this morning sam text me a great idea he goes let's go back through the archive let's find things that we predicted or strong opinions that we had at the time and let's bring him back up let's see do we get them right do we get them wrong what did we get right what do we get wrong and what could we learn from it and so we're gonna go back nobody does by the way everyone loves to make predictions and have opinions and nobody ever goes back unless they were right well we're gonna show you where we were wrong on a bunch of these we did seven or eight of these that we had a strong opinion couple years ago and now they've played out and we can review how we did and at the end we make two new predictions so two new things that things that have our spidey sense tick things that feel like there could be big opportunities that we're gonna plant our flag and say look i think this is the this is one of the new ones and we'll see in two years if we're right wrong that's at the end of the episode alright enjoy yeah i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from all in in like a days off on a less track alright for look we're live what are you drinking this my secret sauce right now i'm not telling people about this yet water nope because see from the color it's a little different green i just do some experiments you know i thought you know we had this we had derek from more plates more dates on and he was talking about pre workout right he created a gorilla mind that supplement and then we talked about buck up and they a pre workout supplement and basically it's like people take a scoop of something before they'd go do their workout so that they get a way better pump and just really like sort of dilate their you vas validation and it gets them to have a better workout i want that for work i want pre workout for work and so i am experimenting with some things that will how do i have like a boost of boost of focus boost of productivity yeah caffeine i think it's called that's okay and got caffeine caffeine is for from mere mortals by the way today's episode it's gonna be exciting so we're gonna actually gonna go over some of the predictions that we've made both right and wrong since the pod started a lot of these predictions are to come from the two thousand twenty era we're gonna look back when we we're gonna call what did you say the i told you episode i told you so i told you so but it is also gonna be i told you we stupid and we get things wrong as well i told you so and sorry i told you that because i might have been wrong right but i got what i told you i definitely saved you i just want you to take your right hand i want you to put your right hand in the air real quick and i want you to reach back and let's give ourselves a little pat on the back here why not because our predictions are so great but because we're actually revisit revisiting predictions because predictions are one of these things that people love to do they love just people love to spout random opinions about stuff and then they just go they just it just all gets washed away in the noise of social media rarely do people ever go back and when they do go back it's only for one reason when they were right nobody ever goes back and says you know what nobody asked but hey just wanna tell you i think i was wrong bit about that one or i was at least half wrong about that one and that's not the code we live by not here not us and so we're going back nobody asked us to do this we're going back and we're revisiting some of the shit we said and we're trying to figure out where we write where we wrong or something in between and we have a a a handful of these that we're gonna go back and these are like you said two three years ago so they've had time to bake and we'll see how they much time but a little bit of time and the thing about predictions is i was you know there's a lot crazy stuff going on in the world right now and i was curious i was like you know you and i have been having this discussion a little bit off the pod about like where do you invest your money if you think the world's gonna end like part of thought exercise part like things are crazy and i was looking at like a lot of really smart people smart money people bill ackerman ray you cited ray dal old race said this and i reply to you was yeah but he's been wrong about x y and z and i had to going die deep about where they are wrong because if you just read the wikipedia page you see when they are right like bill ackerman was right about all these things but i was like oh but he actually lost a ton of money on this thing predictions are challenging because not only are they hard to make but the people who get right get get them right a bunch of times are also wrong a ton of times so it's really challenging to know who to listen to it's like a batting average right like you can bet if you bet three hundred you know like i don't follow the base one anymore but i think you're like an all star and that means you know you're missing two out of three right you are you're you're not hitting on two out of three predictions are way way way worse than that right like if you're predicting correctly on five to ten percent of your predictions but you're right in a big way meaning you're non consensus so you're bet you're right about something that a lot of other people are wrong about then you make it big which is one of my one of my favorite quotes said this on the chris williams pod pe get to be right and optimus get to be rich and so one thing you will see when we go through these i think is that the times where we said us it's not gonna work those are the ones where we have a higher hit rate right because pe naturally get to be right more often however the money is made when you're an opt optimistic about something that other people are pessimistic about or as my father once told me hey even a blind squirrel find a nut once in a while so i love make things by the way speaking of nuts and seeds let me tell you about this first one so a few years ago i was interested in freezing sperm the reason i was interested in freezing sperm is speaker know but okay no listen men's men's sperm count is going down like a crazy amount remember ben our old producer ben had this big threat on twitter where he was like he documented sperm count and he like made some drastic prediction that like in fifty years like very small percentage of men are actually gonna be able to pro and this actually a really big deal and so i've been been research i've been interested in that topic for a minute and so i tried for freezing my sperm and actually re re looked at the episode that we talked about it and the episode was sam's unboxing of his of his sperm kit or something like that because you had it you were like held it up dude here's the story i so like you have to like you know you have to like get the sample first of all to do it at a hospital which i also did you have to bring the specimen thirty minutes after capturing it so like if you're not close to a hospital i don't know what you you go in the room you go in the parking lot i don't know it's like a really weird thing to collect and it's a shameful thing the hair measure parking area it's a covered parking area you could pull into it's a very shameful thing like when you walk into the doctor and drop the bag it's way my i have you ever given pee it's like that's kinda shameful giving a firm is is way worse and so i always making an excuses i'm like i just didn't have a lot of water today and they're like don't know i'm like i captured the specimen though yeah it's a very shameful thing to do and i so anyway i tried one of these at home services and i brought it to my office because you have to you have to do it and then you the refrigerator and then you have to mail it in and i i'd like packed it in a box within a box so no one even knew but i didn't have i had to do it at at lunchtime and people in my office were like what's in what's that in the refrigerator what's this box and and i was like oh it's it's just it's just a thing it's a thing but it says like it it says it's like a bio hazard or something on and then eventually someone like i was like alright what is this and i'm like it's my sperm and they got my employees got really angry at me and they like told hr and i was like i i i don't know what you want me do man i just this is what i had to do so so that's like a funny update but i was using i tried two services one was called legacy one was called daddy d a d i at the time legacy had raised one point five million dollars and the update on them is they've since raised around of three point five around a fifteen million around of twenty five million so what's that that's a forty five million dollars they've raised so i presume things are going well with them so the the most recent round was in two thousand twenty two daddy the company that i talked about at that point it's it's kind of a weird i don't even like saying that yeah they had only raised that out yeah yeah it's weird man so that company has since been acquired they're bought in two thousand twenty two for a hundred million dollars so that is a a thing that we we mailed i think and i think you almost had back to back episodes because you also were talking about t d we said d c t we i think we're like six six letters wanna make a hundred million dollars d to t and we were both like that's a great idea and i thought you were gonna start that company because i was like this is like crazy a fantastic idea you researched it and i was like you're kinda shameless enough to go do that but you didn't do it but you did introduce me to the company that was doing it i think both invested we both invested in is doing fantastic and a company called hone and they've gone i mean they're gang every one of their updates is fantastic so yeah i think i think there was that was a that was a right prediction i i would say and those are both off the beaten path i don't think a whole lot of entrepreneurs were were thinking about capturing the specimen so to speak and you were and that it paid off i think i invested at a ten or fifteen million dollar valuation i don't actually i haven't read their updates because it i think that's sent to my old email if you're listening to this home update my email but i imagine that business is worth nine figures i would think i think it's worth ten times completely be invested in so anyway that that's a that that's an interesting one t and sperm collection yeah that those are those are correct let's do one that was maybe incorrect so we were bullish i don't know if we were bullish but we are very fascinated on bit cloud another thing that we are fascinated it is i remember the day you told me about what an n nxt was when you explained it to me i thought it was off you're like i just bought this kobe thing this kobe card and i like yeah that's kinda cool and then it things the world went a little bit arc for that one was actually amazing which is look like it was it was genuinely beautiful to look at whereas like f nxt then became like i got this rock i have the sq and i was like oh okay you know like you're trying to make a buck only there is no like art aspect to this and i think you paid five hundred dollars i think i we paid seven hundred dollars or something like that and then we flipped it for ten thousand like i don't know thirty days later it was actually credit to ben so ben was the one who got us talking to a bunch of n guys early on and you know the right move would have been to just go like go crazy on it for a while or invest in the companies behind it but i saw that this artist everything like boss logic was doing one and the kobe one looked great i bought it and then when i saw a seller for ten thousand i was like i mean doesn't look that great like how i'll sell to this guy i could still look at it whatever i want well i was out of there the other thing we talked about was big cloud so mark episode a hundred sixty four march twenty six two thousand twenty one i said i signed up to this thing called big cloud because my friend ryan ryan big called me and he said this thing looks cool let's try it and so we both you and i both signed up for it it was all the rage for a minute bit cloud ryan was on that episode so he he kinda was pitching it he called us before told us to get on and then he pitched it to us on the episode so what did he say so big clap by the way it's basically a social it was basically twitter but there was a crypto component where you could buy some you could buy in into someone's right you don't just use sam you basically buy some of the sam coin and if sam is gonna get more popular other people are gonna buy the same coin as well because that's how you kinda subscribe or follow the person and so you could kind of we've all had this moment where you see somebody early on you're like oh man this person's is awesome they're gonna get big and big cloud was organized such that you could do that and it also had almost like because of that it had a patreon built in it's like oh i already have all these kind of paying shareholders i could just create content just for them only if you own x amount of my coin you get to access this content which is what only fans and then the twitter blue subscribers and patreon they all do a version of this so it was like baked in from the start versus usually those are third party services and it was a service it was one of the very few crypto things i actually thought was interesting you said you said i think you were saying it's interesting because you let's do the orion one first so ryan goes i remember when facebook came in my college and we were one of colleges it was really fun this is the first time i felt like that in a long time that's why i wanted to come on the show and then you jumped in and you were like yeah two big differences though one you didn't have to have money on facebook you just you know you just go use it and two like you're putting money into this thing that we don't know the people behind this we don't know who who how it's working like it's a little nerve nerve wracking and you don't even and there was no withdrawal button at the time can you really withdraw money from it you're like hey red flag money can only go in and it can't come out and then we were like nah don't worry about bro like down over here and and i said here's mike put i don't know is this a is if i don't know if this is a scam it kinda looks scam to me and then i had found out who's behind it they were anonymous at the time but i had found out who was behind it when i asking around i said i do know the founders they're legit people in the scene and they do have a reputation on our circles and they had they had raised don't know hundreds of millions of dollars from horror and others like but and we had to founder on later we had the founder on and then and i said you know and i what i liked about it i was like you know today if i sell on amazon i keep seventy percent of of what i of the value i'm creating being a merchant on amazon if i stream on on on youtube i'm keeping you know seventy percent of what i what i i actually should not seventy to that more like it's like a sixty forty split of the of the ad revenue twitch you know roughly fifty percent then you go down to like facebook instagram twitter and the users at the time captured zero like those were multi multi multi multi billion dollar companies that the users who created all of the content and consumed all of the content the users did all of the work to create the value of the network we're getting nothing i said well it does seem like crypto is kinda cool because it can it could change that it can basically reward the people who do the work who create the content on the on these networks and the second thing is we loved the growth hack so what they had done was they took all the popular twitter people and they just pre bought a bunch of their coins so when i joined i think there was like seventy five thousand dollars of value for me to just go claim and i was like okay push i'll push that button let's see what happens and and so they had used the money they raised to buy up popular people's coins and then to to claim your coins you had to be like sign up for your account and tweet out hey i'm verifying my bit cloud and that was kinda going viral for a bit and that mechanic worked until it didn't work in bit cloud failed and we know several people personally da and a few others that invested millions of dollars publicly into bit cloud and that one and and so you you know smart people were doing it it was an interesting idea ultimately that idea failed and so i would say you know we were excite i i was more excited about the you for sure you were like immediately i think we you were pretty much out correct well i i i was out but i liked the idea of it the idea of it was actually fairly interesting like i liked to free money yeah well no like twitter ended up doing it where they just like gave you money so i get paid i think three thousand dollars a year it's on track for three thousand dollars a year for tweeting and like getting impressions i that's cool but you didn't need the crypto component of it no but that's different you got you get paid a share of ad revenue me for following you early on kinda of being one of your early or early believers for re retraining your content for all that stuff i couldn't i couldn't benefit from that right but it's the same outcome for me as as the creator i get like i feel a little more bought it well well no because like what was your last twitter check fifty dollars whatever three thousand divided by twelve is three hundred dollars maybe it something like that three it's four hundred dollars maybe so let's same me four hundred dollars bit cloud early on when it had i don't know fifty thousand users or something like that yeah you're five thousand my account was worth seven hundred fifty thousand dollars like you i have i could've have literally pushed the button and cash that out if i cash out of a little bit of it someone bought a bunch for someone's like hey i'll give you ethereum for all this and i was like yours i sold it so and some someone why the funny thing do you know there's a new one that's basically the same model and it's crushing right now friends tech or something friend tech yeah i'm not on it right now just because i have been busy with other stuff but it's i mean it's generated like two hundred fifty million dollars in revenue as a like as a for the project itself and i think it's distributed the equal amount to to or people have generated that much on it as well so then it sounds like bit cloud well let's do an up to big cloud but it sounds like we are wrong about bit cloud and that it bit cloud didn't work the idea did work in front tech right i think i would bet that in the long horizon let's call it twenty years these networks will be built in with these networks will will do this they will have a currency for the users on the network and so the users will the users who contribute to the network will own and control the the network i do believe where gonna be true front tech i think is like another kinda like attempt i don't think it's probably the one but i do think over the long haul somebody will do that so where's bit clout now it they changed this thing called des i think right the yeah they're doing a bunch of stuff i don't i haven't kept up with it but yeah bit cloud they're were like was just one app on top of the diesel protocol and then the diesel protocol had like many apps the diamond app in this app i don't think any on honest truth because i don't think any of gotten off the ground in a in a meaningful way alright pick a winner or pick don't don't pick a winner pick an interesting one okay interesting one okay cloud kitchens so way back we did an episode let me find the i think we were talking about my cookie dealer and a bunch of other you weren't in so i came over to your office to record one day you could make it for whatever reason and you were like oh my buddy's stew who had been kinda listening to some episode episodes stu iv was there and he was like i'll jump in and he jumped in and he had a bunch of ideas one of the ideas he had what's he he goes you know how travis colon has left uber and he's got this idea of cloud kitchen so he's like you know i'm gonna create these restaurants that are just built for uber eats built for door dash and they'll be delivery only there's no physical location blah he goes well there's a better he's i have another idea cloud kitchens and i was like cloud what you mean he goes like you know social media guys who have clout you know they have this like you know they have a big influence he's like i think they're gonna open up their own restaurant just like you know there's margarita ville and there's and gordon ramsay has his restaurants or whatever you're gonna see celebrities create their own brush restaurant brands they're just gonna license their name and face to somebody and then fast forward like i don't know a year a year and a half mister beast burger comes out and mister beast is one of the biggest social influencers launches his own virtual restaurant chain exactly as stu predicted and at the beginning it looks great because the launch is insane there's videos of people just like going and trying to to order this stuff and i think it did over a hundred million in sort of gross revenue you know just sort of purchases of from from in year one in year one and so it looks like at the time damn do called it great idea however cloud kitchens thing has a couple of issues one is really hard to control quality why why because the way these work are they're just mom and pop restaurants and they send the packaging to them they're like hey if an order comes in that's in your area you're gonna make a burger just make whatever burger you normally make just try to make a good burger a good cheeseburger but wrap it up in this cheeseburger packaging and put it over here the guy's gonna come pick it up that's how cloud kitchens work it just gives existing restaurants extra order flow but because of that you have total like no control over quality because you have you know four hundred operators each making a different recipe each with a different you know sort of quality control around this and at some point mister mitsubishi was like you do this is actually bad for my brand people are ordering it's like not not right it's not good whatever i need to distance myself with this and now they're in a lawsuit with each because they're like nope you signed you signed your rights to to us we're gonna keep calling at this and you're hurting our business by saying that and so now he can't really talk about it so it's not that that's not a failure i mean but it's a failure for him poor execution but it it could work you know it just so happened he the biggest you know at the time or still is and it got too big too fast that doesn't mean it's a bad a bad concept and i still think if someone's gonna do this you could do this you just need to like have a much more controlled skew so if somebody needs to do it with like just like i don't know cookies or they need to do it with a like they need to do like you know what's it called the edible elite edible arrangements or whatever it's like here's a gift you can send somebody it's like you know you need some celebrity who's going to just like create the version of edible arrangements on top of door dash or whatever just like this gifting thing that's like can be more consistent so maybe you could just send the final thing to each location i think reed told us on the pod when they launched cheeseburger burger he was like me and jimmy we're just like in a bedroom we threw together in ninety days like he made it sound like pretty rag tag like it was just like oh let's just throw it out there and see what happens don't i don't know if that's the truth that's the kind of the energy that was implied and you know so it just didn't work out for execution reasons but it could still happen okay here's one that we were okay i'll give you two that i was right but pessimistic about so club house so i wrote a twitter thread that was kinda like the thing that blew up my twitter for a while i wrote a twitter thread that basically was telling people why like club house was the hot name at the time it was it went from like nobody was on it to the cool kids are on it to this is you know a two billion dollar company all of the course of like you less than a year right this thing was just like flying and it was like oh this the next social network and all the big names were believers in this thing i remember i remember being like i enjoyed being on it but i was like oh this is not gonna work for certain reasons and then i would hear really smart people you know mark andre reese invest in this thing andrew chen you know the social guy oh he's investing in this thing then you hear neville who's an investor in it and he's like this will be bigger than twitter and then you know saw hill from gum road i remember listening to him on a club boss thing and he's like club house will be bigger than twitter because everybody can speak and not everybody can write and i was like that's not how this works you can't just be like my app it's called breathe and everybody breathes so i'm gonna be the most valuable company like i was like what is this logic and i wrote this thread i said hey everything's be the next big thing i think it's gonna fail and here's how i think it goes down i wrote this thread the thread goes viral yeah you had like celebrities reach out and nah how you met hu min h and who else so there was a bunch of people that were like you know i don't wanna i don't wanna like name drop you what i mean but like yeah there was it was crazy it was people that i admired yeah it was like your heroes i i like i like some of these podcasts the sports podcast podcasts guys yeah who were famous you know authors or or writers or whatever either followed or dm being like that's that was so so good so i was that was great but i also got blocked by a bunch of vcs who were in invent market in recent blocks me they're like you know you know they go from following to blocking like instantaneously why because i like you know i told them that maybe their investment wouldn't work out and and i got some hate some people were like oh why you rooting for a startup i didn't say i'm rooting for it actually in the thing you said i don't want them to fail i just have experience in this space and it doesn't i don't think it's gonna turn out nicely yeah but i think rightfully so people don't believe that where it's like look i wish you the best they say that like when they're i'm like look i wish you good luck and it's like no you don't but i think you know fast forward i don't know when that was i think those was twenty twenty one so fast forward two years now and i feel like not just was i right that club has failed step by step because i was like this is what they're gonna do they're gonna realize that this doesn't like that they can't grow the thing this way they're gonna then launch a recording feature because they're gonna say you're missing the live show just record it we're gonna optimize towards people creating shows versus people just hanging out and they're gonna try recording and then no one's gonna watch the recordings and then here's what they're they're good we looked at the data and actually yeah people don't watch these recordings because the what makes a great live show isn't as good and is it a well edited recording then they're gonna be like you know who really uses this people who hang and make friends on this and we're gonna switch to a hangout product and sure enough they switched to a hangout product and they did basically each of the steps except for the last one which i predicted was like you know they end up sort of fire selling it to facebook for you know whatever seventy million dollars and then he becomes a product manager of facebook like you know that part hasn't hasn't happened yet but pretty much step by steps that one was was a right but pessimistic and you know i guess one takeaway is doesn't really matter to be right when it's pessimistic there's no nothing really that great comes of it know you kinda look like an asshole even if you're right yeah exactly i'm like and i'm like great now i'm like yeah i told you they would fail and it's like oh okay you speaking of things that you say that you don't really mean did i tell you about that time that a kid flew in from england no what one time when the hustle was getting started this kid called me from england he goes i love the hustle and i was like alright let's talk i started talking to him which just bullshit at the end i go yeah if you're ever s stuff just let me know and and we'll help you out and i've meant it as like a way to end the conversation and i learned at that moment you should never say that i get a message three weeks later and he goes hey sam it's the guy from england so my flight lands my flight lands tomorrow and he just shows up and and we have hustle con like my big event and we make him work the whole event and we're like here you could sleep on our couch and we dress him up in a texas outfit he had never been to america before we gave him boots at a hat that we had an office and we call them texas sam i'm the whole weekend and he stayed with us for like five days all because of the phone i was like yeah you know so now i don't say those things anymore if i don't mean it i try why that sounds like an amazing experience it sounds awesome it was only no it could've been that's it could've been lemonade out of lemons situation for you well it it it was it was it could've have been horrible what was the other one you had too was it yeah so t was this company that was buying up all the buying it was a roll up an ag of amazon amazon brands amazon one of the fastest growing startups ups ever i think they went from zero to a billion dollars in market cap or a valuation in like twelve months and tons of revenue and then tons of copycat cats because everyone was like oh one of the fastest growing startups in the world we're gonna repeat this and and we had friends who did it too some of our friends went and did the same thing where they bought a bunch of amazon businesses may they rest in peace but you it didn't work right that the the problem so you know i remember calling andrew wilkinson and i was like yeah what do you think about the str stuff and i was like i was like i kinda to get it because you know they're doing you know like roll i think roll ups in general are just like a a really nice blueprint for a business this roll up kinda makes sense andrew had done a semi roll up with shopify apps and so i was like do you see this as like you know a really good opportunity what do you think and he goes i think they're picking up pennies in front of a steam roller and i never heard that before but i guess that's a phrase like a like a charlie mu type phrase if and says anything interesting it most likely came from charlie mu that's a zero and charlie is like has wonderful phrases so most of the stuff the most of the w that he has is from charlie mu and i what do you mean he's like it's like picking up a pennies in front of a state roller like you know you're gonna pick them you're picking up these little kind of like what seems like these little cheat for cheap assets and you think it's all going well until you get completely run over and if you fast forward till today that's pretty much exactly what played out these guys bought up a bunch of businesses they rolled up what looked like a lot of revenue and then they got run over and at the time we did an episode and the things we had said were basically so i basically took andrew's point of view and i was like that does feel more right than the other way and said what what could be the problems and i was like basically these the fba businesses are not very durable so if you're gonna do a roll up you kinda want durability to be one of the highest characteristics like normally in business we think growth is the best thing but actually when you're buying businesses it's more about not being wrong than it is about everything going right and so you want durability when you're rolling these up they bought trash they bought like they would buy like one of the thousand vendors on amazon selling chinese dog leash glaciers for for twenty five dollars you know what i mean like they i think they bought traffic and so like you know amazon is not durable for many reasons number one the you know like the your your spot in the rankings for these commodity products really matters and like it's a constant battle to keep to to get your ranking to stay high which includes things like people going and leaving fake reviews on your thing so that your account gets taken down like oh let me just spam you with reviews so that amazon detects you and then deli list you right that's shit like that or copycat cats or people who pay more or whatever then there's amazon themselves launching basic so for every good category amazon like cool here's the amazon basic i don't what do you know what's at the top right like that was also happening then there was the last thing the sort of the death blow which is andrew at tiny they sort of believe what i think a few other of these like hold code types believe which is that synergies are massively overrated that like is very easy to talk yourself into we're gonna buy these five companies and then synergy and it's like what synergy it's like we're gonna centralize the back office and we're going to cross promote with each other it's like no actually no these brands had enough brand love for you to cross promote anything you nobody trusted you the synergies in the back office actually just turned into like a bunch of people not really watching what was going on in these individual businesses the way they were when it was just one person owning them so what's see the update on them so the t was basically dead it's i don't know i know exactly what the stages is is it it's in the fire sale bankruptcy but it's dead and so are all of the ag and so now there's like the opposite phenomenon there's like a del loading and which is actually probably a better opportunity do you go pick the best ten assets from all these ag who are completely underwater and they just have to you know basically get rid of all these assets and so yeah t and all the t copycat cats did not work out alright i'll tell you one that we i wasn't exactly right and the times that this turned out to be true it didn't play out how i thought it was going to so some something that i talked to you about i think since in two thousand nineteen two thousand twenty was privacy so if you look back on some of our episodes when we are still in their old office so this was twenty nineteen i had this insight from the founder of pandora so pandora the music service the founder one time told me he was like yeah like many of our users are like middle of america like dentist who like have pandora playing in the background and what we've noticed about them is they sometimes won't sign up because they don't wanna click the link that says they agreed to our terms and services in our privacy statements and to me that meant the average show cares more about privacy than a lot of people think at the time twenty thousand nineteen the privacy wasn't that big of a thing where you you just click yes no matter what i think that that and so i predicted there's gonna be a lot of businesses that are gonna be created on top of that another example that i had was duck dot go duck dot go is a privacy search engine that doesn't like track you in the same way google does their searches have gone up like crazy and the business has gone on to raise a hundred million dollars which most of it i believe was a secondary sale so they're quietly killing it but i thought that this was gonna be more popular than it has been it's kind of gotten popular because tiktok so i'll i think in minnesota it is or montana it is they have banned or trying to ban tiktok for privacy reasons they're mostly doing it because they don't like china not because necessarily so this where i was wrong they're they're doing it for the chinese purpose not exactly the privacy purpose but i thought that this was by now gonna be a lot more popular than it is it's slowly growing but don't care if you give up all your data so you better give it up to an american company yeah it's very honest yeah so that has that we didn't i i didn't nail that yeah i but i i'm i'm still i'm still holding out but it i thought by now it would have picked up a little bit but it hasn't so i'm gonna give you one that we got right and wrong at the same time meaning we did an episode back in twenty twenty july of twenty twenty covid has been like raging for three months and we do an episode called is gp three the next big thing episode number ninety four we're like in five hundred now this is ninety four and we had gotten access to this tool called gp t three which at the time you had to like get an api key they had to get borrow that you had to get get a friend to get you an invite to get cheaper and it wasn't that good it was okay we were pretty stunned by it mostly because we're twelve olds and we like made it right like a rap off in the form of cardi b for us and we were like this is hilarious this is amazing it just wrote a wrap like this rap actually good i i i said write a rap by cardi b and the title of the rap was walked that plank hung and it was a very long it was like it had rhymes as if cardi b was saying it it was it very very we're both so impressed and we were like this is amazing and we were we were basically like hey this is super cool blah blah and we so we correctly back in july twenty twenty before chat gp became the fastest growing product of all time before open became a hundred billion dollar company before ai was the was the trend we said we released episode with the title is gp three the next big thing answer was yes however i count this as an l why because we just giggle about the rap lyrics and didn't do shit else we didn't do a anything about of it you know the move the the the optimal move was drop everything and go work for open ai is that what you said you said in one of the episodes you said if i'm smart i should drop everything and go work in that area and i'm not smart turns out right then i proved to myself that i was not smart i could've have there was a hundred ways to make a hundred million dollars with this i could've have started a company using gp three as the the backbone which the guys from jasper did they were like oh let's use this to help marketers write blog posts right tweet storms right captions right anything that story needs to play out still though yeah but they build a company that like got to one of the fastest growing companies i've ever seen like getting arr over fifty million dollars in one year's like insane and so could have started a company could have gone and work for open could have invested in the open ai spin outs like ant fro which is now a twenty billion dollar company or you know named to go through the list could have what else could i have done i could have just yeah so between investing starting company or joining a company there was a lot of different ways to capitalize on that opportunity that we identified but i didn't and i think this has happened you know many times we're sort of like you the opportunity the elephant in the room is the opportunity and you just sort of like oh that's cool elephant over there versus being like oh my god wait stop everything i'm doing and let me reassess what i'm doing in order this analogy that you kill the elephant are you gonna kill the look look you know how to some analogy is on the fly sometimes you gotta weave two or two together did you kill the elf we gotta kill times the elephant needs to while the iron hot now you got the striking iron right like we don't know the elephants in rome my friend it's like that michael scott that michael scott episode of the office where he's like sometimes i just started to send and i have no idea where it's gonna go that's podcast for you what's what's the bryant okay so let me preface this i one of the things i like to take pride in is either hiring people because before they get like before they kinda reach their the the pinnacle of the career i also like this on the podcast when we find interesting people and we talk about them a lot of times they're still popular but we got them a we got them before the curve one of them was andrew lieberman we interviewed andrew lieberman i forget exactly when but when i remember when he interviewed us he was just using his pod headphones looking his laptop like it looked like he was in a like a bathroom or something like you like with like as if he was like ran to like some room you know it wasn't like a big deal so that was a cool one so i got somebody here that this is all you so you come on the app episode one day and you go you just got brian johnson and i'm like nah not really you're like you know v moe i'm like yeah of course and you're like well it's owned by a company called brain you know what brain tree i'm like vaguely payments company something and you go listen to this guy's story so this guy's story is basically brian johnson i'd not to do his whole life story but like interesting kind of early on door to door sales type of guy ends up creating a tech company brain tree buys v sells brain tree to paypal for like seven hundred eight hundred million dollars creates this like neural link type of things brain reader and you're like but forget all that i'm like forget all that that was a lot that was amazing you're like forget all of it go to this website blueprint that brian johnson dot com and i go and it's like size six font it looks like i'm reading from a like a textbook and you're like this guy is measuring every part of his body every single organ he is measuring it and then he is optimizing it he's doing crazy shit and look at he's been doing this for like a year and i had never heard of this most people had never heard of this brian johnson now i would say like i think he's kinda tipped where like actually in the tech industry everybody knows about him yeah i some mainstream street people those they'll they'll call him the guy he's trying not to die or something like yeah oh that guy yeah i've seen him he looks weird right like he's like like because i'd bring him up in like every conversation i could find him excuse because he's fascinating and people are like that's great oh i don't i just don't feel like that's gonna work right it's like a very polarizing thing but you found this early and you were watching him you were like talking about it then we got him on the pod early great and we're about to release new another episode i went to his house we recorded another one but like i feel like you spotted this was your a uber angel investment right you spotted brian johnson way before anybody else was really paying attention to him let me explain the story it's been long enough i can tell the story finally here's how i find out about brian i i i can't name names i have a friend that was going on a first date with this lady he had just met and he goes hey sam i'm gonna take this lady she seems awesome i'm wanna gonna take her on a first day i'm gonna take her i have a little plane i wanna take her up in the plane and we're gonna fly around f one you know one was an austin we're gonna go above the stadium and it's gonna be an ordeal would you and sara i'd like to come on this double date i would love it if you'd come we said yeah sure sarah gets sick and i text him i go hey man sarah's not in anymore but i also go and so i go third wheel i third wheel on this date and we go to this date and she's a lovely woman whatever and she it wasn't trying to be cool but i was trying to hype up my buddy and i goes hey lady have you you ever been on a plane on the first day like this is pretty cool she wasn't trying to damp the mood or you know like rubbing it in this guy's face but because she goes oh yeah you know this other guy used said sedated he he liked to fly and we're like so we asked a few more questions and but like what does he fly and she named some jet that's like forty billion or forty million dollar jet and we're like what and she's and and then she has something like yeah but he likes to fly himself but he has a staff and we're like who the hell is this guy and so i google it like who this person is and that's how i find brian it was she used to date him and that's how i find out about it but i to start googling and i come across blueprint that he just launched a few weeks prior and i'm like right this guy's amazing that's how i found brian johnson how did that date go though i didn't work just decision by you to join today i like join the date dude it's and them it's them two in the front two seats and be in the back and i have that and put like putting my hands over there they're like hey guys like it was so fun i had never been up in a blade like that i was like i'm passing this like it guys still go and i was pip them up the whole time i was like hey a guy have you told lady about that one time you did this amazing thing but you're doing like the plain headset thing which is like you have to yell yeah but i'm still leading up yeah did you tell her about the time that you paid for everyone's dinner is two thousand dollars roger yeah was like i'm trying to like pip them up while i'm wearing this headset you're like morning i was like hey we could go there next week yeah was like hey guy did you tell lady about the time that you had the box seats at the f and he you took all of your friends because you're so nice yeah it was like that type of thing it didn't work out though i tried my best guy i'm sorry you know who you are if you're listening to this that's that's hilarious you you had a couple more on i don't know if you have time but you had a couple more on in here that that looked kinda interesting so you had do paid communities and they was this inertia one let's do inertia okay so you this was you you you talk a lot that's no surprise but once around you say something that's pretty profound one of the profound things that you said it's stuck with me this was in two thousand twenty one march of two thousand twenty one you had this episode where you it's just called inertia i believe and you said inertia explains like inertia explains why ninety percent of people are doing what they're doing in my life i've had moments where i realized inertia is a bitch inertia is the reason why i'm doing these things not be not actually because i want to but because of inertia and oftentimes i've gotta check myself and ask myself when i'm really doing the right things and i think that you were referring to a business that you'd had previously sold where it wasn't doing that well and you're like do i even believe this is a big opportunity what i even be doing this if i were already doing it what i've hired these same people when i worked with these same people the answer at the time was hell no and that's when you decided to get out so my question is a no question comment that was good that was a really good insight but question number two you've since sold the business so you started and sold the business i think post this comment yep do you still you like do you still think about inertia all the time and by the way this this came to be think about inertia yeah it's like the roman empire for some guys for me inertia this happened because i had it come to jesus moment i i was with our buddy su and we went to go in san francisco if you drive like thirty minutes down south out of san francisco there's these like casinos that are like half casinos yeah so we go down there and we're hanging out we're playing we're having a good time at the end of the night he's like he's like so why are you he's like so i don't get what you're doing and i go like casino what are you talking about he's like no no this whole thing you were because i was at monkey for a at the time and to the outside what i was doing was the greatest job ever if anybody had ever seen you've seen in our office monkey for it was literally the nicest office you have ever been to in your life i called it a billionaires playground is what it was and that's what it was he literally built his a billionaire ever literally built his dream office and we've just got to use it there's a chef every day and there's a gym and this there's a but it's like for only the fifteen people that we were that you know some and then you had twenty or fifteen yeah twenty or fifteen engineers who are paid really nicely and you just do whatever you want and the job was sean you get to come up with any idea you want here's a team of super talented engineers to build them in designers here's for the funding you never have to go raise funding you you get paid salary and you own the equity you get by the way you don't only wanna you don't wanna focus on one go ahead and do four at a time feel four time you enough resources go ahead and do everything right and i'm twenty five years old when he twenty four years old when he names me ceo and at twenty four that was the greatest opportunity the greatest experience ever at twenty five incredible opportunity then i was twenty nine and i was still doing the same thing except for now the pressure of like succeeding like at the beginning it was i do this is gonna be awesome we're gonna we have so many shots on goal we're gonna do it then we took a lot of shots on goal and we made some good things happen but no big huge win which is what we were all going for and by the end we're really trying to like force a square peg into a round hole it just wasn't working but our mandate was like build the next twitter build the next snapchat like dude that's really fucking hard to do but like okay we're gonna keep trying and so i got this talented team in this beautiful office i'm ceo i'm getting paid well i got equity i got everything you would want and here's is my best friend the guy looked up to saying what the hell are you doing and i was he's looking at me like i'm a junkie like dude what are doing with your life and i'm like what are you talking about this is amazing of course this is amazing right and he's like he told me how much money you made back then and i think it was like low six figures like over it was over a hundred thousand dollars but less than two hundred thousand dollars and i remember when you told me that was like sixty at the time yeah i was that's the most money of anyone i know like do you have a hundred thousand dollars like that way it was huge i remember you told me about my that amount and i was like you're was huge to me too i was like this is amazing then and then i was like if any of these ideas hit this is great so he he's talking to me he's just like i feel he's like i feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again and not getting a results you want and i was like he's he basically asked me a very simple question he's like you know if you weren't already working on this project if i just took the project away i if tomorrow this whole company had to fold because oh they forgot to pay their bills and whatever this told you tomorrow would you pick up the phone would you call these same people and say hey we're still doing this idea right that's the biggest idea we could possibly think of it's the one we must do would you call these same people to work on the same idea and my answer was yes the same people hell no not the same idea he's like he's and and i was like that's kind of a shitty realization ta it's like i was like am i an idiot he's like no he's like this is common he's like inertia is a bitch he's like almost all of us are just doing what we're doing because we were already doing it and like this this even happens with investments after we got acquired i got a bunch of amazon stock and so my portfolio was like super skewed towards amazon i you know all of a sudden here's millions of dollars i'm amazon stock okay if if you're just giving me the billions of dollars i have put all of it into amazon only but because it was already there i was like should i sell amazon don't know it's a good company right it's like because it was already there my decision was totally different than if i had just re under rewritten the the decision from scratch saying if i if i just had this money day is this exactly how i would allocate it and the same thing happens in a portfolio as happens in the time of your life like would i would i allocate my energy and my talents to this project or am i just doing it because i've been doing it if i'm just doing it because that's what i'm already doing and i think the sad answer is that for most people they're doing what they're doing because they're already doing it it's not the thing that if they had a blank slate today they would just go back and recreate this that's the same argument my wife gave to me about selling hubspot stock i've not sold any and she was like well would you buy this stock anyway my argument was well first of all i i do like the company but do i like it enough to have that much of my portfolio in it i i don't know but my argument is like well but i don't wanna pay taxes and frankly i'm not sure if that's a good argument or not but i i am a victim of it as well yeah yeah of course and as ever right there's nuances to some of these things but like that same principle it just applies to a lot of parts of your life a lot of people are in relationships they don't wanna be in because they're already in the relationship they're in jobs they don't wanna be in because they're they're in it and and i just kinda have this like it was two am and i'm in chinese casino and my friend is telling me this thing and i remember we drove to our office a badge in it like two thirty in the morning we go to the whiteboard and we say we're gonna spend the next hour trying to figure out if we can actually make this company work and if at end of this hour we don't look at a plan on this whiteboard that we feel is like this is gonna work like i believe that this is worth a shot then i'm gonna sell this company like tomorrow i'm just gonna get out of this company and then at the end of that hour we looked at it we're like this is i mean these are all just like random long shots that like we can't sit here and say we have a ton of conviction in and then like the next day i talked to our main investor and i said i think it's time to to shake it up like i need to shake up something in my life this is all beautiful this is amazing i can't believe you gave me this experience but like i don't want this anymore let's either sell the company or you should replace me or something something's gotta to change i can't un here what i heard last night and i have a lot of flaws but the one good thing i have is that once i hear the truth i just act on it like i just agree that like i've heard the truth now and that's it there's no going back from that whereas i think some people will see or hear the truth and then they'll go into denial or they'll delay and i don't do denial or delay that's a good one yeah i always i thought that that line inertia a bitch i i remember that one so i had to bring that one up maybe the last one is paid communities so i've been interested there's a there if you listen closely over the last five hundred and fifty episodes there's like two to three things that i have like have been obsessed about and i knew i was gonna act on one them i actually done one of them it's a paid community so by the way i think can you say the two or three what well what would be the two or three i i helping people find jobs so i call it job boards it's beyond that but i've always been fascinated by that and then creating like like somewhat related but was i've been fascinated by the trucking industry or other like blue collar essential jobs with that aren't don't have a lot of technology or software in order to help them be more efficient so the the those are like two or three things that i've always really liked and then of course b to b media companies and database and research businesses but the other one that i really loved was paid communities and if you listen closely starting in two thousand twenty i did a lot of breakdowns on different paid communities so i mentioned tiger twenty one vista which has since sold so i i talked about vista a lot people didn't know what vista is it's like similar to what hampton does so similar to y ipo does but the target market is ceos and business owners of like plumbing companies in the in middle of america doesn't sound that huge but it since sold for about one point eight billion dollars i think about eight or ten months ago it was due and now it's doing close to five hundred million dollars a year in sales very profitable and so i talked about paid communities and i talked about tire twenty one a few other ones here's the i'm i i made a list of pros and cons back in two thousand twenty so this was mar two thousand twenty and i'll tell you if i think the pros and cons are true since i've now run handed for about one year so pros of page paid communities they can grow quickly they seem fun to run if you're interested in the topic you don't need a lot of money to start them they definitely seem profitable and then the cons were a lot of times they don't scale that well i think churn could be pretty pretty high and those like my two main cons so the truth is is that they can grow quickly but you don't want them to grow quick quickly you want them to grow slowly so i was a little bit wrong about that can you start them with zero money zero dollars yes i started hampton with no money we didn't even buy a website or domain name can they be very profitable yes the answer is yes they can what i got wrong or i didn't mention was how meticulous you have to be about growth and they can get big but they just take longer and that's okay because i think if they take long usually not always if something takes longer to grow maybe that means that it's gonna die is it has is less likely to die quickly example thor grow quickly probably is gonna die very quickly there's a lot of examples of that and so it has in fact proven to be a big business or it can be a big business it's harder to grow than i thought but not because of demand but because you don't want it to grow quickly you needed to grow slowly you have to be really thoughtful so i underestimated how challenging that is but i did a lot of the work in front of people i i i would've have thought that someone was gonna launch this i even interviewed the funny thing the funny thing is you you invited a couple of other pain community ceos on the pod as guests ask them a hundred questions and then took their lunch and i just find that to be an incredible story that i look forward to telling as this plays out i i needed to work i need to work first at the time you had a community called club lt tv which was an e econ community i i think it was making a hundred thousand dollars a month pretty much right away i think you actually not that name wonderful it was it was free i didn't charge for it but it was like invite only like i basically that was i was running at e commerce business but i'm part time in it and i've never done e commerce before and so i have a strategy of like if i'm gonna do something that i don't know how to do there are hacks to learn faster one of the hacks is surround yourself with other people who are doing that playing the same game at one to two levels above where you're playing it meaning they're one to two not just better at it than you are and further along than you are and so when we wanted to grow big on on twitter i think both of us had a similar idea we created a group a text message group called the hundred k club and we invited six people who all had that same goal and then we all talked in there about initially like stuff we were doing to make that happen then we all just became friends but like immersion into a small club of people who play the same or playing the same game at a one or two notch higher level than you is one of the one of the hacks to get better it's something faster and so club lt tv was cool if i just create a curated a group of awesome e commerce owners i'm gonna learn a bunch of shit that i need to know to make my own thing successful so i'm not even charging these people because i don't need to make money off this i want the information i actually wanted the network from it and that's exactly what i got out of it but you made money through advertising and we had sponsors yeah and that model actually worked so there's was a company called ave who does this but they did it with like chief information officers so these are like fortune five hundred and they were making they they sold for seventeen times profit two hundred fifty million dollars so they're making i think fifty million in revenue and then whatever that profit is i can't do that math but they saw so that model that you had it works the downside which i don't think you you knew getting into it logistically there's it's it's a very operationally heavy business it's very very challenging it's not e comm is also operationally heavy but it's more so like there's like three or four things that you have to nail with people there's like way more things there's like people's feelings that you have to like account for and it's a little bit more of an art and it's actually quite challenging to hire help for that type of business but you are on something and i actually think club out the way i think that one was a business that could've have told me worked me and ben i remember we just had conversation like hey do we i wanna actually turn this into a business it can it'll work it would be profitable we just saw better opportunities for ourselves but like that's one where if i knew the right person i would have totally just handed it over cl to club lt it'd be like you're the operator of this now there's a clear path to make this a business there's like one called ecommerce fuel that's out there that's kinda like the which i love older version of the same subscriber really why what why you didn't do e commerce i just thought it was awesome andrew the guy who started it i used to read his blog and i thought it was sick it was three hundred dollars a year i think he lessons to the pod i i and i talked to him every everyone once a while i thought it was i thought e commerce feel was great in fact i was a paying member in mo ali this very rich successful guy sorry i'm anyways i'm gonna blow your cover he used to use my account because he didn't wanna pay three hundred dollars a year to he he would use we would share a password so like it's pretty funny but i like e commerce too i thought it was great it's still a thing and he limits it to three thousand people i think right something like that i don't i i don't actually use it because it's a forum and i don't really love like forums and there's like live events or whatever i i like the way we did it with club lt tv thought that was more more fun and easier just easier to to like actually participate in so anyways i thought that yeah that that definitely could have been a business just you know you gotta pick and choose opportunities so long story short what what do you think is the what's your takeaway from this so like what do you okay we made a bunch of bunch predictions we go back we look we see what we're were right about what we were wrong about what's your to the chris borrowing question that i love what's the right lesson to learn out of this the right lesson to learn there's a few the number one is we we make money talking about this stuff and that's great you could say we make a great living doing that i feel like a p for not acting on some of these things i guess i did on one but like there's been five or ten or twenty things where you've told me and i'm like that's cool i should go in on that mainly there's only been three things that i've gone in on which is t but like fuck we talked about open ai like i we should've put our money i think you have in a few cases but i should've put my money where my mouth was a little bit more so that's one lesson which is predictions aren't that easy or aren't that terribly hard having the courage in them is hard mine is the exact same thing which is that the predictions that matter are the ones where you notice something early before everybody knows it but then you like that's you know he's kinda cliche right ideas are kinda cheap and execute everything no the idea is actually quite valuable however it's potential energy you guys are the potential energy to kinetic energy how do you do that through like motion right so it's like chasing it down and actually doing something with it is is where all the value gets created and me and ben have actually figured out a little bit of a better way to do this both through like actually having like vehicles to invest in these things but also we just continually stop and as like i think in the last six months is probably two or three times where we say what's the thing that we see right now that three you know three years from now we're gonna be like dude we talked about that that was in front of our face so what why didn't we just go and meet the guy why didn't we go and invest in the thing why didn't we start one whatever it is right and so by asking that question regularly like what's the thing that's actually hidden in plain sight right now for us i think i'm gonna like turn that dial from like missing a bunch of these opportunities to taking advantage of them we should do a whole episode on what those things are yeah yeah i will i i'll tell you the way i learned that by the way was i met this guy anna mit and anna mit came to my office and he was the first product manager at twitter and i was like tell me what it was like back then he was like well was like i don't know twelve people in the company i joined you fifteen people something like that i joined and i was like was it obvious at the time that like twitter was gonna become twitter he's like no no no not at all like twitter was kinda interesting but looked pretty frivolous and useless people were texting out like what they were eating there was no app at the time it was just you just texted this number like four four four four or whatever like whatever you're having for lunch and at silicon valley people were like kinda having fun with it a little bit but it didn't seem like a serious like he's like i had like job offers from microsoft or whatever like i had serious opportunities and then here was this like twitter thing even the name sounded frivolous and he's like but i had learned one important lesson which is that whenever you see like a phenomenon of behavior meaning you see people acting in a way that seems strange weird or inexplicable or irrational the natural reaction is to just write it off like i don't know those are weirdo that that makes no sense idiots and move on and he's like what i've learned is now he's a vc he's like as a vc and as at the time it's like thank god in my career i i realized that which was when you realize when you see that weird behavior that you don't understand the thing is not to the thing not to do is label it and write it off it's to lean in and try to understand it he's like so i saw that people were like like why would you text out what you're eating right now like what do you why and why do why do you like to see what other people are saying in that sent same way like that seems completely like strange behavior but people are doing it like anytime you see strange behavior and people doing it like that's usually the the inner that's what a amazing opportunity actually looks like and since he told me that i then saw that many times over like we got acquired by twitch i remember in college walking into my the dorm room of the guy next to me who who lived next to me and he was watching a like a replay of someone playing a star craft tournament and i was like you are king do not only is star aircraft on your screen right now you are not even playing you are watching some guy in korea play this game that is literally like the do dumbest thing i didn't and i literally made fun of him for like a year later when we got acquired and he's like oh you're head of esports at twitch now he was like work yeah he literally he was like you fuck he called me he was like you used to make fun of me for this and i was like dude i agree i was totally dumb and wrong i should the way i i i don't even play games but i watch people on youtube playing yeah and i was like i should have leaned in why would somebody do this behavior that seems completely irrational why would somebody watch someone else play video on the other side of the earth through this replay that he had to download at the time there was no twitch at the time he's like he had to download this thing off the server for eight hours and then watch it at night and i was like weird i don't wanna hear it and then of course you know so missing that five times has taught me like lean into that like and i just remembered the opening eye example by the way sam alt president of yc right he is he had the best job in silicon valley president of yc was the best job of silicon silicon valley at the time yc is probably the most like value generative company at the time or like organization he's the president he got picked over anybody else and he left to go join an ai nonprofit i yeah realize something sums up these billionaires are putting a hundred million dollars into this ai research company this profit why would they do that and again i was just like weird sam made doing a weird inexplicable thing said i should have been like hey the smartest guy in silicon valley just left the most prestigious job silicon valley to do this thing that sounds sort of like strange to me lean in and yeah that's the lesson i would share at my takeaway of this whole thing let me wrap up with one quick thing i forgot i should have said this earlier but we did this episode about this guy i think he was in india and we called him in and he like talked to us without his video on and i found him because he had this website called uber pro i think it was called uber dot pro and i've googled his name i googled his name last night i can't find him anywhere online oh he's gone i can't find him anywhere and if anyone can find him please do that this would be amazing i wanna see what he's up to now he was twenty three years old or even younger and what what i did was i gave him a thousand dollars and he gave me ten thousand dollars in uber credit and for like years i took an uber black everywhere because what he did was i think this is how it worked what he did was he found all of these indian kids that were like in his town and when you rode uber for the very first time and you referred people you got twenty five dollars in free credit and somehow he made it so he could convince all these kids to take a free uber to get twenty five dollars in credit and to continually refer themselves i also think he ranked really high in google for uber discount code or uber promo code and he so he accumulated a millions of dollars of uber credit and you could buy the uber credit from him for ten cents or twenty cents on the dollar and i found this website and i was like i'm doing this and i bought i think a thousand dollars worth of uber credit and i then you have to change your iphone from america to moldova your uber account has to be a moldova and that was this loophole and he was making a lot of money doing it for an india and a guy in india he was making thousands of dollars a month which i think in the pot like yeah i'm this is so much money think he was being thirty grand a month and i will i've always i've always wondered what is that kid up to i wanted to know having him on he was fascinating he was he was fast i was a great arbitrage that the guy you know had an architect architecture so very i don't know if it's illegal but definitely against the rules questionable unethical but when you see things like that they're going somewhere and i've always wanted to know what happened to that guy i wanna leave you with two of the kind of you know what i talked about like why am i hearing about this three times don't just ignore this like i'm training my brain to not ignore these signals now i'll give you two of them for people who made it this far in the episode these are the jam this is the jam now this is the part where you're like holy shit i can't believe they save this for the end which is basically the two trends that i see right now that are strangely big go to go to character dot ai and pull up how much traffic you see that that website has oh my god i would have thought like ten thousand a month and what's the real oh my god so two hundred million exactly two a hundred hundred hundred eighty what this like you could go to the wall street journal it won't have two hundred million you could go to new york times it's not gonna have two hundred million this is no media site has that and it has an average visit duration of thirty three minutes it's beta dot character dot ai okay so i've been all talking about i've been talking about ai and i've been talking about like only fans and this like kinda sometimes the crossover between ai and like this like ai only fans thing and i'm looking at investment opportunities in the space there are so many companies that are doing this like chat with a ai type of thing replica character ai whatever and they never thought would be a thing they all have ludicrous traffic called it by the way we talked about replica like a year ago girlfriends ai virtual girlfriends exactly and that's a lot that's a lot of how people use this character ai thing like they kinda chat with the chat i think gray area a little bit i mean it's a lot of like smart people like einstein but but the the top person is ariana grande and billie e and then like some k pop lady like there's probably a a weird thing being willing to chat with ai for a really long time so easy to write off as weird loser but it's it's my friend watching star craft tournaments in the room next door right do king do behavior i will not make that mistake again this is depth this is definitely something don't think that these companies necessarily are the winners but like you know every every product there's a kinda like the wave one of attempts wave two of ten wave three and then finally there's like the last mover right the the last mover who actually nails it and builds a full on product around this and so there's something in this space that's like ranges from companionship to naughty chat that's like with ai that's gonna be massive because the numbers are off the charts the behavior of the strange thing is off the charts okay that's one second one which is less crazy is there's a bunch of smart people that are now have a new business strategy and their business strategy is to buy wounded unicorns and so heard it once heard it twice heard it three times first heard this andrew wilkinson consent andrew wilkinson he he called me back a couple years ago i living in my old house of francisco guy and he i remember him telling me you know what i would do if i was you is i would find one of these startups ups that's raised venture capital but it's not gonna become a billion dollar company but they got to five million dollars in revenue ten million in revenue and you could buy these for cheap because they don't have they can't raise their next round and there's no way out and so there's not really like a a good exit market for that group and those people don't wanna like fire a bunch of the engineers stop paying high prices for their san francisco office space and like become profitable they could in theory but they're just not gonna eat shit in order to do that they're just gonna shut it down return investor money sell the assets to whoever and they're gonna go start their next company or go get a job he told me that first he had then done that with a called meteor so meteor was his developer framework and i think he bought a company that was doing like five to seven million it was doing like five million plus in revenue for like one x revenue or that i it was like some like ignore the multiple of the exact much they i think they very think they raised thirty million dollars or something they have raised a bunch of money it had customers had a revenue but it just wasn't gonna be the next big thing which is venture capital is called become the next big thing or bust and what he realized was if they bust we could pick some of these assets up so andrew had said it then you hear other people that are talking about this that are doing this our friend xavier and ci they're doing this right now if you're driving to san francisco there is a billboard with with their company that says like whatever like there's never too late for a second chance like it looks like honestly it looks like a divorce lawyer because it's k with her arms crossed and it says like you know there's always you know there's always a second chance or something like that and i don't know they have a they look at melbourne entering like when you come in on whatever the one zero one it's like it's right there and it's basically saying you know like don't just shut down your company sell it to us so they're doing this jeremy gif is like he came on and invest like the best and he was like yeah i think one of the big opportunities right now is to do this you hear this four or five times from smart people like you gotta be an the idiot to not realize that there's probably something there and it's like it's not you're hearing it from the news like you gotta know where you're hearing it from you're not hearing it from the news or like the hype cycle type of it's like your hear smart people mentioned these things in kinda passing or these opportunities but it's not consensus yet i realize like oh that's probably one of these like what i call like you know value spots of fat pitches so like what are the big fat pitches that you could go swing it you don't have to go swing at it but like you should identify that at any given time there's like a couple of fat pitch opportunities that you could be going forward that's one of them i wanna learn more about it i wanna how do you find i i wanna know i've got questions like how do you find them just bro don't don't even don't even think about it just keep right of hand you already got your fat pitch well by the way love saying fat pitch by the way just a fun fun phrase to say yeah i agree that it's a good one it's a good one would you still that from ted teddy williams warren buffett who's stole from ted williams who does i know i he said in his biography i know hard to say no it's i said it very easily alright alright that's the pod i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's on on a travel never looking back