5 Conversations that broke our frames this week
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Not going to lie. Haven't heard a word since you said leverage to the tits. I've just been waiting for us to talk about that. Quick break. It was like, you know, today I'm going to wear a turtleneck and I might try to say leverage to the tits. You know, it's like getting a new haircut. Learning affirmations. Yeah. I can pull this off. Leverage to the tits is my version of having bangs. You know what I mean?

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Sam, it's just me and you. No guests. This is nice. It's like a date night for us. The kids are out of the house. Well, let's debrief. I have done a few things. Do you want to go back and forth of the interesting people that we hung out with? I have got two or three. How many do you have?

Yeah, I got three or four, but I have a theme with mine. I don't know if yours would fit this, but the theme with mine is all people who are contrarians in some way. And what I mean by that is not like contrarian, like, you know, it's like an annoying kind of contrarian. Like if you call yourself a contrarian, it's like you're not contrarian, right? Correct. Exactly. They wouldn't say this about themselves. I would say it about them, which is what makes it kosher. The way I would say it is they're all independent thinkers, meaning when I hear the stories of what they're doing,

I don't even want to ask about the thing. It's like, how did you even think of doing that thing? You know what I mean? It's like, all right, before you tell me all the details, how did you even get into that situation? Why were you even looking there? Why were you even deciding to do that? Okay, I can fit within that framework. Okay, yeah, I'll go first. So I hosted this dinner in San Francisco and invited maybe, I don't know, 15, 20 people to this thing. You did? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I know, you boys growing up, friends and...

hosting things. So in the city, you drove to the city. I drove to the city. Yes, this is a true, true facts. And so we go there and there's a guy there who I'm friends with. His name is Justin, Justin called bank. And Justin is a tremendous investor. He was an investor early on in like Grubhub, Snapchat, Stitch Fix, like boom, like just like a bunch of companies that have done really well.

So let me tell you the story. So I was talking to him about some of his big win investments. So I'll tell you a quick one. So there was a Grubhub one. I was like, how'd you get into Grubhub? He's like, oh, Grubhub was a, he's like, it was a funny story. Like they were doing well, but nobody knew them. And I don't think they had raised much money yet. And,

And I tried to get a cold emailed him. I called called called them. I called the office. Couldn't get a hold of him. So he's like, so I just flew to Chicago. I just hung out in the lobby till I bumped into the guys. And I was like, hey, guys, I'm just really a believer in this thing. Sorry to bother you, but I just really believe in this thing. Ends up doing that deal. OK, a classic, classic meet cute. So I was like, how'd the Snapchat one happen?

And he told this great story. He goes, I met Evan and he's like, I will just never forget meeting Evan. He's like, I walked out of that meeting being like this guy. He's one of them. He's like one of the people that's going to build this like legendary companies at the time. I think he was still a student at Stanford student college. I go was Snapchat taking off. Was it like a rocket ship?

He goes, no, no, it was like really small. He's like, it had maybe like 100, 150,000 users, wasn't growing fast. And everybody on the outside viewed it as this like this silly little thing. It was like this toy. It's like, oh, is it just use disappearing photos must be for inappropriate pictures or it's just a stupid college thing.

And he's like, so I was like, so how did you invest? And he tells a story. So he's like, you know, first I met Evan, I heard him out. And he, he shared the story that he's like, Snapchat, people think it's about photos. And when they hear photos, they think about Facebook and Instagram. It's like permanent public photos that are for your memories. And he's like, but actually we use photos for communication. It's like a back and forth. And so Justin goes, Hmm. So it's like messaging. He's like, yeah, it's messaging.

He goes, okay. And so he goes home and he does some research. He goes, I think everybody's been comparing this to Instagram and Facebook. And because of that, the metrics don't look as good. But if you compare this to iMessage, I wonder what this looks like or WhatsApp. So he hustles and he gets in touch with somebody at Apple. And he's like, hey, I just have a good question for you. If somebody sends an iMessage, how many, what percentage of them send an iMessage every day for the next seven days? And they don't.

Run the query for him. Yeah, like if you use iMessage, you're going to use it every day. That's just how you use messaging apps. He asked somebody at WhatsApp, same question. He asked somebody, then he gets in touch with somebody from Instagram. And he's like, hey, for Instagram, if you post a photo, what are the odds you post a photo, you know, the next seven days? They're like, well, super low, right? He's like, okay, what about even just using the app? Like, it's just reasonable, healthy number.

And he goes back to Snapchat. He asked him the number and Evan, like, he's like, I don't know. Let me look it up. He looks it up. He's got the iMessage number and he's like, this is communication. And he's like, and nobody, you know, nobody else was really that, that eager to invest. And he was like, I got to go all in on this thing. And sure enough, he did.

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And you hung out with him and he told you that story at dinner? Yeah. Did you have any other interesting people at your dinner that you want to talk about or no? Yeah, there's a couple guys. So there's one guy, Will, who's coming on the podcast. Will O'Brien, he's this Irish guy. And he's coming on the podcast because he had this sentence that caught my attention. He goes, the ocean is the next space.

Ocean is the next space. What are you talking about? He goes, well, you know how recently all this, you know, there's a bunch of investment now in space tech. So SpaceX obviously first, but then after that, there've been more and more companies that have been get funded Varda and others that are all about rockets and satellites and getting, getting to space, mining asteroids, mining minerals, whatever it is.

And he goes, the ocean is the next space. Like the ocean is this other vast, mostly unexplored, mostly untouched by tech space. And he's building an ocean tech company. And he told me about four or five other ocean tech companies. And it was a finger to the lips. You got to come on the podcast and talk about them there. Don't waste this at a dinner, okay? That's actually a really interesting concept because right now space is hot. Robots, so hot right now. Having a moment.

Is Oceans the new It Girl? I'm looking for it, bro. I'm looking for it. I'm like, what's gonna be hot?

Is she like the hot girl who just has glasses on for some reason? She's still the nerd. And then someone's going to take her glasses off and be like, makeover done. You're the hit girl. The rom-com where all you had to do is take her hair out of the ponytail and take off the glasses. Yeah. You're now beautiful. Is that the ocean right now? Who is that? That's Callie.

No. She shows up at prom. Who's the new girl? It's not a new girl. Imagine them giving their pitch to their LPs or to their investors. You know? Moving off the glasses? Yeah. It's just like...

Ladies and gentlemen, have you seen She's All That? How about 10 things I hate about you? Then, my friend, let us introduce you to our new ocean startup. You get it. I thought that was great because he's just thinking a lot and living in a space that I, it's like, you know, sort of right under your nose, but you never really think about.

That's pretty cool. All right. You want me to tell you about someone I hung out with? Yeah, give me one. All right. So we had this guy on the Money Wise podcast like a month or something ago. And he's like in his 60s. His name is Steve Howden. He's a billionaire. I had a great time talking to him on the podcast. And on the podcast, he was talking about making money and all that traditional stuff.

career shit, but... He's a billionaire from what, by the way? Yeah, so he is worth... He says it on the podcast. He's worth something like $2 billion. He made his initial money

doing door-to-door sales, selling something. And I forget what he sold, but he made like 100 grand. And with that 100 grand, the savings and loan crisis hit. Do you know what that was in the 80s? I don't completely understand it. But basically, a bunch of cheap land became available. He got leveraged to the tits and bought all this property. And that made 3 million. The 3 million, he then bought some storage units that turned into like 9. And then using that 9, he bought a bunch of

they say oil and gas. I don't know, like these Dallas guys like say oil and gas, but basically it means you buy lease rights, meaning you like... Not gonna lie, haven't heard a word since you said leverage to the tits. I've just been waiting for us to talk about that. Quick break.

Quick HubSpot ad break real quick while we discuss that. I kind of liked it. Well done. Yeah. I'm trying it on. Was it too much? Or was it okay? I'm trying it on. It was like, you know, today I'm going to wear a turtleneck and I might try to stay leveraged to the tits. Like...

You know, it's like getting a new haircut. Learning affirmations. Yeah. I can pull this off. Leverage to the tits is my version of having bangs. You know what I mean? All right. So makes a bunch of money, oil and glass and land. Got it. Okay. So you didn't just talk to him on the podcast. Then you went and you did an absolutely normal human thing to do after the podcast. You invited yourself to his family reunion or something. Well, after the pod, I was like,

could I come over? Can I come and just hang out with you? And he was like, yes, absolutely, you can. And so basically, he lives in Dallas. He has this huge mansion. I know that because I look the way I look. A lot of people think that I know about skiing, but I don't. But he was like, I have a ski-in, ski-out house, which I didn't even know what that meant. I've

And I had to figure all this out. But we went to Utah at his huge mansion. It was a ski-in, ski-out thing, which if you do ski, that's a fancy thing or whatever. And I learned a few things. The first thing that I learned, I had no idea, but his three daughters are famous.

So his wife and two daughters are famous. So his wife is Jen Houghton. She's got an Instagram called Turtle Creek Lane. I think she has 1.5 million subscribers and basically her followers. And basically what she does is she decorates their home in the most crazy, over-the-top way. So for example, for Christmas, it looks like a Christmas dollhouse, but that's her real house. And so she got famous doing...

doing that via Instagram and then brought in the other two daughters to do, you know, their stick, which I actually don't know what their stick is, but I know that...

a million people follow them because when I was around them, I was like, they're just living and people just like love watching them. Were they just like snapping content constantly or what? No, that's funny. They weren't. I mean, they did a bit, but it wasn't any different than anyone else who has like a thousand followers, you know, or like, uh, it was not obnoxious. And, uh, they actually had mentioned that they worked with you on a company you invested in and they were like his company that he invested in. They did a great job of hooking us up. So you, they, they knew you, uh, one of them, uh, yeah,

For sure, but I didn't know, maybe from their, I think they do a good job in their personal, the daughter's like personal content. It doesn't look like,

I'm the daughter of a billionaire type of thing, right? It's like super relatable. It's fun. It's, you know, it's easy to follow, easy to like. So I didn't know that they were like these famous people. The second thing I didn't really know, I didn't know they were Mormon, but they weren't just Mormon. He was like King Mormon. Like he's on the board of BYU. And so I think I learned this the first morning when Sarah and I get up at 7 a.m. to go hang out and everyone, we're sitting around the kitchen and we're just kind of like patiently waiting for them to get the coffee ready.

You're just vaping? Rudely in the kitchen? I'm just like sitting in this kitchen and we're like,

Do you guys do coffee? What's up with that? They had to tell me that they don't drink coffee. And they're like, but we went and bought coffee beans to accommodate you. And we have this coffee machine. We even went and bought a coffee machine. We don't know how to use it, but it's over here. And they had to... I don't even know if they bought the right beans. They literally had never gone through this experience, which is like... Imagine not knowing, do you get the beans? Do you get the grounds? What device do you need to ground the beans? Is this the right machine? Or is this like a...

there's five different types of machines they didn't know. And they went to accommodate us, which was hilarious. But what I learned with the Instagram stuff is, dude, Middle America moms, who's their following,

So much more profitable than doing comedy bits for millennials or Gen Z. You know what I mean? 100%. They kill it. And they would post these gummies that they got or this candy or this other widget that someone had sent them. And they were showing me how many of the products that they sell. And it was the craziest thing I've ever seen.

Like it was like, why are the people listening to this podcast? They're like, I want to do things for the trader economy. No, just do it for Lisa in Oklahoma. The mother economy. That's who you want to sell to. Oh my God. It was, it was crazy.

They were like super Mormon. And I'm not into religion. I don't like religion in particular, particularly, but I learned a lot. And the one thing that I learned was they like explicitly stated their values. So like, you know, when you're with your family and you'll make jokes with your sister, like, yeah, you know, like you'll bring her down. You'll be like, hey, you said you're on a diet. Why are you eating that? Or like, you're just like, you're just like mess with her, like just teasing. Right.

There was not one bring them down joke. And I was like, and I asked him about that. I'm like, you guys haven't made fun of each other once. And they were like, well, like, you know, we're taught in this religion that you got to treat like, you know, you got to be Christlike. And like, he doesn't make fun of people. So we don't make fun of people. And they had like all these, like, I would ask them a variety of different questions. Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? And they all had like very explicit answers. It wasn't ever like,

ah it just feels good or I don't know we just kind of do it was all like well mapped out and I thought that was really cool to be like super intentional about living when I asked them I was like why don't you guys drink coffee and they're like well we're taught not to like you know try not to be addicted to things or or try not to like overly rely on stuff and I was like all right that's a good reason and so it was crazy to learn all that stuff but here's let me tell you this last thing that I learned from this family it was like a 15,000 square foot house

And I learned that, you know, you've heard me talk on this pod, and I think you feel the same way, about owning stuff in a big house. It's kind of like, it's like, oh, that's a lot of work. I don't want to do that. Dude, it's such a life hack for being around your family. It's the greatest thing ever. And I've noticed this amongst this family, but also a bunch of other really wealthy families, that if you can acquire a home that's big enough for your grandkids...

and everyone's super comfortable to stay there, they will want to stay there more. And thus you will spend more time with your family. And like, we didn't have a private chef. We didn't do anything. Almost the entire weekend was us just sitting around a kitchen table and we like cooked our own meals and just hung out. And it was like the way to live.

Was it awkward being at their like family reunion or what was... Dude, they were so, they were like, come on in. Even more awkward. They're so nice also. God, what did you do? They were so nice. I just think these guys are nice all the time. And I asked them, I was like, why are you so nice? And I was like, why do you guys have so much fun? Like they had like activities. Like we went like, they're like, let's go in the coal plunge and then get into the hot tub. And then we're going to go do, like they had like,

activities planned that they all did as a family. I was like, what are you guys doing? And they were like, we just want fun to be the center of everything we do. And it was just like... This is amazing. This is like the opposite of like, you know, when you're a bad kid in school and they take you to like jail and they want to like shock value, like show you what your life could look like if you just keep going down this path. Yeah, I just got like hugged really hard. This is like the opposite. You're like, hey...

You want to see what a really healthy family dynamic looks like? I'm going to take you there for a weekend immersion. It was the healthiest family dynamic. I have never seen anything like this. And then they have a subreddit. There's a subreddit dedicated to making fun of them. And it's, have you ever seen this? So first of all, do you know why there's so many Mormon influencers?

Basically, Mormons are explicitly told you should journal. You know, journaling is a good way to reflect on life and it slows you down. That led to Mormon mommy bloggers, which they're like inherently kind of interesting because they're really into like, I think Mormons are told they need to prepare for the end of the world.

Fucking awesome content, right? Like talking about like your, your packing system for like all your nuts and stuff. Like that's really good content. Parlay that into Instagram. And that is one of the reasons why there are so many freaking Mormon influencers. And I didn't know that, but, um,

And so because of that, they have a whole subreddit. It's called like Turtle Creek Lane Snark or something like that. And every time that they would post something, people make fun of them for the silliest stuff. Like one time we were like in the house and like,

One of the kids was eating a piece of cheese. And for some reason, a two-year-old shouldn't have cheese. I don't know why, but that was a post that someone made fun of them. Or there was one time where Sarah, my wife, made it in the background of one of the photos. And they're like, who's this person? As if she was a new cast member. And they were Googling her and listing out her name. It was crazy. And I asked them, I was like, does this stuff bother you? Yeah.

And they just, it totally like, they were like, no, what they care about us is their business. It doesn't bother us at all. And so this family had the most positive outlook on life. And it did wear off on me, to be honest. Like, you know, I'm not about to go and like,

become a Mormon or anything, but I want to hang out with them a whole lot more. Right. This is wild. By the way, didn't he get in like a helicopter accident like the next week or something? The week after. Yeah. He, uh, he, his, he on the podcast on money wise, he talked about how much he loves flying helicopters. Uh, I don't know all the details, but like three days afterwards they were flying a helicopter. I think he was, he's flying it himself. He, in this particular, he does, but in this particular case, he was the passenger, uh,

And they got in a wreck and it was not good. And he survived. He's going to be fine. But it was a bad wreck. And if you go to their Instagram, you'll see all 10 of their family members surrounding him at the hospital. And so, yeah, he's going to have a lot of issues to deal with. But this was the kindest, sweetest family I've ever been around. Do you know Raleigh Williams? Hmm.

He came too. And it was like me and Raleigh Williams and then the Houghton family. And Raleigh Williams, his kid was amazing. She's 10 years old. And she was the most articulate little girl I've ever talked to. I was like, how...

how'd you learn how to talk this good? And she was like, I, you know, for the church, they teach us how to do like a homily. That's what we call it in the Catholic church. I don't know what the Mormons call it. We talk in front of like 500 people at church. And she was like, in doing that, I learned that I need to like, and like told me like all like the principles to like speaking confidently. And I was like, you're the greatest person. I was like, I'm Navy, my next daughter Navy because of, because of you. But this freaking family was awesome. It was so, it felt honestly like I was in a reality TV show, but I,

There's no drama. There was zero drama. It was like the happiest thing I've ever seen. And the husbands, by the way, are the managers. So the husbands are the managers of the two daughters. They were like, one guy was like, yeah, I used to work at Amazon. I helped create, I think, Alexa or something like that. But then when I saw the potential for this influencer stuff, I quit right away. And now we make, and they told me how much money. And it was just an astronomical amount of money. It was crazy. So that was my weekend with a business.

a billionaire Mormon family and it was awesome.

All right, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot Podcast Network, but we're not the only ones. There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you liked them. Maybe you should check them out. One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make, the new habits you could do, the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference, that's what that podcast is all about. Check it out. It's called Nudge, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

All right. Where can we go from here? This might feel like a letdown after that. Let's see. All right. I'm just going to give you three numbers to pick from. I have three people on this list. Give me what you want. Number one, number two, or number three. Number one. Or maybe I could rapid fire these and then you could tell me which one you want to talk about. Okay. Hung out with my friend, James Courier. We did a podcast together. It's going to come out soon. He has this one bit that I just really liked. So he's all about his fund is called NFX as a network effects fund.

He's all about network effects. Like nobody on earth knows more about network effects than this guy. And he has this great blog post and this thing that we talked about, which is called like your life on network effects. I hadn't really thought of it this way, but he, the contrarian thing he said was he was talking about leaving San Francisco. We had, we had a bunch of friends who we used to hang out with that have moved out of San Francisco during COVID. Cause they were like, Oh, everything's online now. So we'll just leave. And then it'll be like good for taxes.

And he goes, he's like, look, everybody, you know, personal choices, do whatever it's like. But if you wanted to be here and you left because of taxes and because you thought it's the same, it's same, same on Zoom. He's like, that's idiotic. You know, you could, he's like, you're just going to save 13% on your taxes and you're going to lose 13x. You're going to make 13x less money on that same, just on that same money saving decision. Moving for taxes. When someone tells me they do that, I think they're stupid.

I think that's a really, that's a foolish thing to do. Do you agree or disagree? There's a lot of people that do that.

I think it's foolish. Sorry, they're not stupid. I think that decision's foolish. Or rather, I don't agree with it. That decision and actually several other decisions they make are probably also stupid. But don't you agree? The point of succeeding is to do what you want, not to have to move to Puerto Rico. If you want to live in Puerto Rico, then great, do it. Exactly. But if taxes is the number one reason, I think that that is your... What's that phrase? You can't see the forest and the trees or something like that?

I mean, I kind of agree. That's why I'm still here. But yeah. So I thought that was interesting. And when he talks about your life on network effects, his idea is basically...

If you could take all your decisions you make and instead of thinking of them as things you did or decisions you made or just like events in your life, if you looked at it as you either joined a network or you left a network, you either added into a network or you subtracted out of a network. So, for example, where you choose to go to college, it's not just a college. It's not just an education. You're picking a network to join. I joined the Duke Alumni Network.

And that alumni network is going to have certain benefits down the road. It's also going to lead me to maybe certain careers that that network tends to go towards, which is like Wall Street finance, things like that.

You know, where you live obviously is a huge one. So like what city you live, if you join the Hollywood network, you're going to be joining a certain lifestyle, certain career opportunities, et cetera. And when you leave, you are opting out of that network or you're getting yourself away from the white hot center of the network. Even just skills you pick, like let's say you want to learn, you learn marketing. Well, you're actually joining a network of other people who know marketing and that's who you're going to hang out with. Those are the opportunities you're going to get. And that's where, that's the sort of the next decisions are going to be heavily influenced by

by the network decisions that you're making, the initial network decisions that you're making. - And what, like, did that make you reflect on the decision that you've made or thinking that you did the right thing or the wrong thing? Or how will you implement this? 'Cause that like makes me,

I don't regret. I don't regret. I moved mostly because of fam... Only because of family. But I do wish I was in California. Which is its own network, right? You, like, opted into your own... Like, you know, your own par family, you know, network or whatever. You know, you opted into... You opted to, like...

Be more dense there and have more connectivity there, which is going to be great for your family raising and all that. But you opted out of the tech network of San Francisco, let's say. Which, by the way, if I could live anywhere, like if family weren't a thing, it would either be an SF or a suburb like 20 minutes away. But I would live there in a heartbeat. And what did it make you feel like?

Well, he kind of points out, he's like, you know, there's some things that you don't choose, like where you're born, right? Things like that. But then there's, after that, it's a lot of what you start to choose to do. And even little things like, you know, language is a network. So, you know, if you're in China right now, like choosing to join the English network is actually like a really powerful decision you can make that's going to like completely change the trajectory of your life, being able to do that. Yeah.

If you start to look at things, English is not just a language, it's a network. It's a network of people who all can communicate with each other using certain syllables and words and vowels and phrases, right? Money is a network, right? So joining the Bitcoin network early on turned out to be a really profitable decision because you picked, hey, we're a bunch of people who all believe that this thing is going to be valuable.

network. Right. So it just made me more aware of that. It made me, you know, why did I host that dinner in San Francisco? Partly because James was like, yeah, one of the big mistakes I made earlier in my career was I got successful and I kind of siloed myself. I

I kind of just wanted to do my own thing on the edge of that work. He's like, it was great for creativity because I was just in my bunker, just doing my thing. But it was terrible because he's like, you know, I turned down that lunch meeting with Travis when he was starting Uber. And I, you know, I was too egotistical to take that job at Facebook early on when Mark was trying to recruit me because I just thought like, I'm going to be off in my own land, creating my own little castle over here. And he's like, again, fun for creativity and for learning, but

a little bit foolish to the how extreme I was with that like and so you know for me for example I'm I moved 45 minutes out of San Francisco that reduced a lot of the serendipitous meetings that I could have in the network in the network of people that I like to be around interesting ambitious people would you move closer then well I don't I don't think I'll move closer because like the family networks out here and it's just better like the school that we're in and all that stuff is better out here but

I'm like, yeah, I could definitely like drive to SF twice a month and have like, you know, host a dinner, do a couple of live podcasts with people there. That'll be great. And that's not that much of an effort, but just to stay just to keep one almost like a in the diagram, right? One line connected to the white hot center of the network. Yeah. And I mean, you live near BART, right? I do. But BART's a network I don't want to be a part of.

You're opting out of that one? Yeah, I'm opting out of that one. All right, I have another person. So basically, I don't speak at conferences unless my wife wants to come with me, if Neville wants to join and do it with me, and if Nick Gray will attend.

Those three things have to happen. I need my entourage. All three or one of the three? All three. All three have to happen. All three have to happen. That's your, like, I only green Skittles. That's your rider? That's my rider. The reason I don't like traveling, but I like to travel if it's for a conference because I love going somewhere. And the first two days are conferences. The next few days are fun because you meet someone at the event who's going to tell you cool shit to do. And also, I just like doing stuff with my friends.

And so I went and spoke at this thing called the Newsletter Conference, which was pretty wild because like 15 of my ex-employees were speakers and are all like many of them are millionaires or making a whole lot of money doing newsletter stuff. And that like made me feel proud. But I met James Altucher. You know who James Altucher is? Yeah, he's been on the podcast. He's a what is his like he's an author. So it's like title in life.

I think James might be the craziest person that I've met in the last six months. So if you Google James Altucher, you're going to see that he's like... The thing that sticks out is his hair. He's got this crazy haircut. And in real life, he sort of looks like a rock star. He's not trying, but he looks so different that he looks super cool and awesome. And so James is the type of guy who... Well, he's got the story. I don't know his full background, but he's created a startup, made a bunch of money, and

blew it all on stocks or bad investments.

Did another startup, made a bunch of money, lost it all. And now I think he's on like mountain three. And he has a thing called Choose Yourself Financial. It started out just as a newsletter where he would just write about his interesting opinions and things like that. He sold a portion or all of it to Agora. Agora is a large newsletter business that makes something like $1 or $2 billion a year in revenue. I don't like their company. I think that they have like 15 or 20 people

It basically started in the 80s as one newsletter. Now they have like 20 and they acquire other people's newsletters. And I think they do a lot of nefarious stuff. So I'm not trying to promote those guys. But now they're not all bad. And he sold to them. And now he's their highest or one of their highest earning newsletters. And his newsletter, Choose Yourself Financial, did $130 million in revenue last year. And it's like crazy. The numbers are crazy. Very profitable. And he said all this on stage. Everything I'm saying is public. Yeah.

And so I hung out with him and his wife, and we had a great time. And he said one thing to me. He said it in passing, and I was like, the record skipped. He was like, yeah, I love DoorDash because I don't leave my house for three or six weeks at a time. And if I need a pen, they just bring me a pen. And I was like, what? What?

Did you just say that you don't leave your house for like three to six weeks at a time? And he told me, he's like, yeah, like sometimes I just get so into something that I literally will not step foot outside for like four weeks at a time. And so he, but he, but he said like five other things like that where he just was so fascinating. And it was proof that, you know how like, I think it was in the Peter Thiel, what's his book called?

0 to 1? 0 to 1. There's like a graph or it's like a bar chart or something like that where it's like extreme success means that you're likely going to have extreme personality traits and those extreme personality traits like come off as weird or undesirable in many settings. You know, you could be like Elon, which means you're going to be kind of mean sometimes. You could be like Albert Einstein, which means you're like forgetful all the time and like wear two different socks or whatever. Like he like has these examples.

James is that guy. He very much has the like brilliant but forgetful and quirky scientist vibe to him. And it was just wild seeing him

just have normal conversations because his opinion and the way he looked at things was 100% fresh and different from how I looked at the most like normal things. For example, when he said he didn't leave his house, I was like, that's horrible. He's like, he was shocked that I was criticizing him. And which is pretty funny because, you know, he should live his life and be happy. And that made him happy. And it was, it was like, or in the green room,

He was playing chess the whole time with Steph Smith, who was also there. I was like, you guys know each other? And they're like, well, we've never actually met, but we play chess like constantly together online. And he meets a lot of his friends playing chess online. And there was just so many little tidbits about this guy that made him so fascinating to me. And by the way, if you saw if you know Agora,

You know, they're famous for these like long form sales pages and like incredibly aggressive advertising. Do you remember in like 2020 or 2019? James's face was everywhere. Yeah. He was like, I hate that. I hated it. I hated it. I hate our landing pages. I hate how long they are. I hate how they look too aggressive. And he was like, I tried to write differently and like make my own landing pages. None of them could ever convert nearly as good as like the crazy shit that they would write. So did he make a ton of money off that Agora thing?

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Or maybe the yes. And also, I think the answer is still. And is still. Okay. Gotcha. All right. I like that one, James. I have another one that's less weird, but more side quest-y. So, Sheil Monat, who came on the podcast recently, you can see his episode. The number's crushed. Yeah.

Yeah, he did really well. So he was at the dinner too. And Shiel tells these stories and you're just kind of like, if you just listen to the stories, you'd be like, wow, this guy's fascinating. You would never know his day job because Shiel is an epic side quester. So his day job is he's a VC. He invests in fintech companies. That's his job. And there's a lot of that. The weird thing is that

If you listen to him, he's like, oh, yeah, I am. I'm taking like like courses or like whatever. I'm getting certified to be a travel agent now so I can access all these travel discounts. He's been doing that. He's like, yeah, I actually looked at buying the ambassadorship position for like being an ambassador of a country because it has these perks. He's like basically like your friend who's like really good with credit card points.

but for everything, including credit card points, by the way, I think on the podcast, he gave us like a pretty good credit card point tip, but he just has like all these epic side quests. He's gone down over and over again. He's like, yeah, I got married in the metaverse and like Taco Bell sponsored it. Oh, and Hey, guess what else I did? You know, I started this auction company to go and buy and sell like the domain endings, like dot app and

and dot photography. Like that was his business. It's like, these aren't even normal. Even his businesses aren't normal businesses. They're just weird side quests that made money. I think his side, is Thistle his? Is that it? Yeah, Thistle was another one. He's like, oh yeah. So the story he told on the thing was he was like, I was interested in this like food delivery space. It got really hot, Sprig, et cetera. I was ordering from all of them.

But I just thought there's no way this thing's making money. So then as a side quest, I signed up and became a driver for a month and I drove around and it was amazing. I met all these people and I learned the model and I realized that this thing's never going to make money. And he was right. Sprig went out of business. So did all the others that were doing it. He's like, but we could do this other thing, Thistle. And I got my friend to do it. And now Thistle is like, I forgot what he said. What did he say on the podcast? It's like an absurd number. I think it was like 100 million plus. Over 100 million plus of revenue. And I was like, wow.

this guy is just always on side quests. So for example, he was talking about, he's like, he's like, oh yeah, Mr. Beast posted this video about like, I'm on this abandoned island or whatever, like this abandoned island. I'm the only one here and there's nothing here, blah, blah, blah. And this guy's like,

And the chill was like, hold on. I've been to that island. But without the video. And he's like, no, wait, that's not abandoned. There's a bar like three minutes away from where he is. And there's this motel. So he tweeted about this. And then Jimmy calls him and is like, hey, man, what are you talking about? That is an abandoned island. He's like, no, it's not. It's three minutes away from a bar. And he's like, no, technically it's abandoned if you look at XYZ. And I was like, this guy just constantly gets himself into –

Wait, Jimmy called him because Jimmy felt his integrity was under attack? Yeah, and he was like, did you give Jimmy my number? I was like, no, I didn't even know this happened.

And Shielded backed down. He was like, no, it's not an abandoned island. Or were they both right? He's like, where you were? He's like, look at it. Three minutes away. There's a place. There's a pub. It's like, it's not abandoned. And I think technically maybe there was something where it's like the border or like, I don't know what this, I didn't get into the details. Obviously, I don't give a shit. But I just thought it was amazing that there's people that just do things for their own amusement. And I'll bring this home with a little TikTok I saw. And it was the TikTok was...

There's like this TikTok had gone viral and I'm glad it went viral because it means that other people are similarly really attracted to people who just do shit for their own amusement and really for no other reason. So the TikTok that went viral was like, I forgot the name of the dance, but it was basically like,

Shout out to my boy Willie for spending all of our bachelor party weekend trying to learn this dance. And I guess there's like some dance and it's like this. He's like this awkward looking white guy. And there's like two black friends trying to show him how to do this dance. And it's just like everywhere they went during the bachelor party. He's just practicing this dance just to like see if he can learn it in a weekend. And like he starts off really bad. And by the end, he's actually like pretty good at the end of the weekend. And then they cut to the.

to the wedding and he's doing the same dance just for fun on the, on his own, on the side of the dance floor, like not part of a performance, just like just doing his thing over there. And, um, I, I respect that. I think I respect that more than I respect like someone's achievements in life. Uh, I kind of respect people that, uh,

that value their own amusement as the highest order bit. And I think Sheil is an example of that. Like the shit he does, he's not doing it because there's some outcome he's seeking. He's just amused by it and therefore like follows it. And he ends up in these situations that at the end become really good stories. But I don't think that's why he's doing it. I think, you know, we've done close to 700 of these episodes. Sheil would be in my top 10 of people who I admire most. I think that Sheil...

Did you... Like, people... I don't even know if we mentioned this one. Do you know that Shield's in a Justin Bieber music video? Of course he is. Why wouldn't he be in a Justin Bieber music video? How did that happen? Like, I was watching...

from the outside. So I think the way it happened was during COVID, Sheil created an online version of Bachelor, like The Bachelor. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I watched this. It was great. And what was it exactly? It was... Was this during COVID or... It was Bachelor on Zoom. I think it was called The Zoom Bachelor or something like that. Yeah. It was Sheil, The Bachelor, and there's a bunch of women that would pop up and then he would like eliminate, give out roses and eliminate them and then he'd pick someone in the end and they went on a date or something. And somehow...

I could be confusing all the stories, but somehow this, it was a hit. It was awesome. And then he, then there's a video of him where he's turned around like this and it looks like he's making out with someone like this.

in the video yeah so he I think he was I'm watching this all from outside I think he posted that video and then he turns around and he smiles and he looks so happy and that clip made it into a Justin Bieber music video and if you go and watch the music video his clip Shields clip is the best clip oh I have it I have it it's

It's there. What was it called? Like, love yourself? Was it love yourself? And he's like, it looks like he's making out with someone. Play that clip and like, watch that. Oh my God, this is so funny. It turns around, he's got a huge mustache for some reason. And he's just cheesing. Do you know another crazy thing about him, by the way? You know, the podcast Startup on Gimlet Media? I think he created that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think he did. He had his hands in it. Maybe we'll say that. Yeah.

He just has had so many weird things happen to him.

Let me tell you another one, another person who I think is doing their own thing. So my buddy Furcon, who you know, he's also been on the podcast. So Furcon and I try to, we were co-founders. We tried to start a bunch of companies together for like, you know, six or seven years. I know Furcon super well. One of the things about Furcon is that he is, he's just a grinder and it doesn't matter how like successful or wealthy he's gotten. I mean, his last company, Applovin, is like a hundred billion dollar company. And it's like absurd.

Why is it taking off so much, by the way? Like Applovin for years, it was sort of a joke because when you would drive in San Francisco, they had billboards where they were trying to recruit engineers. And the name Applovin came out right or we still associated it with Micklovin. And it was like, is this a real company? You know what I mean? And now it's one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Yeah, exactly. So he's been... So Furkan has been early into a bunch of tech things, right? He's basically like a hacker's hacker. So he was really into crypto before crypto was cool. I remember literally being at the office and he was...

like not paying attention because he was buying into the ethereum ico at like you know 17 cents or something like that and i was like ethereum like literally like dorkiest name never gonna work uh so i didn't buy because your boy's a genius and that's why i'm a podcaster now and he's a billionaire and so it's for kind of billionaire now or i don't know i don't know if he is or is it but something he started a hundred billion dollar company i don't know he's he's not like he's not like three zip codes away maybe he's two i don't know he's getting close

So he got into crypto early on. And then when Web3 happened, remember when Web3 happened and everybody was like, like piling into Web3 and Furkan was building a company in that space. Literally, his company's called Third Web. And he was just really into the actual like technology behind it. He's like, oh, I think I can make these tools easier to use for developers and blah, blah, blah, blah. Dude, one time he like did a talk on, remember the Raspberry? Yeah.

Raspberry Pi, yeah. Yeah, and he one time spent like 45 minutes explaining to me all about it, and he knew everything about it. Yeah, yeah, he knows everything about everything. So he's... And the second thing he got really into was VR. So he bought me an Oculus...

Just because he was like, I don't want to tell you about this and like, hope that you go try it out here. Here's the new Oculus headset. Go home and put this on. Okay, that's that's that's not a friend you need. And so I go home and I put it on. I'm blown away. And I'm like, wow, this thing's getting really good. And then I think he bought me like another one when it got better. And then I started buying them and I'm like, I'm paying attention to VR. But, you know, I'm like every other lemming out there. It's like I pay attention when shit gets hot.

And Furkan, the reason why Furkan is so great is because he doesn't pay attention when things get hot. He's like in the hardcore nerd bucket where he's like, I pay attention because it's interesting to me. I don't care if it's popular or not. I don't care if it's hot or not. I don't care if it's here or not. I want to be on this train the whole time. And so he was telling me about his – so he's got this lab called Effing.

And he was telling me first about third web, how it was growing and how it had real revenues. Now it's like, oh, wow, that's great. Then he's telling me about VR. And like Sam, like how many people do you know that are interested in VR right now? Like everybody who is interested in tech is interested in AI. Where's your Oculus sitting right now?

Dude, where's the biggest pile of dust in my room? I think it's back there. Yes, gone. Same. I mean, like, I did what everyone did. They got it. This is awesome. This is going to change the world. It's going to change everything. I don't know where the charger is. It's in my drawer somewhere. Let's go back to scrolling on my phone. Yeah. And he didn't do that. He's like, he would tell me, like, we would hang out, and he's like, I'm working in VR today. Once a week, I go co-work in VR. I'm like, what?

And so guess what? His interest in VR, it's not popular right now. In fact, they went to a VR conference and this VR conference was like, you know, crickets basically. And he sends- Is VR the new ocean? It's the old ocean. That's the problem. It doesn't even have the new tag. And so our buddy Hubert, who works on them, goes there and he wears a t-shirt, all black, that just says, I invest in VR. Huge on the front.

He's like, dude, it was like being the only girl at like a prom or something like that. Everybody was interested in him because he's like the only guy left investing in VR. And he's like, dude, it's actually kind of working. He goes, you know, if you look at the top 15 apps, like the top 15 apps in all of the Oculus store, these three guys over here own three of the top 15. He's like, they're printing money right now. Like this thing is amazing. Yeah, it's not like...

It's not the hot thing right now, but like, I don't know if you can make $10 million as like a small team building these apps and you're the frontline of this and you're the only people who are like specializing this technology, like good things are going to happen. So it just kind of reminded me of like,

you know, all the money is made either and being sort of right on time, but timing is super hard. And so the same way that Warren Buffett was like, don't try to time the market, focus on your time in market. Furcon is doing the like the tech, the engineering version of time in market, where once he's interested in something and he believes in it,

He doesn't let his interest go in and out based off of popular sentiment or VCs or exits or anything like that. It's just based on is the tech getting better or not. And I think that's just such a strong thing that's going to help them be super, super successful. To all the young people listening who are looking for a thing to do, I feel like that story is maybe a life-altering story.

This is a very good premise, and I'm on board with this premise. I do think VR, like, it's actually, and it's not,

This isn't a secret. Mark Zuckerberg, who has a really good ratio of getting things right, has said this is the thing. And also, do you know who also loves VR? Sheil. Sheil posts videos of his... It's not VR, but the meta... Spectacles. Or what's it called? The Ray-Bans? Ray-Bans, yeah. He loves those Ray-Bans. And it's very clear how that's all in the same ballpark of VR and how this can all work.

All right, I got a public service announcement for all the tech founders that are listening to this. Listen, job number one for you is to get customers. And ideally, the bigger the customers, the better. And I know when I was trying to do that, we would get somebody interested. Oh man, there's a big Fortune 500 company or it's a company that's raised hundreds of millions of dollars. They want to work with us. This is so exciting. And then we hit the wall and the wall was the security and compliance team. And all of a sudden, we could not land our biggest customers just because we were shooting ourselves in the foot by not being security ready and compliant.

And so if you want to solve this, use Vanta. Vanta is an all-in-one solution. It helps you get audit ready and it's quick, it's painless, it's easy. They're the number one guys at doing this. There are 8,000 companies that use them. YC companies use them, we use them. And so if you want Vanta to help simplify your security and compliance program, to help you streamline anything, take all those manual security tasks

and automate them, you should use Vanta. If you listen to this, you actually get $1,000 off of Vanta too. So we got a deal for you. Go to vanta.com slash million. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash million. Use Vanta. That's what all the cool kids are doing.

That was what I was going to bring up next. So I love those two. I have them. I bought some for my sister just like for her birthday recently. And I think that it's a great product. It's actually like, do you have them by the way? No, I'll go buy them right now. What do they do? Like, what's the point? The first, the very first easy thing is they're basically AirPods. So people don't really realize this. At worst case scenario, you just bought a pair of AirPods that you're probably not going to lose. So the audio from the, like the glasses, the part that goes behind your ear, it's not in your ear, but you can hear it.

like music, podcasts, whatever, super easily. So the audio is the AirPod type of feature is great. And then the camera, right? Like hands-free camera. If you have a kid, like for kids, this thing is incredible because I wear them to like my daughter's like soccer games or whatever. And like, you know, the moment passes so quickly with kids. And if you're fumbling, get out of your pockets, unlock face ID, nope, nope, type in my password, get the camera Apple, but it's over by then, right? And you're now looking through your phone at life.

versus your glasses. That's where you're already looking. It's on your head. It's on a swivel. All you do, literally, if something's going on or something's interesting, you just tap the thing and it starts recording. And the video looks great, by the way. It's really, really good. So if you're traveling, if you're out and about, if you've got kids, if you're at a sports thing, if you're at a concert, this thing is amazing. These are awesome. To me, these are the future. I think Meta knows this. They're investing in it very heavily.

I think it's interesting because it's kind of uncontested right now. Like maybe Apple will get in the game. Maybe if they still have like the juice to do it. Snapchat seems to have fallen out.

The famous, like, I forgot what the thing was called, Magic Leap. Those guys died or are dying. And Humane Pin died, right? Like all that stuff is kind of dead. And I think Facebook has this sort of uncontested right now. And the thing I was going to say, though, is I remember when I was in San Francisco, this company called Leap Motion got bought. Do you remember Leap Motion? Yes. Yes.

Did it become a video game or like part of a video game? They got bought by Facebook. And what they were doing was they were like, it was like this thing you wore on your wrist. And then you could just move your hands and do like hand gestures to control a computer, essentially. They never really found product market fit because guess what? Not a lot of people want to sit in front of their desktop and like hand gesture like the Minority Report. Like replacing the mouse and keyboard wasn't like super sick, I guess. Yeah, but it's pretty sweet if you have some physical disability, which I mean, there's a lot of like amazing applications, I would imagine.

maybe, but you still got to use your hand, your arm, right? So it's like, you know, same thing as like, I guess a mouse really. But the team that was working on it was like cutting edge at this kind of like gesture control, right?

And guess what? Like being the best team in the world at gesture control or another example of this was they got bought for, I think, 100 million plus. Another company that got bought for 100 million plus that never hit product market fit was the company that was working on face masks. So before, remember when Snapchat came out with those face filters, they were super hot, like the dog face filter. Bitmoji?

No, it was called Masquerade was the name of the company. And so Masquerade, I think it was like a European company. It was just a small company. And again, got bought for like $100 million plus. And then Facebook bought another company that was doing a very similar thing. Or maybe I'm mixing up who bought Masquerade. But I guess my point is being at the leading edge of just the tech, you get two shots to win. If you make the breakthrough app that actually does get product market fit, then you get to win in the billions.

If you're just the most hardcore tech team at building like good functionality and like working on these new platforms,

Your team is your team of 10 really strong engineers. If you could actually build a strong team, your floor becomes like a 50 to $100 million company. I don't think most people realize this. I think most people think starting a company is really risky. Yes, but there are less risky versions of this. And right now, if you were working on the Meta Ray-Bans platform, which like today, there's no app store for it. There's nothing. But guess what? There's going to be, right? Like that form factor is for sure going to exist. And there's for sure going to be apps that are built on it.

And so if I was a pretty hardcore tech team or if I worked at one of these big companies, like let's say I was at Facebook or I was at Snap Spectacles and I was on that team, the smartest thing you could do is spin out with your five smartest friends and be like, hey guys, the floor of this company is a 50 to $100 million company. And the ceiling is like a billion dollar company or 2 billion or whatever it is.

And all we're going to do is we're just going to live at the cutting edge of this. And we just have to survive five years. We have, we need time in market. Like we just have to survive five to five years in order to like be there. And we're going to just work out all the kinks about,

the spatial recognition, about getting gesture control correct, about all these little tech problems that you need to do to make things great. Because either you're going to do it and crack the app or they were going to buy you because you've solved a bunch of gnarly problems. There was, I'm reading this book called Digital Gold. It's about the heavier, you know that it's a

That book, it's about Bitcoin and the founding and like the early community and things like that. I don't think I've read that one. It's great. There's not actually that many books written about like the early characters, which is why I wanted to read it because we had Nick Bilton on and we did American Kingpin about Silk Road. I was like, these stories are really fun.

And now I know of a lot of the early characters of Bitcoin and them talking about going to their first conference. And on the first conference, there was like 50 people there and it was like a shitty restaurant and just all these stories of like, yeah, this checks all the boxes of early Bitcoin.

crowd of just nerds who are regarded as freaks and no one takes them seriously and then one like legitimate financier is like okay there's something here and then another one and then another one and then like there's a controversy but they overcome it and then like it's just like it fits all the stereotypes of these types of stories and what you're describing is like that same thing it's like a group of weirdos uh you know what did we say about um i had some guy pitch me a company that i thought was really stupid and now it's huge it was like uh

uh this product is dumb oh my god people are using this they're dumb oh my god everyone's using this i'm dumb you know what i mean and like it's like that's like how you go through that's like the process of some of these things and uh like when you're talking about these meta glasses you're talking about vr you're talking about oceans i'm like oh my god there's like a story here a story there like it's the same pattern over and over again it's a really fun pattern speaking of crypto i have three crypto things for you real quick number one

James on the podcast tells a story about, because he wrote this blog post a long time ago. He tells a story about how his friend thought he was Satoshi. And the reason why is because... How flattering. I know, by the way. What's up with my friends, dude? Not even a long shot? You think I'm Satoshi? No. I could never. Right.

What an honor though. But the thing that he was saying was, he wrote this blog post that I, it's on his blog still. It's called One Currency to Rule Them All. And it was about one world current, about creating a digital world currency. And he tells a story on the podcast about why he, why he was interested in that, how he's interested and what happened. So he was like him, I forgot who it was. It was, it was him. It was Philip Rosedale who started Second Life.

Which, by the way, like, still to this, you know, basically, Second Life to this day is probably the best execution of a metaverse. Like, they had, like, millions and millions of players. They lived their lives in there. They formed relationships and marriages. They had, like, they have their own currency in there. Is it its own thing still? Yeah.

I don't know if Second Life has officially like died. I don't know if it's still going. I'm not sure. But like at the time they had Linden bucks or whatever, Linden dollars. And it was like a whole thing. So him and Philip Rosedale were like interested in this. And then it was, there's a famous VC. I'm forgetting the name now, but he tells a story about a famous VC. And they used to meet once a week and they would talk about like, okay, how are we going to build this world currency? And they were like, well, here's what it needs to do. And like all the things that Bitcoin eventually did, they're like, it needs to have, you

He needs to have this and he's to have this. And then what they did was they went to the lobby conference, which if you know, is like this hundred, 150 person conference.

I went to the last year of the lobby conference. It was awesome. It was all internet OGs. It was so cool. So they were at one, I guess, and their little breakout conversation was about this. They're like, hey, I think there's a need for this. And he bought the domain blue.com, B-L-U-E.com. He was going to launch it. It was going to be called Blue. And the dollar is green, and this currency was going to be blue. And they had the whole thing sort of planned out, I guess. But they were like...

They couldn't figure out how do we, if this ever becomes a thing, like the target on our back is going to be too crazy. Like we can't do this. And the problem was they were like, we've already talked about it at lobby. And he's like, once we realized this, this thing would need an immaculate conception that it would need to be totally anonymous or pseudonymous, like a start. And nobody could know who did it. Um,

They're like, we blew it. We said it at the lobby conference. There's 14 other people now who have heard us be interested in this. And when the white paper came out years later, Philip called and was like, dude, I can't believe you. You cut me out.

No way. He's like, have you seen Bitcoin? He's like, yeah. He's like, that's you, right? He's like, no, it's not me. He's like, I thought it was you. If it was either of the two of us, it'd be you. You're way more technical. He's like, no, it's not me. Who the hell is this? How cool is that? That is awesome. That is one of the greatest stories I've heard. It's weird that multiple groups of people start working on the same thing independently at the same time, isn't it? And they had the same conclusion that it had to be an anonymous creator.

Yeah, exactly. And you know what? The other crazy thing, you saw this Jack Dorsey, like, is Jack Dorsey Satoshi thing? Dude, that was the stupidest thing, man. Like, there was some compelling evidence, but then what they did was they completely, like, spoiled the broth by putting in there, Jack loves wearing Japanese clothing, like, as, like, examples of why he is Satoshi. Do you know what I mean? It was ridiculous. That's what spoiled it? I didn't think that was that bad. What's wrong with that? There was, like, multiple pieces of compelling—it's supposed to be compelling evidence—

that says like, Jack wore a Who Is Satoshi t-shirt to the Olympics. Like, it was just like ridiculous stuff. No, I thought it was ridiculous. You didn't think it was ridiculous? First I did, because I was like, Jack Dorsey? No way. You know, and then...

there's this deck, right? Do you read the deck? There's an actual full slide deck about it. There was a bunch of good points. There was a bunch of good points about it. What I, things I didn't know, I did not know that Jack was like in those early cypherpunk communities back when he was like 15 years old or something like that. You know what I mean? Like he was actually in that, like whoever started this thing was likely in that really small community of about, I don't know, 1500 people that were on those early mailing lists. Well, he was. And he, and he was, I didn't know that. So that was kind of new information. Okay. Interesting. Okay.

other things that I didn't know. So there was like, there was like a lot of the timing things with when he was starting Twitter and when he was like,

Basically, the timing of when Satoshi was active and then when Twitter took off and then when he left Twitter and he was like, I'm excited about new things. And then all of a sudden, that was his last post. He tweeted, someone needs to create this thing or that thing. And it was right when Satoshi was creating that thing. There was all these weird coincidence in timeline. Exactly. But then there was other stuff where he was like,

look at the code here that sounds like jack's favorite restaurant in san francisco or jack said he wants to be by the u.s mint for his office which twitter was therefore i just thought it was huge reaches there are huge reaches and i don't think it's true uh but i thought wow this is a lot of stuff about jack dorsey that i didn't really realize and like you know for example um

you know, one of the, I think the biggest reaches of the thing where they would look at like strings of the transaction IDs or whatever. And it'd be like, see, this says D2MP, Dude Entombment Plaza. That was his address. You're right. All right. I don't think D just because D2MP showed up in the middle of a string doesn't mean that, that he's saying, you know,

one dude SF one DSF. That's right. You know, it's like, those are the ones where it's like, okay, I don't think that that stuff is, uh, that stuff is true. It's like trying to like figure out if Tupac's still alive. Like, did you hear what that, he said, shook shot me. Like he said it in the song. You know what I mean? I would definitely go read this deck. The deck was very entertaining and it was presented in a very like serious way. And I just appreciate the seriousness that which somebody took, uh, took this, uh, this research. Um,

By the way, that two-minute plaza, that's where we were for the dinner. And so I was like, and it was the same day that the thing dropped. I was like, hey, this is, maybe I'm the crate. Maybe you're Satoshi. That should be the takeaway. That was my takeaway. I've got one more thing for you. Go to Chizzo's.com. So C-H-S-I-Z-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-S-O-

C-H, sorry, start over. Chizos.com. All right. I spelled it all wrong and you still got there. Is it Chizos? Is it Spanish? Chizos. Boots. Do you see the boots? Incredible craftsmanship. I see cowboy boots. Yeah. So I own a pair of these boots. I have no stake in this company, nothing. I just think it's cool. And the founder is part of like, I recently became friends with him, but he's part of my friend group in Austin. He was like friends with Nick and I met him once or twice through Nick.

His name is Will Roman. And this company... You bought a $1,000 pair of cowboy boots? I think $500 or $600 pair a year, like a while ago. And this company, he owns the whole thing. And he was explaining to me at like, we were hanging out and I was like, dude, this is a good story. Can I talk about it? So he gave me permission. But the

But the company does like low seven figures in revenue. And the way it started was he worked in tech, like at a normal tech company, quits his job, moves to Mexico to learn because Mexico is where a lot of like great boots are made, like spends years there, like learning the craftsmanship. Like apprenticing? Yeah, apprenticing. He's like, I want to learn how boots are made and I want to make bespoke boots. That was his dream was to make bespoke boots. He's a Texas guy. He's like, he's kind of looks like a cowboy. And he quits his tech job, moves, learns how to make boots, and

creates this company called Chizos. And he was telling me the other day, he didn't say this, but I got this read on him that he's a little burnt out. He was like, the company's growing 10% to 15% a year. I own the whole thing. And he was explaining his vision. He was like, there's Chicovas, which are kind of cheap, but they sell hundreds of millions of dollars for the boots. It's a startup.

And then there's bespoke bootmakers who are just mom and pop stores. He's like, I want to be a little bit closer. I want to be closer to bespoke than to Kova. I don't want to be cheap. I need the highest quality and I refuse to sacrifice that quality. But I want to build this into a huge company. And I was like, do you spend on marketing? Do you do this? And he's like, no, we don't do anything. I just make the greatest boots. And I Google...

the boot name, Chizzo's Boots, and Reddit and all these other companies or all these other forums are talking about this is the best boot on earth. And I see all this and it starts formulating in my brain. I'm like, this is it, my friend. You have it. The hard part is done. Surely there's some type of nerds out there that can help make this company big. But I thought I'd bring this to you because I criticized...

the DTC world a bit when, well, I have that criticism often about this world and how there's not enough emphasis on product creation and story and things like this. And it's mostly just arbitrage. And I came across this and I was like, that's an example of something that I think, I don't know anything about this world, but I think could be blown up and be made pretty huge.

Yeah, this is really cool. By the way, great branding by this guy. So like, dude, he has everything good. Go to their website. It's very clean. And like this, like sawed in half video. Like what I like about this is a, I love that story of moving to Mexico to like apprentice and actually like learn the craft. And I just kind of want that to be like a TV show. But the second thing is sometimes the people who are really good at making the product can't show it.

There's a little story. So Ben's brother bought into a restaurant or like helped co-found a restaurant where they live in Phoenix and

So we go there for lunch and we're there and it's his brother. And I was like, so why'd you do this? He's like, well, the chef is amazing. He's like, you know, recognized as like one of the best chefs. So he's this great chef. He's like, I just really believe in this guy's product. And I thought we could turn it into a business. He's like, the problem is when you partner with these artists, sometimes they don't A, know anything about how to like convey that or show that. And B, they just won't compromise like price or quality or whatever. There's uncompromising. He's like, bro, like we need to, yeah,

Like we need to make this like we're so expensive compared to everybody else. Like that's it. But nobody really is like we're so expensive and that's hurting our business. And I was talking to him and he's like, he's like, for example, he holds up these tortillas. He's like, you know, these tortillas, like these tortillas cost this much. I forgot what it was like. Whatever. Let's call it. Let's pretend it's two bucks. It's $2 a tortilla. Most people get their tortillas like 20 cents. And I was like, well, why? And he's like, because he demands that every morning we get fresh tortillas that are trucked in from Mexico.

And I was like, wow. That's awesome. Why don't you tell anybody that? And he's like, what?

I'm like, yeah, you should like tell people that we truck our tortillas in fresh from Mexico every morning. I'd gladly pay $2 if I knew that. Your problem isn't that the chef is not willing to compromise and cut costs. Your problem is that you're not marketing this in a way that actually tells the story of why I should, why this food tastes better than anyone else and why this is fresher, why this is more authentic, why this is better, why this is higher priced.

And so that became like a little like one of our core things in my little team, me, Ben, Diego, we talk about all the time. We go we call it the tortilla principle. It's like when we look at businesses that we're either going to buy our own businesses, it's like, where are we trucking in tortillas fresh from Mexico? And are we doing a good job of telling that story? And almost always the answer is no. Like the things you do in your business that are like the blood, sweat and tears to do something great.

you take for granted because they just seem like table stakes for you. And you're not even telling the world about why you do that or what you do there, why you're different than anybody else, why you've gone the extra mile there. Yeah, Joe Sugarman, one of my favorite copywriters, he was like, I used to sell so many of these particular watches. I forget which company. It was Casio, maybe. And they were like, we... And he was like...

we make this out of this aluminum. The Casio was explaining to Joe Sugarman, the copywriter, how they make their watch because he was like, tell me everything so I learn. And he was like, yeah, we use the space-grade aluminum to make this watch. And he was like, wait, so this aluminum is strong enough for spaceships? He's like, yeah, but every watch company ever uses the exact same stuff. He's like,

So? And then they were like, we... And then this quartz movement is special for this reason. But again, every company uses that. He's like, space age aluminum, precise quartz movement. And that became like... That is what sold a lot of Casio watches. And Casio, the makers, it's called the knowledge complex. When you know too much about it that you think that that's not interesting. And Joe Sugarman, an outsider, a copywriter, was like...

no, this is so interesting. And that's what someone needs to do. Google Will Roman. That's the founder. But dude, look at his website. You started your story with this guy worked in tech, had an everyday job, quit his job, moved to Mexico for three years to learn the art of bootmaking. Guess what? Not on his website. I know. Three years of life, three years of marketing collateral that he's not using, right? Like that's a thousand days of his life that he's not putting on the website.

Like even if you, even if you click down the more tab, you're right. It's like more our story. You go to Mars. It's like true small business. Hi, I'm Will. I'm a hardworking guy. Passionate about craftsmanship. Guess what? Everybody says that. Guess what? Everybody hasn't done. Moved to Mexico for three years and apprenticed in this boot factory. I was like, I was like, Will, do you use Reddit? He goes, uh, I don't really know how to work it. I go, let me show you something. If you Google, what's the most, if Google comfortable cowboy boot, read it.

The top post, someone asked that and Chizzo's the top line. It says, this is the most comfortable boot I've ever worn. And there's 117 comments agreeing with that top post. And he's like, oh, that's awesome. He like saw that. I was like, are you insane, man? This is it. You have it. This guy doesn't have a TikTok. Is that right? I don't think so. Does he not know that like every niche nostalgic profession is now like the coolest kid on TikTok? Yeah.

Like if you plant like beets or something like that, if you have a beet farm. Dude, there's like Victorian porn where it's like people like wearing like, you know, like old doll dresses. Like, you know what I mean? Like there's like. The weirder, the better. And the more physical real world, the better. Go look at Epic Gardening, right? Like if he wants to do this, like go teach people about this. Go show them the process. Show them how the factory looks like. Show them cutting a boot in half. Like stuff like that, I think would be just fire on TikTok. Yeah.

And I only brought it up because the story was amazing. I also want to go on record as like, this might be like another like of our like feather in the caps where we called it moment because I do love their boots. It's so good. And I love meeting people who 80% of the work is done. This other part, a lot of people can help you and get it done. And I don't know, maybe not that 80% of the work is done because like actually 80% of the work is the marketing and like operations, but it's,

They did the one hard thing that others aren't really willing to do. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like it's like a great product. Like the product is good. We did this in my sushi restaurant. So the restaurant that we started, we started as an online, a virtual restaurant, right? Before DoorDash and Uber Eats, but we like create a website. We would drive people to the website and you would order sushi and like we would make it in a commissary kitchen and we deliver it to you in like under 20 minutes. And so we had our menu and we go and we'd meet with Dan Ariely. Do you know who that is?

The author. Yeah, he wrote this book called Predictably Irrational. So he's a behavioral economist and he just happened. He was a teacher at Duke. We were Duke students. So we get in with him and like normally companies pay him whatever six figure seven figure contracts to like consult with them. He's willing to meet with us because we're just like three, you know, dumb asses that were like in like at school and we go, Dan, we want to like drive more sales. You're the guy. What should we do?

show me your menu. We look, we show him the menu and he goes, oh, okay. You want to, you want to make more money? Um, you want more people to buy from you? Raise your prices. I go, what? He goes, uh, we go, but like, you know, we thought we could make it more accessible, more affordable. That was the whole pitch. We won the business plan competition by telling people we're going to make sushi more accessible, more affordable. He goes,

Yeah, but when somebody looks at this, they just see cheap sushi. So guess what people don't want? Which is the worst sushi. Cheap sushi is the worst type of sushi. Exactly. So he's like, that's not what you want. And so we, and by the, because we were, the reason I bring this up, we were an online restaurant, so we could literally A, B test. Now we didn't have the tooling. We weren't like smart enough to even know what an A, B test was. I didn't even know the phrase, but we would literally switch it by day. So we would do day one, we would show menu A, day two, we would show menu B, then we would look at the number at the end of the day and be like, how do we do? And,

And so we raised prices and not only did revenue go up, but conversion rate went up. So we actually converted more customers and more money per customer. It's like, oh shit, okay. Dan, what else can we do?

He goes, sushi and the wine industry, I forgot the name he had for it, but he goes, they create their own language around their products. And we go, but that's why it's so inaccessible. I don't understand what any of that stuff means. He goes, exactly. And if you do know what it means, you feel smart and you feel like an insider. And we were like, what? And he goes, so we tested three models of language. So we had what we had before, which was what we thought the accessible version, right?

the Philadelphia roll salmon and cream cheese wrapped up. Tastes great. That was like literally how we used to write. And then we had the next one, which was language. He's like, so same Joe Sugarman principle. He's like, do you freeze your salmon? And we're like, no. Awesome. Fresh, never frozen Atlantic hand, hand caught salmon or something like that. Right. Same roll, same salmon, more words.

boom, conversion rate up. We're like, Oh God, it works. This is true. And then we, we just kept doing the same thing with the whole menu. And it showed me two things. One man, restaurants should really AB test their menus. And I don't think they do a good enough job of this. And B, uh, you can like the same thing can be sold just with, uh, with better words, with better marketing and like dramatically change your business. It's not like,

just something you slap on at the end and that's good enough. It's like, no, you will get this like multiplier on, on, on success based on how well you do this one thing. It's not just like a 10% improvement. It was like a two X, three X type of improvements you could get by stacking these on top of each other. What was your cute way of explaining cream cheese?

I don't know. I think we might have just not even mentioned it. Just put it at the end. And a smooth... You know the other stuff. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, I remember like... And the funny thing was with salmon, it was like we were so excited about fresh, never frozen salmon. And it was like our calling card. Not like those other guys. It was frozen, frozen salmon.

And we used to go even further. We don't even have a freezer in our restaurant. That's how fresh this is.

And then we, like, met the chef, and he was like, you need to freeze a salmon. It kills the bacteria. We were like, oh, shit, sorry. Whoops. Well, and also— Flash frozen salmon to kill all of the bugs. And, like, all—like, have you ever seen the documentaries when the Japanese catch the salmon that they're going to use? They drop it into the boat that has it. Like, it's a freezer. Like, they freeze them, like— Yeah, it's flash frozen. Yeah. So, like, I remember, like, learning of that. I'm like, oh, okay.

Shit, everything I've been told to is a lie. Yeah. All right, that's it. That was a good pod. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, this was a good catch up. It's fun to hang out, fun to talk. And I feel like, I don't know if other people feel this way, but just debriefing interesting people we met and the way their mind works or the little schemes they got into, it's kind of my favorite thing. Well, I stole it from you where I actually started writing, like I'll write notes right after I meet someone.

Even if you don't refer back to it, it's pretty good. It's good. All right, that's it. That's the pod.

Hey, Sean here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for $100 million. And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man? How do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses? And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, and then you just use modern technology to take out steps. Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want and

And that is what my partner Mercury does. They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has, managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations. And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades. No more clunky interfaces, no more 10 tabs to get something done, no more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer. They made it fast. They made it easy. You can actually just get back to running your business. You don't have to worry about the rest of it.

I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now. And it's used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders. So if you want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open up an account in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.