MrBeast of Gardening!? How The Plant Daddy Built A $27M+ Garden

23:34Everyone was like, dude, where's Sam? And I was like, oh, he can't come. He just had a baby. And then everyone's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then nodding. And then one guy goes, wasn't that two and a half months ago? And then we were all like, yeah, what the hell? And I hadn't even thought about it. You can totally go for two days and it's two and a half months in. And so then we all laughed at you and then moved on. It was two and a half months ago, but I committed to three months. I committed to three months. I had to stick with it. So that's point one. What's point two? Point two. What do you think of my not vlog video there what could we have done better so i was i wrote this down to let you know i don't think you can have any of that music on there you know i think it's gonna get taken down no i think it's gonna be fine connor price that's connor price's song he was gonna attend the camp it's fun the first song was dropkick murphy's the first song is fine and it's gonna be absolutely fine nothing's gonna get taken down this isn't like a like oh, I just got to ask for a mission type of thing.

24:31It literally won't... The algorithm is going to prevent this from going live. So I think you have to change that song. But it's great. I thought it was great. Okay, Narc. Okay, third question. Third question for you. Have you noticed this trend? Part of this is me just showing you a vacation photo album, basically. But the other part is noticing that I think we started a movement, dude. I think I just fucked around and started a movement. So I didn't mean to do this. Did you just invent blogging? No, not the blogging. The movement is of these kind of like man camp active conferences. I don't know.

25:09I don't have a good name for it. I'm thinking this comes up like a man business camp type of thing. So I did this camp MFM thing. Then I started noticing other people who heard the podcast were like, oh, you know what would be cool? Like Sean did it for basketball. Let's do it for something else. And so I have a few of these that have now started. So our boy Danny Miranda has like a running club type of thing. Yeah, dude. I see them out there all the time. There's like 50 of them. Looks like a blast. Pat Walls from Starter Story was like, hey, what if we did this for tennis, pickleball, whatever?

25:38And they called it the MRR Open. That's pretty good. Great name. That's a great name. Better than our name. Shit. This guy in Hampton messaged me and he goes, hey, heard about Camp FM. So awesome. Had the same idea. This guy, Victor, he was like, I'm going to do this for poker. And so he did a poker getaway weekend rented a house, invited a bunch of people, and they just played poker all weekend. I think this is the new wave of getting... You can either just get together for drinks, but guess what? The cool kids don't drink anymore. Everyone's sober as a salad. Dude, isn't it insane? Did you see Whole Foods announced the most popular beer that they sell?

26:15Do you know what it is? It's Athletic Brewing Company, a non-alcoholic beer. A non-alcoholic beer is the top selling beer right now in Whole Foods. Is that insane? No one drinks. Yeah, no one drinks. So nobody drinks anymore. So what are we going to do? Get together and just, you know, suck our thumbs? This is not going to work. So next thing, nobody wants to just sit at a conference or, you know, like a lecture hall and just sit there and listen to speakers. Kind of boring. You want to weave it in with these things. So I think this kind of active conference thing is cool. I think more people should make these.

26:46You can invite me. I would love to know about them and then politely pass just because I don't like to leave the house that much. but I think more people should do these and I'm hoping that I'm just hoping that I get credit for starting this movement and I know people are going to go out and say no no this has been going on forever but that was the past but I'm the present future and I just needed to tell you that. I think it's awesome. I want to go to the next one and I'm going to make it a point to go there and make a big deal out of it because I do have FOMO after seeing that video. Good job.

27:15I mean vlogging I don't care if you're giving birth next year when it's happening. You better be there. it uh dude vlogging sucks by the way did mr beast made fun of you in that video or he made fun of he was always with the camera was he giving you guys a hard time for having a camera there yeah because i showed in you know with a camera following me basically and uh the funny part is always with the camera that's the first time i've ever done a vlog as evidenced by the fact that at the end i was like that's vlog kind of sucks let's just make a video out of it um but it was really fun actually having a guy there this our buddy max came and uh he did a great job it's really embarrassing.

27:47I see a lot of people like vlogging and walking around and they have a guy following them on camera. It's quite embarrassing. It draws a lot of attention to you. I find it to be very humiliating. The upside. You might get famous. The downside. You're immediately humiliated. Alright, let me tell you about something. I'm going to talk a little bit about the best business in the world. Now, this business, Chamath, who I think is coming on the pod actually, has said, it's the singular best business model and monopoly ever created. This is easy for you to guess, right? Ritz crackers. No, it's got to be Google.

28:26Google. Yeah, Google. And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Google and search engine stuff because I've been interested in this for years. I've been interested in DuckDuckGo, which I called that shot. I think I missed it. I thought it was going to grow a lot faster than it actually has, but it's like slowly coming about. This is going to be the episode where we take credit for things that we had absolutely no part in and actually didn't call a shot. And in fact, kind of doubted it. Yeah, it's like, hey, do you like making right hand turns on a red light? I invented that. I was doing that when I was 16.

29:00Yeah, I created it. I created that. And so the reason, let me tell you why I've been interested in it. Type four athletic fitting dress pants.

29:15hey the autocomplete didn't even had no idea what i was doing there that's not a common search thick boy pants yeah all right i was searching for this the other day and i had to scroll down so far to get to a website because if you look through like the first it's it's like tons and tons of images is that what you see so i see tons of images so i see a whole shopping carousel. Then I see a couple of ads and then I scroll down, I see Amazon. Okay, yeah. Go ahead. So you got to scroll down a ton to get to a website. It's actually quite annoying. And so Google's been pissing me off. And you just talked about how they have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company.

29:57I'm slowly starting to lose faith in their company because their search has been really shit. And it's starting to piss me off. And so I've been looking for other alternatives. Did you Google for them? Did you just Google search for alternatives? Yeah. I mean, it's like, even though I hate it, I use it. It's like an abusive lover. But I was doing some research on when they first started. So Google started in the late 90s. And when they did, Sergey and Larry, the founders, they created this paper called The Anatomy of Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Riveting stuff. Please take our power writing course, Larry Page.

30:33That title is awful. and in that paper they talk about like what they think is possible with a search engine and and they kind of started from an academic point of view which is pretty cool though to see like their their predictions and there's this one line it says in general it could be argued from the consumer point of view the better the search engine is the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want and then he goes he says the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. So like 30 years later, they just went back and edited it and they're like, nah.

31:09Yeah. The subtext on there, like the subheadline is just psych. Like they just like, and then they said, for this reason, as well as for this reason, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and won't be aligned with the consumer's needs. And they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service search engine is actually the answer. Of course, that is the opposite of what they've eventually have become. Google is a$1.5 trillion company, a market cap company, and 95 % of the revenues come from search. And it's the greatest business model of all time.

31:50I don't know how many people work at Google exactly. I think over 100 ,000. But I would imagine that you could basically fire everyone. but like a thousand people. And the company would just thrive. It would be the most profitable company in the world. And the crappy part about Google, well, I guess it's good for them, bad for us, is that their moat is quite simple, which is the more people who use the search engine, the better it understands which results to give you. And so it's just going to get better or supposedly better and better and better, but harder for a new person to create an alternative.

32:22Now, ultimately, I think actually OpenAI is going to be an alternative. Gardner had this report. where they said by 2026, they think 25 % Google search is going to be reduced by 25 % because of AI. But I found a new alternative that just launched publicly a few days ago or about a month ago. They've been around quietly, but they had a big launch coming out party the other day. And it's kind of cool. So it's called I actually don't know how to pronounce it. It's Kaji. Yeah. Sorry. Good start. I mean, how do you say this word? K-A-G-I. Yeah. Kaji? Kaji? Kaji? Yeah, I don't know. But it's got an interesting premise.

33:02So it was started by this guy named Vladimir. And the premise is that there are zero ads, and it's$5 to$10 a month for a subscription. And I think that's an interesting premise, but I don't think that that would work that well. However, this guy's story is pretty interesting. So he started bootstrapping this business in 2018, slowly started making progress. us. And at this point, he's got about 30 ,000 people who pay for it. And if you go to Kaji.com, K-A-G-I.com slash stats, he reveals all of his stats. And so you can see the number of paid members. You can see how many searches are happening per day.

33:40All of his stuff is pretty transparent. And I love when people do that stuff. It's so fascinating to see. And the reason he had this big launch recently is because they just raised$800 ,000. and very stupidly, it looks like they're spending that$800 ,000 to buy 20 ,000 t-shirts to send to their 30 ,000 members.

34:05So Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to finances. Is that real? Yeah. So they blog all about the business. So if you go to their blog.kaji.com, they blog about everything that's going on in the company. And so they're actually pretty transparent. And in the thing, he was like, yeah, and we're going to be sending out 20 ,000 t-shirts. And I was like doing the math. And I was like, oh, that's like 800 grand.

34:34So that's questionable. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form. And it was open only during business hours. and I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.

35:03And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200 ,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC. But he has this whole manifesto online, and it's pretty fascinating. And this is the type of entrepreneur I really like because he's got this blog, his personal website.

35:38He says, I'm dedicating the work. By the way, be honest. When you found out the founder's name was Vladimir, already you were pretty biased to like this thing, right? Yeah, I'm in. You can add an extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir. Yeah, I'm in. A general rule, and I have no arguments with that. Yeah, he's born in Yugoslavia, and he had all these little indie hacker projects for a long time. Worked at GoDaddy. So he's a very technical guy. He seems very savvy. He was a VP of product at GoDaddy. He had another company called ManageWP, which was a web application that helps users manage WordPress sites.

36:10And that got to a couple million revenue. So he has some experience. But he has this blog where he goes, I'm dedicating this work on Kaji to my three children while I try to make the web a more humane and friendlier place for them. And I started reading that. I'm like, okay, I'm really fascinated by this guy. I'm very interested. And so on his blog, they talk all about the company and how it's working and things like that. And he's got all these great lines about how he's like, paying for search engines is unusual. But that's the only choice if you want to build an independent search engine that isn't ad supported.

36:41You could do donations, but I don't think it's going to work. 5 billion people use a search engine. 99 % of people are never going to pay. The thing is, the tiny minority of people who think differently, the 1 % that will pay, it's still quite a large number. That's 50 million people. And he talks about 20 years of ad-supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search. But a lot of people are already coming to the realization that the predicament that they found themselves in with ad-supported search is not good for them. And my point through all this is, I think I agree with this guy.

37:09The issue is that I don't think he's going to win. I think I agree with all of his stuff about subscriptions and I'm on board with that. And OpenAI is really good for that. But I'm very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment. There's been a few. There was You.com, which I don't think is that intriguing. There was Neva.com. So N-E-E-V-A. That was one. And there's a few others. And this is a type of idea that if you told me that you're going to launch this, most people as well as mine, gut reaction is like, there's not a chance you're ever going to be Google. But when you start thinking about it, I think it's really interesting.

37:47And I want to know what's your opinion of these people trying to build these search engines? And do you actually think that any of them will work other than OpenAI? Well, I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts, which is that Google search over time has become more and more just you search or something and you get an ad. And they add the result, the top half of the page is ads. And that's what you get. Google, I think in Kaji's website, it says that Google, if you just take their revenue, divide it by the number of users, on average, I believe that they make like 300 bucks a year off of each customer.

38:20I think it's like 277. And so that's 23 bucks a month. And that's like what you're worth to Google. So what this guy's doing is basically saying, hey, instead of Google making 23 bucks a month off you, you pay us 10 bucks a month and we'll have no ads. And I think that I agree with you, which is that the big threat to Google is obviously the AI driven, uh, and Google's trying to become that themselves. So, you know, whether it's chat GPT or it's Google or it's Bing, or it's some new one that we haven't heard of perplexity or whatever else, that is the big thing, which is it's a better experience.

38:51And so they're trying to win with better experience. Then you have duck, duck, go, which is basically like we are the anti Google, right? We're going to, and Kaji's in that same bucket. We're the anti anti whatever. I would say DuckDuckGhost is the surprising success, the amount of traffic they had. We did a whole thing on them a few episodes ago, which was looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were. What I think is cool about Kaji is that it doesn't need to beat Google. This is just like, I'm going to build this. I'm a cockroach. I'm going to build this business and you can't kill me because I'm going to be supported by my customers.

39:22Right now, it sounds like he's probably making like, what, two to three million bucks a year in revenue? I think it's closer to one to 1.5. of subscription revenue. Let's say 1.5 million in revenue and he's probably able to run the thing break even or profitably at that rate and he'll just keep crawling. Next year he'll be at 40 ,000 members and then next year he'll be at 60 ,000 members or whatever. He'll just keep growing and it's not worth killing if you're Google. It's too small to matter and he doesn't have to become huge. I think what he's saying is my mission is for people that believe in this, he says the 1 % who would pay, I don't think it's 1%, I think it's like 0.1 % that would pay.

40:00Here's your option. And now the question is, how good is this? Like, for example, you're into this. Did you sign up? Hey, are you using this now instead of Google? It's so hard to use something instead of Google because they're the default everywhere. Yeah. And basically, my frustration with Google is borderline to the point where I'm like, all right, I'm out. But the thing is, is that I'm like, six or seven more times, Google, and I am out of here. the issue is like i've logged in with everything like on chrome you know what i mean i'm like shit i gotta type in all these passwords this sucks but i mean i definitely you know chat gpt has definitely taken away at least 30 of my like google time which is a pretty insane number actually and i uh we're gonna have to do an entire episode on sergey bernan larry page these guys are crazy fascinating and i was reading a little bit about them when i was like researching how google started and they were like huge shitheads and like Sergey Brin dude they were shitheads you're gonna have to explain that one to me so Sergey Brin he's got this uh he had his resume online and in the code he put uh if you expect the source code of his website you'll find Brin's hidden objective laid out bare which is and this is in quotes this is exactly what he had in the code I want a large office good pay very little work frequent expense account trips to exotic lands would be a huge plus is that real that's insane that's on you can go to the website right now and find it you would never expect somebody who's like innermost goal is a big office no work expense accounts to create fucking google yeah it's funny it's funny and then there's stories of larry page um where he he was just kind of like they had this like combination of just like being really blunt and just not totally understanding normal human emotions.

41:57And so Larry and Sergey, they took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other. And they would call each other stupid and be like, your idea is so stupid. That's dumb. Why are you... And they would fight and fight and fight. And then one person would win. And then the other person would concede and be like, oh, your idea is better. And they would bond over that. And then they're like, to all the other employees, they're like, that's what you all need to do. Unfortunately, when you're at 50 or 100 or 300 people, Most people aren't like that. And there's these crazy stories of like, apparently, do you know how like a janitor, when they take out the trash, oftentimes and they replace the bag, they'll actually leave an empty bag at the bottom of the trash in case someone else wants to take it out.

42:34And they're like, well, there's a bag already there for you. Larry saw this and he was like, that's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone clean. That is brilliant. And he made this whole like memo about how the janitor does that and how brilliant that is. And he's like, why can't you guys be like this? In fact, everyone in the office needs to be like this. Here's the new rules. And he laid out these like eight rules. And it was like, if you think that your idea is right, go straight to the person who's in charge and tell them exactly what you think and don't hold back. Or it would be like, if you are working on a project and you are not providing value, leave that project right away and go and let the doers do what they need to do and just get them coffee and just serve them.

43:10And he would do all these things that are very logical. If you disagree, some more. Yeah. He would say these crazy things that you hear them and like, Yeah, that's more productive. Unfortunately, this whole thing called human emotion gets in the way. And so it's probably not practical when you have 500 employees. But there's all these stories about how these guys would behave. And it's very fascinating. And they were shitheads when they first started. I think Google right now is going through this period where their CEO... I think it sucks, to be honest. And so I think they're going to come back.

43:40But right now, I'm not bullish on Google. I think they're going to be around for a real long time because they're so big. but I'm eager to see something come and kind of crush them. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the funny thing about all like crush them type of ideas is that when a company is really successful, it's like a giant castle with a huge moat. And everybody who tries to like siege the castle, it's like the kajis of the world. They're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle. And it's too hard. The castle is too big, too strong. The moat's too big, etc. And what ends up happening is that the thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land.

44:19It's somebody who just walks over like two miles and is like, hey, this is actually like, this is fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring. They build a new castle over there. And actually the thing that diminishes the castle is that that original castle is just no longer as relevant. Like the world and the attention has moved. The new plants that everybody wants, they grow on this other land over here. And nobody took your thing, but you became less relevant in the world. Yeah, no one wants that thing anymore. Microsoft didn't defeat IBM or whatever by making, you know, by beating them at their own game.

44:49They were like, oh, actually the game is software. It's operating systems. And then the things that beat the Microsoft monopoly and like Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world, got then beat by the Googles and the Amazons and the Facebooks of the world, which were like, hey, okay, cool. You can keep the operating system. We'll take the internet. And Microsoft missed the internet. The internet was the place. And then even when the internet was the place, then it was like the companies that made it on mobile were the ones. they were like, oh, cool. Yeah, you can have that desktop app. We're going to make Uber and we're going to create these new mobile companies, Instagram, WhatsApps, and they outpaced the growth of Facebook.

45:26And so now the question, now the thing is, well, AI is here and crypto is here and these are the new lands. And then the big projects that are getting built here, they're just competing for something in a different game altogether. And I think that's really what ends up happening more so than somebody overtakes a company like Google. It's that Google becomes less relevant. You don't need search. Why do you not need search? Well, because the AI just does it. Why would I go search for links? That doesn't even make sense anymore. I don't need that. I need the answer or even better than the answer.

45:55Oh, I just need this little AI agent that's just going to look at what I'm doing and then do jobs for me. I don't even have to go search for an answer. It knows the answer and then it does the task. That's where this is going. And so whoever does that is going to actually be the one that is the next Google without even creating a new search engine. Right. And that's nine out of 10 times. It seems that's how like big innovative things come about where it's like, you know, all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car and they're trying to make a V6, turn it into a V8. And then we're going to turn into a V10.

46:25We're going to put more cylinders in more horsepower. And then you're like, oh, this electric car just like went way faster and it has zero cylinders. You know what I mean? That's exactly how it works. did I tell you about the um my boss who his boss was Larry Page and what he told me so he didn't tell me many stories but he told me one which was I came in once and I was like yeah um I was like presenting my goal I was like yeah our goal is to do you know 9.1 this year uh what I remember what the metric was like 9.1 million users or something like that and he's like you know what Larry Page used to say when I would uh present a goal it's like I'm gonna do nine of something he's like he would just say, that's a wuss goal.

47:05If you can do nine, you can do 10. He's like, never set a goal at nine. And I was like, what? And he's like, I just said what I said. If you can do nine, you can do 10. Saying nine is just a wussy way to go about things. And I was like, he told you that? He's like, yeah, he would tell everybody that. And so I stole that and I made the change. And then now in my companies, I do the same thing. If anybody ever comes to me like, yeah, we're going to do four and a half. Now you're going to do five. We're going to do 9.2. No, know you're gonna do 10 like if you can if you're gonna get 9.2 you can get to 10 trust me it's like when uh 5 10 guys lie and they say they're 5 11 it's like dog just say 6 1 be the real thing

47:48yeah act as if my friend act as if um all right that's the pod 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, let's travel, never looking back

48:08Hey, 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 as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. 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.

48:40If 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.