Threads vs Twitter & Millionaire Sam Ovens Doesn't Believe In A.I. Hype

In short

Podcast Episode Summary: My First Million - Episode 473

Episode Details

Title: Threads vs Twitter & Millionaire Sam Ovens Doesn't Believe In A.I. Hype
Hosts: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr)
Guest: Sam Ovens (@samovensnz)
Release Date: [Insert Release Date]

Episode Overview In this episode, the hosts discuss the emergence of Threads as a competitor to Twitter and feature an interview with entrepreneur Sam Ovens, who shares his views on online courses and artificial intelligence.

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Key Topics Discussed

Threads vs Twitter
Introduction to Threads:
Threads launched as a competitor to Twitter, quickly amassing over 100 million users in just five days.
Discussion on the competitive landscape and how Threads capitalizes on Instagram's user base.

Bull Case for Threads:
Rapid user growth indicates strong market interest.
Potential for Instagram users to migrate, with only a 20% conversion needed to surpass Twitter's user base.
Threads’ design and user experience improvements compared to Twitter.

Bear Case for Threads:
Facebook’s history with standalone apps not performing well (e.g., Poke, Snapchat competitor).
Concerns about user retention and churn, with many new sign-ups potentially not sticking around.
Twitter's established network and critical content (news, sports) that may not transfer to Threads.

Predictions:
Shaan and Sam predicted that Threads could potentially outperform Twitter in terms of user engagement and mainstream appeal but may not fully "kill" Twitter.

Interview with Sam Ovens
Background and Business Model:
Sam Ovens discusses his success with consulting.com, which generated peak revenues of $30 million, focusing on training and courses.
Shift from a high-volume, ad-driven model to a more sustainable, profit-oriented approach.

Current Endeavor - Skool:
Ovens introduces Skool, a community-driven platform for creators, emphasizing user feedback and organic growth.
Discussion on the challenges and methodologies in building a software platform without external funding.

Personal Insights:
Reflection on a minimalist lifestyle, emphasizing focus and simplicity in both personal and professional domains.
Ovens shares anecdotes about his journey and views on entrepreneurship, including a unique home birth experience for his child.

Skepticism Towards A.I. Hype
Sam Ovens expresses skepticism about the current AI hype, arguing that it has not yet replaced traditional tools like Google for his daily tasks.
Discussion on the future of AI and its practical applications in business.

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Key Takeaways

Market Dynamics: Rapid user acquisition can indicate potential success, but historical patterns in social media suggest caution.
Business Strategy: Sustainable growth often requires a pivot from high-revenue models centered around advertising to community-focused approaches.
Personal Philosophy: Simplification and focus can lead to better decision-making and business outcomes.

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Additional Notes

L of the Week: The hosts also share personal anecdotes and humorous stories, including a segment called "L of the Week," which adds a light-hearted touch to the discussion.
Viewer Engagement: Encouragement for listeners to engage with the podcast via comments, especially on YouTube.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Parker, I think it's Parker Thompson on Twitter. he replied to that. He goes, okay, so for those keeping score at home, Elon bought a product for$44 billion and then Zuck built the same product for a thousand times less, is stealing all of his users like an absolute Chad and is God willing about to choke him out in 90 seconds on a steel cage soon. Huh, so that's what a cuck means now. 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. All right, what's up? Today's episode, we're talking about threads versus Twitter, the big debate, and we're going to talk about where we land, our predictions for what we think is going to happen, how it's going to play out.

0:41We told some funny stories. And then in the second half, we have an interview with a guy named Sam Oven. So Sam met this guy, Sam. He used to run a business called consulting.com that at its peak hit 30 million in revenue. He was all over our Facebook feeds as kind of like one of these internet marketer guys. And so we were curious, like, who is this guy? And what's he all about? Definitely an interesting interview. I would say he had some interesting stuff to say. Also, his energy was totally different than most of the guests and also different than what you would expect out of an internet marketer.

1:15So I'm curious to see what people think of it. I would say it's sort of like a different style of interview than we've done before. Sam, what do you think? So for those watching on YouTube, I'm sweating right now. The reason I'm sweating is around minute 35. I can't stop laughing. I'm still laughing about it. You're going to enjoy it. Taco Bell story. Let's just leave it at that. Oh my God, it's ridiculous. I don't know how this story came about in a business pod. I'm happy it did. I'm sweating right now. If you are on Spotify or Apple and you're listening to this, go to our YouTube page, search My First Million, go to this episode, let us know in the comments what you think.

1:52People liked when we did that last time, Sean. We got a lot of comments, a lot of good feedback. It's been fun to read all the comments, but let us know what you think, and we'll talk to you soon. All right, what's up, Sam? We got to talk about Threads. Threads versus Twitter. Threads came out a few days ago. We've had a few days to play with it, to sit on it, to think about it, and I think everybody's given their opinion on it, and why not ours? I want to hear what you have to say about this. I have kind of like a way I think we could talk about this, what I'm calling the bull and bear case. So the bull case, the bear case, and then where we land.

2:30But I first just want to hear, like, I don't know, when did you get on it? And what was your kind of initial reaction? How on your radar was this thing to begin with? I had only heard about it three or four days before it launched. And I heard about it because of a leak. I think there was a leak, right? Somehow it leaked out that it was coming out. So I downloaded the app, like you can download it before it launched. and then I got the notification right at midnight or whenever it said it launched and I signed up. I think it's pretty cool. Are you jealous that I already have more followers than you do on that?

2:59Because I was already going hard on Instagram? Yeah, yeah. Going hard on Instagram paid off there. You got like a double bonus for growing your Instagram. So props to you on that. I think it's great. You know why I think it's great? I really only think it's great for one reason, which is Twitter to me is pretty great. But dude, my feed is just like fight videos and people getting shot and dying. like it's real it's kind of become a little bit sad that's on you i also i don't know if that's anyone else's fault you know when you click the follow button and the like button and the save button the algorithm will just give you more look here's the deal if you see like a fight video you watch it like you're not not gonna watch that it's like when you have a hot girl that like scrolls through like you're you slow you scroll slower through that what is this how did How did this get here?

3:45All right. Keep going. Yeah, so just all these weird handles. I also think that I've become such a stand for Zuck and this whole thing, he's just proven to be like the man. He's come off very likable. And so I find myself picking sides based off of the owner of the company. Yeah, yeah. It's become sports. It's become tribal. Whose team are you on? And I don't know how the hell I ended up seeing Zuck, But I'm like, I'm on Team Zuck. It's very obvious to me. It's very clear. I think this guy's done an incredible rebrand of his personality because he went from like easy to hate for a bunch of reasons.

4:25One, becomes rich and powerful. People don't like that. Two, he looked like a robot, talked like a robot, seemed to have no personality. So, you know, that was, you know, again, like for the people who didn't get turned off by the power and billionaire thing, they got turned off by like, okay, this guy's a lizard or he's a robot. like what's going on with this guy. And then somehow, you know, he hired the top PR agencies in the world. He hired the fixer. The wolf came in and tried to fix him. All he needed to do was start working out. The guy takes 10 jiu-jitsu classes and learns how to do a pull-up.

4:58And all of a sudden, idiots like us are like, you know what? I fuck with this guy. Yeah, he's relatable somehow. Yeah, it totally worked on me. And then to the point where you start thinking about it. This happened also with LeBron James. LeBron James at one point was, super hyped. Then he became the guy. Then people started to turn on him. Then he did this thing where he left his team, went to Miami, and everyone's like, oh, I hate this guy. Then somebody's pointed out, so you're telling me this kid who had all the pressure in the world when he was 17, 18 years old delivered on the hype, lived up to it, never got in trouble with the law.

5:31You've never heard about this guy. Married his high school sweetheart, is a good dad to his kids, is one of the best players of all time, and just like keeps himself in phenomenal fitness and shape and tries as hard as he can every single year. What do you have a problem with? And in the same way, I feel like that's happened for Zuck where it's like, so this guy who built this company that billions of people use, stuck with the company, he works hard every single day, married, his college sweetheart, never been in trouble with anything, doesn't tweet out offensive stuff, doesn't say anything just to get a reaction, seems like a perfectly reasonable guy, works out hard, is a good dad like what do you hate about this guy again what's going on do you know how old zuck is i don't know he's like our age he's like he's a little older than us right he's like 37 38 39 yeah he's he just turned 39 you know in lebron also 38 these guys are the same man they're the same they've been dude since they were 18 yeah yeah lebron got drafted what he was a high schooler right 18 years old high school zuck has been the man since he was 21 or 22 there's been nothing i I mean, there's been like, if you look at the grand scheme, there's been no like human errors.

6:39No self. Yeah, there's been like business errors. There have been cringe, but there's been nothing that they've done where you're like, oh, that guy's a piece of shit. If your biggest crime is cringe, you're doing all right. You know what I mean? Yes, when you're the man for that long, that is impossible. That is so challenging to do that. You know what I mean? So we're clearly Zuck fan. Let's talk about ThreadZone. Oh, and by the way, did you see what Elon posted? I don't know. Did you see it on Twitter? he goes, Zuck is a cuck. You know what a cuck is? Yeah, yeah. I had to look it up, actually.

7:09A cuck is a guy who wants his wife to sleep with other men and he enjoys it. And then he also goes, I challenge Zuck to a dick measuring contest. Literally a dick measuring contest. He says stuff like that. Dude, he says stuff like that and I'm like, oh my God. He's an absolute tryhard to me. Don't like it. It says, by the way, there's a funny tweet from Parker. I think it's Parker Thompson on Twitter, he replied to that. He goes, okay, so for those keeping score at home, Elon bought a product for $44 billion, and then Zuck built the same product for a thousand times less, is stealing all of his users like an absolute Chad, and is God willing about to choke him out in 90 seconds on a steel cage soon.

7:50Huh. So that's what a cuck means now. I think it's great, man. Zuck is just looking great on this. Alright, so by threads, you have on here that they grew to$70 million. It's actually$100. It's 100. So they go to 100 million users in a week. So we'll deliver the bull case first. So the bull case is this. And the will threads win argument. So the bull case is we're five days in and they've reached 100 million users, making it the fastest growing product of all time. Okay. Instagram has about a billion and a half users. They seem to be converting over pretty quickly to this. We already got 100 million on the platform.

8:28If 20 % of Instagram's users come on board, it's now bigger than Twitter. So 20 % conversion from Instagram is what they're going to need. They've done, I don't know, 5 % or something like that. I don't know, public math. Something like 5 % so far in five days. The next reason that this is bullish is Instagram people - And Zuck shared that on threads. He said, we just hit 100 million. And he said, we've not even really promoted it yet. Yeah, we haven't even done our promotions yet, which is nice. It's also really cool that he's revealing some of the stuff. Yeah, yeah. He's really active on it right now.

9:00part victory lap, part community engagement, which is cool. And he tweeted for the first time in 15 years right on the day of the launch, which was also nice. And it was like the meme of the three Spider-Mans pointing at each other. It was great. He's in on the joke. Whoever he hired, his nephew, or whoever just is like, yo, give me your app. Give me your phone. I'm going to make you likable. Like, hey, instead of fighting it, just post a meme. It's cool. Don't worry. But he needs a verb. So there's no verb. What do you say? You threaded it? you posted it? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, we're threading.

9:33I don't know what's going on. So the interesting part is I go on threads and I expect to see the same sorts of people as I do on Twitter. And there's some, but there's a whole new market of people who were basically never on Twitter. Just didn't, like Twitter didn't work for them. So, you know, you get a whole new set of people that are going to use threads that weren't, they don't have to switch off of Twitter. They're just new people to a Twitter-like behavior. So it can basically beat Twitter without getting people to switch because it's expanding the market. Twitter is, I don't know if you know this, Twitter is basically the most abandoned product I think ever.

10:08So more than a billion people have signed up for Twitter or tried Twitter and then been like, nah, I'm good. That's not for me. And the big question, sort of like the$100 billion or$200 billion question is, is that because the idea of Twitter doesn't appeal to that many people or that Twitter's execution was not good enough to hook those people. And if it's the idea, then those same people who try threads will eventually bounce because they're like, they're just people who like to look at pictures and videos. They don't want to write text and read random ass text messages from different people.

10:44So if it's the idea, then Twitter's safe. All these people will try it and they'll bounce. But if it was the execution, if it was that Twitter didn't hook them properly, then they're screwed because if there's one thing that, that the Instagram and Facebook teams are going to do is they're going to execute. You can already see it in the small things that they're doing where they're like, yeah, we're just going to make like kind of like the feed work better and blocking and muting and like all of the, like all of the stuff, we're just going to do the stuff. The stuff that they've been doing for 20 years, which is like, Hey, when somebody signs up, let's just make it really easy for them to find like their friends or interesting people for them.

11:21And like, let's just make this, this feed killer. Like this is like this algorithm killer where you just want to keep scrolling stuff that Twitter never really did. Like if you go look at Twitter's ad product, like have you ever run Twitter ads? Yeah. So this is what I was going to say. This is another bull case, which is if you've never run ads before and you go talk to anyone who has run any ads, Facebook is always in the top two or three parts of the conversation. So normally it's number one. It's usually the best platform. I've spent maybe 10 plus million dollars of my own, like me actually running ads.

11:54Facebook is always number one. Twitter is never part of the conversation. I don't even know if it's like that anymore because I haven't run ads in a few years. Well, I run ads on it now. So I'm running ads on it literally right now. And it works, but the ad platform is so trash compared to Facebook and Google's ad platform, which is so surprising because that's how they make money. You would think they're highly incentivized to do it. So anyways, I guess my bigger point is not really about whose ad platform is going to be better. It's just that matters. It's going to be execution on all the details on getting people linked up with the right people, making the feed super interesting and, you know, and handling spam better and abuse better and all the things that Twitter has struggled with over.

12:37Over the years. So the bold case is that basically this hundred million users, if they convert some of Instagram people, they'll be bigger than Twitter. They don't even need people from Twitter to switch. They can just bring net new people to the market and they can just continue to promote this across Instagram and WhatsApp. So that's the bold case. now I'm going to switch to the bear case. Also, part of the bull case, Twitter shoots itself in the foot a lot. Elon does a lot of dumb shit, pisses a lot of people off. He's basically pushing to put a paywall where you have to pay$8 a month in order to have your shit be seen in the feed.

13:07That's basically introducing friction. He added the tweet limit not long ago which introduces friction because no more tweets for you. Cut off the ability to post tweets and have them embed in other places because he was like, oh, we're getting scraped too much. So he basically put a login wall in front of the content. Like he's adding friction everywhere. So these are, these are foot faults. These are, you know, nobody, this is not threads killing you. This is you killing you. And so that's, that's part of the bull case. Now here's the bear case. Why this won't work. If I was to argue why this won't work, here's what I would say.

13:38I'd say, um, Hey, name the last Facebook standalone product that just worked. Not one that they bought, but one that they made. And that's where there's really a kind of a graveyard of poke and a bunch of these other apps that they tried to create. They tried to create a TikTok competitor. It didn't work. They tried to create a Snapchat competitor. It didn't work. So there is a graveyard of these things. The only things that have worked have been things that they put into the Instagram app, like stories and reels, because people are hooked on Instagram. So the standalone app thing hasn't really worked, and this is a standalone app.

14:08The next problem, just because 100 million people try it doesn't mean they're actually going to stick. There's going to be massive churn, just like there is when any... Have you gone back? Yeah, I open it up right now, but I'm not hooked on it. completely myself yet are you i'm not hooked yet no i'm definitely not i'm pretty hooked on twitter but i've also built up like a big following plus a bunch of people that i follow so my feed is more interesting on twitter it's a cure yeah i've been curated for 10 years i was gonna say we might be the one percent the one percent because we make a living in part because of twitter and so we could be like there could be a part of it of like oh shit i don't want to use this other thing because i already have this one thing that's working and this thing is just going to like cannibalize it So I can't tell if there's that bias there or what it is.

14:51But no, I'm not hooked yet. But I am opening it maybe once a day, maybe once every two days. I am a little bit like, shit, I don't want another thing to have to use. But I am happy that it's text-based because that's where I excel. Because I'm a Missouri 6. But I'm a Microsoft Word 9. Yeah, I got a good face for Twitter. So I prefer that. But we are the outliers because both of us have, I don't know, together, we probably have almost almost a million followers together on Twitter. And so going now I go to threads, I have 3000 followers or something. I'm starting from scratch again. And, you know, I'm like that guy who I moved to San Francisco and I bought a house and I just redid my lawn.

15:41And then everybody started moving and they started raising the prices. And I'm like, I'm I'm dug in. I'm like, yeah, I'm dug in. I already paid for the reno. You know, like, I guess I'm just here when everyone else is choosing places that might be a better fit. So, you know, we might be the wrong person there. Here's the other reasons that Twitter might win. Twitter, after the churn, you know, threads might have 20 million or 30 million active users compared to Twitter's 300 million, right? So I think there's going to be so much churn that this 100 million number is a bit of fool's gold. The next thing, Twitter has key content.

16:17So it has news. It has sports. So it's got the journalists. It's got the athletes. It's got the people that cover the NBA and the NFL. Like it's got famous people. It's basically got like this key, like rapid breaking news and influential content. Threads is going to have new content, but like the type of person who's big on IG may not be the right type of person for what works in this text medium. We don't TBD. There's a TBD on that. The next thing threads is just a straight up clone. There are no product improvements. And in fact, there's some big drawbacks. Like they don't have DMs. They don't have like, you know.

16:52Dude, I get DMs. I've been getting DMs, I think. I don't know what they're called. There's no inbox. People have been messaging me. Let me pull it up. But I think they're at mentioning you. There's definitely no. Oh, maybe that's what it is. I don't even know how to use it yet. Then, yeah, it's a mention, but it looks like a DM. Like the thing looks like a DM. All right. Yeah, you're right. So it's just they cloned the app, but they left some things out. Now, that might make it better. But for the most part, I would say the product strategy, like if you printed out the roadmap, it's like, here's some features that you turn the page and it just says, not Elon Musk, not Twitter, right?

17:25Like it's just basically, here's not Twitter. And like there's a bunch of people who don't like Elon, don't like Twitter, and they'll just try this out. So I don't know if that's a great long-term product strategy. By the way, speaking of mediums and leaving things out, do you use Twitter on your phone or desktop? Both, yeah. I mostly use it on desktop and I use the thread app and I was like, Hey, when's when I need a desktop thing? And that's why I prefer typing on it. And people were like, call me boomer and shit. And apparently that is, that's some boomer shit. Dude, that's some boomer shit, I guess, but I hate using it on my phone.

17:54I want to use it on my computer so I could scroll through and click shit. Yeah. That's like if a guy knocks on the bathroom stalls, like, Hey, I got to take a piss sitting down and you're like, what? It's not illegal to do what you're saying, but certainly not acceptable. And that's... Yeah, you're more of a... What are you, more of a pee with your shorts down at your ankle type of guy while standing up? Yeah, exactly. So your desktop thing, it's okay to use desktop, but let's not get out of control. I think most... Not most. I think a ton of people do that, man. I'm telling you, the older guys, I guess I'm old now, but I need a desktop version.

18:27That's who we should appeal to as a social media platform. The older guys.

18:34We'll call it khaki. All right. So here's a couple other things, which is the best creators on Twitter. So the people who have basically in a 10, 15 year period proven that they're really good at creating text-based content now have a big following and don't really want to start over from scratch on Instagram, aka me. So I think those are some of the downsides of this. But I do think once you take into account the bull and the bear case, it's prediction time. How do you think that this plays out? let's do the interesting nuggets really quick if it doesn't work out nikita our friend nikita who is worked at meta and did all the social stuff what did he say he was basically like you know this thing's gonna be at 100 million users soon and if it fails after that that will sort of officially make it the biggest fail in social app history at that point which i think i don't think that really means anything to be honest i think the truth is i think it's going to end up closer to the bull than it is the bear.

19:30I think it will more work than it does fail. I don't think Elon would ever sell Twitter out of like pride reasons, but I think it will, if it weren't run by a billionaire, I think it would effectively put it out of business for the ad purposes. I think it's going to work. I don't know if it will overtake, but I think it's going to work so good that it's going to cannibalize Twitter and they're going to be at least equal. The CEO of Cloudflare tweeted out a chart, I don't know if you saw this, of Twitter traffic because Cloudflare has like, I don't know, they run like the internet in some way. Yeah, I don't know.

20:06Maybe they haven't paid their bill or maybe there's all public information. That's like a doctor revealing your illnesses, isn't it? It's like these two guys are making fun of each other. It's like, actually this guy, his cholesterol is way worse than yours. Right? If you want to beat him up, but kick him in the left knee. he uh he did that basically he tweeted out the showing that this uh that twitter down like five percent in overall traffic so far this week from from thread so it's like you know he said like it's uh plummeting or something like that like dropping off a cliff which is like pretty dramatic for i don't know five percent i wouldn't call plummeting but that's weird that he shared that that's super weird yeah uh it's going to be closer to the ball i and And whatever I've learned, Nikita actually would always joke about this.

20:53He would say, never, ever, ever bet against Zuck. And I've heard so many people say that. Would I bet against Elon? For sure. Not often. Not often. I think that he follows through a lot. He's just been closer to death so many times. And I don't think Zuck entirely has. I just think that Zuckerberg, when it comes to this field, consumer social, I just think that I would not bet against that person. Yeah, exactly. I think that's the rub here. I think that it's not Zuck versus Elon, mono-e-mono. In the same way that in the cage, Zuck will probably win because he trains. He's been training jiu-jitsu for a couple years, so that gives him a little head start.

21:33In the same way that Zuck probably could not build a rocket company or a car company. He couldn't even build Oculus. He couldn't even do that type of hardware. It's doing pretty well, to be honest. It's doing okay, but I think that they're not going to be the one. perhaps we'll see but i guess like it's his domain the so the social app thing is is their domain they have instagram i think i'm with you i land where i do think threads will be bigger than twitter i don't think it kills twitter i just think it sort of stunts whatever slow growth that twitter has it just stunts it even further and twitter remains this kind of niche this basically this thing that has really strong appeal to a niche and i think that threads becomes the more mainstream version of it like i think it becomes the more palatable just cool interesting thing in the same in the same way that like this happens a lot with music or with uh tv shows or with with stuff like that where something has its time and then the new thing comes out and it's just has like a little more mainstream appeal and it just becomes the default and the other thing doesn't die doesn't go away necessarily but i do think that if you fast forward two years or 18 to 24 months i think it's pretty i think my bet would be threads is bigger than twitter and twitter basically has now like a ceiling on its head that it's bumping into it can never really grow from there it might get better at monetizing those people or preventing them from switching but the dominant place for that will be will be threads which is insane to me it seemed impossible like to dethrone a social network like 12 months ago there's this cultural shift with young people where they're so much more kind and nicer than our generation when we were that age and you see that in tiktok so if you go to tiktok and you look at the comments people are so much more positive uh there's still something they're not more positive that's tiktok is amazing at sorting comments and hiding comments whatever whatever that is okay maybe maybe because all you see is kindness and jokes and then you're like oh that's how i'm supposed to behave here and twitter never figured that out it builds a culture whereas on twitter i post something and i get made fun of so much sometimes and i always click on the accounts and it's clearly like a bot or i don't know what it is but there's this huge underground culture i have no idea how this is happening of people who all they do is make fun of people.

24:07And it shows it to me. Do you get that when people are making fun of you all the time? Yeah. Yeah, because it just shows you everything. Twitter says it shows you everything. You said something, here's what they said back. And guess what? There's always going to be people that either disagree, argue, or just say mean shit to you. That's like, you know, that's actually the way the world works. The best companies have figured out how to algorithmically suppress that behavior. Yes. And the day I opened up threads, it was like Gary V saying, I hope you all have such a wonderful day. And they seeded it with these positive people.

24:42And it created this weird culture where it seems significantly more positive so far. You open up threads like, good morning, y 'all. Yeah. 10 ,000 likes. I have Pomp saying, I hope you have a wonderful day and get after it. It's just so much. And I have Sahil already popping up on my shit. It's like all positivity. whereas Twitter, it's way more negative. And honestly, it does wear me out. And by the way, Zuck has sort of said this in his threads where he's like, yeah, that's part of our key strategy. He's like, I always thought there should be a sort of like this town square public conversation type product that gets to a billion users.

25:21Twitter, for some reason, never figured it out. We're going to do our best. And then people were like, oh, I noticed this place is more kind or sort of like, you know, much more positive energy right now. and he goes, yeah, I think that's really important. That's what we're going to, you know, that's something we're going to really focus on and try to get right. I don't think that Twitter ever got that right. Some of these features like setting the culture in that way are invisible. They're not like, now you can do live video. Now you can do Twitter spaces. It's not a feature that you see. It's almost what you don't see.

25:52That's the feature. I think that Facebook and Instagram have a lot of experience fighting abuse, spam, hateful content, and it's not going to be It's not going to be gone. Whatever. That's fine. I get that. But I think they're going to do a better job of it. In the same way that you remember, it used to be a common thing people say, which is if you ever want to see hell on earth, go to the YouTube comments. YouTube comments were considered an actual cesspool. And now if you go to a popular YouTube video, the comments are often like they add to the joke. They're funny. And they're positive. And I don't know what they did over time.

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26:28but over time they fixed that problem which was that the youtube comments were like you know where you know hope goes to die and now uh it's good it's part of the experience and sure there's some spam or there's still obviously like the one-off thing but it's nowhere near where it was like in the early days i went out to dinner last night i'm uh in williamsburg i went out to dinner last night and i you know williamsburg everything's tight in new york and i sat next to this guy who worked at Meta on the Threads team. And I'm not going to reveal a lot because I don't want to rat this guy out. But me and Sarah were out to dinner and I texted her.

27:03I was like, let's just not talk. And we just listened to this guy. We just listened to this guy talk for two hours about launch week and what it was like. And he was like, it was the most exciting time of my career. This guy was so bought in to the Threads movement. He even was talking about how much money he was making. It was crazy, man. I was just sitting there. Dish, what'd you hear? You don't have to say the person, everything. It was seven figures a year. It was seven figures. This guy, I feel like I know all about this guy. I kind of know where he's from. Or at least I know where he moved from.

27:34I heard the very typical, this is so funny. You hear people say this all the time when they first moved to New York or when they're like tech guys. They say San Francisco was all about what have you built lately? New York, it's all about how much money do you make? You're reminded every time about how important money is. San Francisco, it's all about what you build. That's such a comment. Are you saying it in a positive way? The guy who was asking about the difference between San Francisco and New York. It's refreshing that my pay stub delivers. But he was just talking about, like, he was like the launch and he was just saying, like, how the morale of the company is really high and how everyone was pumped, which is something Facebook needed because it was pretty shitty for a long time with all the negative PR.

28:13Then he was just talking all about, like, the launch and, like, what they were doing. It was so fascinating when I would just sit there. I'm shocked that he didn't, like, catch the hit, that I was just, like, listening in to this whole camera. conversation. I just heard everything. If there's one thing that Facebook engineers don't have, a lot of awareness. Dude. I don't think you noticed that you weren't talking to your wife. You ever go out to dinner and if you're with a business associate or a successful friend and you talk about money, you're talking about like, I want to buy this house. It costs us much money or this is what I'm earning.

28:46What do you think I should do with it? Whatever. When you talk about these sensitive topics, whenever the waitress or waiter comes over, I always quit talking about that because I'm like, that's embarrassing. It's tacky. They didn't get that hint. And so I remember them talking about... I remember they said the seven-figure thing. It's like, yeah, it's not that big of a deal. You can just go get a director at a startup and get a million-dollar package. And that's okay. But are you really doing anything meaningful? Right as the woman was waiting to see if they wanted dessert. And I remember seeing that.

29:13I was like, oh, I hate that. That is so fucking embarrassing and obnoxious. You got to shut up at that point. That's when you, you know, you're like, you got to lower your voice. You got to whisper. I'm hell yeah. You know what I mean? Like that's what you're supposed to do in that scenario. But these guys did not catch that hint. I hate that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little PC that dies inside every time. You know who sucks at that is whenever I'm with our friends, Suli. Suli is horrible at that. Is he? I'll talk about shit. Yes. I'll talk about like, you know, about like what he's investing in so loudly.

29:46and I'm like, dude, shut the fuck up. This is embarrassing. Everyone's looking over you. Don't use that word million, please. I haven't seen that, but I have another friend that does it like crazy and then I'll be like, I'm like kicking him under the table and he'll just be like, what? Why are you kicking me? And I'm like, dude. We have a friend that we took to this place in San Francisco that I guess has like the best hot chocolate. He likes hot chocolate. So we're like, dude, you're a little baby for liking hot chocolate, first of all. but if you are a baby that likes hot chocolate you gotta go to this place, it has the best hot chocolate so we go, sits at the bar bartender comes up or whatever, like the table whatever and it's like, hey this guy loves hot chocolate and we told him this is the best spot so he had to try it and he's like, oh, the waiter was like, what are you, four?

30:31yeah, he's like, oh, cool, yeah, yeah let me bring you one, so he brings one out guy takes a sip immediately gives like an audible like, ugh and then he doesn't like it And so we're like, oh, you know, whatever. Okay, guess it's not, I don't know. Guess not your way, your type. And so he just puts it down, right? So it's sitting in front of him. Waiter walks by, and he just pushes it forward towards the bartender guy, almost like he's pushing his chips all in at a poker table. And the guy's like, oh, are you done? And he's like, you didn't like it? He goes, no, it's not very good. Oh, my God. That's so embarrassing.

31:14What are you trying to accomplish here? Why are you doing this? So I literally just fall off my stool and crawl away and die. And, you know, I had to deal with this interaction, but it was terrible. I had a friend. We went out and got dinner. And afterwards, they gave us coffee and we wanted decaf. And the next day, we texted back and forth. We're like, hey, did you stay up all night last night? And he was like, yeah. I was like, I think they gave us regular coffee. And he's like, I got to call them. I got to call them and let them know. And he was like insistent. He's like, I got to call them.

31:41So we like called them. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? We're on vacation. We're visiting. That's such a weird, it was such a Larry David move to call someone to tell them, you made a mistake last night. You gave us a normal coffee instead of decaf. And those types of people are very challenging for me to be around. Except when Larry David does it, it's likable and adorable. And when anybody else in real life does it, it's just hateable. My mother-in-law has a version of that where anytime we're complaining about something, her go-to is not even tell them and call them. She's like, call the news.

32:14They will investigate this. And I'm like, no, it's really not. Dude, I can't stand that. It's really not what's going to happen here. I've ordered a steak before, and they've brought me pesto chicken pizza, and I won't say a word. I'm like, yeah, whatever. It's food. I can eat that. I got to tell you this story. I can't decide. I wanted to do a segment called L of the Week, because I think we sometimes brag a lot on here. We say how we're so great and all these different ways. I think it'd be nice to share a big L that we took. But I got to be honest. This might actually be a dub. This might not even be an L because the experience was so incredible.

32:44What was it? All right. So I go. I'm feeling I'm doing something. I'm working, whatever. And I'm feeling hungry while I was driving back from an errand. And I'm like, I'm hungry. I'm just going to pick up some food real quick. So I go to Subway. I'll get a sandwich. And I go to Subway. I walk in. There's like five people in line. There's only one guy working. And it's a black guy. There's a white guy checking out. And I'm like thinking about what sandwich I'm going to get. And I kind of decide. I noticed that that guy's still checking out. And I look over and I'm like, what's taking this guy forever?

33:13And these guys are talking about like, it's like, so where'd you go? It's like South Africa. He's like, yeah. And they're talking about Africa and talking about race, talking about race relations. And they're just talking and like zero, like I'm happy that there's whatever, no racism on earth, but I'd really like a sandwich right now. And so with the four people in front of me. How about that meatball marinara? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Red. that's the color of my meatball that I'd like right now and so they're just talking and then they hug and I'm like what's going on right now and when they hug I lose it I leave I walk out and I'm like I'm hungrier than ever because I've just killed nine minutes here exclusively about a sandwich and I got teased there's no sandwich coming right next to the subway is a Taco Bell and I make a business decision I say it is I guess it is what it is I'm going to Taco Bell today I haven't been to Taco Bell like 13 years going to Taco Bell.

34:09So I walk into Taco Bell and I'm in line. And you could always, I have this theory about places, which is you could see your future when you go into a place because it's you're going to end up, if you go to a place regularly enough, you're going to start looking like the people that are in that place. So sometimes I'll go to a fitness class and I'll look around and be like, all right, if these people who are like the clear regulars here don't look the way I want to look, I'm just going to leave now because this is not a good path. It's a good life path. Yeah, what did you see in Taco Bell? Like a bunch of Tweety Bird shirts?

34:39so i go to first everybody in taco bell was under 17 so i was like oh i get it their body can like still tolerate this i'm the only guy in his 30s at this place so i'm i'm and there's one guy sitting there and he's probably like 28 and he's sitting down and it's just him and he's got a feast in front of him like this guy he was like hey omakase chef's choice bring it all out so he's omakase that taco bell and he's sitting there he's eating up a storm and there's only me these three teen girls who are in front of me ordering and then this guy. And it's kind of quiet in Taco Bell. And I'm standing in line and this guy pulls a move that I I'm still stunned just thinking about this.

35:21He's sitting there in Taco Bell eating his feast and he just rips the loudest fart. Just the loudest audible fart. And we all look over and I'm like, wow, so embarrassing. This guy just farted loud in public wow and it was almost like he's sitting on one of those benches it like echoed it was like this crazy auditory experience and i look at the guy and he just stares back at all of us and he just raises eyebrows like what we're all here like you're also here at 3 p.m on a tuesday and that is what it is and i was like holy shit this guy did not back down he did not power in shame he alpha'd us and was just literally was like what and i was like nothing i guess just carry on you're right we're all equals here at the bottom of society you just got dutch jumping by a taco bell guy it was incredible so it was like a l i took and a big dove for this guy and i just it was an experience i had to share with you when did that happen this is like five days ago.

36:34I've been sitting on the story. There's no one else I could really tell. I started to tell the story to my wife and she was like, you went to Taco Bell? And I was like, you're missing the point of the whole story. And I didn't even get to the good part. And I just thought, okay. You should have farted back at him. I wish I had one in the chamber. I didn't. I mean, he really just like laid it down right there in front of us. And what did the girl say? I mean, the eye contact. Nobody said anything. We all looked to laugh at him. And then we just got stunned by his bravado. holy shit biggest power move I've ever experienced

37:14that's the best how is the food at least honestly the food at Taco Bell is phenomenal like the taste of Taco Bell is great it is a great taste they got like the menu I mean first of all the innovation you've been to a Taco Bell like you know Taco Bell used to be tacos it's not like It's like, this is Doritos. That's become a taco. Now it's a taco inside of a burrito. And it's like, how's the taco inside the burrito? And you're like, it's, we call it a cheesy gordita crunch. And then they had like this thing called the volcano right now. And I was like, I guess just give me the volcano. Cause I didn't even know what to do there.

37:49I was like, I don't really understand what's happening. I'm still, still reeling from what just happened a few minutes ago. And I got the volcano thing. It was great. It was fantastic. You should have brought that African guy over to get it. Let them sniff up America. Let them see what it is. This is what we're about, bro. Come on. Peace, love, and happiness. That hug shit. That's not real. That's not the usual experience. This is the real. This is why we're World War Back to Back champions. Because guys like that, salt of the earth. They don't make them like that anymore. Can you imagine a European doing that?

38:22Impossible. Impossible. No. A kind person from Singapore? Never. you get arrested for that in Singapore that's crazy yeah that's like 5 to 20 in Singapore there's not a chance so Sean I've got a funny story so we have Sam Ovens today I'll do a little bit of an intro but about 3 or 4 years ago I used to see Sam's ads everywhere and it was basically him in a bright blue blazer in his fancy apartment overlooking Manhattan and there was a little bit of hate in me and there was a little bit of... You had slick back hair too, I remember. He had slick back hair. Yeah, and for some reason, he pissed me off.

39:09And I wrote on one of the ads, you're full of shit or something like that. You did a hater comment? I did a hater comment. And it sat in me for years. And I talked to my friends who eventually bought some of his products and they're like, oh no, it's awesome. We loved it. And I started learning more and I was like, I think I was wrong. And so I sent Sam this message, I think 18 or 24 months ago. And I was like, I'm sorry. For some reason, that one comment, it bothered me. And eventually, I saw Sam four weeks ago at a party at Sophia's party. And I talked to him. And my wife and I talked to him for an hour.

39:45And I was like, you're one of the more fascinating people that I've ever spoke to. And I was like, did you get that email where I apologize? I said he got it. So that's how we got here. But Sam, how do you describe yourself? You had consulting.com, which was like a big information business, but you have a new thing. You want to tell us how you describe yourself? Sure. I'm an entrepreneur and I have a software company called School. I'm CEO of that. It's like a community platform for creators. You're kind of underselling yourself there, eh? What do you want me to say? The reason why I like to get out with you is, Sean, he reminds me of Jack Smith so much.

40:27Like, it's the same type of like. Yeah, but the funny thing is like, Jack, you're right. There's like definitely like a, an echo of Jack there. But Jack's, I almost feel like Jack picked business models that suited his like personality and his like way of thinking. Whereas Sam, the funny thing is that when I discovered you, likes him, I saw this sort of like outgoing persona. It's like guy who's recording a selfie video of himself in his fancy apartment telling me something. It's sort of like, oh, this guy thinks he's some hotshot business guy, whatever. And now you talk now and I'm like, this guy owns a surf shop or something.

41:09Why is this guy like in the most zen mode, almost introverted to an extent. Isn't that strange? Was that strange for you to have like a very public persona, even though you clearly are actually more of a laid back, maybe more introverted guy? Yeah, I think that's why it rubbed people the wrong way, like Sam, because that's kind of the thing that I didn't like about that business. If you're selling training or coaching or whatever, is you have to be very out there. You have to make content of yourself. You have to continuously promote yourself, right? And I was always very uncomfortable doing that.

41:51And I guess I used the New York apartment and the blue suit as like a... A character. Yeah, like a character or like a crutch to help me. You know what I mean? Yeah, and it worked. you built consulting.com, which was like a, the way I'll describe it as like sort of like training masterminds courses type of thing, where you would teach people how to start their own consulting business. And people would pay you a few thousand dollars and you put out a bunch of free content, and then that would get people sort of in the funnel. And then eventually they would pay you a couple thousand dollars to learn how to start their own consulting business.

42:27And from what I understand, like you scaled it up to about 30 million a year at one point, that is sort of the peak on the revenue side before being like, this is too much and too crazy. And we have too many people, too little profits. We're pushing the boundary too much. You sort of scaled it back down to a more manageable level where the revenue went down, but the profits went up or the same and you had less headache. So it definitely worked. Where'd you get the idea for that? Were you just like in a basement watching Tai Lopez videos being like, okay, I understand I I can do this now. Or like, why did you decide to even do that?

43:03You mean like sell courses? Sell courses in the way that you sold them, which was just like a really heavy paid ad strategy with you as this character or this persona, the face of it. Very internet marketing. Yeah. I wanted to start my own business. I used to have a job. This is going back like 12 years. And I used to watch this interview site called Mixergy. Do you guys remember that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we love Andrew. Yeah. And I watched an interview one day and this guy was saying that he was going to show, he had a software company. His name was Dane Maxwell. And then he said he was going to teach some other people how to start a software company.

43:43And that was my first experience of being in a course. He launched a course that was called back then the Software Roundtable. And I learned how to start a software company in that and started a software company. It was called Snap Inspect. And so I first experienced being in a course, like from the student side. And through that experience, I had a successful software company. And then I was like the star student of that Software Roundtable Foundation thing. So then I did and he made me do an interview on Mixergy. This is back when I was very young. and then a bunch of people started emailing me and saying, could I, they wanted to pay me so I could help them with their software company and I would just sell like six one-hour Skype calls for$1 ,000 and then very quickly, I ran out of time to sell.

44:41I sold so many of these packages and I just noticed that I was repeating myself on these calls like a lot and I was like, oh, this could be a course. Everyone's like struggling with the same problems. And I've run out of time, right? So the next guy took through this six one-hour calls. I recorded the calls. And then I put them in a Dropbox folder. And then the people that wanted to buy my coaching from that point on, I said, I don't have any time left, but I've got like a course that you can buy for the same price. and I would just sell it for$1 ,000 and give them a login to the Dropbox. And they would watch the recordings in there.

45:26And they liked it and they didn't ask for their money back. And that's where it started. And then when I sold more and more of those, I was like, whoa, I should put some more effort into this. So I did. And then I wondered, how can I sell more of this instead of just waiting for people to come to me from my Mixer G interview and ask me over email. So that's when I started learning about like internet marketing. And then I remember the people back then were like Frank Kern and who else? There was like Ramit Sethi. There was this guy called Clay Collins. Do you remember this era of like, yeah. And so I just, I learned how to market from that world, like that kind of underground internet marketing world.

46:16And then my course business started to do so good. It quickly overtook the profit of my software company. And I just wasn't very passionate about property management, which was the niche that my software product was for. Was that called Snap Inspect? Yeah, it still exists. It's snapinspect.com. and I just wasn't passionate about the niche. So I sold my shares of Snap Inspect to my co-founder and then just went all in on the course business. And that's what eventually became consulting.com. And in the end, I was making courses, showing people how to make courses. I just fell in love with the craft of finding a group of people that you care about and solving their problems and then sharing the solutions with them and turning that into a business.

47:09How did you get the domain, consulting.com? Because that's a great domain. I went to the URL and there was nothing on it. And then I used MX Toolbox to find out who owned it. And then I just sent him an email and I said, do you want to sell it? And he said, yes. How much did you pay for that one? That one was$300 ,000. Just in the 10 minutes that you've just given that spiel and telling the background, and then the hour that I've hung out with you, you have this trait that I love that certain people have, where in your brain, you're the type of person that you see a challenge, and you don't think of it like a lot of people think of it as an emotional thing.

47:51But it's very logical. And you're like, this is a puzzle. I'm going to figure out this math equation. And that gives you joy. At least it seems like it. But with the marketing thing, it seems like the same thing where you're like, if I wear this jacket, that will pop off in a thumbnail. And that's important for a higher click-through rate. And it's like you just read tons of books and you put together an algorithm on what to do. And that's why it didn't seem entirely authentic that that was who you were. But it seemed like you were just playing a game that you wanted to win. Is that how you went about it?

48:21What interesting people did you learn the algorithm from that aren't entirely popular or that are like some strange resources? I guess I just looked at the people who are doing quite well, like Brendan Bouchard and Marie Forleo. This is back then. And I noticed that they had like a, if you thought of their name, you could quickly assign like a couple of attributes to them. They had like a brand essentially. And I was like this kid from New Zealand teaching people how to start a business. And so I was like, Like, whatever it is, it needs to, if when people see my video, they instantly need to think of money, basically.

49:06And my main market is America and New York is like so iconic. It's like the money place, right? So that was why I went to New York and why I found an apartment with a view like that. I heard a rumor that that apartment is almost like exactly the same apartment as something from, it was at a, Wolf of Wall Street or one of those like iconic money movies where they like hang a guy over the balcony. I heard that you wanted that apartment for that reason. Is that true? That isn't true. I wanted the apartment because it had a really cool view. But then we were watching that movie and we had to pause it and be like, wait a second, is that this building?

49:46And we realized it's not the same building, but it must be one of the five in that area that are all very close to each other. Got it. And so you start doing this. Now, I'm curious, a lot of the names you mentioned, I never hear about those people anymore. I remember Frank Kearns. I remember even Pagan and some of these guys that you could kind of go study their content, their funnels. But they're not around anymore. Or if they are, I don't know where they are. They don't seem to be crushing it anymore like they used to. Am I wrong? Are they just out there crushing and I just don't see them for some reason?

50:22or why do you think that they, very few kind of sustained, or did they just get so rich they quit? Or are they like locked into one mode and they didn't evolve with the times? What do you think happened? I think things have changed a lot and a lot of people didn't adapt. But also I think some people just got, they're just not going as hard or they might've got burned out and they're just relaxing a little bit. Probably a combination of all of those things. How big were some of those old school marketers, They're old school to me. How big were some of their businesses? You never know. Like, you never really know.

50:57That's why it's always so interesting. I have no idea because they never talk about that. Well, they weren't real businesses in a way because they would make a ton of money on a launch, right? But then that product would kind of go away and then they might do another launch in six months. And it was all based on this launch model. And these launches would pull big numbers, like millions of dollars. But, and I'm sure there was a lot of profit in that too, but they weren't like these products that were evergreen that could be sold continuously. And they didn't have a team and they weren't like contributing to this body of work.

51:36They weren't building on top of what they built yesterday, essentially. You had this interesting video where we were talking about Jack. Jack's one of my best buddies and he was on the last episode. and you guys are very similar. But on this video, you opened it up and you just looked at the camera and you go, I'm back. And apparently, the story of the video was consulting.com. Consulting got to like$30 million in revenue. And you'd hired dozens of people, fancy offices. You hated it. You basically scale it down to I think you called it a ban. I think it was like five or six people. You're like, we're going to do$10 million in revenue,$5 million in profit.

52:11Everyone gets a share the profit. What was like the peak of the consulting business? And then where was it when you sold it? Sure. So the peak was, it must have been around like 2017 or 2018. And it was doing 36 million a year in revenue. But profit wise was probably only like 5 million on that. Most of it was expenses. And we had about 50 people and we were spending like 2 million a month on ads. And it was just, everything was breaking. I hired everyone way too fast. And it was heavily dependent on ads, which I didn't like. I was reading this book on my honeymoon in Tulum, in Mexico. And it's called Lean Thinking.

53:06And apparently it's like Jeff Bezos's favorite book, which is why I was reading it. And in there, they talk about how you should optimize a business based on value, the way a customer experiences it, right? And you should analyze the headcount, How many people are like working on, how many people are actually contributing to value the customer would experience in your headcount? And then your money flows. So like, how are you allocating the capital? Where is all the money being spent? And does the customer experience value from that? And then your time and attention and energy, right? So you're just analyzing all of these flows.

53:48And I realized that all of our time, money, attention, and headcount was on ads. and that customers did not think ads were valuable. In fact, they thought what you did, it actually pissed them off, right? So I was like, oh man, I've really screwed this one up. And I was like, everything should be focused on the customer. And so I went back after that vacation and realized that I basically had to start again. and so I just started restructuring that company. I realized that organic content was really good because customers find that valuable, right? Like a good YouTube channel, good email newsletter.

54:37So I was like, we should do that. And then if we do that, we don't need to do ads. And then I was like, everyone on the team should be contributing value to like the customer. They should be doing support or they should be account management for mastermind clients. They should be customer facing in some way. And all of my time and attention and energy should be thinking about the customer's problems instead of advertising problems, right? And so I just, with that kind of mental model, I just started restructuring the whole company. And then, so like you've talked about consulting a bunch on other pods, but the story is that you eventually and we can go back to it you eventually sold it but your new company school it's uh whenever i was texting to you it always uh autocorrects the stool s-k-o-o-l you were telling me you didn't exactly say it this way but i i read it this way you were telling me that you you're like we're not taking any funding or at least you're not anytime soon because you self-funded it with 10 million and you're like i'm hiring the best people So you went from this internet marketing type of culture to startup.

55:50First of all, is that true? And second, was that number right? 10 million that you're going in on this? That's true. And why the shift from this startup where you have hired all the... You're running things very Silicon Valley-esque versus what I imagine in my head a lot of internet marketers are not like. Well, I started in software, remember? The first company I ever did was Snap Inspect. So I've always had a love for software. The problem back then, though, was I didn't love my market like property managers. And we were constantly have limited by our money. You know, software engineers are expensive.

56:30Subscription revenue has a cash flow trough in it. And so we were limited by money and I didn't love my market, but I did love software. And I also hated like having to market. I swore I was never going to touch software again unless it had network effects because I wanted it to grow itself, basically like a platform instead of a software tool. So then I fell in love with courses and the beauty of that was like I was able to save a lot of money. And then I came back to software because I now was building software for the market that I loved, which was like online creators. and I had money this time, so I wouldn't be limited by that.

57:10I could get the best engineers and not cut corners on anything and take a more long-term view. And this was a platform opportunity instead of like a software tool. So we didn't have to have a marketing or sales team and we had no like hack. And how is this growing? Because I see the traffic is like, I don't know, 8 million visits a month or something insane like that. It looks like you got an affiliate program here. If you're not running marketing, where's the growth coming from? Because I get that there's network effects. That's way more than like Circle. Is it called Circle? That's way more than a lot of like high VC competitors, the traffic, I believe.

57:48Yeah, so I don't know if the number's right, but let's say - It's more than double Circle, yeah. How are you getting so much traffic? It's a community platform. So once you start a community and you add some content to it, the first thing you do is you invite members, right? and then what happens is roughly 1 % of members create their own community so they're like oh this platform's cool I want to make one of these and then they create their own and then they invite their members and then that there's a there's a loop there or a network effect when you were doing your content stuff your ads I had read stuff like you did some interesting things like you we talked about like the apartment and the suit and I don't know you're like a motorcycle in the middle of the room and stuff like that.

58:30What were some interesting experiments that you ran that either worked or didn't work that sort of taught you something about human psychology or the way that people's, what gets people's attention, what gets people interested, what gets them hooked? What are some learnings from all those different kind of content experiments you did when you were doing, when you were making, when your content, your face was the driver? A lot of people just want to make money. Like that one was annoying. so if you just put a jet in something or a fancy car or a new york apartment like it works so well that it's it's annoying because you're like oh do i have to do that shit aren't people just won't they just listen to the value of the idea but that's what i learned back then when i was doing those experiments i think now people are looking for like longer form real stuff that like a podcast podcasts are really taking off right so i think the people that are doing a good job now is like what you guys are doing i think having a podcast and an email newsletter that's what i would do if i was starting again right now that those two work really well together we have this friend rebecca zamalo who has tens of millions or maybe 15 or something million youtube subscribers and she only launched it in like 2017 not that long ago and i was like rebecca why did you get so big and she goes, I took it like a job.

59:56So like I got laid off or I quit. I forget what happened with her other job. And she goes, this is now my thing. So it was like a 40 hour week. It's like, this is all I'm doing. And I was like, doesn't everyone do that? She said, no, shockingly, no. Most of a lot of popular YouTubers, it starts as a side hobby. And even when they're like fairly big, it's still not full time. But she's like, I just treat this son of a bitch like a company. Like I just ran it like a company and it worked out. So I think that like that focusing. No chance she said son of a bitch. No chance you said some bitch. I added it.

1:00:27That's a Sam Parz special. Maybe I summed that out. Maybe it was like, you know, I took this wonderful thing very seriously. You've been pretty good at focus. I mean, why even sell consulting.com if it's like doing well and you're not working on it? I mean, you seem like you're very, very, very focused on shit. I mean, just to go 10 million on school, was that a significant chunk for you to do that? And was that like a verbal commitment? Like I'm willing to do up to X or did you literally wire it into a bank account and say that's now in the company that's being used for this company? It's we're, we're burning that.

1:01:03That yeah, that like I bought a house cause you know, I've got a wife and family. So I bought a house and I left some money in the personal account for like family. And then I was like, everything else I'm just, I'm betting on this company. So no, no, no other portfolio. Nothing. How big do you think school is going to be? That's hard to answer. There's what I would like it to be. Which is what? I've always wanted to build something that a billion people use. How are you sleeping at night knowing that a lot of your nut is in there? That's a very stressful thing. Quite well at the moment because things are going really well.

1:01:44The growth is compounding pretty fast. and top-tier VCs email us every week, I've had to just stop talking to them. And a lot of people want to give us money, but we're not taking it. And so I think the fact that a lot of people want to give me money has allowed me to calm down quite a lot, that we're not going to run out of money. Also, just the growth. Is it profitable? No, it's not, but deliberately so. Okay, fair enough. And where did you base the company? uh is it remote or people in uh in america and new zealand where you where are your people everyone's in la and sanfren and do you um like what we when sam says he you remind him of jack smith one of the cool things about jack smith is that while he's clever and interesting on the business side he's also clever and weird and does crazy experiments also in his personal life uh whether it's biohacking or lifestyle choice or not naming his child until she was one years old, whatever, parenting, everything.

1:02:48He takes a novel approach to each thing. I'm curious, are you weird in other areas of your life? Do you do anything that's non-standard that to you makes sense, but maybe to other people sounds a little strange? I'm sure. Would you like to say any examples since this is a podcast?

1:03:07I mean I slept on a futon for like three years and I loved it and then when my wife got pregnant she she made me give it up but I really missed that futon you know a Japanese futon yeah I love that thing I just like to keep things very simple and minimal like I only have one pair of shoes and I only have like the same type of socks and the same kind of like underwear and the same t-shirts and then like three wool jumpers and that's all I have and then I have the same soap like this tea tree soap and I just have like 20 blocks of it and I even take one with me when I travel because I only like that soap I like don't wear sunglasses because I think they're unnecessary and I just like to reduce things.

1:03:58I like to find something that I think is good and then only use that and then just get a few different pairs of that and just keep things as simple and as minimal as humanly possible. Is your wife normal? Yeah, she is.

1:04:21The reason why one of the things you said we were sitting around, Sean. It was me, Sam, and my wife, Sarah. We were sitting around at this restaurant. And Sam, you've got some strange energy in a very cool way. You've got very strange and cool energy that I like. I love people like you. And we were just sitting around and the conversation kind of died. And we sat in silence for like three seconds, I think. And then you just said, I delivered my baby. and we were like we were like what? With what? And you said my hands and we were like hold on say this again and you're talking about how your wife she you're going to do like a home delivery or something and the midwife didn't make it in time and you just did the damn thing and you just did it and I remember thinking like the reason I love this guy is I don't think he understands like how your mannerisms, your voice they're so unique and strange in such an interesting way which I frankly love.

1:05:37I love people like you because you're so unique and you're not vanilla. Do you realize that you're like that? Honestly, not really because I don't try to fit in and I don't try to like, I don't even look at what other people are doing. Like I don't have social media at all. And I never look at really what's going on or what's in the news or anything. And I just do what I want. So what do you do with that free time? So let's say no social media, no news for most people, that's like four to five hours a day or something like that. How do you reinvest that four to five hours a day? Where do you put it?

1:06:14What, what does give you energy or what do you do for entertainment or what do you do to, to unwind? I mean, all I really do is focus on school and that's mostly the product. So I'm just obsessive about the product, all the details of it. And then I go home, hang out with my wife and daughter, and then I need two hours of like watching something to unwind. Otherwise I can't sleep. And so I'll watch series, like TV series. And I like old stuff, like things before technology, because it's nice and slow and it helps me go to sleep. But when you say you're obsessive, what does that mean? Do people like working with you?

1:06:59Are you the type of guy who, if something very small at the footer is screwed up, you freak out over that? Yeah, I can see a pixel. So if something's off, I'm like, something's off over there, And then I'll inspect it with Chrome Inspector and it will be one pixel. So I can like, I joke with the team that I can see a pixel. And yeah, I'll go into those details. I designed schools interface and Figma, like the whole thing. And defined a lot of like how that entire system works, which is, it's quite complex. I knew you were like that because when consulting.com first came out, most courses didn't look the way yours looked.

1:07:42Yours had this really cool thing of a... It was like a caveman becoming a person. Right? Is that what it was? And then it was like a picture of the globe. And it looked like a software page. It looked very unique. And I remember seeing the design of it. And I thought, that is incredibly unique. And it stood out. It made you feel more sophisticated than most other people in the space. Do you remember that page? Am I describing it accurately? Yeah. What were you thinking when you made that? That's what I like to do. I like to just spend a long time on the tiny details. I've spent days trying to figure out the right pixel radius of a rounded corner for a button.

1:08:24Is that a feature or a bug? If somebody I worked with was spending days on how much the border radius should be on a button, I would slap them. I'd be like, what are you doing? Like this is not, this doesn't matter. And this is not going to be like high impact. So why are you doing this? So, you know, is that a, is it a good thing or is that a by-product? Like maybe you do that in certain areas where it really works. Then I got to live with the fact that I do it in these other areas where it doesn't matter at all. Yeah. So I, I won't block anyone by doing that. Right. So like when we're building the thing, like I'll be very fast and not the bottleneck of the team.

1:09:03but then in my spare time I'm playing with things thinking about the next time we update the design system and I'm just tweaking little things in my that's what I do for fun so it's not like what I'm doing is my work kind of thing how do you how do you organize your day uh do you have like a are you like focused on one thing do you have like a morning like okay this is my to-do list what what how do you how do you create your day most of what I do I would say it's product strategy and design That's like where I spend all of my time, just in those zones. And we have got like three product teams at school.

1:09:39So three full stack product teams with back end, front end, QA, product manager, designer, right? And they've got three roadmaps that are all going in parallel. And I need to think ahead of them. Like I've got to dream up like the whole product strategy and roadmap and everything. And then I have to reverse engineer it into chunks, break it down, and then figure out which team should work on what thing and sequence it. And then I've got to design the whole thing, spec it, brief that team, and stay a few development cycles ahead. And so I'll either be designing something, trying to figure out a priority, talking to that engineering team, or doing the final QA check before we push something into production.

1:10:30I actually think that's totally the right way, in my opinion, that a lot of companies should run. The reason they don't is because, A, that's really, really hard. So you're the brainchild. You probably know every single thing that's happening. That's incredibly challenging for just about everyone. number two it doesn't feel good to feel like a dictator it's like basically you're you guys are a band and you're like the main you're you know you're the main you're the main guy you're celine dion and everyone else is the backup band that's a weird reference but it is what it is you're billy joel i don't feel like that's where i went yeah that's the way that's where we went you're i don't know long hair uh you're like the guy whereas or i don't know if i can recover from that.

1:11:15Whereas most startups, it's like, it's, it's a lot more decentralized and things like that. But with this type of product, it seems like you're like the, the, the main person and there's a circle around you with shit going on. Is that right? It sounds fucking exhausting. Funny example of this was, I remember Sam, when you were running the hustle and I was running my company, we would meet up every couple of weeks as part of our like kind of like founder mastermind thing where we would get together. You know, I was sort of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid, which was like autonomy and like give people empower your people and all these things.

1:11:46And I was like, you know, preach it to my team. Like, Hey, whoever's got the best idea, we're going with you. You know, Oh janitor, you got an idea. Let's do it. You know, like, let's make it happen. And Sam showed me, uh, I've met up with Sam and Sam shows me like a 12 page doc that he wrote out for some new woman that he hired. And he just go in the document just says, uh, welcome. him. Here's the things that you're going to do. Your job is to do this. Here's how you will do this. Step one, do this. Step two, do this. And he wrote this 20 page doc and was just like, handed it to her and was like, this is, do not deviate from this.

1:12:27I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear your ideas on this. And I asked you, I was like, why'd you do this? You're like, cause people fuck up. And I just, I need her. I think this is the right way to do it. And I just need her to do it this way. No, because whatever Sam has said, I totally agree with that. The problem is that it's fucking exhausting. You know what I mean? Like, it's really hard to do that for a long period of time. It's not scalable. It's kind of scalable. Oh, yeah, like the engineers, I'm not telling them what to do, like in terms of code, right? So, and then I'm not even coming up with all the ideas from my own mind.

1:13:02I spend a lot of my time looking at what our community wants. So like going through our school community where people ask for stuff and share bugs and feedback, then I'll talk to power users. I always find who's spending the most time on the platform, get a top 100, just DM a few of them, get on Zoom, just talk to them for hours about it. And then I use the product myself. And then I talk to the team too. And so ideas come from all of these places, but I'm like the filter and the sorter and the prioritizer, basically. And then when I go to engineering, I know what the feature should be, but they might push back on a lot of what I say based on how easy that is to implement with code.

1:13:45They might be like, oh, do you really need to do it this way because that's going to make the code messy? Or why don't you do it this way? That would be way more simple for the system. And I'll listen to that feedback and adjust the actual feature because I'm trying to give the users what they want, but I'm also trying to keep the code clean. and I'm trying to build things fast too. So I'm like, how could we shrink the scope of this to make it so we could deliver something faster? And so it's not like I'm just dictating to everyone. There's a lot of collaboration. You know, Sean, something I've...

1:14:23Do you know that company Jasper? Yeah. Have you talked to those guys? The founder's name is Dave or David. Yeah, I see him on the website of consulting.com. Dude, that's what I was going to say. For one, if you go to Unsplash, I think it was called, or one of those stock websites, stock image websites, for some reason, Dave is on the picture of so many stock pictures. I used to use a picture of him. And then I met him. I'm like, Dude, I use your face for a stock image. You're on this royalty-free website. And number two, he used to be part of consulting.com, didn't he? So Jasper, for the listeners, is like a, I guess, a billion-dollar now company that does AI stuff.

1:15:00Was he part of your crew? He bought my course many years ago. And he was one of our most successful students. He used to sell coaching, like training and stuff. But then he wanted to get into software. So then he did this thing, Proof. Do you remember that? That little pop-up? Yeah. Yeah. And then that turned into Jasper. And did I, why did someone, someone told me to ask you what you think about AI. Why did they say that? I think it's like massively overhyped. and somewhat like just unnecessary. Like, I don't know about you guys, but ChatGPT hasn't replaced my Google usage. I still use Google every day and I've found no real task for it, honestly.

1:15:46But the hype is extreme. The hype cycle is there around like the growth and like, well, it's not there yet, but I can see the future of this. So you're not bullish at all in the future of it? No. All right. I'll take the other side of that. Sam, anything else you want to ask before we wrap up? No, I appreciate you coming. I want to talk to you again another time. I find you fascinating. I think that you're an original thinker and I appreciate people like you. Thanks. All right. Well, that's the pod. That's it.

1:16:26No days off on the road. Let's travel. Never looking back.

1:16:42All 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.

1:17:10It'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.

1:17:36For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.

From the publisher

Episode 473: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) (Threads @shaanvpuri) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) (Threads @thesamparr) talk about Threads... the latest competitor to Twitter. And an interview with entrepreneur Sam Ovens (@samovensnz) - who made millions off of courses - his latest project and why he's not into A.I.
Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here.
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Check Out Shaan's Stuff:
* Try Shepherd
* Shaan's Personal Assistant System
* Power Writing Course
* Daily Newsletter

Check Out Sam's Stuff:
* Hampton
* Ideation Bootcamp
* Copy That
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Show Notes:
(02:10) - Threads vs Twitter
(04:15) - Zuck vs Elon
(13:30) - Threads Bull case
(14:40) - Threads Bear case
(21:05) - Predictions
(34:30) - L of the Week
(40:40) - Intro Sam Ovens
(45:05) - Why sell courses?
(59:50) - Getting traffic on Skool
(01:03:20) - How large will Skool become?
(01:04:50) - Are you weird in other areas of your life?
(01:17:20) - Why Sam's not into A.I.
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Links:
* Skool
* Mixergy
* SnapInspect
* Consulting.com
* Rebecca Zamolo
* Jasper ai
* Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.
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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
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Additional episodes you might enjoy:
• #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits
• #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future
• #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto
* #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett
• #218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates
• Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More
• How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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