into.

Other than that, I think, you know, for me, the most interesting part about Reddit is

if, because I care about like, you know, what's actionable.

So like, this is cool because it's so simple and it gives you a simple output.

It doesn't give you like the best output ever, but it took like two seconds to do so it didn't

take much input.

What I really like is the, you know, the subscriber growth.

And if I could ever figure out the, like the ranks, sorry, like the retention.

So basically, you know, on every subreddit, it shows you kind of like how many are currently

on the page.

And so what I like is the ratio of like total subscribers to how many people are currently

on the page, because that's kind of the engagement levels.

And what I've found is that, you know, the subreddits where there's a lot of opportunity

are the ones where that ratio is really, really high where you're able to get a lot of engagement

per, per subscriber to the community.

So one way to do that, it's manual.

So what I've been doing is I use this tool to kind of like scope out things.

And then if you go to subreddit stats, you enter a subreddit and it'll tell you the rank

and all this stuff.

But as you're saying it, what matters is like, who's active?

Is it more active now than yesterday versus a year before?

So you can see how subscribers change over time, but there's also this feature where

you can see the most popular posts.

And you can see that within the last year versus all time, et cetera.

And you can basically see like, a, like in the last year, are there popular posts?

And are those posts more popular than the ones from the prior year?

And so that's kind of like a quick gut check to be like, is this actually more engaged

with, or is it just, you know, kind of dead subscribers on this?

Right.

And Steph, you're one of the writers or you're the main writer for Trends.

Was.

Was.

Okay.

What happened?

You don't write for Trends anymore?

No, I read the product, so I don't write as much anymore.

Yeah.

Death by promotion.

Okay.

Gotcha.

So, so give me, so if you don't subscribe to Trends, go put your credit card down and

it's basically like this podcast, but better and written format, so it's easier to consume.

Give me something from this week's Trends or maybe last, last couple of weeks that stood

out to you that you're like, oh, that's actually really cool.

That's a really cool opportunity for somebody.

So I'm going to call it a quick one, just because it's timely and it's something that,

you know, everyone's obsessed with the markets, but one of the cool things that Ethan, one

of our analysts found is this thing is basically the site that tracks all insider trades.

And so if you are an executive somewhere, you need to buy a lot, report any trades that

you do above a certain amount, I believe.

And so it's the site that just tracks all of these things or all of these insider trades

of people selling, buying, et cetera.

You can see exactly who it is, exactly what their title is.

And I think there was this quote of from that Ethan found, which is like, you, you don't

know exactly why someone sells, but you always know why someone buys.

And if someone buys, it's because they think the price is going to go up.

And if they're an insider, you know, it's not full proof.

This is definitely not financial advice, but it's, it's a signal that for whatever reason,

whatever they know inside is, is leaning towards positive.

And so what I think would be cool is if someone just took all of that information and they

just created like an insider trade smart alert system that you could configure based on certain

industries of stocks that you're interested in, you could track certain stocks.

If you, you know, if I'm really interested, I think Cloudflare is an amazing company.

If I could just know every time there's an insider trade for Cloudflare and it would

just text me, um, I'm not saying that it would be super actionable, but I think that would

be a neat little project.

And in general, I think that site is, is super interesting.

So interesting.

We should do this for one.

It is so interesting.

And this week's one, Sean was public storage, the daughter of the founder who, I don't know

if she's a chairman now or what she is, but she, uh, bought tens of millions of dollars

of public storage stack, right?

That's kind of amazing.

All right.

We're down 3% today, but that's okay.

Maybe she knows that down a little bit today, but she's buying.

Yeah, I don't know.

That's interesting.

Um, I, uh, that's not my favorite section lately is the insider trades.

I don't, I'm not going to buy any of the stock because I don't buy any stock, but, or no one

off stock, but that's crazy cool because it was just cool to learn about it.

Yeah.

You don't even need to buy stock, but yeah, for example, like the storage space, it's

like, Oh, okay.

Well, this person obviously thinks this, their company is going to do great.

What does their company do?

What's the gap that maybe exists outside of that company within storage and like, you

know, could I create a company there?

So I think that in general is like just a signal of like insiders that, you know, you

can't get if you're not paying attention.

So I think that could be someone should create that.

I would subscribe to that.

So I'll tell you my insider trading story.

So I, uh, I accidentally did an insider trade not too long ago where I, uh, I sold a bunch

of my Amazon stock and, um, or I bought or I sold or whatever, I did a transaction.

And then I real, I remembered, I was like, Oh shit, there's, uh, a window in which because

technically I'm an Amazon employee, there's a window in which I'm allowed to do this.

And this, you know, the trading window opens up once every quarter or something like that.

And that's the time when you could do this.

And I was doing, I had done it outside the trading window and I was like, damn it.

This is how I die.

You know, I go down for insider trading of all things.

I didn't even have any info.

And so then I email our, our, uh, general counsel and I was like, Hey, um, you know,

I did this, uh, you know, I don't know if this is going to trigger, you know, a SWAT

team outside my door in five minutes, but, uh, you know, hope, hope we can figure this

out.

And then, and I was really worried.

Um, I was like, this is like more worried than I probably should have been.

And then he emails me back like 10 minutes later and he's like, like, don't worry.

You don't have any insider info.

I was like, I was like, Hey, yeah, I was like, fuck you, uh, you don't know what I know.

You don't know what I do.

And so I got really, uh, then I was upset for the other reason and, but at least I'm off

the hook and I'm not in jail.

There was a, what was it?

A funny story.

A friend worked at a company and, uh, her, uh, she had her laptop on her computer, a

friend of, there's a friend of a friend.

She had her laptop on her computer and her boyfriend, this was her story, went and looked

over at it and saw the numbers and he went and, uh, shorted the stock and he made a quarter

of a million dollars and they arrested him for it.

Yeah.

It's crazy stuff, but it has to be happening all the time.

All the time.

It has to be happening all the fucking time.

There's no way, uh, there's no way that this stuff is, is like, I remember I had a,

I have, uh, a friend who worked in a hedge fund in New York and I don't know if this

is true or not.

I don't even know if he was just kind of like, I don't know, exaggerating, but he's like,

every Monday there was a Manila folder that would show up under our door and he's like,

we paid a lot of money for this Manila folder and inside this Manila folder was some information

and he's like, every hedge fund had this, was getting this Manila folder and he didn't

tell me anything else.

He didn't need to tell me anything else.

I was like, say no more, you know, I love a good conspiracy when I hear one.

Uh, I'll infer the rest from here.

Sure.

They, they, we, we don't, haven't you seen the TV show billions?

We know they're to do that.

Um, all right.

Can I bring up one idea that I saw so, uh, last week, apparently I shit on something

called the Gen Z mafia.

I didn't mean to shit.

I didn't mean to shit on it.

More so I was making fun of the article, uh, because I have no idea what it is, but I did

shit on it.

So I'll own up to that, but I apologize.

Kinda.

Um, but anyway, one of the kids reached out to me.

So Gen Z mafia stuff.

It's this group of, I guess Gen Z people who have like a Slack channel or something.

Yeah.

They have a discord, I think, or a Slack, a discord and they just like are building stuff.

And one of the kids reached out to me, which is pretty cool.

And I just, he, I don't have any insider information, but on his profile, this kid, he must be 20

years old.

He has this website called Fion tech.

So it's Fion F I O N dot tech.

And the headline is detect wildfires before they start, stop them before they spread.

And he's building, it's just fascinating.

He's building technology to help you, uh, track and predict when and where fought wildfires

are going to start.

And, uh, it looks like he's going to sell to hedge funds and people like that.

Crazy fascinating.

I did some, I did a little bit of research.

There are people in this space, obviously, um, and they, uh, some of them are, are meaningfully

big hundreds of millions in sales.

It looks like, but crazy cool that a, this young kid is doing this and B, there's that

this exists.

Pretty cool.

If they can pull it off.

Yeah.

How are they doing this?

How are they getting the info?

Uh, it says that they have 12 or 15 data sources and they kind of use those data sources to

print, to predict what's going to happen.

Okay.

So I just joined the Gen Z mafia discord cause they had invited, basically when you shit

on it and I was like standing up for them, they were like, yeah, fuck Sam and we love

Sean.

And so I got an invite to it yesterday.

So I just, I just joined it.

Let me tell you my experience as I joined.

So first I joined and immediately I just had to sign the code of conduct.

So it's a discord.

It's a discord.

I had to sign a code of contact, which has been signed by 1169 people.

Um, there's a count on the right.

There's the council, which is the admins, I think, um, there's the ministry of building,

which is another group, 16 people online right now.

Um, yeah, this is crazy.

There's a lot of people in here and I think this is awesome.

What they're doing, like this is what I wish I was doing when I was like 17 years old.

Like this would have been way better than just sitting there and playing NBA 2K all day.

Yeah.

It's pretty awesome.

And I actually, I wasn't shitting on them because I don't, I don't know anything about

them, but that article was horrible.

And the guy wrote to me, he goes, yeah, that article was horrible.

She totally, it was by that one journalist that, uh, that Bellagi guy hates, but he was

like, yeah, she totally over exaggerated X, Y and Z. Uh, so it was just the article,

but super fascinating group.

Right.

Yeah, it's great.

Uh, so, okay, I'm going to hang out in here and I'll report back.

I'll tell you if it's, if it's great, I'll tell you if it's just okay or I'll tell you

if it sucks.

Are they, uh, go ahead, Seth, are they all working on their own projects or what's, what did

they do in, um, well, I think it's like anything, like any group, like some people are actively

working on something.

Some people are like toying with something and then a lot of people are just kind of

hanging out and you know, waiting for them inspiration to strike, I guess.

Right.

Well, this ties into one of the ideas that you guys have actually talked about before

how like, um, so let me break this down.

So one of the things that you guys have talked about and I agree with is that corporate training

or anything like that, any sort of like educational, um, thing that happens within large companies

sucks.

And in general, even, um, you know, education in general is, is like lacking in terms of

it not being like entertaining and not captivating like young people.

So what I think people should do, these like large, like corporate training, uh, companies

is go and like hire a bunch of these Gen Zers to create basically like a like hype videos,

but also to like make the actual training more like a game versus, you know, what it

is now that, you know, no one actually wants to go through, um, and what actually made me

really think of this is Sam, I know you saw, did you see the nuclear energy girl, Sean?

No, who's this?

So she's, let me pull up her actual, is this like someone on Tik Tok?

No, it's, she's on Tik Tok, but I saw it on Twitter, but, um, so her Twitter, um, handle

is Issa is a B O E M E K E, like I'll just send this to you right now, but, um, anyway,

she created this like amazing kind of like Tik Tok video about, uh, and how, how it works,

like why it's actually really chill and why it's better than most other energy forms.

And it was like the best example I've seen of someone taking like a relatively boring

topic that most people don't want to engage with and making it like so compelling.

And so I think these companies should go hire this girl, Isabelle, other people go hire

them say, I'm going to pay you like 10 K to go like make a couple of videos about, you

know, whatever they're trying to train their, their employees on.

And I think it would kill it or, or, you know, a holding company could do this as well.

But you know what I mean?

Like I just think these Gen Zers are so good at actually making content that people want

to engage with.

It's unfortunately just often not about things that are, you know, important in the world.

But yeah, I think someone should do this.

You didn't see this video, Sean.

No, but when I, but you described it great and I'm looking at it now, and this is weird.

She's weird.

She's so weird.

It's awesome.

She looks like a AI like character or something.

It looks like, you know, like a little McKayla or something.

Yeah, exactly.

But I think this is actually a really genius content idea that I'm going to probably do.

Maybe I'll do it soon.

Denomously.

And then, you know, but too late, I already just outed myself.

So I think it'd be really hilarious if you just hire, you know, you know, that scene

in the movie, the big short.

So great movie.

And then there's this one scene where they're trying to explain like mortgage-backed securities

or something like that.

And then it like cuts to like, I forgot who, like some actress or some model sitting in

a bathtub.

Selena Gomez, I think.

I don't think Selena Gomez, but yeah, yeah, yeah, she's in one and then Margot Robbie's

in another.

Margot Robbie is the one who has taken up.

It's like her in a bathtub with champagne with her like leg out and then she just explains

this like really boring topic, but she's like really sexy.

So you're like, oh, you know, I'm in, I'm entertained enough to go through this.

I think somebody should just make, you know, hot models teaching science as like a YouTube

or TikTok channel.

And I think you just do extremely, extremely well just off that like combination and how

controversial slash viral would be.

Yeah.

One more thing I'll throw out there related to this, have you guys heard of art school?

S Q O O L no, tell us about it.

It's a, this guy who I follow on Twitter, who's like amazing, like creative genius.

His name is Julian Glander and he created this thing called art school, which is basically

this online game, which is kind of like a parody of actual art school in that, you know, people

joke that in real art school, pay a bunch of money and you don't learn anything.

And so he created this like online world where, you know, you have this like character, I

think his name like Froschman or something and you go around and you learn about art

and you actually learn about art through this art AI that grades your art, which is another

parody on like how art is actually graded.

But you actually do learn about art and you, you know, it is actually like a school and

I thought this was just like a genius example of how you could turn learning into a game

that people actually want to engage with.

And in general, I just wanted to, you know, shout out Julian because this stuff is awesome.

His okay.

I went to the website, his, he has a sales video on Vimeo and this is a good way to

figure out how big something is, is you, if you click through and look at the video on

Vimeo, you can see how many views it has or on YouTube and you could like see like what

the engagement is, 35,000 views.

A lot of people are buying this, it's $5 to buy this game.

This kid is awesome.

Dude, Gen Z is so cool.

Hey, don't, don't try to make up for it now.

No, don't try to make up for it now.

You really know how you feel about Gen Z.

I have proof.

I've written this in our Slack.

I said, everyone at Gen Z dresses cool and is good looking and they can all dance well.

This is what I've, I've been on TikTaka enough to know this.

Uh, this, like, they all wear vans and like cool hoodies and have like great skin and

badass haircuts.

Great skin.

How do teams have great skin now?

Dude, I don't know.

They all look like Rihanna.

They're just like cool looking.

But like, look at this website.

It's like, it's like a cool kid made it.

Like the nerds are cool.

The nerds are cool.

Oh, we should just end the podcast on that one.

That was amazing.

Have you used TikTaka?

I have, but TikTaka is like, you know, the, the one cool kid who gets famous on, like

the feed is like the best of it's not like what everybody is.

No, they're all creative.

They're so creative.

Gen Z is so creative.

It's cause they just grew up with Instagram.

They just, they just kind of love Gen Z, although they are all like depressed and they don't

have sex either.

What are they depressed about?

I thought they're good looking with great skin and creativity.

Why are they depressed?

Well, they only look like that because they compare themselves to one another all the

time.

I'm telling you, Gen Z has like a massive depression problem and the guys aren't horny.

Like that's like a thing.

Like, no, for real, like I went to the sound so old, I went to a conference and we had

a whole session on Gen Z and they're like the rate at which they're having sex is super

low.

Right.

What's interesting about that is like, I think our society just in general is, is going

towards like Japan.

Japan's been like this for many decades, right?

They do everything online.

Like, you know, dudes don't hang out with anyone.

They're like, you know, stuff like that, which has been going on in Japan for years.

I think Japan is like the perfect place to just look and be like, what's trending in

Japan or what's trending in Japan like five, 10 years ago.

I want to, Steph, I want to hear you describe dudes in Japan again without like you were

navigating the tripwires.

They're going to try that again.

Well, they're dudes in Japan who know there's a ton of guys who literally like, there's

an abnormal number of single guys in Japan who don't actually, you know, see other people.

They just fall in love with like these avatars.

Dude, I'm telling you, that's weird.

So my friend Nikita, he, he's a great follow on Twitter.

His handle is like Nikita beer or something like that Nikita underscore beer, B-I-E-R.

And he created that app, TBH, that Facebook bot and you know, she's like, you know, this

goofy teen app or whatever.

And he always, he's great because he just shits on like a lot of the mainstream stuff.

He's like, basically he's tweeted something out like, you know, all the nerds in Silicon

Valley arguing over notion versus Rome.

Forget that nobody, nobody fucking takes notes like nobody, no real person takes notes outside

of like our bubble.

And like that's not what's interesting or what's hot to like people.

And so I like how he says like, these are very provocative things.

Another one that like to me came to mind that's like of that mindset is I was looking at like

a bunch of internet stats, internet traffic stats.

And the conclusion I came to was everybody talks how they want to, talks about how they

want to meditate, but nobody meditates.

Everybody masturbates.

And like that's, you know, if you take away one thought about building products for people,

try to build the thing that people actually want to do and not the like cool virtue signaling

thing that, that, that really in actuality, very few people are doing.

That's all, that's awesome.

He did that tweet, was that, was that tweet well loved?

That was me.

That one was the second part was me, but it's channeling my inner Nikita because I've just

been reading his stuff and loving it.

You came up with this whole masturbate instead of meditate idea.

That's a good one.

Dude, I just broke ground right here.

That was the first time it's ever been said.

Okay, we're going to run with that at a, at a different point.

I got to think about that.

That's the title of the podcast.

People don't meditate they know, I mean, it's definitely true.

I think we're going to wrap up.

All right.

Yeah.

My trainer's here.

All right.

Thank you, Steph.

Thanks for having me.

This is fun.

And we went through like a third of your documents so you can come back on, you know, every couple

of weeks and we can just, we finish this document at some point.

I'm game for that.

You did the heavy lifting.

Thank you.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.