How this dumb doll makes $2M per day

this stock has grown in the last year from a seven billion dollar company to now a forty four billion dollar company forty four billion okay know i mean that's not that's what elon bought x for people this guy selling lo it it's insane it it's crazy i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less night whenever never look do know what one of these are oh my gosh ramon will not quit talking to me about these things okay so those alright so for the listener sean showing what am i holding up they look like dolls basically in the same vein as a troll but i have gotten texts from my friend our friend ramon who says have you heard this thing it's worth and he says the number and i'm like oh you it must have been a typo so what what's the deal with these things do you know what they're called i don't super or something no this this is a lab boo alright just get you're yourself self educated this is a lab boo doll okay does i have a prada sign on it yeah that's part of the part of the stick here okay so what's the what's the story with these things this is basically the most viral toy in the world yeah it's one of the biggest craze since you know e and things like that and so the story behind this thing is pretty crazy i just wanted to tell you some of the things that i know about it of course my wife put me onto this months ago and i just ignored it as the the stock of this company is up like seven x in a year because this thing is go crazy chinese company right chinese company yeah so this is made by the this these dolls are produced by a chinese company called pop mark and the maker of this guy wang he is now the tenth richest man in china and like he's adding like a billion dollars to his net worth in the last you know but he's like thirty right or or like he's he's he's really young like dude look at this picture of him yeah but chinese guys always look really young until they don't till they don't yeah haven't you ever heard like all of my asian friends they're like we always look young and then we fall off a cliff alright do you see this guy yeah yeah i mean he could be twelve or fiftieth yeah i don't know yeah so this guy is behind this company pop mart but it's kinda fascinating what's going on with this craze right like it's it's really taken over so somebody gave these to my kids as like a gift and i didn't really understand the significance of it i was like oh cool thanks i didn't realize that we were just gifted like a really important thing this is like one of the more valuable items in my house right now like these things sell for thousands of dollars the top ones can sell for six figures that's how crazy the the craze is for this okay so tell me the story because this is this sounds like a good good stock to short because that's typically how these like collectible kinda we'll get to that yes i i agree with you we'll get that alright so the story of the le abu dolls is there's a guy who's an artist around twenty fifteen he's he's in the netherlands he gets inspired for to create like a kind of like a a and a a toy world so like a a character world based on where he's at in the netherlands and he designs these dolls these kinda like like look at their teeth like the little like g looking doll and and little there's hope for us okay because the experts are describing this a as ugly cute and it's succeeded because it's cute and i just thought like our podcast i just feel like that just gave us like some wind in our sales for what we could do as well on youtube it's worse for us because we're not particularly ugly but we're not particularly good looking is there like a and cute what the kids called mid yeah alright so he creates these in twenty fifteen not a lot happens from there but in twenty nineteen so four years later he partners with this company pop mart and pop mart was started about a decade ago because this guy wang had this insight which is he thought that this adult trend we talked about this before because you're into legos so he's like this adult trend this like kid's toys for adults like it's gonna be a thing yeah and so he creates the store and the store to really takes advantage of this like style this business mechanic called blind boxes which i don't know if you've seen lol dolls or mini brands where you buy the box but you don't know what's inside similar to like pokemon card packs you buy the pack you don't know what cards are inside and so this mechanic which i think they call like the gotcha mechanic creates a lot more spending right people will will keep buying because it's a little bit like a treasure hunt and you wanna see what you can find what you can get well you can to be a scam like i remember logan paul or jake paul were sponsored or did business with a company called mystery box and that was like a rage like a very trendy thing like three months do you remember that like ten like these loot boxes are in games and people know that okay this is kind of not it's not a scam per s but it's basically manipulative right it gets people to buy a lot more people get addicted to this thing and especially when you're targeting kids which is why logan paul and those guys got in trouble was hey this is targeting kids the beauty of this is it's not targeting kids so the way these blew up is through celebrities wait can i ask the question about the company pop mark so he had or eight yeah pop mart he had this a it was a toy company for a long time or what was the the origin so the story is twenty ten he opens up a small designer store in beijing and he's trying to build it off this kid collectible brand he starts selling blind boxes this lo was not in didn't play at this point there's other blind boxes that he's trying to sell and in ten years they grow from one store to you know three hundred plus stores two thousand vending machines where you could just like it's just you know you just buy one of these boxes right right out of a machine it ends up going public in twenty twenty stock doubles on the first day the stock has grown in the last year from a seven billion dollar company to now a forty four billion dollar company forty four billion that's what i mean that's that's what elon bought x for so that's so insane so the before it became when it was just a four or seven i think you said billion dollar company they just sold like dolls that people liked and it so which which a seven billion dollar toy company is is that's already a mega success so they sold other people's stuff that was over four years but yeah yeah they're they're selling collectible of different brands different ip and this is one of the ip that they have and this stall alone like these these lo boo did like seven hundred million last year so they're like now like almost it's it's it's it's getting close about half of the revenue of the company overall because the trend has exploded and then they connect with this with this artist and so that's breaks us to where we are now yeah so the question is how did this explode where does a the thing that fascinating me is like where does a trend like this even come from how does this happen because it's totally irrational right like why this doll why not another doll who is it the teeth is it the outfit is it what what is it behind it so there's some i guess learnings to have from this about like the psychology of a winning product so just wanna tell you a little story about how this happens so check this out exhibit a twenty twenty three okay yeah so this is a photo that you clearly can tell it's just rihanna like getting coffee or leaving a hotel she's going to an airport and she just looks like she's it's not sponsored she's just being a lady and she has one of the toy b box or boo boo or whatever they're call called the h off of her book bag book that was is first it's first okay i it looks like a book i'm looking for far away it looks like a book bag okay so she spotted with it interesting at the same time another trend is happening in thailand in thailand people are starting to see these lo for whatever reason as possible good luck charms and in thailand people are quite religious and they started to view these as like almost like a spiritual like a little guardian that they could have with them and so that's that rumor starts to spread and then what happens is do you know the the band black pink do you have you ever heard of this band nothing it's like a korean pop band faces like one of those popular pop brands in the in the world yeah it's a girl band like spice girls oh i know it yeah i like i like those guys i i see their music videos they're very eye catching yeah i know what you're excited about well it's just like it's a sensation you'll go on youtube and you're like what is this thing with a billion views on youtube it's sort of like the sensation of like the bts thing yeah yeah exactly okay so okay so this is right here this is now we're talking about black pink so lisa from black pink goes to thailand to visit her friend her friend says hey what you wanna do today they decide let's go shopping she thinks okay we're gonna go shopping and close bags what are we gonna go buy but no she wants to go to pop mart and she says what pop i don't know what pop mart is but they go to a pop mart store at the pop mart store the friend really wants a le boo and lisa says honestly not into it don't i don't get it don't don't care about it blah blah but the friend gets super disappointed because they're all sold out and the lady at the store is like listen it's impossible you're not gonna get one and that little meme monster inside leases starts to roar the one in her stomach and she's like you know what if i can't have it i must have it and she decides actually i think i do like little boo and i think i do wanna go get little boo and she starts to collect these now she starts getting obsessed with pop she goes she blows my boxes as she starts collecting this this becomes her d stress type of thing she does from the the stressful life of being a world famous pop star yeah now she gets caught having a lo why because she posts it on her instagram so now we're fast word twenty twenty four this is the photo that created the craze it went from just like you know how a hurricane starts and there's like some some sweeping wins maybe a a casual storm a casual rain storm and then then comes to hurricane and this this instagram story started the hurricane and it's her hugging her le boo can i say something i kind of get it that looks pretty cool it looks it for you youtube at this photo yeah it's it's like an old white guy in overalls so it's kinda what it looks like it looks like a farm yeah this does look like a midwest farmer actually this i kinda like i i and it's big it's about two feet tall i kinda think that's neat i understand understand the yeah so they they come in different sizes the the one that's sold for over a hundred thousand that was like a a human size one okay okay so this is the stock since that photo was taken and you can see the stock is up seven x since then as was like crushing and so the lu craze starts and what you know what's interesting about this is why okay so celebrity started posting about it that's it okay i get that but what else so here's some of the other things that i found kinda interesting from a i don't know behavioral psychology point of view the first is the lipstick effect have you ever heard of the lipstick effect i don't think so so there's an economic theory that basically says that whenever people are under financial pressure so maybe the economy's is a little bit choppy maybe there's you know you know there's inflation there's there's wage pressure whatever it is people will opt people think that you'll stop spending but what actually happens is you shift the spending and so instead of buying a new bag you'll just buy some lipstick they'll buy a new lipstick and so lipstick sales will explode at the time during economic pressure because you take away from bigger luxury purchases and they go into smaller luxury purchases so instead of a two hundred dollar outfit or bag you're gonna buy a twenty dollar item instead and so people think that this is part of what's behind lo which is that this thing you know initially started where these are like you know a twenty dollar twenty five dollar box that you buy and you get a lo but the thing with these the smart thing of these is i showed you the doll this is the most important part this little ring because most stuffed animals you just keep them at home so there's no viral vitality to it right you just have it at the comfort of your own home nobody sees it you don't get to show it off it's not a status symbol by just having the bag clip attached to these things they suddenly became like luxury accessories and so that's why rihanna had it attached to her bag and this black pink lady had hit hers and then david be is posting that and kim kardashian post that she has ten of them and she starts clipping them to her bags it becomes this add on to your luxury bag this cute little add on that you could put on your bag and then each one of these has an outfit so i can take this off and i can buy new clothes for this and i can upgrade my lab so now you have all can you spell lab abu l a b u b u oh okay i see the way lab is actually only one of the characters but that's just what it became called the the church called the monsters but nobody that didn't stick oh my gosh i'm on their website i i picked it's kinda cool i i mean and so and so what what i think is interesting here is that you have this kind of what charlie marker calls the la palo effect so maybe you have the lipstick effect causing people to liquor for little treasuries then you have the adult effect where you have adults looking for you know maybe comfort and pleasure because when there that's another economic theory here which is that when adults face stress from work and global events like wars and whatnot they find emotional relief and con connect collecting toys and things that connect with their childhood so you have that effective activity kicking you have the lipstick effect kicking in you have the status symbol effect of this where you can attach this to your bag you have the ugly cute effect which we are just we're just crushing with right now and so all these come together to create the phenomenon that is lo great great great job good fine i i've been hearing about this but i didn't exactly dive deep so that's cool that you did this this is not sustainable and this is definitely gonna go away in the next five years but let's get it while the getting is good alright so i've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year and i've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year and so i have a little bit of experience launching building creating new things and i actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas instead what i'm really really good at what my skill set is is researching different ideas different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies and i did invent this by the way we had this guy brad jacobs we talked him on the podcast he started like four or five different publicly traded companies where tens of billions of dollars each he actually is the one who i learned how to do this from and so with the team at hubspot we put together all of my research tactics frameworks techniques on spotting different opportunities in the market reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against a wall and hoping that it sticks and so if you wanna see my framework you can check it out the link is below in the youtube description so i started thinking how do i make money on this alright so the first way i should've made money on this was when my wife started telling me about this which was i don't know six to eight months ago i should've have either brought the stock i should have looked i didn't even think it was gonna be a stock i just thought it was like the stuffed animal i didn't think it was a a public company should have bought the stock or you know you could could've have could have tried to collect and flip okay that's too much effort so what's the play here so i went and looked up i asked ai i said tell me the last five crazy toy craze as crazy as le boo over the last fifty years and compare them what were some of the other ones so it would have been cabbage cabbage patch was the first one that i came baby beanie babies babies was the second i think trolls were popular for a minute but i don't know if they were a craze then it gave me pokemon pokemon cards which had two two bumps there was the one when we were kids were buying a collective packs reached about about the same revenue about two billion dollars a year and then it died down for about twenty years and then recently would like kinda logan paul started collecting them again yeah video in another peak it had one point six billion in it sales on the pep cards recently so pokemon and then the last one i gave me which was i thought kind of interesting as ai but actually is a good point because i was thinking maybe fur or tom i i didn't know what was gonna give me those were smaller it gave me stanley cups which actually makes total sense because it's the same thing it's the exact same thing and so it gave me those and the funny thing about these is on a on the scale lo abu is actually still small so this doll in about seven hundred million those all at their peak were kinda like one point six to two billion dollars in sales so i actually expect that over the next year this thing goes even the star kinda of goes viral nova it burns out and it hits a two billion or three billion in in revenue and then it's gonna crash because the funny thing with all of these is they all had about a two to three year peak tops and so i think the actual play if you wanna make money on this thing is to short pop mart stock so starting around you know end of twenty twenty six and you know maybe maybe through twenty twenty seven now shorting is dangerous because you could lose your shirt because it short has sort of asymmetric downside but if you i think if you were betting man the odds are that you know by twenty twenty seven this thing is not a forty four billion dollar company anymore what was the name okay so you had a friend michael michael smith michael act smith he had a the guy who created calm dot com before he created calm dot com the the meditation app he actually had a toy a stuffed animal toy company called like middle monsters or something that's right what was the name of this and this so his company was called mine candy and it was moshe monsters what's the most was a a mobile game was this if i remember correctly this is all fifteen years ago it's so it's harder to remember everything but he raised lots of money as a technology company almost or at least from tech vcs and he was like i'm gonna build a massive toy business and i remember reading at the time this is insane you're stupid but now that i think about it there's been many examples of where that is not stupid and this is yet another one of where you could actually build a really cool ip toy company and he was sounds like he was on the right track it didn't work it it was big in the uk so in the uk it was like i don't know one out of every three kids is playing motion monster it was like insane it was like ninety million users globally and i remember meeting him i think it was still during the kinda like it was kinda like the tail end of the peak so it it was big but it was it it had stopped exploding and he was like that's okay we're gonna like try to turn this into a thing and he was telling me they're making moshe shampoo and ba wash and you know it's going into every category but unfortunately that one didn't work out we have to get michael on by the way i gonna say that we have to get michael in the pie because have you mind he's one z coolest guys i've met he's such a nice guy first of all like total genuine good dude super creative really creative genius and then also like a rock star kind of like would you meet him you're like oh i'm talking to russell brands like you know cooler cooler brother you should everyone should google him name michael act smith and i remember back at forth teen or thirteen or twelve where i'd i'm still interested in but i was like i wanna be like i was like looking for a person i wanted to be like and it was like him he would be because yeah there was like photos of him like holding hands with like pairs hilton or like he was like if you google like michael laughed smith like but they're not even dating that's the best part just hold his hands she was like he had like paparazzi photos of him because he would head this like tech angle even though it wasn't exactly in tech but he if you guys google him and see what he looks understand he looks like yearly telegraph described him as a rockstar star version of willy won that's his your wikipedia page it's great this guy was so cool and now he has since started calm which i've no idea how big it is but it's hundreds or hundreds of millions billions a multi billion dollar company yeah he's the man this guy's absolutely the man and he's been the man for twenty years he has he has he's he's amazing okay i'm gonna call him after this and be like i will fly to you let's do it up episode because where's he i live now i think he was in the uk he was kinda back and forth between like you know us and uk i think he's in uk now he's just like a rich guy now he just like does what he wants well i think he always did what he wants that's why he was that's why he was our here that's the difference between that guy needs to do a big rich that's the difference between guys like me and guys like him i guess like he is exactly we chase money and money chased him yeah it didn't run very fast this guy's is the man cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze could help your business grow okay i have another one for you can i give you another one so we did kids toys i have another one you might know the story of this one if you ever had one of these what's this oh i'm holding up no it looks like boys that bubble a box of tony's choco hell yeah brother i love tony's choco do they have something that have pop rocks in on i been saying wrong for a long time it's not tony's choco it's tony's choco lonely do you know that i just call it tony's i love tony's i learned i i have i've always bought them and then when we hung out with mister beast i kinda he told us the backstory story i didn't realize how amazing they were i love tony's yeah yeah they're and their back even better than i thought because when we were hanging out with jimmy he was like oh yeah you know he for for feast really wanted to get feast to have a supply chain that had no child labor he's like you know most of the cocoa farms in africa have child labor all the big chocolate brands you know hershey's etcetera they all buy from them when i learned that that was f up i went over there and we try and we basically been spending you know couple years now trying to fix the supply chain so that that doesn't have to be the case he was like every company i don't like this this or that thing about him but there's one company that i really admire that seems to be doing something well and i think that's how he like phrase it and he said tony uses the one they do things right is basically what exactly and he actually called the founders of this and learn from them of like okay what do i need to do which is cool because they were the ones who were who initially made the push but do you know the the backstory of why they made the push into doing this wasn't it started by an actor or a famous person in holland or something like that a journalist okay it was like a non business person who started it and they started it with it's one of these cool stories where they didn't so much care about chocolate they cared about like helping the earth or human rights or something and we're just so happened to be doing it via chocolate like it was like a story like that wasn't it so the story is these i think there was two dust journalists but these two just journalists they're covering the chocolate industry on their tv show and they hear about you know that the chocolate companies are all all the chocolate all the cocoa comes from west africa and that there's a lot of child yeah slavery and child labor so two separate things right slavery and then child labor habit happening on the farms there so they wanna go and investigate so they go down there they investigate they find that it's true and they put you know they put out a story to try to help and i think there's store the exact stories is that at one point all the big chocolate companies signed like a treaty they signed like a pact to say we're gonna stop this and i guess like years later they had gone back they had gone to investigate and it was like the exact same situation they saw that it kinda nothing had really changed and so these guys are pretty dis discontinued by it so they decide like this is where the story gets crazy because a normal person even a normal a great journalist would just report the story maybe use some some some choice language when they when they talk about it and then they would shake their finger at them and move on but these journalists went and did like you know took the exit off of high agency avenue and we're like no no watch this and so the guys they come back and they do that they decide to do a publicity stunt so he eats the chocolate and he calls the police and the police come and they're like what are you doing and he goes i'm eating chocolate that was made with slave labor and child labor and they're like that's what that's not a you're eating chocolate that's not a crime he goes no no actually according to statute blah blah blah knowing consuming this product knowing what i know that this is the product of great child labor and slave labor that's actually a illegal arrest me boys and so they lock them up they take them to jail and that becomes this viral sort of new stunt that brings even more attention to this now prosecutors end up dismissing the case because they're like we're not gonna prosecute this but they decide to go in and create their own ethically made chocolate brand and they decide to call it tony's choco lonely because they're like the guy's the guy's name is too and but in the the that's his dutch name but they're like american western i's version of of of tone i guess is his name would be tony so they goes tony's and instead of and he said it's gonna be very lonely to build a chocolate company that's actually trying to be like ethically sourced so they called it tony's choco lonely okay great and that's all they felt in their fight against the cocoa you know industry and it becomes a hit pretty much right away they they sell twenty thousand bars in two days because of the public like resonance with their story and it becomes the best selling taco brand in their market which is the netherlands they get like twenty percent share in the in the netherlands it passes up mars and nestle and other other competitors there and then they start expanding and they keep expanding and then they start finding like minded brands so they're you i don't know if you know about ben and jerry's but ben and jerry's is also one of these like very sort of like strong ethical yeah indian driven they they stick to what they wanna to do good people corporations i actually saw ben or jerry i forgot which one talk at an event i was at like fifteen years ago and ever been pretty blown away by the like how genuine it was for them and how the extent that they had gone right so for example i don't know if it was like they have this one flavor that's like their brownie flavor i forgot it like you know i'm so fucking fit i can't even remember the name dude it's insane let's talk the fudge brown something fat so so that's so my past i'm just gave you're like i i i barely remember how that felt last week the way meanwhile i'm holding up this tony jo three bars are missing from this pack blame it on the kids too my wife gets pissed off at me because of whatever we bring like a treat to like a friend's house we bring dessert they cooked dinner and like it's like already open like she's like what the hell you can't like give like a pack of ice cream but there's like one i'm like why not we're gonna open it anyway like happen i'm gonna get open it now that's so good one that's sort of what happened exactly she's like i'm she's she's like i'm a she always compares me to like a bear looking at the cabinets for honey and i get my brother this my brother on aaron he's he's one of these people that like you know doesn't know it doesn't eat a ton in general like food not a big it's not a big foodie yeah but if you leave like a snack he's like a barrel like if you leave a treat in their house it's gone by the morning and you're like did you wake up and and and so like you'll eat the whole bag right of anything and so my sister calls it like with oreos like like we got a pack of oreos right and she's like oh my god aaron's doing a line right now i'm doing a line to her man you eat the entire row of oreos like you did a whole line and i just thought that was so aaron likes sam party exactly oh we gotta have a back on brother aaron was the og the real og now he used he had two guest cameo experiences like way back in the first thirty episodes of hilarious anyways chocolate the company so tony chocolate only what do they do or ben jerry's finish the ben jerry's thing they opened up a factory i think somewhere like in upstate new york or something like and they they it was after they met what's it called when you get out of jail and like you're in the program but like don't wanna go rec like they they wanted to reduce rec like people go back end up back in jail which traditionally incredibly high it's really high and one of the big drivers of why do people who after a long sentence get out and go back it's not because they're like kinda of morally corrupted at their core it's like they couldn't get a job and then they didn't have have money and the they their social life and previous friends or losers or they let prison without knowing in one but only at fifty dollars exactly and so a big a one way to decrease is people can get a job but nobody wants to take them job so they created a whole factory they're brownie factory is all brownie made by ex cons basically the they're the ben jerry's flavor they're like we wanted to they they they met some guys who had a good good recipe and they like built a factory around them essentially so they're they're do good so child to c only me to break into the us starts partnering with ben and jerry's and the revenue has just grown and grown and grown and so like last year i think they did two hundred million in revenue and they made this like a legit chocolate company that started with two journalists just basically trying to make a stand against the man how cool is that this is awesome this is so cool i do they run the company now no so they're out now there's like a ceo they they like you it's just kinda run by like you know not normal suits basically at this point and they get some fl because like their supply chain is still not perfect and but they're very transparent about it so they're the crazy thing is like they'll report that they had like you know eleven issues this year of like child labor discovered in their supply chain and people are like see you're not totally free and they're like what we're trying to like we're trying to be transparent and say you know we we're way less than anybody else we're been we're also honest about this and we're reporting it so that we can keep improving this but they get some slack as like you i guess like skeptics say that maybe they're just washing at this point now since the founder left and even i think the founder has sort of alluded to like it's not the same since we left i don't know the exact story it's like i'm trying to read these like dutch translations of articles and decided that like i'd rather just eat the chocolate and chill so i'm not sure the exact story but i think there's maybe a little controversy around that yeah i i've known about this brand for a while and this and i didn't know the i only knew it what jimmy had said which wasn't in this depth but that makes me like them way more the product's awesome mean i love the brand they all also and i i eat the shadow out of them i mean it's it it messes me but that's cool maybe you could be the influencer that blows them up even more same far i eat the shit out of them it's just like you most of my like guilty evening start with a bar tony's like and the part of the end jar on plus not of how finally like that the the issue is they would sell their candy like it used to come in like the extra huge guys it was a huge bar they only sell in bulk by the way did i ever tell you about the time we were talking about rec this is not entirely related to business but i think you'll get a kick out of this did i tell you about the time do you know that i've been to like i think we've talked about this i'm gonna san quentin in a few times in indiana state prison so you've mentioned that you did but i don't know the exact story what's the background of this so i've gone to i have a friend who happened this is the story it's gonna be a him but i've been to indiana state prison a couple times or once i went to santa quit quentin in a few times one time i went to indiana state prison so we we go because my friend has this charity called the last mile and the idea is like when you commit a crime particularly murder you're not always sentenced to life you're inevitably going to get out and it's better for that person if if they get out and have a job it's better for society if they get out and get a job and it's better for the taxpayer if they get out and get a job because you don't want them to go back to prison because that's that's bad for everyone and so it's we are all incentivized it's totally bipartisan to get this person to be trained and to get a job and so this company the last mile started offering friend chris they helped you learn i think when i went i think they were learning wordpress i don't know what they learn now but this was a while they were learning wordpress or they're learning learning like some front end development so you can get a job at like an ebay or like coding now yeah i don't know what they do now yeah they have like some like weird like like hot or not app just something like i don't know what these guys are doing but my friend chris started it and he was a prominent capitalist he helped he was the first investor and wish he was an early investor in snap he did boom he did all these other like cool startups ups and for some reason one day he went and volunteered at san quentin at a prison and he was like i think this is my life's mission to like help reduce rec meaning wow when you get out of prison and you don't go back and so he created this thing called the last mile they now have hundreds of employees they've had thousands of people who have gone through their program and i up until recently i i he told me the stat a couple years ago so i i don't wanna like jinx someone and i don't know the update but of the thousand or two thousand people who graduated not one had ever been back to prison and that's like a huge thing and and so it's really interesting that this tech person has like he quit so he doesn't invest anymore this is all he does and i talked to another guy mike nova regrets he he was on the pod two weeks ago and that's his thing now too is reducing rec so reducing the rate that you go back to prison but i know a bunch of people who have given up their careers to go pursue this i'm on their website right now pretty crazy stats so it says since the seventies the prison population the us has increased by seven hundred percent which is not what you would expect you know that's not just like that makes sense it should grow every year like no the prison population should not necessarily grow at that rate it says that every prison every person in prison has an annual cost to the american taxpayer of seventy thousand dollars which means we pay about fifty billion dollars a year is spent on state and federal prisons isn't that crazy it's an it's it's a it's amazing the the last miles participants in the last mile who who go through there i guess it's like a education program as they get out have a seventy five percent employment rate when they come out which is good and i wonder what the non i i wonder what the baseline is it's gotta be half that well so basically what happens and i and i talked to some of these guys when they're were in there they're were like look when i got out i had been in for ten or fifteen years i was a thug like i didn't wanna associate with my old people and like my family had either died or wasn't it around and they basically gave me a bus ticket in fifty bucks and i was like sir where do i go i'm not sure where i go to right now what do i do and so they're like that's why came back here i just started going back to how you to behave by the way why does he have a this guy chris looks awesome chris red why does he have a serious radio show what does does zac get broadcast into in the prisons in some way or like is that just external thing both so he so chris is interesting so we had michael harris on the pod michael my her is his nickname he is the founder of death row records chris is kind of he i joke he's an og g he's at he's at original gangster so he knows all of these guys so he's friends with doctor dr snoop the founders of death row all these cool guys and they all have this like blend of like hip hop but also like crime like interest and so he decided to have a show with sirius where he would get get some of these cool guys on the radio show and they would talk about what his issue is but also it was like wrapped up in like kinda of cool stories because it's kinda of right like hip hop and like celebrity and so he had a show for sirius where he would talk about it get this guys live in the dream got rich decided to do good in the world has a great podcast the triple threat love he's cool and so he actually so i became really close with him he invested in my company when i was a twenty five year old or twenty six year old in san francisco very coincidentally we both moved to this small town in west port connecticut together and we hang out all the time and his wife his her name's is beverly she's at ninety five pound woman and i've been to san quentin and we we were walking on the yard but these guys doing like bench press and sit ups and tonight of whatever and i walked with this little lady through the yard and the red sea parted and if she just walked through it and she's like tyrone how are you and she would go miss bev nice to see you it was the craziest thing that i've ever seen it was like i'd tell you if she like ran this prison yard she was the only woman there and it was the craziest thing i've ever seen and they have a joke that says if a glow you may go when you walk in to san quentin they stamp your hand and so when you leave you have to show them your stamp underneath underneath a black light in order to get out and they would do jokes where she would wink at the guy when i'm walking in and he didn't actually stamp me he just pretended and i would go to scan my hand to leave and my hand didn't glow and they're like sir you cannot leave have to get this figured out and i was like i'm not staying here so like they would pull like tricks on you when you go and see this place it was wild but that's amazing chris and bev are two people when i think of how to live life it's them that that's the way to go at dope can i tell you a related story so my buddy's trevor who was writing a book and he did this crate a very smart move which i i never really heard anybody else to but i thought it was a good idea he goes hey man check your email check my email and there's like a plane ticket and it's plane ticket to go see him and he's like i'm gonna i wanna write this book and i want it to be great and i could sit here and brainstorm this on my own but i really wanna do something that i'm calling a bookstore and he basically decided to fly out the five kind of smartest most interesting people he knew to hang out with him for a day and just help him flesh out and brainstorm the book together and he's like i will owe you one for life but i just really respect you to trust you and i really want your help with this because i'm trying to make this great i go and in the room is basically my buddy trevor his brother and then there's the head of like the women's volleyball the us women's volleyball team which is like way outperformed in the olympics and one won like a bunch of gold and there was one of the person and then there was this guy larry i'm like oh i'm a professional brainstorm this is literally what i do i'm like just ready to rock and roll but i'm just blown away by this guy larry every time the guy larry opens his mouth he says something that's super wise super smart on the nose just a few words but he's always on point and so after about an hour the brainstorm around the book i was like dude i gotta ask larry i missed the intro what's your story dude because you're incredible and larry tells the story where larry is like you know i my name's larry blah and he goes i was incarcerated for the past twenty two years and i think he had just gotten out i don't know how long it had been maybe a year or two something like that and he goes yeah from the age eighteen he's now forty he's like at at age eighteen i was arrested and i was i was in for you know whatever twenty two plus years and i was like larry no offense but you just got out a couple years ago how are you so smart how do you know all this stuff because he would read all this he would have these amazing polls or whatever we talking about you would reference this thing in this book and this quote he could just recite by memory so larry i'm like larry how do you know all this and he goes i was incarcerated at age eighteen they lock you up and throw away the key right like you're basically like the lowest man on the tote pole for society they don't nobody invest in you at that point you're you're a sunk cost and so he's like i was you know get in trouble and it was a rough place and it was not a good time and he's like i made a decision i'm no longer in prison i'm in university he's like so every day i just studied i just decided to go to university for the past twenty years he's like i decided to read all the books and learn and write and better myself and he's like i would literally change what i saw i would walk in the prison yard and i wouldn't see the barb wire he's like i saw roses he's like i literally just re brain washed myself that i am not in prison i am in university and i carried myself like that and i acted like that he made the most of what was you know otherwise a very bad situation i just remember being so blown away and inspired by this scott larry when i heard that heard that story because i was like you know if larry can do that at a life sentence in prison this sounds stupid but like then i can be bored in a line at starbucks for it out or you know whatever like i you can change where you are you don't you have to be in the situation that it looks like you're in like you can literally just decide no no i'm in university right now no no i'm in a spa right now no i'm in i'm in the brainstorming session right now yeah i mean i am where i wanna be about that that's so cool yeah it's really challenging because on one hand for some reason you start you feel like sad for someone like because you beat someone like i a of the guys i met they i think they kinda had a tone for their sins a little bit where like they've changed but you're like oh i feel so bad for you like that sucks you deserve said they you like learn about what they did and you're like actually no like consequences exist for a reason like that sounds fair to me and it creates like you get whenever i've done these things with these guys i get so many mixed emotions it's a very challenging thing it's very hard thing to be part of too but it is a no brainer right you want someone to like yeah not go back so you guys know this but i have a company called hampton join hampton dot com it's a vetted community for founders and ceos well we have this member named la von and la saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem with hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a pdf it's tedious it's annoying and it's always waste of time and so la like any great entrepreneur he built a solution and that solution is called mo mo uses ai to automatically transfer data from any document into a pdf and so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract you just put a file into mo and it auto fills the output pdf in seconds and a little backstory for all the tech out there built the entire web app without using a line of code he used something called bubble io o they've added ai tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt it's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like mo very fast without knowing how to code and so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you check out mo dot a i m o l k u dot a i alright back to the pod so tell you my embarrassing prison story no but that sounds so awesome it's very this can go so many ways so i go i i go just where do you make a dad jokes at your first day in so so i moved to silicon valley and i'm working with this guy michael birch and michael birch is a wonderful guy michael's built a successful career silicon basically like a billionaire so one day he messaged me like pack it like pack a bag with enough clothes for a day i i got two days and meet me like at like whatever like meet me at like eight am at this spot you're not going to work today oh alright i don't know what's gonna happen i go and we started having no idea where you're going i think he tells me on the drive that we're going to he's a part of this group called the inside circle and inside circle was it where they take guys from the outside to go meet guys on the inside and it was at the prison fu was it was it called fu prison yeah fu and so we go drive there it's a maximum security prison and i'm basically just a huge us right so i don't know what i don't know what i'm getting into i don't know i didn't actually sign up for this michael just kinda like trust me you'll you like this is good you should do this i still don't really understand what we're doing i i think it's like a you know like dare where they like scare you they like taylor scared straight like you're like i thought it scares excited i we're just gonna observe from like behind this like really thick glass i'm like oh cool we're gonna be like watch and i'll be like wow i learned so much today from observing tag on the glass and then they open the door and they're like alright guys come on in i was like what and so we go in and they're like alright you know pick a buddy pick up pick a partner and so i'm like and i like pick the guy and and the the program starts it basically it's like a men's group so you said to circle you talk about your feelings oh by the way when i walk in immediately my eyes are drawn to one person because it was so obvious to me like this was the hardest guy in the person somehow this guy had sunglasses and i don't know why he was allowed to have sunglasses he had a walking get had a cane which i thought like you're not allowed to have like a like something that could be like a weapon he's but he's got a candidate he's got sunglasses but he's not blind by the way what has sunglasses like up on his head sometimes care black a black guy and he had like an entourage like he had like two guys with him who were really big and like but they deferred to him and he was kinda older and i was like i don't know who this guy is but i've seen enough was he is somebody to know that this guy somebody here and maybe somebody on the outside don't know but he's somebody in here anyway so he's in my group and his two like entourage guys so we get in the circle and i'm like i don't know what i'm supposed to do am i giving advice is this some entry what is and it's like no you're here to talk about you know it's a there's a safe space unpack your feelings i'm like oh god and so first guy starts and he starts talking about how he's feeling pissed off he's feeling pissed off because like i mean a crazy story but like he's locked up in here and his sister outside is having he's she's being abused by her boyfriend he just wants to kill this guy but he's on the inside he can't get to this guy she he feels powerless and now he's sharing this heavy emotional real life problem yeah like a grade day real life problem and i'm i of course because i'm horrible i stop listening i'm just like panicked thinking of what am i gonna say you know when you're like supposed to be listening but you're just actually just planning what you're supposed to say i start doing that because i i putting gonna to like retail fake movie so you sound hard like yeah so i'm like my my startup doesn't it probably wear a fit this very really grinding my gear with the hell am i gonna say i don't have real world problems right like my life's is pretty good and the we're going around the circle and it's just one crazy like real problem after another and then and then it's getting to me and i'm just like what am i gonna say and so i'm like alright i guess i go deep in the bag i'm like alright i do have you there is something it's like pretty heavy i don't really talk about this normally but like i guess thank god i have this because this is the time in place to unpack this story and so i start unpacking this story and in my mind i'm and also i'm like i'm talking kinda slower and dramatically because i'm like let me really hand this up a little bit like let me not let me not be me and laugh during this let me you know try to be serious here and i think i'm doing a great job and the guy with the glasses just midway through he's like man i don't believe none of that shit i'm like i'm like no and i immediately i'm like no it's true he goes i know it's true hey and i'm like so what it's just to clarify you said still are we cool what's going on and he was like and he was like man dead ain't angel truth though so he's like it's true but at that ain't your truth and i'm like what is this puzzle what is this riddle i don't know what this means and then the creates is like really intense moment where i to stand up and he's like think they're like alright it's time to do the work i'm like what understand look your eat up and so he's like right right he's like what's your truth and i'm like what i just feel and i'm like i'm like i'm like no but that is a real situation that has happened to me and they were like no what's your truth and i was like alright the truth is i'm just trying to say what i think you guys want me to say because i just want you to like me and i put i'm like i just want you to not hate me and he looks at he just stares at me he stares up he gets to my face he goes that's what truth give me a big hug and then we sat down and then for the next hour i was like i don't know what the hell just happened but i think i'm you know prison gang and this is awesome but i think i think i'm accepted this felt amazing that's called a breakthrough yeah i had a breakthrough so that was pretty awesome for the story that's great did you how did the end did you guys like exchange information what he do dude have you ever taken ecstasy i haven't but i i assume that's what it felt like because for the rest of the time i was just like the weight of the world was off my shoulders and i just enjoyed myself and i and i realized like oh i could just be my insecure neuro self and that's fine here okay cool i don't have to pretend great and then they were like ain't pretending anymore we like this guy whatever you whatever you saying that i don't really care but we just know that you're not pan to us what value do these guys get what a lesson learned what value do these guys get well i think you know they live out for company hard life no i think it's just in general they live a pretty hard life and they go to this meeting every week so they have this kinda like two hours a week where they get to go and kinda like as they would say like take the mask i'll put the armor down in fact like it would be a mix of like the hispanic guys the white guys and the black guys in this session but then they would like openly say like yeah but like he his friend were like shank my friend and so it's on but here it's not on but as soon as we get out it's on again and i was like this is like a pretty bizarre dynamic but they all agree like alright when we're here it's whatever but when when we're out there it is what it is that's this the way that's that's the way it's on i remember realize that's insane but you know understandable in a way so they have this as a space where they can like del kind of emotionally mentally which is important and feel like a human being and be able to like express themselves i think it's a pretty d feeling right when you're again locked up throw away the key and you know anybody comes in they to see you as your label right but like in that environment for those three hours that we were there you know the but nobody was there's no status nobody was better than anybody else like yeah there was us but i was worse than everybody else guess it's probably more accurate way of saying it but like there was no they got to like be treated well and be help and be just talk to one man to another man at least again these are my my this is like my interpretation it i'm sure that people who do this more have like a more sophisticated way at a better way of saying it by the way now that we're talking about this and we can wrap up but jack smith i forgot this is his big philanthropic cause as well so jack smith if you ask what he's doing on a regular basis for a long time i would say are doing he's like oh i'm i'm pals with like people who are locked up and they i have a system where they can order any book and i'll get it for them isn't he giving books isn't it a book program yeah where he created a website i forget how he did it but where they can order a book and he'll buy them any single book that they want dude most generic name jackson you can't find anything would you google for jake's smith like yeah okay well maybe we do this so there's the last mile which you could donate to so get a last mile the last mile dot org you can donate there there's inside circle foundation where you could donate there so maybe do a little good so if there's anybody who's listening to this since this is inspired either to to start your own thing or attend one of these or to donate good do it man because it's seen it firsthand does a lot of good and i think doesn't get the type of attention that it would ever want by the the inside circle guys they also made like a movie a documentary about the program and chris red is the guy who who i who's kind of my mentor someone i look up to and you could find him on twitter he's he's super low key but he's been a seed investor of like probably five to ten different unicorns hugely successful and now has dedicated his life to this so just dm if you're wanna do whatever he's he's pretty open i think you're gonna do something like this by the way yeah i haven't found my calls for long do you have like a a career arc in mind where you're like cool i achieve a i climbed success mountain and then i you know parachute over to like you know save the world i that at the age of forty i'm going to stop the getting of money so i said by by forty i will no longer pursue any money and we will have a cause and that's what we would dedicate ourselves too that's what i that's that's you've also told me that you're gonna disappear off the internet i think this is badass asset you should talk more about this i said at the age of forty yeah i wanna get off the internet and i wanna not pursue any money making things ever again i don't want it to like ruin my perspective and just be a shallow capitalist and only care about that and just delete the internet and just focus on like doing something good that's that's what that's the current that's the current plan how old are you now i turned thirty six a month ago so i'm thirty six four years away dude do you think that's a crazy plan of course it's crazy plan but it's pretty cool plan i think it sounds pretty cool i said i said about forty are you i mean what's your level of seriousness about this this is like that's what's happening or like i'm just testing this out seeing how these words sound in my mouth no i i just think that i think that i think if you only pursue making money i think that you become a very shallow person i think that there's more to life i think that there's been so many times where i've seen something inspiring and beautiful and in my head i think oh and then we could do this and turn into this and then like optimize by doing this as opposed to saying this is beautiful this is wonderful i want to experience let's let's keep it small and so i wanna like force myself to appreciate that one of my heroes is this guy named felix dennis he wrote the book how to get rich felix dennis was a publisher in england where he founded a bunch of companies a bunch of publishing companies eventually it was worth six or seven hundred million dollars and he wrote that and he was diagnosed with cancer something like at the age of sixty and then at the age of like sixty one while he was like learning about his cancer or something he got into poetry and he was like i'm obsessed with writing poetry why on earth did i not discovered the sooner any quit business partially because he was dying and because he fell in love with poetry and he wrote in his book that if i could do it all over again i would have quit at the age of forty because i had enough and i would have pursued poetry because that was my calling and i always found that to be amazing because i think that oftentimes when we're doing what we're doing every single day we get caught into the make more do more optimize more when it's like kind of i wanna be in the present and i wanna enjoy the things that i wanna enjoy regardless if they make money because how many hobbies have you had where you're like well i would only do it if i could like make like oh i wanna like buy these toys and like maybe i could buy like ten them turned to a money make thing now what you're doing is actually pretty cool so you but you still have a capitalist mindset to it you are playing the piano and you are live streaming it which i think is amazing but in my head i'm like i wanna do that too it's like why i only wanna do that because i want people to see me learning a hobby do you what i mean i like that's like taint well only live once no i'm not criticizing you i'm criticizing i i was inspired to do it because i want glory do you know what i need yeah and well i i learned pretty quickly when i started playing the piano that nobody gives a shit if you could play the piano by the way it's not like a thing like if somebody plays the piano well it's like oh cool you could play the piano well they don't wanna listen to even one song wants to listen to somebody play five in a song on piano that's a very like clearer thing to me since literally piano but it doesn't matter because planning playing a five minutes a song is incredibly fun in fact i was i sent ben text message i'm gonna read you this text message because i think it's very relevant to what we're talking about so pop did a a spa recently did you see this yeah i i i saw but i don't entirely know what it that means but yeah so our friend pop anthony they backed a company and the company's goal was to do the kind of michael sailor playbook which is it's a bitcoin acquisition and finance company and so what they're doing is they they raise i think seven hundred fifty million dollars they spa it it's now a public you know it's gonna be public company and they basically bought seven or fifty million dollars worth of bitcoin then they're gonna raise debt buy more bitcoin they're gonna because just pin companies or pension funds can own pump stock but they can't own bitcoin so this is how they get exposure to it is that right that's one one aspect to it there's others which is like it's lever so like you know you can for every dollar you put in let's let's say buy bitcoin directly you could buy one dollar of bitcoin but like fair thing my they're gonna borrow and buy more than a dollar of bitcoin for every dollar of equity you know for example they all so want to eventually turn it into like a full financial services so essentially like a bitcoin backed bank i think that's a part of the vision anyways i don't know exactly what they're doing this you know they're only allowed to say certain things but point is it's like pump this guy who's very much like us i think he's the same age similarly hang out with the the me all the time creator on the internet good dude and he's you know he's not like some uber uber uber genius that's like but he's like relatable that's what i'm saying so he's like he's like one of us and it's clear that you know this didn't just happen he's been working on this for you know some period of time maybe six months maybe a year maybe two years you don't know so he he it's like oh wow pom raised seven hundred fifty million dollars has this public company now i think he owns eight percent of it i saw from the filing so like you know theoretically pump has like eighty million dollars of value from this right some creators make courses pump gonna make like you know probably hundreds of millions of dollars from this thing if it goes well okay and that's clearly what he put a lot of energy and focus on and did a great job fundraising for it and i was texting ben i was like wow that's incredible i was like meanwhile i've logged a hundred twenty hours on the piano in the last six months how'd i go honestly no regrets though i fucking love the piano out dude so listen you tweeted out you said i used to think jealousy was a bad thing like a sin and i tried to avoid avoid it but jealousy is a wedding crash it shows up uni invited and recently i started using jealousy to my advantage advantage jealousy is an incredible signal it tells me at a very primal no logic level what my subconscious wants it's a heat signal for taste i don't obey signal but i do observe it and it helps me now and so the sounds very strange but when i saw what papa was doing i was like that's so badass congrats to him but then very weirdly when i saw you streaming you played the piano for some reason i thought that was oddly one of the cooler things you've done in the last year or two and i felt stronger and i'm like well why do i feel that why do i think that that is cool i don't know why exactly but it relates to that tweet or i'm like what's the signal there that that's sending so anyway i thought that was really cool i thought that was significantly cooler and i said this as well when you were contemplating making a play or or starting a business or something like that it's like i don't know for some reason the play so much cooler so i think i would pursue those like artistic things over the money thing and this sounds like a very tri you know like not everyone has the privilege should be able to do that but i do think that like it's better for your soul that way yeah exactly i you could already you know hear the comments oh must be nice for you you don't have to work another version of it is tech bros discover hobbies yeah there's more life and money but also by the way both through yeah both both at both very valid points of view don't think it's the important point of view but i do think they're valid points of you i think the important point of view is like try to figure out what you actually wanna do and then pursue it like in a relentless sort of un una unnamed way and i think it's very cool when you said that thing i think you told me like in five seven years i plan to delete my social media disappear from the internet and and now you're talking about like you know and you know stop the stop pursuing the getting of money yeah i really hope you stick to that i don't know if you will because i think it's a very hard thing to do it's like hey can you turn down like it's like being like i no longer eat sugar right like anything think those people who like like i'm gonna stop i'm a diet right it's hard to stick to a diet but if you actually did that you would like shoot up in the rankings of almost badass people i know you know what i mean you're already top ten but you shoot up i've got four years to go i better get all i better get all of it while i can but i do think that it's also give me a percentage how certain are you you're gonna do that at the age of forty i just need to know i'm gonna hold you to this sixty to seventy percent i mean like i feel this a lot of it has to do with family too like i feel like when my little kids start like talking and having personalities i think i would fall in love with them even more and i just wanna like be a good example that there's more to life than than just the getting of money yeah yeah yeah i'm totally washed was kids are so cute i'm just washed up now i can't do i can't do anything dude i'm just yeah like the all the more personality she shows the more where i'm like oh nothing really matters except our health and being around each other right right i don't know is that does that stay linear like or does it like like does it keep getting higher the more they talk to you yeah it is but i i think at least for me like there's a there is a cap it's not one of these un unwanted things it's not spend every waking moment with you my you got like you're too annoying i'm i'm too tired this is too much but it does i do i do have like a a it became my favorite thing for like three hours a day like for three hours a day my kids are my favorite thing in the world that's three hours a day that my favorite thing used to be working it used to be you know reading there's other things that we're in that spot of like that three hours a day of like voluntary time i could i could direct towards anything and now my kids are that right like would like jumping into the pool with them and doing stuff or playing a game or whatever that that's like it is super super fun but it is capped at like a three to four hours a day beyond that i'm like like how dare my wife make me raise my own children this is too much i need to be helped and saved who's who's here you save me this is the softest episode we've ever had alright we should get off before we start crying alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and ph are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast