AI-Planned Dinner with Billionaires, NVIDIA Stock Bump & Billion $ Panda Express

26:37So basically, like we can like our screens will be more interactive and all that. And so he invents this chip and he runs the company now for 30 years. So he's been CEO for this company longer than any other like newish tech company. And he made this bet and it wasn't that big of a bet. So when he launched in 1993, he raised a two million dollar round of funding at a six million dollar valuation. So this wasn't like some, like, you're going to crush this. Like, it was just a normal startup at the time. But he makes this bet that he thinks that CPUs, which is what people used to use, that that's going to be like a little bit less popular.

27:13And GPUs, which is for graphics and like more general use, that's going to be like the thing. And so the first people who start using it are gamers. So in like different gaming PCs, people start using it. And then Apple, Microsoft, whatever, they're like, oh, man, we actually also want some of these chips. So we're going to use that. But now it's expanded way beyond that. So Tesla uses their chips. So when you want to do self-driving, they've got an NVIDIA chip that helps them figure out where people are. The camera will use the GPU chip and then it will put... When you're on a Tesla, you can see people walking across the street.

27:48And then now they're even using it for artificial intelligence. So anyone who's using OpenAI, Amazon Web Services, things like that, they're also using GPU. And so this company, it's one of those companies that you don't really think about because it's a B2B company. But at this point, and this is what shocked me, NVIDIA is now either the seventh or eighth largest company in the world. Is that insane? Wow. And so like this company, because their stock did well, the whole NASDAQ, which is like a tech-based index. The market cap is almost$1 trillion. It's$963 billion right now. it's insane right so because nvidia popped the whole nasdaq the whole nasdaq which is a a tech based uh a tech forward like stock exchange that's what i meant not indexed they're killing it because of that and so i have no idea i like heard that name and be i'm like what is this little like gaming company how is this like moving the stock market and that's what it is and this guy uh the founder the um the acquired guys have a really good episode on him sam's jensen he's like really interesting so he was a taiwanese immigrant and he his parents didn't have any money so they sent him to a like a boarding school which is like a reform school for kids who had issues and like his roommate was this guy who had just got out of prison at the age of like 16 or 17 and he had been stabbed like 15 times and so the guy was like hey keep me out of your work computers and i'll show you how to lift weights and so if you look at this guy now jensen he's like a pretty buff guy and he also has like the word nvidia the nvidia logo tattooed on him and he like says i'll be like really wild things.

29:22Like he'll say, my will to survive is greater than almost anyone's will to kill me. And like, yeah, all these phrases where he just says like, I'm all in baby. And so he's a really interesting entrepreneur, but he's like the Gary Oldman of the world where we don't actually like, he's not up there. Like we're not watching videos of him, like Mark Zuckerberg doing jujitsu because he's not like a mainstream facing guy. But now I think it's going to change because they are absolutely crushing it and i'm one of the many people who probably had no idea what they do yeah yeah when the acquired guys came on our pod i think you asked them you're like hey you studied all these companies you studied all these these epic titans of business um and i think you said like who would you not want to compete with or who would you want to compete with the least and they said this guy, Jensen Wong, they were like, Jensen, the guy from NVIDIA, the leather jacket wearing CEO has got the NVIDIA tattoo on his shoulder who has just been like, you know, a monster for like, you know, 20 years with this company.

30:23And that was not the answer. Like, I wouldn't have guessed that that's who they would have said. And it was an unfulfilling answer because I was like, well, I don't know anything about this guy. And I bet most of our listeners were like, oh, I thought you would have said Mark Zuckerberg or someone famous. and this guy's just quietly kind of behind the scenes, although he is like a loud personality. He doesn't seem obnoxious, but he wears like a cool leather jacket and he looks like very confident, but he's just been quietly behind the scene, kind of killing it. I don't know what his net worth is now, but I bet you he's one of like the top 30 or 50 richest people in America or in the world at the moment.

30:56And he just gave a talk at like the Taiwanese like national university or something like that. And he, I haven't seen it yet, but it was like his commencement speech. and like you remember the Steve Jobs like the great one like the one he did at Stanford that was like just like incredible he gave a talk I haven't seen the whole thing but there's a couple of lessons some people have tweeted out I want to share a couple with you so he's like he goes lesson number one humility he goes confront failure head on and ask for help so he says back in the day one year in the early days of NVIDIA they got their first big chip contract and it was with sega the video game console and he goes after a year of development they realized that they had picked the wrong technical strategy to make the chip that was going to do the things that sega needed to fulfill the contract and he's like we realized our architecture was the wrong strategy he's like uh you know we didn't know what to do should we scramble try to make it work should we just deliver something that's not great like what should we do should we start over we don't have time he's like so i just called the ceo of sega and I was like, hey, I think you have to find another partner.

32:05But I also need you to keep paying us on the contract. He's like, what? He's like, I hate to even ask this. I'm embarrassed. If we don't have this money, we're going to go out of business. If you just please pay out the rest of this contract, I'm embarrassed to even ask you this. But we need these six months to survive. And we screwed up. I'll do everything in my power to help you do this. And I'll try to make it right after this. but if we don't have this, if you don't pay this contract, it's over. The show's over for us. And the CEO of Sega agreed. He actually paid it out. They gave him six months to survive.

32:39He's like, you got to confront your mistakes head on with humility and ask for help. That saved Nvidia. He's like, this is the hardest thing to learn for somebody who's the smart and successful type. They try to avoid failure or be in denial or hide from it. What else did it say? He goes, second is lesson number two, you have to endure the pain and suffering to realize your dream. So he goes, in 2007 we announced CUDA, this new way to program your GPUs. I think that's the real key for NVIDIA. They don't just make the chips. They make the CUDA thing is important. It's basically the way that developers can use GPUs and control the GPU to do what they want.

33:22And by the way, they don't even make the chips. They design them and they have partnership with this other Taiwanese company, which is why sometimes you'll say, you'll hear things like, well, if Taiwan gets invaded by China, the eighth largest company in the world is going to be kind of screwed, which means X, Y, and Z for the rest. Yeah, especially all the companies that need chips. Like, oh, all of our cars need chips. All of our computers need chips. All of our phones need chips. If we lose control of the chips, it's like losing the nukes or it's like losing access to oil. It's like a big deal.

33:54So anyways, so he goes we basically we tried to create this thing back in 2007 it was super hard, super expensive our profits took a huge hit and we had many years of poor performance and our shareholders were skeptical like dude why are you spending all this money on this stupid GPUs, CUDA thing you need to improve profitability blah blah blah but we just said no we're going to keep doing this and basically it took like 3 or 4 years before there was even a market for this but by the time there was a market for this they were so far ahead he's like so then the phone comes out the phone phones become a huge success now phones need gpus and by 2010 they had the lead in the mobile chip market so uh chips for phones he's like that was huge and um oh no sorry the uh i screwed up this story the gpus thing becomes a big deal as gaming continues to to go that direction and like all the ai machine learning stuff.

34:50But like that was, it took like, you know, almost 10 years for that to come through, but they like stuck to their guns and stuck with it, even though the shareholders and the public markets were punishing them for it. And then the last one, he's like, you know, we were in the mobile chip market. We were the leader and he's like, um, but it just became so competitive. It was so many people fighting for the same pie. They basically decided to like sacrifice, um, sacrifice the mobile market and leave that in order to do, to, uh, to go for like, you know, a different market, this kind of AI machine learning market.

35:20And again, it seemed like a terrible strategic bet. It's like you're leaving the biggest market, cell phones, in order to go for this unknown risky thing. And that strategic bet paid off because they became, by far, the leader in this field. And now that became the biggest market, the market everybody's bullish about. And the reason their stock is up so much is because they gave guidance. They had a revenue target or forecast or whatever. there was a revenue forecast and they like just came out like, actually, we think we're going to crush that by like 30%. And they're like, wait, 30 % on a number that's already in the multi-billions.

35:56And they're like, yes. So the stock took off after that. Dude, it's awesome. So I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan of this guy. So is it hot or I think it's long? I don't know. The silent ages are always a challenge for me. But Mr. Jensen, I've been in media. You are today's killer Asian number one. Sean, tell me who are killer agents number two and three. All right. We're going from a guy who makes GPUs and AI, artificial intelligence, to orange chicken baby. To MSG. To MSG. I butchered the joke. It was too good. GPU to MSG. So I met somebody who was like a real estate person. And they were like, I was like, yeah, how's the real estate thing going?

36:42They're like, oh, dude, it's going great. We're growing, growing, growing. I was like, so you're still just doing this all with your own money? And he's like, yeah, although there's one person who wants to put money in that I'll take. And I was like, but you've always said no to anybody's money. Like why? Who's this one person? And why? Why are you interested? He goes, it's the guy who started Panda Express. This guy's a multi-billionaire and he's got so much money. He's got an unbelievable amount of money that he doesn't know what to do with it. I was like, he needs a place to invest this money.

37:10And I was like, Panda Express? Like how much money are they making? And I kind of looked into it. So this segment is Panda Express, the$10 billion mom and pop. So I don't know how much you know about Panda Express, but... I bet. It does. I know you've tested the goods. So basically, it's a privately owned company. So it's just owned by this husband and wife. It does about$5 billion a year in sales,$5.3 billion last year. There are no franchises of this thing. So they kind of independently own, I think, almost all. There might be like 100 that are in international territories that they don't control.

37:49But for the most part, they have grown this thing to a huge international chain. It's, I think, the third biggest fast food chain or something like that. It's just behind the huge ones, the McDonald's and Chick-fil-A's of the world. And they are on track to become a$10 billion mom and pop company, which is just kind of insane. and my friend who I who was telling me what are their names what's that Andrew it's Andrew like churn I don't know how you say it exactly it's like churn it's c-h-e-r-n-g or something like that it's him and his wife and they they've owned this thing they've run this thing so he started the first one it was like called like the Panda Inn back in the day it was like a normal restaurant I think he's I think he started it yeah I think his dad had one his dad was the chef so his dad was a was a chef and he opened up Panda Inn and his dad was the chef of that restaurant.

38:44And then fast food started taking off and Andrew got pretty fascinated with this idea of fast food and was like, okay, what if we did Chinese fast food? And so the second or third location they did was this express, this fast food. And it was in California, right? Where there was more Asians. And they start doing a bunch of things that are smart. So some of the strategic smart things that they did was they opened up a bunch of locations as they grew in airports and military bases, which a lot of people weren't doing at the time, but they were like, oh, this is a great way to build awareness. These are huge hubs that a lot of people come through.

39:21If we're here, we will become known and normal as a cuisine, basically. And so they did those. Even though those weren't the most profitable locations, they did it for the brand. The second thing, his wife was a food engineer or something like that. And so she was one of the first people in Chinese restaurants to use a whole bunch of tech, so tech to monitor inventory or measure speed for operations. And that's why they became so efficient. And they call themselves McDonald's of the East because they're as efficient as a McDonald's, even though almost every other kind of like Chinese restaurant was a traditional mom and pop.

40:04They write down the orders by hand. They track inventory by going to open up the fridge. and eyeballing everything and being like, I think we need to order more eggs. Whereas they turned this into kind of like a machine. And they would find things that were working in one store. So like this guy in Hawaii who owned one of the, who was running one of the stores, the chef there, he created orange chicken. And he's like, oh, I think I could take, you know, that one beef dish, that's an appetizer that uses the orange peels. I think I could use that orange thing on the General Siles chicken and like combine the two, have this fried chicken that's got the orange flavor.

40:35So Panda Express invented orange chicken? That's what it sounded like from my reading. Now, I don't know if there's others that are debating that, but that's how they frame it at least. And they sell 100 million pounds of orange chicken a year. It's like a crazy number. And so, yeah, just this insane thing. So I think they do almost like$800 million of EBITDA. And so I know someone who knows him. It's an incredible amount of money. I know someone who knows him, and he told me the same number. Yeah. He told me, he goes, they're knocking on the door. because they're knocking on the door of a billion in EBITDA.

41:11Exactly. That's how much cash they have. And then it's like, well, what do you do with all this money? And people have asked them, are you going to take it public? And the CFO is like, never. This is going to be a family business. They'll pass it down from generation to generation. Our job is to make this a multi-generational family-owned business. And I think that's really cool. There's so few of those that refuse to go public. And why do they need to? They're rolling in profits, right? They don't need the liquidity of the markets. They don't have investors that they need to pull off. I couldn't find if there was some angel investors early on.

41:40There probably was something. I don't know if they own literally 100%, but it seems like it's either 100 % or close to it in terms of their ownership, which I think is kind of insane. He also does a few other things. So if I remember correctly, I might get some of the details wrong, but I think that the day you start working there, I believe he, like even like as a i think this is like as a cashier not just like h2b as like a a retail worker i think he buys you the book um how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie because he said that when he i don't know he is i think he might be an immigrant but his parents were for sure immigrants and he was like trying to figure out how to like assimilate and how to like be more likable and charismatic so he could like uh get along with americans and he read how to win friends and influence people and it like changes life.

42:31I also think he read like Think and Grow Rich. And so he like gives people these books and he also sponsors tons of his employees to go to Tony Robbins stuff. So he's like all about this like self-help stuff, which is cool. We got a bunch of common. We got a bunch of common. And he likes that for his employees. And so I think if I had to guess, when you get to be the size of 100 million pounds of orange chicken, you're no longer like a product company or just like a restaurant company. you're a collecting people and making sure that they all behave in a very particular type of way as well as like a logistics company and so in terms of like you know like there's a reason why McDonald's whenever they know something it's like oh that's this huge announcement just because you have a McRibs like dude because they have to go and like get like you know 500 pounds of pork in order to like make this it's like a huge ordeal but in terms of treating his people well and like collecting people he like invests I heard into them a whole lot so he's kind of like a really interesting guide I don't know if this is like PR spun stuff where all, you know, he looks great all the time, just from the outside, but it seems like he does a lot of really good, good stuff.

43:38There's a, I just asked Chad Chibiti for some fun facts. I said, give me some fun anecdotes about them. And they said the thing about the books, it said he buys thousands of copies of his favorite books. One is like Awakening the Buddha Within and gives it to his employees. Another thing that it says is according to a Forbes article, So staff members often start the day with affirmations like, people are depending on me to be at my best. I believe in myself and my abilities. Opportunities are everywhere. And I don't know if that's truly how they start their day, but it's a hell of a lot better than just saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

44:14I think we should put this in schools. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, 2 ,000 plus stores as a kind of family-owned and non-franchised out business is mind-boggling level of scale to reach. And it's him and his wife, Peggy, that just like still kind of like own the thing. And he does the total opposite of what you just said before. He moved to Nevada. He now lives in Nevada because he's making so much income. But yeah, I know that he, I think Nevada's now, it was like a big deal when he left California to Nevada. My thing is about tech entrepreneurs. If you are going to build a Silicon Valley style venture startup, this is the place to be for that.

44:57I'm not saying everybody in the world should live in California. If you're slinging 100 million pounds of orange chicken, you can live wherever the hell you want. That's rule number three. I want you to tell me, we're going to move into the last section here. I want you to tell me, you got a little ambitious here. You titled this section, famous people who are back with new companies. I don't want to call them famous. Maybe somewhat popular. Notable. Notable. Notable is a better one. Let's do notable. Tell me what you got. I don't know if you've seen this, but there's a few people who are well-known in our industry for a bunch of reasons that are doing interesting things.

45:32I want to get your quick reaction to each of them. I don't know if you've seen all these, but we'll start with Naval. Naval is kind of like the one of the godfathers of Silicon Valley. He's been here again And since that kind of like pre.com boom days, he did a startup that went public and then he famously got in a big dispute with a bunch of people about it. He created a blog that was called Venture Hacks and then him and his partner Nivy and that eventually sort of led to AngelList, which is a multi-billion dollar startup that's like LinkedIn for the tech industry. And he's got like, I don't know, a million plus followers on Twitter because very insightful guy.

46:13So Naval's awesome. He's got a new app. He turned into like a, he's like a self-appointed guru, which is brilliant. I think he's actually the opposite. I think he's a non-self-appointed guru. I think other people appoint him a guru and he's like, that makes me a little uncomfortable, but I kind of like it. He leaned, he leaned into it. He leaned into it hard. But I've, as somebody who's consumed, I think every word that Naval has said somehow, like I've watched all his live streams, his podcasts, all that stuff, right? Love his stuff. he many times will be like people why don't you do more or have your own things and he's like I don't want I don't I don't like playing this role of this guru thing I don't like how much I like it and I have to be very careful that I don't fall into that I don't want that to be my life and my identity and get excited about I'm just excited about learning this thing because I'm going to go tell everybody about it and then everybody's going to think I'm so smart he's like No, I don't want that.

47:10I want to learn the thing because I like to learn it. And that's it. And he's like, you know, he's like, I, you know, like it's like junk food when he's like, I get on here and I give random advice to people. It's my junk food. It's not what I want to be eating. And people base their lives on it. But it's far. Jensen's got the NVIDIA tattoo. I got the Naval tattoo on my arm. Okay, so what's air chat? Have you seen it? Have you played with it? Okay. Yeah, isn't it just like a little bit? but it almost felt like an AI friend. Is that what it is? No, not at all. So it's an app. It's like a social media app.

47:45So you open it up and there's these rooms. So you can go into a room that's like, it might be people talk about AI and it's sort of like, it's audio, but it's recorded. So I could go on there and I could be like, I was playing with this chat GPT thing and one of the cool things that I've been doing is this. Has anybody tried anything that's blown their mind? That blew my mind. And then another person who follows me can just reply and be like, dudes are totally right. Here's what I did. And you're hearing their voice. It's like voice plus the transcription of it. So it's kind of like a way to have almost like a podcast-y style thing where you're having a conversation, but it's open.

48:20Anybody can kind of hop in that you allow into your room. And the conversation goes wherever it is, wherever it goes. So a little bit of like a dinner party in a way. And so there's like, for example, one of the rooms I liked was the guy Nivy telling the origin story of Angel List, which I had never heard before, but he was like, all right, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell you the origin story of angel list. And it's actually like not what I thought. He's like, we had venture, venture hacks, the blog, and that was kind of popular. And then I was like, I was trying to figure out what to do.

48:49Like, how do we turn this into a business? And so I emailed Naval. Naval owned 10 % of it. And I was like, all right, Naval, hey, I don't know what you think about this, but like, I'm thinking about selling this PDF. Like, okay, venture hacks is a free blog, but then here's this PDF. Like we were joking about like the webinar thing. It's like, dude, even some of these awesome people did it. And he's like, I'm going to sell this PDF that will just give people templates. And Naval's like, okay, that's cool. For my 10%, just keep it. This awesome PDF thing you're going to try to do, go ahead and hold on to my 10%.

49:22I don't need it. You need it more than I do. And then he's like, then we were driving home from some events after I had told him about the PDF thing. I was ready to go do that. And Naval had this like, we were shooting the shit and we had this idea like, oh you know what i really want is like i want a list of investors and just what they invest in what check size because people are always asking us due to venture hacks like hey do you know any investors that would invest in my startup he's like i just want a list that i can refer to as like here's all the investors i know here's what they invest in and here's a check size so when someone asks for an intro i can go look at the list and make the intro and then maybe he's like yeah that's cool i don't think that's a business like it's good that's gonna make less money than my PDF, but you're right.

50:03That would be really useful for us. So he's like, so I went home that night. He's like, I made a form and I emailed it out to every investor I know that was like, yo, what do you invest in? What's your average check size and what's your email address? And are you open to people contacting you for introductions for deals? He's like, and I sent it to people and they immediately filled it in. It was the ugliest form. I didn't even pay for the premium. him. He's like, just a reminder that like, you know, you just need to start, you need to get it out there and get momentum going. And he's like, now, um, I, I, with any project, if I can't like launch some version of it in the first 24 hours, it like kind of like, it bothers me a lot.

50:42Like, I don't really want to do projects where I can't do that. He's like, so that was the first, that was V1 of Angelus. We got this, these people back and then we put it on a, we put it on our website and then we like got some like compressed coverage. Cause it was like, oh, here's a list of all the angels. And it was like, and all their emails were there. So that was bad. So we had to take that off and then hide their emails because people were just getting spamming them. He's like, and then that became like the precursor to what AngelList was, which is now this like multi-billion dollar company was like just this list of angel investors.

51:10And that was the simplest, like useful thing. And he's like, and so he's telling the story in the air chat. And he's like, if you guys want, by the way, like I could tell you the two other ideas that we like, you know, two other paths that we looked at that like turned out not being good ideas, but let me know. And then you could see that this... Now I'm like, oh, great, I'm going to follow along. I kind of want to hear this oral history of AngelList. And so it's cool in that way, right? Like it's a cool new app. So he's coming out with this and he's like, I'm a co-founder of this. And the other guy I think who's behind it is that guy, Brian Norgard.

51:45I don't know how you say his last name exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who's kind of like well-respected in the tech scene as like a product guy, a product designer guy. Didn't he like work at Tinder or something? yeah he basically like he started a couple things that like had a bunch of hype but didn't fully pan out but were cool products like didn't work but were cool and then ended up like had a product at like the match group or something like that at IAC and so then he like ran tinder and now he's like doing this I guess so that's kind of like one app so give me your you haven't played with it so it's hard to get your quick reaction well I yeah you gotta like sign up for a waitlist that's cool rub it in Do you think that this is going to be a thing?

52:26I do not. So I think it's going to be... It actually reminds me a lot of Clubhouse in that early on, Clubhouse was awesome. It was awesome because it was such a curated community and it was like they brute forced only dope people onto the platform because that's who their friend group was. And so early on with Clubhouse, you would go into any room and it'd be like super interesting conversation. You could just hop in and meet people and you could build. And I told my friend this, there was a guy who used to work for me, Jason. And I was like, Jason, he was still at Twitch after he got acquired and was kind of like, you know, spinning his wheels a little bit.

53:03And I go, Jason, you should just forget about Twitch. I said, every night you should go on Clubhouse and hang out there for like five hours. You will build like the best network in Silicon Valley in the next two months if you just do that. Because I was like, you're an awesome talker. People love you when they meet you. But it's just hard to go meet like the power players. Clubhouse is this place where all the power players are hanging out and they want to be talking to randos because that's what Clubhouse is and that they're excited about Clubhouse. Therefore, they're excited about talking to randos.

53:32I was like, you can go in there and go from rando to friend in like two months. And he did exactly that. He went in there. He started hanging out and he built this awesome friend group. They still hang out in real life today. He ended up raising a fund out of that group of people like, dude, you seem like you know a lot about crypto. Like, can you invest some of my money in crypto? And he's like, I don't know. and ended up raising a few million dollar fund, invested in it, made these guys money, triple, I think he doubled or tripled their money and paid it all back and gave, stopped the fund within like a year, which is like incredible.

54:02And yeah, he just like had this awesome networking experience. So to me, AirChat's like that right now. You go in there, everybody's smart and awesome and like the who's who of the tech world. And so it's great for me as a user right now. I don't think it'll stick like that. And I also don't think it'll catch on to be a mainstream social media thing because for one reason, audio is too slow. People can like scroll and read, I don't know, something crazy, like three or five times faster than audio. And so there is a, it's too slow. Any social media, you're now competing with TikTok. It's like, how do you compete with the entertainment per second that you get rate that you get from an Instagram or TikTok or even a Twitter?

54:43It's all short form, bite size, just instant dopamine hits. And it's like podcasts. It's very hard to compete with that. It'll never be as like, you know, billions of people are just opening this thing up all the time because audio is too slow and you get too few like hits of awesomeness per minute that you compare to your other options, other buttons on your phone. So that's why I don't think it'll become like a mainstream thing. Tell me about this tradie thing. Okay. So Dom, who was the founder of fast.com, which was a funny story. What's the 30-second story of Fast? 30-second story of Fast, the guy gets his domain, fast.com, comes out with crazy hype on Twitter of just Fast is going to be the next big thing.

55:29It's one-click instant checkout. What Amazon did with one-click checkout, we're going to do for the rest of the internet. And they're just pumping on Twitter how Fast is going to be awesome. They raise a bunch of money at a huge valuation. They're bragging about how - Hundreds of millions, right? Hundreds of millions, yeah. Hundreds of millions. Pre-launch, pre-traction, basically. and a few of us were kind of like I don't know man I'm not sure like where's your customers what's going on and sure enough the bubble pops people sort of realize that fast.com has basically no traction it had like I don't know like tens of thousands in revenue as it had like you know almost a billion dollar valuation and the product doesn't really work that great the team is whatever.

56:14It all just falls apart. I don't remember the exact details of how it fell apart, but it fell apart. They were burning, I think,$10 million a month of investor money at one point, something like that, between$3 and$10 million. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were burning an absurd amount of money he couldn't raise anymore because they had no traction. At a certain point, the investors want to see traction. And so Fast just combusts. And then it comes out that, oh, this guy Dom previously had built a company in Australia called tow.com that was supposed to be uber for towing your car and tow truck drivers and basically like that company also had a dope domain tow.com.au and uh raised money it got a bunch of press got some users but not a lot ran up a bill that he couldn't pay like a 13 million dollar bill or something like that he's getting sued for by this like the government there because like towing contracts that he couldn't fulfill and ended up just like leaving Australia and like starting for like, you know, he used to be Dominic Holland and he rebranded as Dom in the US and, and, and did fast.com.

57:18So it's kind of like, okay, this guy's track record. So now he's got tradie.com. Another quick domain name. Have you seen this thing? Tradie? Like, yeah. And so explain what it is and I'll tell you what I heard about it. So it kind of looked on the surface, like most of Dom's ideas, it sounds kind of like a good idea. So it says the fastest way to grow your trade business. And he just shows a bunch of blue collar types. Oh, this guy does landscaping. This guy's got a tractor. And it's like, hey, we give you a website. We let your customers book you and pay for you online. We give you an easy way to do invoicing.

57:53If you're a professional tradesperson, you should be using trading. That's the pitch. It's not a bad pitch. I think it's a good idea. Now tell what you heard about it because I think we heard the same thing. So here, I'll read it. So someone tweeted, they go, looking at treaty.com, so far 80 % of the businesses I've contacted from the site, meaning there's a bunch of businesses that were listed as testimonials. I think he said, it looks like Dom's at it again, right? That's the frame. Yeah, he goes, he's at it again. He goes, 80 % of the companies I contacted from the site don't seem to be real.

58:29They're shell companies with fake Yelp and Google listings. And 90 % of them didn't poke up, didn't pick up the phone. Trady said, one Trady made their landing page without permit. Oh, one person who was listed on the website said that Trady made the landing page without that company's permission. And two so far seem to actually be using the product, but Trady is giving it to them for free and sponsoring them. And then he shows all the domain names that the same LLC that owns Tradie has also bought all these other domain names that were listed on the website of Tradie.com. Yeah, this is got Justin Mitchell.

59:07Jay Mitch is the guy who tweeted this out. And so, yeah, straight off the bat. And now, by the way, I think all those are gone from the Tradie website. So with that and again, my takeaway is run. Not touching this thing. Instant reaction. All right. And the next two, Tip Top and Bay Area Times. Yeah, let's skip that one. Let's do the Pomp one. So Pomp, friend of the pod, is doing something interesting. I don't know the full story. I haven't talked to him about this. Have you talked to him about this Bay Area Times thing? No, not yet. Do you know what? I don't even know about it. I don't even know what it is.

59:44Okay, so go to bayareatimes.com. It looks like. So Pomp is famous for, he was one of the early guys who was very vocal about crypto. He started a podcast, YouTube channel, and now he's a whole personality. He's pivoted away a little bit from crypto. So now he's just talking about business, but also a little bit politics and sports and all types of stuff. Yeah, his kind of relaunch I want to talk to you about, which is basically like, how do you think that's going and going to go? So he was the Bitcoin bull. He popped off in terms of, he's built his audience around Bitcoin and saying how amazing crypto is.

1:00:18and then people will note like the crypto haters basically will be like, dude, look at this. He removed the red laser eyes. He removed all mention of Bitcoin from his bio and now he hosted a real estate conference the other day. He's hosting startup events, just like normal startup things. His media stuff is not about crypto anymore. And so I think he's diversifying and kind of shifting away from... I think it's working really well too. Yeah. And like, I would just say this. I think for most people, it's a very hard transition. I would not want to bet against pop. I think he is a very formidable, smart person who is going to be successful in whatever he chooses to be successful at.

1:01:03And I think he's chosen. I'd like to build my hold code to be about these, these things instead of just this one. And I think it's a very hard pivot to make. And he's making it very well. He's doing it very well so far from what I can tell. So basically he owns, right now he owns, I think he owns an executive recruiting company, a research company. Job board. What else? A job board. Yeah, a job board. And like a course that trains you to get jobs in crypto. And then maybe like two more. Or his media companies. And then I think he's investing beyond that. So here's what he said. He goes, introducing the Bay Area Times.

1:01:40This is a new product that uses data and visuals to analyze what's happening across business, finance, and tech on a daily basis. So you can go to BayAreaTimes.com and he basically says, narratives dominate the headlines on other platforms. Writers spend paragraphs regurgitating the same points over and over again. These legacy products take too long to read. They bury the data deep in the paragraphs and it's hard to recall the information. But what if you just want cold, hard facts? What if you want to see the data in a single chart? What if you don't have 10 minutes to read every morning? That's what we built this for.

1:02:07So every morning they send out an email that's got five big stories. It's got a visual, which is like a chart or a graph, along with a few bullet points. No hidden agenda, no choice of facts, no bias narrative. That's his claim. He says he's been testing this with 20 ,000 readers and the feedback has been phenomenal. Go for it, right? And so you could see, it looks like it's built on Substack. Beehive. Oh, yeah, sorry. Oh, yeah, this is Beehive. So let me go to the first one. All right, so like the one that he sent out three days ago, it's basically, here's the data. It's like, what's going on in the stock market?

1:02:40What's going on with Bitcoin, gold, Ethereum, etc.? And then it'll be like, here's a chart on life expectancy. And it says, life expectancy has been stagnant for the past 20 years. After the COVID drop, it's at 77 years old, which is the same level as 2003. So that's like the one big chart. And then they put bullet points underneath it. So he's basically using visuals and data to explain what's going on in the news. I think it's cool. I think the worst case scenario here for him is that this makes like two or three million dollars a year. And it's very, very profitable. The best case, it becomes hustle, morning through, whatever.

1:03:12It's millions of subscribers and makes tens of millions or however much more. I think it's cool. What do you think? I kind of wish this was an actual printed thing. I like people that are going into like newspapers and magazines right now. I think those are very interesting. So there's Agora, the newsletter company I always talk about. they would say that they would charge like two grand a year and they would send you like a newsletter, but it was a financial newsletter. Except when they say newsletter, they would literally mail it to you and they still do that. And it was just printed on like printer paper.

1:03:46And it was kind of cool for that reason. Right. And I actually agree with you. I think that could be cool where you just like literally mail someone and it comes in like one of those tan envelopes. And it looks like, it's almost like, uh, here's like the, here's like, um, like I think the president every day gets like a briefing. It's like a presidential briefing where it's like, here's what you need to know. And like oftentimes I'm like, just a piece of paper. Like, just give me that, but at my house. Totally. And I actually do think that would be cool. Did we talk about this jumbo mail marketing thing?

1:04:14What's that? So I saw this on Twitter. It's pretty cool. So basically they go, the tagline is this. Have you ever received a package in the mail and thrown it away without opening it? Neither have we. and basically they're like 90 % of people, 90 plus percent of people who receive like a stuffed envelope, like a stuffed package will rip the thing off and open it. So if you go to, um, the Twitter is at mail jumbo, it's basically this, the icons is elephant. And it goes, we create jumbo chunky mail. That's guaranteed to reach your audience. It's good for real estate investors, home services, and business buyers.

1:04:52Um, and basically that what they do is like, they just do direct mail, kind of like, we got a bunch of spam in the mail, like, oh, whatever. We want to buy your business or we're a real estate agent, whatever. But they do it in these jumbo packages just to increase your response rate. So they're like, yeah, it costs more, but you're actually going to get more people to read your thing. And I thought this was a brilliant, simple side hustle style business that I think also will get to mid seven figures in revenue and be a profitable bootstrap business of just jumbo mail marketing. There's this guy named Sam Ovens who we've talked about.

1:05:29But like 10 years ago, he had this course called consulting.com and he would teach you how to become a consultant, whether it's like how to do SEO for companies. I don't know what services the consultant would do, but he would teach you how to start a consultancy business. And he has one big thing that he, I don't know if he says he invented it, but he goes, this is like my shtick, is I do this thing called lumpy mail, where I send just a normal envelope, but I put something lumpy in it. Like I forget what he would put, but like a figurine or a pen, I forget whatever it was, but it would make it feel like the envelope had a little bit of weight to it.

1:05:59He goes, the reason I do that is because when lumpy mail gets opened way more and I can get your attention way more. And so what these guys are doing, he used to call it lumpy. They're calling it jumbo. I thought that they like learned about it from him. But, and he claims that it was amazing. Well, the guy who's behind it, one of the guys who's behind it is the same guy that does, is the mobile home park guy on Twitter. who also does like nine other businesses and is like completely, he's like, if somebody downloaded the podcast into their brain and then their brain said, let's do all of them.

1:06:32He just takes, he's doing like nine ideas at once at all times. He's kind of a madman, but this is one of his ideas. And he did it because when he was trying to buy businesses, like I think like the mobile home, like buy these mobile parks, mobile home parks, he needed to do mass outreach and he wanted to increase his response rate of, are they actually even seeing my offer or that I want to buy their business? And how do I get them to reply? And so I think this was part of the inspiration for that. I think we should wrap up here. But before we do, I want to give you kudos. You said something last pod that was very funny that totally flew under the radar.

1:07:11And if you made it this far, 60 minutes in, I'm going to give you a piece of gold that you can go, just a joke that you're going to tell your friends. we said something about like breaking up with someone. Maybe it was like breaking up in the business relationship. I don't remember. But I said something like, it's not you, it's me. And you said, yeah, it's not you, it's me in that I think you're horrible. And I regurgitated that joke this weekend. Killed it. The roof, they loved it. I looked so funny. It was such a, you said that line and it totally like weathered the radars. Like, look, it's not you, it's me and that I think you're the worst.

1:07:50So that is like a free joke. I have just given you something. I've given you the listener something. What do they give us when we give them something, right? Nobody just takes, right? You don't want to be a taker. That would be. Yes, that would go against our agreement that we have with our listeners. I've just given you something. Sean gave you something that I now gifted to you. Now I want you to go to our YouTube page and our, I always call it the iTunes page and that just shows how old I am. I don't know what, the podcast app, like the Apple podcast app. Go to both of them and click subscribe because if you've listened to this, we've given to that.

1:08:25By the way, drop comments on the YouTube. That is now my favorite part of the podcast because we did this for two years with no YouTube and there's no feedback loop. You don't get any comments on the podcast app. But on YouTube, people leave comments and now we get, I don't know, I don't know how many of these, like maybe 30, 40 comments per video. I read every single one of them every single time. No joke. It's my only way to interact with people. They're all saying you look ripped now. I do like that part of the comments. Not going to lie, that is a good feeling. They're like, wow. But it's also one of those what do you call it?

1:09:03I had a before before and now I'm a before photo. You had a way before picture. I used to be the way before and now I'm just a before. And I think people recognize that. No, you look good. I appreciate them for that. You can see, you definitely have some, you got some SEP definition. Bicep, triceps. You got the SEPs. I got SEPs over here. But I'm going to start commenting back to anybody that says something interesting. And to that spammer out there that keeps trying to trick all of our people into a WhatsApp group, I'm hunting you. I'm coming for you because the YouTube algorithm can't get you.

1:09:40I will get you. I will find you. It's hard. I have a unique set of skills that have prepared me for this moment to find you on every single video and remove your comments. Yeah, 10 years of Googling has prepared you to reverse image search and figure out where they've made their mistake. All right, we're out of here. That's the pot. We'll see you all soon.

1:10:01I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel. never looking back.

1:10:21Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love. I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And you know, as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the nineties, you're operating like you're in the nineties. And trust me, I've been there clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:10:51If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.