Billion $ TV Empires, Dating Business Ideas, And More Elon

27:14And at the age of 48, she became a billionaire. So that's Oprah's story. Super fascinating. I mean, she's been in the game forever, it seems. And I think she's what, 60 something now and still killing it. I didn't realize she was the CEO and like active and all this. I thought she was more so like a face, but I think she's actually not, you know, not just a face, but it seems like she's like actually like a mogul, a tycoon. Right. You know, one thing that stands out when we talk about these is that there is this like flywheel that happens. Once you become a certain level of famous, it's almost like, you know, that graph that's like going viral, the fuck around and find out graph.

27:51It's basically like fuck around and find out, but the positive version. It's like you could kind of like if Oprah was like, here's Oprah's maple syrup. here's Oprah's, you know, like new line of spoons. Here's Oprah's, you know, new board game. Does it really matter at this point? It'd be like her board game does 50 million in sales. Her syrup is the number one syrup in the country right now. Like it's kind of at that point, you just choose. And because so much trust and distribution has been built up. And I have a friend who this week, I can't say the details, but they went to a very famous person.

28:26they went to a very famous person and they said they had a business idea they said hey uh our friend has a has a background in a certain industry and said hey famous person you should be doing something in that industry let me walk to you show up at your door knock at your door and say here's a full business plan of exactly how you would dominate in this category so they go they fly out knock on the door um first they don't meet the famous person famous person sends a a manager to them. By the way, are they A-list famous? They're super famous, yes. Super, super famous. Got it. Okay. A-list famous.

29:05And so they go to them and first they get hit with a manager and they say, they're trying to look over the manager's head and be like, hey, is a famous... I just wanted to talk to... Just hoping to get a word in with the famous person. Can you get out of the way? And they're like, no, no, no. You have to get through this wall first. They talk to the manager first. They say, hey, look, here's my background. I've been super successful in this industry. I think you guys could crush it in this industry. Um, why don't, can I meet the famous person now and tell them the idea? They said, no, no, no. Tell me the idea.

29:30I'm in charge of this. I said, okay, here's the idea. And then the person says, manager says, that's a good idea. Okay, cool. And, um, then they get the meeting with the, the famous and the whole time they were told, Hey, uh, you fly in on Monday, you'll meet with the famous person sometime this week. Just hang out in the hotel. Just be here, which is a pretty big time move to try to try to pull on somebody to not give you a time, but say, hey we'll we'll hold this walkie-talkie would you hear me put your pants on get ready where the meeting's happening but i can't tell you what it's gonna be like they've got a special calendar in google it everything ends in ish but it's you know monday ish you know like it's all ish right you're given a window and you better be prepared during that window to strike okay so end up getting the meeting with the with the famous person famous person comes in explain the whole idea famous person likes the idea, but also has a bunch of their own ideas, of course, as famous people do.

30:27And so I asked my friend later, I said, so what happened? And the response was this, they go, well, I'm pretty sure we convinced famous person that they should do this and do this with us. And I'm pretty sure they convinced me that I should not do this with them. I thought that was just a hilarious takeaway. And I was like, okay, well, why? They said, well, you know they have all their own ideas they go honestly everything they're trying to do in this space probably won't work like i think they're going about it the whole wrong way but they'll probably end up being successful anyways that's the crazy thing about this like uh their margin for error is so large and they can kind of do anything and still have it work because their brand their celebrity their distribution their trust and loyalty and their audience is so large that you can kind of mess up eight out of 10 things and still get it to work eventually.

31:22Whereas most startups, most businesses don't have that margin for error. And so I don't know what the big takeaway is. It's kind of a no duh, but it's, if you're mega, mega famous, it's not hard at that point to do the empire thing because it's like, what was his name? They got Moise from Native, when he was selling his company and they're like, you sell just deodorant, you're asking for this big valuation. And he goes, yeah, because do you know how to write the word native on a bottle of shampoo? Do you know how to write the word native on a bottle of toothpaste? Cool. That's your expansion plan.

31:55Like I left a lot of room for this to grow. If you could still write the word native on something, it will work. And that's how I feel about these mega celebrity brands, which is like, if you put my face on something, it's going to work. So let's put this in a very realistic context. So you and I have that minus or no, divided by 100. So we're Oprah divided by a thousand, whatever it is, but we have a very small taste of it. And we also have friends, you know, like the Tim Ferriss of the world and whoever else who have it, you know, times 10 or 20 for us and are in this like potentially billion dollar space.

32:29There's been three things I think that I've narrowed it down to that make this empire strategy that hold me back. And I imagine someone like Tim, who's a perfectionist or someone like that, holds them back. Number one is reputational risk. So putting your name on crap products and then how on earth can you actually like track it all to make sure that you're not putting your name on bad products that you actually stand by. And so because of that, it's almost like you have to pick and choose. But then there's other people like Richard Branson that put, you know, version on everything. And it kind of has seemed like it worked out.

33:06So that's like the big thing. Number two is finding people who you can trust. When you have five or 10 or 30 different things going on, you need really trustworthy people. And even if it's your family, even if it's your brother and your cousin, people can screw you. And you have to really stay on top of it. You have to find a partner who's good enough to really have your back. Even my accountant, or I imagine if your lawyer or your accountant, and every once in a while, you're like, is this person actually thinking of me? Or how are they incentivized here? And who's actually making the right decision?

33:37That's actually exhausting, and I think quite hard. And then the final thing is, do they want the headache of that. So like a Joe Rogan, he just like, no, F this, like I'm on my island here. I have what I need. I don't want to put my name on anything. Screw that. I don't need anything. And I want to keep things small and tight. And so those are kind of the three things I think prevent like empires from being built like this. Yeah, I think that's true. So say that, say the, the first one again, what was the first one? Do you remember? Reputational risk, having people that you can trust and then just like not wanting more headache.

34:12And here's the counter to each. Okay, reputational risk, putting your name on crap products. Do you, have you drank Prime? Once. I tried it. It's fine. It's fine. It's also the fastest growing drink in the country right now. And it's fine. And I think that that's the counter to that is, yes, you can't put it on a crap product or do something that would, you know, hurt people or do something like that. Like, you know, something, nothing, nothing on the sort of terrible end of the register. but there's a lot of leeway between the best product in the market and it's fine and you just got to fall somewhere there right it's like a it's like you're playing golf and the fairway is so wide you really got to screw it up if you hit to hit it out of bounds and that's how i feel with these products like is uh kylie's lip product the best product on the market i have no idea is um you know for most of these products i can't tell you that conor mcgregor's whiskey or the rock tequila is uh is anything better than fine they might just be you're saying their head there's got to be a threshold there's a threshold and the threshold pretty goddamn low so i think the reputational risk is is a little bit less than than what i what i think a lot of people would worry about uh the rest is true it can become a headache and you do have to find competent people to run them the good thing is when you have that brand it's like prime the prime didn't start by logan paul and ksi saying let's create a drink let's go to the flavor house and create a formulation there were some entrepreneurs who approached them that said we do this we've done this at you know medium scale with you guys we could go super scaled and we will take care of everything you guys take the cut you guys help us with the promotion but like look we come with this track record and i think that's what happens for most of these celebrities is they're approached by people with track records like even the example i was just giving somebody with a track record came and said i know this industry i've done this before with your brand and your distribution we could do this again in a big way um and i think those opportunities come knocking at your door so it's not even like where do i go find somebody great it's like can i filter can i just like recognize great when it shows up shows up at my door is really the uh the question for most of these people do you think you would enjoy that type of fame like chip and joanna no um not only would I not enjoy it from a like, oh, I don't want to get bothered when I'm out and about with my kids and stuff like that.

36:33But also, more than that is I don't enjoy what it takes to get there. And that's actually what goes like. That's actually the most important question of business. I was talking to Ben Levy about this the other day. We're talking about business ideas. Earlier, I asked you this a while ago and you go, there's a price to pay. I ain't willing to pay it. Yeah, exactly. Know the price and then decide if you're going to pay it. And when we were talking about business ideas, it was like, oh, do we like this idea or this idea? And the easy thing to do, I think everybody gets this wrong, is like, I love basketball.

37:06So I want to do a basketball-based idea. Or I love, I'm really passionate about helping people. So I'm going to do this healthcare startup, whatever it may be. And they think that their enjoyment of the thing is going to be based on the product or category that they're in. But in reality, most of the time you spend when you're an entrepreneur is trying to grow or sell. It's trying to get more customers and grow the actual business. And so you're not playing basketball. Your day-to-day experience is actually about selling and trying to grow. And what ends up happening is that some ways are more enjoyable or suit you better than others.

37:43So for some people, they love Facebook ads or they love SEO. And for some people, they love phone calls. And for some people, they love high-level business deals, enterprise sales, where you're nurturing a long relationship for a long period of time. And the big mistake people make is they think, oh, I'm creating a basketball-related startup. What they don't realize is that the only way for that business to grow is through enterprise sales. And they hate enterprise sales, or they're unwilling to go and sell to these facility managers of NBA stadiums, or they're unwilling to sell to blah, blah, blah.

38:16lot. And they think they're in the basketball business, but they're in the enterprise sales business because 90 % of their day-to-day work and the challenge that they're faced with and the stuff they have to do, whether they're selling basketballs or ping pong balls or books, it doesn't matter. It's the sales channel, the sales process is where you're going to spend most of your time. So you got to figure out which sales process do I like the most or at least tolerate the best and then find a business that uses that sales process. I think that is like a, uh, I wish somebody had told me that earlier because I got tripped up with this for many, many years.

38:53And then when I look back, I'm like, oh, I just really like growing things through Facebook ads. It's like, it's to me, it's way better than these other ones. And so like, so I have a list. I'm like, my favorite sales channel is just mention it on the podcast. It couldn't be anything easier than that. Like if I could just tell people what I think about this product and then they go buy it because they already trust me and they like me and we have enough listeners to this product, to this podcast, that is the number one easiest sales channel, most pleasurable. So if I can think of a business that works in that, fantastic.

39:22Number two for me is Facebook ads. Why? Because I don't have to talk to anybody. I sit behind a computer. I set up the budget. And when it works, I just scale it up with the push of a button. I don't have to hire more salespeople. I don't have to like go do something new. You can take one image that works or one video, one 10 second video that works in Facebook ads and put millions of dollars of spend behind it and make multiple millions more off that ad. I love that. I love that model. I like that. I can look at the dashboard, see a number and know what to do. I guess that's like my number two.

39:54And my number three is cold emails because I'm good at cold emailing and it's kind of a pain in the ass, but I've done it before. I can train people to do that of how to cold email in order to generate customers. Those are my three favorites. Everything else, I don't like as much. And so when I think of an idea, it's got to fall in that top three. Have you? So we had, I guess, technically, the hustle kind of was enterprise sales. I mean, we had six, maybe once or twice. We had seven figure deals. And that's like a long process. I wasn't allowed to go to those meetings because like, I remember like I had to go and buy like brown shoes and like tight jeans and like tuck my shirt in and like a certain way.

40:27I was like, dude, like, I'm Todd. Nice to meet you. Like, it wasn't for me. I got all the details wrong. Just a tank top tucked in some khakis, which are tucked into some brown shoes. A giant tunnel you've created where they're tucking everything in. Right before the meeting, they're like, Sam, the buttons are supposed to be in the front. Ah, that was a breakaway.

40:53Yeah, so I was learning as I went. But as the owner of a company that had enterprise sales, it is awesome. Because what I didn't realize, there's this amazing thing that I learned which is that sales teams can create demand. So even if your product, our product was great, but even if your product is okay, if you have a good sales team, you can truly create demand. And I didn't understand that until like year two or three of like having a team like this. I'm like, oh my God, this is how the world works because most big companies, they just have a certain amount of budget. They have to spend it on something.

41:26And if you just get in with them and you wine and dine them and they like you, half the time the product doesn't even matter. They just have to spend it. Otherwise, next year, they won't have the same budget. If they don't have the same budget, they don't have a job. So and you can like that or you can not like it. Frankly, I don't love that, that that's like the truth. But if you can make it work, it's pretty amazing. And I like learn that the hard way while running a company like this. And if you don't know which one you like, your best bet is to go get exposure to a bunch of them. So go try your hand and do like a six month rotation where you're basically like, OK, how do I do this enterprise sales thing?

42:00How do I do cold calling? how do I do Google ads? How do I do these different things and figure out which one of these appeals to you? Because once you do that, then you could kind of pick and choose. I know most people, and I would think you would find this to be true. Most successful people we know, they don't really hop around sales channels that much. It's like, if they're good at - You find one thing and you kill it. Yeah, they, oh, you're good at SEO. They just do SEO four different times and four different flavors. Oh, you're good at Facebook ads? You do Facebook ads for one business, then another business, then another business.

42:31If you're good at enterprise sales, you just figure out which businesses to plug into that over time. And they kind of make a career out of really understanding one growth process because being a master at any growth thing is super, super valuable. Do you want to talk about Hustle GPT-3 or do you want to go to another topic? Let's do some quicker ones. I feel like we did a long-winded thing. So I have a couple of quick ones. Tell me. Okay. So I'm going to give you my two bad dating ideas. And by the way, I'd like to put another drunk ideas on the books to just put that out there. This would have been in my drunk ideas thing, but we don't have it scheduled.

43:14So I'm just going to do it sober. So two bad dating ideas. Number one, do you watch the TV show Love is Blind? Sarah does. So it's on my TV all the time. Okay, good. So, you know, the premise. You and my wife have like the exact same TV stuff. Like for the listener, Sean and Sarah are texting about Bachelor or Bachelorette, whatever it's called. Yeah. Or no, what do you guys talk about? The Challenge. The Challenge, but also these other shows. So, so Love is Blind is this like sensation show on Netflix, which is basically like you get a bunch of single people together. They're in these rooms. They can't see each other.

43:52So you kind of speed date, you date, you date other people, but you never get to see them. So you're only supposed to fall in love with their personality. and then after you choose who you like the best on their personality, then you get to see him and you get to see what happens. And don't you get married at the end? Yeah, well, of course, like any great story, it needs stakes, and so they raise the stakes by saying, you don't just get to pick, say, oh, I like Sam the best, I want to see him now. It's like, in order to see him, you must get engaged blind and get married four weeks later. So that's how they make it a TV show.

44:20And some people walk on the altar. Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people, when they see the other person, they're like, oh, hey, it's so good to see you like they're just like oh man like i imagined something different and now i'm stuck with you and now i look like an asshole because i fell in love with your personality and i fell out of love with your face uh but they can't say that so they have to find some other excuse one guy on the show was like they're trying to get an idea of how uh how they looked and they go so i'm pretty the guy was like i only weigh 150 pounds yes could i give you a piggyback ride No, no, he goes, it was so smooth the way he did it.

44:57And by smooth, I mean terrible. He goes, I love to go to music festivals. She's like, me too. He goes, at music festivals, you know, I usually put my girlfriend up on my shoulders. Do you think I'd be able to do that?

45:15Did she catch it? Yeah, she was like, no, that's my worst nightmare is a guy struggling to lift my body weight. And so she was just like, what the hell? What size rowboat do we need? On this season, there's one guy, they fell in love, and then they meet, and he's not bad looking or whatever, but he does really intense eye contact. The guy doesn't blink, and she's like, you're going to never known this from behind the wall. And so she's like, ha-ha, how come you're not looking away? And he's like, what? What do you mean? I am blinking. And she's like, no, please look away. It's like so uncomfortable to watch.

45:55So anyways, great show. I think somebody should take this show on the road. Literally, I think somebody should do a, I think the show, but if not the show, then somebody should spin this off. Do a Love is Blind tour where you go city to city and people pay to be a part of the experiment. So people pay to actually like do the show themselves. I also think you should do a podcast version of Love is Blind because podcast is audio only. So it's already no visual. so you could have two people talking and you could sort of edit and cut this together and make a pod version of Love is Blind so I think people could take this concept of this dating show or it could be other dating shows too but make a tour out of it make a show out of it where it's going from city to city and people get to participate almost like American Ninja Warrior some people get to participate and other people get to watch the show going down and I think that these things could generate a lot of money ticket wise because Netflix has done the hard work of educating the market And so once you get that education in the market, now somebody should go to them and get the license.

46:57Like we talked about this with kids cartoons. Or they can just call it like love with poor eyesight.

47:06Fuzzy love. Yeah. I forgot my glasses love. So like people did this with the cartoons. That was a three out of ten. Yeah, it's okay. I gave you a laugh to try to like, you know, smooth it over. but like kids cartoons like Blippi or Cocomelon there's these companies that go and they license the rights to create the Cocomelon live tour or the Blippi live tour and I've gone to these and I did a segment on the pod about these these things make millions dollars a year yeah well the every parent loves it's like where you can't really there's not many places you could take a tiny kid that's like kid friendly but this is perfect because they already love these cartoons on YouTube.

47:43And so I'm willing to pay 50 bucks a ticket times four. So I pay 200 bucks. Then I buy the merch. Then I buy the snacks because of course my kids want snacks. And, you know, we go there and we've dropped 400,$500 by the, by the end of it, or, you know, something like that. And so these, these shows can make a lot of money. And so I think somebody could do this with other television shows, including the dating shows. That's not a bad idea at all. Well, that's, that's a great idea. You need to come up with something worse. Yeah. You should have seen an average person try to explain that idea you would have laughed about the room okay here's my second love is blind on tour ah even that sounds all right so my second uh bad dating uh idea okay so you've heard about this like dating app raya you know about this app it's basically a dating app originally for famous people but now it's like dating apps for people with like verified on instagram or something yeah i don't even really understand it i think somebody needs to come over the top on Raya and make the even more elite dating app.

48:42So I'm calling it Daddy. Here's what Daddy is. So Daddy, Daddy or Zaddy, you know, we're debating it internally. So Daddy is an app where for a guy to be on Daddy, actually, let me first start with the girl side. Okay, for a woman to be on Daddy, she's got to basically audition or apply. And we're only accepting the top 1 % of eligible women. So this is beautiful, but not just beautiful. Smart, but not just smart. You got to be living in a town, a big city, so that you're available to be reached, to be dated. So beautiful, smart, top 1%, maybe even top 0.1 % of applicants get in, more elite than Harvard.

49:27And then on the guy side, you got to pay$25 ,000 a year to be on the app. So that's the app idea. 5 ,000 men. If you can get 5 ,000 men who have the money to drop 25 G's on their dating app, they get access to this elite pool of women who want access to this rich group of men. And it is what it is. That's our slogan. It is what it is. Is it right? No, but it is what it is. Okay. And so it is what it is. It's rich guys with beautiful, smart women. and the business model is if we can get 5 ,000 guys to pay us this amount, that's$100 million a year business. Does that sound like something you might be interested in?

50:13So when I was studying for Hampton to launch Hampton, I was curious about communities. And there's a bunch of, a lot of people were like, you should charge like 100 grand a year. And the reason being is there's a bunch of communities out there where the whole thing of making it elite and community is just, can you pay the money? And I was thinking about that And I'm like, first, like the audacity. And second, if you can get my first question is, how dare you are? Who are you? But if you can get past that. How amazing is that where your whole business is just if you could pay it, you're probably good.

50:51So we'll just we'll be we're happy to be that middleman and check it out. And so there's this app called The League. Do you know what The League is? It's a dating app. It started when we were in San Francisco by this woman named Amanda Bradford, who I'm friends with here in Austin. She sold it recently to what's the big the big company IAC, who owns like Match and Bumble and or not Bumble Tinder. And what Amanda was getting started, she was or the league kind of took off. And so I don't you probably don't know. It was like Ivy League was the premise, right? It was like Ivy League. But then one day she was like, how hard can I push this?

51:28And so right now, the league costs, I believe it's either$499 or$999. So it's either$499 or$999. It's one of those two. And the reason being is that's the highest price per month that you can charge on the Apple Store. It's$399 per month. Sorry, yeah. $399 per month. So yeah, it's the highest that you could possibly charge. And she goes, screw it. That's what it's going to cost to get premium features. and people like at Earth, I think her team was like, this is crazy. We can't do this. No one will do this. And it crushed it. And IAC came to her and they're like, we want to buy you because how on earth are you able to charge this?

52:08And I imagine in her head, she was like, well, it was actually pretty easy. I just added an extra nine at the end of nine. It was the highest tier is called Investor. Member,$299. Owner,$399. Investor,$999. And 99 cents. Yeah, it's like, there's like an episode in South Park where they come up with this new MBA. And they're like, look, I don't make up the rules. I just think them up and write them down. You can't argue with me. I didn't make up the rules. And it's like, well, how'd you increase pricing so much? Well, I just clicked that button nine. And we made it instead of 999, we made it 900.

52:47Or instead of 99.99, it was 999. So anyway, it's killed it. And so I actually think that there are a lot of interesting opportunities in the market where you can just charge way more. And it feels very weird. That's the business model. And actually, now that I think about it, $25 ,000 a year, that was complete small boy stuff. And I apologize to the entire audience. This needs to be a hundred grand a year. This has to be a hundred grand a year. And guess what? We only need a thousand members now. We only need a thousand guys who are willing to drop a hundred grand in order to get access to the most.

53:20And in fact, you know what we're going to do? We're going to take a portion of that money and we're going to pay some women to be on this app. We're going to say, look, you are so great. You were casted onto this and you are going to be paid to be a part of this network because we want to blur the lines between prostitution and legal dating. Oh my God. It is what it is, as we say. God bless you. Maybe this will work. But yeah, good luck. But I think there needs to be more apps that do this, that go over the top with it. I agree. Basically find the theoretical max of what the market will bear or what people actually want to do, right?

54:02Like what is the actual behavior people want and what are they willing to do? And it's usually more than you think or more than, you know, sounds reasonable. Like what if you just took an unreasonable approach to the same thing? What would you do differently is a question you can ask about really any business. Like there's these guys, they created this thing called the Unreasonable Institute back in the day. And I loved it. Is that real? Yeah, it was a great idea. It was called the Unreasonable Institute. And it was for, I just love the name because I love the entire premise, which was what good has come from just taking a reasonable approach to something?

54:34If you're trying to make any big shit happen, you're trying to do anything, change the way anything works, you know, like create a new system or improve something or innovate, you know, in a way, by definition, you're going to do something slightly unreasonable. And so - Is this called the Unreasonable Group? Yeah, it was called the Unreasonable Institute. Then they had the Unreasonable like tour where they like, they like got a cruise ship and went into international waters. And then they did a bunch of these. Now it's probably called, this is like 10 plus years ago. So yeah. That's so funny.

55:03It's probably changed. Well, there's this thing called Unreasonable Group and it's the Unreasonable Collective is an international community of sophisticated investors. We pool capital as a community and co-invest in world class. But then there's the Unreasonable Institute, which is a fast track program to give altruistic entrepreneur skills and funding to affect a large scale of change. Yeah, I think that's the one. one sounds maybe a little yeah the first one maybe sounds cooler though but uh uh that's cool i like that name um speaking of unreasonable you want to wrap this up by talking one thing elon musk okay did you see what he did uh so you see the twitter thing well which which twitter thing i feel like every day there's an elon musk twitter thing yeah that's where he blurred out the w oh yeah oh okay this is news no i saw this i saw basically this is explain this this is dumb There's this thing in the UFC called, if you win, so basically the UFC and all about fighting, it has weight divisions.

55:59And every once in a while, someone like Conor McGregor or someone else comes along and they achieve greatness. And they earn what's called the champ champ status, meaning they have a champ. They're the champion in one weight division. And then while having that belt, they also gain a few pounds and go up and win another belt. It's unheard of. In my opinion, Elon is the champ champ. He has amazing products. He's one of the best entrepreneurs out there. He's the champion. He's also the most tringiest. He's the champ champ right now. He does whatever the fuck he wants. That's what champ champs do.

56:31And recently, like last night, he tweeted out that there was a dispute with the landlord saying, you can't like alter the sign or something like that. So he took like a piece of white sheet or paper or something, and he blurred out the W. So now Twitter, the sign, it's a huge sign when you live in San Francisco. I lived a block away from it. it says titter and it's the most cringe thing i've ever seen why on earth would he do that i love a good troll but that's not like funny it just makes like people like look i like trolling i love punching up uh but this is like uh this is punching yourself in the face i like making people uncomfortable this is the bad type of uncomfortable go to his twitter uh right now do you see what his name is on twitter right now because you thought that was the cringiest thing he's done in the last 48 hours well he's one-upped himself oh my god what an idiot oh god what is his name right now is hairy balls he spells balls b-o-l-z but it's hairy balls that is his name on twitter right now oh elon you're so you're so irreverent yeah dude oh it's these billionaires with senses of humor like just like us i would love to see what elon thinks the like other people's reaction is he must type these in and just sit back and just smirk just have a smug look on his face just imagine oh man the internet's gonna love this i'm super rich but i don't take myself too seriously look at this yeah next week it's gonna be like uh like elon baller 69 like it's just like this is the lamest thing ever man i don't know how i mean i guess like look when with extreme personalities comes extreme success but they don't tell you there's another end of that bell curve and that's extreme that's extreme cringe and and we're experiencing that a little bit right now i know a lot of billionaires not a lot i know a couple billionaires and i know a lot of wildly successful people and they do every once in a while like you're like oh hey man you don't know how to hold the conversation appropriately let me help you out here this is kind of what's happening with him it just so happens that it's in front of 120 25 million followers he has like the cringe version of Tourette's like dude just stop you can't he can't stop just blurting out these cringy things yeah it's it's ridiculous um he's he I actually think that he's kind of ruining his legacy for sure here.

59:03Like maybe five years ago, he was the man. And he still is the man, frankly, like his accomplishments are amazing, but he's a little less of the man at this point. There was a funny, just a little funny back and forth. He somebody tweeted out a graph of all the billion dollar or a chart of all the billion dollar companies and what industries they're in. Yeah, I saw that. And Paul Graham retweeted it. He says, oh, you know, what's interesting here is like we're clearly like over indexed on like software and like, you know, real world things like hardware or manufacturing. And there's only like a few companies in that bucket.

59:40But don't let that hold you back. You should still do it. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And Elon replied and was like, yeah, like a complete waste. You know, it says something like it was like a big waste of resources or brainpower or talent that that was the case. and then and the response was the biggest own and i've seen in a week it was it was a really good reply paul graham goes yeah can you think of anybody right now who's really talented and uh and could be doing those things but is wasting their time on a software project and it's so good because obviously he's talking about elon um and uh yeah it's like a perfect self self-own really by elon yeah it was pretty good too good it was good that was good i'm a big fan of him, of Paul Grand.

1:00:29I'm still an Elon guy. I think I might get myself a Tesla, but I don't like this. It makes it hard to want to wear a Tesla t-shirt, that's for sure. Not that he cares, but it makes it challenging to root for him publicly when he makes these stupid comments. People in our comments hate when I make fun of Elon or dis-Elon or Chamath or these guys because they're fans of them, which is totally fair. You can be fans of whoever you want. But I just want to, for the record, I'm out on Elon early. Because guess what? More and more, you're going to be out on this guy over time. And I just want to plant the flag.

1:01:04I'm out on him early because his cringe will eventually wash away all these people or he's going to get canceled for something. I'm telling you, it's going to happen. And I would like the record to show that I was out early. Dude, these people in our comments are crazy to me because why can't someone do a lot of really good stuff and also some bad stuff? Like, why can't like someone kick ass at a ton of different things and make a huge amount of mistakes. Totally. Because whenever we talk about this, we say, yeah, he's the best at a bunch of different things. He's the greatest entrepreneur of, I don't know, the last 30 years, 50 years.

1:01:40That is true. Also true, he's pretty cringe and corny and disingenuous about some things. Right? That's also true. Yeah. It's like, I can love Michael Jackson's music and also not love what he did. You know, like both can exist. I can like Chick-fil-A chicken and also not stand by what they stand for. You know, both can be true. And I can't stand that with the commenters on our stuff. But we're going to get a reaction on this. I'm eager to see what it is. But anyway, that's an action-packed pod, I think.

1:02:42All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of. And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:03:10It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency. Well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

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