My First Million: Newsletter Schemes, Copywriting Scams and Chaotic Singles

We send him an email. He said, hey, just wanted to.

Oh, like, you know, if if you read the milk road, you like it, like, just respond to, like, whatever.

Hello, you know, tell me where you're like, hey, you're a subscriber to the milk road. Where do you live?

Guess how many replies we got?

I have no idea.

I think we literally got three replies out of how many cents there was maybe like, I don't want to say 20,000 or something like that.

20,000 in three replied.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to

I put my all in it like my days off on the road. Let's try never looking back, dude

According to the youtube data by the end of this sentence half the audience will have dropped off

That's how content goes nowadays. You have like four four point two seconds to look at everybody

Is that true? It was is it really that short? I thought it was like, okay, but it is like that

I mean like after somebody clicks play you just see the recurve the curve start to go space mountain downwards and then

And then it flattens out. But are you looking at the data? Like I I rarely log in

You just let it flash the camera in the first five seconds every every time. So there you go

You know how like there's a joke about news anchors wearing like uh shorts with me

It's the sleeveless t-shirt

I'm going jacked it sleeveless t baby. How's that for flashing?

I

Mean I don't even know what you're prepared for you're like I can go outside it can rain

I could become a doctor for a minute. I can work out. I can climb a mountain

It's 107 degrees in awesom today and so

I'm either shirtless or sleeveless t most of the time when I record I got to put the jacket on so I had like a little professional

Dude, I've been trying to convince ben to move to california from austin. I originally pegged it at a 15 chance. What's what's it at now?

Oh, I think we're like up to 50. I think we've made serious headway

Now I put in all this work. What I needed to do was just wait for summer

Just smoke them out, right?

All I had to do is just smoke them out. I don't know if I ever told you this. I once was doing a deal

that required us to

Negotiate with a company called petro china petro china is basically like exxon mobile, but it's owned by the government in china

And so we go to this and they're like the big they're like, you know huge company

But it's owned by the government so nobody knows how much it's worth all that stuff

But it's mega powerful oil and gas company in china

So we go and we're supposed to negotiate this deal

And I I think I kid you not they just

They did the opposite of smoking us out or sweating us out. They just froze us out. They put us in a room

That was like just cold as hell

And there was no way out like first getting to the room was like a 20 minute walk

Like a like a passage like going through this labyrinth of doors and we get to this room

We're in

They're like they'll be with you soon

and then they leave

And seven hours pass and we're sitting in this room and I'm like, hey

I think they forgot about us and we got to go talk to somebody and then I tried to stand up

And immediately an arm like puts me back in the chair. They're like, no, no, no

This is part of things to freeze you

Just yeah, just to make it uncomfortable and they're like you show no weakness here

We just sit and there's this uh urban myth. I don't know if it's sure or not or steve cohen

Uh, you know one of the guys who apparently is based off of uh

Is billions characters based off of him steve cohen rich guy owns the bets where the reason why

Patagonia vests are popular on wall street is he used to make his office freezing

So when the sec regulars would come in they were really uncomfortable and everyone knew they didn't want to stay

Yeah, they didn't want to stay

But so apparently it works

Dude, I mean my cosco has a walk-in

freezer where you go get like our walk-in fridge where you but it's a room

It's a giant room where you go get vegetables

That thing is so uncomfortable. I mean, it's like whenever it's the nearest vegetable

That's all I'm getting and then I'm getting out of there. So I definitely believe it if I was the sec

I would I would get the fuck out of there

I forgot to ask you this so

and uh

Right now so basically in 2017. I wrote this ad for the hustle and it was

My boss thinks I'm smart parentheses. I'm not

It's because I read the hustle and he has no idea that it exists

Dash a reader of the hustle and that was like our ad on facebook

On twitter. I see that ad

Everywhere for every newsletter for every like ai where it was like my boss thinks I know about ai

I don't the reason I what happened is you did it morning brew then did it

So they copy did they do it? That's funny. I've been running an ad like that for a long time

Um, so you if you've seen those ads you're like, oh good idea. I'll copy that

Then the other thing was uh, facebook launched the ad library

So now you can go see other companies ads so you can just go and look what what ads are they running?

Google launched an ad library tiktok now launched an ad library so you can go see anyone's tiktok ads too

Then you've talked about that ad on the podcast and I noticed after the after you said it on the podcast

Then people started running it

Then there's also a guy who worked for you who worked for us at mill road who then goes and he's pitching up

He's basically going to telling every newsletter company

I'm the key to the growth of the hustle of milk road of every fucking newsletter company

I did it. I'm the best. Um, I could tell you exactly what they did

And um, I don't know about you for the hustle, but for us. I'm like this guy is massively overstating

What he did but like whatever. I mean, I guess we were already in the we already had a million subscribers

but yeah, I mean and I didn't work closely with him, but I'm

I'm sure he's great. I just uh, we were I'm not saying he's bad at his job

But he is definitely overselling and he is people will come to me and they'll be like

Um, hey, I just wanted to get a quick reference check this guy. Basically like he does a

sales deck that just says like

I did everything for a milk road. Like I I figured it all out. I did all these things and like is that legit

And I'm like no and actually the funny thing is I think in the short term that helped him

Is a long term that hurt him because two very big names have come to me and they said hey

I'm thinking behind this guy sounds like you did great work for you guys. Just want to do a quick post check like

um thumbs up thumbs down would you recommend and I was like

I wish I could say yes, but like

No for these two reasons one

He's overstating what he did if he just said what he did they would have been fine

uh, two

When we sold the company he went and put up a twitter thread saying like

Hey milk road sold and here's all the things that they do to to grow

And we asked him we were like, hey man, can you take that down like we're still running as a business like you can't

Just you shouldn't just like you're a you're a service provider. You're you're a contractor for us. Yeah. Yeah

We're a client of yours. We never said and you wasn't confident shailty

You should never go publish all of your clients things or even it's not actually all but like we don't want any of this stuff out there

right and um

And he's like no, I got to get mine too from the sale and I'm like what like dude

I'm asking you to take this down

Are you really like your client? So it was never deleted and he was he tried to say no again

I was like wow like Jesus. That is like insanely unprofessional to do that

um in my opinion at least and uh

You know, so whatever he did delete it after that after I was like, wow, are you like are you serious?

This is actually the stance you're gonna take. That's an insane stance to take

Yeah, I don't like when people talk about two two really big names that I think would have been like way bigger than the hustle

Way bigger than milk road

We're gonna work with him have asked me and I'm like, I can't I'm just gonna tell you what my experience was

You decide and they're like, oh no, we would not want to work with somebody who does that and I was like, damn like the short term

Yeah, that hurts leads to long term loss. Unfortunately like

You know, that's the the irony of of doing stuff that and I've done stuff like that too where I make a short term

short term good decision

That actually cost me in the long run

But it's hard to see in the moment, you know, so it's it's yeah, that's a that's a that's an expensive lesson

But my question was were you running this ad and did it still work up until we sold it was still working

We didn't run that ad we didn't run my boss things and whatever

um

We did I think try a version of like my friends think I'm uh

You know, like whatever my friends think I know everything about crypto what they don't know is that I just read the milk road every morning

um

Something like that. I think we ran that but those weren't hyper like that wasn't the highest performer

our other we had other stuff that was better performers, but um

In general that was our best one more than 50 of our subscribers were organic

so

it doesn't like, you know

you know the

If more than 50 of your growth comes organic then that that means it's the content that's the content the brand

Dude, I've talked to so many of these new newsletter guys and they're all doing so when we

When we started the hustle like up into hundreds of thousands were organic and then we like learned

I didn't know what paid marketing was and we learned about it and then we started doing this thing called co-registration which

It would typically only scammy marketer type of people would do that like people selling like sex pills and shit

And we were like, well, that's interesting like in theory

Let's actually figure out what it means in a non-scammy way. And so we like well explain it

So you go to a site. So for example, um, you go to uh, I'll try to find a real-life example

Go to if you go to bold.org

It's a website where you can apply

Uh, you can enter in your information and it automatically applies you to tons and tons of different scholarships

um

And what it says was great if you want somehow they have a point system where it's like it's free to use

But you have to sign up for like these newsletters in order to be able to

Um in order to be able to apply to even more scholarships. And so we would pay bold.org

Some money. I don't remember the money one dollar. Let's say for every

College kid who entered their email and sent them to the hustle and then they would go and subscribe to more stuff

More scholarships. And so that's what co-reg is. So you're registering for one thing

But then you are asked to register for another thing in exchange for some type of perk

Typically that that's an internet marketing hack that's done with scammy stuff really scammy people

But we went to product hunt and we were like, hey, have you guys thought about doing co-reg and like, yeah, we're working on it

We're like, well, that would be great. We would be your first customer

And so that's how we started growing really quickly

Or we were already growing quickly. But once you, you know, we're adding like we're adding like 5 000 people a day

We invent at every every stage right at the beginning you do friends of friends of family

Then you do your own social media. Then you do uh posts that are really good content that's going to go viral

That's going to get you now to the next level of organic

Then you start layering on some paid

Then you have to diversify your paid because not one source is going to work as well as the others and they you know

They don't all scale right and when you're adding 100 000 people a month

You have like 50 or some amount is still organic

But then that's still like 80 000 customers that you need to sign up

So some will be facebook some of this some that some co-reg so courage works really well

The problem with it is that it's a very low intent reader. So like the scholarship person is it like the highest is like

Hey, Sean sign up for milk road. It's awesome. That's high intent

Uh, less less high but still high is like, oh, I saw this ad on facebook saying there's this newsletter. That sounds cool

I'm interested the lowest intent is i'm trying to buy a uh, I'm trying to get a coupon for target

But I have to get enter in the I have to get my email

Yeah, in order that's the lowest intent or i'm trying to win this free prize and I get more entries if I just sign up for

This fucking newsletter, whatever. I'll sign up for it. That's the lowest intent now

I talked about but that but the the thing is is that you grow quickly

So for a quarter you can get an email subscriber

But for every 10 email subscribers only one will actually be of high quality

And so the problem is is you get addicted to this and so I was talking to all these other newsletter guys

And they're like I got to a hundred thousand in like six months. I'm like, oh sick. How they go

Oh, let's say called co-redge and I'm like, oh, you're fucked. This is a horrible newsletter. You're fucked

This is your business is is dog. There's there's other versions of this

So sub stack has a thing where you subscribe to someone sub stack and then they're like

Here's five other sub stacks you might like auto checked and you just you're just trying to continue

And now you're subscribed to five newsletters and you see people whose curve on sub stack looks flat

Like you know normal growth normal good growth normal good growth and then like hockey stick

It's like yes, I crossed 300,000 500,000 subscribers

It's like yeah, but these aren't people who actually want to read your thing

And then the other thing is that they think the open rate is high

But open rates nowadays because of the way they've changed with apple and cookie stuff works

It's it's not reliable. So for example, yeah when we started 40 was good when we started 40 was good

That was considered the best and then 50 we would get 50 and we're like we're the greatest there is now

Everyone it's 50 percent right and because it's because they're not actually 50 percent

It's because

Open rates cannot be measured the same way they used to be able to make be measured where it was more more reliable

Now you have to use click the rate or whatever

Like are people actually clicking your your ads your content that sort of thing

And so this guy that I was talking about for the milk road. He was the one who was like, oh, yeah

Co-red we should do this and we were like, okay. Let's try it. Let's see how it goes. We tried it

sure enough

Sure enough you get you get good growth out of it. But and you get addicted to it

But it's the quality so after we sold we were like, hey, let's let you know like some point we were like, okay

Let's look at all these sources. We're getting this organic. We're getting this from here. This from here

We did an analysis and we're like, all right. Let's test this coverage thing the open rates look good

Let's just let's how do we figure out if these are high quality or not?

I don't know open rates are good. The cost is good should be fine, right?

We sent him an email. He said, uh, hey, just wanted to

Oh, like, you know, if if you read the milk road, do you like it? Like just respond to like whatever?

Hello, you know, tell me where you're like, hey, you're a subscriber to the milk road. Where do you live?

Yeah, we want to know where you live if somebody actually reads your daily newsletter 50% of the time

They're so excited to get an email from the founder that says, you know, hey, I'm just reaching out to say whatever

They'll give a very high reply rate

Guess how many replies we got I have no idea

I think we literally got three replies out of how many cents there was maybe like, I don't want to say

20,000 or something like that like 20,000 in three replied. It was it was like a big number

Yeah, I don't know the exact but like I know that the reply number was something like three replies that day

Maybe more trickled in but like doesn't matter that day three people replied and we were like, oh cut this off immediately

Um, and that same guy goes and he pedals that to all the other newsletters. It's like, yeah, this is what the hustle did

This is what milk road does

It's like we did with a small percentage of what we were doing and as soon as we

Were able to test it we were like, oh screw this. Why would we want a subscriber number?

Like unless you try to do somebody you don't want a subscriber number

That's not real right like real subscribers the only way to build a real business

And uh, you know, I talked to the morning brew guys and I think they're they're also very like they I think just straight measure on like

What does this lead to in terms of clicks on our ads? Yeah, like or like conversions even, you know from how many people buy

Are advertising buying something right like if you because if I'm if I'm getting you as a customer

That's the right way to do it, right? That's the the sustainable way to do it

Uh, but I don't think people you know kids these days

Doing it differently than then back in our day one one year ago. Yeah, I remember way back then six months ago

No, that that's how they have to do it and they also um another thing is I talked to another guy and I was like well

Of your list, how many if you said that you're hosting an ai event that was free, uh, how many people are going to show up?

He's like, oh, we'd sell out immediately. I'm like great then you're doing that that sounds like you're doing it correctly

And then I talked to another guy. I'm like, well, how many people would show up to this event and they're like, uh, no one

I'm like, well, well, then this this business sucks like they're they're not they're not real

Uh, you should bail and quit uh, or start over

Uh, but yeah, the the coverage thing is mostly nonsense. It doesn't always have to be or you could uh

It's kind of a pain in the ass if you make money through advertising

It's like you need to hit a top line number and that's why I hate advertising is because there's very there's inverse

Incentives so like not everyone's aligned for the same thing. And so I think that's why I fucking hate advertising

Uh, it could be done well

But when you have like a team to support and you want katie to hit or quota and get paid

I'm like, uh, fuck you gotta like make sacrifices and I hate that

But anyway, I wanted to bring up this ad because we were talking about copywriting

On friday, I uh interviewed laird hamilton

How did it go?

So it went really bad. Uh, it went very

It went bad, uh

But what?

Well

He's not a business guy for one, but I'm like a fitness. I'm into fitness and stuff

But I wanted to ask him all the fitness stuff

But I was like, I don't I watched so many hours of him leading up to it

And I was like, I don't want to just ask the same questions

Like I just watched so much of your stuff that all the questions that I thought I was going to have

You've already answered them. Yeah, you've answered it

And so there was like that that there but also

Dude, I just think it's a bummer to meet your heroes because

He's amazing

But I just want him to be this like idea rather than this reality. Do you know what I mean?

I like I like him so like I remember

I just I've been very lucky to meet a bunch of my heroes and once you meet them

They're a little bit less of a hero and I think I just prefer them being a hero

Not to say that he didn't live up to my expectations. He did it was just that uh

I don't want to be even remotely a peer of his I want him to be like, you know, right

My my great-grandpa who I've heard stories about

If you're a fan of this podcast if you consider me a sam, you know somebody that you look up to in any way

Prepare to be disappointed. All right. We're just very average people

When you meet us we will destroy we will ruin this podcast for you

But I was super self-conscious about it

So if you guys hear the pod let me know like in the youtube comments what you think but it was it was only okay

I think it was maybe it was only okay for me as because I was in interviewing him

But I just learned so much about him and I'm like, oh, I already know everything

There's nothing new to know about you or I'm just not you unique enough to ask a question

You should have shifted gears and gone bobby all tough on him

What's that? Oh, uh, like that girl awkward interview girl and just act like you don't care

She has shot up. So basically I saw her on tiktok

And I the thing about tiktok and instagram is you don't know who else knows what you're watching, right?

Uh, like it's hard like there's no like chart or there's no like greatest hits

And so I was just like who is this random chick popping up

Uh interviewing these these guys when she's like in her bed

Interviewing like drake like not just like but then I saw drake and I'm like, what the hell what is going on with this?

how is this like

Just this 21 year old woman who's like rude to her guest talking to drake and then on the podcast charts

I think she was number one for a few days

Yeah, she's been in the top five. She went from

I've never heard of this person and she didn't have a podcast to a top five podcast in like two weeks

So we're doing something wrong

A pay well, yeah for sure

She has this ad for seek geek seek geek advertised on her podcast with drake and she was like so today's sponsor is seek geek

Which makes sense because drake apparently hosts events

And I think seek geek lets you buy tickets for events. So if you like events and drake

Yeah, and she goes and they gave you 20 dollars

cool

That's her ad so no no the call to action was the best she said something like uh, she was like

So go, um, you can use seek geek if you want I guess

It's so funny. She's pretty good. I don't want to listen to 60 minutes of that interview but like

The interview is drake so she's interviewing drake, which is like I think her first podcast that came out and she's like in the middle of it

She's like

I don't I don't know any other questions. Do you

Do you have any other questions and he's like, uh, not really like

Weren't they in bed under the covers during the interview? Yeah, they're in a bed, which is

I mean, she's a genius clearly. So she's a genius. So I think her story is she was like a mom

She was like a mommy tiktoker

But I don't really

understand how she went from mommy tiktoker

to

podcast her

interviewing drake with like a really clear

brand that's amazing like a very distinct style

That's amazing because if you watch her tiktok, she doesn't talk like that

Yeah, it's just a character. She's or she doesn't I mean, it's not like

I don't think her tiktok is mainly like that. Like I'm gonna pull one up right now

No, some of it is like normal or her joking around with her friends. But no, it's it's like steven colbert

But instead of this conservative guy, it's the I don't give a shit

type of person. So she uh, I watched like an hour straight of one of these podcasts

I've rarely listened to like if you tell me, hey, there's a new podcast

Like I need 10 people to recommend a podcast before I go try it. You know what I mean? Like it's not like an easy ask

but um

Yeah, I got hooked on her shit really quickly and watched a hour long awkward interview with her and mark cuban and

Her with rick glasman. I don't know if you saw this but she did one with rick glasman and

It didn't seem like he was in on the joke

Who's rick glasman? I think he was actually the first one that she recorded

Rick glasman's a comedian. He's oh got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He might have been on the joke because he's like a very talented guy like he could

He could find that line where it looks like he's not in on the joke, but he is

um

But she was just like, uh, I mean, she's just awkward the interviewing him and he at some point. He's just like

What is like, what is this? Why are you doing this?

And she's like, why am I doing what I'm interviewing you

And he's like, no, but you're he's like you're saying that you're interviewing me, but everything I say you just

Say is a lie. Why would I lie? Why would I come to your podcast and lie and she's like, I don't know

Why are you lying? And then he's like

He's like, I'm not lie. Is this your bit. Is this what you do and he's like he just can't figure it out

He's like, I'm sorry. I was frustrated and defensive because I felt like you were trolling me or something

I didn't understand what was happening

I still don't really understand what's happening, but I'm gonna do better to try to answer your questions

And she's like, thank you

And he's like I wasn't being mean I was reacting

I want to know what happens before and after the interview because after like

So you and I have done some stuff in person with people and like you're really cool and friendly enough to people

But I don't know what you do afterwards like particularly with like a tucker carlson interview where he's like getting mean with people

And like do you shake hands afterwards and say thanks for coming?

You know what I mean lord, or just like does it does it was terrible. Thank you. That was that

Yeah, like oh, we dislike each other strongly

Yeah, so I'm curious to see what like the before where she's like and seen

And does she like be friendly and like give him a hug

I don't I would like to see what that before and after is like

Yeah, I I don't know. She's a mystery to me somebody explained this to me

I I just don't understand who she is how she landed such big guess why she immediately is so popular

I mean like I get her brand, but like how did she even break out? That's kind of what I don't get

Um, but whatever bobby all tough good good for you bobby all tough 25 years old. I think 25 25 26 years old and uh

Like clearly going to be one of the most famous podcasters

already. Yeah, fuck us

Yeah, I mean that's the third time that's happened or the second time it's happened with the color daddy woman

Uh, where like it was like episode two. She's shot up there. That's pretty rare

I mean, it's more common with youtube with podcasts that that doesn't happen

often at all

right now someone's gonna do that obnoxious tweet where it's like

Everybody thinks bobby all tough is an overnight success. Here's how it was 10 years in the making

And then it's just going to be like, you know

Some stupid origin story that like really wasn't like she actually is kind of an overnight success. Yeah, which is cool

I like there should be some right there should be some people talk about like they don't exist

I'm like, well instagram is only two years old. I mean like those are real like it's real

Um, which which which one of these things you want to go to? All right

Um dating so you and I both happily married off the dating market, but shit's getting crazy

In the dating world. I don't know if you've seen these two things. I'm going to tell you about

The first one is called chaos singles party. Have you ever heard of this? No, do download the dating apps now just to

Like check it out and see what it's about

If my wife asks this just just for science

Of course, no, I bought all these but I read the this was in the new york times. So

Um, I heard I read this story in the new york times and I was like what this sounds fascinating. So here's the story

this woman cassidy davis

Is on the dating app. She's just a normal person. Um

And it's valentine's day 2022. So last year valentine's day

She's frustrated. She doesn't doesn't have anything to do on valentine. So she just basically she's like, hey

Here's less what we should do. We should throw like a singles party on valentine's day

So if you're single on valentine's day come to this she tells every one of her girlfriends who's also struggling with online dating

hey

match with someone on tinder

and then invite them to this party invite them to a house party

And they're like what and she's like, yeah, just match with one person and invite them as your plus one to this house party

But everybody's gonna do it. So it would be just a bunch of single people at this party

And she's like, all right, so they they try to do it. She at the last minute

Is like, I don't know if anyone's gonna come so she invites 65 guys from tinder to be like come and they're like

What is happening? Is this real? Are you like cat fishing me? She's like, dude, just keep it come or don't come. All right

That's it

And so she has this house party and you can see the video on her on her tiktok, but it's like a very which city

I'm not sure where this one was but it's a small it was like a small thing

It looked like maybe there was like 20 people there, but they were kind of having fun

So it was like a bunch of single young people

Playing like drinking games or whatever she records. She makes a tiktok out of it

Stitches it together like just the highlights of the party basically

Posted on tiktok and says what she did. She goes she's like I

Did the most chaotic thing possible for valentine's day. I invited

I told to have all my girlfriends to match with someone on tinder and invite them to my house for this house party

And it was awesome and then people that thing explodes that video gets like whatever

tons of views

And the concept people really like this concept and so she's like i'm gonna do another one

So she posts an update. She's like i'm gonna do another one in two or three weeks

Puts a link up for the chaos singles party same rules. Is it free?

Um, I think it might have been free. Maybe there's a cover chart. I'm not sure

500 people show up to that one

And since then for the last year and a half of this woman's life

She's just been going on the road traveling city to city. She partnered up with tinder

They like promote this thing now in the app. They'll even promote her her parties

Um, and she gets paid to basically host these things and now 200 300 people a night come to these singles parties

Same rules match with one that's your plus one come to this event

You can mix and mingle you can you can stick with the person you invited or or just whatever

It's all just people on tinder who want to like

Have this chaos singles party. I love this idea. This is awesome. I'm looking at her tiktok now

So well done by her and now these things are like big like they're partnering with like legit venues

It like looks like a lot of fun. It looks like a whole whole scene now

This is awesome. I'm looking at her tiktok. This woman's talented

Did I tell you about the or did you ever see the twitter things that I used to do for dating sometimes?

Yeah, those were great. It was basically my friend, right? It was basically like it was Thanksgiving

And uh, we were having friends over and some of them were single and I'm like they were like, hey

Can you post me on your twitter? I want uh, they asked or you said it because that's crazy ask

One of the people made a joke. They're like, dude, just post me on your twitter

I need to meet a guy or some of it was like one of sarah's friends was like

I need to meet a nice a nice guy who's successful. Can you like

Introduce me. I was like, I'm just going to post you on twitter

And then I was like, well, I don't want to make you the only person like I'm your pimp

So I'm going to get 10 friends and the twitter said the tweet said, um

Hope you're hungry on Thanksgiving day, uh, you know, like here's 10 people 10 of my buds

Yeah, I was like, hope you're hungry. Meet my friend Jessica. Yeah

Here's 10. Here's 10 of my friends who are single and I said like a little bit about what they do for work

and just I just went on their instagram and took a picture and

It got viewed like two million times and I got DM'd by a lot of brands like, hey, you want to make this a thing?

We'll sponsor it. I was like, no, that's not going to be my thing. I don't want that. No, I was just fucking around

And I think that that could potentially work like we actually turned it into like a

Like where it's like an affluent crowd dating app or something like that

I think I I did it with Jonathan and Jonathan

Actually met a girl who he went out with I think like a handful of times like so for Jonathan

I think it was successful. Is this true? What happened after you got posted on this thing?

Well, one of the girls who applied

Shout out to Connor and she came to the south by meetup that we did so I got to meet her there hung out a little bit

um, but in terms of like my DM's like I got hit up by a gay dude and

this nice indian woman who I

Decided not to reply to you. So super successful. Yeah, but for her and for for the women. I'm sure it crushed

Are you still seeing that girl Connor? Are you guys just buddies now?

Um, no, not really. She lives in florida. So but it kind of worked. Yeah

We're brassman for straws

I mean pretty successful sounds like

These gorilla things I love by the way. I love these like gorilla gorilla dating. Yes. So here's another one

Date me docs. Have you have you heard about this trend?

So it's date me dot directory. Is that the your that's the that's the directory of them

But date me docs is like basically you take instead of going on a dating app

You created a google doc and you just write in long form

All about you your story what you want who you are what you're into what you're not into where your boundaries are all that stuff

You just make a very detailed

Google doc and that's your profile and then somebody created the directory

That links all the people like it's like an air table table. So it'd be like, you know, here's, you know, um, christina

She's a female. She's interested in men. She's age 42. And it's it's just literally an air table

and um

Dude, they're all poly they put mono and poly they're like it looks like

Almost half of them are poly

I mean, they want to have an open relationship, but they're not serious

Kids these days. No, I think it's like, oh, I think they want to like

Be dating a bunch of people at once or something

It's like half of them are poly. That's wild to me. Yeah. Yeah. That's I think, um, you know, that's that's something that's changed

I think since we were like when I was dating

10 years ago

I never met anybody who was like, you know, I'm polyamorous

No, it was like you see on the tv show that came up. It was like

Yeah, the only people who did that are like are like, um, it's like a guy who's got like 10 wives and it's on the tlc channel

It comes on after john and k plus eight. Yeah

Yeah, this is uh, I think that's new. So anyways, the these docs if you look at these click click into some of these docs

They put photos and stuff and like a huge bio. This is wild

I click this one. Uh, that's by misha. It's the fourth one down

So misha is a male and it takes to to a website that there's just like these like

torches like you're entering a dungeon

Probably not the vibe misha that you want but here we go

And then the title is just romance

I am currently single looking for our primary partner hot. That's how you said that primary partner like that

um, only been in oath relationships just what a house

blah blah blah

And then

It's like here's a bunch of my favorite blog posts. Here's some of my first dates. You can chat with me on discord

Here's my spotify. Here's some pictures of me

Uh, a bunch of pictures boom boom boom. All right, so that's that's misha

but like one of the things I noticed I clicked through a bunch of these is how

Intellectual all of these are so they'll be like

you know

Things you don't normally put on a dating profile. It'd be like like here's one. I'm on this woman's uh page

Shreda. She says

um

I'm not ideologically monogamous meaning. I don't think monogamy is innately superior to polyamory

I hold romantic feelings for more than one person at once but also struggle with jealousy of all of what it's like very

Is like is this therapy? What is this?

This is like a whole like open book style of letting somebody into your brain, which I can definitely see

working for some people

And I can see it totally not working for a type for the type of person who they don't want out

So I actually think this is a really great idea because I think it attracts in

a lot of the same type of person the kind of like

A little bit overly intellectual

Very open-minded type of crowd that would be attracted. You know, it's kind of tech tech focused

crowd here

Oh my gosh, this is why I'm just smiling

That was just literally he's looking at his screen and he's just smirking

I'm looking at

A lot of this uh, it's there's one guy. He's got a 15 page user manual

And he like documents his whole life to explain how to like and he talks about like ethical stuff

He's like the correct answer to the trolley problem is to kill one person to save five

Like he like there is a correct answer

Like this is wild and on some regard. I'm like, well, if you're like a single woman who's like 30 and you're like

Look, I just need to meet like a competent man who's like thoughtful. I guess this is the way to go

unfortunately

These aren't the type of guys that typically like can woo a woman

I'm on a doc right now and it just there's a whole sub subsection called child rearing plans

Then it's seven paragraphs of their plans for child rearing. This is pre first date, which is kind of amazing

so have you heard of um

This reminds me of two things one if you uh, there's this guy named christian

Rutter, I think his name is he founded okcupid. He was one of the three or four co-founders and he had a

blog

On all the data that okcupid had and so and then he eventually turned it into a book and the thing was basically like

You say one thing but your actions on our dating app say another thing like you say you want x y and z

And I think one of the big takeaways was you say you want this this and this

You really just go after people's photos

So like you say you don't want you say you don't want a smoker

But if they're hot enough you'll you'll go with a smoker

You say you don't want an animal lover

But if they like fit your like your physical wants you're gonna you're gonna want to be with them and

Like that always intrigued me and that's why I don't think some of these like long form things will actually work

I think they want it to work, but it won't the other thing is have you heard about the league?

Do you remember the dating app the league?

Yeah, she came on the pod once well. Yeah, her name is Amanda Bradford. She's a buddy of mine. She sold the league

Do you know they sold the league?

I didn't know they sold it. So they sold it. Yes. I believe it was a very good sale

They sold it to match I think match.com or one of the big ones and I asked why they bought it and she was like

Well, basically we only had like five or ten employees or something at the league. It was a really small team

But the league originally

I don't know if it started out as the phrase ivy league, but it was basically like high end

To meet a high end partner and you had to like apply and stuff like that and she was like one day

I just said I went to she's a developer

And she goes I logged into like our our app store account and I was like

We're charging 20 bucks a month right now. How high does the app store let me charge?

Like what's the highest amount for subscription revenue? And I think

I think it was like $99 a week. She's like, that's the highest I go. Fuck it. That's what we're going to do

We're just going to do $99 a week

And she was like everyone at my company and everyone outside says it's not going to work

She's like it crushed it. We our revenue went up like crazy

And one of the biggest reasons why match bought us is they're like

We need to figure out how to sell products that are hundreds of dollars a month and no one knows how and she's like, oh

I'll teach you how

All you do is you go to your the app store and you just delete the number that you put in and you just put the higher number

And guess what people are still going to do it

And that was like her thing was that it was a really really expensive

Dating app and it totally worked

for for higher end people

and so

I still think that could be cool what what you and I didn't have when we were younger when we were dating

We probably wouldn't have qualified then

And we are and unfortunately we're not uh, we can't use it now, but basically have you heard of raya?

Yeah, it's like a celebrity

It's like you gotta be hot and famous to be in or something like that

Yeah, I think they just look at your instagram like if you're verified on instagram you're allowed to do it

So raya is like everyone who's single is like saying like, oh, of course we know all about it

But raya is cool, but I like these like exclusive dating apps and these expensive ones. I think it's way better

I've got friends that run tinder competitors and it sounds like a horrible business. It's one of the very few businesses where

You can't be like number three or number four like there's basically number one and number two and that's it

At least that's what it appears like if you're going for mass market

What's the quote? It's like, you know, I don't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member

That's that's sort of what you want when it comes to

dating or cool things

The you know

This date me docs thing. I think is a really fun idea. I'm glad

Whoever I don't know who created this but kind of kind of like a cool cool idea

And obviously like things like this have been around for a long time, right? Like Indian people famously like this is how

My parents got married for example you write in the newspaper

Like you're you're like all the bio data. It's like your your name or age your job

Your whatever and you just create this profile

That's like text only and people are like cool married. Let's do it

And um, you know that that's basically how things how things work. So, you know, something this actually can work

the funny thing is um

This is actually you know what I'm actually do i'm actually just gonna recruit on here

I think this is a great recruiting platform

I think these people are probably all really smart thoughtful individuals who are tech savvy a lot of developers on here

They put their github profile. Yeah, fuck it linked in i'm just i'm scraping this for leads

To hire from this is amazing

Uh, uh, dude, there's one guy on here says 16 years old. That's a trap jack. I'm not clicking that

I've seen way too many episodes of chris hands and i'm not clicking that

I know where that went straight to the fbi website, bro

The next phrase you hear is uh, come on in

Check yourself in

Dude, my first one of my first internet companies was called bunk and the premise was we would put these ads

We would uh, we put these at so close to the next air bb

Well, it should have been air bnb and it should have been just tinder for tinder

But it basically the way it started was we would go and find online three and four bedroom apartments

And we would like

If it was a four bedroom apartment for four grand we would say we have one bedroom available for one thousand dollars

And we would get 500 people to apply

And then we would host a party and team up people to get that place as well as a bunch of other places

Because we're like, oh you guys are all looking for similar budgets apparently

so just like come and team up and get your own apartment

And uh, it worked it worked quite well and then a bunch of the people at the party started like hooking up with each other

And we didn't catch the clue that we should have just made this a dating thing

That's and then we launched this app

We called it roommates and it was basically tinder for roommates and again. We didn't catch the clue

That people like I actually met a girl two different girls on that app

Uh, that I ended up dating in 2013 or 14 and again, we didn't catch the clue

We should have just done this for dating. It would have worked a lot better

Yeah, the dating game is changing, you know one thing that dating is always going to be a problem

Like it will never not be a pain point for people like no

And there's no such thing as sort of like solving dating and anytime one thing gets popular it creates the need for another

So like you know tinder created the need for something like hinge

And now when you have sort of like tinder and hinge generation

I talk to people who are dating now and they're like, oh, you know what?

Two worst things about those like about tinder and hinge is like you get either on tinder

You just get bots like this is just girls trying to get you to like

Subscriber to their only fans like oh this really hot girl matched with me and she's interested in me

She tells me to just click this link and then like follow that. Oh man. This is just an upsell

Like this is a bot. It's just upselling me basically the other one is people that um

Like because like we were joking about the poly thing, but like people have a lot of different like

I don't know preferences and kind of different situations. There's like a lot more configurations than like

I'm a boy who likes girls. I'm a boy who likes boys, right? Like that's kind of what we knew was like

You know, we were checkers not chess when it came to dating, right? There was only so many moves you could make you move forward

It backwards that was it

And so you're you're red or black. That's that's the game. Yeah now. It's like, you know multicolored chess

and so the the way that

My friend was telling me he's like, oh, there's this one app

I think it was called field or something like that. Uh, maybe I got that wrong

But I think it's called field and he's like I like it because people just super straight up

It's like the culture on that app is you got to be ultra direct

It's like I am looking for and you say the exact

thing you're looking for and what you're into and what you're not into so that like

People know like they're not gonna get meet somebody. Oh, this person's really cool

But they want a completely different type of relationship configuration gender configuration that I'm into

And so, um, so I think, you know, there's there's always a new need

You know how when you and I do meetups and every once in a while a line will form to like say hi

It's like, hey, how are you?

I was joking with my friend and she's like, you know, that's what it feels like to be a hot chick all the time

like

You know, like when you and I will have like an mfm meetup and we walk in and you'll see like oh people

Like are staring at us like this guy's giving me energy like he wants to like me to open

I'll turn my hips a little bit and let him like

And give them like the you know, like I'll open my

That's what it is. It's like wherever you put your junk

It's like you'll be at a thing and you're like one-on-one with this other guy

But you feel this it's all dudes and you feel this other this energy you feel this other guy hovering

You're like, all right. I'll turn my hips a little so this guy could get in on the combo

And uh, that's basically what it feels like to be like a

Six out of ten woman like all the time or maybe even lower like just to be a woman all the time

It's just you just whatever you want. It's yours

Dude just last thing you know this do you remember?

Like when I was in college the the game was like you would go to a bar or club or whatever

And literally it was like a physical version of tinder. It was like you just go

You guys just go behind the girl and just grind and if the girl like accepts the grind then then you're in

It's like national. It's like national geographic man

You're like a bird flexing its feathers

Craziest that's the craziest thing that used to be normal. I don't know if that's still normal

That's the craziest thing that like I experienced in my life. Did you do that? I never did that. That was so uncomfortable

Dude, that was all anybody around me even knew like that was getting run burn on your junk

Oh, no not a chance. I was too uncomfortable for that

You had a question on here that I actually was thinking about the other day

You have a question on here and I I originally thought I wrote this

But I guess you did where it's what's an example of things today that our grandkids in 50 years will think is absolutely insane

I've been thinking about this because on tiktok and instagram the kids grinding is my example grinding at the club is my first example

I don't know if they do that anymore or not, but didn't even take 50 years

It took me 15 and I already realized that was batch of crazy then

Well, you'll see these videos and they'll be of high school. So like the kids now will be like check this out

This is a home video of the class of 2008 in high school

And you like see them walking around and like you see like the the stuff that we used to wear and you see like our razor flip phones

And then like the kids reminisce like I can't believe they did this or that was so much better

Or this was so much worse. You had a cool question on here about what do you think will be crazy?

Yeah, I think about this a lot

What are things that 50 years from now like our grandkids will look at the way we live today

It'd be like what the hell were you thinking right like?

um, you know, there's past example like if you go way past it's like

Slavery wow, I can't believe that was just like the way you guys did things or whatever right like, you know

Riding horseback. That's crazy. That's how people got around or just like people just dying of like everything

You know like early on early aids like that's crazy. That was so risky to have a kid

Like, you know one out of what four or five kids would just die before they even hit 10 like that's

That's really really rough

I was reading this Lewis and Clark book and whenever they get sick on the trail

They like give each other pills and they're like, we're just going to give you diarrhea and you're going to shit out the sickness

They call it a rush pill

They go we're going to give you these pills and you're going to get tons of diarrhea and you're going to be heal

And that was like the thing it was just we're just going to make you poop a ton

Yeah, yeah, we did that with four loco. It was great

This changes shape. All right, so so you had you wrote some on here of more recent history

So you said driving to places without google maps. Yeah, I like these are things that we experienced the before and after

Right, like we're at that age where we experienced the paper map era the asking people for directions era

Just knowing how the interstate system of the united states works like my dad just kind of knew roughly

What you do

To google maps, dude, I don't even know the highway. I live in austin. I don't even know the highway the big highway one mile away

I can't even tell you the name of it same. I don't even look up

Go by feel

All right, then you had land lines versus sell like land lines being the only way to contact someone versus cell phones

We we both experienced that

You wrote unsafe cars. What did you mean by unsafe cars, dude?

My first car was in 1992 mas de protege

and we bought it for I got it for nine hundred dollars for my mailman and

When you look at that

Yeah, but I deliver the mail you're like

I'll take it sometimes

We'd have to wear we'd have to wear ties on uh

We'd have to wear ties to school every once in a while and if like my dad went to work too early

And he wasn't there my mailman would tie my tie

So like I got to know the mailman a little bit kind of weird bought it from bought my car from 900 dollars

And if you see that car

To a new brand new like Honda Civic if you ever watch the videos of them running into each other

It's insane. It's absolutely insane like the safety. It's pretty wild how dangerous they are

So yeah, I think like these like uh, when we look at cars

When I look at cars from like the 80s and 90s, it's ridiculous how shitty they are. Yeah, that's crazy

So what are the ones that you think 50 years from now?

So we got a couple on here. Let's just go back and forth. You do one. I'll do one

The first one is having and I've said this for a while

But having like a growth on you having something growing in your body that's going to kill you

That you could have figured out had you just gotten some type of scan a year earlier

So I think that's gonna we're gonna look back at like dude

So you just had this thing in your body and you didn't even know it'll be like so

How did you know it's like well if you if you would feel a lump then you would just go to the doctors like feel a lump

Yeah, like if there's like a golf ball in you

That's new. All right. Let me go get it checked out. That's literally state-of-the-art

Like I just described state-of-the-art procedure and half the time you're like, yeah, fuck it. It'll go away. You know

Maybe it was that burger right earlier. Yeah, like

Go away. It's probably a life phone. I'll go away and so yeah, I think that will be a thing

How about yours?

Um, okay easy one. I'll start easy mode driving yourself like it's pretty clear self-driving cars are like on the horizon

The idea that like yeah back in my day

We used to get a license when we were 16 years old and then yeah, I just used to drive

I used to just hold there. We used to have a steering wheel on the car

And you just have to look where you're going and all the other cars were also holding steering wheels

Looking where they were going and we tried not to crash and if you're on a two-lane road

It's 80 miles an hour the opposite way with three feet of distance

Yeah, yeah, you just well they painted these lines and you just had to stay in the middle

And you just had to keep awake and stay in the middle just keep looking

And they'll be like what like that will sound completely barbaric, right like

And it's like did people not crash? Yeah, they sure did. Did they die?

Some people get drunk before they did it like it'll sound just like

What were you guys thinking and it was like well, we just didn't have the tech at the time

But like when you have self-driving cars

Cars are going to drive perfectly

Without you need it. There won't even be a steering wheel on the car

Cars will become like entertainment pods. You'll play video games or you'll sleep or you'll watch movies or you'll work

Like cars will become a whole different thing

Very soon and there's a clear before and after

Another one is so different diets like we still debate. We're like the akins diet. That's a thing

Oh, no, no, no, you want to do the other thing where you got to eat lots of carbs, you know car whole grains

That's that's what you have to do and to this day like we're like, well, what which one do you feel good on?

I don't know like just do whatever I've alternated carnivore and vegan twice

Yeah, you are vegan to your you'll only consume vegans

It's just constantly changed and like

We don't know which one necessarily is better

You know, there's like really good arguments for both and we aren't sure and I think that that's pretty insane

That uh, who knows, you know, I don't know

By the way, have you ever do you know a lot of doctors? Do you know how many classes they take on nutrition? Typically?

It's like it's like a class like they don't doctors don't study nutrition, which is pretty insane

Or at least like your average like or exercise. Yeah, your average doctor doesn't exactly

It doesn't really know too much about exercise and nutrition

And so I think that that's like something we're going to be like

I don't know

You just kind of like try to do a bunch of different stuff and like you'd read a read a bunch of blog posts on it and

Listen to podcasts and like

You just kind of guessed a little bit, right? I think eating meat. So killing animals to eat their meat

I think will be seen like a

genocide

Like a slavery. I think it'll be seen as completely barbaric and immoral

50 years from now when we have the alternative that there will be an alternative which is basically

Lab grown meat or synthetic food

That will solve the kind of protein problems and taste get the taste right

And the cost right and at that when that happens as that shift happens

We'll just be like, yeah, people just just take the thing you slaughter it

You just kill it and then you eat it and they'll be like you do it yourself. No gross. I would never do that

They do it and then they package it and then we eat it and they're like what like, didn't you have a dog?

It's like, yeah, I would never do that to a dog

It's like what you would do it to this other animal. It's like, yeah

It's like, how did you guys decide? It's like, well

I guess I'm on cuteness or like, I don't know. I don't know how we decided what was completely

Illegal and immoral and would get you canceled versus like

You eat it two times a day like, you know, there's the line is very thin between like cow and chicken and dog

Right, like it's not that that's not that clear why one yes, first the other no

So I think that eating meat will become we'll be seen as as basically like our generations

We just committed genocide on animals

I have 20 cows at my ranch. You knew that right that cows out there. They're not yours, right?

They're just straight or they're yours

They're what my neighbor they're my neighbor owns them and they are allowed to use my land to graze

And I don't pay taxes because of that or I pay less taxes

But basically, uh, you I get to know them. So like I know who they are

Like I know which ones are which I know whose mom is who and like

It's like it sucked our first week there that we bought the place like a four-month-year-old calf died

or it was but a four-month-year-old calf is still like

600 pounds or whatever it was. It was like a 600 pound baby

And apparently it like swallowed a golf ball. It's my neighbor was like, hey, were you hitting golf balls?

I was like, no, dude, I

I was like, I just I just moved here. I didn't it wasn't me. I don't know

Um, like it's all on instagram

It falls at the new

Yeah, and I was like, dude, once you get to know me, you'll you'll understand neither of us to golfer

I'm not a golfer, you know what I mean?

And so and then I was like, hey, uh, jeff this guy was I was like, what

Do I go and get like a shovel or something? He goes. Oh, no, that's some bitch is going to be gone in three days

I was like, what do you mean? He goes, you'll see and so I come back in three days and the whole body and carcass

Everything was gone the all the animals like the birds and hogs. They just ate it. It was completely gone

And the mother would go back to the spot where that calf was and would like mourn

And I was like, my heart was broken. I was like, I don't know if I could eat meat in the same way now

So I felt like devastated and so since then I've basically I only eat red meat like once a month because the cow is like

I get to know them and I'm like, I feel too sad. I can't do it. I'm not I'm not

I'm not that manly of a man. I can't do it. But you you you think that child birthing

Manually is going to be a thing of the past

Yeah, so, uh, when I was in LA, we had dinner with a person named Jessica. Ma, you know, she is

Yeah, she's uh, she's very impressive

She's super impressive. I think she did a company called in denaro. I don't know her very well

She she's at the dinner, but she was on the other side table. So I didn't get to know her too much

But uh, she seemed very interesting like in denaro was like an accounting company that's still very successful

But I think it's so successful now that she just has tons of money and does more stuff

Yeah, it's a big one

I think she's she's out of that business now from what it sounds like. Um, and we were like, what do you do?

It she's like, oh, I basically invest and incubate like, um,

like hard science

Businesses and I think she's still only like 29

Yeah, yeah, it was she was very very impressive

We should actually have her on sometimes you could just tell that people are playing a different game at a different level

So there's like, yeah same game different level

Different game same level and then there's different game different level. I would put her in different game different level

Yeah, you can talk to her. She's pretty brilliant. I'm within five minutes. You're like, oh, okay

I think she was I think her she started in denaro an accounting

Software company at 19. I don't know much about her but she started her. I just went to her linkedin by the way

Uh started her first six figure business when she was in middle school

Goddamn different game different level again. Yeah

I was I was I hadn't even grinded yet at that. Yeah

Yeah, that's crazy. Um, anyways, so she's she's doing this thing. Um

One of the things we we so we were talking to her

But we were like, what are some of the like crazy science things that you're funding and then she would say things that were like

Her thing was like novel like she's trying to fund like a novel approach

At like an existing thing. I don't want to butcher it

But something like that which basically like a which called a bold a bold uh bold science

So it's like basically like someone taking a new scientific approach

At an existing problem. So she'll go to universities and she'll find

Um research labs where they'll be like this is the one researcher who's trying to do this thing

But this like completely other way than the general field is going and she's like cool

I want to fund that because those bold approaches when they work working a really big way and um

So one of the things we talked about just somehow in the conversation came up was like

the uh

Like birthing a child is like the natural way or whatever like, you know woven carries baby nine months

It goes to the labor delivers baby

um, you know

Dad snips the umbilical cord like that's the the process as we know it today. Wait, does the dad do it?

They they are like dad. You want to do it?

You gotta be ready. Is that what is that whatever to be offered? I'm not doing that

On them in the moment. They're gonna be like dad come do this and you're gonna be like what no, I'm good. I'm

I'm holding her hand over here. I'm I'm busy and they'll be like no no no come come do it

And then you're gonna be like, uh

And you're gonna hold the thing and be like, I don't want to hurt this. This is gonna hurt. What is this?

I'm not doing that man. I don't even want to I won't even trim her toenails. I'm not gonna touch that

I don't want to touch that thing you're did you do it? I did it. Yeah

Oh, man, I don't the peer pressure of six doctors and your wife who just like did a modern miracle

Did a like act of human bravery and courage?

And then you're like, I don't feel comfortable doing this like dude. I am not doing that wimp of the year

Like I'm already told my wife. I think I'm gonna pass out. I'm thinking a couple zanexes in the room

This is on no, that's too much for me, man. I don't know if I can do that. I'm I'm not one of that guys

I'm not that guy. I don't think my brother-in-law with my sister was, uh,

You haven't given having birth giving birth. Whatever. Yeah

She like yawned at some point

And she just turned and looked at him like, oh, are you tired?

He was like, no, sorry, it's just been like 70 hours

He's like, no, it's just boring

Yeah, it is honestly kind of boring. Um, but yeah anyways, yeah, you better be afraid you're gonna have to do it

Um, so anyways, birth of a child. So she was like, yeah, I think that's gonna be seen as like

unnecessary sort of barbaric, um, not like as like, um, scientifically sound as like eventually we'll be able to kind of like

And almost like incubate the baby, um, and just like deliver the baby through

like essentially a machine that the baby will be sort of like

Grown and delivered that way and have you met someone who's had a surrogate?

Yeah, maybe we haven't had surrogate. Yeah, I have and they've acknowledged that they don't feel

They didn't love the kid the same as the other one

First of all, did you ask of course I asked of course is that not the that's that that's obviously the first thing

You're gonna ask when you hear about it. Well, there's like a there's like a handful of questions

There's a handful of questions, which is a like obviously how much does that cost?

Yeah, yeah, other women. Yeah, where'd you find them?

Uh, and then like what did you do? Like what was the relationship like and then like my fourth question is like

Did they ever try to hold the baby hostage?

Dude, I could still imagine you being the worst possible surrogate because you wouldn't micromanage their lifestyle

It's like hey, it's my baby in there. You better

Get up here on this treadmill right now

The surrogate can basically hold you hostage, right because you'll do anything

You'll do like, well, yeah, whatever you want

Like I'm I have to give you what you want because I will do anything for that kid

But then the last the fifth question was like, all right, but like

Did you love the kid as much as the other ones and the answer was at first? No, definitely not. I definitely didn't

Uh, they got on us with me and I so I don't know if I believe this is gonna be a thing

Um, but yeah, I feel like if there's the option it's kind of like the epidural

like

So I think when we were in the hospital

So my wife's insane and wants to only do natural birth and like feel all the pain for no reason

But she's like, you know, she's like that's how I get down. I'm like, oh wow. Oh my god

Or so I guess opposites

I've taken the life version of epidural

You took the epidural

Exactly

Yeah, do you already open it up?

So

But the doctor had said 90% she's like 85 to 90% of the patients in their hospital do the epidural

Because like, you know, it makes sense like if you can

You know, not feel that level of pain. Yeah, it's it's easy to see why somebody would choose that. So, um

You know, if you just sort of extrapolate from there, you're like, cool

Would you like to also not have the nine months of pregnancy like going on in your body?

Um

If there was that option like you really think people wouldn't take it. I think people would take it

Yeah, I think some people would but I just don't I don't know if it's really the look at the ozympic thing

Dude, if you give people the magic pill the way out like people take that shit

Like like if you get the cost, right, that's a good point. I do I do love people are going to avoid pain

All right, they're gonna avoid discomfort and pain where they can I order door dash three times a day

Like you think that people aren't gonna do this. They're gonna. Yeah, you're right actually

I love magic pills whenever I hear someone this who's selling like a magical cure or a magic pill

I'm I'm in probably won't work but tell me everything

Ozympic is a little bit of a magic pill when I when I was taking it it was quite magical. Did you take it?

No, no, I haven't taken it. You should it's awesome

I guess I'm also kind of crazy in that way where I'm like, well, then it wouldn't be as satisfying

Like I want to do this on my own

Yeah, yeah, but having abs is pretty sick. So

Two or three failed diets away from from breaking and going on ozympic

Um, all right, what else we got? I want to tell you about this thing

that

When people read it, they probably didn't have the same reaction as I did but I think they should so

There's this guy

It's called the greatest scam ever written and it's about a copywriter

Who ran the scam his name was patrice runner and so it started basically in the 90s where

He originally saw this ad. Have you ever heard of this book called the lazy man's way to riches?

Yes

So I don't remember when that originally came out. I think in the 60s, but the lazy man's

Way to riches is a really famous ad it sold like three or four million copies of this book

And the ad is famous

Amongst copywriters because it was really successful and a lot of the copywriting that we use now for the internet

They kind of originated from that ad and this guy patrice runner

He saw this ad and he was poor and he was like

I don't want to be poor anymore. It's pretty amazing that this guy just convinced me

To buy this book based off of just like, uh, you know 20 paragraphs of text. That's amazing

I want to learn how to do that. And so he did

And so he starts studying copywriting and he reads a newspaper about this lady named like madame duval maria duval was her name

And basically there was a story about her and how there was a murder in the Caribbean

And how they couldn't find where the body is and she was a psychic and she led the people to where the body was

And I don't know if that's actually true if she actually did that

But it was in the newspaper that that happened and so he contacted her it was like look

I want to side up

Create this

Psychic company and I want you to be the face and I'm going to give you five percent of profits forever

And you really don't even need to do anything other than like let me use your face occasionally and that's it

so she signs up for it and he starts creating these ads where

He would mail people these letters that looked like it was typed out

And it was from maria duval and it would use these amazing like bits of copies

So like the thing would say like the opening line was if you've got a special bottle of bubbly that you've been saving for celebrating great news

Now's the time now is the time to open it up

And that would be like the opening line and it was a nine page letter that he would send to people and he would say like

you know send me uh, $40 or $50 and we will like

You you'll have good luck

It was basically like you send money and you get nothing and then eventually it was like oh you sent $40

We're going to keep sending you more letters and they would send like

Two letters a day sometimes so someone would often times would receive two letters

And they would send like an ad for some vitamin that you would need to take and recipients that basically it said

The recipients were urged to reply and close a check or money order for $50 to receive a mysterious

Uh bit of power and luck in order to attract attract money

As and then also they would after they accepted the money

They would get a document called a guide to my new life that included winning lottery numbers

and so this guy did this and uh, he did it for

So well that he was making 20 million dollars a year doing this

And eventually the thing ran for 10 years and it made 250 million dollars

And then the government swoops in and they're like dude, this is fraud and so now he's in jail

And he's waiting sensing but he might get up to life in prison

So like he's looking at like at least like 20 years of prison for this and

They were like, why'd you do this? He's like, I was just so attracted to copywriting and with writing

He told the reporter this is all from this uh an article from uh called the walrus

There's a great article and they show you like what the ads look like but we'll talk about that in a second

But he goes with writing you could get the attention of someone and at the end after just a few minutes

That person sends you a check to get a project

Uh to get a product to an address or company that they've never heard of

And when I read stories like this that should be the takeaway, which is not like this criminal is bad

But how do I use this amazing copywriting stuff actually for good?

And if you click on the article you'll see the envelopes would have these amazing things

Like we're on the back of the envelope. It would say something like um

After you've sealed this envelope, we will be the only one to have ever opened it

And it says please leave the following blank and it says here's the day we received it

Here's the time that we received it and the recipient who's supposed to be maria duvall

Would have to check the box in order to like say like yep

I've opened it and they put all these little like strange like tactics of getting someone's to convince and believe what they were saying

It's incredibly fascinating. So it's called the uh the the publication they did that an article on this guy

It's called the walrus. It's really good because you should read this and think like

Copywriting is amazing. This guy was a fraud obviously. So that's bad

But whatever he did do that for good shit and it's awesome

It's a really fascinating article about this guy

But yeah, now he's going to get sentenced to like it looks like 20 years of prison

And you know who else did this this great copywriter?

Great copywriter gary halbert. You remember gary halbert. So yeah, why did he go to jail?

I didn't actually know it was tax tax something. Yeah tax. I think tax and also basically he would sell this product

I think it was called a family

Uh, was it called a suit of arms? What's it called a crest like a family crest?

He would sell this product whereas like you mail in like par and then you get mail back like a crest

I don't know if it's like a graphic, but he just didn't fulfill the orders. He just took the money and like

Bounced it was just like so easy to do that too to just give him a crest like

Yeah, he just took the money fiver. He was just too early. Yeah, and so he went to prison

I think for like 10 years and that's where he wrote this really good book where it's like he wrote

Letters to his son on copywriting and that's called the letter from boron

I guess boron was the name of the prison that he was in

But these copywriters it's really cool how you're able to pull this shit off

And you by the way people act like you can't do this anymore because people are smarter. That's not true

100% can still pull off all this but it's very fascinating

Uh, I'm with you. I think this is one way that we are very very similar where we both read these things

and have the same

sort of like

Unexpected reaction, which is some blend of like

excitement and admiration not for the crime

But for the the tools that led to the like, you know, it's the same way. I love it. Definitely 11. It's like

Robbing a bank. I like I like it. I like the I like what goes in to rob in that bank, right?

it's like you shouldn't like the criminal in this case, but you are attracted to the skill to the cleverness to the

The guile that goes into doing something well every guy who saw lino de caprio and wolf of wall street or catch me if you can

Was like, hey, bomb. Can I can you give me one of your checks? I want to see if I can actually change the numbers on it

Like everyone like you know what I mean?

Like everyone who saw that was do the same thing or like everyone looked up like

You know shrapford oakma jordan belford's thing after they

Wolf of wall street movie like everyone's attracted cards or whatever right? Yeah, right? They're like, oh, I could counting cards

How does that work? I could do that. You had a great bit of copy that I read on facebook the other day you go

You go the more shirtless pictures I I post the more free protein

I'm sent some asked me to some asked to pay me to post I've never done that and I don't intend to but here's some brands that

I use blah blah blah

We may be whores in the par household, but we're certainly not

Where did you get that I stole that from arie gold so arie gold that tv show entourage

So every great copywriter does the same thing where you do this too

You hear phrases you hear phrases and you store them and you just store them

It's so every single person who's good at writing you have a bank that you just we call it a swipe file

But I remember even when I was in sixth grade watching entourage at sunday night at 9 p.m

On hbo. I remember hearing that I go that's mine. I'm stealing that one

And you just wait for that perfect opportunity to use those lines

Dude, I have my my it's literally called you said you said phrases literally my sheet is called my note is called phrases

Um, and I just have so many good ones here. I love it because what people don't know is like

Phrases are really important. So I'm working on this with hampton actually where we're trying to create like our mantra or like

With every type of community. It's basically a cult or sorority where you like you need like a phrase that summarizes it

You need a crest you need a crest. I need a crest like I need something

And I've been like tinkering with phrases and it's so important to like nail a phrase and like there's so many like really good phrases

Um, like for example, I'm reading this book about martin luther king's assassination and he was assassinated

Uh, well, well, basically he was at this protest where garbage workers black garbage workers

Were uh, we're wanted to be treated better and their phrase was just I am and it was underlined

I am a man

And like that like that one phrase is let's treat me like a you know, I'm not I'm not a slave anymore

I'm a man treat me like a man

And so I it's like all these phrases and I just like we'll see a phrase even though I remember writing that I am a man

We are mostly man

I'm looking for more things to apply

Oh, that's too touchy of a subject. Uh, that's a whole another thing. But anyway, I love these like beautiful phrases

I love these beautiful phrases. You gotta collect them. Are you a workshop in a couple right now?

You want to do a little live workshop?

So one that has gotten shut down, but I love it which is

CTC confidential confidentiality transparency and commitment

So ctc and and just you got a ct. So you miss one meeting your band

Uh, we've actually kicked three people out already because we've heard that they've

communicated with outsiders of like, uh, some confidential information

But ctc is what i'm trying to uh, which is what i'm trying to

Get stuck make a thing. Yes. It's not becoming a thing as of late. But yeah, what else you got?

Well, that's it. That's the only one that's

Hard to work over there

Dude

It's hard because it can't be rushed

It's hard coming up with a phrase. Uh, like what are these phrases?

What are some ones that you're inspired by so you said the i am one?

What are some other ones that you think are are well done?

Well, this other one is is they're calling it core, which is like commitment openness, uh, respect and, uh,

One other thing I don't know what the e stands for but core and the core is not sticking with me

But i'm i'm trying to be open mind core is not sticking with me because four things to remember is a lot harder than three

Values then it's not like you're uh, it's like your values. Yes values. Yeah your your slogan

So one thing i've been thinking about is no one

Uh, nothing. No one never

Where I was like that nothing. No one ever never which is like is this confidential nothing? No one never dude

Like yes, like everything everything it's nothing. No one ever never you can never talk about what's going on

So i'm pulling around with nothing. No one never. I like that one. Yeah. Yeah. Nice

Uh, that one that one did a little something for me. I like that. Yeah, did it get you going?

Uh, what are some other interesting ones? I there's not like that many that are intriguing to me to be honest

But i'm trying to figure out like how to do it. It's really hard just creating that shift from scratch

It's way harder than it looks

Or i'm just not talented, but like are there any good ones that you like

You know the one thing I heard about like on the value side that always stuck with me was

Um, a value is useless without acknowledging the trade-off

So like, you know, most companies when they do their kind of like values, they'll be like respect honor integrity

Which is stupid because like what's the opposite?

It's of course. Yeah, like uh, you said nothing

That's of interest you've acknowledged. No like uh sacrifice in that and it's just generic and so it's not memorable

It's not memorable. It's not useful because it's like, um

It's just an of course type of statement whereas, uh, you know, facebook did one that that stuck which was move fast and break things

It's beautiful

And move fast and break things was so good and the reason why was because it acknowledged

The downside of moving fast is sometimes you're gonna break shit

and like

They said yeah, yes, we take that we will we'll err on the side of that well, we will take that trade-off and so, um

I think that values are only useful when you acknowledge

When you when they bake into it

the opinionated

trade-off right like that the fact that yep

There are pros and cons to this and our opinion is that this is the pro that matters

Right. Um, and and that we're down we we will live with this downside

Because that big because that's what shows you what you value like for example, um

If you're somebody who's really high integrity

You're gonna, um

You're gonna

Let's say there's you know opportunities to take you're gonna not take you're gonna have to sacrifice

Things that could go your way because you're high integrity. This is like michelle obama had one that that kind of was

Yes, it's gotta it's gotta be like painfully truthful painfully true exactly

So she did that when they go low we go high

Which is like kind of acknowledges that like you all they go low it hurts

You want to hit them back, but no we go high right when they go low we go high

That's another example of one that's like

I like I don't know when she said that but that's like more than five years ago

I still remember that a lot of people repeated that

Kind of like to make fun of her but it was politics people make fun of everything

but like

I do think there was something in that that was like

More real than just like

We stand for respect. It's like, okay, cool. It doesn't mean anything to anybody when you say that

It's like we're all numb to those sorts of things like subway eat fresh

And we print grill marks onto our chicken because it's not really grilled like you know, it's like all right

well

That's what they should really say

Looks fresh, but it ain't

We uh, my high school had a great one that I've always remembered it was meant for we were an all-boys school

And it was meant for others

And they just did such a good job of like nailing that into our brains just you got to be a man for others

There's like that's gonna be a dating app, too

Yeah

You're right

Uh, so I remember meant for others. I like that but it's been really challenging. So I guess I got to go fight some more phrases

um

But but uh, yeah, I gotta I gotta I gotta make that better

Do you have any that you use for any of your companies? None of your what was milk roads? Did milk road have one?

No, but uh, I don't think you need one at the beginning by the way at the beginning

I don't think you need I think you do need certain north stars like, you know, you started the hustle you were like, um

We call it both bullshit free news

Yeah, you were like this is like you're no nonsense or no bullshit

You're you're you're smart friend telling you what happened in a no bullshit way

That was a really good like north star guiding principle that you could just say, okay cool

So like we stole a version of that for the bill pro because what would what ended up happening?

Here's like a tactical way that that started to drift

The top story in all the news news things would have been about like some

arbitrary bullshit like some

um, maybe it was like a regulatory thing or maybe it was like a kind of a boring regulatory thing or it was like

some layer 2 blockchain on uh on like some layer 2 protocol on top of some like obscure blockchain did this thing

And we would write about it and I would read it

Because at this point I was like that, you know, I was like the editor

I really never was the writer for milk road

But I would read it and I would just call ben I'd be like

Dude, what like are you interested in this? He's like well not really, but I mean this seemed to be like

I mean it's a top story

By other news outlets. I was like cool, but like if you weren't into it like I was like here's the test

Would you text me about this?

Like would you text me and tell me about this and would I be interested?

But it's already baked into you wouldn't even text me if you didn't know if you you would only text me if you knew

I'd be interested

So I was like, let's just use that as the test like the litmus test is basically

Would you text me about this thing that happened?

If I was like, yeah, what's new in crypto right now?

Like if that's not the thing then don't put it in the newsletter

Even if other people are writing about it and when we made that shift

all of the like metrics kind of went up because people just

naturally would resonate with that better because

um, we had like a guiding principle for what what goes in and what goes out

And I think that's the other thing that goes that's really useful is

um, it's really easy to talk about what goes in

What's important is to say what goes out and I do this with like strategy planning documents too

Like if I like I wrote up a strategy for our e-comm business

I think everybody should do something like this by the way

I wrote it down and I wrote here's the six bets that we have made this year

We're making this year

And I write them down first of all, for example, I wrote the things called big bets and I shared this document with everyone

I said big bet number one was um, we didn't have anybody in like demand planning or inventory forecasting

I was like it's pretty stupid that we don't have anybody anybody doing this because of that

I think we have a ton of waste and we're miss like sometimes we're way under on products that people want

Sometimes we're way over and it just sits there and just ties up our cash

I think that if we hire somebody who's got experience doing this

We will get 20 30 improvement on the bottom line literally just from that one hire

That's bet number one and then we hire that person now. We're seeing how it plays out that number two was like

that's smart um, let's say like

Whatever I've done without giving too much away. Let me say

Like part like this this type of partnership. We're trying to go for this type of partnership

um

With this other big entity we believe that if we do that it's going to have this effect

That's the bet we're making we'll know if it's successful if x happens

I just wrote that wrote this down and so the whole strat company strategy for the year

Is one page long and it's just six like sentences. It's like

Here's the situation. Here's the bet here's the situation

Here's the bet and I just wrote that out new and then with that at the bottom

I wrote and here's the bets we are not making that we otherwise reasonably could have so for example

We're not launching on amazon because if you're because even though that would clearly add to the bottom line

but if we're launching on amazon that's going to take resources away and

See those other six bets that's going to take all of our attention this year. So we're saying no to that

We're saying no to this other thing. We're saying no to this other thing

All of which were totally reasonable you could make a case for but we decided

Not to do them because we don't want to spread ourselves too thin

And it was actually that not doing section like the the first part was useful

But the second part was even more useful and I think that people should should highlight those like

You know, it's not focus is not what you say yes to focus is the hundred good ideas you say no to

And so I think when you take that principle and you apply it

That that's where you find the interesting stuff like whether it's in your company marketing or whatever

What what are you calling that?

In e-commerce playbook. Oh, I just like the bets like big bets what I called it

Like what are the big bets that we're making this year and we'll see and I wrote at the I also wrote at the top like

We don't think that all of these are going to pan out the way we expect

Are they what are you right now?

I wrote one or two

Are going to either fail or we won't even execute on because

One or two winners will suck up a bunch of our energy. I expect that to happen. I expect the middle four

to work

Maybe you know plus or minus 20 on how well we think they should work

So like some will slightly underperform our expectations some will slightly overperform

One one or two of the six bets will either fail completely or we won't execute well enough because our attention got sucked away by the other ones

And one or two should have a huge payoff

That's the distribution if we if they all just work as expected

We didn't really bet wildly enough right?

It's like kind of like the goals thing that you don't want to hit 100 of your goals

You want to hit maybe like 70 percent of your goals that shows that you stretched far enough without over stretching

All right, we're out of here

Sam hit them with the line

That is the pod

Let's travel never looking back

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.