He built a $1M/MRR dinner club app in 2 weeks with 0 employees

23:45Just some random compliment. And the guy was very affected. And the woman was like, why are you like that? And he's like, I haven't had a compliment. it in like eight months like no one said anything nice about me in so long and then so it's like complimenting should we change the world right now you look great today we create should we create yeah exactly thank you i love your love your jacket uh love your inspector gadget outfit uh oh wait did it wrong um should we just start like you know a uh you know like a no not november should we start a new trend should we pick a month and it's basically just bros complimenting bros and it's like hey every day your job you gotta give another guy just a solid compliment a one way flight to feel good and that's what month has nothing going on just a bunch of guys being dudes every May yeah the march of men here we go every march every day 30 days gotta give another guy a compliment that's actually a great idea Yeah.

24:49This is also what I wanted to do with like, you know, people were hosting these MFM meetups in every city. This is kind of what I wanted this to be, which is like, I would love it if we could do this with, like if we could basically have time left, create like an MFM button or whatever, or like, I don't know, somehow somebody create this for our listeners, which is like, if it was, you know, on the first of every month, and it's always on the first of every month, there's a dinner in hundreds of cities around the world. where you're going to meet with five other people, six other people who listen to the podcast.

25:21We're going to have to call it more than a nod because that's basically my interaction with most every man ever is just a nod. Are we going to do more than a nod to each other now? Yeah, exactly. The nod is pretty effective, to be honest. I see you. Yeah, it's just a nod. I see you and I respect you. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about your weekend? I have a strong opinion about something, but I have nothing to do with the industry and you do. You are working in the e-com world. Was Black Friday, and I guess Cyber Monday is still for you, miserable or awesome? Well, for me now, I have a full team in place.

26:03So it was awesome. I didn't have to do a thing. I just looked at the app and I said, wow, that's a great number right there. I was not on the hook. It's like the perfect thing. I'm not on the hook for the inputs, but I get the outputs. Now, to be clear, I sweated this business for three, four years to be able to get to that spot. But now it's great. Before that, I will say, very stressful. And it's stressful in the same way that I don't love birthdays. I don't like forced fun. And I don't like high expectations-based events where it's like, you need this to go well. You want this to go well. Seems like it's going well for everybody else because you'll just see screenshots of people just crushing it.

26:47And I remember in the first couple of years, I was so underwhelmed and disappointed by Black Friday, which was a combination of me not knowing how to do it. But really, Black Friday is basically people who already know about your brand, who kind of wait around for discounts, who like your brand to come back, which for a new brand, you just have a very small pool of people that already know and care about you that have been waiting to shop with you for your discount. So the first couple of years just sucked. And now, it's amazing. Now I get why they call it Black Friday. You know why it's called Black Friday?

27:19Yeah, let me tell you the background really quick. But basically, in the 70s, originally Black Friday was negative. It was called Black Friday because for some reason, there was a, what was it, Army versus Navy football game. It was the Philly police called it Black Friday because they hated it. They hated the Friday after Thanksgiving. This is the day that all the bad people come in town and it's just going to be crowded. And then retailers also use Black Friday because they're like, this is when our employees never show up because it's the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday sucked. And then in the 80s or 90s, it kind of got shifted to where Black Friday now means we're going to change it from...

27:58Your business, your retail business is in the red, meaning you lose money all the time. This is the beginning of the season, the first day of the season where you're going to switch to black and you're finally going to make a profit for the quarter. Exactly, exactly. They flipped it on its head, right? They lemons and delaminated it where this bad day where, oh, there's going to be a huge rush in the city. Everyone's going to try to do their shopping at once. It's going to create traffic. Then there's going to be a bunch of drunk people because of the game. And they turned it into this shopping event now that the retailers love.

28:27And then in 2005, a consortium, there was a trade group that included Google and Amazon and a few other online retailers. they said, hey, this Black Friday thing, that's pretty good. But we need our own thing. And they come up with Cyber Monday. And so they collectively agree to do Cyber Monday together. And then once Amazon gets even more famous and more big, they are pushing it forward to where Cyber Monday is huge. And now all the other retailers are doing it. But as an outsider, my opinion, and it's not entirely rooted in data, other than there are numbers where if you discount something like 20 % and you only have a 40 % gross margin, you got to sell like two times as much.

29:11If you discount it 30%, you have to sell three times. The stats are pretty crazy how much more you need to sell for each 10 % discount. But from an outsider, I hate Black Friday. I just think that it ruins people's brands. To me, everything eventually is going to turn into J.Crew where it's like, I only buy it when inevitably they have their 50 % off sale. Well, actually, it kind of works the other way, which is every brand wants to discount, but doesn't want to dilute the brand. Why do you want a discount? You got too much inventory left over, and that's just cash that's tied up sitting on your shelf.

29:48Maybe it's expiring, maybe it's just out of season, but it's definitely cash that's tied up in inventory. So every brand is not perfect with inventory. That's the first problem. The second is, you want to juice your numbers. So if you have a way to juice your numbers, you would love to have more revenue, more profit, if you could. The problem is, if you just start discounting, you sort of train people to shop with discounts. Like you said, the beauty of Black Friday is it gets every brand air covered. It says, all right, we're all going to do it. I'm not less of a premium brand because I'm doing this, right?

30:18I'm going to join in. And so you get the kind of middle set of brands, right, in every category, you're going to have the low end that are always trying to compete on price. They're always trying to lower the price. They're always trying to discount. They're known as discount brands. You have the mid-tier, which was trying to find that balance between still value, still a value purchase, but maintaining some brand premium. Would you say that's like a J.Crew? I don't shop J.Crew, so I couldn't tell you anything about J.Crew. But that's like a Nike, for example, right? Nike's not Louis Vuitton. It's not truly luxury scarcity, but it's also not trying to be 32 degrees, you know, the Costco athleisure wear brand, right?

30:58And so you have that middle group and that middle group, they want to participate in a Black Friday because it gives them air cover to do the discounts like the cheap brands without being seen as a desperate cheap brand. Because it's like, well, today is the day. We all do it, right? And so I think it's really important for them. And then you have the luxury brands who can go the other way and they could say 0 % off. In fact, it's 10 % more expensive today, right? Because they're going to use this as a branding moment. They're not going to sell high volume anyways. So they use this as a moment to reinforce their position as luxury.

31:28So it kind of works for everybody. I think I prefer the last one. I would hate to have to do this. I've been friends with you and I've been friends with dozens of other people who have startups in the e-com space, not established yet brands. Some established, but their Fridays are miserable. And it seems like their entire year makes or break this two weeks. Does that seem accurate? It is for a lot of people. That's not the case for us. I saw somebody who does 50 % of their revenue for the year in this eight-week sprint or six-week sprint between Black Friday, the start of your early Black Friday sales to the Christmas shipping cutoff.

32:10By the way, can I give you two funny things? What? One is Jack Butcher used to do this great reverse Black Friday sale. Do you remember this? He always did some crazy stuff. He's great, man. He's an artist. Which one are you referring to? So he's an artist and he knows that positioning. Positioning is all counter positioning. Meaning you position yourself relative to the position of other things. That's how positioning works. It's all a relative exercise. And so he gets that. And so what he did was I think he had like a course or something like that. and he would do a reverse Black Friday sale where he would start the price at a certain thing and then they would just go up in the like two weeks leading to Black Friday.

32:47Every day, the prices are going to go up. So if you want to buy it, buy it now because for the next two weeks, prices will go up every single day. And it wasn't even really that that was that effective of a sales tactic, but it's like rather than do nothing or dilute your brand, he decided to use it as a branding moment, which I thought was cool. We also talked about the, I don't know if it was Brooklyn and who started this, but it was the old leaked email tactic. I did it and I stole it from Chubbies. Did they also steal from it? I think they also stole it. I've seen a ton of people do this same trend, but we talked about it on the pod.

33:20That seems beneath Brooklyn. But most consumers don't know. They don't care. They have no idea. They fall for it. That's kind of the point, which is you send this email out to your user base that looks like it was supposed to be an internal email where someone on the marketing team is like, hey, just doing the testing, final testing for Black Friday. I have it. The code is X. You know, go test it out and see if it works. And then you said a follow up. Oh, my God. Whoops. That was not meant to send to everybody. But we're going to honor it. They're not fired. Yeah, or, you know, whatever. We'll deal with Jacob's, you know, mess up internally.

33:55But, you know, whatever. Have at it. Well, we're going to leave it up for 24 hours. And then people go crazy because they feel like they got access to a leaked discount code. And it works, by the way. I did that, too. It was super effective. I did it in 2019. Yeah. Yeah, right before we sold, about a few months before we sold. And I did it in 19. And we did it for Trends.co, which was a digital product, which is like the best Black Friday deal ever. I don't have to fulfill anything. And it's 100 % profit. And I don't remember exactly, but we made something like a million dollars in profit in one day.

34:26Right. From that email. So you love Black Friday. What the hell are you talking about? Well, I guess like if I were to own a brand now, like a particularly, I think Black Friday is mostly clothing or furniture, something like a normal retailer. I don't think I would do it, but I would be tempted to. You're like those people who live in a gated community with 12-foot fences around their house and then want an open border. It's like, bro, your house doesn't even have an open border. What are you talking about? It's like, you're like, oh, I hate Black Friday after you totally leaned into Black Friday and did the sales tactics.

35:01Yeah, once I got rich off of it, now it's dumb. Yeah, exactly. it's dumping beneath me now yeah oh you used to do that yeah no it's I do you did you buy anything yesterday no by the way I found it so funny there's a great meme that was like Thursday everybody's like I'm so thankful for everything that I have and I just feel so full my cup is so full with all the love and everything that's my life my life is so so full I'm so thankful for everything so grateful and then Friday you're like I need more more shit I don't have anything. I need... You know how much stuff I need right now that I don't have?

35:40It's like literally the clock strikes 12 and everybody's attitude flips. Dude, you want to do it... All right. You were talking about challenges. How about this challenge? What if you try to go one week, so seven days, without spending a cent on a consumable? So like your mortgage or rent is okay. Daycare is okay. But like coffee... Like, no, it has to be... Eating out. You can't eat out. You can't eat out. It's just like what you bought the week before at the grocery store. You think you can go seven days without spending a cent. So you can't buy anything extra. Can I? Absolutely. Will I? Absolutely not.

36:18I think I'm down. I want to do that as the MFM challenge. A whole week of not buying anything. They do... Dude, look. People do fast. We got to do a money fast. I'll tell you what I wanted to do that you're not... I'll tell you where I'm going to get your butt to clench. So I was pretty inspired by Burning Man. You've never gone to Burning Man, have you? No, but I'm inspired by it. It's like a movie. It's based on a true story. So everybody, if you live in San Francisco, people will make you nauseous telling you how amazing Burning Man is. And what they're trying to do is convince me to go, but what they don't know about me is I'm like a cat.

37:00The more you try to pet me, the further I run away. So you telling me to do something only makes it less cool in my books. And so by this, at a certain point I was like, I'm definitely just not going. Why? Cause I'm stubborn. You're dug in. I am what the, what the French call dug in. And, but I was like, Oh, what's cool about it? And I was like, I do like the idea of like, you go to this deserted place. You basically build a town. It's all barter and free love and you know, all that good stuff. And then they burn this thing at the end and it's sort of symbolic in this way. And I thought, what's my version of that?

37:33And I came up with this idea and I pitched out at this dinner and this guy was like that. So here's the idea. I go, we should do a money burn. I was like, so much of our life is based around money and wanting money and this attachment to money and unhealthy relationships with money. And money has this power over you. And I felt it on me. Money has a power over me. It gets me to do what I don't want to do sometimes. It gets me to act in ways that I'm ashamed of sometimes. It gets me to, it just takes up so much of my mind space that it really shouldn't. That portion of my mind could be used on other things.

38:06But money has this power over me. I go, you know what we should do once a year, we should do this thing where you take some amount of money. And for everybody, it's different. You come with an envelope and it's an amount of money that hurts you to burn. Oh my God. And we burn it. And I was like, think of A, how it would feel, B, what it represents, see how polarizing and how angry this would make people. How much news and buzz this would create and how much of a conversation this would create. I go, imagine if the tech head up their ass elites in San Francisco do the most obnoxious thing possible.

38:42They go and they literally light money on fire. And they say they're doing it for this reason, but it's going to piss off a bunch of other people. It's going to inspire a bunch of people. I was like, this is actually a tremendous idea. And my friend was like, Dude, this is one of the best ideas you've ever had. I'm hooked. Who, which friend said this was a good idea. I have to make sure I never listened to their opinion ever again. I'm not going to say their name because I don't want to out them on this. But they were like, and for years, every year they text me the same thing. When are we doing the money burn?

39:11And I don't do it because I'm like, I literally already feel anxiety over that idea of like taking, I don't know,$7 ,000 and just burning it. Just some amount of money that would feel horrible to burn. Like what is that minimum? How are you going to say that you're willing to burn$7, but I'm just saying don't spend like 150 bucks in one week on coffee. Well, because I think it's like, if I'm going to do it, might as well do the more dramatic impactful version of it. You know what I mean? Like how good of a story is it? If I'm like, yeah. And then for one week I didn't drink coffee outside the house.

39:44Like nobody gives a shit, right? It's like, okay. It's like doing a fast where you still eat sandwiches. Like, okay, well that's not really that impressive. So if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do something that makes for a better story than your consumables fast, which is not catchy and not buzzworthy and not bragworthy. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a horrible idea. But I think you should do it. I would love to watch. Imagine there was the money burn. Would you do it? No, but I would love to watch you do it.

40:16I'm still too scared to do it. All right, let's move on.

40:23Well, guys, when it comes to banking, the only time I feel truly happy is when I'm using Mercury. And that's today's sponsor for the show. That is the banking product I use for not one, not two, but actually eight of my businesses. I have eight Mercury accounts. I just went and counted. I use it for every one of my companies. It's an absolute no-brainer. Over 200 ,000 other fast-growing, ambitious companies use Mercury. It's one place you can go where not only you can, of course, have your money there, but you can send invoices. You can pay bills. You can create reimbursements for your team. pretty much all of your financial needs can be housed under Mercury.

40:54And the product is beautiful to use. And the reason why is because it's a product that was not made by finance people. It was made by a founder, Ahmad. He's been on this podcast before. And he used tons of products as a startup founder. And this is the one that he wished he had. And I actually reached out to them to become a sponsor for this show because I'm such a big fan of it. So if you need a banking product for your startup, use Mercury. You will not regret it. It's amazing. For more information, check out mercury.com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details yeah by the way i did a great chat gpt prompt about black friday i just want to share this prompt prompt hack prompt hack is uh so i go to chat gpt and i'm like hey tell me about black friday the origin and anything interesting blah blah and then it's like oh the philadelphia police department did this thing right so me and you both did the same thing here's the prompt hack Then I went and I said, it says something about the Macy's Day Parade.

41:47I go, tell me about the Macy's Day Parade as if you were Malcolm Gladwell teaching me about it. What would he say? Because I just use Malcolm Gladwell as this guy who gets interested in the things that we all overlook or the things we've all already accepted and then turns it into a bigger story. So he just goes, a tipping point for American consumer culture. And he talks about how the Macy's Day Parade was started by this immigrant and how it was the employees that were dressing up almost like clowns and cowboys and knights. They borrowed live animals. And Malcolm would say, this is how all great movements began.

42:23Messy, grassroots, and deeply personal. And then it talks about each symbol of it, right? Like the balloons or why the balloons were a genius thing over the live animals. And just using this, how Malcolm Gladwell would explain X. or you can switch out Malcolm Gladwell, but you can be like, Richard Feynman, how would he explain this scientific topic? It's such a prompt hack for ChatGPT. It makes ChatGPT talk to you in a different way. Our friend Sahil, he had a tweet and he said, what's the best one-shot prompt that you've made in the last 30 days? It could be for a recipe, a front-end developer, an image generation.

42:59The more specific, the better. The best answer gets$1 ,000. and it's all these pretty good prompts that people have submitted that were amazing. The simple one that I actually liked which is, based off of everything that you know about me, suggest three to five books that you think I'd enjoy reading. That was pretty good and I went and did that and it suggested a book that I'm going to start reading. Another one was, you are a lawyer that specializes in working with startups. Please review this legal document that was sent to you by your client and summarize each section in plain English and determine if that's good or bad for me.

43:35That's actually a pretty good one too. But there's like... This is good. Today has been chaos. Ask me questions to help me figure out what to do next. Don't stop asking until you are fully sure you have all of the context of my situation and can generate an actionable plan for me. I use ChatGPT this way too. I tell ChatGPT often to ask me questions. So say, your role is this. I'm trying to figure out X. I don't know where to start. Start asking me questions and don't stop until you feel you have enough necessary information to give me useful advice. Or ask me questions. And I just, I keep saying, ask me more questions.

44:10I'll answer parts of their questions along the way. And it's such a useful thinking tool this way versus just searching and getting an answer. If you try to say, hey, how should I do X? It's going to give you a generic answer. But if you say, ask me the questions that you would need if you were my coach who has tons of experience in this subject in order to get me to figure out the answer to this. It forces you to think about it better. Are there like deep questions? It could be like marriage advice or it could be like, what do I do with my life advice? Or like, I'm struggling with this person.

44:42Help me solve it. Like things like that. Yeah, because any of those, any of those personal things, I've used it with tax things. Because if you ask it a tax question or a legal question, it'll give you a generic answer, but there's high risk, right? Like it doesn't have all your context because you don't know how to give it everything you need. So it just gives you kind of a general answer, which could be totally misleading when it comes to tax or legal. But instead I say, here's my situation. Ask me the questions that you would need to know if you were my lawyer. So then it asked me the question.

45:09At that point, now it has the context. Then I say, give me an informed answer based on what I just told you. And then it knows, well, you could do X, but since you said you're incorporated here, blah, blah, blah, right? And it can give you a smarter answer that way. Oh, that's pretty good. Have you used it for any other prompts that are helping you solve just like light problems where it's like a therapist would help guide you or like an executive coach? Yeah, I use it. I tell it it's my coach or it's my therapist or it's my strategist or it's my analyst. And then I'll either ask it the questions or I'll tell it to ask me the questions.

45:45By the way, that's one of the useful things about ChatGPT is tell it the role up front. So a prompt structure that works is role, goal, and then I think context. And so you go, role, you say, you are my research assistant. Your job is to find examples that support the ideas that I'm going to present you. Goal. I'm trying to write a really persuasive blog post about X. So I need to come up with great examples and counterexamples. And then I'll give it the context. The context is blah, blah, blah. And then it knows the role, it knows the goal, and then it has the context in order to actually do the job.

46:17Dude, that's amazing. I love ChatGPT. That's why I got my AI tutor every week to teach me how to actually use these tools better. I have a friend that works at OpenAI, and apparently he was able to sell some of his shares. And he was like, do you remember when I told you I was starting to work there, and I told you if things go well, how much money I think I could make? Add a zero to that. And that's just a percentage of the shares that I sold to achieve that number. Wait, can you say roughly the level of seniority of this person and roughly the amount of money they made and roughly what time?

46:53I'm going to be very vague on purpose. I'm going to say, let's say they've worked there for two to three years. And I think according to the news, like Business Insider, they just did an article and they said the average pay, all in pay was like$800 ,000. So if you're making$800 ,000 three years ago, let's say that's 400 cash, 400 equity. So you're expecting 400 a year in equity. I don't know how much their value has gone up in three years, but I think 10x. Yeah. So if you're expecting 400 grand a year in equity, you now have$4 million a year in equity. And if you've been there for three years, that's$12 million.

47:31Nice. That's crazy, right? And that's not even all your shares because I think they're known for paying people even more now, that there's even more competitors. And you didn't even invent artificial intelligence, right? You didn't even have to do the incredible thing at that company in order to do that. You did good work. And I mean this in a good way. You didn't have to pull off a miracle in order to get incredibly wealthy. And you were like the 1 ,000th employee. Which is why people should listen to our Sarah's List episodes. And whether you believe that the companies we picked are right or not, you should do that.

48:07If you're going to take a job, might as well take a job on a rocket ship. Might as well take a job where your equity is going to appreciate this absurd rate or has a realistic chance to. The problem is most people have no ability to assess that. And it's not always obvious. For example, I think OpenAI raised money at$120 million valuation recently. Is that right? $120 billion. Sorry,$120 billion. I would imagine the majority of people listening to this are saying, that's outrageous. But in five years, there's definitely a world where we look back and be like, that was a steal. How did I not put my whole life savings into that?

48:45There's a world where that's definitely a possibility. Yeah, there's still a 10x jump from here for an open AI. Open AI has a legitimate, a realistic chance of becoming a trillion dollar company. Which you can only say about a handful of companies. I was listening to this thing about Facebook. And this guy was talking about working there. And he was like, when I joined, it was worth$78 billion. And I thought, this is peak. I'm selling everything. I got to get out. Facebook's now worth$1.5 trillion. And so these numbers, they're really hard to comprehend. I mean, dude, have you ever thought about a trillion dollars?

49:26How much is it? I honestly haven't. A trillion dollars is$1 ,000 billion. That is like an insane number. They should call it that. They should call it$1 ,000 billion and not even trillion. Trillion actually doesn't even do it justice. That's so bad. And you know what? In about five to ten. Is that even right? Is it$1 ,000 billion or is it$100 billion? No, it's$1 ,000 billion. It's$1 ,000 billion. Is that insane? Is that insane? That's insane. Not only is that insane, there's a world where in 10, for sure 20 years, that a human being is worth that. Because I think, how much is Elon Musk worth now?

50:02$200 billion. So if he just has a 7 % annual growth rate, that's going to double in 10 years and then double again. So you're looking at$800 billion. That's just so much money. 1 ,000 billion. He's the betting favorite to become the world's first trillionaire. That is so... So which would mean... I think he said that he thinks Putin might already be that. Or he said that he's the richest man, but he's not on any of the lists. So that would be like, let's say if you're worth... The difference between... So 100 million divided... So that'd be like the equivalent of a 100 ,000... So a trillionaire to a billionaire is the same thing as a 100 millionaire to a 100 ,000-air.

50:45Does that make sense? Yeah. That's insane, right? That's insane. So like the$100 billion person and someone worth$100 ,000, they're not in the same ballpark. Like their lifestyles are like drastically different. Now to a billionaire, a trillion, that's how different it is. It makes a billionaire like just like a six-figure, like W-2 employee. Yeah, like one bad medical bill can knock you out. Yeah, it's like, you know what I mean? Like you still use Wow Airline and you only did it because you got the voucher for$250 round trip. It's ridiculous. I was thinking about that math. It's crazy. And the reason I was thinking about it is because Warren Buffett just did this big speech or this big letter where he wrote that...

51:28Dude, he's such a good writer. He was like, Father Time always wins. And Father Time, he's a mean son of a bitch. Does he really? Yeah. Like he said, Father Time always wins. And he's a real fickle guy. and he took my wife Susie before me and our plan all along. We just assumed because he eats horribly. We were like, we just assumed that I was going to die first. And so the plan was that it was her job to give away all the money. Unfortunately, she died. And then we also gave the money to our children. But you know what's crazy? Our children are in their 70s now and they are not going to live long enough to be able to give away all of our money.

52:03And so when Susie died, they each got$10 million and Warren Buffett's currently worth$150 billion. So$10 million is nothing. but they each got$10 million and now it's their job when I died to give away the money I don't think they're going to live long enough to be able to give away this much money and the future generations I don't know them as well as my current kids and I trust my current kids but it's hard to say with my future generations and so they have this monumental task to give away all this money and if they don't it has to go to this foundation where everyone has to vote on it because this way each of the children as well as the grandchildren have an excuse to say something like, well, my brother doesn't think that's a good investment, so I'm so sorry.

52:42I've got to pass on you. And so he wrote this letter explaining a bunch of tips and tricks. He's like, even if you're rich or you're wealthy, my opinion is you should discuss your will with your children before you die. It's a great way to bring the family together. And he also says... That's so funny, by the way. Isn't it funny that a will is like the surprise? It is weird. It is weird. It's like, ooh, let's open up the time capsule, see what was it. Why is it a surprise? That doesn't even make sense. Dude, there's so many issues with will that I've learned about because we're setting up estates.

53:11For example, a lot of people, and he talks about this, but I've read about it constantly and I know friends, their wills aren't equal, particularly women. Vanderbilt did this where it was like the women get $400 ,000, the men each get$10 million. It creates all this anger amongst siblings which ruins families. He talks about that in his letter. It was a really good letter that he just released last week about how he's... Didn't he sign the giving pledge though, right? Yeah, but he pledged. I don't think he pledged a percentage. I think he pledged an amount that he said in the letter. And he's like, but the amount is now huge.

53:49So I need to give more. And so, yeah, he's giving it all the way. He said 99 % of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Maybe it's just that the 1 % is now huge. Is that the issue? I didn't understand. Well, I didn't understand because in the letter, it was like, I am now gifting 150 ,000 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Previously, we did this, but now we need to give more. So he didn't reference the giving pledge. It was like an absolute amount, not a percentage amount. Other than saying he gave each of his kids$10 million. And he's like, that's all I gave them. So he's selling...

54:27These gifts I'm making today reduced my holdings of Berkshire shares to 206 ,000. a 56 % decrease since my 2006 pledge. So he's cutting it in half. And so how much is that? 206 ,000 shares. I think it's$1.5 billion that he just gave away. I think it's more, dude. Berkshire A stock is 700 grand a share. So 700 grand a share times 250 ,000, just to use round numbers, is almost... Oh, sorry, wait. It's like, dude, my calculator... How many commas is this? That's almost 200 billion. Oh, yeah. Well, that's a lot of money. What's happening? The numbers are so grand that it's frankly incredibly hard to comprehend.

55:15But basically, he's making the largest GIFs of all time. I can't believe we just agreed to do public math. We only have two rules here. One, don't get canceled. Two, don't embarrass yourself by doing public math. and we did it. Yeah, we did it a bunch of times, frankly. But dude, it's a good article, right? You'll have to read that. Yeah, I'm going to read this thing. Buffett talking about giving away$150 billion, but he's doing it in a way that we can easily understand by saying everyone should read their will before they die with their children. Dude, Buffett doing anything, I'm in. I'm so in on Buffett telling any story or talking about any subject of his liking.

55:53He is absolute blank check of attention from me. Right? Yes. Yes. Bill Simmons had this thing that he coined once called the Tyson Zone about Mike Tyson where he goes, the Tyson Zone is when somebody reaches a level of crazy that somebody could tell you anything about Mike Tyson and you would believe it. If it was like, oh, Mike Tyson got arrested because he's been eating sharks every morning. It's like, fuck, that's crazy. He bit an ear. He's going to jail. It's like there's no story that is out of bounds on Mike Tyson. And I feel like the Buffett Zone is basically somebody who you have my undivided attention at will.

56:32Whenever you want it, for however long. If he's like, I'm doing a 16-hour live stream, I'd be like, okay, well, I guess I better get a comfy chair because I'm going to be here for 16 hours today. There is nothing Warren Buffett could do that I would not be interested in. If he was just like, I'm going to live stream myself doing ASMR, eating soup, I'd be like, all right, I'm in. I'm going to start just attributing facts and stats to him. Well, you know what Buffett says. He says... Buffett says is the new Harvard study. Yeah. There was a study at Harvard to support whatever point I'd like to make.

57:06And similarly, Buffett once said X. Oh, really quick. Can you tell me if this is true? Is this Enron thing a joke? I think it's real, but I'm not sure. All right. Which is, I hope it's a joke. What is it? What's the story? Someone bought Enron and is relaunching it as a crypto token? It's worse than a bad Silicon Valley plot. I don't know if the story is out, but the Twitter handle Enron, which Enron, if you are under the age of 28, you probably don't even remember this, but Enron is like... It's like FTX for oil. Yeah, it was like an oil energy company in the 90s that was one of the biggest companies in the world.

57:54And then in a month's time, it went bankrupt. And it turns out because the executives had all committed fraud. And a bunch of them even killed themselves before they got sentenced. And a lot of them went to prison. Whatever. Horrible. On Twitter, somebody is now tweeting from the Enron Twitter handle with their logo saying, We're back. And they are talking about their new decentralized product. And no one online knows, is this real or is this not? but it's the perfect way to say fuck you to the crypto crowd because that's basically what they're doing they're just sitting in a room should we name our new crypto scam after a scam do two wrongs make a right it's like when a rapper samples an old song and they're like yeah it's like a new fraud sampling an old fraud yeah they're remixing crime dude can I just give you one rant real quick I was watching this video that was like, it's called, I was on YouTube, it's called the Elon Musk learning method.

58:53I was like, all right, click. That's like another Warren Buffett says. Yeah, exactly. Elon explaining how he does this or like, you know, some backstory about Elon. But one thing he says in it, which I think is just, it just struck me. This is an obvious point, but I guess the implications of it really just like slapped me in the face. He was like, people say like, you know, we have to give people better access to education. and he goes, he's like, that could not be further from the truth. He's like, you can literally learn anything. Everything you want to learn is available online at a world-class level for free to anyone who has an internet connection, which is almost everyone.

59:33And he's like, basically, there is no lack of access to education. And it's so true. Like, if I want, if I say, oh man, I wish I could have gone to Harvard. Okay, just Google it. Watch. Every Harvard lecture you want is online. You can sit there. You can get a Harvard computer science education today for free in your underwear at home. And nobody does it. Dude, I do it. I spent hours this weekend learning how different magic tricks were done on YouTube. Hours. I can't be fooled. Oh, not even learning how to do them? Just learning how they're done? I just needed to confirm that David Blaine was just a human.

1:00:20dude that when that show came out magician's greatest secrets revealed do you remember that they're so pissed i was i remember literally thinking to myself i was like i was like tnt you sure do know drama this is an amazing premise they were like this magician has to wear this mask because if his peers in the magic industry knew what he was about to tell you they're gonna kill him he would be killed ostracized he could never show his face in a magic room again i was like, oh, holy shit. Mom! Mom! Where's the remote? And I was like pre-recording. I got a notebook out and I was like, oh my god, how do they do it?

1:00:54And he just showed you every magic trick and how they do it. It's the greatest. It's the greatest. It's the absolute greatest. That's what I do on YouTube. You're telling me he didn't actually bite that quarter in half?

1:01:10Oh, it's so insane. What were you saying about Elon, though? It doesn't matter. That's the pod. All right. That's it. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, less travel, never looking back.

1:01:33All 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.

1:02:01It'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.

1:02:26For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.