My First Million: MFM Goes Viral on TikTok, Solana Billionaires, Right to Be Forgotten, and More

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.

It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There's so much talent being sucked into this thing.

These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases and actually it's actually

going to make it all work.

You can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this

and have nothing come from it.

All right.

We're live.

What's going on?

I'm self-conscious now because we're blown up on TikTok.

I just look at myself.

I'm like, I should have shaved and now that I have to see myself and I see people and

also the TikTok comments are brutal.

They're good, but they, you know, they're like, just want to argue with every point

that gets made.

So let's talk about this.

Now when I see myself, I'm like, shit, this is going on TikTok.

I better, I need to shave for the next one.

So basically 10 days ago or 15 days ago, something like that, like not long ago, we told everyone

that we're going to do this contest.

We're going to give $5,000 to like three people who take our clips and turn them into videos.

The best people are on TikTok.

So I actually posted the tags down there for you.

So I must have made a mistake.

I told people to say, to, to, to use the hashtag MFM clips, but then I also, I must have said

clip as well without the S. And so people are using two hashtag clips and clip MFN

clip and MFN clips and some aren't using both.

But if you use those links, I showed you, we have in the ballpark of around 15 ish

million impressions from these videos.

And it's mostly young folks who created these TikTok handles from scratch, took our, our

content and some videos have over a million.

Some of them have hundreds of thousands of likes.

They're great.

And do you read the comments?

No, what do they say?

Did they make any content creators?

You go through the cycle of why you get excited and you read the comment and the early comments

are good.

And then the more popular you get, the comments start to turn mean.

And then you just, you, everybody reaches a point where they, oh no, then the third

phase is you say you don't read the comments, but you secretly do.

And then finally, you know, whatever, these are the seven stages of grief or something,

social media grief.

You finally stopped reading the comments because you're like, this is just too toxic.

So yeah, they, they basically just shit on us for whatever we say.

Like if we say you put down 20% to buy a house, then all the comments are about ways that

you can all, all you can also not put down 20%.

If you do this, this is this.

It's like, all right.

Okay.

Tick.com enter.

You got me.

You are smarter than us.

You are going to constantly find some like edge case loophole or, you know, mistake in

what was said.

Do they make fun of how we look or talk or anything?

Like they insult us?

No, they don't really, they're either like, these guys are annoying.

Like they'll be like, let's say somebody cuts a clip of one of us breaking down, you know,

our monthly expenses or something like that.

And then the comment will just, but they don't know like the vibe of the pot.

They don't know why someone would just say that of the blue, right?

It's not something that people normally talk about.

So they're just like, why did he feel the need to tell us how much he's spending on

eggs?

Or like, why is he telling us his body fat percentage, whatever?

They're just like, there's that kind, which is, dude, what a douche.

Nobody asked, you know, why are you doing that?

Then there's the comments that are like, you know, actually, actually it's this other thing.

And then there's some comments which are like, bro, I don't want, I don't want that future.

There's no thanks, you know, because we'll be like, here's how things are changing.

Dude, companies just only think about money and like, you know, comments like that.

So those are the three flavors of hatred we get so far.

Luckily so far, nobody's just shitting on our like face and body.

Oh, that's good.

That's a surprise.

That's a win as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah.

And in general, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words about my appearance do

hurt me.

Yeah.

Just like, don't make fun of my teeth or like hair.

You can make fun of my brain.

Okay, this promotion has been a home run.

Like I thought it was going to be pretty good.

I didn't think it was going to be this good.

And so what we'll have to do is there's like a couple people who I'm recognizing because

I watch them that are killing it.

We're going to have to have them on the pod and explain how they got so many views.

It's pretty amazing.

Right.

And let's talk about this for a second because I think there's something interesting to learn

here.

So you have said many times, I've grown a lot of things.

I've grown an email newsletter to multi millions.

I've grown a subscription business to multi millions.

I've, you know, grown a whatever you're like a podcast is the hardest thing I've ever had

to grow.

And you say that.

I think it's just kind of a cool thing to say in general.

I agree with it in the sense of it.

There's no like easy growth hacks to growing a podcast.

There's no just like button you can push paid ads don't really work.

Nothing really works like that.

The good news is once somebody actually subscribed to your podcast, they become like a really

loyal fan and they like feel like they know you.

So it's got a lot of value, but it's hard to get that easy growth.

This is the first and we've tried a bunch of shit.

We've tried what we did nothing initially.

Then we tried placing it in our email newsletters.

We tried bringing on big named guests.

We tried paid ads.

We tried a bunch of different things, none of which really like kind of felt like it

was really working, but the podcast growing organically.

This is the first thing.

Oh, by the way, we also tried making our own clips, paying an agency tens of thousands

of dollars a month to be making really awesome animated and they were great content.

They were high quality clips, but it didn't lead to this.

This was different.

This was, Hey, anybody open playing field, just go for it and we'll give out prizes

to the people who are actually good at it, merit based, right?

And what they're good at is they understood Tik Tok, whereas like we suck at Tik Tok.

We don't know how to create content there.

They pull clip, they pull the right clips because they're actually listeners and fans

of the show.

So they know which clip is actually going to be interesting versus like, you know, some

random employee at our company being like, ah, you know, at the 42 minute mark, let's

use that one for the clip.

These guys will pull like 10 that they think are interesting and put them out there and

they're motivated because they're like, shit, if I do this good, I can get a million views

on this and I can go, you know, I can get five grand from these guys.

Like that's a pretty sweet deal for, for doing something, you know, pretty fun.

So this is actually worked.

Yeah, it's pretty wild.

And like some, there's one guy who basically took our Rob Deodeck episode and I looked at

his feed and he, I'm not exactly, I don't think I'm exaggerating.

It's 50 clips in a row of like, he basically just took it and just divided it up and like

three of the 50 did, was he just took our talking out and just, Rob talks, he grabs

a clip, which is smart.

Yeah.

And his whole feed, I looked at his feed, it was all that one episode and like three

of them had like 500,000 views.

Yeah.

So go, go follow them.

I think MFM cuts is one on, on Tik Tok and Twitter is MFM clips.

Now there's a bunch of other variations of that name.

All right.

I want to tell you about something interesting.

I got a few interesting things to talk to you about.

Okay.

So let me tell you about something that I was thinking about this weekend.

So I've got a buddy, you kind of know them and we, I'm not going to name them, but a

few years ago he did something, he was accused of doing a crime that was a horrible crime,

one of the worst crimes you could commit.

And he was the, he was an executive at a company and it made the news.

So six months later, after he went to court, he went to trial, the government dropped the

case because it was a horrible misunderstanding.

He didn't do what he was accused of doing and they exonerated him and they go, we're sorry,

we were wrong.

We, we, we called this one wrong.

And the first time the story went out, it made all the headlines.

And if you Google this person's name, it came up on top, but what didn't come up on top

was like six months later, it said charges dropped, the misunderstanding came about for

this reason.

This person lost their job because of that and lost obviously a lot of money.

And I was, I've always thought about this and I listened to a podcast this weekend and

it was called the right to be forgotten and it was by radio lab.

And so this, it's this idea of the right to be forgotten and it's in Europe.

It's actually a law.

I don't know exactly what the law says, but it says like, if something isn't particularly

newsworthy, but you're writing about it anyway, and it really hurts that person more than

that provides value to the comment or to like a reader, you have to take it down.

And there's a couple of newspapers like the Boston Globe as well as in this particular

podcast, they looked at this, this newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, and there are stories

of like a cop emailing them and he's like, look, you wrote about this time that I lied

about some paperwork and ended up getting fired.

I didn't hurt anyone and now I can't get a job and another as a police officer anywhere

else.

There's a lot of the gap on the right to be forgotten for you here.

Yeah.

So basically it's a law that says search engines should have to remove links about your past

if under certain circumstances and it came about because there was a woman, an actress

who was in a movie and then it got dubbed.

So there was a, the film was called the innocence of Muslims and then her, her original line

got dubbed over and then they made it so that it looked like she was saying, is your, is

your Muhammad a child molester, right? So that was the clip.

And she starts getting death threats and like people go crazy about this and she's like,

what is this?

Like why like, okay, this thing got dubbed.

Now this clip got onto into the search engine and it comes up if you search my name or certain

things and it's causing, you know, like harm to me and my personal life.

And so she sued Google in 2014 and ultimately they, they upheld it, which was she would

like to have it have the film forgotten and strip from YouTube. Unfortunately, the right

to be forgotten, which is recognized in the EU is not recognized in the US. And so it's

the EU does respect this as they're, they're tighter on privacy with GDPR and things like

that. And the US does not.

So yeah. And so in the US, we don't have that, but it's kind of interesting because I personally

have seen this hurt people, but you think like right now, like, let's say that you're

at a bar and you're drunk and you call someone like a really bad word and it's on Reddit

and they find your name, you're screwed. Like there's a point of like, your life is going

to be hurt meaningfully for like the next decade. And like, you should suffer some consequences

for someone's calling something, something rude, but not like that serious, you know.

And so I've been thinking a lot about this business, about this reputation management

business. Have you ever researched it?

Yeah, my former co-founder used to work there. So he used to tell me stories all the time.

Great. I want to hear all about it. And I know a little bit about this because listen

to this. So one of the companies is called reputation.com. So there's this porn star

named Sasha Gray. So do me a favor, type in Sasha Gray on your Google and click images.

This Sasha Gray doesn't, she's not an actress anymore, not a porn actress anymore, but she

was like a very prolific porn actress. When you clicked images, what do you see?

Here we go. I'm here. Okay. So I see a bunch of headshots of her. I see no real porn. Well,

I guess, I guess some scandalous stuff, but mostly porn. Yeah. Mostly just pictures of

her fully clothed or like in a bikini. So one time at the hustle, right when we first

launched, I helped write this article about Sasha Gray and she hired this firm called

reputation.com. And she basically wanted to retire from pornography and become like an

actor and whatever else, something different. And she hired reputation.com to hide or like

basically blog a bunch and write a bunch in order to get the porn images to go down. And

I remember when we wrote this article, reputation.com did something kind of funny. And if I would

go on my Google analytics at night, I would look at real time and there would be thousands

of people reading this article and I saw that they searched Sasha Gray. And so reputation.com

manipulated it. So the article that we wrote about reputation.com and Sasha Gray came up

number one, if you Googled Sasha Gray and at night when people are going to look at

porn, they Googled Sasha Gray and they landed on our article. It was pretty wild. I would

see it at night every week or every night it would go up. And so I got crazy fascinated

about reputation.com. And so for this segment, I wanted to talk about reputation.com. I think

there's Yext and their sprinkler. And these are businesses that do like four or $500 million

a year. And all they do is reputation management. What do you know about reputation.com?

So he used to tell me stories like, you know, I asked him, I was like, Oh, would you do,

you know, before this? What was your job before that? And eventually he said reputation.com

and I got fascinated like you. I was like, what is that? So he told me he's like, you

know, here's the scenario. You're a senator and your son who has the same, you know, John

Chambers Jr. Sorry, sorry to any John Chambers out there. It's a hypothetical. So your son

who has the same name as you basically gets a DUI or gets arrested for battery or something

like that. So now anytime somebody searches John Chambers, this mugshot is going to come

up or this bad news story is going to come up. And basically they go to reputation.com

and they say, I would like this to disappear off the front page. I would like this to disappear.

A reputation.com says I can't make it disappear. The internet sort of is uncontrollable, but

I can get you off the front page of Google. And they're like, that would be amazing. And

they say for the low, low price of $120,000, $75,000, whatever it is.

Expensive.

Expensive. Because they know people are, by the time you're at reputation.com, you're

bent over the barrel. They can charge pretty much whatever they can get away with. So like,

you know, a NASCAR driver, a politician, whoever, people of interest, people who wanted their

names or their kids' names to get out of the bad news. And so they had a team of engineers

that were just, it's a constant cat and mouse game to figure out how to beat Google. So like,

keep my mic, go about it. He's like, one of the biggest days at the company was when we

figured out, you know, Google has the autocomplete, right? So you go, you type, Sampar, it's going

to be Sampar the hustle, Sampar net worth, Sampar wife, Sampar is gay. It'll be like

all these, like the same 10 queries for everybody, right? And what he figured out was that when

you type, you know, Sampar, if it used to say felony, like F would now say friend instead

of felony, like it would, they would figure out how to even finish the autocomplete, because

even when they were good at getting you off the front page by blogging, by promoting other

articles, whatever, getting them higher ranked, if the autocomplete was still always suggesting

felony, then people would click it and they would search for felony, it would be reinforcing

then Google would search for it more. So they needed to clear that. So there was just constant

cat and mouse game to understand how is Google doing, how is Google deciding what goes where

and then how do we content farm or manipulate this in some way that will change what the

first page results are because 98% of people don't go past the first page or something

like that.

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Yeah, and so it's amazing to hear about that. And then there's a company called Yext, Y-E-X-T.

They're publicly traded. And they do, I think that they are just a direct competitor, Reputation.com.

They're publicly traded. They did $390 million, I think, last year in revenue. Their market

cap is not very good. It's like four or five times revenue. Are you looking at it?

I'm on Reputation.com. I just wanted to see the latest. Like, you wouldn't even know when

you go to this, what they do, because it says, this is their headline. First, it looks like

a hospital website, like a nice health tech website or something like that. Then it says,

a world of interactions demands a platform of action. It's like, we're a fixer is what

it should say.

So, but here's the problem.

By the way, maybe they change what they do. I don't know.

I think they still do it. I think they offer like a smaller package. Like when we wrote

the Sasha Gray articles, that was in 2016. They have like a $13,000 package. But the

problem is there's, there's kind of two problems with us. The first is that the results aren't

guaranteed. Like you can't guarantee that it's going to work, which is, I guess it's

not a problem, but that's just how it works. You know, when someone calls you, I get these

calls all the time because I own domain names and I forgot to hide my name. It's like, Hey,

we'll put you on the first page of Google. Yeah, it's a scam. You can't just promise

that.

But the second thing is that if you're an individual, if you're just someone who like

said some stupid drunken thing to someone one day and now your name's all over the place,

you, you, it's really, really hard to, to like, unless you're willing to pay $100,000,

which is what a lot of this stuff costs. It's incredibly challenged to manage your reputation

if you're just like a person. And so I was thinking about like, is there anything interesting

in that space? I actually think that there could be something. I like this company called

do not pay. You know what do not pay is? Yeah, I love do not pay. The guy is the guy behind

it's awesome. And it's a great idea.

So do not pay. It started by this guy and I actually didn't research this. I'm just

all the top of my head. It started by this guy named Josh Browder, I think powder. And

he's young. Like when he started it, I think it was 21. Oh, 25. Okay. Well, no, no. Now

I think he's like 25. When he was started, he was even younger. Yeah, he was obviously

and he was like, like it was like a prodigy type of thing. And originally, the business

existed to help you fight parking tickets automatically. But now they have a bunch of

features like it's basically all basically all sticking it to the man. So another feature

is like, we will sue cold collars on your behalf or something like that, right? They'll

also do like, you know, we will unsubscribe you from stuff that you're not using that

you pay for, you know, just ways to save ways that you do not pay, which is why it's a great

aim and a great idea. And I think there's a world where like a do not you could use

a do not pay service like this to help manage your reputation online. And this is a need

that I think we're actually going to see more and more and more of it. It's like a very

like exponential thing where it's like more and more people are going to be written about

and more and more people are going to need this. And I don't know. It's just something

I've been thinking about. Do you have any? I don't know where the new opportunity is

in this one, because I think it really depends on it's kind of like you need Google to exist

for reputation.com to exist. And so really it's about thinking, okay, there was a version

of this on social networks that people were doing. Like I remember this one guy came to

me and he was a great entrepreneur. He ended up not doing this idea, but like I always

thought it was a great idea. Others have done it, which is when you everybody has social

media where they post stupid stuff when you're younger or when you're just drunk or whatever.

And so what they do is they go to companies and they say, hey, we ran a check on all your

employees and we found these red flags. And you should be aware of who you're hiring as

well as what they're saying and representing your company, how they represent your company

elsewhere. So they end up getting contracts with companies to monitor and clean up. And

they're not like tattletailing. They're sort of like an insider helping you out saying,

hey, you have this employee who's saying this, you may want to take action, but the action

might just be letting the employee know that we flagged this as potentially controversial

and maybe they want to delete it. And so it's a monitoring service for social media

reputations and social media controversy, which I think is a great, great idea.

It just sucks that you got to do that. Well, it sucks that the world is the way it is. Well,

some people think it's good to hold you accountable, but in reality, it's just a bunch of like,

you know, don't say, don't say what you really feel is really the result of most of this because

people just get afraid to say anything because they're worried about getting canceled.

So in your buddy liked working at reputation.com, were they like, they were by the book?

He was like, technically, it was super interesting to figure out how we do all this stuff.

You know, he's like, he always says this thing like, at one point we had indexed every person

on the web and we had them and their cluster and their reputation. And so, you know, I think it

was technically very interesting, but obviously like sort of soul sucking and boring as well. So

he, you know, bounced. Yeah, I think I can see that, but it is an interesting problem I've been

thinking about. All right, let me tell you about one more thing. All right. So I was reading the

information, the information.com and they had an article about Solano. So I told you about this

on Slack. So there's this Solana. Sorry. I don't know anything about it really other than don't

out yourself here as a crypto nobody. Yeah, I don't want to act like I'm an expert here. I'm not.

I just, I read a lot about it though, but news articles. So Chris McCann, I knew this guy named

Chris McCann because he had this thing called startup digest. And that's one of the reasons why

HustleCon became popular is because I would email Chris and I would say, Hey, can you please put

this in the email? And he had this email called startup digest. It started in San Francisco

and he would email, email each week different events happening in San Francisco, different

startup events. This was when the startup community was much smaller and everyone wanted to go to

events and it was just here's a roundup of cool events happening. He eventually expanded it to

different cities. He sold it not for a lot of money, probably a hundred, probably six figures,

I bet. But he kind of worked his way into Benchmark where he like was just an employee there.

And somehow or another invested $250,000 into what's it called? Is it Solano or Solana?

Solana. I'm a fucking new. He invested $250,000 into Solana. And the information wrote an

article about how that $250 turned into a billion dollars. Is that crazy? And probably I think three,

three years, maybe four years max. Yeah, it's insane. I sent you, I sent you somebody else who

also has made multiple billions of dollars from their Solana investment. I sent that last week

to you. But, but basically Solana has gone like the fund. Yeah. So Solana has gone from, let's see,

I mean, it was like sub a dollar not long ago. And now it's $200 per coin. And it's basically,

it's what is Solana? Solana is a competitor to Ethereum. If you know what Ethereum is,

if you don't know what Ethereum is, just fast forward this segment, you probably don't care.

So Solana is like a competitor to Ethereum. And as recently as, okay, so this time last year,

Solana was $1.54. And when it launched, when it did its ICO, it was just under a dollar,

I think it was. And so, and that was only, that was, you know, a couple of years ago,

two years ago or something like that. So basically, even to just take last year, $1.54,

you put $100,000 into that. And now you have, I think $20 million or something like that.

I'm actually going to do some public math here for everybody. Yeah, $20 million. So

Solana has had this insane run up. And it sounds like he, I think through, he's in this fund called

red something, red circle or something like that. A race, yeah, race something.

They were like the seed investors in Solana. And, you know, that's the right project to

be a seed investor in is a crypto project that becomes a, you know, multi-billion-dollar crypto

asset. And sure enough, you could turn 250K into a billion dollars. That's kind of insane.

I don't think it was his personal 250K necessarily, but even if it was the fund.

The article made it sound like it was, but even if it's not, that doesn't change much.

The insanity. Yeah, it doesn't change much because he still is going to walk away with

nine, over a hundred million, some figure like there. But this article, I was reading about it,

and they're basically like saying there's like a lot of really high profile tech folks at traditional

tech companies giving up amazing things in order to like flee to this crypto thing. And I'll get,

and I want to ask you a question about that. But example, like this woman, Sandy Carter, VP of

Amazon's cloud computing, she left to join unstoppable domains. Brian Roberts, who was

the CFO of Lyft, he left to join OpenSea. And he said, I've seen enough cycles and paradigm chips to

be cognizant when something this big is just emerging and that we're only at the beginning

and it's just going to get bigger. We had David Marcus. He basically led Facebook's cryptocurrency

thing. He bounced to start his own thing. This one dude left Google in order to become Coinbase's

cheap product officer. And when it went public, his stake was worth $600 million. And then of course,

Jack Dorsey bounced from Twitter in order to work at Square. And it's like definitely involves crypto.

They renamed it Block because they're focusing on blockchain. But it's crazy. And my question to you

is this, have you ever seen someone create that much wealth that fast? And do you have any stories

of people who you know or know of that are doing this and like what their stories are? Because

this is crazy. Well, I'll say the first thing is that you're right that there's basically a giant

black hole that's sucking up all the talent in the world. And it's called crypto. And it's almost

a self. There's a lot of people who don't believe that crypto is a thing or they think it's massively

overhyped. And they say, you know, give me one example of a real use case of this thing. Nobody's

actually using it for payments or Web three. There's no real Web three products. And it's sort

of there. There's some truth to what they're saying. I wouldn't say that they're completely

off base. It's like a valid critique. I don't think it's true, but it's a valid criticism.

But the it's almost a self fulfilling prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this

thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases. And actually,

it's actually going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent spend all day thinking

about this and building in this and have nothing come from it. That's like the biggest like takeaway

for me of like, even if you're the biggest crypto skeptic, there's a self fulfilling

prophecy here, which is that it sucked up all the dev talent sucked up all the smartest people

sucked. It sucked up like $20 billion of venture capital every year now. And all that funding,

all that talent is going to is going to create things that actually do work and do hit beyond

what's already there today. So there's that now to your question. Have I seen somebody get rich

this quick? I want to have my buddy on. I have a friend who used to work work with me and I caught

up with them and his story. He basically went from like average like an average job. You wouldn't

look at this person say, oh, that's a star career. And they're good. They were doing well,

obviously, but they were doing like normal person. Well, and they went from normal person. Well,

to making like to personally making like $15 million in the last year, just by they basically

quit their job and they went down a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in DeFi. And

they started playing with all the DeFi projects, investing their money in DeFi. And they didn't

have a huge base of capital. They had, you know, call it half a million dollars that they put in.

And to turn half a million dollars. And if you have no path in your career to being like,

you know, a deck of millionaire, right? Like if you don't have a path where you're like,

yeah, I'm going to have fucking money to go from no path, no, no like reasonable

storyline that makes sense there. You have a job at a company that pays you good salary. And that's

that to that is amazing to me and awesome. And like, you know, just like blew my mind more so

than these guys who become multi billionaires who were like prodigies and like invented the protocol

or invested 250k in a random token. It's like, this is somebody who just took their own money out

of the stock market and was like, ah, instead of investing in Apple, Google and Facebook,

I'm going to invest in crypto and turned a normal amount, a normal like life savings amount of money

into a life changing amount of money. And I want to have him on to tell his full story because

it actually has like a bunch of twists and turns that are like kind of amazing. So I'm going to

ask him if he'll come on and share it. I don't know if he's willing to. Yeah, you know them.

I don't know if they're willing to share, but if they are, it's going to make for an amazing episode.

I'll ask him if he'll do it next week. Do they have USD or like some type of stable?

No, they're they're still in crypto like 100 or 100 plus percent because they, you know,

but is it stable like a big like a popular thing? It's a mix of popular things and like

something they could sell at least stuff. Yeah, they could. Everything's liquid. If they wanted

to cash out and say, I'm done, I'm going to Malibu and I'm going to chill. I'm going to pretend that

this year never existed. And I basically want a lottery. They could do that because we have a buddy

in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin. But he's like, I can't sell

it. So it's like that's different. That's like those are like either illiquid, like, oh, there's

this coin, but it's not listed yet. Or it's liquid, but there's like no trading volume whatsoever on

this coin. And so like, yeah, if you have $10 million and you go to sell even a hundred thousand,

it will crash the price of the coin. That's not what this is. That's that's a different thing.

What that is is I make a million coins. I keep 999,000 for myself. And then I sell one of them for

a dollar. And now the total value of my thing is a million dollars. And it's like, no, it's not really.

You there's such a such a small amount of the supply out there being sold. It's not indicative

of the true price. This is what I'm talking about is not that situation. Is there any other person?

All right. So you have a story of someone who did 500,000 to 15 million. I just told you about

this guy who in like two or three years, this person, non technical, never was a trader or

a financial person like they would own like a index fund or mutual fund before that didn't

know how to spell blockchain. You know, like this person is that's why this blows my mind.

It's not just this. I know that amount is not the craziest amount of money. It's an awesome

amount of money for anybody. But what's crazy is the point A to point B. It makes no sense. It's

like, how could those two points connect in that amount of time? It's mind blowing to me.

So I told you a story about this dude, Chris, who did 250,000 up to a billion.

You just said 500,000 to 15 million. Do we know anyone else that has this like crazy, crazy journey?

Personally, you've talked about this guy. You talked about somebody, right? That your friend?

Yeah, the friend that they paid one million to a hundred million. Yeah. So at a peak when

Bitcoin was 60,000. So whatever it's at, discount it. Okay. I have another one. There is a kid

who I call him a kid because he was actually a kid. He I built this a product called Blab back

in the day is like kind of like clubhouse. He you could basically go hang out and chat with people.

And this kid used to come home every day from school. He used to get on and chat and he didn't

chat in the other rooms that had 13 year olds. He came to our rooms because he loved technology

startups. He wanted to be in the startup scene. And I think he was maybe 13 at the time. Okay.

So fast forward. It's been like six years since then. So now he's like, let's say 21 or something

like that. It's been a while. He created some, but he was a technical guy. He created a protocol.

Like I was like, Oh, what's your been up to? Like, how's your startup going? And he's like,

Oh, it's the startups. Okay. We haven't been focusing on it for the last few months. I was

like, Oh, I know, man, it's tough. You just hang in there, buddy. You know, just pivot. He's like,

actually, like we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random like side

chains. And it was like a blah, blah, blah, some bunch of terms I don't even understand.

You know, it's a it's a derivatives perpetual contract for adding liquidity to this blah,

blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I don't even understand what you're saying. And he's like, yeah, the

market cap of it, like, you know, basically like the market cap of it is like 900 million right

now. And you know, I think he cashed out $10 million in this. He's like, he's like, dude,

it's been insane. The market cap went up like crazy. Now it's at 200 million. And he's like,

I was able to like take out like a life changing amount of money. I took out 10 million. He was,

he was like, he was asking me because he goes, I heard you guys talking about charities and

charity water. You told the charity water stores really moved. Like I've set aside seven figures

to donate. You're like, what? I was like, you've set aside seven figures. Like, are you seven years

old? What? How did this happen? Where? What has happened to this amount of time? Like I used to

talk to you when you would come home from eighth grade and get online. Like you're donating millions

of dollars to charity now. Like what is again, A and B, it broke my brain. And I don't mean this

as an insult to them. If they were, if they were only 15 then, so they're still only like 19.

I think they're 20 now or 21, something like that. It's been like seven years since we made

that thing. So you know, it's not, it's not mind blowing to me that this person is successful

in both cases. I really like this person. That's why I used to hang out with them. That's why I

used to work with one of them. I think they're really smart and we're going to be normal person

successful. It's like when, you know, I went like, my sister went to high school with this girl,

Lilly Galichi, who's like this super famous Instagram star now. She's like, has her own TV

show on Bravo. And it's like, wait, that's the Lilly girl who used to come to our house after

school. Like she was just like a normal girl. Like wait, that's her. Like that doesn't even look

like her anymore. Yeah, she's had some work done. Right. It's like just mind blowing to know a

normal person who's like, yeah, that's a cool normal. They'll do well in life to be like, no,

actually they're like one of those crazy outlier stories. And in a way that you wouldn't have

otherwise predicted, you know, it didn't make any sense. Like, you know, it's not, it's not that

that was their skill set and they tried, tried, tried that thing for 10 years and finally hit.

It's like, just out of nowhere, they just did this thing and it hit and crypto is this amazing

thing like that. And by the way, I want to say something. When I first talked to my friend,

I caught up with my friend. I felt insanely jealous. I was like so, I was happy for him and

I like him and all that, but I was also like, I was like, in my head, I was just like, what the

fuck have I been doing with my life? The friend that used to work for you? Both of them. But the

same reaction. Yeah, because it feels weird because you're like, oh, wait, you kind of looked up to

me and I was the master. But now, now I'm like, you know, way less successful than you. So like,

what just happened? You just like catapulted really crazy. We're like between the last time

we caught up and now there is jealousy there. It's easy. And I just want to say like, you know,

interesting thing to observe is what is your reaction to hearing stories like this?

There's a part of me that I'm not proud of, which gets jealous of it. But that used to be,

I would feel that I wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what I was feeling. And I would kind

of find reasons why it was like, ah, that's just luck or, you know, well, they probably are taking

a bunch of risk and they might lose it all. And I'm kind of secretly rooting for it to not not

all work out just so perfectly as it has. That's gone. But I still got a little bit of that jealousy

pang left. And I'd say the interesting thing is my coach said to me, he goes, you know,

you'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure.

And they're not focused on your success. They're focused on their failure. Your success has

reminded them of their failure or your abundance has reminded them of their lack. And if you notice

that in yourself, you want to be aware of that and change that. And if you find other people and

you're like, ah, these people are haters, like, you know, just understand what's coming on. They

don't actually hate you. Your success has reminded them of some failing that they have in themselves.

And that's where their attention has gone. And so, yeah, I wanted to share that because I definitely

felt this like crazy feeling that I hadn't felt in a long time, but these stories were so mind

blowing that I could I was like, wow, this, I don't even know what to say. I feel lucky to

know who I know, which we have the same group basically that I've like these stories that

sound unbelievably true. I'm like, yeah, I know that person. I saw it. It was wild. So like an

example is Moise Ali selling native deodorant for a hundred million dollars, two years after

starting it. I was in, we shared an office when he was starting it. And I saw him try to learn

Facebook ads. Like I saw the thing come to fruition. I saw it right in front of my eyes every

single day for like six or 10 months. And that was almost half the journey. It's actually pretty

amazing, you know, and I think about like, this isn't like a one to one correlation because there's

other components here. But like, I was thinking about this. I'm like, Jamaica is a very small

country. There's not a lot of people there, but they just dominate the hundred meter dash. And

obviously there's some genetic, there's a lot of genetic factors going there, but it can't be

significantly different than America. And I was thinking like, man, one of the reasons being is

they just are just surrounded by like, it's just normal to be great at something and that then

and that makes it normal to work hard. And you're like, well, I should be running these times in

practice and you don't like freak out. You just get it done because that's what's expected. And I

kind of feel that way in terms of making money because of our friends are who they are. It's

like, well, you just want to spend something up. And if, yeah, if you're willing to dedicate three

years, like you definitely can add eight figures of net worth to your like it for sure, like it's

easy. It's not easy, but it's simple. And it's kind of cool to like be around people where you

start seeing like, yeah, look, it's really simple. You just do this, this, this, of course, you got

to dedicate every right, you have to dedicate tens of hours, you know, 50, 60 hours a week for

like many years. But yeah, it's very simple. It's straightforward. Well, the first example you gave

with Moise was starting it literally at the table. I think he sat at the table next to you, right?

Like in the, in Founders Dojo or whatever those hacker dojo, Founders Dojo. Founders Dojo. Like,

I think he was interested at first, if I remember correctly, he was like, what should I sell? Should

I do mattresses? And he was like ordering mattresses and like measuring them and like singing like,

oh, that's too much work. Mattresses are too big. What else is there? By the way, the public story

is like, my sister was pregnant and she couldn't find a deodorant that had, didn't have chemicals,

which might harm her baby. So I wanted to create that product. And it's like, dude, I know you,

you were like, all right, how do I build it? I want to make a business. I want to sell some

shit. What do people want? Oh, people like Kleenex's mattresses are too big to ship. Okay.

Yeah. Scratch that off the list deodorant small under one pound ships easily. People use it every

month. It's a renewable and there's a niche and there is a genuine problem for it. But like,

I know you do. There's a, there's a real story and then there's the narrative.

And like, I like stories, not narratives. It's not bad. He was just like seeking problems to

solve. He's like, boom, found it. And I respect that. I like that. And that's how I think. So,

you know, it's normal to me. There's something too, when you see it being built day by day,

brick by brick, you're like, there's just a respect and for me, like total joy. I never

feel the jealousy in that case. Like for example, I remember when you started the hustle, I remember

when you were doing just the event and then you were like, I'm going to do this thing. And then

I came to your office with you and John. And it was like, like, it was like, we went into a room

that was like a conference room that was like the size of a bathroom. And like, you had a presentation

and like, I listened to it and I was like, okay, this is cool. But like, what about this,

this and this? And you guys were like, I don't know, we'll figure it out. And then you like,

you started with these like long form, your original thing was long form stories. And then

you're like, kind of was working, but not really. You're like, I'm thinking about switching to this

like newsletter thing, just daily news, skim is doing it's working. These guys are doing it.

I think we could do it in our nation. I think it'll be even better. And so seeing that then

it's like, cool, seven years later, Sam, whatever, I don't know how long it's been seven years. Was

it seven? We sold it about five. Okay, five years in Sam sells the thing and is successful.

Nothing but props, respect and joy of like, wow, that was so cool. I got to sit there on the journey

with you. There's a difference of that watching somebody build it brick by brick. And a difference

of actually this happened in 12 months. You didn't get to see the hard work that was obviously going

in and the risks that were being taken. So you'd, all you hear is like, I tried this thing and it

just hit a hundred X, 200 X, like what? You know, it's, it feels more like a lot of reading. It

feels less like the hard work thing. I think that happens a lot in crypto. There's a little

difference there. The second part is I remember when I moved, so I moved from Australia to Silicon

Valley without having a game plan. I think you were kind of the same way. Didn't you just like

come to Silicon Valley? Like just showed up. I did the same thing. I was sitting in Australia. I

remember specifically I went to a meetup and they asked me to speak about the, about lean startups,

about startups. And I went and I spoke and everybody at the end was like, yay, you know, great talk.

People afterwards were like, wow, that was really great talk. And in my head, my buddy was like,

what's wrong? Cause he could see I was just like kind of upset. He's like, what's wrong? He didn't

like it. And I was like, I was like, I don't know anything about startups. And I'm like the thought

leader here. This is like, I'm doing something wrong. Like this is like, I feel like not imposter

syndrome. I feel like idiot syndrome. It's a blind leading the blind. It's like, these guys know

zero about startups. I know point one about startups. But if I'm the smart guy here, then that, where

are the actual smart guys? They're not here. And I asked, I was like, yo, what are the success stories

in Brisbane about like startups? You guys are not in the start scene. They're like, yeah, these guys

did great. Oh, where are they? They don't come to these events. No, they moved to San Francisco.

These guys moved. These guys moved. And I was like, oh, all the smart people move. Okay. Maybe I

should move. So I changed my phone number first, just to mentally be like, all right, I have a

Silicon Valley area code. I don't know why for me, that was just like, I think I could just do it

like over like, I did it in one night before I could move. It was like faster than moving was

just to change my phone numbers, make a statement. And then I remember being like, all right, I'm

going to move there. I'll figure it out. And I quit my job, you know, on the spot. And I was like,

I'm just going to move there. I played poker for three months to hold myself over while I applied

for a job, literally one job. And they didn't hire me. They were like, kept stringing me along.

And I was like, this was the one I ended up working at monkey fur. No, there was like a slow

process, two month process. So finally, I was just like, all right, fucking, I'm just going to move

there. And if this doesn't work, I think I'll get this job. But if it doesn't work, I'll get some,

I'll do something else. What was the title? Just product manager. Like I was the first PM there.

So I, I finally came. And when I came there, like, all right, why'd you move? Like, why'd you,

why'd you come here? And I was like, well, you know, I wanted to see what's in the water here,

right? Like, if this is where all the smart people are, this is what the little startups are,

like, what do you guys know that I don't know? And I was thinking it's about tactics.

It's about operations. Maybe people are just like, literally, this is the cream of the crop.

These are just the smartest people. And there's certainly some of that. But I'll tell you what

to me was the actual, this was the actual difference, the thing that made coming to Silicon Valley

work. I went to this coffee shop. You remember the Creamery or the second? It's like this,

like, yeah, that's where everyone would hang out. It was at a second in Brandon, I think.

Yeah, exactly. So this place called the Creamery, it's kind of famous for where people take meetings.

And I went there. And I just sat there for like half a day. I was just eating. I didn't, I didn't

have anywhere to go. I didn't have an office. I didn't have an apartment. So I was like, well,

we'll sit here and then I'll go search for apartments later. And I remember just seeing

table after table next to me, somebody would come in and they'd be like, just pitching their idea

to either an investor or a buddy, like trying to make a co-founder, like a co-founder or two

friends catching up or an investment pitch. And it was always like these like harebrained ideas.

It's like, oh, you know, LinkedIn, but for, you know, cat doctors or whatever, this is these stupid

ideas. And I remember just sitting there thinking, oh, that's a stupid idea. That's a stupid idea.

And then I was sort of realizing like, oh, that's actually kind of cool. Like the normal

conversation here, the coffee shop conversation here is I get the, I got this idea. I'm going to

change the world. I got this idea. It's going to be huge. And I was like, everybody kind of

has bought into this. And like, if you go to Hollywood, that's what happens. Like the waiters

and waitresses, I'm going to be a star. And in New York is a different thing. And it's,

it's Silicon Valley. It's basically, I get those, I got this idea. It's going to be big.

And that's normal. Whereas before everywhere I lived, if you were the guy who's got an idea

and you're going to quit your job to go do it, you're crazy. You're the crazy guy here. You're

the normal guy here. If in Silicon Valley, if you're like, I work at JP Morgan, you basically

have to like bow your head in shame. You have to like come up with some excuse. It's like,

you know, because my wife is pregnant with twins and I've really got to pay the mortgage.

But as soon as that's over, you know, like, I'm back in the game. I'm going to go back

into the startup game. Like if you're, if you work for McKinsey anywhere else, that's great.

If you work for, you know, McKinsey or Deloitte in San Francisco, you're like the low class

person. You're not the high class person because the high class person is the founder with the idea

or the angel investors betting on ideas. So the, just that culture where that's normal and possible

to just constantly quit your job, have an idea, throw everything into it, maybe get rich. That's

what makes Silicon Valley so awesome. Or at least that's what it did. And what you're talking about

where like if your friends group has these types of success stories and is doing this type of shit,

it, your brain will just automatically change into thinking that's possible. That's normal.

That's super doable for me too. And that you can't underestimate that. I think for some people,

that's what this show is. It's like, if you hear us three times a week, at least that's like part

of your friend group that talks that way, thinks that way and will make it feel normal to have ideas,

to bet on ideas, to make a bunch of money, to make huge investments. Whereas in your,

your geography may not be, people around you and your neighbors and stuff like that may not

think that way. Yeah. And it basically changed my perspective. Like this only happens to other

people too. Obviously this is, obviously I'm going to, it's about our time. Yeah. I'm going to

achieve the desired outcome. It's just a, like for on which swing am I going to get my hit and

B, which thing do I want to dedicate five or 10 years on? Right. Because if you like work eight

years on something and you're around the right people and you've been like going like, I felt

like living there as like, I was in school. So it's like, well, I'm in school. I know, like,

I know it when I see it and I can just keep working on something. And then I'll see right

away that it's working. And then I just spend time on it and just give it time and it works. It

will always work. That's kind of like the attitude. I think I've told the story. I've told like,

why I did the e-commerce thing and why I think it worked. So I was sitting with our mutual friend.

I think I can say his name. Maybe we'll bleed this out later, but I was sitting with him

and his backyard. He had this, you know, he has that awesome. And when he lived in California,

he had this awesome backyard with the basketball court and like a pudding green and pool and

chickens, stuff like that. And we were just chilling for the day and his dog was running around.

And we were talking and while we were talking, the Shopify Ching kept going off on his phone.

And he would have that thing all the time. I used to yell at him, I go, turn that shit off.

Yeah. So it was like, Ching. And then like two minutes later to be like, Ching. And then I was

like, I was like, what is that? He's like, Oh, my bad. My like, I, sorry. I totally spaced. I

didn't even realize that I didn't like, I'm so like, I'm so numb. I didn't even realize that was

happening. Like that's obnoxious. My bad. I go, no, no, no, leave that on. What is that? He goes,

that's the Shopify. Like every time we get a sale, it does that. I said, I leave that on

because you share. I was like, yeah, leave it on. So it went on the whole time. It goes off the whole

time. By the end of the, and we were talking about some other shit completely. We're talking about

dogs and family and kids and like whatever. By the end of the hour, I was like, all right, man,

I got to get, you know, whatever I got to go, but I'm definitely starting at a Shopify thing.

I want my phone to do that. He's like, he's like, yeah, you totally should. I was like,

just literally that experience. If I did not have that, and the jealousy worked to my favor,

right? The jealousy was a signal of if I want that more than what I have, maybe I need to make a

change, right? Cause I was like, I'm going to go back to the office where I earn a fixed salary.

It's a great, I was making great money, but like it is capped. I will make the same amount,

whether I do a good job or a bad job. Whereas for him, it was like, he got to chill. It was

making money passively. And if he did a better job, he was going to make more money. So that was

the first thing. It made me maybe decide I'm going to do this. And then I started like Mois. I was

like, what can I sell? What can I sell? All right. All right. What can I sell? Okay. What were the

other options? Of other ideas I had to sell. Yeah. I remember going through candles. Candles

are kind of an amazing business, but very competitive. Candles are the same thing as

deodorant. You use them and they burn out. They literally melt away and you have to buy another

one. It's so expensive. I just bought a hundred dollar can't candle. Yeah. They're high of either

super high margin. So they're not expensive to make. They're just really, you could charge a

lot for them. You can have a whole bunch of skews very easily that are all the same. They're all

just different cents. There are the high end, middle end, low end. There's candles that are like,

you know, oh, this smells like your hometown of Missouri. There's like a bunch of gimmicks you

can do this, whatever. So candles was definitely one of those on my mind. I told you about the

crystal story. I was basically like, because I asked my buddy, so I asked that friend and I asked

others said, how do you think about this? Hey, they gave me some frameworks of how to think about

it, right? Like, look, you're going to, the reason this whole thing works is Facebook ads.

So that means you're going to acquire customers. So something like this dollar amount, all right.

So you need to, how much was that dollar amount? So like 20 bucks at the time, it was like 20,

25 bucks, something like that. But now it'd be higher. Now it's higher. Now it's like 40,

45 bucks, something like that. But it's like, all right, let's just say in a best case scenario,

you're going to break even on the first purchase. So you want a product that's going to have 65 to

70% gross margins. So that means the actual, let's say, I don't forget public math, but like,

let's just round numbers here. A candle, let's say the cost of goods is $5. You want to make sure

that you could sell that thing for $30 or whatever to have that type of gross margin.

And then you're going to have, you know, let's call it 15%, 20% is your cost of fulfillment.

So that's like packaging it, you know, picking it in your warehouse and then shipping it to the

customer and customer. And okay, cool. So then you take all that out. So basically you end up with

a break even. And the question is, if you can break even on the first purchase, meaning it costs

you $25, let's say in Facebook to get a customer, then you want that to be your net profit on a

single order. Then you're basically, that's like the, that's like a great position to be in because

you're breaking even on day one. And then every purchase, you build up a customer base by recycling

that cash flow. And this, you know, every month, you're not going, you're not going deeper and

deeper in debt. And then as you build your customer base, when they come back and repeat

purchase and you want that repeat purchase rate to be high. So like, you know, one of our friends

has a thing that doesn't have high peer repurchase rate. The other one has like deodorant has amazing

repeat purchase rate. So if they repeat purchase, that means your lifetime value will be higher

for your customer and all that extra, every next purchase will be much more profitable.

And the business would be more valuable. And then the little things like, hey,

the way that the shipping works in the country is like, you know, things that are under one pound,

they ship at this low rate. Once it's over a pound, shipping is like much more expensive.

Like there's like a normal USPS, USPS, like whatever, priority mail that if it's under a pound,

it's like whatever, five bucks or four bucks or whatever. So there's like certain little things

that help. And so like, if you've talked to Moise, Moise used to like change his packaging

so that he would be at 0.99 pounds, right? Like he was like, I want to be just under one pound.

And that was like his, his like key, one of the key things that helped control cost.

So anyways, there's a whole bunch of frameworks. I went through a bunch of product ideas to

figure it out. And the other ones, you're going to like, you know, the easiest thing to sell on

Facebook is stuff that appeals to like white woman in middle America. So like, how do you sell to a

35 to 65 year old woman that lives in Texas? And like that's the, that's the persona that's

like the most easy to fish for on Facebook. You can obviously sell anything to anybody. Facebook's

huge. But like, if you can get one for white women in middle America, like your gold, that's

the majority of your customers are. Yeah, ours are a little younger than that. But like, yeah,

that's like the thing white ladies, why women in middle America is like a great market to sell to

and most of Silicon Valley makes a mistake. They go for what is LA, New York and San Francisco

millennials, single millennials like me. And that's such a expensive customer. It's an expensive

customer. Their their lifestyle changes very quickly. And they don't need your shit anymore.

And it's just like Uber and Lyft and shit. Like the ad spend is just too hard.

Everything is very competitive. It's just like, I guess the way to think about it is not that

necessary that one is that much better than the other. I wouldn't actually say that. It's just

more like, don't narrow your scope to Euro single lifestyle as like a 25 year old dude in San Francisco

who like orders, you know, every meal on Postmates. It's like, you're not representative of the world.

So, you know, like, don't limit yourself to just that. Because like, you know, it might be

truckers in middle America that love, you know, that by XYZ or whatever, there might be just like

a different market that that's really lucrative that you're not really paying attention to right

now. So pay attention to other groups. So anyways, the second thing that happened was I asked them,

I asked, so we had two buddies that were doing the same thing. Two was enough where I was like,

oh, if he can do it, he can do that. I could do it. No problem. And so I was like, I asked them,

I was like, what are your sales? And then, you know, it shocked me, right? It was like, oh,

you know, the business we did 7 million our first year, 21 million our second year and 41 million

our third year. I was like, what the fuck is going on? I was like, and they're like, oh, yeah,

we didn't raise any money. It's just profitable. You know, I just take a dividend out. I'm like,

what are these words profit, you know, like where I come from, Silicon Valley, we don't say that

word. What's that? What's that P word? Like, like, you know, the profit, like Jesus, like,

so when I heard that, I was like, all right. And then that became my normal. Like,

I was like, okay, I'm going to do 7 million my first year. I'm going to do 20 million my second

year. I'm going to report like that became my what I thought was achievable and normal. If I

hadn't heard that from them, I would have never scaled as fast. And sure enough, we did, you know,

7 million the first year. Now in our second year, hopefully we'll get to 20. Like,

I hit this exact, I hit the exact thing to the point where I'm like, maybe I should have shot

higher. Maybe maybe just hearing their number created like an artificial ceiling, but I've

definitely created an artificial floor. Are you how many people work there full time?

Let's just couple rate. Yeah, like four or five. Are you happy with e-commerce? I've asked you this

like every quarter. Are you happy with the same thing? It's a great business in one way and it's

a terrible pain in the ass in the other way. You know, like, you know, whatever, like right now

everything is, it's a lot of headwinds are going against e-commerce. So Facebook's getting more

expensive. Shipping anything around the world is getting super expensive and slower. So those are

the two core costs, right? Getting a customer and then fulfilling your product. You're doing physical

products and guess what? With inflation, everything gets more expensive. So like,

there's a lot of headwinds against e-commerce right now and it's very competitive. So, you know,

there's a bunch of reasons why it's bad. Then again, it's working and like, you know, I'm happy

with our business. So, you know, it's good. But what I recommend is to the next person, not necessarily.

I think if you can do software, do software. If you don't really want to like do real work,

don't do e-commerce because e-commerce has real work. Like we have a warehouse, you know, it's

annoying. Let me tell you something really quick before we are up. I just invested in, I don't ever

do DTC companies like these consumer shipping companies, but this guy listening to our podcast,

I bet you he reached out to you too. It's called the Good Crisp company. Yeah. So he sent me,

like, I guess on the podcast, I mentioned that I love snacks or something. I don't know. Well,

we know we were talking about better for you snacks, right? So junk food that's like keto,

keto cookies, whatever. So he's got Pringles that are like better for you than Pringles.

But they taste like Pringles. Yeah. They're awesome. I ate this entire box

of like, and it was like a lot of chips. Like it was, it was kind of messed up.

It's, it's kind of Pringles. Yeah. And I was like, dude, this is awesome.

The valuation was like two times sales. I ended up investing in it.

I really wanted to invest. I'm just too, I told the guy, I was like, you have an amazing,

you have a great business. I would totally invest in this. I'm just completely obsessed with crypto

and like every dollar, every extra dollar that I could put into something speculative,

I just want to put into crypto. I don't want to put into anything else.

What's your crypto stuff that you're, that you're doing now then?

Dude, I bought Luna. Luna's just been like on fire. I don't know if you follow Luna.

How much did it go up by? Well, it depends what's time horizon, but

mine is basically, I don't know, up 40% in like two months or something.

Right. It's like amazing, but, and, and I think it has like a long way to go still.

Not again, not financial advice. I'm just like gambling. So you're here. Imagine me saying,

here's what number I'm betting on in roulette. Just take it as that. Don't take it as like,

you know, my word. But I think there's a lot of interesting things about it.

I'd heard, I'd heard about it from a few interesting people. And then I was like,

all right, what is this thing actually? And I can explain it if you want, but basically,

I'll refrain for now. That's the, that's the thing I've been interested in.

Good. And you did do good, Chris. It's a cool company, man.

The problem with all e-commerce, so our mutual friend has this great phrase,

which is e-commerce businesses are great to own horrible to invest in. Now, I wouldn't say,

not horrible, but it's like, it's great for the owner of the business. It's not great for the

investors. And that's only because the upside is somewhat limited. So even native, which sold

for a hundred million dollars, it's like, these almost never go for multiple billions,

but they're often valued at the same valuations as like a software company, which can become a

multi-billion dollar company. And so like, you know, you invested, I think, you know, I don't

know about that one, but I was looking at other, another good deal that was in e-commerce that

I liked. And it's like, oh, we have, you know, we're doing 10 or 20 million dollars in revenue.

You know, 20% of that is profits or EBITDA, you know, we're valued at 50 million or 60 million.

It's like, it was a good company. It was definitely going to work. Like the business

was working and was going to probably keep working. And, you know, the reality is that that

it's unlikely that that will ever even sell for 600 million, let alone six billion, right?

So it's like, you get these like 2x, 3x, 4x of revenue, like sales or sorry,

evaluation sales. And that's just not super compelling when you have better options. Like

if you can invest in software, do it, you know? And in a couple of weeks, we're going to have this

guy on. I lined it up, AJ Patel from High Key Cookie and Zesty Paws. That guy's amazing. He's

one of the most impressive people I've ever read about. And he was an owner of one of those businesses.

And by the way, I should say two other things. There's obviously exceptions to every rule. So,

you know, like there are definitely some e-commerce investments that are going to do awesome.

Like Native did awesome because it sold for 100 million, but he had only raised, I think,

2 million bucks or something like that, a million dollars. So, you know, he was super

capital efficient, whereas most of these are not. They burn a fuck ton of money on marketing and

inventory. The second thing, the only other bad thing about e-commerce is like, even when I say,

oh, we did 7 million, 10 million or whatever this year, that doesn't mean, A, that's revenue,

not profits, and B, almost whatever you do have for profits gets reinvested back into the business

because you're buying inventory for the next four months. So, if you're buying ads for the next

month and like, so you're always cash poor until you finally turn the corner. And there is a corner

that you turn when you're a good business, but early on you don't get that. Have you turned it?

We have not turned that no, because we're like, we are like, oh, great, we need to buy double or

triple the inventory for the next season and for the next season. And after that, so, you know,

it's going to. Stressful as fuck. Yeah, like, you know, but it's cool. Like, it works, but it

works if you don't need a bunch of cash to pull out and you're okay being cash poor for a while.

Real estate's like this often too. You could be cash poor in real estate, but be like,

you know, have a lot of value. Yeah, but it's not going to go to zero. Yes. Real estate is

slow, way slow, but it's more liquid and it's not going to grow fast, but it won't go away.

So it's a little different. Whereas your thing. Well, it can go away in the sense that if the

valuation drops, then, you know, you're more, you know, you don't make a profit. It's not that it

goes to zero, but you're, you're, what you owe the bank is the, now the value of the company.

And so your equity can go down, right? Like, yes, but a E-com business can double or triple in a

year. Real estate likely will never do that. But that E-com business, let's say that like

something's made illegal or there's an embargo. Who knows? Like there's a world where it can go

out of business. Yeah, for sure. I have a couple more. I don't know if you want to just stay on.

We could just split these into, you know, we talked about just like releasing these as like

segments instead of hour-long episodes. Do you have time or no? Yeah, I got time.

All right. Have you seen this thing that happened called SOS, SOS token?

No, what is it? All right. I got to tell you about this. This is genius. Okay. So

there's a, there's a, there's an app called OpenSea or a website called OpenSea. You've

heard of OpenSea. It's basically like eBay. It's eBay for NFTs. So it's a place where you go and buy

and sell NFTs. And OpenSea is, it's in crypto, but it doesn't do some of the things that crypto

people like. So it's like, it's not fully open source. You know, all the code is not open source.

Like they, like the website, the way the website works, I think it's, you know, proprietary. It's

that you can't just fork that code and just put your own name on it. The second thing is that

they don't have a token involved with it. And the third is that, you know, they raised a bunch

of money from private, from, from traditional venture capitalists. And in the crypto world,

that's like, uh, you sell out type of. So Andreessen Horowitz, I think, put money in. It's a

multi-billion dollar marketplace. And I think it's going to be like, it's going to be huge. I think

they did like, I don't know, $8 billion of transaction volume in like one month this year.

So it's been, it's been growing like crazy. It is one of the best startups you can invest in right

now would be OpenSea. Now, what happened? So they, they're CFO, they hire this hotshot CFO.

CFO goes on some show, some, some either podcast or some talk show and he says,

you know, we're looking at potentially going public. And he's saying it because that's a

good thing for the company. And immediately the users are like, oh, you're using the old

route of like getting liquidity that's going to make you guys rich. But all of us users who have

built this into the most popular NFT marketplace, we're going to get nothing from that. Like we

don't own stock in your company. So you go public, we don't get anything. We built this thing. And

again, that's against the, that's against the core, the ethos of, of your, of your thing. Ben

just found it 10 billion and 10 billion in trading volume in August alone. So that's insane,

same, same numbers. So what happened? So this group of people got together. I think the guy,

the guy who was behind it, his handle is like nine X, nine X, nine X or something like that.

Right. So this guy come, they create something called the open DAO. If you go to the open DAO.com

and they say, they created a token called SOS. So open C is the name of the platform.

So this is like SOS, like save our ship. He creates this token called SOS. He creates 100

trillion tokens and he gives them out and what they did was kind of genius. So on like two days

ago, anybody who was in crypto Twitter, anybody who buys NFTs started saying, Oh, there was an

airdrop, which means if I look in my wallet, I'm going to have tokens. It's like finding 20 bucks

in your wallet. And so they did an airdrop to all the users of open C based on how much you use

open C. So how do they get that information? It's, it's the block. It's on. That's the beauty.

It's like, this can only happen in crypto. So because I know, but I would have thought that

like, I guess you could just scrape the website and just get a list of everyone's wallets on.

No, no, no, it's not the website. Open C is just like a website that accesses the Ethereum

blockchain. So all the transaction happened on the Ethereum blockchain, the buying and selling

of the NFT, the minting of the NFTs on the blockchain, the buying and selling is all there.

And the blockchain again, is this open source public, public record basically that you can

go access. You can go, I can go type in your wallet address, like your public wallet address,

and I can just go see how much money is in your account right now if I just go into ether scan.

And so now you might have multiple wallets, but like that's one thing you can do. So what they

did was they went, they looked at every, every transaction on open C, all the wallets and they

said, okay, Sean's wallet has spent 10 ETH. He's done five transactions. So he should get X

percentage of it. So they took of the hundred trillion. They said half of it, we're just going

to drop to all the users of open C. So I woke up and I had 58 billion of these tokens in there at

a point, oh, whatever price. My total was whatever, like $300, whatever it was like $500 because I

don't use open C a ton. I didn't do too many transactions. But if you're one of these people

who's like an NFT collector or flipper who is very active on the platform, who buys and sells,

you know, you know, board apes and things like that, people made like $3,000, $5,000, $15,000.

So it's like finding $5,000 in your wallet. And you're like, what is this? Ah, I got this free

money. And it's money that they minted. And they basically, it was almost like it's a marketing

step, but it's almost like a hostile takeover. So they basically went out there. What they were

saying was, here's what open C should have done. They should have given all the users some tokens,

proportionate to their usage. Based on how much you've been using the platform,

you get some of the open C token and that, and then the open C token will be publicly

tradable. So you get to benefit and the core team will keep some of the open C token, like the

company will keep 20% of this. That's how that's like the normal way in crypto. So the genius

part of this is that some third party just did this on their behalf and it's like, and now what,

and they, so now there's a liquid market of like hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it was

like $300 million dollars. The group, okay, so here's how they did it. They said 50% goes to the

users, 10% goes to the stakers and the liquidity pool, 30% goes to like the stakers and liquidity

pool and 20% will stay with the treasury of our, of our foundation. And we are going to build

an open source version of open C. We're going to build a competitor to open C. And all you users

who are power users of open C, you now have a stake in our new open C that's to come. That's

going to do things the right way. But they've got to build, I mean, building an open C is

fucking hard. So, I mean, how many people work there? 500 people? No, no, no, dude, these things

can be built by like, you know, four motivated developers if you needed to. Then why the hell

does Airbnb meet 5000 people? It'll take a lot to maintain it and do customer support and all

those things. Yes, that will take time. But just building the actual product that will start

to get people to shift off of open C to do this, a team of five to 10 contributors can actually

do this if they're great developers that are focused. Now that's TBD. It's like a Kickstarter.

It's like, Hey, we give your money in a Kickstarter. Are they ever going to build a thing? Well,

it kind of depends. Are they honest and are they going to work hard? I don't know. We'll see.

But these guys basically, they, they essentially raised, it's like they hijacked open C and they

raised their share was 20 trillion out of the 100, 20%. They have $130 million now in their

treasury that they can pay their development team to build the open source competitor to this.

Who's who's the guy behind it? The people behind it? This 9x, 9x, 9x and then someone else who's

x.xyz. That's his handle. I think that's who's behind it. I think it's, look, I don't know if

this is going to work, but I think it's something that's only possible in the crypto world because

again, this is one of the reasons why people are like, decentralization is cool. It's cool because

the users can always pick up their ball and leave. They can go to another court and so open C does not

own their, their wallets. It does not own their NFTs. They have no lock in to keep the users there

except for behaving well and treating them well. And if somebody else says, I'm going to treat you

better over here, it is very easy for me to take my wallet, take my NFTs and go over here. And

even better, that other group can incentivize me to come over here and try it out by saying,

Hey, here's some free tokens that we minted out of thin air. So I think this is a genius

takeover marketing move. It's like a hostile takeover. It reminds me of, I had a buddy who was

going to do this to a company called Ripple. Have you ever heard of Ripple? Yeah, but they,

they're shady, right? Okay. So Ripple was this thing kind of like started pretty early on.

And they had this like, you know, honestly, not a bad idea. They were like, look, you know,

the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the Swift standard.

Ripple was like, we're going to be a bank to bank communication layer that uses blockchain,

right? So they're like, we're going to use blockchain technology with a real use case,

which is banks sending money back and forth to each other. So that was their idea. They got a

bunch of funding from Founders Fund and others, and they released this thing called XRP. That's

the name of their token. All right. So whatever, nobody cares about that, how it works, nobody

cares. But the interesting part is XRP has like, was worth a lot. The founders of Ripple became

billionaires overnight before, like, that's the thing with crypto, you can get rich before,

like this OpenDAO has $130 million before they have a product. In Ripple, those guys became

billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really fucked up incentive, and

which is why sometimes shit doesn't actually get built in crypto because, hey, I already got the

millions. I could just run away. I could just do a half-assed job. It doesn't really matter at this

point. I went public on day one. So Ripple has a market cap right now of $94 billion. I think I'm

reading this right. $94 billion, something like that. No, no, sorry, $44 billion. $44 billion,

right? That's like the market cap of like, you know, Bank of America, some shit like that. So

obviously Ripple's not actually valued at that, but Ripple had believers and they had early momentum.

They were very early in the crypto games. They had a lot of PR and the CEO would go on CNBC and

talk about how this is going to change the game. So what happened? In the crypto community, people

were kind of like poo-pooing Ripple. They're like, this is like centralized. They took way too much

share for themselves. They didn't give enough to users. That's why these guys are billionaires.

Their product kind of sucks and they're kind of shady, whatever. So the reputation was Ripple.

Anybody who was in the known crypto, pretty much the general consensus was Ripple's full of shit.

And so my buddy had this idea. He was like, I'm going to do the first hostile takeover

of a crypto network. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, look, I can see every single

person's wallet who owns Ripple. I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. But you don't

know their name and all that. He goes, I don't need their name. I was like, you don't have their

email address. He goes, I don't need their email address. I could just put something in their wallet

and they'll wake up and they'll open their wallet and they'll see that they have something in it.

I was like, okay, so I'm going to go out there. I'm going to say XRP is stupid for these five

reasons. Number one, the founders took away. Can you message these people anything?

You can include a message in the transaction of giving them the thing in the memo of the thing.

But like the way you do it is you first drop the token, you tell people, hey, if you held Ripple,

you got this token today and then you write your manifesto on your Twitter or your website about

what this is all about. So it's kind of like somebody put a $50 check in your wallet. You're

like, what's this all about? It says go to this website to explain why you just got this $50.

So that's how this marketing mechanism works. So he was like, I'm going to put some money in

there. I'm going to put my currency in all the Ripple holders wallet and then I'm going to tell

them Ripple is stupid for these five reasons. The founders took too much. This other problem,

this other problem, the token is inflationary, blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to change all that.

We only take 10%. We are not inflationary. We do not do this sketchy shit, blah, blah, blah.

My five point plan of how to make Ripple better. And we're calling it our own thing.

And here's the deal. If you own Ripple, if you send your Ripple to my wallet,

I will send you back five times your value of this. If you're in the first,

for the first thousand people that do this, then for the next 10,000 people that do this,

you're going to get four times your Ripple back. And for the next 10,000 people,

you're going to get three times your Ripple back. So basically, there's this urgency of like,

okay, if this is going to become the next Ripple, if I send my money and now I'm going to get five,

I'm going to get a 5x multiplier on my money. And what he was going to do was just,

he goes, when you send it to this wallet, we're going to just dump it. We're just going to sell

it. And we're going to put so much sell pressure. We're going to crash the price of Ripple. So if

you do it early... And do they do this? So let me finish the story. So he goes, if you do this early,

you're going to get five times your amount, and you're not going to sit there holding the bag

while we dump this thing. It's like a prisoner's dilemma game theory. It was so genius. He's like,

he's like, here's the math. If you're, if you're holding this thing, you have to assess,

are other people going to take them up on this offer? If they do, then the Ripple I'm holding

is going to go down like crazy. I'm going to go down like five to 10x. If I jump, if I jump ship,

I get a 5x multiplier on my money and I don't sit there holding the sinking ship.

And the game theory of this, I think was going to work. So he has this plan and he starts,

and he starts, and so he's like, okay, well, he needs to be credible. So he went to some

very, very wealthy people and he got about $50 million lined up to do this hostile takeover.

And he was like, he needed it to be like $200 million. And so he's like,

I need to create this huge war chest. So I can tell people, look, we have this much money.

So this, it's backed by something. Come on board. And he's like, dude, I, he's like,

basically I'm going to this investor. I'm saying, if you give me $200 million,

I'm going to take down this project. I'm going to absorb all the value of this project that's

currently worth $40 billion. Right. So he's like, it's a huge return for those investors. And they,

and they also don't even believe in Ripple. So it was this high stakes fucking James Bond shit.

And what the problem was, one of the investors that he had went to for this

leaked the plan to a journalist, this guy, Dan Primak or whatever. He's like pretty famous journalist.

Yeah, from Axios Axios. Axios writes the story ahead of time. He says,

hey, there's somebody planning a hostile takeover XRP. And here's how it's going to work.

And XRP obvious, the Ripple team obviously sees this and they're like, okay, just in case they,

so they sold some amount of their Ripple to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer.

So that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price, they had enough liquidity to

buy back the, buy back the tokens and keep the price high. So it kind of foiled his plan where

they, the only, the only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise

and he could have done it in like a two day period, he could have tanked the price of Ripple

and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side. But because they had heads

up, they could create enough liquidity and they could be able to like support their price before

somebody could do this to them. But how crazy is that dude? This is like some barbarians at the

gate shit. Like this is like 1980s, like Drexel, like hostile takeover where they like were like,

what's it called? Like greenmailing? Have you ever read like these like 1980s finance

books? I have, I have the book, I haven't read it yet. Yeah, that's basically what they did.

Like it was like, it was like warfare. I was like, this is some George Soros shit. You know,

the George Soros broke the Bank of England. Yes, that was, that was what he was, that's

actually what he was telling me. He goes, this is some George Soros shit. And I was like,

what do you mean? He goes, George Soros broke the Bank of England by doing something very similar

to this. And as he was explaining, I was like, there's no way this works. He's like, well,

you know, it's risky, but like, if it works, who did it? And he didn't, he didn't end up doing it.

But I mean, who, who's the person? It's an article. Is it public?

I don't know if it's public, but I'll tell you, it's our friend who, you remember we went to

dinner after our live show in Miami. It's our friend. Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah. That's crazy. I

thought if if Dan would have wrote about it, he would have named him. Yeah, I think he didn't

know the name or he, I don't think he included the name of the thing, but how fucking nuts is that?

That's crazy. If you get, if that person could have pulled it off, that's wild.

This is barbarians at the gate shit, hostile takeover stuff. Yeah, I love it. All right,

I have a couple more topics if we want to do a more or if we want to go, we can go.

All right, I got, I can do 15 more minutes. All right, let's do one more.

Okay, I got two random ideas for you. Okay, here's the, here's the first idea.

All right, this idea is my gift to the chief marketing officer of Gucci. You know, you're

welcome courtesy of Sean. I see this headline. All right, so I was thinking the other day,

I was, I was sitting there, sitting at the, at a restaurant. And as I do, I'm just watching,

I'm just people watching, I'm just watching these crazy creatures called humans. What the

fuck are they doing? And I saw all these people that had fancy bags, Gucci bags, Louis Vuitton

bags as it's very different from my world. I don't, I don't give a shit about that, but

they obviously do. And I was watching this and then I came home, I'm watching this show,

Selling Sunset, funny show on Netflix about real, real estate team. Dude, I watched it too, man.

Well, you know, I watched all that shit. Yeah. So, so, you know, I dabble and if you notice,

every day they come to work, they're wearing like the craziest fat, like what nobody wears to work,

they're wearing like $5,000. $5,000 dress with like a $5,000 bag and they put the bag right on

the middle of the desk. It's like, there's no laptop, there's no computer. It's like a desk

with a chair and their purse on top. And then they just gossip with each other, right? That's

where the show is at this point. So, I'll just think about this like luxury thing. And luxury

has just caught my eye. And I said, what else? What else could you do? And I don't know how this

came to mind, but here's a crazy idea. It's really a marketing stunt. It's not a business idea. It's

a marketing stunt for Gucci. So, here's what you're going to do. Every year, there are over a million

joint replacements in America. So, people getting hip replacements, knee replacements,

people getting, you know, they fracture their foot, they get a steel rod put in. There are

over a million people a year that get this done. I got it done. You got it done? What did you get

done? I've got screws. I broke my leg. I've got screws and a little, I got metal on my feet.

Now, you're not the right person to ask, but is there a version of Sam

that might have paid an extra $500 to have that be a Gucci nail? The answer is, yeah,

of course. The answer is, yeah. The answer is, yeah. So, we're talking about, I thought you

were going to go with like Gucci prosthetic legs, but you're talking about like... Just branded.

On the inside. That's actually a cool idea. On the fucking inside. And you only see it on the x-ray?

Only see it. You have the picture before it goes into your body, right? So, you get the Instagram

porn of, okay, hey guys, I'm doing well. Post surgery. Here's my pics. And as you're swiping...

It's an awesome flex. It's a fucking Louis V hip that's coming into your body.

That's an awesome flex. It's an LV knee. Dude, how good is that?

You can only see it in airport scanners. And then they do something so that, exactly. In x-ray,

you'll always see an emblem on the thing. Now, I don't know how... Doctors will figure out the

science of how this works without fucking a peer system. That's pretty great. That's good.

How good is that, dude? That is amazing. This is just an extra little revenue line,

tons of news, because everyone's going to say, this is what's wrong with the world. You're going

to take over. And guess what? There's going to be a bunch of people out there who are going and

getting surgeries done that are going to say, yeah, okay, it's the average knee replacement.

It's like $25,000, $30,000, like all in. I think that, you know, maybe it can be as low as $12,000

to $15,000. You tell him, and the actual part itself that goes in, I think is a $5,000 part

that the hospital orders. You're telling me I wouldn't get the $7,500 supreme fucking, you know,

knee to knee. The Nike logo. The just do it hip. Come on. Yeah. Come on. That's just licensing

revenue for them. It's marketing. It's influencer candy, dude. If people get grills, if rappers

go get diamond grills, if they're, you know, somebody out there like me, some guy like me out

there was like, yo, diamond braces. What? Yeah, diamond braces. Actually, fuck it. Not even for

braces. Just diamond teeth. Diamond teeth worked. If diamond teeth work, the Louis V hip can work.

Dude, this is a good idea. This is pretty funny. This is brilliant. This is actually a good one.

That one was for you, for TikTok. That's for your TikTokers out there. That was my TikTok segment.

That's actually, this is actually a fun idea. Wait, who, who did you research this? Is that

even possible? I have no idea if it's possible. I've got like, I don't think you could,

I don't think you could see stuff like that. I've got X-rays of my screws and like, you can like,

look at them, but I don't think, I don't know how that would work. It might have to be a striping.

It might have to be dots, polka dots. It might have to be something that will show up there.

It might be an emblem that's just on it, a tiny emblem. But you know, like the red bottom shoes

for what's it called, you know, like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we're fucking nerds. But the

black or the red bottom shoes, they wrap about them. Yeah, exactly. Whatever. People will find a

way to see the shit. And you just, if that's the only problem with this idea, we got a good problem

to have. So, and also, by the way, tattoos, I think you could also do this with tattoo parlors.

I think you could drop branded official license designs of tattoos for brands and be like, yeah,

if you get this one, it's actually, that's like, actually the brand. Because like,

people get tattoos of brands like Louis Vuitton, Jake Paul has a Nike swoosh where his like

sock would be on his on his calf. That's hilarious. Actually. And I was like, that's funny. He got a

brand tattooed on him. And I think I was also like, you know, why wouldn't brands actually drop tattoo

designs just like they drop bag and shoe designs? Like, I feel like that should happen. That's

interesting. That's another interesting idea. All right. Two for two. All right. I have one more

for you. Okay, this one's less fun, but I think it's still good. Do you remember Glamour Shots?

Love them. Did you, your mom have Glamour Shots? Do you know anybody who has Glamour Shots?

I didn't do it, but like my sister did. It's hilarious. It's like Napoleon Dynamite shit

where you go to the mall and you wear stupid makeup and a bad haircut and you take these

awesome pictures. Of course. Do you know the business behind Glamour Shots? No. Okay, so.

Is that the, is that the name of a brand? Glamour Shots was the name of the company,

I think. Okay. So here's the, here's the quick backstory. I did like, you know,

two seconds of research on this. So it could be wrong. Started by a frat party photographer who

was like, you know, taking pics at frats. And I was like, all right, what else I got?

So it initially starts, it calls it party pics. Then when they were like kind of looking at trends,

they were like, oh, people are liking this like high glamour style, like big hair, loud,

loud clothes, certain backdrops. And so they were like, all right.

He's like, so he renames it to Glamour Shots and it's physical locations. And within first year,

it already starts working by year three, seven million in revenue and copycats popping up everywhere.

Hollywood headshots, freeze frame, you name it. There's different portrait shops popping up.

At one point it just, he expands through the franchising model, expands to 380 stores,

Taiwan, Japan, everybody wants a piece of Glamour Shots. And the trick, the thing that like

really made it work was most great name, most professional photographers, you would go,

well, there's a couple of things that made it work. One was the style was iconic.

The second was, so it wasn't just come, I'll take a picture of you was come,

I'll make you look like a Hollywood star with the hair, the makeup, the clothes, and it was only like,

you know, top half up. So you would be wearing your jeans underneath and then at your top would be

like this denim studded jacket or whatever with the color popped or whatever. So backdrops with

the colors, everybody knows the look, fan blowing your hair, that whole thing. So that was one,

one innovation. The other was instant gratification. So you would take the photo and for most

photographers, they're like, great, I'll, I'll, I'll go, you know, get these exposed,

then I'll, I'll add you whatever, touch them up, pick the best ones and I'll get, I'll get you,

you know, some, some options in a few, few days, few weeks. Glamour Shots, they used a special

like kind of camera technique or whatever. So it was actually taking a video, I think,

and then we'll grab an image and you could see it right there on the screen in real time and

you could pick and be like, Oh, I want that one. That one's so good. They got you in the heat of

the moment when you were in peak state, when you were already caught up in the frenzy and people

were dropping 300, 400, $500 inflation adjusted on their glamour shots, average customer spend.

So it was like highly lucrative as that's basically like, you know, for like a 30 minute

shoot, you're making, you know, huge profits. And they had these like six categories of styles

that you got to pick from. The names are hilarious. One is can't wait to be touched.

Another spontaneous, tailored, elegant, bold. And that's where these like classic looks come from.

So there was some genius behind the person who really understood what the customer wants behind

it. Whatever happened to the company. So it gets to a hundred million in sales by 1994.

By 2001, it's now dropped back down to 93 stores. Now there's like 40 stores left.

It's basically where they're the way in dying. Didn't didn't last and keep up with the times.

Here's the idea. Reboot and glamour shots and we're rebooting glamour shots.

Everything nostalgic from the nineties is crushed. Oh, you're rebooting Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men.

You're rebooting Home Alone. Home alone is getting rebooted. We're rebooting glamour shots.

That's what I'm telling you. I'm on board. So there's I'm looking at it now. There's only five.

So there's only five of these locations left. Yeah, we're down to the last

remember the Alamo where we're down to the last stand. So the question is, how would you actually

reboot glamour shots? So I wanted to brainstorm with you for two minutes. How would you reboot

glamour shots? I got a couple ideas. I don't know if you have one off top of your head. Otherwise,

I'll go. You got to do it in person, I think. I think that's part of it. That's part of it.

What do you need to do that's different? I mean, you just do an ad campaign with really cool

celebrities or some celebrities and you'd be like, here's what they would look like, like, you know,

a modern, a modern person, what they would look like with a glamour shot. What would you do?

So I'm going to reboot it. I'm not okay. So a nostalgia is one, one, one, one angle. You could

just say this look would come back. But I think that's that's short side. I think what you got

to do is you got to work backwards. So my mom had glamour shots on the wall. The end product was

a framed picture on the wall of her looking like an 80 soap opera 90 soap opera person basically

with the hair blown out and crazy lighting and crazy dress. Well, what is the what's the end

product people want today? Instagram, baby. They want epic Instagram content. So we've talked

about Museum of Ice Cream. We've talked about some of these. I think those are secretly glamour

shots reboots. I think you got to go all in on the glamour shots reboot. So you're going to you're

going to make somebody look fucking amazing for social media. I know people out there throwing

up in their mouth. They're like, Oh, this is everything that's wrong with. Well, guess what,

people, people, people care what they look like, how they come across in social media.

If you if you hate that fact, cool, delete Instagram. But if you still got Instagram,

you're still in on this idea. OK, so how are we going to do it? One idea was,

could you get Airbnbs convert them into like basically like dope lifestyle looking Airbnbs

and just rent them out for shoots? Instead of, you know, renting it out for $700 a night,

you're renting it out for $100 an hour and you're doing or $200 an hour and you're doing

shoots for people where they get to look like they live in a dope lifestyle. They look like

they're living it. But that's that's different than a glamour shot. A glamour shot is like

supposed to be funny. It's not supposed to be funny, dude. That it looks funny now when we

look back like look back at your dad with an afro or whatever. Like actually, you had an afro

in high school. So look back at your own high school. That's supposed to be funny at the time.

I don't know if you were trying to be funny, but for glamour shots, they are trying to be glamour.

But that's different with these Instagram things. You're talking about being like lying.

You're trying to look cool. Yeah. So so that's one one angle to it. I think you're lying. You

don't live in that fancy house. Yeah. But you're not saying I live here. You're just posing a

picture like people do. So we're going to have like a like a people rent fancy cars and they

take pictures with it and then they've returned the car to anyone who does that personally.

Thank God. No. Have I seen people who do that on Instagram? Yes. I've seen people who do that

on Instagram. Tons of people do that on Instagram. It's like what you would need is people rent

dresses for the day. You know, dude, you just need like a like one airline seat and like

what looks like an airline. You've seen that, right? The half private jet. It's like a movie

set. It's like where they film porno's. Exactly. So so there's that. I think, okay,

but that's a little capital intensive to get airbbs. Maybe you do it with a green screen.

So I think one one way you could do this is you could just have someone come take pictures with

a green screen and you just do it where once they take the pictures once in one of your

locations with the green screen, very cheap to do, then you CGI them into like a whole bunch

of different looks that becomes their collection of like they could be power suits. They could be

could be boss mode. They could be party mode. They could be whatever, but you just have green

screen props and scenarios and you show them exactly how to pose to look good. Most people

don't even know how to pose. Myself included. When you meet somebody who knows how to pose,

you're like, oh, like that's fucking half of it. The other half is like lighting in

fucking props, but like an editing, right? Like, but do you remember when the guy came

to take photos of us at the Miami thing? He was like, all right, stand here, half squint your

eye. You're like, why? Yeah, I was like, I was like, I look like I have down central. What do

you mean? He's like, no, trust me, kind of squint your eye. He's like, then, you know,

like protrude your neck forward. I was like, no, this looks like a turtle. He's like, no, look,

watch, I got rid of your double chin. You know, you look like sharper and like more powerful.

Okay, look at this angle. This gives you confidence. Look from this angle specifically,

whereas for me, I'm like the fucking nutcracker. If I take a photo, it's like stand straight,

look straight, hands to my side, smile, cheese. Like that's how I take all my photos, right?

But there is an art to posing and most people don't know how to do it. So I think there's a

there's a version of glamour shots that somebody could reboot that just gives you an end product

that you want for social media. I don't know exactly what it is. I would just say, I would just say,

bring back the classics. I think that you could just, you could just do it as is.

What happened to the company? So did it? Dude, you could just do this with like

dating profiles and stuff. Whatever. I don't know. The company still exists, but I think it's kind

of like just gotten down the drain. I don't know. I don't know the ending of that story.

I wonder what happened to the founders. Does he have like some, his name is Bob. Does he have

like some huge like mansion down LA, like that glamour shop money? 1000%. He's going to have

a huge mansion. Yeah, take two seconds to just Google that. I bet you, I bet you this guy's

got to have a thing in LA. If he doesn't, we're just going to edit this part out.

I can't see, but is it actually Bob? Oh, he lives in Texas and Dripping Springs, Texas,

which is near Austin. And it's where like, it's like where moms who get glamour shots live.

It's like the suburbs of Texas. Oh, by the way, that's the glamour shots is still thriving in

Texas. I think that's the only place where it's still like a thriving business. I think I read

that. Dude, this guy's awesome. All right. That's all I got. Those are my topics. This is awesome.

We got to get Bob on here. All right. That's the pod.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.