My First Million: AI-Planned Dinner with Billionaires, NVIDIA Stock Bump & Billion $ Panda Express

AI is obviously all the rage.

The entire menu was created by ChatGPT.

So those basically just typed in.

I appreciate that.

I'm hosting a dinner for a bunch of tech people,

the X number of tech people,

create a menu for an epic dinner party.

It created a full menu.

Okay, that's cool.

And then it's like, cool,

like generate an image using Dolly or whatever.

And then basically created the whole menu that way,

and the chef had to cook whatever

ChatGPT had created, which is pretty clever.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road.

Let's travel.

Before we go into this episode,

I got to say I'm doing a workshop with our boy, Nick Huber.

Do you see this?

Just say the W words for me.

It's a workshop.

It's not a-

No, it's not.

Say that other W word.

It's on the web.

It might be a webinar.

I might be doing a webinar.

It's similar to a seminar on the web.

I didn't even realize that was what the webinar was from.

Yeah, I'm doing one of the lamest things

one man can do to with another, and that's a webinar.

All right, well, what's this webinar about?

Basically, both of us are total,

I don't know, nerds or we're just obsessed

with hiring internationally.

Like for both of our companies,

I think we both had a moment where we were like,

wait, I'm pretty sure I could find somebody

for cost 10 times less,

and the secret part that most people don't realize,

everybody gets that if you hire somebody overseas,

they're cheaper.

What I found, I don't know how much you do this,

but they're way less management.

Does overseas mean like across the Mississippi River

in Missouri?

That would that mean line?

It's overseas, like for you at the California,

you're gonna come into like Hannibal, Missouri.

No, basically, I have, let's see,

I got in one of my e-commerce business,

I think I have six or seven people in the Philippines,

plus two in Latin America.

So those are kind of the two hotspots.

Latin America, you get the same time zone,

and they're good for certain types of roles,

like we have like data analytics and stuff like that.

And then the Philippines,

we have all of our customer support,

plus like anything that's like sales and outreach.

So we'll just be like,

hey, we wanna go get every influencer on board.

I'm not even gonna talk to you,

just go make that happen and every morning report

how many influencers are on board,

show me the pipeline, show me the,

hey, we want this many wholesalers

to start selling our stuff.

Go make this happen.

And they're just like an automated sales machine,

which is pretty amazing.

But anyways, we're doing this webinar,

because yeah, we just wanna give away kind of like.

Yeah, you gotta call it a web in our,

yeah, we're gonna do it on the web in our.

Anyways, we decided we'll do one,

we'll teach anybody who, it's like delegation 101.

But if you wanna do it,

if you wanna join or whatever,

it's on the sixth, I think, the sixth of June.

Well, how do people find it?

Go to, all right, we're gonna put on the screen

a giant link in the description.

It'll be the top link in the podcast description

and or the YouTube notes.

But if you don't see any of those places,

you can just go to my website,

and it'll be a little banner if you wanna do it.

Cause for doing this thing might as well,

if we're doing it for free,

it might as well have as many people who can sign up.

And if you sign up, even though you can't make it live,

you'll just get the recording.

So if you ever want to then hire internationally,

you'll have the recording and all of our like kind of

our cheat codes of after doing this for,

I don't know, 10 years, here's what works,

here's what does it.

All right, so we've started on one end of the spectrum.

Can we please go to the other end of the spectrum

and tell me about a dinner you had?

Yeah, I had this dinner.

I thought I already talked about it,

but I don't think I did.

Billionaire dinner is a great way to go

when we started with the web.

Yeah, exactly.

See, what happens is you hire people for low cost,

then you go to this billionaire dinner.

So that's basically what I did.

So I went to a dinner at a billionaire's place.

And I can't say exactly who,

but I wanna share three takeaways from this thing.

Are they a billionaire from being early at a tech company

or for starting something amazing?

Starting their own tech companies.

Do they sell it or is it still?

At this dinner, there was somebody who sold their business

for, I think I could say some of the people who were there.

So let me try to do that.

There was the guy who created Figma was there.

So sold his company recently for 20 billion.

So he was there.

There was people that were like really internet OGs,

like their first internet company was in 98

or something like that.

And so that's the part I actually loved.

I was talking to them.

So that's the story I wanna share.

Those people are the best, they're the best.

Cause I was like, what was it like back in the early days?

And I'm gonna tell you one thing that he told me.

But before I do that, a couple of interesting things now,

I've done a couple of these dinners.

Hold on.

Yeah.

How did you get invited to this?

I know one of the people there.

So they, what they do is they host these regularly

with the same crew, but then whoever is the host

for that month gets to invite guests.

So they were, they get to invite three or four guests

that are not in the main group to kind of spice up the dinner,

but then the main group is like been going for 10 years plus.

So it's kind of aspirational.

I was like, oh, I'm gonna start one of these too.

It's a once a month dinner with a core crew

and then whoever's the host for that month

gets to pick the food.

And I think you do like a special gift.

Like Reed Hoffman, who's the creator of LinkedIn

was in the group, whatever.

And when it was his turn to host,

I remember that he created like his own board game

of like an anti, like it was a cards against Trump.

Like his own version of cards against humanity,

but it was just Trump jokes.

And he gave one to every guest, right?

So just like ball or shit like that.

So anyways, I'm at this dinner

and I was at three observations.

I've been to a couple of these dinners.

Somehow every dinner I go to in San Francisco

is like at least 30 to 50% people talking about psychedelics.

And your boy's never done psychedelics.

Sober as a cat.

Not once.

No, no, not once.

Way too scared to do it.

Have you ever done psychedelics?

I don't even really honestly know

what would count as psychedelics.

I think it's like LSD.

I think it's like MDMA.

I think it's DMT.

These are all the letters,

but I don't partake in any acronyms like this.

On one time I met this girl

and we went out on like a first or maybe it was the second date.

And this was when I was still drinking.

So we were a little drunk

and then we also took shrooms

and a little bit of a ecstasy or Molly or MDMA

or I don't even know if it was any of them.

So I definitely felt a little bit of all one,

but I was also like pretty intoxicated too.

So it was a little bit, maybe 50% of the potency

but that was the only time I've ever done it.

And that was 15 years ago.

The only acronym I have done is DARE

and that kept me off all of this.

But I gotta say, so I've done three of these dinners now

in San Francisco with like entrepreneurial types,

successful Silicon Valley types.

And it's crazy how much people talk about psychedelics.

Like half the table is our regular users of psychedelics

or like, you know, regular meaning,

it wasn't like your story of like I did it once

and it was cool, but not for me or whatever.

Dude, I wasn't trying to like find myself.

I was just trying to like, you know, have a freaky night.

Find her.

Yeah, we were trying to find something,

but it wasn't by self.

I started to find myself like, you know,

like with each other later than anything,

but that's about it.

So in these conversations, to me,

what's coming up is not like, it's not, bro,

I got so drunk, it's not a brag like that.

The conversation is like this weird intellectual thing

where it's like one third talking

about how psychedelics are cool.

One third talking about public policy,

like I can't believe these are outlawed.

It's crazy.

And then one third is science.

It's like, there's-

Dude, I don't give a shit about any of those topics.

There is so much research about how this can like cure PTSD

and like blah, blah, blah.

And it just keeps happening.

Every dinner I've gone to in San Francisco,

three in a row now,

half the conversation is talking about this,

which tells me one of two things.

It's a potpourri in the middle of the table,

like fart flavored.

Is that like, is that what this place is like?

I'll tell you about the food in a second.

They, the thing with these is,

I've had this experience once before or twice before

where a lot of people in Silicon Valley

are talking about something that I'm like,

ah, this seems weird.

And then like five years later,

it's the norm or seven years later,

it's the total norm.

So there is this thing that's like,

Paul Graham says, if you want to invent the future,

you first just live in it.

And I think that's one of the things

that Silicon Valley is pretty good at

is people here will do things,

whether it's like what you're doing,

biohacking where you're wearing continuous glucose monitors.

Like Tim Ferriss was wearing continuous glucose monitor

back in like 2008 or something like that.

And then a decade later now,

it's like a thing that a lot of fitness people are doing.

There's whole startups that are built around

letting you do this like,

like NutriSense or levels or whatever.

And, but it was like very strange at the time,

but there were this like small community of people doing it.

Same thing with crypto.

Back in 2012, there was people going to these meetups

that were like all about Bitcoin.

And then they seem like, you know,

the biggest kind of freaks at the time, 2011, 2012.

And then a decade later, it's on CNBC every day.

And so like, I've seen this a few times in Silicon Valley

where they're somewhat ahead of the curve.

But of course, it's like anything that's at like,

you know, a little bit contrary.

And it's not always, just cause it's weird,

doesn't mean it's always going to be a thing.

But the psychedelic conversation,

that was cool 10 years ago.

Now it's, it's, I mean, you can go to,

I mean, I see everyone on Facebook saying,

I just got back from some country

where we did an ayahuasca retreat.

I mean, like, I don't think that's normal for most people.

I think that's like your circle

and my circle a little bit more

than it is the average person.

All right, so that was one piece of it.

Second, AI is obviously all the rage.

The entire menu was created by ChatGPT.

So those basically just typed in.

I appreciate that.

I'm hosting a dinner for a bunch of tech people,

the X number of tech people create a menu

for an epic dinner party.

And it created a full menu.

Okay, that's cool.

And he goes, write the whole thing

like a Shakespearean play.

And it sort of just translated the menu

into like this like very flowery poem basically.

And then it's like, cool,

like generate an image using Dolly or whatever.

And then basically created the whole menu that way

and the chef had to cook whatever ChatGPT had created,

which was, which was pretty clever,

including like the drinks and whatever.

So I thought that was, that was fun.

And then the last thing I want to say is,

I was talking to one guy

and I didn't ask him if I could say this.

So I don't, I don't want to say his name necessarily,

but he was one of those internet OGs.

And I was like, I was like, so what's your story?

And he's like, well, I started a business back in,

he says the name of this company

that like I've heard of from the dotcom boom.

And they're like, you know, disappeared after that.

And I was like, oh, wow, like that's interesting.

And I was like, so what was it like back then?

You know, doing a startup here.

He's like, he's like, it was crazy.

He's like, I knew every single person doing a startup.

He's like, he's like, we used to have like,

like in San Francisco here, we used to have these meetups.

He's like, we would meet up once a month.

And he's like, it started out with just me

and this one guy, he named the guy,

I think I can name this guy.

He's the guy who started Nextdoor,

this guy near of Tolia.

And he's like, me and Nerova were like,

hey, let's get together a bunch of anybody else

who you know that's like interested in this tech,

like internet thing, like our fellow nerds.

Yeah.

Like if they, if you know anybody doing internet stuff,

let's invite him to this thing.

And then they created this group and he's like,

dude, the group was insane.

He's like, it was the guy who went to go there.

Like the guy who created Zynga then,

the guy who created LinkedIn,

the guy who created YouTube,

the guy who created PayPal, like all of them.

He's like, we were just hanging out.

Like it was just like, like, you know,

we used to do those mastermind dinners in San Francisco.

He's like, it was like that.

He's like, at that time,

you didn't know who any of these people were.

You didn't know who's special, who wasn't.

You just knew we're all super interested in the internet.

They add three zeros to like our success.

And it was basically the same thing.

Exactly.

And so he's like, he's like, we would get together

and it was just like debates about like,

what's going on with the internet

and like what cool stuff you're seeing.

And he's like, we would just shoot the shit

late until the night.

He's like, and then afterwards it started growing.

He's like, so it started growing.

Then we had like too many people for one table.

So we made two tables.

I was the host of one

and the other guy was the host of the other table.

Let's lead that discussion.

Then afterwards we would compare notes

and be like, who should we invite back?

He's like, the key was the internet started growing

in popularity like crazy.

Like a lot of people wanted to do internet companies.

The way that we made the community work was

we started pruning hardcore.

So he's like, we were like the bigger

the overall community gets,

the more high level this one needs to get.

So let's only invite back people that we think are

like the most dynamic,

the people who are gonna do the most interesting things.

He's like, so dude,

this would have been the best venture portfolio of all time.

Like it was every internet company that's big now,

they were there.

And then even the people who were like,

you'll have like a Jack Dorsey or something like that.

It's like, they hadn't even done their big thing yet.

And they're kind of the junior guy at this thing

hanging out.

I don't know if he specifically was doing it,

but he gave me some names of some examples

of people that were there.

Cause I was like, who could you tell

at that time was going to do something?

And who did he say?

He's like, I felt like half the group.

He's like, basically we, as he's like,

what we did was when somebody like stood out

of somebody that really kind of knew where the puck was going,

we made him a table host.

So they would host their own table.

By the end we had like eight, nine tables going

and there was a whole host.

Did he say of anyone?

The question I would have asked was the opposite is,

who's a mega success?

So you thought, oh, that doofus.

I can't believe he turned into something.

Yeah. And he did tell me a couple of stories,

but on both directions, people he thought was just,

this person's an animal.

They're going to do great things.

And somebody who's a little over it.

I don't want to say, cause you know,

if they figured out that I don't want them to be upset

or whatever, but I would say like,

one of the things he told me was it wasn't,

it wasn't the people who were working on ideas

that sounded big.

So all the people that ended up with a big thing,

the things they were working on,

weren't the things that sounded like important businesses

from day one.

And they became important.

They became important.

They eventually iterated to the important thing.

It was a bigger space than we all realized.

It was like, it was basically the person that was like,

kind of like doing the thing that was most interesting

to them and not necessarily the like,

okay, internet's going to be a big deal.

So therefore I'm going to create this important sounding

real world business on the internet.

It wasn't that.

It was like, okay, yeah, this is cool

that people are doing this like,

like social networking at the time was not seen

as a space that was going to be yield

a hundred billion dollar companies, right?

Like it wasn't, that wasn't a thing that was a,

that sounded like the frivolous fun thing.

It's like, oh cool, you like,

you can like create a profile and like take a quiz

and you can like write something silly on their wall

or whatever.

Like that didn't seem like the big ideas.

All the big ideas seemed like, you know,

even like things like,

so it was like break into three categories.

Like things that you didn't think were going to happen

on the internet, selling cars, booking travel.

Like, you know, it wasn't like,

it's like, are people going to do that?

Or maybe they'll do like home, home buying.

It's like, I don't know, maybe that seems like something

you really want to do in the real world.

It's like those seemed like kind of fringe

cause I don't know if people will do it.

It was social networking that seemed fringe and small

and that's fun, but not that interesting.

Cause we don't, it's free.

How are we going to make a big business out of this?

You know, what are you going to do with all these free users

that are just going on there and goofing off?

And then, then there was like, you know,

the things that were actually like important

sounding businesses.

So I thought that was kind of interesting too.

And it reminds me of, have you seen this clip?

This is all my last thing on this.

Look up NFX on TikTok.

So NFX is a, is an investment fund.

And then-

NSX Insights.

Insights, that's exactly right.

Yeah, okay, I'm on their page.

Watch that first video.

We'll put this in the YouTube video,

but watch this first video real quick

of James Currier standing there.

All right, it says everyone in NSF

is all in on generative AI.

So there's an underground scene of startups.

This kind of revolution happens every 14 years

and builders are here to change the world.

And it's James Currier, who's on a stage

or like a, he's on a chair in a room full of like 20 guys.

Share your key performance indicators with each other.

He's saying to people, share your ideas.

The speed of what you move is what gives you

and this town and this community its advantage.

And it's 65% of all the money invested in AI,

it's being invested in San Francisco right now.

So he's given this pump up speech

where he's trying to say like, you know, years ago

there was like the Facebooks, but just to let you know,

this is happening right now with AI.

And he's in a room with people like giving this cool speech

and everyone's like staring up at him

and they seem like they're super into it.

It's so cool.

So he's literally like, you can see a staircase coming down.

So he's somewhere downstairs in like a basement.

He's standing on a chair

and he's in a room full of people.

And he's like, basically gives them a rally speech of like,

look, this is where the magic happens.

He's like, you're in this town, you're in this room,

you're with a bunch of builders.

And what he says is every 14 years or so,

one of these waves happen

and they last somewhere between 24 to 36 months.

And he's talking about AI.

He's like, we've seen this before with mobile.

So mobile comes out, there's this three year window

between kind of like 2009 to 2012.

It happened with the internet.

And I was like, you know, kind of like 99,000

to kind of 2003, 2004.

And he's like, you get 36 to maybe 48 months max

to take advantage of this moment.

And you're in this room, you're with other people.

There's some like, basically like,

there's somebody in this room right now

who's building the next big thing.

I hope it's you, but you want to trade ideas,

trade strategies, trade what you're like doing,

find interesting people,

work on projects with them, invest in each other.

Like this is your time to focus.

These windows only open up for a small period of time,

move as fast as you can.

And I thought it was pretty,

I thought it was pretty dope to see this kind of like,

I don't know, this, like a rally cry.

And it really does seem like that's what's happening

with artificial intelligence right now.

Like there's a window, the big shit's gonna get built

right now, the next kind of Facebooks of the world

are being built right now.

And it just kind of re-highlights the intensity

of the moment if you're an entrepreneur.

Have you heard that parable about like,

there's this guy who, he's, there's a big flood

and he's on this roof and a guy with a boat comes by

and goes, hey, come on, get in my boat.

I need to save you.

And the guy on the roof goes, no, no, no, I'm praying to God.

I'm a religious guy, God's gonna save me.

And he goes, all right, fine.

Another guy comes on the boat, it's the same thing.

And he goes, no, no, no, I'm not gonna get in that boat.

I'm gonna wait for the God to come and save me.

That happens two or three times.

The guy eventually drowns and dies.

He goes to heaven.

And he goes, God, what the hell?

Why didn't you come and save me?

And God goes, dude, I had four boats come and get you.

Like, why didn't you, why don't you just hop in?

That was me.

This video, the reason it's somewhat of that is

there's this like James Currier,

who he's wearing like pretty much an ugly shirt.

That's like a, he's wearing like a tucked in T-shirt

into blue jeans, kind of dad jeans.

I mean, he looks like a dad.

He's probably...

He is a dad.

Yeah, he's 55, so he looks like he should.

And he's wearing like kind of an ugly shirt.

And he's like, just a normal looking guy, I guess,

is what I mean.

And he's giving this really nice speech, but in a basement.

And it's that same thing where like everyone's looking

for some big opportunity from like grand like epiphany moment.

It's like, no, just some guy who dresses like this,

who's in a basement.

And he's telling you like this is happening.

The message is here.

The message is here and the message is clear.

He's trying to shake you by the,

he's trying to grab you by the collar and shake you.

And be like, hey, this like playtime is over.

The window is open, go.

And I love it.

I think that's, I think it's 100% true.

And I want to leave with two controversial opinions.

It's a video with 6,000 views.

This is, this is the man in the boat

excited to save you from drowning.

Yeah, but by the way, the best stuff,

like the best content I consume,

the most insightful, meaningful content I consume

is all like this.

It's got like 1,200 views on YouTube.

It's got, you know, 6,000 views on TikTok.

The best stuff is not the most popular stuff

when it comes to like business stuff.

You used to host HustleCon

and people had to fly out to San Francisco,

pay a couple hundred bucks for their ticket,

spend all day, do that.

Not everybody could do that.

Not everybody could afford the flight, the hotel,

the ticket, take a day off work, blah, blah, blah.

You put all the talks up on YouTube.

Every single one of them was on YouTube.

It's, in fact, it's on our channel on YouTube.

We just scroll back all the way to the oldest videos.

All the talks are there.

And all the talks have like 400 views.

And it's crazy.

It's like, oh, you want to be successful?

Oh, really?

It's the same thing.

Like Harvard's whole curriculum is like online.

You can go take any Harvard class you want online.

And people will cry about not like,

not having the opportunities

that the rich Harvard kids have.

What are you talking about?

All the classes are online.

You can take every single computer science course right now,

have the same education that Gates had,

that Zuckerberg had access to.

You got access to all of it.

And they'll have like 900 views.

And it just shows you that like the real ones

are going to go do the thing.

Those 900 views are like the valuable people.

Like I want to go meet all 900 people

that are watching those videos,

because those are the people that are actually finding.

So that's takeaway one?

That's, oh, no, my two controversial things.

San Francisco is back, baby.

And the second thing is this whole like idea

of moving away to lower your taxes

and moving away to be remote.

The best teams are going to be working together.

They're going to be in the room with each other,

especially pre-product market fit.

But I will take any team that's co-located

over a remote team any day,

just head to head if it was a competition.

I would take the team that's going to be in there every day

having a bunch of stare and diffidence conversations,

whiteboarding ideas,

getting to know each other better

because they're just spending like absurd,

obscene amount of time together.

I would rather have those people

that are willing to commit and go all in like that

over a distributed remote team

where you're spending half your day actually,

walking your dog and taking care of your kids

and doing a lot of stuff.

I think they're just going to outperform.

And I think that San Francisco is going to outperform.

I think that going to the dense city

and the people who care about the extra 10% in taxes

or the people who are like,

oh, I don't want to live here

because I don't like the DA's policy on crime.

I just think that that's,

I think it's insane that people in a game

where the upside is like 1,000 X returns

that people optimize for a 10% break

in state income taxes is crazy to me.

Yeah, but bro, you're like a living savings.

Let's go.

Let's go close enough.

I'm going to be a little stone's throw away.

I'm across the bridge.

What person get the Iraq bath bar?

I don't know.

You got a catapult for that?

I'm one easy pass away.

Yeah, you're one easy 50 mile throw away.

I agree with everything you're saying.

All right, this next segment,

we're going to call it three killer Asians.

And it's about three people.

One of those, two of those people is a couple

that you're going to talk about, but I'll go first.

And then the reason I'm bringing this up.

So this week, so let me preface by saying,

I don't know anything about like public markets.

I'm an index investor.

I don't do anything like crazy.

And so I don't know much,

but this week I paid attention to my portfolio.

Did you pay attention to yours?

There was a nice little bump.

I have not checked.

What's going on?

So stocks are doing well.

The tech sector is doing well.

And I emailed my banker, I texted him, I go, Griffin,

what's going on, man?

Why do I have so much more money

than I did the day before?

And he said, NVIDIA just crushed their earnings.

And like a lot of people out there,

I know the name NVIDIA.

I know that NVIDIA is a company,

but I don't really know what they do.

Do you know what NVIDIA does?

They make chips.

They make the chips that go into your,

like you buy a gaming PC, the graphics,

the GPU in there is going to be made by NVIDIA.

It's like Intel makes chips and NVIDIA makes chips

and AMD makes chips.

There's like three companies that make chips.

Okay, so do me a favor, do you have Google up?

Google Gary Oldman.

So the word Gary and then Oldman,

O-L-E-M-A-N, you know, you see who that is?

O-L-E-M-A-N.

Oldman, like Oldman.

You see it?

It's pulling up an actor.

It's an actor.

Gary Oldman.

Yeah, you see it?

Yeah, you see Gary?

All right, you recognize Gary?

Yeah, I see this guy around.

Yeah, okay.

Dab in another guy named Gary Cole.

You see Gary Cole?

Yeah, another actor, okay.

And what's your reaction when you see him?

I have no reaction to this guy.

What am I supposed to be reacting to?

You just like seeing him around, right?

Yeah, sure, it looks like a guy.

NVIDIA is like the Gary's, the tech world.

Gary Oldman.

I have no idea where you're going with that.

So Gary Oldman, for those of you who are on the computer,

Gary Oldman was the chiefs on Dark Knight,

like the top in Dark Knight.

The guy who puts up the bat signal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's also Winston Churchill in the Darkest Hour movie.

He plays all these roles where you see him

and you're like, oh, that guy's great.

He's awesome.

He's always there.

He always has a good performance

and everything, and it's probably pretty good.

But he's never the guy,

and he's never, I can't tell you who he is.

I don't have to look it up.

There's a bunch of these actors who are like that.

That's what NVIDIA is of the tech world.

So basically, and this isn't gonna sound like obvious

to anyone who's in deep tech,

but for someone like me who's not,

I had to figure out what NVIDIA is.

So basically, the story is that they create GPU,

is it GPU chips or is it GPU?

They invented it.

So prior to NVIDIA, there was these other chip companies

and Intel was one of them.

Just like the big dogs who you have heard

about the 70s and 80s,

and they just make chips that ran your computer, whatever.

But then as computers got a little bit better,

Jensen hung the founder.

He was like, look, we need to have a 3D chip

or a chip for 3D video and graphic process.

So basically, our screens will be more interactive

and all that.

And so he vents this chip

and he runs the company now for 30 years.

So he's been CEO of this company

longer than any other new-ish tech company.

And he made this bet and it wasn't that big of a bet.

So when he launched in 1993,

he raised a $2 million round of funding

at a $6 million valuation.

So this wasn't some like, you're gonna crush this.

Like it was just a normal startup at the time.

But he makes this bet that he thinks that CPUs,

which is what people used to use,

that that's gonna be like a little bit less popular

and GPUs, which is for graphics and like more general use,

that's gonna be like the thing.

And so the first people who start using it are gamers.

So in like different gaming PCs, people start using it.

And then Apple, Microsoft, whatever, they're like,

oh man, we actually also want some of these chips.

So we're gonna use that.

But now it's expanded way beyond that.

So like Tesla uses their chips.

So like when you wanna like do self-driving,

they've got an NVIDIA chip that helps them figure out

like where people are.

You know, the camera will use the GPU chip

and then it will put like, you know,

when you're on a Tesla,

you can see people walking across the street.

And then now they're even using for artificial intelligence.

So anyone who's using like open AI,

Amazon web services, things like that,

they're also using GPUs.

And so this company, it's one of those companies

you don't really think about because it's a B2B company.

But at this point, and this is what shocked me,

NVIDIA is now either the seventh or eighth largest company

in the world.

Is that insane?

Wow.

And so like this company, because their stock did well,

the whole NASDAQ, which is like a tech-based index.

The market cap is almost one trillion.

It's 963 billion right now.

It's insane, right?

So because NVIDIA popped the whole NASDAQ,

the whole NASDAQ, which is a tech-based,

a tech-forward like stock exchange,

that's what I meant, not indexed,

they're killing it because of that.

And so I had no idea.

I like heard that name and be like,

what is this little like gaming company?

How is this like moving the stock market?

And that's what it is.

And this guy, the founder, the acquired guys

have a really good episode on him.

Same as Jensen, he's like really interesting.

So he was a Taiwanese immigrant

and his parents didn't have any money.

So they sent him to like a boarding school,

which is like a reform school for kids who had issues.

And like his roommate was this guy

who had just got out of prison at the age of like 16 or 17.

And he had been stabbed like 50 times.

And so the guy was like,

hey, keep me out of your work computers

and I'll show you how to lift weights.

And so if you look at this guy now, Jensen,

he's like a pretty buff guy.

And he also has like the word NVIDIA,

the NVIDIA logo at QDoggham.

And he like says, I'll be like really wild things.

Like I'll say, by will to survive

is greater than almost anyone's will to kill me.

And you're like, yeah, all these phrases

where he just says like, I'm all in baby.

And so he's a really interesting entrepreneur,

but he's like the Gary Oldman of the world

where we don't actually like, he's not up there.

Like we're not watching videos of him

like Mark Zuckerberg do Jiu-Jitsu

because he's not like a mainstream facing guy.

But now I think it's gonna change

because they are absolutely crushing it.

And I'm one of the many people

who probably had no idea what they do.

Yeah, when the acquired guys came on our pod,

I think you asked them, you're like,

hey, you studied all these companies.

You studied all these epic titans of business.

And I think you said like,

who would you not want to compete with?

Or who would you want to compete with the least?

And they said this guy Jensen Wong,

they were like, Jensen, the guy from NVIDIA,

the leather jacket wearing CEO,

he's got the NVIDIA tattoo on his shoulder

who has just been like, you know, a monster

for like, you know, 20 years with this company.

And that was not the answer.

Like, I wouldn't have guessed

that that's who they would have said.

And it was an unfulfilling answer

because I was like, well, I don't know anything

about this guy.

And I bet most of our listeners were like,

oh, I thought you would have said Mark Zuckerberg

or someone famous.

And this guy's just quietly kind of behind the scenes.

Although he is like a loud personality.

He doesn't see obnoxious,

but he wears like a cool leather jacket

and he looks like very confident.

But he's just been quietly behind the scenes,

kind of killing it.

I don't know what his net worth is now,

but I bet you he's one of the like the top 30

or 50 richest people in America

or in the world at the moment.

And he just gave a talk at like the Taiwanese

like national university or something like that.

And he, I haven't seen it yet.

I suppose like his commencement speech.

And like, you remember this, the Steve Jobs,

like the great one, like the one he did at Stanford

that was like, just like incredible.

He gave a talk, I haven't seen the whole thing,

but there's a couple of lessons

that people have tweeted out.

I want to share a couple with you.

So he's like, he goes lesson number one, humility.

He goes, confront failure head on and ask for help.

So he says back in the day or the one year

in the early days of NVIDIA,

they got their first big chip contract

and it was with Sega, the video game console.

And he goes, after a year of development,

they realized that they had picked

the wrong technical strategy to make the chip

that was going to do the things that Sega needed

to fulfill the contract.

And he's like, we realized our architecture

was the wrong strategy.

He's like, we didn't know what to do.

Should we scramble, try to make it work?

Should we just deliver something that's not great?

Like, what should we do?

Should we start over?

We don't have time.

He's like, so I just called the CEO of Sega

and I was like, hey, I think you have to find

another partner, but I also need you

to keep paying us on the contract.

He's like, what?

He's like, I hate to even ask this.

I'm embarrassed.

If we don't have this money,

we're going to go out of business.

Like, if you just please pay out the rest of this contract,

like I'm embarrassed to even ask you this,

but we need these six months to survive.

And we screwed up, you know,

I'll do everything in my power to help you do this

and I'll try to make it right after this.

But like, if we don't have this,

if you don't pay this contract, it's over.

The show's over for us.

And the CEO of Sega agreed.

He actually paid it out.

They gave him six months to survive.

He's like, you got to confront your mistakes head on

with humility and ask for help.

That saved NVIDIA.

He's like, this is the hardest thing to learn

for somebody who's the smart and successful type.

They try to, you know, avoid failure

or be a denial or a hide from it.

What else did it say?

He goes, second is lesson number two.

You have to endure the pain and suffering

to realize your dream.

So he goes, in 2007, we announced CUDA,

this like new way to like,

kind of like program your GPUs.

I think that's the real key for NVIDIA.

They don't just make the chips.

They make the, this CUDA thing is important.

It's basically the way that people,

developers can use GPUs and like control the GPU

to do what they want.

So he's like-

And by the way, they don't even make the chips.

They like design them and they have a partnership

with this other Taiwanese company,

which is why like sometimes they'll say like,

you'll hear things like, well,

Taiwan gets invaded by China.

We're at risk.

The eighth largest company in the world

is going to be kind of screwed,

which means X, Y, and Z for the rest.

Yeah, especially all the companies that need chips.

Like, oh, all of our cars need chips.

All of our computers need chips.

All of our phones need chips.

If we lose control of the chips,

it's like losing the nukes

or it's like losing access to oil.

It's like a big deal.

So anyways, so he goes,

it goes, you know, we basically,

we tried to create this thing back in 2007.

It was super hard, super expensive.

Our profits took a huge hit.

And we had many years of poor performance

and our shareholders were skeptical.

Like, dude, why are you spending all this money

on this stupid like GPUs, CUDA thing?

Like you need to improve profitability, blah, blah, blah.

He's like, but we just said, no,

we're going to keep doing this.

And basically it took like three or four years

before there was even a market for this.

But by the time there was a market for this,

they were so far ahead.

He's like, so then the phone comes out

and the phone's become a huge success.

Now phones need GPUs.

And by 2010, they had the lead in the mobile chip market.

So chips for phones.

He's like, that was huge.

Oh, no, sorry.

I screwed up this story.

The GPUs thing becomes a big deal

as gaming continues to go that direction

and like all the AI machine learning stuff.

But like that was, it took like,

almost 10 years for that to come through.

But they like stuck to their guns and stuck with it,

even though the shareholders

and the public markets were punishing them for it.

And then the last one, he's like,

we were in the mobile chip market,

we were the leader.

And he's like, but it just became so competitive.

It was so many people fighting for the same pie.

They basically decided to like sacrifice,

sacrifice the mobile market and leave that

in order to go for like a different market,

this kind of AI machine learning market.

And again, it seemed like a terrible strategic bet.

It's like, you're leaving the biggest market,

cell phones in order to go for this unknown risky thing.

And that strategic bet paid off

because they became by far the leader in this field.

And now that became like the biggest market,

the market everybody's bullish about.

And the reason their stock is up so much

is because they like gave guidance,

like they had like a revenue target or forecast

or whatever, there was a revenue forecast.

And they like just came out like,

actually we think we're gonna crush that by like 30%.

And they're like, wait, 30% on a number

that's already in the multi-billions.

And they're like, yes.

So the stock took off after that.

Dude, it's awesome.

So I'm a big fan of this guy's hopes.

Is it, huh?

Or, I think it's long.

The silent ages, they are always a challenge for me.

But Mr. Jensen, I've been in media.

You are today's killer Asian number one.

Sean, tell me who are killer Asians at number two and three.

All right, we're going from a guy who makes GPUs

and AI artificial intelligence to orange-

MSG.

MSG, I'm butchering the joke, it's too good.

It's GPU to MSG.

So I met somebody who was like a real estate person.

And they were like, I was like, yeah,

how's the real estate thing going?

They're like, oh dude, it's going great.

We're growing, growing, growing.

I was like, so you're still just doing this

all with your own money?

And he's like, yeah, although there's one person

who wants to put money in that I'll take.

And I was like, but you've always said no to anybody's money.

Like why, who's this one person?

And why, why are you interested?

He goes, it's the guy you started Panda Express.

This guy's a billionaire, like multi-billionaire.

And he's got so much money.

He's got an unbelievable amount of money

that he doesn't know what to do with it.

I was like, you know, he's like,

needs a place to invest this money.

And I was like Panda Express,

like how much money are they making?

And I kind of looked into it.

So this segment is Panda Express,

the $10 billion mom and pop.

So I don't know how much you know about Panda Express,

but I bet it does.

I know you've tested the goods.

So basically it's a privately owned company.

So it's just owned by this husband and wife.

It does about five billion a year in sales,

5.3 billion last year.

There are no franchises of this thing.

So they kind of independently own, I think almost all,

there might be like a hundred that are like

in international territories that they don't control.

But for the most part,

they have grown this thing to a huge international chain.

It's I think the third biggest fast food chain

or something like that.

Just behind sort of like the huge ones,

the McDonald's, the Chick-fil-A's of the world.

And they're on track to become a $10 billion mom and pop

company, which is just kind of insane.

And my friend who I, who was telling me about-

What are their names?

What's that?

What are their names?

Andrew like churn, I don't know how you say it exactly,

it's like churn, it's C-H-E-R-N-G or something like that.

It's him and his wife and they vote this thing.

So he started the first one,

it was like called like the Panda Inn back in the day.

It was like a normal restaurant.

I think he started it-

I think he started it-

Yeah, I think his dad had one.

His dad was the chef.

So his dad was a chef and he opened a Panda Inn

and his dad was the chef of that restaurant.

And then fast food started taking off

and Andrew got pretty fascinated with this idea of fast food.

It was like, okay, what if we did Chinese fast food?

And so the second or third location they did

was this like express, this like fast food.

And it was in California, right?

Yeah, I think there was more Asians.

And they start doing a bunch of things that are smart.

So some of the strategic smart things that they did was,

they opened up a bunch of locations

as they grew in airports and military bases,

which a lot of people weren't doing at the time,

but they were like, oh, this is a great way

to build awareness.

Like these are like huge hubs

that a lot of people come through.

If we're here, we will become like known and normal

as like a cuisine basically.

And so they did those,

even though those weren't the most profitable locations,

they did it kind of like for the brand.

The second thing, his wife was like a food engineer

or something like that.

And so she was one of the first people

in Chinese restaurants to use a whole bunch of tech.

So tech to monitor inventory

or measure speed for operations.

And that's why they became so efficient

and they call themselves McDonald's of the East

because they're as efficient as a McDonald's,

even though almost every other kind of like,

Chinese restaurant was a traditional mom and pop.

They didn't, you know, they write down the orders by hand.

They track inventory by going and open up the fridge

and eyeball and everything and being like,

I think we need to order more eggs.

Whereas they turned this into kind of like a machine.

And they would find things that were working in one store.

So like this guy in Hawaii who owned one of the,

who was running one of the stores, the chef there,

he created orange chicken.

And he's like, oh, I think I could take, you know,

that one beef dish that's an appetizer

that uses the orange peels.

I think I could use that orange thing

on the general styles chicken and like combine the two

and this fried chicken that's got the orange flavor.

So Panda Express invented orange chicken.

That's what it sounded like for my reading.

Now, I don't know if there's others that are debating that,

but that's how they frame it at least.

And they sell a hundred million pounds of orange chicken a year.

It's like a crazy number.

And so, yeah, just this insane thing.

So I think they do almost like $800 million of EBITDA.

And so I know someone who knows him.

I know someone who knows him and he told me the same number.

Yeah.

He told me he goes, he goes, they're knocking on the door.

He goes, they're knocking on the door of a billion

and EBITDA.

Exactly.

And then it's like, well,

what do you do with all this money?

And the people have asked him like,

are you going to take it public?

And the CFO is like, never.

This is going to be a family business

that pass it down from generation to generation.

Our job is to make this a multi-generational

family-owned business.

And I think that's really cool.

Like there's so few of those that like refuse to go public.

And why do they need to?

They're rolling in profits, right?

Like they don't need the liquidity of the markets.

They don't have investors that they need to pull off.

I couldn't find if there was like some angel investors early on

that there probably was something.

I don't know if they own literally a hundred percent,

but it seems like it's either a hundred percent

or close to it in terms of their ownership,

which I think is kind of insane.

He also does a few other things.

So if I remember correctly,

I might get some of the details wrong,

but I think that the day you start working there,

I believe he like even like as a,

I think this is like as a cashier,

not just like H2O BAS, like a retail worker.

I think he buys you the book,

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Because he said that when he,

I think he might be an immigrant,

but his parents were for sure immigrant

that he was like trying to figure out how to like assimilate

and how to like be more likable and charismatic

so he could like get along with Americans.

And he read How to Win Friends and Influence People

and it like changed his life.

I also think he read like Speaking Grow Ridge.

And so he like gives people these books

and he also sponsors tons of his employees

to go to Tony Robbins stuff.

So he's like all about this like self-help stuff,

which is cool.

We got a bunch of comments.

We got a bunch of comments.

He likes that for his employees.

And so I think if I had to guess,

when you get to be the size of 100 million pounds

of orange chicken,

you're no longer like a product company

or just like a restaurant company.

You're a collecting people and making sure

that they all behave in a very particular type of way,

as well as like a logistics company.

And so in terms of like,

you know, like there's a reason why McDonald,

whenever they know something, it's like,

oh, that's this huge announcement

just because you have a McRibs like dude,

they have to go and like get like,

you know, 500 pounds of pork in order to like make this.

It's like a huge ordeal.

But in terms of treating his people well

and like collecting people,

he like invests, I heard, into them a whole lot.

So he's kind of like a really interesting guide.

I don't know if this is like PR spun stuff where all,

you know, he looks great all the time,

just from the outside,

but he seems like he does a lot of really good, good stuff.

There's a, I just asked a chat to me for some fun facts.

I said, give me some fun anecdotes about them.

And they said the thing about the books

that he buys thousands of copies of his favorite books.

One is like awakening the Buddha within

and gives it to his employees.

Another thing that it says is,

according to a Forbes article,

staff members often start the day with affirmations

like people are depending on me to be at my best.

I believe in myself and my abilities.

Opportunities are everywhere.

And I don't know if that's truly how they start their day,

but it's a hell of a lot better

than just saying the pledge of allegiance.

I think we should put this in schools.

Yeah, it's crazy.

I mean, 2000 plus stores as a kind of family owned,

private and non-franchised out business

is mind boggling level of scale to reach.

He also, and his wife Peggy,

that just like still kind of like own the thing.

And he does the total opposite of what you just said before.

He moved to Nevada.

He now lives in Nevada because he's making so much income.

But yeah, I know that he, I think Nevada is now,

it was like a big deal when he left California to Nevada.

That's his home state now.

My thing is about tech entrepreneurs.

If you are gonna build a Silicon Valley style venture stardom,

this is the place to be for that.

I'm not saying everybody in the world

should live in California.

If you're slinging 100 million pounds of orange chicken,

you live wherever the hell you want.

That's rule number three.

I want you to tell me,

we're gonna move into the last section here.

I want you to tell me,

you've got a little ambitious here.

You titled this section,

famous people who are back with new companies.

I don't wanna call them famous,

maybe notable, somewhat popular.

Notable, notable, notable is a better one.

Let's do notable.

Tell me what you got.

I don't know if you've seen this,

but there's a few people who are well known

in our industry for a bunch of reasons

that are doing interesting things.

I wanna get your quick reaction to each of them.

So I don't know if you've seen all these,

but we'll start with Naval.

So Naval is kind of like the,

I don't know, one of the Godfathers of Silicon Valley.

He's been here, again,

since that kind of like pre.com boom days.

He did a startup that went public,

and then he famously got a big dispute

with a bunch of people about it.

He created a blog that was called Venture Hacks,

and then him and his partner, Nivy,

and that eventually sort of led to Angel List,

which is a multi-billion dollar startup

that's like linked in for the tech industry.

And he's known, he's got like,

I don't know, a million plus followers on Twitter

because very insightful guy.

So Naval is awesome.

He's got a new app.

He turned into like a,

he's like a self-appointed guru,

which is brilliant branding.

I think he's actually the opposite.

I think he's a non-self-appointed guru.

I think other people appoint him a guru,

and he's like, that makes me a little uncomfortable,

but I kind of like it.

He leaned into it.

He leaned into it hard.

But I've, as somebody who's consumed,

I think every word that Naval has said somehow,

like I've watched all his live streams, his podcast,

all that stuff, right?

Love his stuff.

He, many times will be like,

people, you know, why don't people be like,

why don't you do more or have your own things?

And he's like, I don't want, I don't,

I don't like this playing this role of the screw thing.

I don't like how much I like it.

And I have to be very careful that I don't fall into that.

I don't want that to be my life and my identity

and get excited about,

I'm just excited about learning this thing

because I'm gonna go tell everybody about it.

And then everybody's gonna think I'm so smart.

He's like, no, I don't want that.

I want to learn the thing because I like to learn it,

and that's it.

And he's like, you know, he's like,

like it's like junk food.

When he's like, I get on here

and I give random advice to people,

it's my junk food.

It's not what I want to be eating.

And people base their lives on it.

But it is far.

Yeah, Jensen's got the Nvidia tattoo.

I got the Naval tattoo on my arm.

Okay, so what's AirChat?

Have you seen it?

Have you played with it?

Yeah, it's just like a little bit,

but it almost felt like an AI friend.

Is that what it is?

No, not at all.

So it's an app, it's like a social media app.

So you open it up and there's these like rooms.

So you can go into a room that's like,

it might be people talk about AI

and it's sort of like, it's audio, but it's recorded.

So I could go on there and I could be like,

you know, I was playing with this chat GPD thing,

and one of the cool things that I've been doing is this.

Has anybody tried anything that's blown their mind?

That blew my mind.

And then another person who follows me

can just reply to like,

dude, you're totally right.

Here's what I did.

And you're hearing their voice.

It's like voice plus the transcription of it.

So it's kind of like a way to have

almost like a podcast style thing

where you're having a conversation,

but it's open like anybody can kind of hop in

that you allow into your room.

And the conversation goes wherever it goes.

So a little bit of like a dinner party in a way.

And so there's like, for example,

one of the rooms I liked was the guy Nivy

telling the origin story of Angel List,

which I had never heard before,

but he was like, all right, I'm going to go back

and I'm going to tell you the origin story of Angel List.

And it's actually like not what I had thought.

He's like, we had venture, venture hacks, the blog,

and that was kind of popular.

And then I was like, I was trying to figure out what to do.

Like, how did we turn this into a business?

And so I emailed Neval, Neval had owned 10% of it.

And I was like, all right, Neval.

Hey, I don't know what you think about this,

but like I'm thinking about selling this PDF,

like, okay, venture hacks is a free blog,

but then here's this PDF,

like we're joking about like the webinar thing.

It's like, dude, even some of these awesome people did it.

And he's like, I'm going to sell this PDF

that will like just give people like templates.

And Neval's like, okay, that's cool.

You know, for my 10%, just keep it with how this,

like this awesome PDF thing you're going to try to do,

like go ahead and hold on to my 10%.

I don't need it.

You need it more than I do.

He's like, then we were driving home from some events

after I had told him about the PDF thing.

I was like, ready to go do that.

And Neval had this like, I, you know,

like we were shooting the shit and we had this idea like,

oh, you know what I really want is like,

I want a list of investors and just what they invest in,

what check size,

cause people are always asking us due to venture hacks.

Like, hey, do you know any investors

that would invest in my startup?

He's like, I just want a list that I can refer to as like,

here's all the investors I know,

here's what they invest in and here's the check size.

So when someone asks for an intro,

I can go look at the list and make the intro.

And then maybe he's like, yeah, that's cool.

I don't think that's a business.

Like it's good.

That's going to make less money than my PDF.

But like, you're right.

That would be really useful for us.

So he's like, so I went home that night.

He's like, I made a form and I emailed it out to every

investor I know that was like, yo, what do you invest in?

What's your average check size and what's your email address?

And like, you know,

are you open to people contacting you about like,

for introductions for deals?

He's like, and I sent it to people

and they immediately filled it in.

It was the ugliest form.

I didn't even pay for the premium.

He's like, just a reminder that like, you know,

you just need to start, you need to get it out there

and like get momentum going.

And he's like, now with any project,

if I can't like launch some version of it

in the first 24 hours, it like kind of like,

it bothers me a lot.

Like I don't really want to do projects where I can't do that.

He's like, so that was the first, that was V1 of Angel

is we got this, these people back.

And then we put it on a, we put it on our website.

And then we like got some like compressed coverage

cause it was like, oh, here's a list of all the angels.

And it was like, on all their emails were there.

So that was bad.

So we had to take that off and then hide their emails

cause people were just getting spamming them.

He's like, and then that became like the precursor

to what Angel list was, which is now this like

multi-billion dollar company was like,

just this list of angel investors.

And that was the simplest, like useful thing.

And he's like, and so he's telling the story

in the air chat and he's like,

if you guys want, by the way,

like I could tell you the two other ideas

that we like, you know, the two other paths that we looked at

that like turned out to not be not being good ideas.

But, you know, let me know.

And then you could see that this,

now I'm like, oh, great, I'm going to follow along.

I kind of want to hear this oral history of Angel list.

And so it's cool in that way, right?

Like it's a, it's a cool new app.

So he's coming out with this and he's like,

I'm a co-founder of this.

And the other guy I think who's behind it is that guy,

Brian Norgaard.

I don't know how he says last time exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Who's kind of like well respected in the tech scene

as like a product guy, a product designer guy.

And they like work at Tinder or something.

Yeah, he basically like, he started a couple of things

that like had a bunch of hype,

but didn't fully pan out, but were cool products.

Like didn't work, but were cool.

And then ended up like, had a product at like the match group

or something like that at LAC.

And so then he like ran Tinder.

And now he's like doing this, I guess.

So that's kind of like one, one app.

So give me your, I don't, you haven't played with it.

So it's hard to get your quick reaction.

Well, I, yeah, you got to like sign up for a wait list.

It's also like cool.

It's just, do you think that,

do you think that this is going to be like a thing?

I do not.

So I, I think it's going to be,

it's actually reminds me a lot of Clubhouse

in that early on Clubhouse was awesome.

What is awesome because it was such a curated community.

And it was like, they brute-forced only dope people

onto the platform because that's who their friend group was.

And so early on with Clubhouse,

you would go into any room and it'd be like,

super interesting conversation.

You could just hop in and meet people

and you could build, and I told my friend this,

there was a guy who used to work for me, Jason.

And I was like, Jason,

he was still at Twitch after he got acquired

and was kind of like, you know,

spinning his wheels a little bit.

And I go, Jason, you should just forget about Twitch.

I said, every night you should go on Clubhouse

and hang out there for like five hours.

You will build like the best network in Silicon Valley

in the next two months if you just do that.

Cause I was like, you're an awesome talker.

People love you when they meet you,

but it's just hard to go meet like the power players.

Clubhouse is this place

where all the power players are hanging out

and they want to be talking to Rando's

because that's what Clubhouse is.

And that they're excited about Clubhouse,

therefore they're excited about talking to Rando's.

I was like, you can go in there

and go from Rando to friend in like two months.

And he did exactly that.

He went in there and he started hanging out

and he built this awesome friend group.

They still hang out in real life today.

He ended up raising a fund out of that group

of people like, do you seem like you know a lot about crypto?

Like, can you invest some of my money in crypto?

And he's like, I don't know.

And ended up raising like a few million dollar fund,

invested it, made these guys money, triple,

I think he doubled or tripled their money

and paid it all back and gave,

stopped the fund within like a year,

which is like incredible.

And yeah, he just like had this awesome network experience.

So to me, air chats like that right now,

you go in there, everybody's smart and awesome.

And like the who's who of the tech world.

And so it's great for me as a user right now.

I don't think it'll stick like that.

And I also don't think it'll catch on

to be a mainstream social media thing

because for one reason, audio is too slow.

People can like scroll and read,

I don't know, some crazy like three or five times faster

than audio.

And so there is a, it's too slow.

Any social media, you're not competing with TikTok.

It's like, how do you compete with the entertainment

per second that you get rate that you get

from an Instagram or TikTok or even a Twitter?

It's all short form, bite size,

just instant dopamine hits.

And it's like podcasts, it's very hard to compete with that.

It'll never be as like, you know, billions of people

are just opening this thing up all the time

because audio is too slow and you get too few,

like hits of awesomeness per per minute

that you compare to your other options

or other buttons on your phone.

So that's why I don't think it'll become

like a mainstream thing.

Tell me about this tradey thing.

Okay, so Dom, who was the founder of Fast.com,

which was a funny story.

What's the 30 second story of Fast?

30 second story of Fast, the guy gets his domain,

Fast.com, comes out with the crazy hype on Twitter.

Of just fast is gonna be like the next big thing.

It's one click instant checkout.

What Amazon did with one click checkout,

we're gonna do for the rest of the internet.

And they're just pumping on Twitter

how fast is gonna be awesome.

They raise a bunch of money at a huge valuation.

They're bragging about how-

Hundreds of millions, right?

Hundreds of millions.

Hundreds of millions.

Pre-launch, yeah, pre-traction basically.

And a few of us were kind of like,

I don't know, man, I'm not sure, like,

where's your customers?

Well, what's going on?

And sure enough, the bubble pops,

people sort of realize that Fast.com has basically

no traction.

It had like, I don't know, like tens of thousands

in revenue as it had like, you know,

almost a billion dollar valuation.

And the product doesn't really work that great.

The team is like, whatever, it all just falls apart.

I don't remember the exact details of how it fell apart.

Like, but it fell apart.

They were burning, I think, $10 million a month

of investor money at one point.

Something like that, between three and 10 million.

I don't remember the exact numbers,

but they were burning an absurd amount of money.

He couldn't raise anymore

because they had no traction.

At a certain point, the investors wanna see traction.

And so Fast just combusts.

And then it comes out that, oh, this guy Dom,

previously had built a company in Australia

called Toe.com.

That was supposed to be Uber for towing your car

and tow truck drivers.

And basically like, that company also had a dope domain,

Toe.com.au, and raised money, got a bunch of press,

got some users, but not a lot,

ran up a bill that he couldn't pay,

like a $13 million bill or something like that.

He's getting sued for by the government there

because towing contracts that he couldn't fulfill

and ended up just leaving Australia

and he used to be Dominic Holland

and he rebranded as Dom in the US and did Fast.com.

So it's kinda like, okay, this guy's track record.

So now he's got tradie.com, another quick domain name.

Have you seen this thing, tradie?

Like, as in tradesmen?

Yeah, and so explain what it is

and I'll tell you what I heard about it.

So it kinda, on the surface, like most of Dom's ideas,

it sounds kinda like a good idea.

So it says, the fastest way to grow your trade business

and it just shows a bunch of blue collar types.

So this guy does landscaping,

this guy's got a tractor and it's like,

hey, we give you a website,

we let you do your customers book you

and pay for you online.

We give you easy way to do invoicing.

If you're a professional tradesperson,

you should be using tradie.

That's the pitch.

It's not a bad pitch, I think it's a good idea.

Now tell what you heard about it

because I think we heard the same thing.

So if y'all read it.

So someone tweeted, they go, looking at tradie.com.

So far, 80% of the businesses I've contacted from the site,

meaning there's a bunch of businesses

that were listed as testimonials.

I think he said, it looks like Dom's at it again, right?

That's the frame.

Yeah, he goes, Dom, he goes, he's at it again.

He goes, 80% of the companies that contacted it

from the site don't seem to be real.

They're shell companies with fake Yelp and Google listings

and 90% of them didn't pick up the phone.

Trady said, one tradie made their landing page without permit.

Oh, one person who was listed on the website

said that tradie made the landing page

without that company's permission

and two so far seem to actually be using the product

but tradie is giving it to them for free

and sponsoring them.

And then he shows like all the domain names

that the same LLC that owns tradie

has also bought all these other domain names

that were listed on the website of tradie.com.

Yeah, this is guy Justin Mitchell.

Jay Mitch is the guy who tweeted this out.

And so, so yeah, like straight off the bat.

And now, by the way,

I think all those are gone from the tradie website.

So...

So with that and again, my takeaway is run.

No, I'm not touching this thing.

Instant reaction.

All right, and the next two, Tip Top and Bay Area Times.

Yeah, let's skip that one.

Let's do the Pomp one.

So Pomp, friend of the pod is doing something interesting.

I don't know the full story.

I haven't talked to him about this.

Have you talked to him about this Bay Area Times thing?

No, not yet.

Do you know what?

I didn't even know about it.

I don't even know what it is.

Okay, so go to Bay Area Times.com.

It looks like...

So Pomp is famous for, he was one of the early guys

who was very vocal about crypto.

He started a podcast, YouTube channel

and now he's a whole personality.

He's pivoted away a little bit from crypto.

So now he's just talking about business,

but also a little bit politics and sports

and all types of things.

His kind of relaunch, I want to talk to you about,

which is basically like,

how do you think that's going and gonna go?

So he was the Bitcoin bull.

He popped off in terms of...

He's built his audience around Bitcoin

and saying how amazing crypto is.

And then people will note,

like the crypto kind of haters basically will be like,

dude, look at this.

He removed the red laser eyes.

He've removed, I'll mention of Bitcoin from his bio.

And now like, he hosted a real estate conference

the other day.

He's hosting like, you know, startup events,

you know, just like normal startup things.

He's doing this, like his media stuff

is not about crypto anymore.

And so, you know, I think he's diversifying

and kind of shifting away from...

I think it's working really well too.

Yeah, and like, I would just say this.

I think for most people, it's a very hard transition.

I would not want to bet against Pomp.

I think he is a very formidable, smart person

who is going to be successful

and whatever he chooses to be successful at.

And I think he's chosen...

I'd like to build my hold code to be about these things

instead of just this one.

And I think it's a very hard pivot to make

and he's making it very well.

He's doing it very well so far from what I can tell.

So here's some...

And basically he owns...

Right now he owns...

I think he owns an executive recruiting company,

a research company.

Job board.

What else?

A job board.

Yeah, a job board.

And of course, that trains you to get jobs in crypto.

And then maybe like two more things.

Or his media companies.

And then I think he's investing beyond that.

So here's what he said.

He goes, introducing the Bay Area Times.

This is a new product that uses data and visuals

to analyze what's happening across business, finance,

and tech on a daily basis.

So you can go to Bay AreaTimes.com

and he basically says,

Narratives dominate the headlines on other platforms.

Writers spend paragraph or guru day

in the same points over and over again.

These are like these products take too long to read.

They bury the data deep in the paragraphs

and it's hard to recall the information.

But what if you just want cold hard facts?

What if you want to see the data in a single chart?

What if you don't have 10 minutes to read every morning?

That's what we built this for.

So every morning they send out an email

that's got five big stories.

It's got a visual, which is like a chart or a graph

along with a few bullet points.

No hidden agenda, no twisted facts, no bias narrative.

That's his claim.

He says he's been testing this with 20,000 readers

and the feedback has been phenomenal.

Go for it, right?

And so you could see,

it looks like it's built on sub-stack.

Be Hive.

Oh yeah, sorry, this is Be Hive.

So let me go to the first one.

All right, so the one that he sent out three days ago,

it's basically, here's the data.

It's like, what's going on in the stock market?

What's going on with Bitcoin, gold, Ethereum, et cetera?

And then it'll be like,

here's a chart on life expectancy.

And it says life expectancy has been stagnant

for the past 20 years after the COVID drop.

It's at 77 years old, which is the same level as 2003, right?

So that's like the one big chart

and then they put bullet points underneath it.

So he's basically using visuals and data

to explain what's going on in the news.

I think it's cool.

I think the worst case scenario here for him

is that this makes like $2 or $3 million a year

and it's very, very profitable.

The best case, it becomes hustle morning through whatever.

It gets millions of subscribers

and makes tens of millions or however much more.

I think it's cool.

What do you think?

I kind of wish this was an actual printed thing.

I like people that are going into like newspapers

and magazines right now.

I think those are very interesting.

So there's Agora, the newsletter company

I always talk about.

They would say that they would charge like two grand a year

and they would send you like a newsletter

but it was a financial newsletter

except when they say newsletter

they would literally mail it to you and they still do that.

And it was just printed on like printer paper

and it was kind of cool for that reason.

And I actually agree with you.

I think that could be cool

where you just like literally mail someone

and it comes in like one of those tan envelopes

and it looks like it's almost like here's like the,

here's like, I think the president every day

gets like a briefing.

It's like a presidential briefing

where it's like here's what you need to know

and like oftentimes I'm like just a piece of paper.

Like just give me that, but at my house.

And I actually do think that would be cool.

Did we talk about this jumbo mail marketing thing?

What's that?

I saw this on Twitter, it's pretty cool.

So basically they go, the tagline is this,

have you ever received a package in the mail

and thrown it away without opening it?

Neither have we.

And basically they're like 90% of people,

90 plus percent of people who receive like a stuffed envelope

like a stuffed package will rip the thing off and open it.

So if you go to the Twitter is at mail jumbo

it's basically the icon's this elephant

and it goes we create jumbo chunky mail

that's guaranteed to reach your audience.

It's good for real estate investors,

home services and business buyers.

And basically what they do is like,

they just do direct mail like kind of like,

we got a bunch of like spam in the mail like,

oh, whatever, we want to buy your business

or we're real estate agent or whatever.

But they do it in these jumbo packages

just to increase your response rate.

So they're like, yeah, it costs more

but you're actually going to get more people

to read your thing.

And I thought this was like a brilliant,

simple like side hustle style business

that I think also will get to,

mid seven figures in revenue

and be a profitable bootstrap business

of just jumbo mail marketing.

There's this guy named Sam Evans

who we've talked about that like 10 years ago

he had this course called consulting.com

and he would teach you how to become a consultant

whether it's like how to do SEO for companies.

I don't know what services the consultant would do

but he would teach you how to start a consultancy business.

And he has one big thing that he,

I don't know if he says he invented it

but he goes, this is like my shtick

is I do this thing called lumpy mail

where I said just a normal envelope

but I put something lumpy in it.

Like I forget what he would put

but like a figurine or a pen.

I forget whatever it was

but it would make it feel like the envelope

had a little bit of weight to it.

And he goes, the reason I do that is

because when lumpy mail gets opened way more

and I can get your attention way more.

And so what these guys are doing,

these are called lumpy, they're calling it jumbo.

I thought that they like learned about it from him.

But, and he claims that it was amazing.

Well, the guy who's behind it,

one of the guys who's behind it is the same guy

that does, is the mobile home park guy on Twitter

who also does like nine other businesses

and is like complete.

He's like, if somebody downloaded the podcast

into their brain and then their brain said,

let's do all of them.

He's doing like nine ideas at once at all times.

He's kind of a madman, but this is one of his ideas.

And he did it because when he was trying to buy businesses,

like I think like the mobile home,

like buy these mobile parks, mobile home parks,

he needed to do mass outreach

and he wanted to increase his response rate of,

are they actually even seeing my offer

or that I want to buy their business

and how do I get them to reply?

And so I think this was part of the inspiration for that.

I think we should wrap up here.

But as before we do, I want to give you kudos.

So you said something last pod that was a very funny

that totally flew under the radar.

And if you made it this far, 60 minutes in,

I'm going to give you a piece of gold

that you can go this joke

that you're going to tell your friends.

We said something about like breaking up with someone.

Maybe it was like breaking up in the business relationship.

I don't remember, but I said something like,

it's not you, it's me.

And you said, yeah, it's not you,

it's me in that I think you're horrible.

And I've regurgitated that joke this weekend.

Killed it.

The read loved it.

I liked it so funny.

There was such a, you said that line

and it totally like went under the radar.

It's like, look, it's not you, it's me

and that I think you're the worst.

So that is like a free joke.

I have just given you something.

All right, there you go.

I've given you the listener something.

What do they give us when we give them something, right?

Nobody just takes, right?

You don't want to be a taker.

That would be.

Yes, that would go against our agreement

that we have with our listeners.

I've just given you something.

Shaw gave you something that I now gifted to you.

Now I want you to go to our YouTube page

and our, I always call it the iTunes page

and that just shows how old I am.

I don't know what the podcast app,

like the Apple podcast app.

Go to both of them and click subscribe

because if you've listened to this, we've given you that.

And by the way, drop comments on the YouTube.

That is now my favorite part of the podcast

because we did this for two years with no YouTube

and there's no feedback loop.

You don't get any comments on the podcast app.

But on YouTube, people leave comments

and now we get, I don't know,

I don't know how many it is,

like maybe 30, 40 comments per video.

I love, I read every single one of them every single time.

Like no joke, it's like my only way

to kind of like interact with people.

Dude, they're all saying you look rich now.

I do like that part of the comments.

I'm not gonna lie, that is a good feeling.

They're like, wow.

But it's also one of those like, what do you call it?

I had a before before and now I'm a before photo.

You had a way before picture, yes.

I used to be the way before and now I'm just a before

and I think people recognize that project.

I appreciate them for that.

You can see, you definitely have some set definition,

bicep, triceps, you get the seps.

The seps is over here.

But I'm gonna start commenting back to anybody

that says something interesting.

And to that spammer out there

that keeps trying to trick all of our people

into a WhatsApp group, I'm hunting you.

I'm coming for you,

because the YouTube algorithm can't get you,

I will get you, I will find you.

It's hard.

I have a unique set of skills that have prepared me

for this moment to find you on every single video

and remove your comments.

Yeah, 10 years of Googling has prepared you

to reverse image search and figure out

where they've made the mistake.

All right, we're out of here.

Bye, we'll see y'all soon.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it

like no days on for the road.

Let's travel never looking back.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.