Wait, My Intern Became a 21-Year-Old Millionaire??

33:33I'm not going to change. I don't want to change my lifestyle. Like I like my lifestyle. Yeah. You were like, I'm just going to look to invest it somewhere else. And if I think this is still the best place to invest it, I'm just going to do that. And like, you know, if I lose it, I'm so young that like, whatever, I get the story and I'll just keep going. And the way you said it, like the, my meter went from, oh my God, this guy's insane to like, honestly, I see his perspective. which is that two million bucks changes most people's lives, but you were like, I don't think that, that doesn't get me where I'm trying to go.

34:06Yeah. And in fact, you know, if I still believe in this, I just want to see where this goes in for, you know, for a while as crypto, as NFTs, you're right, like became the thing that year. Yeah. You know, there was sort of like a peak moment in that where it became worth more than$10 million, right? So it was like, would have played out very well. Timing is always very, very tricky. Do you look at this as I was trying to try I was trying to time a bubble. Or do you look at this as I believe in this company and I still believe in this company and that's why I have this stuff? Believe in the company.

34:38And also I was kind of seeing this as like, there's like a few people that have like these life holds. It's like, you know, you hold these, like this is a lifetime hold. This isn't like you buy in, you sell out, whatever. And so I was convincing myself of that. It's like, I'll buy this. And, you know, when this becomes like the next 10 cent, I'll have a couple hundred million dollar stake and that's how, and I didn't have to do it. This was like the only investment I had to do. I didn't have to make all these other investments. There's still some like part of me that believes in that. It's like, I still see a pathway where like in the next 20, 30 years, whatever, this is like 100, 200, 300 billion dollar company or whatever.

35:17And it's like, I have, I've got a pretty decent, you know, stake in that. And so, yeah, that's what I was like convincing myself of. that is a bit less now during times like this but i still have some thing here where i'm like okay um is it hard to not just get attached like identity wise to like i don't want to be wrong yeah i've made that mistake before like i think you know especially this is such an extreme case it's one specific thing you were so right you were boy genius then it crashes but you're like am i now boy idiot or am i boy genius is this the moment where i held through the tough times or did I just fuck up and I need to learn that lesson?

35:57Really hard. How do you deal with that? Well, I think, well, I went into, let me just do something. So I was still investing some money on behalf of other people and I was going around and meeting founders and stuff like that. And that's why I'm doing something else right now. Well, okay, yeah, you have other bets. Yeah, I've got other bets. So that's what got me through. And I was like, if this goes away, I need to make sure that this is the next big bet. I don't need to be right on this one. If it ends up the way it's going, I've got time to make more bets and be really right on something else.

36:33Yeah, and also you had done so much degenerate trading that you don't emotionally mood swing. Yeah, the money all actually becomes play money in a way. Well, aside from Anamoka, I had a bunch of other token investments, especially when Facebook renamed to Meta. Remember, I was buying up all the MetaVest coins, Decentraland, Axie, Sandbox. And so I experienced, you know, making millions of dollars, like liquid cash. I also, I learned a lot of lessons there. I also lost a lot of that money when I didn't manage my risk post-serve. But I experienced like the numbers just became like you're looking at the screen.

37:09I have no attachment to it. There'll be like those days where I'd be up a couple hundred thousand dollars. I'm like, obviously I spent a lot of it. I was like, you know, all my boys were treated well we went out I when I eat we all eat yeah it was like um I was a pretty shy nerdy nerdy guy right so I didn't really know how to talk to girls but if you want to learn how to talk to girls get rich I had it's like a it was like a huge confidence boost I was yeah I was it just gives you the confidence it's just the confidence for you which yeah I think it was a confidence it was like even if she rejects me I'm still I can go look at my meta bass later and feel good about myself yeah it was it feels more like yeah and also for me like having two million dollars in a bank felt like a billion dollars to me of course yeah i'm like i'm spending a lot and it's just like it's not going down because i'm like i don't have kids and i have family i don't have any i have no obligations whatsoever um so even a lot didn't put a big debt would you would do anything stupid uh so yeah i got an apartment i got a i got a tesla um i spent like there'll be weekends where i'd get like limos out for me and my boy would get like like i remember like my birthday we got like three limos we drove down to the Gold Coast which is like you know what Gold Coast is in Australia um dude I'm so happy to hear this because when I like I don't know what I was paying you back then it wasn't much it was like the very first thing was it was 30k a year I think it was yeah we started 30k I think it went up after that yeah yeah to maybe like 80 to 100 yeah that's what I was paying you then and that well I remember at the time being like oh this is not gonna work this guy's getting like super rich doing these like crazy investments on the side like yeah it's not gonna make sense for him to have a job at some point which is great like my goal wasn't to have you work for me for 20 years it was like here's a young entrepreneurial guy come get some reps with me come like just get you off the traditional path yeah and then like i hope you go do big shit and like you know i could be your biggest fan and all that that's kind of what's happening and i'm yeah i've had my popcorn you know watching watching you do this stuff and it's being totally entertained the whole way yeah because you definitely like had like a roller coaster um you're kind of like those like wall street bets kids basically like yeah i was on wall street bets like since i was in like high school like i was yeah i was always on that forum there's the equivalent in australia um there's a thing called hot copper which is like the equivalent of wall street bets and on there i was like the most active person i got and my nickname was mr silicon valley because i was just investing in tech stocks right and i'm like if you go on like everyone can look at my profile it's like i'm oh i'm tweeting about animoka i'm like talking about animoka on that platform and there's another company called brain ship that It ended up becoming like a multi-billion dollar because of the AI craze and stuff like that.

39:42I was constantly looking at anything to do with what is like the next 100x stock. Because for me, it's stocks, right? I can't invest it. You tell me some story. A billionaire takes you out to lunch and it's like, what's the next Andamoka? He reads the article and he's like, I got to meet this whiz kid. Takes you out. He's like, what's the next one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You shit your pants immediately. You're like, I don't fucking know. Yeah, because during that time, I mean, this was Zep era, right? So I'm like, everything I'm telling people to invest in, it's going up and up and up. And, you know, I'm a genius.

40:15Yeah, I'm a genius. And so I was like, oh, shit. But I truly believed. I was like, Adam Ocker just raised a billion dollars. I was like, you should invest in Adam Ocker. Adam Ocker is the thing. That is the next thing. And he was like, okay, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And in the next few days. But inside, he's like, goddamn, I love that confidence. Yeah, in the next few days, he ended up becoming like the top 10 shareholder in the company. Bought out tens of millions of dollars of stuff. and obviously, you know, Edamok didn't stop at a billion. So he made, you know, over nine figures in that.

40:43Did he tip you a little bit on the way out or tip the dealer? There's that comment. Fair enough. So you go through that crazy journey. One of the things that comes out of that was you were then on behalf of this guy plus other people you were doing other investments. One of them is Shuffle. Let's talk about Shuffle. So Um, you had flacked me a while back and you were like, Hey, crazy story. I think on the pod, I was like, can't say who told me this. Right. Yeah. Now it's all, now it's like way more public. At the time you were like, Hey, there's a company called steak. Yeah. That is making unbelievable amounts of money.

41:22You were like, they had like a, whatever,$800 million dividend last year. Like that's just, that's the profits they took out. You're like this guy, one of the owners, I don't know how old are they? They're like, they're in their like late twenties, mid twenties. Yeah, like 27 years old, bought a$50 million house in Australia. Yeah. And another guy bought like a, whatever,$100 million house. And it's like, that's how you guys sound like rich, by the way, when they're buying like, oh, look at the real estate. Yeah, that is like, you know, when they're buying an asset like that. Because people didn't know it.

41:47The articles are basically like, mystery, you know, mega millionaire buys$50 million home. And then it was like, they had two companies. They had like a software company that makes like, Game of Links. Yeah. It's like makes like the gaming software to go play like the games. And then they have stake, which is the casino. They're like basically crypto casino. And they're like, you know, intertwined companies or whatever. Yeah. A little Alameda, you know, FTX. You know, I'm getting some vibes here as I describe it all out. But either way, like stake has been, you know, it's become like huge. And they have Drake playing and then whatever gambling and shit like that.

42:24So you meet these guys who are doing a competitor to that in a way. Yeah. How do you describe shuffle? and tell us about like this crazy space because I only know what you told me about the steak thing at the time and then since a bunch of news has come out like kind of validating what you said tell me about the space and tell me at the time so I was so I was traveling around this Australia meeting other founders and I was at this dinner and at that dinner the guy there was a guy that was like pretty good friends with the steak co-founders and he would like say these numbers this is before the articles and stuff like that so he would say some insane batshit crazy numbers and I'm like if these numbers are true, this is the fastest growing tech startup in Australia in history.

43:05Like this is maybe in the world. Like this is like very, I mean, they were founded in 2017 and they're going to do a couple of billion dollars in revenue. This is like some kids in their 20s, right? So I initially heard of that. I was like, okay. And then already at that time, I remember messaging you about, I wanted to start like a crypto trading, like let people do, like I want to start a, I titled the document. I want to build like the world's largest casino. Right. And I remember this document. Yeah. Yeah, and the way that product is actually like a huge product now. I don't know if you've heard of Rollbit, but they have like a crypto trading thing.

43:36I was looking to do that, but that's like regulatory, just like a nightmare. It's like an unlicensed thing. And so I was like, okay, but I see this gambling stuff. It's huge. Stakers, you know, they just did a billion dollars in net profit in a single year. How do I get some exposure to that? And this, going back to like how I find these opportunities, I just remembered there was another kid in uni that lived in a whole different city to me in Australia that posted his research on Afterpay. And this was like a couple of years ago. And I don't know why he popped out in my mind again. So I went looking for that article, I found his name and I hit him a message on LinkedIn, like, hey, like, you know, what are you doing these days?

44:17Let's catch up and whatever. And yeah, we caught up. And then that's when he started telling me about like these other crypto kids in Australia that have like made it pretty big doing all this degenerate stuff and they're starting a crypto casino and it's going to be a competitor to not to stake but there's like that's the thing the market is so huge there's I could you know there's a few other competitors that are also doing a billion dollars um and it's just not really reported on right because it's kind of like a uh yeah kind of shady industry so I was like okay I But for me, coming from a pretty small town in Australia, when you meet other people that are kind of like you, and we all had a success in our own domain, I'm like, if we just come together, we're going to hit something big.

44:59And I just wanted to be around those people. And so it was more like a bet on this group of... Yeah, just like also ambitious, smart, slightly degenerate, or very degenerate. Yeah, like young 20-year-olds, basically. Yeah. And these old people, and we've all kind of been through the same thing of making a lot of money, losing a lot of money. So we can kind of like lean on each other in that way. Like we understand each other in that. So by the way, this happens in like it's happened in Online Pover. I remember like the rise of Online Pover and the kind of poker kids who all made it. And they all kind of lived in houses together and figured out how to like each like beat the game together.

45:38Basically, same thing happened with social media. So like the TikTokers or the Viners who all went and lived in the same building. in Los Angeles. Right, yeah, yeah. Collabbed with each other plus traded tips plus like got brand deals for each other and they all like rose up way faster than the people who were on their own or didn't have the kind of connection. This was my Juntauger. Yeah. So, yeah, so that's how I met them and I was like, we all kind of agreed. A lot of the background of the Shuffle team, they come from like the big exchanges. FTX is one of them, BitMEX, Crypto.com, that's all their backgrounds and so we all had the hard-earned Stanford of the sketch world.

46:18So I was like, we all, and obviously I've traded on all of them, and we all just had, like, we all agreed on this macro thesis of every single cycle, there is, like, this one clear big winner, which is the exchanges, right? Their business model is every bet, every degenerate bet you take, they have a little fee. It's called transaction fee for them. For us, it's called house edge, but it's the same exact thing. The same model. structure, the legal structure is actually really similar as well. They will get a license out in Seychelles or FTX was in Bahamas. Crypto casinos are in the Dutch Caribbean and Curacao.

46:52So it was like, there's all these similarities. What is that? There's like some place that's like, they just made it their business in some country. Yeah, Curacao. Where the hell is Curacao? It's just a place where you can, I mean, anyone, if you want to get a license to do like an online crypto casino, you could probably spin one up in like six weeks. And that's their model. They're like, we're open for business for casino, for online casinos, basically. And like, that's where everybody goes to get their... Yeah, we're like in the same structure as Steak and, you know, all the other guys were all under the same license and there's some risk to that, obviously.

47:29What happens to a license? How long can you sort of play this game? And you have to sort of calculate what amount of risk you want to take there. But yeah, that's, it's exactly the same as these exchanges that were out in the Seychelles or Bahamas. And so we saw that and we're like, okay, here's a clear difference between exchanges and casinos though. Exchanges are raising at tens of billions of dollars and they've got all the fame. Whereas if people just understood, if this was more public on how profitable these casinos are and how they're very similar businesses to exchanges, then there would be some re-rating evaluation for these casinos.

48:08And so that was like, that's the, but a lot of these investors and funds, they have like a no vice clause, right? They just can't invest in weed. They can't invest in gambling or porn or whatever, even though there's money to be made there. So I think like, that's one of the other reasons is like, yeah, some people just either themselves individually, morally say that or their fund charter basically prohibits them from doing those things. So they're just like out on it. Even if they know it's a great business. I mean, who doesn't think a casino is an amazing business? We raised a seed round and that was like the hardest.

48:38I know. My biggest regrets was not investing. I tried to invest and then it was like, oh, it's like one entity here, here. And I was like, oh God, like if I have other people's money, if it's my own money, fine. But when I have other people's money, I have to like, you know, think twice. And just in that time, it like closed or whatever. Yeah. But anyway, like that's, we all agree that in this like next cycle, whenever it is, could be five years down the line, who knows. But in the next cycle for crypto, So we believe that there will be one, two or three casinos in the top 20 of all the coins.

49:10And that's billions of dollars of value that we think that we could do. And a big difference with us is like, I'm on this podcast right now. We're not anonymous. We're not like these people that are like all these crypto casinos. Usually they're like very anonymous people. And I mean, if you're putting your money into a platform, you want to know who's behind it, right? You want to know who these guys are. but how do you like all the how did you follow all the FTX stuff going on right now I'm like really into this trial it's like my soap opera right now that I'm paying attention to it's your Roman Empire that's it's my Roman Empire exactly do you have you been following it and also like how do you feel about that how do you think like because it seems like crypto casino is like risk times risk in that sense of like I don't know something between you know malpractice to like you know the craziness that comes with with just that amount of money flowing through something.

50:01Yeah. And you said you have people that worked in some of those places. What did they, I guess, what stories have you heard? And I guess, I don't know, like, not like Ishan spokesman, you know, like not you professionally, if we can, just like my friend, like, how do you think about that stuff? Yeah. It's like, it's, I mean, being in crypto already, you already, you have like an appetite for speculation. And so anyone that's already in the industry, it's like, you're taking some, you're taking some risk on okay there is some like regulatory risk already that one day this license might close down and your business is like you know screwed up like and so you have to be kind of smart and calculate about that it's like okay what are the other licenses can we start build building it up like we have to build our entire platform like in a modular way so if something happens to one license we can split off let's say our casino and then put a license to the sportsbook and offer it in a different region so it's just like lost it's like we had bit.

50:57Yeah. So, so some regulatory risk to some, like, it's funny, like, products have, most startups have product market fit risk. Like, we don't know if anybody wants what we have to offer. Yeah. You have no market risk. Then the second tier is technical risk. It's like, if we can make a, whatever, self-driving car, people are going to want it. There's no market risk, but there's technical risk. Can you even build a self-driving car? Yeah. With this, there's no technical risk either, right? It's like, I mean, obviously you have to do technical work, but it's not that's not the risk in the business it's all regulatory uh it's all regulatory risk in this which is so different than like 99 of the other startups i look at yeah very few times do you just get regulatory there's also just like actual risk that you have to manage of your book like limits that you like we will sweat sometimes like when we because we had to start upping the limits you know there's some high rollers that come and go like we i want to do a 10k blackjack hand I want to do a 25k blackjack hand and you're just like okay holy shit we have to you know if they have a few good runs it could be all of a sudden down a couple hundred thousand dollars and I see your revenue is not always guaranteed that's also like the biggest difference in this in the talk about the traction so you guys launched I don't know when in February of this year yeah what's the what can you share traction wise uh so you know we're probably gonna do a half a billion in volume uh like this month um and you know this is generating a few million in revenue a month and hopefully this month will be a few million in profit a month.

52:24And this is also another thing that these businesses are built to strip out the cash flow. It's like you build the business and then you pay this out. This is not like you're not praying for some exit. We all went into it knowing that no one's going to buy a crypto casino. You build it to make a lot of money and then strip the money out and pay it out to all the holders of the business. So that's also like, yeah, it's a very like, yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's a good problem. So yeah, it's only been a couple of months, but yeah, it's probably 50 million run rates probably where we're at right now.

53:00Super impressive. Crazy. Any good stories about like, I don't know, how did you bootstrap it? Where'd you go get your first customers? How did you, because that was your job. Yeah. Yeah. So because you'd be like, I'm in fucking Asia right now, you know, meeting people. I'm like, what are you doing in Asia? You're like, I'm building the brand. I'm figuring out how to get this thing off the ground. Well, this is like a really, the first thing that I, I don't know why I didn't really know this, but the people that come and play on your site, if they like to gamble, you know, they probably also have some other vices and like, they're probably not, some of them are probably, you know, can get very angry, very easy.

53:40The whole thing is about either you make money or lose money. So when they make money, obviously they're happy. or when they lose money, you know. Right. This place sucks. Beyond like, I'm going to find out where you live and I'm going to find out like, so that was like, when you talk about your first 10 customers, like your first 10 customers are pretty rough people that you have to do. So, I mean, the first thing we went to was we're all a bunch of crypto kids that made a bunch of money and we gambled it ourselves. So like we already had a lot of other crypto kids that made a bunch of money and, you know, like to gamble.

54:09So we went to those guys first and like, hey, come, you know, plan our website and test it out. And we would, you know, there's little tricks and stuff of like, stuff with like deposit bonuses and like standard kind of stuff. Your standard like sports play motions and stuff like that. One thing that I think we did that was, oh, that's pretty interesting that we found out was, okay, we should stop spending so much time trying to get thousands of people who will deposit like$10,$20 or whatever because they'll come on, they'll come on your side and it's good for them to, you know, play, but they will lose$5 and then, you know, spend, 48 hours in your support, you know, I'm going to kill you.

54:47Where do you guys live? I need my$5 back. Versus like, okay, let's maybe try and find customers that are, you know, not like that. And we got pretty lucky in some parts of Asia, especially Japan, right? Like they are people who bet really big and they're very respectful. And they're very like, they don't waste any of our time. Like they will lose money. It's like we're going to honor. Yeah. So it's like, okay, these are the customers we want. Now we know the customers that we want and that's good for the business. And yeah, we started making some pushes there and and trying to find, you know, this is a pretty heavy like affiliate business.

55:23You want to find you want other people to go out and do the work because you can't do Facebook. We can't do Facebook ads. We're prohibited from doing Google. So you can't do PPC. So you have to find really creative ways of trying to acquire customers. And yeah, that was. Yeah. Well, this is why like Stake, I think, bought or they created KIT. Yeah. And they're basically like paying Twitch streamers, you know, gobs of money, reportedly like 50 million, 100 million dollar contracts to come play because they're like, oh, these are popular people. One of the things they'll play is we'll give the money to gamble on our platform.

55:54They gave Drake like tens of millions of dollars of like, go play, show people that you're doing a 20 million dollar bet. Yeah. And are you gambling 20 million dollars one night? It makes you look like a baller. It creates great content that's going to go viral and get you likes. and all those people are going to see that gambling on stake is fun and drake does it right like that's like they're yeah is that accurate that's my perspective so stake pioneered that model like they're like uh we can't bid on these other channels with all these other crypto like other casinos um and so let's try and find other ways and the streaming model like they pioneered that the thing that's genius about also is that instead of like an influencer posting a picture saying hey come play on stake they're playing the product they're showing you how it works they're seeing their reaction their face in picture with the whole thing so not only are you educating people about how to play it and how to like this like next level in terms of I guess like player value as well like they will deposit and you know they'll play they'll lose and they're watching their favorite streamer play again they're like time for me to also deposit again so we found out like the affiliates or the influencers that are really like they have a discord channel or they yeah they have a you know they're constantly live streaming right those people make the most you told me something you said we would not, rather than have you have a million followers, we want you to have 2 ,000 people active in a Discord that you talk to all the time.

57:18That's more valuable. I think this isn't just for casinos. I think for e-com, there's people that do Facebook groups and anywhere there's a concentrated you have those 1 ,000 loyal fans or whatever, those customers are worth all the money. We did an influencer campaign. We spent$100 ,000 on influencers. Probably the first paid influencer campaign we'd done. So I was like, let's try$100 ,000, and we're going to spread that across these. I think we did seven influencers, I think. Right. And so these are people who have, let's call it, 250 ,000 to 3 or 4 million followers on Instagram. And I shit you not, some of those people who have a lot of followers, literally had zero conversion zero like dude i could post on facebook you get one conversion like it's crazy some people kicked ass and as like what's the difference i've noticed that you know the instagram has this one feature which is like when um not everybody has it but like you can broadcast so like i don't know if you've seen this but like israel has this like almost like one to many group chat oh yeah you can send a message and they can only emoji react they can't like it's not like your fans can chat back but it looks like a chat right and i noticed that the people who have active versions of those where they'll just be like, oh, you know, my favorite mug.

58:38Yeah. It'll get like 3000 likes there. Right. That's a way better signal for who actually converts versus like just a generic post or story or follower count. Yeah. Which is like, you know, neither here or there. And I think that really move product. You can tell like the difference in it. It's also just about them being like very high intent. And so I think about the people that would go into that broadcast channel in the first place. It'd be like a small percentage of like that person's like most loyal like fans or whatever that are active and you know right yeah so i think um for like that that could be applied everywhere uh wherever you can get like who cares about trying to get you know four million impressions i just want to get i want my product in front of like the thousand most i keep using the word degenerate but not degenerate i'm like you know whatever the thousand people that are by the way i use degenerate positively too when we were hiring we used to uh you know companies have like corporate values yeah and It's like integrity and honesty.

59:35And like, it's like everybody has the same values. It's like, don't kill somebody or something. I don't know. Ours was degeneracy. Yeah. And people were like, why does it say you should be a degenerate to work here? And we were like. what it is like that's what we want we want people who like when they work on something like there's just two types of people. There's some people that like, you know, they work to live and some people live to work, right? Like, right. We are the types that when we do a project, we go all in, we love doing it. We obsess over making something fucking awesome. That's going to take a lot of work.

1:00:06And the late nights, we don't want to feel like we're like asking for a favor. Every time we try to go above and beyond to do something cool, like, right. And, but it wasn't about working hours only. That was just one aspect. The other thing we used to say is like, we noticed that the people who were the best earlier in their life had a degenerate like obsession with something that wasn't like the thing your parents would reward you for or the school would reward you for right so for a lot of people was gaming it's like oh yeah i just spent like an ungodly amount of hours in in ultima four or like you know runescape or something like that that was such a strong signal to us that like this person is going to be great now with us because they have that switch where once they get really into something they practice to like to master it and they get obsessed they want to beat the game and like they're not doing it for the because people told them to do this they're they're doing it because they can't not do it yeah and so we found that people who had early obsessions in life were the best people that we wanted to work with you also want that in customers or an influencer who's got people that are diehard fans like why do people love taylor swift like swifties they just they identify in that tribe is what you want yeah and i think that like whether people like the idea of a crypto casino or that makes them feel like really crazy or whatever i think that the marketing lesson about how these guys market themselves it's like one of the best like marketing hacks that created a multi-billion dollar outcome was this one realization that hey let's pay these influencers and celebrities to specifically do live streaming on twitch which is not the main marketing channel for 99 of other brands and let's give them money to gamble so that people can watch the the sort of thrill of victory and the agony of defeat live in real time.

1:01:47And that is the best marketing for our product.

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1:02:53I also think for those guys, I think they're really, they're like one of the most like fascinating entrepreneurs to come out of Australia because I think for Kik, it's not, it's actually, I think the goal here is. all right they've now you know made this five to ten billion dollar like crypto casino it's like where's this they want to go more now this you know twitch was valued at 40 50 billion i think these guys legitimately just want to go in and you know although they want to use the money to beat twitch they want to yeah they want to use money to like this is their next thing to get them to like i think they want to leverage they were already working with all these streamers paying them you know millions of dollars to gamble it's like well let's actually just also pay you guys million dollars to stream but on our platform it's like i think they saw uh uh a sort of gap here they came at the right time um but i yeah i don't think it's just for gambling i think these guys truly um you know love there's no way that works because streaming doesn't make that much money yeah yeah there is no way that that works in the sense that uh you know that they would really have to be betting that they could and you know okay so i don't think it could work but here's the case where maybe could so i remember so tiktok now is obviously massive yeah do you remember when tiktok came out so like yeah it was musically and then they did like a musically and musically was doing good but didn't like make it to like the full mainstream and it was kind of still seen as this like kitty lip-syncing kind of it wasn't like tiktok today you can go learn shit yeah you can you know people make you laugh you can promote your business you can sell products you could do anything but at the time musically was literally like tween girls lip-sicking right that's like all it was right there's like more of what the more of what the product was so then they rebranded it's like they get bought they rebranded tiktok which like i remember laughing about the name like what is that name and they literally spent a billion dollars marketing that app to make sure every teenager has it installed on their phone yeah and like i we had a kid who was working for us at the time that was in high school but he would come and work at our office I was like dude what do your friends think of TikTok he's like oh it's like the joke but he's like I gotta say like everybody knows TikTok he's like there's not one person in my school that doesn't know TikTok he's like we don't think it's cool yet but like I gotta give it to him like 100 % of every kid in my school is aware that there's a TikTok app that they want you to download and like they actually brute force like created the network effect I guess there's a world where Kit could do that but it's also I think that banking on maybe they do something where the friction to buy something on live streaming is lowered and that's a whole new like avenue I think there's I think they know that the traditional model is not going to ever work and that let's just get all the eyeballs and then maybe they can flick some switch somewhere and you know like Instagram Reels makes like 10 billion dollars a year I don't know how but like you've clicked some switch plugged into the world's greatest ad engine and the world Facebook's ad engine is the greatest ad engine maybe Google's one or two but like The reel is based on that because it's plugged into one of the greatest money makers ever.

1:05:55And live streaming commerce is a pretty huge thing in Asia. And so if it can somehow work in Western markets, I think there's something there where they could flick the switch. And then this is how they go from, we're already worth a couple billion dollars. How do we get to 10, 20, 50? And maybe they don't care about how much they're worth, but what's the biggest impact? Yeah, what's the next? They've already won one game. like how do we how do we get to the next so I think yeah that's super like I think more people should probably know about those guys and are you like I'm going to be a degenerate forever or are you like you know I'm just going to do this for this period and then I'm going to do something else well I'm I'm just I really want to be a part of something that could be huge and that could grow really fast and so I want to do that with shuffle and yeah ride this wave like will I do another thing in sports betting or gambling whatever I don't know, you know, maybe not.

1:06:50But I, like, like I mentioned to you earlier before, it's like, you make your nut and go to your noble mission. But I'm like, I think, I think I might. Justin Maher's quote. Love that quote. I love that quote, not because I think it's right, but because so many people, when they hear that, they're like, that's what I'm doing. Because it's such an easy out to like, just point anything that you're doing in the moment. Because you're like, I'm going to do the noble mission later. And so I love it because it's hilarious how much people love that quote. I don't know if it's good wisdom or bad wisdom.

1:07:20I can tell. But what, by the way, what ideas do you have? So, yeah. Do you know MFM? You know, that's what we do here. I'm going to, I'm going to get out my notes app really quick. Okay. And we might have already talked about some. Just really quickly, there was, before we were talking about kids that were playing RuneScape and stuff like that, I literally have already one in here. I had incubator around kids who are building businesses within games. I like that. Because I think every single... Yeah, every... So, I guess during my era like I'm a bit older now during my era it was kids that were building Minecraft servers or I know for the guys that did Steak they were RuneScape kids they built a casino in RuneScape first and then they did their own thing so it's like RuneScape, Minecraft I think now it's like Roblox or like maybe like Fortnite creator maps and stuff like that like if you're building businesses within games every single person I've met that's done that they're all like super successful millionaires I 100 % agree I think I tweeted this out I go, what people think a winner's backgrounds looks like, what the world tells you, it's like, you know, good grades, he goes to a good school, has good internships, and after-school activities, runs for student council.

1:08:32But what I've seen is what the real winners are, are the kid, the guy who's running his own gaming server when he's 14. Kind of because he just wants to be able to buy games. He's not even running it as a business, right? Like the sneaker head, like sneaker flippers basically um you know people that are like hardcore gamers that are like become best in the world at a video game that's like super competitive yeah that and like you know which requires skill strategy communication like tons like obsession those are pretty translatable skills yeah uh you know speech and debate is another one like there's these like unorthodox backgrounds runescape is one that's crazy the runescape mafia yeah a number of rich young people I've met that the common denominator is yeah we used to be like I didn't play runescape but they're like yeah runescape has like the marketplace or the plaza or something yeah and they were like yeah we used to roll we used to run the plaza or the marketplace and I was like geez this is something I have an idea around that which is uh I was like I want to create kind of like the outcast conference so basically what I want to do is be like these are actual hotbeds of talent that nobody's really talking about I want to invite like the people who do that it's Like your point of entry is like you, you need to hit one of those criteria you run in gaming server or like, yeah, you're like elite at this.

1:09:49Like, you know, I found this one thing called mind sport. It's like some place you go that you put, it's like Olympics, but for nerds. So you don't do, you don't run, you play chess and then you play backgammon and then you play like, you play like this, like advanced version of chess. Like, you know, you play go, you play like all these games and whoever's like the best across these like 10 really hard strategy games is like the mind sport champion. Yeah. And you know, that guy's a freak. You know, they're all going to be amazing. As soon as they decide like, oh, okay. It's time for me to have a career now.

1:10:19Yeah. As long as they just get to like funnel in the right place and don't just go be a McKenzie drone. Like, you know, those people are going to kick ass. So I'm like, oh, I want to make a thing where it's free for them to attend, but you got to be the best of the best. And I want to just be able to like curate that talent and be like, I'm going to place my bets on these people now. Like, hey, if any of you ever started a company, just remember this goodwill. of me bringing you here, paying for all of this because I want to be your first investor. I genuinely think that's going to be one of the highest ROI things that I could do.

1:10:50Well, I think a lot of them get lost to banking or something like that. And then there's a lot of them as well that they just don't have guidance coming out of the first thing that they do. And so they fuck around for maybe a few years. That's why I'm going to outcast because they probably feel like I'm kind of like blind a little bit. I wasn't doing all the shit that the other Achiever kids were doing. But it's like, no, no, no, trust me. Let me show you 10 other people that are like you. And then they're like, oh, I see myself in them. Like, I can do it too. This is the basis of like a lot of sports.

1:11:20Like you see a guy that's from your hometown and now you start to believe you can do it too. Why do you like Australian entrepreneurs so much? Like, what do you care? It's like, because they're from Australia, I'm from Australia. If they made it, I can make it. Yes, that's cool. But had you never heard of any, you would probably also be banking somewhere, you know, on that. And also, I think a lot of them, when you spend your time or your childhood or whatever, in a room doing all this stuff, you're making money or you're learning business skills, but then you start lacking in other areas. So then that's setting yourself up for failure to waste some time, whether it's then afterwards, you have some girl troubles or afterwards you don't know how to do something with family or whatever, blah, blah, blah.

1:12:02Yeah, I think that that's why... Oh, that's a great idea. I'm just going to have a kissing room. I'm not gonna have a high girl it's like yo if you haven't had your first kiss let's just do it now and we're gonna get that all out of the way we're gonna kill we're gonna crush these like lingering dogs in your head yeah but yeah that was one of them I mean but what was your idea it was I the idea was like just like a like a you know giving these kids like mentorship and like just like incubator okay just like a little Y Combinator thing for these weirdos what I see yeah there's a I was just at a conference I was just really surprised something within conferences where I think maybe more people should make conferences for cashed up niches because especially if you do the exhibitor model where it's like oh my god.

1:12:50And some of these people, the one I just went to, they're paying a couple hundred thousand dollars for a booth. So maybe that starts off as you do your newsletter. You do the low effort thing first, the low price, low effort thing of newsletters, whatever, build that audience and then just immediately go into, I'm surprised you guys haven't done a conference yet, because I feel like that would make it. Like an MFM one? Yeah, like an MFM conference. Yeah, just lazy. Another one that actually kind of related, I think this is kind of boring, but like a CRM for, again, like cashed up niches. So we're right now looking for like a new CRM platform and you know, everyone goes to like Salesforce or whatever, but they operate in like a hundred different verticals, right?

1:13:30And so who's going to get our 10k a month? it's going to be the one that is still built specifically for iGaming which is our niche whatever so right now we're making a decision and we're going to go with some other smaller couple we're not going with salesforce we're going with this other one they're going to get out you know 10 grand a month or whatever because they're specifically for iGaming so that's like another one that's a little bit boring but it's like if you could just find some niche that one for example I think is like farming I mean real estate is another one right yeah within that you could even be like senior living or right hvac you know like things like that where you know that everybody there can spell ebita well it's like it's i think for anything that where the interactions or the behaviors of your customer is very it's very high value but it's also it's very different to like maybe like an e-com or whatever like or like just a transaction like on our one it's like you you have a bunch of games that you like and you spend you know we want to know exactly if you've lost this amount of money in the next few hours we want to like make some contact with you and stuff like that right we can't really do custom behaviors like that with like a sales force or whatever because or like whatever else crm platform because it's it's very tailored to a very broad niche so anything that has like so you're saying high value customers and then basically figure out like first principles what should this look like for this niche yeah yeah i think something like that that's pretty good i like that'd be a good I think that's a very like that's a very good sandbox for somebody that wanted to explore.

1:15:03And we just talked about this before. It could be someone that does like, so in the gaming biz, there's VIP, like VIPs make up your whole entire business that we're talking about. There's actually other verticals as well where VIPs is like your thing. Actually, every single business probably has VIPs that they're just like not interacting with. So maybe like VIP medicine software for e-com, for whatever you know, even for like retail businesses or whatever, like you probably have, yeah, you probably have like customers that will come in. Let's say I started getting into like the hot, cold exposure therapy stuff.

1:15:36So I started going like, how tech bro of you. I started going into these places like, you know, three, four times a week. But, you know, if these guys just would have, you know, that like I'm paying this much amount of money, come up, sell me on something else or do something else. Like, I think that even like retail businesses, like just if you were to focus less of your time on trying to, you know, broaden and like getting, you know, paying on these Facebook ads to get the next thousand customers. What about the 10 that's going to spend like, you know, you know, whatever, five, 10 times more on the business.

1:16:08So that's probably, I think some VIP management software for the next guys. That would be. It could sit on top of whatever, whatever niche you choose. It could just sit on top of the current software and just be like, yeah, but this one is all about your VIPs and we're just going to extract the data that we need and then give you the actions or the recommendations or the triggers in order for you to like. When should, when do we reach out what should we give them what do they like it's right um that could that could be one um this is probably not so unique but i think i don't know if you've used these use people like this but like uh agencies for content that do it's like full service of like thumbnails and um editors and i like i don't know how hard that is to find like people that really know their shit about you know creating online content because it seems like every single person wants to like you know be a personality or brand right now um and so people that i mean a lot of these are like uni kids that know how to do this um but it's like exactly how to connect those middle yeah they'd be the middlemen for the uni which was like done for you so dfy yeah so like people are doing this e-com now honestly i think they're pretty scammy but they're like hey we will just hand you an e-commerce business that makes cash flow right it's like anytime someone promises as your passive income just like run away.

1:17:22Yeah. But like, that's what they're promising. And a lot of people, I mean, these companies that are promising this are making a ton of money. And one of the reasons why is it's tempting to, instead of just saying, here, we'll teach you Facebook ads, but now you got to go figure out the rest. What product? What's the supply chain? What's Google ads? They're like, we're just going to give you the whole thing. Yeah. Turkey. And so, you know, there's a version of that. Like there's video editors and content there. There's, you know, copywriters. But like, you kind of want the whole thing that's sort of like done for you package.

1:17:50Yeah, I think like a full service agency for all that sort of stuff might work out. I'm trying to think of what else. Let's see. This one's kind of related to like maybe what you did with Shepard. But so recently we had to expand to Japan, right? Mm-hmm. And that is like none of us speak Japanese. We don't know how to scale in that country. And so, well, what we had to do was like, first, let me research what other companies have done. And I remember reading, I think maybe it was like a Chamaf video when he was at Facebook. And he was like, we hired some MBAs and they flew over to Japan. They came back and, you know, a few months went by.

1:18:33We weren't growing. We're like, what's going on? We fired those MBAs. We got this like young woman from that was actually living in Japan. And within the first month, we were seeing growth. And we're like, wait, what? Okay, what are you doing that these MBA people haven't done? She's like, well, you know, on the Facebook profile, like, we don't care about your relationship status. We care about your blood type. And it's just like stuff like that that you would only know to do. Localization, not translation. And to find those people was like, yeah, it's pretty hard to do that. So maybe if there's some like agency where, like, so we hired uni kids that speak native, like fluent English so we can communicate with them.

1:19:09but also they're fluent in Japanese. And doing that, our growth has been like TEDx of just like, they know the market in terms of... By the way, none of them knew anything about gambling. They don't need to know that. We can teach them that. They just need to know what are the people like? How do you communicate with them? How do we localize all that content, do everything to cater to this market? And in certain markets, it's very important that you are respectful and you appear like you're not... You appear like you're not a foreign company that's trying to attract the customers. You appear like you're born out of that country.

1:19:44Right. So doing that whole process for me was very hard to find the right people that spoke English that also was native in Japanese and knew all that. So maybe if there was some Shepard-like agency to help you, okay, you're expanding into this country. Here's your growth assistants that are native to that language and can do all these things. That's cool. I like that. yeah there's two crazy things on that one if you look at the facebook growth chart like one of the key things for facebook was getting the site translated and localized across like and they did a they had to do some crazy wikipedia like shit to get the whole site translated because there's so many different i mean the facebook site was kind of complex at the time and so um i remember seeing that that was very impressive to me second is there's a sub version of this which is just to do business in certain places you have to establish an office yeah like china you can't do business there unless you have a local office you can't do business certain places can't pay you can't pay local people unless you have a thing or whatever and just that can take like a year yeah and so like i remember with twit when we're at twitch it's like oh yeah we're trying to put our servers here we're trying to do this here um we're using we had to use amazon's people to do international expansion because like twitch even as a multi-billion dollar company didn't have like that expertise in house right and they would be like yeah it's going to be 12 months and they'd be like we're finally live in whatever so-and-so country with our office.

1:21:07And I'm like, what? And they're like, this has been a year of effort. I mean, that's insane. That seems like, can we turn that to software somehow? Like the way that Stripe Atlas did for a company corporation? Like, is there a Stripe Atlas for the world in that way? I've got a little funny story about the localization stuff. So, like, everyone probably listening is probably thinking like, oh, but why don't you just get AI to translate your stuff? And it's not there to the point because we were using just ChatTBT, a bunch of guys that were non-Japanese speakers and chat to be here and you know we're talking to like very high value customers right and you know the ai hasn't really caught up in like tone or like certain like nuances and so apparently like you know we were talking to a vip like they were a kid like we're saying good boy and like stuff like that and yeah it was yeah i'm not sure people are into that shit yeah these people like and then yeah yeah definitely these people definitely were they were like they stopped playing with us yeah yeah like disrespecting people blah blah so um yeah so getting like native way yeah getting like well especially languages like that like getting like native people to know how to speak um yeah no way so what one of the projects i worked on when i was at twitch was like we were trying to grow like crazy in brazil like and so i was like all right luckily we had a group of people like there's four people in an office in brazil that like no one was even talking to really they were like yeah they were so at arm's length from headquarters and i was like hey i'm here and you guys are like my key people they're like oh awesome we have so many ideas like can you help us do them we're like yeah i was like what sorts of ideas and they were like well you know our uh everybody here uses youtube and so subscribe is like how you follow people on youtube but on twitch subscribe is you cost money so everybody here they open the twitch app and they click subscribe to follow the someone they find interesting it says pay five dollars right they're like dollars first of all five that's a week of groceries yeah and secondly this site you have to pay to watch people screw this they don't even know that it's free to watch right yeah it's like can you just change the text on that button and i was like oh damn how many more of those are there inside this app and another one was like we were like trying to come up with like this marketing campaigns we like marketing like our marketing experts like coming up with these ideas i asked the local team they were like hey can you buy the can you just give me your credit card i want to buy five iphones i was like iphones why he's like in brazil an iphone is like a gold bar this is like he's like we're just gonna give these away trust me you'll get like 20 000 people watching this stream i'm like what he's like this is a gold bar imagine somebody just giving out like golden bars he just kept saying that and he did it and it was just exactly that it was like all of a sudden was just number one most watched guy on twitch that day was right the guy giving away one iphone and he he milked it for like four hours he's like i'm not giving it away until we get like 30 ,000 people in here.

1:23:48Yeah. And he's like, and it worked. It was insane. Yeah. Stuff like that, that way that we find out like every week of like, oh shit, you guys actually do it this way. And by us, have you heard about what Mr. Beast does with this? Uh, is it like the dubbing videos? So first he exploded his growth by just being one of the few American YouTubers to like create his Brazil page, create his Philippines, create his Indonesia page. He created separate accounts for all those, localized them hired somebody who speaks the language and like you know like when we were over hanging out with a some lady walked in speaking portuguese and i was like like yeah what the hell's going on and he's like oh yeah she manages like my whole page for for brazil uh you know like you have to have somebody who speaks the language and knows it and then what they did was i was like so do you dub it he's like yeah we dub it but we hire like voice actors i'm like why don't you you can use ai i'm like excited to be like he's yeah yeah i'm sure you can but like he's like what we do is we go and we find the guy who did the spider-man voice in brazil and he does my dub for like pretty cheap and then every comment is holy shit it's spider-man yeah and like he's getting crazy engagement because they're like that's spider-man and he's like yeah it cost me like an extra five grand but like look at what it did to my page i think they turn that into like a agency where they like they try they do for other people as well like it's yeah they do the done for you thing they're like yeah if we did this for growth we should do this for 20 other youtubers and I was like, dude, of all your businesses, like Beastables or whatever, this is like the most underrated one because I'm like, this is genius.

1:25:18It's selling your sawdust, your byproduct, stuff you've already built in the house. You're just making it available for others. And you're Mr. Beast. If you just said, hey, every YouTuber, you can use what I use, they'll all sign up, right? So it's like instant customer acquisition, and they're like, dude, you don't even have a page in the Philippines. We're going to create it. we're going to run it for you, we get half or whatever. We get 30 to 50%. Right. So it's like, they don't just take like a monthly fee. They own like, you know, the majority, you know, like a huge chunk of that channel.

1:25:50I'm like, that's a really good model. Yeah. I wonder if anyone's done like a roll up of YouTube channels and brands or whatever. Like that seems like, it seems like every niche ends up being like, you get rolled up, you get rolled up and do that. So I don't know. I've heard of spotter. No, I haven't noticed. So they're kind of doing it. What they're doing is they go to the creators and they say, we'll buy your back catalog. right so they say we'll give you two million dollars a day you can invest that in your videos now to make better videos and they're like we can just see with adsense we'll make our money back in two years and then after that like forever we profit off your back catalog that's like the equivalent of like taylor swift selling exact masses whatever exactly so they this company is like i don't know raised a lot of money i don't know the key is underwriting it's like i don't know if they correctly underwrite these deals or not yeah but like mr b sold a bunch of his back channel, a back catalog, a bunch of other people have.

1:26:40So I think they've like either raised that a billion dollar valuation or close. Do a map for YouTube. I have a friend that I work with who manages Speed's, you know Speed the kit? He manages his IP, I don't know what to call it, like whenever there's a video of Speed going viral on YouTube or TikTok, whatever, they will claim it and then they make revenue off they'll run ads on it and I think very quickly like just Speed alone has generated like a million dollars so far and he's like we should just be doing this for like, not just speed, like all these different creators. Yeah. They'll put it down as, you know, create like a big business.

1:27:13So that might be also like another, like within that. Because the way that works is if your video, if your IP is being played by somebody else, you can claim it and either they take it down, or you get all the ad revenue. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think you should just do, yeah, do that. So, because they found like, they're like, just like, well, people create as like speed, like a lot of the eyeballs that is, on him is not on his videos. It's on the millions of clips and compilations and stuff. That's going unclaimed. There's easy money that you could be claiming and getting. That's probably another thing that people should look into.

1:27:54This is so good. This is great. These are fun ideas. I'm glad we did this, man. This is awesome. Sean, where should they follow you or what can they do? You can follow me, Twitter. I'm Ishan Haq, but the last two letters of my name is Cutoff, so it's just H-A-Q. So if you're S-H-A-A-N, I'm I-S-H-A-N-H-A-Q. That's my Twitter. Nobody knows what H is in America. H. Exactly. H. But yeah, follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Look me up. Put it in the description. Dude, amazing. I'm proud of you. This has been so amazing to - I've gotten the validation. yeah yeah you know i'll say it i i am super impressed i just i'm so glad you kind of you've you've taken you know the ball you just run with it and you're taking just such interesting shots on goal yeah and like whether any of these work or not right now is pretty secondary like yeah by the time you're 30 your scoreboard is going to be filled up you're going to have made all the successes you whether it was this or that i don't know which one yeah by the time you're 30 you're going to have it all done uh in terms of like you know the achievement side but you're also just going to have had so much fun.

1:29:05And like, you know, these lessons you're learning about like hiring these kids in Japan because of this. Those are the real lessons of business. And so I'm so glad you're getting them, man. This is so cool to see. Thanks. I appreciate it. I've got one last question for you. I remember you said, so I forgot like your one life goal was like, I think it was like you want to educate with a one percent of the world or whatever. What I said at the time was I want to be like for one percent of the world, I want to be their favorite teacher. Yeah. Like, you know, which was at the time, I think like 60 million people or something like that.

1:29:36I was like, if, if 60 million people thought like, cause like for me, I'm like, Oh, like I learned so much from Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss or Naval or these people. Like, I'd love to just be that for, for people. I think that's like, yeah, I know what they kind of have done for me. That'd be so cool if I was at for other people that I think that would be like the highest calling for me. Yeah. yeah and do you think so is that a is that still the case and then be like do you still want to do that and be uh like what do you think will be the what do you think will be like the avenue that way you achieve that like is it is it because you're already in the ears of you know all these people whatever those stats are now yeah a very different so what the stats are yeah but um do you think you'll be podcasting it's not actually that goal that goal i think was arbitrary like who cares if it's 16 who cares if it's one percent it was ambitious just like it sounded good but i'm like i'm only need to say this to myself like i don't i need to believe it for myself what this what this actually means and that's not something i like needed to die to do you know like i didn't like feel like it was do or die to do be to be able to pull that off it was something that like sounded better than what i really meant it was also kind of virtue signaling like you know um i don't even know if like teacher is the right word but i guess the thing that I think about now is almost like the D, I stripped the ambition out of that and just made it really simple but more true for me, which was I want to be somebody that if I was 21, I would look up to this person.

1:31:07I'd be like, that is what I want to be. That guy's awesome. And that's a combination of things. So for example, part of it is making content, being out there. Otherwise, I wouldn't have even known that this guy existed. Part of it is do cool shit so that stuff that like I respect, or I think it's cool in some way. Some of it is like, build a cool business. Some of it's like, you know, this outcast conference. Like, that's cool. I'm like, I like his reasoning behind that. I like that he went and did it. Or like, you know, you know, just giving somebody, you know, a bunch of money because you believe in them and like my version of philanthropy.

1:31:42It's not like donating to the cause and going and sitting on the board of some nonprofit. But like, if you see somebody who's got a dream, like fund it and like make that happen. So I want to do cool shit that like, I would respect. and the last part is the way you come across like i i know that my favorite people were charismatic storytellers they were funny they were likable they didn't feel like they were bullshitting you they had moments where they were honest and like they could have just not shared that or they could have said a sanitized version but they chose to just be real so i'm like those became my like scoreboard is like would i at age 18 to 24 like would i have thought this guy's the man and like i know even at that time i was like if i saw someone that was awesome like elon musk oh he's amazing i remember watching some documentary about him on the plane before he even started like uh tesla i think it was like a long time ago and i remember thinking this guy's awesome but he had like had four marriages at that point i was like that's not winning to me yeah i like that he's an outlier in this one domain but like i didn't want to replicate these other three so like you know to me i'm like the thing i would have respected is somebody who's like just like they're a really great dad like for example one of the things i want to do instead of instead of doing another business or write a check is like i want to go coach like a high school basketball team like mighty ducks style for a year or two years or something like that yeah and i'm if i remember if i had if old me if young me had heard that some guy was just some rich guy was doing that yeah i would have been like i don't care if he's not the richest or most successful, that guy's awesome.

1:33:16And so I just kind of want to be the person like, what's that quote? Be who you needed when you were younger? Not needed, but be who you would have admired when you were younger. And that's the goal. Not the exact goal I had before. Which I don't know if it's better or worse, but it's more true for me. I think you'll say at some point you're like, I think you went to LA or something, you met a bunch of rich people. At this point now, I've met a bunch of billionaires and other cool people. And for the most part, a lot of rich people are miserable. And like we mentioned before about the kids that stay in their room and build these businesses, they lack other components of life.

1:33:54And I see that reflected throughout all these people that are, yeah, they've made a bunch of money or they've done this one cool thing, but they've neglected every other part of their life. And it's like, okay, I wouldn't trade. I wouldn't want to be in those shoes. it's similar to what the I forgot who it was but some guy talked to the Instacart CEO and he was like uh are you how old are you and he was like I'm 33 and he's like I would be and this guy's worth billions of dollars like I'll do anything to be 33 again uh like he would trade trade all this money so it's like I see that a lot more now and you know I'm hopefully maturing because before I was like yeah I just want to get all this and get the money and stuff like that um but yeah I something cool and one thing that one of the probably the most important thing not important but like effective things that i love working under you um was i mean everybody maybe it was maybe you're talking to sully or sully taught you this was like aggression like just being like aggressive in like getting getting things done and what you want like i think most people don't don't do that like they don't follow up or you know they don't they don't be annoyed like they don't try to be annoying um when i when i started applying that i was like okay things are moving way, way, way faster.

1:35:07Yeah, I remember probably like, because I used to kind of, you were like my dear diary. It's like I'd come home and I'd be like, I don't even know what time it was your time. I'd be like, 3 a.m. Yeah, 3 a.m. And I'd be like, hey, I'm ready to work. And like, I'd be like, I met this guy or I noticed this thing and I would like kind of like use you as my sounding board to like play some of these lessons back. Yeah. So it's cool to hear what like stuck. But yeah, that idea of like intensity is the strategy, meaning like, yeah, this guy's not smarter than me. He's not. more knowledgeable to me about this.

1:35:37He's not like, there's no special aura around this person. What is it that's made this person so successful? And what, what do I, what's the difference between me and them? And I just noticed, I was like, oh, he doesn't have these like imaginary walls where it's like, you stop here. Right. It's just like, no, like, okay, we want to do this. Like, I remember one time we wanted to do a deal. The guy who, we want to invest in this company. And he was like, dude, I was kind of on the fence. And he was like, what if we just wire him the money? And I was like,$2 million. And he's like, he's like yeah like let's wire him the money he's the honest guy like we met the guy he's like not like a crook yeah um he's like let's just wire him the money and then like i feel like that'll tip the scale once the money's in his bank account he's not gonna like want to like wire it back and i was like this guy's insane and like we had another moment like that where we were working on a one of the founders was like oh i really need to raise this round they're telling us this urgency i really got to do this we're running out of money uh the pitches are not going well the first few pitches didn't go well can you guys help we're like yeah we can help we can help right now sounded like an emergency oh well we got a a thing and we're like you got a thing you just said this is like so important okay whenever you can they get on they get on a call with us we go through the deck before we we said send the deck in advance there's like 40 minutes before the call what do most people do 40 minutes before they call this we'll talk about it in 40 minutes yeah no no no so he was like by the time the call happened he'd already emailed back like slides 9 through 13 suck eliminate them slide 4 is backwards put it in slide 1 slide 1 needs to say this had already given them the full first round of feedback yeah they were like what the hell so they were like looking at it and we're like cool let's just make these changes right now and they're like no no we don't want we want to be respectful of your time he's like the thing that's respectful of my time is like showing that you're like full force going for this not that you're not going to use my time I'm here to help but like let's do the thing yeah you want to make this awesome let's make it awesome so they start working on it and they're like okay we we know what we need to do next because we need to go pull some data do whatever and um so we'll check back in with you whenever he's like uh you know it was like noon he was like cool like let's check in at 6 p.m today and they're like two calls in a day and even i was like two calls in a day i've never done that with somebody yeah yeah have you ever scheduled two calls in one day with somebody like it never happens it's not that it's so crazy it's not like running into a burning building but it's kind of the business equivalent of running into it's like whoa that's unusual that's like a highly intense way to do this yeah and you could tell they were kind of shipped by it and then they did it and at 6 p.m it was like still not not like exactly where we needed it to be or we realized something and we're like cool nine and tomorrow let's do it again by the third day we were like this deck is in great shape but these guys were like worn out yeah and so he was like dude i'm just getting warmed up this isn't great this is like what i live for is find the thing and laser are in and just go for it and like what who says we can't meet twice in a day who says that they said no to the first proposal well let's what if you know there is some number they'll do this at what's that number and like you know he'll just think about it differently yeah that stuck with me i'm glad that kind of that idea stuck with you i say it out loud so that somebody out there listening will be realized like yo my intensity knob is stuck at six yeah like 10 isn't more hours it's just like more focus and it's more intensity at the main issue and not self-limiting by fake imaginary walls that don't exist yeah yeah you gotta bring the energy no small boy stuff there we go alright that's it that's the pod

1:39:31bag. Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love. I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And you know, as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the nineties, you're operating like you're in the nineties. And trust me, I've been there clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:40:02If 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, and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC. Thank you.