0:00
And his verification is for a hundred million dollars liquid plus.
Search this video
0:01
And so the guy has over a hundred million dollars.
0:07
And he did it all through two or three of these apps and I believe with close to no employees and he did it over around like eight or ten years. What up? What up?
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They told us to do intros now of the podcast.
0:26
So this is My First Million podcast where uh we tell you a hundred good ideas, half are good, half are bad, but it's on you to figure out which ones.
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This is My First Million where I make fun of Sam about how he talks, he makes fun of me about how I look and in between we squeeze in a few business ideas. Let's see, what else?
0:45
What else we got for them?
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And supposedly uh we're supposed to be successful people.
0:48
So it's like the reviews people say, they say it's kind of like we're just sitting at a bar with a bunch of our successful friends.
0:55
Dare I say, I hate this word, multi-millionaire friends and just hear what they talk about.
1:01
But that Uh just a couple of decamillionaires hanging out on the on the pod.
1:10
Dude, um yeah, how are we supposed to brag about that?
1:12
You know, what I learned from from my last successful venture, I now take those learnings to the podcast.
1:21
Can I just say that regardless of the decamillionaire nonsense, I did something a few weeks ago that I think was amazing.
1:27
I bought a sixty-dollar tattoo gun on Amazon and I let my wife give me a hand tattoo instead of wearing a wedding ring. Oh, wow. Totally worth it.
1:41
Uh uh let let me be the judge.
1:42
Can you bring that a little closer here? What's What is it? just an X. Can you see it?
1:48
Is it Right, like an and that's not focusing. Okay, it's an X.
1:53
Like you know It's It's an infected X, but it's an X.
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You know, like where where something was there, then it's like dead, and now you've like put an X there.
1:59
That's kind of the the vibe you're going for, or what?
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Yeah, or like, you know, triple X on like a moonshine whiskey jug.
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Yeah, something like that.
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And she wanted to do this, or you wanted to do this?
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She seems more sensible than you, so I don't know how Yeah, of course she didn't want to do this.
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I just said, "Sarah, I bought this tattoo gun.
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Sit down right now, or otherwise I'm just going to do it myself." Uh okay, threats.
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And I handed her an orange. threats.
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Yeah, like it literally I set it up, and within 2 minutes it was done.
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I handed her an orange, I go, "Write an X on that orange.
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Great, I'll do that on my fist."
2:33
People always ask us, "What's the secret to being a decamillionaire?"
2:35
And we tell them, it's threats.
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You got to threaten your your business partners, your marital partners.
2:42
You got to threaten all your partners.
2:44
Actually, Sam, you you you kind of do use this sort of like I wouldn't call it a threat, but as they say in It's Always Sunny, um it's the implication of danger.
2:54
You I feel like you you do use this the the implication of things going wrong.
2:59
Am I am I right about that? What's an example?
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In your management style, like, you know, uh you're trying to get the team motivated, you have two paths you could go down.
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You could you could start with why, and tell them why you're so excited about this, why this is good for them.
3:15
Or you could just hit them with a with a solid threat, with the implication of of of things not going so well if if we don't do X. Which way do you go? I like the second one.
3:25
I'm more of a guy who will do like if if I can All right, tell me how you are.
3:32
If you can make a million dollars, or not lose a million dollars, which one are you more motivated to do?
3:38
For me, not lose a million dollars.
3:38
And I think for you, the same. Same, absolutely same.
3:43
It's not to do something.
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So, I love setting my life up, and I do this all the time with like my wife and stuff.
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I'll be like, "Well, [ __ ] like I already booked it.
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Like we already we're we got to do this thing."
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Or uh you know, I always set stuff up that if I don't do it, there's consequences.
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That's the way to live, man.
4:00
And I used to do that with my employees all the time. And you know what?
4:03
They always said they hated it.
4:04
And then whenever they leave and quit eventually, they'll say something like, "Yeah, but I did so much cool [ __ ] and we actually got a lot of stuff done."
4:12
So, I think people actually like it. Right.
4:14
Yeah, they tell their therapist as they just spend years recovering from you. Yeah, I guess so.
4:19
Dude, can we Do you have a bunch of topics? I got a few, yeah. I got a couple, too.
4:25
Can I start on one that like I think it's blowing my mind and I So, yeah, basically yesterday I went on a long walk.
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I did I went on like a 10-mi walk.
4:34
Do you ever go on a long walk? Yeah, I go on a walk. I got a dog, yeah.
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Yeah, I just went on a really long walk and I went and walked around all these fancy neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
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And I started, you know, I do what what people do.
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I pull up Zillow as I'm walking and I'm like, you know, I wonder what it's like to live here.
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And the houses that I like, what I usually will do is I see a house and I go, "Oh, I would like to live there."
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And I pull it up and it's $8 million.
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And $8 million, that's one number.
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But then you actually look at how much money you need to come up on at closing.
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And then you look at how much money you need to spend each and every month on the mortgage and on your interest and on maintenance and things like that. And I started thinking.
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I think I'm going to live over here in Brooklyn.
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And I wanted to like map out how much money I would expect I would spend to live the lifestyle I want to spend. And it is astronomical.
5:23
And I want us to talk about some some of those expenses.
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You want to talk about some how much walk me through it. Okay, so listen to this.
5:33
First of all, I'm going to talk about the life that I'm going to live when I move to Brooklyn.
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And all the listeners, there's going to be a bunch of them that's going to say, "Oh, Sam, no one needs an $8 million house." Yeah, I get it.
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You know, like all I need is like a bucket of water and like some apples and like a pair of Crocs and I'm happy.
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But this is the life that I choose to live. So like I get it.
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No one needs this, but I'm picking this.
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So get off my back on this hypothetical case that might be a reality in two years.
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So I just got to get that out of the way.
6:00
But in terms of hypotheticals, it's not entirely hypothetical because I went and talked to a couple friends who do this.
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But listen to this [ __ ] So I found a home that I wanted to buy and I actually linked to it on the the MBD master doc.
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Okay, so it's a street easy is on street easy. It's a nice house.
6:16
Okay, it's only 3,000 square feet though, but it's a brownstone in my favorite neighborhood of Cobble Hill. It's $5 million.
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I actually think the range of things I want are between 5 and 8, but this one I just found it was available. It's $5 million.
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Which basically means I got to come up with $1.
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1 million as my down payment and then I'm going to spend around $20,000 a month in mortgage and interest and and things like that, not including maintenance, which is going to be a more expensive.
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It's going to be probably another two or three thousand dollars a month.
6:45
Then I think it would probably cost on the low end 50,000, on the middle only end of like $150,000 to furnish it the way I would like to furnish it, right?
6:55
Have you ever furnished a house? Yeah. Yeah, it depends.
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If you go like like my wife, she's like, oh yeah.
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I'm like, what do you like?
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She's like Restoration Hardware. I'm like, jeez.
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Like, you know, every item in the store is like, you know, 5,000 to $10,000.
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And so, you know, you just add that up per room you're putting in like 20 to 25 grand worth of stuff per per room in the house, which is pretty nuts. Yeah, totally.
7:19
So like 150k is that's just kind of what it would cost if you want to go that route.
7:23
If you want to go West Elm, West Elm, then yeah, you're you can maybe get it done for 175,000, but it it's quite expensive.
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Then if I'm going to get this fat house, I'm getting it cuz I have two kids or a couple kids.
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So I need my $40,000 $50,000 a year nanny.
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I imagine I would spend around $30,000 a year in food.
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And so basically, it comes up to where I think I'm spending 600 to 700,000 dollars a year to live the life I want to live in Brooklyn. But, here's the kicker.
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If you're making over a million dollars a year in Brooklyn or or for sure in Manhattan, it's even more than this, half your money goes away to taxes.
8:04
So, basically, if I'm spending around $600,000 a year, I need to make 1.
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2 million dollars just to cover my my monthly nut. Break even. Just to break even.
8:16
And if I if it's And And I I talked to two friends.
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One friend who lives in Brooklyn, he told me that he spends around $500,000 a year.
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And then another friend that also lives nearby, and he told me he spends $800,000 a year.
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And he sent me He sent me his uh list.
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But he goes, "I have an uh an additional house in North uh Rhode Island.
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But if you take that uh vacation home, we are spending around $650,000 a year."
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So, to to live like this, it's crazy.
8:42
And when you go and walk on these streets, you know, there's a house every block.
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If you go in Manhattan, there's this fancy apartment every block.
8:50
How on earth do you think people so many people afford this? It's crazy.
8:56
Like when you actually think about the logistics, right?
8:58
Well, well, a lot of the people who own these homes, they own them before they were worth five million dollars.
9:05
So, go look at the, you know, the Zillow history of this thing.
9:08
10 years ago, what was this home worth?
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You know, I'm guessing it's less than, you know, less than half of this, maybe 35% of this price 10 years ago, 30%.
9:14
And so, you're what you're talking about here is like, you know, a home that what that they bought in their basis is a million, million and a half dollars, something like that, instead of five.
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So, now the monthly payment is less, and now the property taxes are less.
9:29
And so, you know, you cut out your biggest expense in this case, um you you trim that down.
9:34
So, I think that's that's the answer for how a lot of people have this is inheritance or um or buying in, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago when these were worth a fraction of what they're worth today.
9:48
And so, that's why they can afford to kind of live above their weight.
9:49
Well, so I had four takeaways when I started thinking about this.
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The first was that there's a story behind everything.
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So, all these people like a simpleton like me is like, "Oh, you just got to earn this much money and they did it by starting a business."
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It's like, "No, that's not the reality."
10:00
And Zach Crockett, who works at The Hustle, he basically we were talking about this and he was going to write a story on this.
10:06
And he said that he researched a bunch of these homes and what he did was he uh for all the $5 million brown for a bunch of $5 million brownstones in NYC, he used a tool called Melissa and he looked up the property records.
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Then, he Googled the names uh of each person who quote owned it and then he like looked at their family records, which he just did this all through just sleuthing and like looking through stuff.
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And he found out that a bunch of them, like seven out of 10 of them, were like teachers or artists or or or a professor.
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Things that you basically like you can earn a bunch of money, but you're not earning enough money to buy this home.
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And what he surmised and came to the conclusion was like they just get a lot of help.
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And so, like it's hard to own a $5 million brownstone when you're a reporter at the New York Post or something like, you know, $120,000 a year job.
10:54
So, I think there's a story behind everything.
10:55
The second thing is I think you just have to earn a lot of money. Dude, listen to this.
10:58
If you earn uh uh one Hang on. Hang on.
11:06
That was a killer insight. What?
11:10
The You got to earn a lot of money. Yeah.
11:12
Where'd you come up with that?
11:12
The You got to earn a lot of money.
11:14
But listen, let's let's put the math on this.
11:17
How many How many years do you think you need to How long would it take you to save $10 million if you lived in New York? To save $10 million? Yeah.
11:26
To get a portfolio of $10 million. Uh I have no idea. I don't know. Let's say 20 years. Okay. So, if you make $1.
11:32
5 million and you're spending around $25,000 a month in living expenses, it's going to take you around 15 years to be able to save $10 million. Which is pretty crazy.
11:44
Now, you've got to figure out how to earn at least a million and a half for 10 years. Or for 13 years.
11:51
Which is like it that in itself is impossible.
11:54
Or not impossible, very very very challenging. And so, the oh hold on.
11:59
Your your first thing was like these people are teachers and artists and you said they got to have some help.
12:03
You're talking about like family help.
12:04
You're not talking about like there's nothing else, right?
12:05
You're saying you have rich family. Yeah. Okay. All right. Sorry. Carry on.
12:11
I think that I think just having a like I underestimated that.
12:14
When I think about this, I'm like, "Who's parents would give them $2 million for a down payment on a home?"
12:19
And I think the answer to that is actually a lot.
12:24
I can't I I can't imagine that, but the like that that was hard for me to cuz you know, I don't [ __ ] know.
12:28
Like my mom and dad like the best gift they ever gave me was when I turned 21, they gave me $1,000 and that was like the last birthday present I ever got.
12:33
I I don't even think it's a down payment.
12:35
It's okay, you're a teacher, great.
12:36
Your down payment is covered.
12:38
Where are you coming up with 25k a month of your monthly monthly payment just for your home?
12:42
Like that's what you got.
12:44
I think they're This is this is an all cash, here's your house free and clear, you get to live here.
12:50
And you cover your life expenses.
12:52
If you're paying for a latte, that's you, but uh I'll buy you this brownstone.
12:55
I think I think that's got to be what it is.
12:56
I think that's it that that has to be what it is or the second thing is you got to earn a lot.
13:01
The third thing is I think you got to I want how many of them do you think sell a business?
13:04
I think earning a lot like a big nut of 10, 20 million dollars it seems like impossible to do without selling an asset.
13:16
You got to be in finance, law, um maybe medicine or consulting to be pulling in a million dollars a year of income.
13:23
I don't I don't think there are many other jobs that do that.
13:28
We're not talking about athletes, entertainers cuz that's just a small such a small portion of the population.
13:32
But of jobs that a normal person can get that's going to make you a million to two million dollars a year, I'm pretty sure you got to be either a banker or banker or consultant if you're employed or you got to be self-employed as a doctor or a lawyer or something like that to be able to pull that in.
13:47
So that's like Am I missing one?
13:48
That's like Those are non-entrepreneurial Those are Yeah, those are non-entrepreneurial jobs.
13:53
Like the other ways that you just own a small business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
13:58
You own a small business, you own a big business, you you know, you own a contracting firm, you do construction around the city, whatever it is.
14:05
Those are the other way where you can do this and that's usually you're not earning some steady 1.
14:09
5 million per year, you're earning like nothing, nothing, nothing, a lot, a lot, a lot, huge and then back to nothing, you know, like that sort of thing.
14:17
It's this It's this lumpy curve that an entrepreneur has where you're basically broke till you're very unbroke. Um so yeah. But okay.
14:26
Yeah, what else you got to say about this?
14:29
And my third and final takeaway here is basically there's so much out there.
14:33
There is so much money out there.
14:35
There is so much opportunity.
14:37
You walk by all these places and again, Ben's laughing at me.
14:41
This is obvious, but it when you see it in real life, I walked down the street and I'm like, "Oh, that apartment, that costs $12,000 a month to rent in that top floor of that brownstone."
14:49
So and there's three of those in there.
14:51
So like there's three people each paying $12,000 and there's just like home, home, home, home, home, home, home. It's astronomical.
14:59
There's just so much money out there to be made.
15:01
It's just so much opportunity.
15:03
So anyway, I walk did this three-hour walk yesterday and I just I felt enlightened and I just wanted to come to the table and and fill you in on that.
15:11
Nothing Nothing Nothing um spectacular.
15:16
Well, that's why I'm glad you started the show with something unspectacular.
15:21
That's why you know, these TikToks that are like they stop somebody in a fancy car or fancy house and they go, "Hey, I just wanted to know what do you do for a living?"
15:29
And the guy's like, "Um and they're like, you know, first of all, like is this like a trap?
15:31
Are you like an IRS agent? What is this?"
15:33
And they're like, "Uh I paint houses."
15:35
Or they'll be like, you know, "I I work in real estate."
15:37
Uh you know, "I work in the financial services industry."
15:41
And it's like, "Oh, okay.
15:44
What what's going on here?"
15:44
But I think the reason those are popular is because wealth for most people is a complete mystery.
15:51
It is a complete black box unless you come from wealth.
15:54
If you come from wealth and you grow up and at your, you know, you're going to 15th birthday parties where like Serena Williams is there to play tennis with the other kids.
16:03
You're like, "What the hell?"
16:04
Like, you know, like this is everything is just nice.
16:05
Everybody goes to we summer in the Hamptons.
16:07
You have a place where you summer.
16:08
Like summering is a verb.
16:10
Uh and then you, you know, you're you're you know that you're, "Oh, my godfather, you know, he's he owns like 44 dental practices."
16:18
And so you If you grow up with wealth, you you wealth doesn't seem like this mysterious unattainable thing.
16:25
You in fact, you realize there's like a thousand paths and it's up to you to decide which one you want.
16:28
But for most people, wealth is like kind of just this mysterious thing.
16:33
You don't even see how wealthy people live.
16:34
You don't hear like the numbers you talked about.
16:36
I think for a lot of people listening, they're going to be like, "What in the hell is Sam talking about?
16:41
Somebody pays $500,000 $800,000 a year of just their living expenses?"
16:46
Like that sounds like the most money you could make, let alone spend per year.
16:51
And so when you're talking about spending more than a person's life savings in a year, that's a I think very foreign to people.
16:57
Then you say, "Okay, well how do you achieve that?"
17:01
And now you have maybe one example, two examples.
17:03
You don't have like 25, 35, 45 examples to choose from.
17:09
And so I think that's why those TikTok channels are popular.
17:10
I think that's why this podcast is popular because you either react to this type of information with one of two reactions.
17:19
Bitterness or inspiration.
17:21
For most people, it's bitterness.
17:21
You hear about other people's success or their extravagant spending and you get bitter.
17:28
You see the difference between what they do and what you do and you don't focus on the fact that maybe you want to do it.
17:33
Instead, you focus on the fact that they're wrong, evil, unnecessary, blah blah blah, whatever it is, and how, you know, they only could have got it by by sort of cheating the system or some unfair advantages and you get bitter.
17:45
And that's where I would say 90% of people fall into the bitter camp.
17:49
But some people, they hear those stories and they take inspiration.
17:52
And if you take inspiration, you start to collect each of these anecdotes.
17:55
You start to collect each of these data points and you say, "Oh, I'm taking this foggy map that I have, this cloudy map where I couldn't really see, and I'm just pushing away the fog.
18:04
I'm getting clarity on, wow, there's a thousand ways to win.
18:09
And wow, winning it can be a lot bigger than I even imagined."
18:11
And once you sort of have that in your head, that's when things become a lot easier because you start to notice all around you examples of people building wealth in unique ways and ways that are not always long and hard, ways that are not always painful or require genius.
18:25
You'll start to see examples of somebody who does it by, you know, simply, like, you know, starting a mushroom farm in California.
18:33
And it's like, yeah, that's what they do.
18:34
Or somebody I remember I I met a guy who created the tread that goes on treadmills.
18:39
He's like, "Yeah, we're we're tread manufacturer." I was like, "What?"
18:43
And he's like, And these guys would do like 15 million a year in sales and they Was he a marketing genius? No. Was he a sales genius? No.
18:50
He just simply was like, "Oh, there's demand for tread that goes on conveyor belts, treadmills, and profit do you think? I mean, I don't know.
18:57
I was like I was like in fifth grade at the time.
18:59
I remember it was my friend's dad. And I was like, "What?
19:02
Why is Why is Jordan so rich?"
19:04
And it was like, "Oh, Jordan's rich cuz Jordan's dad sells treads on treadmill."
19:08
And then we met these other people that were rich and they I was like, you know, again, I wasn't even asking the question, but I remember my sister saying something like, "Yeah, they have like mushroom farms."
19:18
And I remember being like, in my head, farmers don't make like tons of money.
19:21
And then I realized pretty quickly, oh, farmers can make a ton of money.
19:23
And so, you know, but I was just slowly collecting these antidotes.
19:28
Only when I was in my 20s and I was like, "If I want to know how to get rich, then I need to know like a lot more examples of richness.
19:35
And if I want to get rich fast, then I need to get examples of people getting rich fast."
19:41
And this actually good transition.
19:43
We have a friend who is we were just in the group chat.
19:50
We have a friend who it seems like might get rich very quickly here. And let me explain. Richer.
19:58
They created a product or a service or an app and they every day they're posting a chart of like the growth of this thing and it's like a early version of a hockey stick.
20:07
It's like, yep, we went from doing $100 a day, $500 a day, $1,000 a day, today $3,000 a day, today is going to be $9,000 a day.
20:16
Pretty quickly, like, you know, fast forward 2 weeks, this person's going to put a chart in there that's going to show them doing $200,000 in revenue just today.
20:24
And it's going to be nothing has changed.
20:24
It's just they just let the growth carry on.
20:26
And you see that and you're like, wow, that's that's winning like that's the HOV lane.
20:32
That's the fast lane where you can just go in and you can win faster.
20:35
Like, jeez, I didn't realize that.
20:35
I thought I got to bust my ass for 10 years.
20:39
And the reality has been busting their ass for 10 years building up the skills so that they can launch a new product and they can do, let's call it, 5 to 10 million this year in in potential profits.
20:50
Now, this person, if you remember, uh many months ago, And they told us us this exact this exact thing.
20:59
They go, "Yeah, I'm just thinking about ideas that can make I forgot what they said, 10 or 15 million dollars.
21:09
I want to make 10 million dollars in a year, 50 million dollars in a year.
21:13
And I was like, okay, like, you know, yeah, sure.
21:16
I, you know, and I want Jessica Alba to, you know, add me on Snapchat right now.
21:20
Like, but you it's not necessarily going to happen.
21:21
Like, you could just say it, but he was like, no, I've been studying.
21:24
There's apps that do that in the App Store.
21:28
And like showing us screenshots. Yeah.
21:32
Yeah, he's showing you screenshots and examples.
21:33
He's like, that does that? Yeah. This does that? Yeah.
21:34
And you see you now you see 10 of them.
21:36
And all of a sudden, first of all, I never knew somebody who even stated a goal like that.
21:40
So, just hearing it for the first time was like, that's interesting.
21:44
I knew people that would say, I want to build a huge company, a billion-dollar company. That was normal. I'd heard that before.
21:51
I'd heard, uh, I want to get a high-paying job, you know, I want to make, you know, 500k a year at at this company. I've heard that before.
21:55
I had never really heard somebody be like, I'm looking for a way that I can make 10 million dollars in 3 months.
21:59
That was actually the exact thing.
22:01
It was, how do I make 10 million dollars in 3 months?
22:05
And so, I was like, all right, well, never heard that. That was new.
22:07
Then, I thought, well, my brain doesn't come up with any examples of how to do that that's like, you know, doesn't involve, you know, putting a ski mask on and walking into a Wells Fargo.
22:16
So, like, you know, what And then, he gave me 10 examples.
22:20
This is like, okay, well, now I got 10 examples.
22:22
Number 11 doesn't seem so far-fetched at that point.
22:24
And I remember coming to talking to you and being like, dude, have you heard anybody think like this, talk like this, come up with ideas like this?
22:34
Because I believe that there's great power in questions.
22:37
And I'd never really heard somebody ask the question, how do I make 10 million dollars in the next 3 months?
22:41
And once that question was asked, now my brain has to start coming up with answers.
22:45
And at first, my brain was struggling.
22:48
And then, as he gave me examples, it started to get better and better and better and come up with examples about how you might do that.
22:52
And now, it's literally happening. Right in front of us.
22:57
is actually playing out right in front of us.
22:58
What do you think of this? I think it's awesome.
23:00
I think I think it's still too early.
23:02
I think anything that comes fast will go away fast or can go away fast.
23:06
But he called his shot and we are seeing on a daily basis whether it's it's coming it is in fact now coming into reality and I think it's awesome.
23:14
I think that there's ways I think Peter Thiel said it where he's like what's your five-year goal?
23:21
And then someone says their goal and he says cool how can you do that in six months?
23:25
So I usually believe in that.
23:27
This guy took it even further which is what's your five-year goal do it in three months and it's awesome.
23:32
And there's another guy who I know that's done this and he's public. His name is Alan Wong.
23:35
Do you have the the the app on your iPhone that let you listen to police scanners?
23:41
It's like the police scanner app.
23:43
No, but I know I know of these apps.
23:45
These are actually weird.
23:47
Yeah, it's like five-zero radio app.
23:50
I think like 5-0 radio app.
23:52
And this this guy Alan Wong he posted in Reddit in 2013 and he basically said um uh he said hey I'm Alan Wong I was told to create name a here. it up here.
24:05
Yeah, you want to you want to read it or read parts of it?
24:07
He goes Yeah, he goes I'm a ask me anything I'm a person in his 20s who went from rags to riches during the recession. He goes how I did it? I develop apps.
24:14
My most popular apps is called the 5-0 radio police scanner.
24:17
It lets you listen to police chatter around the world.
24:20
You've probably seen this used in the latest Spider-Man movie although they rebranded it.
24:23
Uh and as of 2012 my apps have been downloaded by 20 million people.
24:28
By the way this is 10 years ago. He wrote this.
24:30
So he did this in the 2008 2009 an update on it that I can give you in a in a second.
24:34
So so he goes my parents were raised in the slums of China.
24:36
They fled here with my brother to New York.
24:39
My mother worked in a sweat shop in Chinatown before she quit became a homemaker.
24:42
My father was an herbalist before he passed away unnaturally three months after I graduated from college.
24:47
After his passing no one in my family had a job.
24:50
Uh so he says I found a full-time job at Columbia University.
24:52
I was the only one with income so I taught myself how to create apps in my free time and I created apps on the weekends with hopes of making some side income.
24:58
I didn't expect this to make me millions.
25:02
And then he says, what does he say his money?
25:04
I don't think he says his money somewhere here, but uh yeah, go ahead, fill in the gaps for instance.
25:08
So, he doesn't say it there, but I found it.
25:10
So, there's this other subreddit that I talk about all the time called fatFIRE, and they've got this particular type of flare called verified by the mods, where the mods, the moderators, look at the income or your balance sheet, they look at something and they say, yeah, we believe it what you are saying is true.
25:26
And his verification is for a hundred million dollars liquid plus.
25:31
And so, the guy has over a hundred million dollars.
25:35
And he did it all through two or three of these apps, and I believe with close to no employees, and he did it over around like eight or ten years.
25:45
It say he by the way he says, So, he has three apps.
25:48
He has 5-0 Radio, then he has Police Scanner Plus, and then he has one more called, what is it called?
25:59
Um Hang on, he's got three apps that were in the top like the top hundred.
26:06
So, so he goes, This means I'm the only person ever in App Store history.
26:10
This is what he wrote at the time.
26:12
This was back in, I don't know, 2012, 2013, something like that.
26:16
I'm the only person history to have it in the in the app to have three apps in the App Store that were top ten overall in the paid and free categories at the same time.
26:24
Yeah, man, this guy's cool.
26:26
And then he if you Google his username, it's Rego Apps, so r e g o apps, and then fatFIRE, you'll see his post from fatFIRE, and he talks about what it's like to be different tiers of rich, and he's has all types of of like, you know, when I was at this thing, this is how I felt.
26:46
When I was at this other thing, this is how I felt.
26:49
And now, according to his flare, it's over a hundred million.
26:51
It's a This is a So, you were asking who else do I know that's done this?
26:55
I don't know this guy, and I can't verify that any of this is true, but it's pretty interesting, and it might be true.
27:01
Well, yeah, and and I don't know the speed that this guy did it, but um still amazing.
27:04
By the way, we should get verified in Fat FIRE.
27:07
Why aren't we posting in Fat FIRE?
27:08
That seems like a That's our Those are our people.
27:11
We should have hang out there. post there.
27:13
I post there under a name that no one knows me as, but I would post there more.
27:16
Would you post Do Do you uh you use this? Yeah, I'll go browse.
27:19
I don't I never post, never comment, but I'll I'll make an account, and I'll uh let's do it. Let's get verified. Let's do an AMA there.
27:26
Yeah, so look, this guy's thing says, "I fat I found his username."
27:30
He goes, "I fat fired at age 25.
27:32
I make $10 million a year in my 30s.
27:35
10 Yeah, 10 million plus a year in my 30s, and I have over $100 million according to which has been verified for the mods."
27:41
And here, this is what he says.
27:43
Someone says, "What's the difference in millionaires or in money levels?"
27:46
So, he goes, "At 100k to a million, you can tip very generously and be okay with that.
27:50
At 1 to 5 million, you can fund some medical expenses and maybe a college college tuition or two.
27:56
Maybe for an extended family member or friend.
27:57
At 5 to 20, you could pay off a handful of college tuitions."
27:59
I guess they're asking about donation.
28:01
"You can pay off a handful of college tuitions and some expensive surgeries."
28:03
And then he jumps to uh 50 to 50 million, you can create several nonprofits and overseas that uh that are overseas and help people uh at a community level like building a school or local community or something.
28:15
So, he like talks about this constantly throughout this subreddit, and it's very very interesting. Yeah, that's cool. I like that. Uh that's a good story.
28:21
I um I uh I'm going to have another story to share on this, and let's call it 30 days, let's say.
28:31
I'm going to call I'm going to leave that little seed here.
28:34
30 days, I'll have another interesting story to share on this topic.
28:38
But, let's switch to something else.
28:46
A million dollars isn't cool. You what's cool? A billion dollars.
28:52
Let's talk about um this guy, Scott Painter.
28:55
Do you know who Scott Painter is?
28:57
This is my This is my billy of the week.
28:59
This is guy, Scott Painter.
29:00
I don't know if he's a billy, but he's got that big billy energy for sure.
29:03
And I'm going to tell you this guy's story and you're going to be you're going to be amazed by this guy. All right, go for it.
29:08
Do you know who I'm talking about?
29:10
Do you know who Have you ever heard this name before?
29:12
No, I'm just looking it up now.
29:14
So, Scott Painter is known because he was the CEO of something called TrueCar.
29:19
And so, TrueCar is like a super successful um it was like one of the super successful early uh car companies on the internet.
29:28
So, what they were doing was they were publishing price information so that you could go and figure out, you know, the what the true price of this car is so that um you know, if before you would go to a dealership and depending on which dealer you went to and which salesperson you talked to and what how they sort of sized you up as a sucker, you would get like a 30% price differential on the price of the same car.
29:47
So, you could go to one place and the same exact car they'll they'll charge you um you know, 30% more or less depending on uh which place you went.
29:57
So, there's a huge spread.
29:58
After TrueCar, people could just go figure out, well, this is the price of this car.
30:02
A 1997, you know, Mazda Miata is supposed with this many miles is supposed to be this price.
30:06
And in every market they would go into the price gaps that that dealers were charging would spread would change from 30% down to like 3%.
30:13
And so, they were like helping bring in price transparency.
30:17
But this dude has a crazy story.
30:19
He has built He has basically spent like 20 years just constantly trying to reinvent the auto industry online.
30:26
So, this guy did uh I'm just going to read you like his his LinkedIn.
30:31
So, he's um he's the he starts off Well, he goes to the army first of all and he's a Spanish interrogator, which is just like a kind of a crazy little path that he took.
30:38
And he talks about like, you know, why he went there is like, you know, my, you know, dad wasn't so cool. I needed freedom.
30:44
Army was freedom for me, so I went to the army.
30:46
And um So, anyways, he go he goes and he becomes VP of marketing at 1-800-Car Search. This is early internet.
30:53
We're talking like 1999, basically.
30:55
He And so, there's 1-800-Car Search, 1-800-Dentist.
31:00
He's like the VP of marketing for each.
31:02
Then he creates like a consult So, he's just hopping one year one year after another.
31:04
He creates Dental Advantage.
31:06
It's like consulting for dentists about how to use the internet.
31:08
Then he starts another one called Vision Incorporated. This is again 1999-ish.
31:11
And he's like um helping companies transform like for e-commerce.
31:16
Like, "Hey, companies are going to need to do e-commerce.
31:17
I'm going to help them do this." So, he He was right.
31:20
He was just way early on on this trend of e-commerce.
31:24
And then he just starts this like crazy run in the car industry.
31:26
So, he goes the He's the founder of CarsDirect.
31:28
They go from zero to 650 million in sales in year one.
31:34
Then he goes He starts He starts advertising. com. Yeah.
31:38
Then he's CEO and founder of TrueCar.
31:41
Then he's CEO and founder of Pricelock, which was like uh lock in your like gas prices.
31:46
Then he was a founder Then after So, he's a He does TrueCar. He takes it public.
31:50
And he gets in this crazy scenario where he is the uh I think he's the largest individual shareholder.
31:57
He's not only the largest individual shareholder, he's buying up a ton of stock.
32:00
He believes in the stock like crazy.
32:02
They have an earnings miss.
32:02
Uh like the economy sort of turns.
32:05
Car own people start uh slow down with their car buying.
32:08
They have a big quarter miss. Stock drops like crazy.
32:13
He gets margin called cuz he was buying so much of his own stock.
32:15
And he's basically forced to borrow money from friends to pay off his margin call.
32:19
And he he resigns from the company.
32:21
That same month, he basically has to step down as CEO.
32:26
He lost a ton of money on his own stock. He He gets a divorce.
32:29
And his literal house burns down.
32:35
And what What do the following week the following week he incorporates fair.
32:39
com to a new way to buy cars.
32:41
And this was like basically the idea that like hey, car buying is super super complicated. You go, you buy a car.
32:48
I don't know if you've ever done it, but like the process of you have to buy a car, you have to qualify for financing, like you know, 80% of cars are financed in the United States.
32:56
No nobody buys cars all cash here.
32:57
And um and then you have like this complicated like credit check payment thing, then you have your your insurance on top, you have your title insurance, you have to do the right registration.
33:06
You have to do all this different stuff.
33:09
He's like, what if instead it was like, you know, what if buying a car was as simple as like buying a coffee or Netflix like subscription?
33:14
So what he would do is you would just put in your phone number, it would like find out all your information, it would and it would say, "What car do you want?"
33:20
You pick a car, it'd be like, "Cool, that car's $500 a month."
33:23
And you own that car, and you can turn it in at any time if you don't want that car.
33:27
So it's like a long-term rentals basically was what Fair was doing.
33:30
Fair grows like crazy, they raise hundreds of millions of dollars because A, this guy is got this crazy track record.
33:36
B, he's very like kind of charismatic and um formidable.
33:39
Like you see this guy as a founder, you're like God, I would hate to be competing against this guy in the same market. And he thinks very big.
33:47
He's like, you know, we're going to change the way that car ownership is done.
33:49
We're going to make this faster, cheaper, whatever.
33:51
SoftBank piles in $300 million into a series B round, and um and they're on their way.
33:58
And Fair ends up going up really fast and then crashing really fast because uh the few years ago, I don't know if you know about it, basically like the yeah, as the tech market's like valuations turned, SoftBank was was was the big whale in the space started losing money.
34:11
They lost money on WeWork, then they lost money on uh what was the other big one?
34:15
SoftBank had like, I don't know, three or four like huge things like Uber.
34:18
Like they had huge a bunch of huge things going like the prices crashed from where they had invested.
34:24
And so he couldn't raise any more money.
34:27
And he had built this like very complicated thing.
34:28
They lay off 40% of people.
34:30
Fair doesn't really work out.
34:32
And now he's back again because I see this thing that says this new startup Autonomy has placed $400 million worth of purchase orders to buy 8,000 something Teslas this year. I was like, what?
34:45
Who is buying 8,000 Teslas?
34:47
Who is paying $400 million to buy Teslas?
34:51
And it's a startup called Autonomy that is trying to make it where you can just rent electric cars.
34:56
Simply like you could you There's a lot of people that want to own electric car like a Tesla and they can't afford it.
35:03
It's too expensive all in.
35:03
So here, pay this monthly fee and you get to rent a Tesla.
35:07
You get to own You basically get to like have a Tesla.
35:09
You're not renting it like day by day. It's a long-term rental. He's back.
35:14
And so they placed $1 billion of purchase orders across different electric vehicle manufacturers to do this. So he's He's back.
35:21
He must have raised a ton of money again plus like raised a bunch of debt.
35:25
And he's back with his new startup Drive Autonomy.
35:27
And this guy is fascinating.
35:29
I went down a rabbit hole listening to interviews of this guy.
35:32
He is a very interesting dude.
35:38
Because of this Autonomy thing.
35:38
I worked backwards from the last thing I told you where I was like But what Why were you just looking up purchase orders of electric cars? million.
35:46
I saw a tweet I saw a tweet you know you I follow on Twitter like you know Elon and a bunch of like these like kind of Tesla fanboy and Tesla hater accounts.
35:53
Like I follow both sides.
35:53
Like there's basically a huge group of people that I should actually say it's a small group of people that believe Tesla is a giant fraud and is going to zero. They're called Tesla Q.
36:02
And then there's other people that believe that Elon Musk is you know the second coming of Jesus and I follow both and in the second coming of Jesus camp they were like Tesla, you know, this huge you know, here's more good news for Tesla.
36:14
These guys Drive Autonomy has placed $400 million of orders for for Teslas because there's so much demand and Elon had replied saying um he was like demand has never been the problem. It's supply.
36:26
Like manufacturing, like production of cars is our problem.
36:29
Like yeah, this is good news, but like we don't have a demand problem. We have so much demand. We have supply problem.
36:35
But I was curious where is this, you know, half a billion dollars of demand coming from?
36:39
I've never heard of this startup before. What do they do?
36:43
And and that's what they do.
36:46
What what was he like when you hear him talk? Is he charismatic?
36:47
He just looks like a a normal white dude. Very matter-of-fact.
36:54
Um So he's basically like he's a good storyteller.
36:57
He's quick into the point.
36:59
He He reminds me a lot of like, you know, that other guy we like, Frank Slootman, the guy who runs Snowflake, who wrote that amazing blog post amp it up, which is basically describes like you know, don't be such a wuss.
37:09
Like, you know, run your company to win.
37:11
And we're here to win and like this is the plan to win.
37:14
And that guy has just been like a serial CEO of companies that just grow really fast. This guy's like that.
37:22
So let me tell you some of the kind of like interesting little nuggets that came out of this.
37:25
So I'm just going to keep rambling on this guy.
37:27
So he's basically he's like he's like I'm a multi-time college dropout.
37:31
Like I have dropped out of college multiple times.
37:33
I dropped out of like my kind of prep college.
37:35
I dropped out of undergrad.
37:39
And I dropped out of grad school.
37:39
And he's like I basically had a ton of failure.
37:42
You guys know me because I've tried like 25 things and three have worked.
37:47
And he's like, you know, but that's entrepreneurship.
37:49
Like, you know, you need three to work out of 25 in a 20-year career.
37:52
And like that's that's like what winning looks like.
37:54
Um he's like, you know, I always loved cars.
37:57
He goes cars are a where am I at in life purchase?
38:01
He goes I can just look at a look at a car that I owned and it would tell me a story about where I was in life, you know, like you know, when I'm graduating from when I'm graduating, right?
38:10
I'm coming of age or when I like, you know, when I moved or when I got a got a my first good job or like whatever.
38:16
He's like a car basically marked you know, each chapter.
38:20
He's like that's how it is for most people.
38:22
I kind of had that insight, which is like a car is like your avatar that you use when you go around the world.
38:26
The car says something about you.
38:29
And you know, when you when you go upgrade to the minivan, it's cuz you're going into family mode.
38:32
And like, that's what I kind of realized.
38:34
He goes, people spend a crazy amount of money on cars.
38:37
Cuz in the interview, the guy's like, how have you been able to raise so much money?
38:40
He goes, well, I play in like the biggest market.
38:43
He goes, 15% of all people's gross income goes to mobility.
38:47
Half in buying their car and half into fuel, taxes, repairs, insurance, etc.
38:51
He's like, so when you have this thing that makes up 15% of what everybody makes, or just put differently, like I think it's like a third of your net worth, you know, if people are spending on a new when they buy a new car, he's like, the TAM is just enormous.
39:04
Like, you know, it's like 5 billion 5 trillion a year goes into cars or something insane like that.
39:11
So, he's like, you know, that's the easy answer to how have I raised so much money?
39:14
I went and played in this big space.
39:15
And then I tried to reinvent it at every Every time I would do one, I would try to reinvent it.
39:19
So, he's like, you know, we were the first ones to be like, we put the upfront price of a car on the internet.
39:25
Nobody was doing that at there in the early days.
39:27
I think that's the CarsDirect. Is he successful?
39:29
You said that he got margin called.
39:31
Does that mean he was broke?
39:36
Uh doesn't necessarily mean he was broke.
39:37
It means he didn't have enough collateral for like what he borrowed for his stock.
39:40
Now, if the stock recovered, which I don't know, I haven't looked at TrueCar stock.
39:44
their their market cap is 230. million? Yeah. That's That's yeah.
39:51
It doesn't does not look like it is uh done very well since then.
39:56
So, uh yeah, it's like basically, you know, a third of where it was back in 2014.
40:02
So, yeah, that's that's not doing so well.
40:04
Um and he says that in his thing.
40:06
He's like, I've I He's like, I made a bunch and I've lost it all many times over.
40:11
Um and so, you know, I'm sure this guy's done well.
40:12
Like, I I don't think you can build multiple companies that get valued at billions of dollars, take a company public.
40:18
I don't think you can do that in like You got to real You got to be like kind of really [ __ ] reckless to walk away with less than, you know, 20 million at at the end of all that.
40:25
Dude, I love people who who take swings, even if they miss like consistently or like, you know, in this guy's case like he didn't entirely miss.
40:34
He did actually build some amazing things, but like maybe it was just shy of what it could have been.
40:39
Another guy who's doing that right now, tell me what you think about him.
40:42
Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, he just raised $250 million in seed funding for a $1 billion apartment business.
40:53
I don't exactly know what the business does, but it sounds like it's WeLive, the thing that we talked about where you, you know, it's like fancy apartment buildings that are all most of the same.
41:02
You pay a premium cuz it's all pre-designed and looks really nice and it has a community on it, which honestly I think is awesome.
41:07
I also think WeWork is awesome.
41:12
Uh what do you think about a guy like Adam Neumann taking another swing?
41:19
Our software is the worst.
41:19
Have you heard of HubSpot?
41:21
See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous.
41:28
I think I love our new CRM.
41:30
Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. I think it's great.
41:35
I think it's so easy for people to [ __ ] on him.
41:37
Uh and you people [ __ ] on him for two reasons.
41:41
One is, well, I'll forget the reasons.
41:43
I'll give the explanation.
41:43
The reason is just simply like, you know, it's fun to hate on somebody, you know, that you don't know that like Well, and he's full of He's full of [ __ ] He flew too high.
41:50
They They got too big-headed and then they they crashed. People like that.
41:54
But I think the criticism is what?
41:56
The criticism is WeWork failed.
42:01
Well, WeWork didn't really fail.
42:03
It just didn't achieve the like you know, what WeWork worth today.
42:07
WeWork is still like, you know, uh Like five or six billion.
42:10
company more valuable than than anything that we've ever built, you know?
42:13
So, it's like uh yeah, WeWork is valued at 3.
42:15
96 billion right now, publicly traded.
42:19
Um you know, so it's not like the it's not like WeWork actually failed.
42:22
It just you know, he raised too much money too high valuation, didn't live up to that uh that dream of that that promise and a bunch of people got burned if you bought the stock or you joined the company at that really high price.
42:32
Yeah, you're underwater for that.
42:33
So, that's the first criticism.
42:35
The second is he lied, cheated, stealed, you know, he licensed the he was like paying himself out of the company for the trademark of We.
42:44
He like, you know, did stupid things like, you know, this like summer camp where everybody got drunk or whatever.
42:52
Those things to me are somewhere between a little whack, a little messed up to actually like understandable and more common than you think when it comes to these like hyper-growth companies led by he's a liar. I think he's crazy.
43:06
kind of ego-driven people.
43:08
But, there's crazy good, there's crazy bad.
43:10
Is he crazy good or crazy bad? What do you think?
43:12
Mostly good, but could be in some cases it was bad.
43:15
But, I think that when I at least when I read about him and I don't know the guy, I've hung out with um Miguel, the co-founder, and my my read on these guys is I don't think you're lying.
43:23
I just think that you got some things wrong and I think that you're just like incredibly enthusiastic and I don't know.
43:30
Like, is it when you paint the picture of the future and you end up being way wrong, you're you're not a liar, you're just wrong.
43:38
You know, you're optimistic, but you still called it wrong.
43:40
But, you're not a liar or at least you don't you're not a liar if you believe that it's going to be true. is different, right?
43:45
Right, delusional or irrational is very different than like lying or fraud and I think there's a line, who knows if he crossed it.
43:54
I don't know all the details, I'm not involved in all that, but from from the outside, it looks to me like he was one of these guys who is huge dreamer, un- irrational self-confidence, so unbelievable self-confidence that they are going to pull it off.
44:07
That they're going to pull off this crazy crazy dream.
44:11
I do think they get, you know, high on their own supply where they start to think that like, you know, the stuff that got them to the to the point where, you know, you're on the cover of Time magazine and everybody's throwing money at you to fund you.
44:21
Then all of a sudden you think, you know, I can't be touched.
44:23
And I've seen this play out many, many times.
44:27
I've gotten burned on some of these.
44:28
So, I've, you know, that like I you know, I invested in in Terra, which was like, you know, Luna like crypto coin, right?
44:35
And the the founder of that was the same way.
44:37
This guy Do Kwon, super smart, charismatic, uh unbelievable confidence that his thing was going to work and some people some people all all along the way were saying he's crazy.
44:48
And then slowly but surely a bunch of smart people gave him money, you know, because it was like this guy's crazy, but he's kind of pulling it off and maybe he is just crazy enough to pull it off and we have many examples in history of people who are crazy enough to pull it off.
44:59
Let's see if this happens.
45:01
And um and and then over time his ego ballooned and it ballooned and it ballooned and he kept basically taking larger risks and tempting people to uh to, you know, sort of call him on his bluff and then and then somebody did and the market like a series of events happened and it
45:14
crashed and all went to zero and everybody looks dumb and, you know, I lost a million dollars of like, you know, what I had in worth of Luna in like 2 days because I believed that this guy was going to be one of the crazy ones to pull it off. I
45:26
I didn't think he was not crazy.
45:28
I thought he was crazy and like might be the good crazy and was worth a bet.
45:31
And so on on other times I've bailed because I thought, you know what?
45:39
I'm not falling for this sort of the hero entrepreneur, the charisma, the the visionary entrepreneur thing.
45:43
I owned Tesla stock when it was really, really low.
45:49
I remember um I remember at the time Tesla was valued at maybe like 2 billion and uh 2 3 billion, something like that.
45:57
And I remember investing in it.
45:57
My dad was like, "Tesla, they don't make any money."
46:01
And I was like, yeah, but I think that like, you know, here's my reason why I think they're going to be big, blah ABC.
46:07
And then I said I said he's like, yeah, but like, you know, it's already valued at 3 billion.
46:10
I was like, well, you know, I at the time I think GM was like 25 billion or something like that.
46:13
Um one of the big companies that are Tesla now? Like 500 billion?
46:20
Yeah, I mean it hit a trillion.
46:20
So like, you know, I would have rode 2 billion to a trillion. I can't do that math.
46:24
That's like a That's like was my It was the first stock that I bought.
46:30
I I think I put in like 25K or something crazy like that.
46:33
The 25K was the exact numbers, but I don't remember 1 point millions, right?
46:37
Yeah, at 1 point I calculated it was a $5 million I I would have had $5 million.
46:41
I What I did was I turned the 25K into like 125K and I sold because I started to get suspicious that like damn, this guy really over promises.
46:51
Like and he had he does over promise.
46:51
He over promises on like when something will be built, how good it'll be, like he's he's pretty much wrong on the timing always.
46:58
Like he's he's been saying that the Cybertruck is coming out.
47:02
He's been saying that the uh you know, the Model 3 would be more affordable than it is.
47:04
He'll say that autopilot like he's been charging people for autopilot like the self-driving full you you you buy FSD full self-driving and it's like not full self-driving and you've been paying thousands of dollars for like multiple years now.
47:15
And he always says it's the right around the corner, right?
47:18
And so like this guy does have this I remember when I was reading the the the Twitter stuff about like people who are basically saying this guy's a fraud, Tesla's a scam.
47:27
Um it was very, very convincing.
47:29
There was a lot of convincing evidence.
47:30
I remember like they went through 20 CFOs.
47:35
20 CFOs in like a 4-year time span.
47:35
And like the new CFO was like some guy who's never been a CFO before.
47:40
And like somebody who really smart once told me like, just follow the CFOs.
47:44
The CFOs know what's going on with the company.
47:47
They know the company health better than anybody.
47:48
And like that made a lot of sense to me.
47:50
I actually still believe that principle.
47:52
It just turned out to be wrong here.
47:53
it it if you No, no, it it was right, which is that it was on the brink of collapse consistently and uh he kept pushing it. the needle. He pulled it off. Yeah. He He pulled it off. He threaded the needle. He pulled it off.
48:04
And there's still a bunch a mountain of evidence as to like that it was very close to failing that he basically over-promised {slash} that over-promise would be the generous term.
48:14
You know, sort of lied, manipulated, you know, to keep the stock up to prevent it from getting like, you know, basically crashing and and and going out of business.
48:24
There's a bunch of evidence that that supports that, but the bottom line is he pulled it off and I was, you know, $5 million wrong for selling early.
48:31
And and so I've been on both sides of this.
48:33
And I I think where I netted out is some people literally are just con artists and they are literally just going to scam you and their charisma will will manipulate you and dupe you into into believing in them.
48:46
But there the some of the best entrepreneurs do have the same have such a similar profile where they're irrational, delusional willing to like run into you know, a fire pit and they're like, there's no way you'll make it out.
48:58
And then they, you know, nine out of 10 don't, but the one out of 10 who do, you know, like change the game.
49:05
And so I've just sort of landed on you know what?
49:08
I'm going to lean towards I'm going to lean towards optimistic on this cuz even though I would be right if I was pessimistic about it nine times out of 10, I'd miss the I'd have a false negative on the one that actually works out and that one will A pay for all the
49:23
losers in investing terms and B like, you know, it's just more fun to sort of like follow these entrepreneurs and and understand what they're doing, you know, and what why they believe they can do this and be more optimistic than a hater towards them. That's kind of where I
49:35
That's kind of where I landed on That's a good one.
49:38
All right, let me just tell you I'm going to I want to end with two things.
49:41
One is the lamest thing I've seen on the internet the past few weeks and number two is a company that is making way more money than I thought and I'm absolutely going to clone it eventually.
49:49
I'm going to start with the second one.
49:51
The Go to bit Yeah, go to bitpipe. com.
49:58
So, b i t p i p e dot com. Tell me what you see. Okay. Oh my god.
50:06
All right, I see a Craigslist-looking website.
50:07
It says Bitpipe is the enterprise IT professional's guide to IT resources.
50:13
Browse our free online library with the latest technical white papers, webcasts, product information.
50:17
All right, I don't know what this is, but basically it looks like it's a set of blogs, maybe?
50:22
Content about IT Click one of them.
50:25
Click content management. Okay, I'm done. Then, click view now.
50:31
Okay, it looks like it's a set of reports. So, click view now.
50:36
So, I did it for you and says, "This is an article from Computer Weekly.
50:41
It was released on August 22 August 2022 and it's called like it's so technical, I don't even know what it actually is.
50:54
What's the one that you're looking at?"
50:57
I'm looking at Eurotunnel's digital journey for realities of post-COVID travel.
51:00
And it tells me I can download this e-zine, e-zine. What the hell is that?
51:05
All right, and I'm going to let let me tell you an even worse one.
51:06
This one's called How to Choose an HR software system.
51:10
This one's There's one called How to Choose Listen to this one.
51:19
It's called How to Choose an HR software system.
51:21
An HR system is one of the most important purchases an organization makes.
51:26
Nowadays, the stakes couldn't be higher.
51:30
And download this this guy this e-guide and learn all the key steps in setting up an effective buying process and how to identify HR HR software features.
51:39
Then, it says, "Give us your corporate email address, your first name, last name, company name, job title, seniority, job function, number of employees, industry, address, country, state, zip, phone, and just click download now and we'll send it to you. All right.
51:54
So, this website, it's owned by a company that owns like 20 or 30 of these websites.
52:03
And it only has about 3,000 customers, but it makes around 400 to 500 million dollars a year in revenue.
52:11
And the way it works Yes. Sam, no. No. No.
52:15
I refuse to accept this reality. No. No way. Cut this out. I don't like this. I don't like this.
52:27
It's public It's a publicly traded company.
52:29
It's a publicly traded company with a market cap of about two and a half or three billion dollars.
52:35
So, it's owned by a company called exact thing, Bitpipe, makes that much or the whole company makes that much?
52:40
The The whole company, which is roughly like 10 or 20 of websites like this.
52:47
What's the company called? It's TechTarget.
52:48
So, every company on this Bitpipe website, you see how it says this is from computerweekly.
52:53
com or this article is from networking uh it's like flow route socialnetworking. com.
53:03
This was from um like this other website that talks about global knowledge, which is your guide on information systems.
53:10
So, they own like 10 or 20 publications that talk all about like buying software for huge companies.
53:17
And they get very few people coming to these websites a month, very few.
53:21
But, because the article is called how to buy an HR system for 1,000 plus employees, there's around 2,500 companies in America that will pay them money to uh do a couple things.
53:34
The first thing is they want to contact the people The lady who is giving an her email and information on an article on how to pick an HR system is a lady who maybe 30 different HR customers will say, "Hey, I'll give you 500 bucks if you can give me that lady's information so I can call her."
53:50
The second thing that they do is they they'll track that lady.
53:53
That lady, Linda, she's going to go to computerweekly.
53:57
com and look at an HR software thing.
53:59
Then she's going to go to information system and look at a cloud uh software thing.
54:03
And then uh what TechTarget is going to do is they're going to go to their clients and be like, "Hey, hey, [ __ ] you there?
54:09
I got a lady who's about to buy this thing, that thing, and that thing.
54:13
You want to talk to her or you want to holler?" And that's what they do.
54:17
And that's how they make their money.
54:19
And they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That's all they do.
54:21
They go, "Hey, this [ __ ] is about to buy some cloud software.
54:26
You want to holler or what?"
54:34
They own a website actually called what is.
54:36
And it's just like people Googling like like that.
54:38
But that'd be their phrase. Hey, what it is, bro? Yeah.
54:42
Yeah, I got this chief information officer at Gartner. Yeah.
54:46
Yeah, they want to score, man. Yes, she's texting me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you up? This is insane.
54:53
Sorry, so but why do people why is that person who's the head of HR, why are they landing at this website that looks like it's from like 1979?
55:01
Why are they This looks like you know, back when the internet was called the intranet and it was like six computers.
55:07
This looks like a intranet website.
55:08
It's not even an internet site.
55:12
And the [ __ ] are they going to Google or figure out? Googling?
55:14
Because dude, if you Google like what is a good software, if I'm if I'm uh you know, like so if I'm the the chief information off officer of a 10,000 or 5,000 person companies, I'm going to get my information from a few different ways.
55:28
I'm going to watch loads of very specific webinars that are on like a trade show a a trade magazine.
55:36
I'm going to read trade magazine.
55:36
And by trade magazine, I'm going to learn about them cuz they're hosting like a hundred-person trade show that's all talks about like how to pick an HR software in Vegas.
55:45
And it's really just a really fun way for me to go and watch the Chippendales like get do their thing.
55:49
But then I'm going to go to like a vendor that day and like we're, you know, we're going to hang out and do some blow.
55:54
But then that the So, they're going to go to that website and learn all about it because that's how they know them.
55:58
And then occasionally, that company's going to do a webinar.
56:00
In order to access the webinar, you're I'm going to give them a bunch of information.
56:03
And they're going to sell that information to the eight companies that could possibly service me.
56:07
And that's how the TechTarget makes money.
56:09
And so, this lady, Linda, she's going to go to all these websites and meet all these people because it's such a small It's a small small industry.
56:16
There's like maybe tens or at most hundreds of thousands of people who would do this.
56:20
And this is what I've been thinking about, this B2B media world. It is awful. Say it with me. It is awful.
56:25
It is a horrible horrible industry. It is awful. Uh yes.
56:30
With a with a barrier or a uh uh uh uh the the it's such a low benchline or uh uh threshold of what's good and what's not good.
56:39
The content is horrible, and people love it.
56:41
And these businesses work aren't we starting a company that just beats these guys?
56:47
Why aren't we starting the most boring B2B media company, but we put our spin on it.
56:54
Just like Mugshawtys did to mugshots, we are going to do to the B B2B media industry.
57:00
The B2B [ __ ] That's what we're going to call it.
57:02
The B2B [ __ ] Hey, where where are the B2B [ __ ] What's up? Yeah.
57:10
It's going to be like a like a radio show.
57:12
We're just going to be like, "Hey, it's the B2B [ __ ] Today, we're going to talk about information systems." Yeah, exactly.
57:22
We're going to have a podcast that's a radio station.
57:25
Actually, we're just going to have a AM radio station.
57:26
And we're going to have a uh you know, we're going to give pagers to every CIO in America.
57:31
And we're going to have like little sound clips It's going to be like B2B [ __ ] in the morning.
57:37
Yeah, this is going to work. Yeah, exactly.
57:41
Yeah, you know my favorite thing by the way, there's radio stations that do the cheaters segment.
57:45
You see this where they like basically call It's like, "Hey, will you call my boyfriend and just see if he would cheat on me?"
57:52
And like they just like call the boyfriend and then she's on the other line and they basically trick him into being like "Yeah, all right, I'll meet you at Home Depot. What time?"
57:58
And then they're like, "Actually, Rebecca's on the other line."
58:02
And Rebecca's like, "You son of a That's what we're going to do.
58:04
We're going to get one vendor, your existing HR solution on the line.
58:07
And then we're going to call being like, "Hey, are you interested in a new HR solution?"
58:10
And when they say yes, we're going to be like, "Oh, we got Workday on the line. Workday, what's up?
58:16
He's going to cheat on you. He's going to cheat."
58:19
And it's called churn busters and we just catch them in the act.
58:24
No one has ever laughed at this style of content except until up until right now.
58:29
We are the first people to ever make tech target a fun topic to Yeah.
58:33
But dude, this is interesting, right?
58:35
The this business model is crazy fascinating to me.
58:37
They make money through webinars, they make money through like these e-papers or they [ __ ] call them a zine.
58:43
I mean, that's just like who's working here.
58:44
Um, so my next business, I already have started a company.
58:48
It's like this community thing.
58:49
I'm going to add this this style of company.
58:51
I'm going to add it to This is going to be in our portfolio of products.
58:55
Now, let me show you the last thing.
58:56
Dude, last week I said say before you do that Can I just before you do that This is This is yet again a number seven.
59:06
We got a number seven, a Sam Parr special.
59:09
This is a Sam Parr special.
59:09
It's like no one's even heard of this website.
59:13
Somehow it does hundreds of millions of years a year.
59:14
It looks like it's from 1982 and like you know, how do you even know these?
59:19
I don't know, but this is a Sam Parr special.
59:23
This is why I like to talk to you because you bring these things.
59:27
Nobody Nobody I know in my entire life I could I could hit up every single person I'd say, "Hey, you ever heard of Bit Pipe?"
59:33
I would get the answer no across the board.
59:34
You're the only person that I know that knows about this stuff.
59:37
Well, look up TechTarget market cap. What is it? Is it like 2. It's like multi-billion.
59:43
It's like one of these companies that's like in plain sight, but no one pays attention to. Yeah. Um so, it's there.
59:50
uh let's see the current price.
59:50
So, it's trading at $72 a share with a market cap of $2. 1 billion.
59:56
And like what was its peak?
59:56
Its peak was probably five or six or seven.
1:00:00
I mean, it's not like a little thing. Uh yeah. Double.
1:00:04
Yeah, it basically double where it's at now. All right, last thing.
1:00:08
The lamest thing that I saw last week.
1:00:10
So, this guy posted on LinkedIn a picture of him crying.
1:00:17
And it it he's The post starts off, "This will be the most vulnerable thing I'll ever share.
1:00:23
I've gone back and forth whether to post this or not, but we just had to lay off a few of our employees."
1:00:26
And he talks about how it's his fault and how he made all these decisions.
1:00:30
And I'm going to have to file this under things that I'm going to take to the [ __ ] grave.
1:00:39
I cannot believe this post.
1:00:43
I cannot believe this post.
1:00:43
What happened to like a man being stoic and just like, you know, like just taking this just take these feelings and just push them down. You know what I mean?
1:00:53
Just accept it and push them down. Hey. It's great.
1:00:55
Hey, on that shelf that just has daddy issues, make room.
1:00:58
We got something new I need to put on this shelf that I'm burying deep down in my gut. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:01:04
I want that problem to walk over and be like, "Excuse me, mind if I scoot in right here?"
1:01:08
That's what needs to happen with this.
1:01:10
I cannot believe this person shared this. Is that ridiculous?
1:01:11
I mean, I didn't even understand it, by the way.
1:01:17
He goes He goes uh I've seen a lot of I've seen a lot of layoffs over the last few weeks on LinkedIn.
1:01:22
Most of these are due to the economy or whatever other reason. Ours, my fault.
1:01:26
I made a decision in February that I stuck with for too long.
1:01:30
Now, I know my team will say, "We made this decision together." By the way, they won't.
1:01:34
They'll say, "You made this decision."
1:01:37
They're not going to be like, "We all made this mistake, boss."
1:01:41
Um yeah, so then he basically writes this long thing and he writes it like in a marketer style where it's every other line, like single line, enter, one line, enter.
1:01:49
And then he posts this picture of himself looking into the camera crying.
1:01:55
And this has um I think it has 50,000 likes and 10,000 comments, but most of the comments are just [ __ ] on him, which is hilarious. Oh, sorry.
1:02:03
You said what has 50,000?
1:02:05
It has 50,000 likes, 10,000 comments, and most of them are just making fun of this guy.
1:02:09
So, as as is deserved, to be honest.
1:02:12
Like, you know, I My first of all, we don't con- condone bullying, but we definitely don't condone absolutely faking the funk like this guy's doing.
1:02:21
The the top comment that I liked was some guy was like, "Hang on, did you turn your ring light on before you took this selfie cuz I can kind of see the reflection?
1:02:29
Uh it looks like you turned a ring light on to take this selfie of you crying to post on LinkedIn."
1:02:36
And uh that's like That's just calls it out so perfectly.
1:02:38
The the the inauthenticity of the fake authenticity that this guy tried to tried to portray.
1:02:45
I condone some type of bullying.
1:02:45
I condone bullying this guy cuz if the bullies had they done their job, nerds like this wouldn't be going around existing.
1:02:53
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.
1:02:55
I saw this and I was like, "Bullies, you failed us.
1:02:59
How on Earth did this guy get away with it?
1:03:01
This is the You need like, you know, in every ecosystem, it's like, "Yeah, well, these the plankton have to be there cuz they're absorbing this."
1:03:09
And like, you know, these parasites, actually you need them because of this.
1:03:14
That's why we need bullies.
1:03:16
Otherwise, [ __ ] like this is going to run rampant if there's no bullying.
1:03:20
Yes, this guy someone need he needed a big brother.
1:03:22
He needed a big sister, someone to be like, "Look, this isn't how you act.
1:03:26
This is not This isn't the right way to behave when something like this happens, you dork."
1:03:30
I cannot believe this post.
1:03:34
pro-bully here at the My First Million podcast.
1:03:37
Dude, there's just going to be a generations of cool a generation missing cool kids because of this.
1:03:43
Um no, I saw this post, man, and I thought this was brilliant.
1:03:46
This is the definition of small boy stuff.
1:03:49
Like when we say no small boy stuff, this is what we're talking about. Yeah.
1:03:53
This is the This is This is small boy stuff.
1:03:55
This is This is as small boy as it gets.
1:03:56
I saw this and I was just like, "Oh, man, I've seen a I've seen a bunch of these like like Henry Ward from Carta wrote this letter of saying how he screwed up."
1:04:05
And I was like, "All right, that's cool. Whatever."
1:04:06
This is the worst example I've ever seen of this.
1:04:08
I I think that What do you think's going to happen to this guy's career?
1:04:14
Like if you're a customer of his, I'd be like, "Oh, we like your code must suck."
1:04:17
Like, you know, like if your if your product is even 50% as weak as you, it's not going to work. Do you know what I mean? You know what I mean?
1:04:34
Dude, some of these comments are hilarious.
1:04:36
They're like, um Braden Braden, I understand. These things happen. Happens for a reason. Focus on the positive. Let it go.
1:04:43
Rest easy, my sweet child. Rest easy.
1:04:47
Like starts off with a serious comment.
1:04:49
It's like sleep sweetly, my sweet child.
1:04:55
Is that a man or a woman saying that?
1:04:56
the best content ever on LinkedIn.
1:04:56
This is the best content on LinkedIn.
1:04:59
Like the comments the combination of the post and the comments all of a sudden LinkedIn was the most entertaining you know, like social media of the day from the from this one post.
1:05:10
Dude, I was gagging reading it, man. It was This was crazy.
1:05:12
I I I felt embarrassed for I just felt so embarrassed for him.
1:05:15
You know how like um we talk about cringe stuff? I legitimately cringed.
1:05:20
I remember my face being like Like I just had that My face was changing shapes reading this.
1:05:26
Yeah, like I have this tooth that's like a little sensitive and it just started like ringing when the I was like, "Ah!"
1:05:36
Like I too cold of ice cream.
1:05:36
Like that's how I felt when I read this.
1:05:38
Just like this uncomfortable this uncomfortable feeling that I just needed to pass.
1:05:44
Uh all right, so that's the episode.
1:05:44
Uh go and tell your friends, tell your mom, uh you know, go add us on LinkedIn, go do what you got to do. It's my first million.