#40 - Zach Yadegari, Blake Anderson, Alex Slater, & Connor McLaren

44:51Yeah, exactly. So Steve Jobs did that to make money before Apple. And I think that this is kind of all how all of us approach entrepreneurship too, which is like, you can pursue the stepping stone path where you work on progressively harder things as you mature and increase your skill and knowledge or general skills and knowledge. so yeah i think that yeah and i think bootstrapping is very conducive to that when you raise venture capital it there's somewhat of an expectation uh an implicit agreement that you are going to pursue a decabillion dollar outcome um which once again like not knocking anybody for pursuing it there there are a ton of upsides that come from it but uh yeah i think that i think that's how we view it I honestly think it's bad that that's the default because most people think the only way to even get started in entrepreneurship is to raise money.

45:47And that's a fallacy. Yeah. And even on the flip side, within bootstrapping, I think people often look at it as like the only way to bootstrap is to be an indie hacker. Right. And to not build teams. Also to be technical. I think everyone, like when Quitter launched, everyone thought it was just Alex. When Calier launched, I don't know if you were public about it, but if it was just Zach. Yeah, I had a little bit of distribution, so people did kind of know. But no one realizes that there's like massive teams behind, not massive, but there's teams behind us working together. And you think it's just a solo person.

46:19Just a few months ago, I saw some posts about how we had four employees. I'm like, no, we have 30 something. Yeah, the breakdown of our team is interesting because, I mean, it's 30 people total. It's more than 30, but half of those are actually virtual assistants. And so the other half of those are like people on, I guess, more specialized roles. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day. I think the like before I hired someone as a full time employee, I was like, yeah, you know, one person, one billion dollar company or whatever. And then I hired someone and I watched the like productivity and everything that we can do to skyrocket overnight.

46:54And I was like, holy shit, the whole solo thing is like a complete sigh up. Yeah, like there's maybe it works for some people, but for most businesses, you should try to find cracked individuals and hire them. I think one of my favorite quotes, I think it was Richard Branson said it, but it was along the lines of find really talented people and get out of their way. Give them the resources to succeed and get the fuck out of the way because your biases and how you think it should be run will stunt growth and stunt what you actually hired them to do. I think you do embody that as well. I see you're very good at identifying the right person and just being like, that is not my fucking domain.

47:28You know, like when you have 25 beers and you don't are able to code. I trust him. I trust him. So I'd be I'd be curious, like what are individually you have this understanding that you're not going to be the best that you can be at every single facet of the business? What are the things that you just know through growing these these businesses over the last few years or like not your strong points? And what should you just outsource versus what you should you be like the only person that's making that decision? You're the best guy to do it. i i am definitely a believer in knowing how to do almost everything but not necessarily being the best um and so like i know connor uh you know you can't code but outside of that i think every one of us here we can code design and market right we're all generally capable which makes it much easier to hire and and identify the right people like i i know a lot of people that have zero technical knowledge and they just fucking consistently hire terrible engineers because they don't know the difference between a bad good and great engineer and that applies to marketing and design it's also um i can't code at all but while i'm here and after we launch i'm more bandwidth i do want to spend a week and just dive into everything because i'm confident enough i can learn it enough just to like whip up mvps like it's not hard yeah no you could definitely it's not you could probably you could probably design before 10x engineer in one week you think yeah if you could do that 100 i mean you'll get clueless founding engineer get a fucking job in meta in a week like three million dollars you think i mean four or five if you just watch the course you'll learn a lot about development and design yeah because you taught it yeah you have to buy the course actually it's we all should buy it we all should actually pay to be in yeah that will we can actually in PsyOp revenue we can just gift the course to our team members and just make them super correct oh$5 ,000 we give people credits to purchase and we claim it as revenue I love that idea I mean but you guys don't even have any investors so it's just PsyOphing yourself no it's PsyOphing social media oh okay we made fucking million dollars first day it's all credits it's all fucking I mean this is just I mean big tech companies do do actually do this what yeah that usually works when it's like private.

49:52And then I don't know about if we say it on a podcast. Is this Cal AI strategy? Just send credit? Yeah, this is actually Cal AI. All of our error is fake. It's all actually, you look at the revenue breakdown. It's like, you know, 36 plus mil a year. It's like 35 mil is just B2B sales to a, you know, entity where we just send 35 mil. Anderson Consulting and Adegard Consulting. We just fucking, is literally just churning the same$5 ,000 back and forth. we don't actually have any cash really it's 5k just yeah okay so you mentioned he's joking he's joking yeah yeah he's not kidding guys i've seen it can i is fake it's not even real quitter quitter got signed into the thing now we're now we're now recycling cash have you guys ever even downloaded cali x it's not actually a real app if you look it up on the app store will not come up yeah if you download cali i and try to pay it literally won't even work so it's just an onboard it's literally just do the onboarding and then try to pay like see if you can actually sign up for the free trial it literally has to give your face on your face it literally won't even work try it try it you'll see try it right pause the podcast we'll wait we'll wait actually yeah all right 60 second intermission right now just pause now on pause all right okay so going back to the point where you're talking about like Elon sleeping on the factory floor, you know, this is not a hardware company.

51:19But there is this idea of like, there are just fires, you know, at some point, one day, there's some random fire. And then the next day, there's a different random fire. How do you think about basically moving in between each fire and like systematically deleting them? Are you talking about a mafia, Cal AI? Both, just generally. Well, it was actually Alex Hermosey, who said this once on one of his podcasts. And I strongly agree with it, that their simplicity within business is really key. If you look at apps, for example, there are only really three things, like Cal AI hard paywall apps, that truly matter.

51:57It's one, getting people to download. Two is converting the downloads. And then three is getting them to stay. So essentially the marketing, the retention, and the conversion rate, or the top of funnel retention conversion rate. And so there are always going to be all these files, things that break UI bugs, bugs within data syncing of accounts. And sometimes you have to let the little fires burn in order to attack the bigger problems. You may want to go extinguish all these small fires because they're easy to do. They're these little things. And, you know, you might think you might go crazy, think they're adding up and it's going to destroy my business.

52:37But it's really just the main you need to figure out for your business model. It's generally the same for most. What are the two or three things that matter? And then it's the Prito distribution. I would spend pretty much 80 percent of time on those 20 percent of time on anything else. I don't think I can emphasize that enough. Like on tech Twitter and in the indie hacker world specifically, you see it all the time. these dudes like optimizing the fuck out of their aso and they're like tiny little design tweaks and whatnot and yet they're at 400 mrr and i mean i remember launching riz gpt the first the first successful app that i built and it was a complete you're not mr miyagi there's two i just duplicated i'm trying to like get over it so i don't hit the cookie okay so So launching RizGPT and it was a shit show.

53:35We didn't have reviews, no notifications. The name of the app when you downloaded it was RizGPT-production. The API keys were in the front end. It was a mess. And yet we hit 80K MRR within three days. And I remember people doing case studies on it. And everyone's freaking the fuck out. They're like, there's no way they're actually doing this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. and to zach's point it's like um i think it applies to both the things that you spend your time towards in terms of building and then also the fires that you extinguish it's like identify the core uh components of the business getting people to download converting them making sure that they have a good experience and that they stay and um everything outside of that you kind of kind of wait i think with life too right like us living together there's a lot of things that pop up we have to take care with the house and do this and do that and i think everyone has a mental priorities list and you just trust each other is going to get it done um with quitter right now we're in a position of hiring um to try to find the right talent but it helps when you have a good team that can handle the fires for you and so you can handle some of the larger things but generally speaking i'm just a big believer of doing it now yeah um i think that's something that the whole house has kind of realized the past week of just like get the shit done now and don't put it off in a week and then have it keep being a little issue.

54:57Bias towards action. Yeah. I'd be curious. So when you first start building the app, you know, you have the like API keys on the front and everyone can see them. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of like small things that are just like bad, but you, you know, shipping faster equals you actually have a product that has revenue and all this stuff. In your mind, you know, I know the critical path probably changes over time as to like what are the key things that we need to do. And you're probably able to ship faster with more bugs at the very beginning than you are, you know, when you have 3 million or 300 million users.

55:29So how has that kind of shifted in your guys's mind from the start where it's just shipping to now it's more like you want to make sure it's locked in? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the sort of principles that you apply when you're a small scrappy team of, you know, like, not hyper fixating on the small little issues do become real concerns as you scale and it's kind of funny it's like the same way that as you grow up you know um when you're a teenager maybe you people tend to like demonize their parents they're like oh they're all these fucking rules blah blah and as you get older you start to understand them and i think the same thing kind of applies to scaling a business which is early on you kind of demonize all these big business principles and then as your company grows you begin to understand them a little bit more and and understand the importance of of you know running a tight ship

56:29i agree with him right and so for right now when you like wake up in the morning what is the critical path for your guys's different companies for app mafia specifically it's been getting the course done so we're almost back end of it front end of it yeah this is going to change a lot like right now we're doing a lot of the groundwork just setting the systems up yeah long term the vision is that our lifestyles will that we will be able to just live and then we have people around us filming making the content happen we help with ideation and we are still working on improving everything optimizing everything but generally day to day if the systems are built properly we won't need to think all the time necessarily about about operations and more just about how can we be entertaining how can and our lives are naturally entertaining i mean we're all young making millions of dollars driving supercars living in a mansion throwing parties so that's intrinsically things that people like watching roll the clip roll the clip um i think yeah to zach's point it's just we have the ability to inspire people and change the narrative online or like you have to go raise millions of dollars you need to go down the econ path of the drop shipping path and like buy this course when like you can go bootstrap a software and build a 10k a month quit your nine to five give yourself the freedom to go think of bigger better ideas and meet the right people doing it and i think at the end of the day the mafia's whole goal is to like build a giant community and inspire and seed and help these men and women build a better life for themselves i will say though i think a very a core principle that we followed at cali i they follow quitter and we're following it at mafia is this whole idea of speed everything we do is to be done incredibly quickly and if it's not then you'll just slowly fall behind on everything and You won't get things done.

58:24You won't build the momentum that you need to hit the escape velocity. I actually want to say with you guys, I mean, you heard that we were launching tomorrow and you were like, OK, we're going to film this today. We're going to edit this all up and we'll be able to get it up tomorrow. And like at the time, I was like, OK, cool. It's just going to be like a camera or two recording. But now, like seeing all the high quality production you guys have, it's going to take you a long time. And it's this dedication that's really required to, I think, build anything great. Yeah, we're not sleeping tonight.

58:52we're going we're going straight home editing and then i'm going to be watching it and like making sure every single fucking frame is locked in um good stuff yeah i i would be kind of curious so like i am constantly running through like two main things or actually three main things through my mind one i want to be shipping more faster two i want to be improving quality and then three i'm like why can't we do it today why can't we do like you know someone says can you do a call next week i'm like why not you know just call me right now you know or just don't call me i fucking hate that yeah i hate the like oh we're gonna pencil in a time next week i'm like you know call me this afternoon or like even if it's next week i'll just be like call me at some point you know find the time i don't i hate the like scheduling into the calendar i can't take a call literally on the plane they won't like let it through the wi-fi but like as soon as i land just fucking pick up the phone um yeah but how do you guys how do you guys think about basically constantly forcing the timelines to go faster so that you know the iteration loops are slower or smaller I think we actually went through this.

59:50In the beginning, in the first two weeks here, we got very caught up in like moving in and the Miami lifestyle and having fun. And we didn't have deadlines on things. And we kind of sit down and be like, dude, what the fuck are we doing? Like, do we want to build this thing to the best of its ability and lock the fuck in and work quickly, which we all can do? Or do we want to get distracted by being in Miami and potentially fuck this up? And so I think we had to put deadlines on getting the course material done, getting the backend done, making sure the launch video is done. We're also being perfectionists.

1:00:17yeah that's another one just shipping fast i think another thing was like um we spent a lot of money on a launch video and it didn't work out while we wanted it to and so we then were like all right what do we do we figure this out scrapped it what 25 35k lost 30 down the drain did it saw the video we said that sucks we're not it bounced back and now we have another one cooking up for tomorrow that we're we're happy with so i've actually had that situation like more recently like if it's not absolutely insane and way better than i've ever done i'm not really yeah i don't care how much money time whatever we put into it if it's not good we'll just kill it and then by the same token um and as well as in line with your question about speed i dude i think honestly one of the reasons that people don't move quickly enough is oftentimes a lack of confidence in that um constantly deliberating back and forth and worried about how something's going to be perceived and whether it's going to go well or not go well and and honestly i think taking life like not super seriously and just fucking doing things and seeing what sticks and accepting that at times you're going to embarrass yourself and you're going to do you're going to break shit within your business but that the more decisions you make the the more data you get and the stronger your intuition grows over time if you do nothing your intuition and and your your mental models are never going to form right they'll be completely blank like this podcast honestly it was like the first podcast we're doing like so casually i feel like yeah yeah bouncing back and forth between scaling businesses photosynthesis partying girls your technical ability yeah very much not there 25 beers yeah you had like 30 minutes beat me man no honestly what what do you think we actually did like 15 20 really that many dude i was just drinking fucking tequila i had at least six here and then like four plus shots at the bar and then multiple tequila sodas so i i i think of both confidence i mean arrogance is one thing but confidence is something that you did you gotta hear alex's fake until you make it story all right go for it oh yeah this is fucking bro tell them the whole thing like how we met what you all the lies bro 100 mil no i don't know yeah i like that one too i okay so i guess to begin my story i try to raise 100 million pre-seed to build a super social app to take on wechat but bring it to the u.s um and then yeah anyways fast forward a few years that was just that was just a mark you want to compete against elon yeah this was before he bought twitter so and that's so he you actually had the idea first yeah i did and there were notes in my phone this is crazy there were notes in my phone screenshotting elon talking about buying twitter and then i'm writing i need to compete with this guy like how old is this time like 16 16 years are you 18 now uh 19 now 19 okay dude fast forward yeah fast forward to miami and you know we've I'll skip the story but we met Ryan made a hotel I remember telling him you know I'm a I'm a teal fellow he snuck into the hotel by the way it was not I'm a teal fellow yeah he was like no way bro like one percent acceptance rate what are you doing with money and I'm like yeah yeah well I'm just like living doing stuff with it how much money did you have in your bank at this time maybe$250 it was like that's you lied about being a teal yeah yeah at the time at the time to impresses yeah bro i i built an unblocked gaming website and it was making like sixty thousand dollars a year at this point and so when he he just randomly we met him in miami at a hotel it was like a resort slash hotel we were at the pool i was with a few of my friends we were leaving to go get dinner he comes up to us i don't even know what he says but yeah yo what's up um and i know sometimes i'm just in a very spontaneous mood so i was like yo you want to come get dinner with us random kid never met him before and he came with us we went to a steakhouse smith and walensky's in miami great steakhouse we should go back there honestly full circle moment 100 but we go and in the uber i'm telling him about my project and he's telling me like yo i'm building apps too i'm like mind blown like i've never met someone else that's in the entrepreneurial world and this was before i ever got on twitter so i actually thought i was like isolated in this bubble i was the only entrepreneur the only guy that can do it was it you guys went to room 40 no fuck you're gonna room 40 he's nuts in a podcast all right back to this okay all right so we were in the uber just talking we were just talking and he started telling me about his app and then i don't even know why he said this because it was unnecessary but he lied and said he was a teal fellow I asked if he was in college he was like no I'm traveling I'm actually a teal fellow and I I wanted to apply to that so I was like no fucking way I was like so impressed by him and I started asking him all these questions about his life and he was just giving me all these non-answers not really answering anything but like I just thought he was this mysterious like international man of mystery or something James Bond we went to the dinner we had the whole thing he's just a charlatan was like entire time bro I found out later and then And so we met.

1:05:40It was cool. We like spoke the whole night. And then fast forward like two months, he was going to San Francisco for this startup accelerator called OnDeck. And we stayed in touch. He was like, yo, I'm doing this. You should apply. So I applied. I did it. I got in and we flew out together. Well, we stayed in the same hacker house, actually. Oh, shit. Not hacker house, bro. Oh my god. So we went and this whole time I was thinking he's a teal fellow. I kept saying, I introduced him to people as a teal fellow. Some people are just like, what the fuck are you talking about? But then I slowly started piecing together that he wasn't a teal fellow because I just, I don't know what it was.

1:06:27When he kept, like, clues started coming in. I learned he wasn't. That's when Cal AI actually started. That's when we launched that same weekend of the Startup Excel. There is when we launched Cal AI. Luckily, like, he was a cool guy and other things. So I didn't just like block him for being a liar or anything. How did you admit it? Bro, he never admitted it. I think I just like... I actually am still told. You are still told. I actually am still told. Funny story actually. Oh, dude, I remember now. No, bro. Okay. So I posted something on Twitter. I fucked it. It was one of my earliest posts.

1:06:58It was a picture of me and him at the hotel. You guys could find us. And it was like, I think everything happens for a reason. I just met this guy. He's a teal fellow. He builds apps. And then a few weeks later, I was like asking him about the Teal Fellowship. He sent me a fake email that he created saying that he got removed from Teal Fellowship because there was something posted publicly online. And I felt so bad. I thought I got this guy kicked out of the Teal Fellowship, bro. Hey, moral of the story here is you need to manipulate people to become friends with Teal Fellowship. That is why I'm here today.

1:07:32The white version of Drake. If I didn't lie, who knows where I'd be. But dude, what do you like? That's why you always lie. Do you believe in fake it so you mentioned? Because... No, no, no. No, no, no. But I feel like some level of... The girls were lying, but they were fake it till they met you. Yeah, you're attracting girls from girlfriends. Some level of delusion is an important prerequisite to greatness because every vision is just a delusion. So, you know... Be delusional. If you are convinced yourself... That you're a teal fellow, you'll become a teal fellow. Just go up to random people whenever you meet them, if they're successful, Tell me you're a fucking Teal fellow Walk up to Peter Teal, tell me you're a Teal fellow You know what?

1:08:09Zach sent me his Teal fellowship application He asked me to review it And said, is this good? And I finally remember it saying So what motivates you? That was one of the questions What drives you? What is something tangible that you want? That was the question He wrote, I want to be driving a supercar And this and that And I was like, this is terrible Teal won't accept this like you need to change this use the 100k for a down payment on a lamp i actually know i know someone that just dropped the entire 100k on like a house he just like took it that's fine you can spend it on anything you know someone now it's 200k so you can actually buy an entire supercar we know someone that is a teal fellow and use the money to get gay strippers to dance on them.

1:08:58Gay strippers? You know who you are. You know who you are. Name drop, bro. Name drop. Name drop. Nick Shevchenko. That's right. That kid was talking shit on Zach when I first met him, no lie. I was like, you know, that's my fucking co-founder. Probably why he hired gay strippers. is he even gay he's a shadow of roy i don't know he's a shadow of roy all he does is roy's not gay no but roy roy did the stripping dog i love roy yeah around my podcast was like dude i want to be like fucking gang is con yeah yeah roy talking about how he wants to have like i think i don't think he said this on my podcast 40 actually no i think yeah but he has told me that he wants to um He wants to have many children He wants to have a fucking armada He told me he wants to marry some rice Asian wife A rice farm He's going to fucking fly in and try to scoop her out of there What?

1:10:02Yeah, he said he was the purest woman ever But if he doesn't get that He's Korean He's probably Korean He's Genghis Khan So he's Mongolia There's another podcast that we recorded probably like three or four days ago. And we thought that like we had to cut one section because it was way too like off the chain. And I think we're just going to put it back in. And then after that, yeah, I don't think there's any issue with it. No, we got to leave it all. Whatever. No cuts. Dude called me. He said, leave it in, coward. It's like an end podcast. I was like, I don't know. I always say the word pussy, but.

1:10:40Listen, I was on a fucking podcast two days ago talking about doing cocaine, right? It's like, you know, it can always get worse. That's crazy. And then what someone told you, like, oh, no, yeah, Richie, right? And he was like, oh, you're not going to be able to raise money from VC. I was like, dude, I don't fucking care. Well, listen, I don't advocate for drugs. I don't actually often do drugs, very, very rarely, and I would never encourage people to do it. But, you know, call a spade a spade. I did that shit. Yo, I actually think, and this is important for the viewers to understand, is that I used to hear a lot of things, online advice, how successful people made their money, made their fortunes, built their businesses.

1:11:18But something I've learned partially from just meeting these people in person is that everyone's story contradicts another person's story. For every example of what worked, there's a counterexample to that of someone doing the complete opposite of it working. The fake it till you make it worked for Alex, but there are plenty of stories where people faked it till they ended up in jail. Faked it till they ended up in jail. And so I think that pretty much everything with what you hear, what you learn from people is you shouldn't I don't think you there are any really universal rules that work in any space or industry the only things are really the laws of physics and that's that's it generally speaking I mean just lean into your uh your attributes right who are you as a person what are you good at what are you not good at and I think we're all here because we lean into who we are and we have different stories but now we're sitting at the table together i think everyone should study like the principles of complex systems to be honest because even just an elementary understanding of complex systems will lead you to the conclusion that well humans are complex systems and uh you know it's not we aren't like these sort of we don't exist on like single dimension optimization curves where you can kind of just pick the correct set of actions and achieve the highest outcome right and so i think given the unique nature of every individual um there will be different emergent behavior from the the set of actions that you take so like zach says like two different people can take the exact same out actions and have completely vastly different different results and it's super interesting i actually heard two founders speak about this is that there are all of these stories where companies were on the brink of death, but then they made it through.

1:13:04They succeeded. And then everyone looks at that and they glorify those stories. They think this is what makes a great startup. This is what it takes. It takes almost dying startup. And they made all the right moves because they were successful in the end. But there are also so many stories of startups that got to that exact same point, were in the same position, they were on the brink of death, then they actually did die. And it's not necessarily that they did anything wrong. It's just that there were multiple factors at play and if the environment around them was slightly different it would have worked out they would have went from the brink of death to massively succeeding but the factors just weren't in their favor it's funny because people think of like elon as this guy that like doesn't fuck up or he's like this god tier business builder but the reality is like he's been quoted as saying that tesla almost went bankrupt a number of times spacex almost went bankrupt a number of times.

1:13:55And I think many of like, many of the reasons, like even the fake it tell you make it thing. There was like a board meeting where they were deciding, you know, he was, it was like an investor meeting, like three days from Tesla's, you know, they couldn't make payroll, payroll in like 2008 or nine. Um, and everyone in the meeting said that they didn't want to invest. And then he said, basically he'd do the entire round, even though he had no money in his bank account, he bluffed the entire thing. And the dynamic in the room Christmas too. Yeah. Yeah. It was like the environment in the room shifted.

1:14:25So suddenly it was like, oh, well, if you're actually going to make this investment and the company is going to survive, suddenly we do want to invest. Interesting. Walter Isaacson wrote the biography on both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. Spent multiple years shadowing both of them. He's written biographies on some of the most successful people throughout history. He was a mentor and professor of mine at Tulane. And it is super cool to see firsthand that like one of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me was something along the lines of like, most advice is bullshit. Do things, lean into what works, take risk.

1:15:01Right. It's like very high level, very, very basic, but it's very true. It's like they're very, I mean, they're, like we were just saying, founders of completely different archetypes that are able to achieve insane levels of success. And especially online, like it's very easy to remove nuance and just take like three examples of founders with a similar archetype and be like, this is what you need to do to succeed. completely ignoring all the people that exist outside of that whether it be founder personality traits uh business strategic decisions uh life orientation um or or any any other factor what happened to your eye by the way oh yeah i stepped on fucking glass really it's just everywhere you said i cleaned it up there might be a bit but all right all right i'll tell this story i'll tell i I got two stories I guess here hey should I tell them go for it yeah we can always like I just yeah I won we'll keep them we show the body a good face show the body that's outside and the body um it's not trying to be cool guys okay I won I just slipped and I hit my face on the floor we threw a party it was wet outside he slipped on the granite and then second one I um I accidentally broke up accidentally broke a glass as an accidentally uh right in front of me he threw it in the air this is being taken out of context i was there is there is an objective flip it there was an objective objective failed landed on the granite and i i picked up most of it you guys should see the damage all right well you should see how much that i picked up all right yeah yeah yeah why are you attacking me go back to chickpea what's going on what is your reaction to that also wait what is your thought process of like you're with the girl last night at the bar it was going great and you're like i'm gonna drop her off home she's coming tomorrow like for the pregame so being a kind individual but she's she's longer she's long term like oh she's long term she's chick i don't know his boyfriend are you sure i didn't ask wait did i ask we're fine it is crazy that like that is something that you guys have to do i think i told zach this morning like wait till next week the distance is gonna start causing friction to the point where like well it's true it's true think about it they're living completely separate lives i just want to make this clear as much as we make jokes we are very kind people and we respect everybody.

1:17:40Alex is winking at me right now. I don't know what he's doing that for. We're very kind individuals. We take care of everyone around us. We fuck around by the end of the day. We want to make sure everyone's doing a good job. What do you mean by that? We fuck around? What do you mean by that? What I mean is that we like to have a good time and joke and be lighthearted and I will bust Blake's balls and he will bust my balls. Whoa! Get cracked. I will say, though, that just like we look at consumer apps, like retention, conversion rate churn, and you can basically apply that to anything. And what Alex was saying about the friction is that these girls and their boyfriends are going to have pretty bad retention because of the distance.

1:18:16That's true. The onboarding experience has to be rough. Because the custom plan is not matching. I don't know what you meant by that one, but okay. Because your brain's not big enough. Your brain? Yeah, because think about it. No, think about it. Alex, the size matter. The size matter? No, no, no. The size matter? I'll speak from experience because I recorded this segment last night. During the onboarding. What do you record? during the onboarding we're talking about design and every single question is super personal so you feel like that's being tailored towards you right and at the end of it hear me out okay so you build them the custom plan right why are you air quoting well do you now build no i do not build do you build it yeah we do bro we give them a calorie plan all right well there is no custom plan what's the custom all right anyways back to the topic so because they're answering questions it feels like apps like for them they're like okay this is what's happening in my life this is my goals the apps being built around me okay correct so when it comes to a partner

1:19:23so you're saying that if you ask a girl the right questions you can build a custom i'm gonna get with you boyfriend plan because I'm going to do a boyfriend, therefore. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Try to tie it up. Try to tie it up. Let's see this. So the questions make the app relate to your life. Photos in. So you're like, okay, this is like the perfect app for me. And this is my custom plan. But, you know, give it two weeks at UM, the custom plan is going to be different because your boyfriend's wanting to watch your friend's life. And because it's less relatable and personal, you're like, hey, I don't think I'm going to buy this subscription anymore.

1:19:59I might just cancel it or refund it. and find another app that's going to refund the subscriptions some people have subscriptions to multiple apps at a time as well and they might do a free trial while they're also subscribed to a competitor they might do that

1:20:18see I tied it up anyone who's still watching this please rate that I think the retention on this is actually going to be really good I'm just curious what led you to ask us these questions about women and drugs yeah why and this has been pretty unprofessional you know i'm looking down my list of questions i don't see so many questions about but the conversation what what have you actually done what so i don't even do so initially i did questions i do like 40 out of 40 hours of research for a pod and i turned out like i just heard the story so many times i'd listen like 20 different pods for one interview and it just became like by the time I was actually interviewing them, I think to myself, everyone already knows this stuff.

1:21:01And so it doesn't, like it's not a good podcast. So I'm doing like less research, but way more just like, what am I personally interested in? Fuck whatever is normal or what should be asked. And I'm just like 100 % going all in. And then anytime you guys start talking, I'm like, that's a thread. Go there. My stuff is, what the fuck is that mafia? Creating a super tight knit community of killers. I'm reading them right now. He's lying. How many girls have you slept with this week? Making a ton of money in apps and then self-funding future businesses. How do you relate apps to women and subscription plans?

1:21:33What does a free trial look like for women that try to date Alex Slade? What is Only Mafia? What is Calorie Boy on Yik Yak? Oh my gosh, dude. Can I show you this? I'm getting like, bro, I don't know if you'd call it flamed or what. No, they're just talking about you. Yeah, sure. so in a cup to you bro okay people have been commenting yik yak is an anonymous platform where you could make comments on college campuses and dude people are saying some crazy stuff about you i'm sorry zach hey they posted this picture jesus christ um do you want us to put it up on the screen yeah yeah all right guy looking for calories i don't know average calorie tracker guy party and it's like the eyes wide shot cult party wait did you guys see that the 18 year old boy got a lambo delivered to campus heard the guy in the passenger seat blows him well crazy we support homosexuality we went yeah we went from hard tech nuclear reactors and cloud seating to whatever the fuck this is it's gonna be great this is mafia mafia mafia we gotta do this weekly we gotta just have a setup where we just riff podcast it'll be fun this is this is great um yeah all right uh let's actually let's actually talk about this um so you're scaling the the like short-term goal is you're building all these businesses where you can just basically hyper scale them through your own cash and like in reinvesting the dollars that you make at some point you know you want to build like much larger businesses that can scale to like hundreds of billions of revenue or whatever how do you get there what are those businesses going to be personally i want to build a somewhat of like a whoop competitor with local inference ai i'm really excited about um the future of ai hardware i don't think i'm going to compete on glasses um i would love to build uh you know ar software as well it's very exciting to me i think there would be a mass amount of opportunity as uh uh glasses replace if uh and when glasses replace phones as a primary uh device that we use but yeah probably something within my domains you know like we could all do this right now drop everything build a fucking billion dollar company but really easy i think 100 on paper all these companies are already a billion dollar company Like every, if someone's, if someone's trading, you know, a company at like a hundred times revenue, 30 million equals 3 billion.

1:24:11Yeah. Traditional valuations. We are billionaires. I think Warren Buffett said that. Vacancy making. No, but I mean, I'm off. Yeah. I think we'll actually grow to over a billion dollar valuation. But, um, but yeah, no, like we could do this right now, but I think it's more fun and exciting to just enjoy the present and just be young and be YouTubers for a bit. build calai and just live off that personal brand and then 10 15 years from now once we like once we're done with this cycle but all right cool now it's time to build the billion dollar company we have a movement we have the ability to build like a really strong movement in 15 years from yeah jesus no okay okay you're gonna be you're gonna be old 20 30 years from now then maybe start taking life seriously no no no i think when do you expect like five years yeah i think that The biggest personal goal I have is I would love my last name is McLaren in my entire life.

1:25:01I've been asked if I'm a part of it. And I say one day because I genuinely want to buy the company and turn it around. I think in the. You keep turning around. It seems like they're doing. They went bankrupt. They went bankrupt. They went bankrupt. Saudi Arabia bought them. The Saudis bought them because they went bankrupt. Yeah. How much did the Saudis are turning around? Yeah. But then I'll get involved. Oh, yeah. All right. But no, McLaren's notorious for like always being in the shop. like fast cars they're sexy but yeah I just want to be a part of it blow them up I think let's say that mafia is the cool thing is you build a community and we can actually potentially bring keeping at mafia house and bring up young founders did like almost replace us yeah we give like a phase clan as probably like in a few months we put in a bid for a thing yeah I think we should debt financing how much does that even cost billion you tell us a few thousand x leverage like five thousand fifty thousand x leverage maybe you only put like a million down or something like that yeah we could do it but we'll put jude's name on it yeah yeah jude will stop won't fucking co-sign the line unironically you guys would probably crush running a car company yeah that'd be sick bro it would actually be leverage buyout bro no but seriously all companies right now that i think are traditional industries i actually really believe that we can But anyone else that really understands the trends can totally revolutionize it.

1:26:24Our strategy, I mean, every industry has alpha where you could leverage social media, leverage AI to make it even better. If we bought a car company, what we would probably do is make more of this lifestyle content, send cars to other people. I do not buy any of that, bro. It's a fucking, running a multinational corporation with tens of thousands of employees. I could do it. very different from running 20 person I mean totally I'm talking about the marketing I'm talking about the marketing side but Zach could build a nuclear weapon and yeah Zach earlier said that within three years if he devoted himself to it he could build a nuclear weapon if that was my only goal that I could do it there's no fucking deal North Korea needs to get this guy right now North Korea that's my only goal people have an arsenal I'm curious I have a question for the table so obviously we didn't start with millions of dollars Did you expect it to be this easy now that you have this material?

1:27:19I think that, yeah, I think three years ago I thought that this was achievable. But like from three years from now, I don't think a nuclear weapon is achievable. Zach, what is your comment? Self-limiting beliefs. Self-limiting beliefs. Definitely self-limiting beliefs. I think we could do it. I think Alex and I could do it together. Because honestly, fuck. We could beat them if they tried. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do a YouTube video. It really is a self-hubmation. I truly believe we can do it. I mean, because I haven't looked into it that much, so I can't create a plan or write a spot here. Are you in some, like, secret society?

1:27:53Is that how you're 18 and ready to do it? Countries, what I would do. Tens of millions of people have been trying to build nukes for decades. Here's the counter to that. SpaceX. SpaceX outcompeted NASA like crazy. They outcompeted other countries over decades. Sure. Not three years. But this is just a nuclear warhead. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And they didn't have a nuke. They fought. They fought. I think you have something up your sleeve. Are you part of some secret society for this? Did you really become successful off of your own merit? He actually got into the TL fellowship. Dude, all we need to do is hire a couple of nuclear engineers and get some enriched uranium and fucking worth it.

1:28:32What's the bottleneck? Let's just figure it out myself. Yeah, let's figure it out right now. I think the bottleneck is the materials necessary. It's the mindset. That's the fucking mindset. We have the mindset. How to build a new material. Sir, are you trying to go to Russia and buy a retrofitted rocket for one year's of revenue for Cali? Am I trying to right now? No, but if I needed to, if I wanted to, I could. My plan, I would probably start by raising money. I would probably raise as much as I actually physically can. In the form of venture capital? Venture capital. To build a nuclear warhead in three years?

1:29:10Yes. and my pitch would be that we'll take over a country together split the jackpot no you could actually do if you got your hands on a new if you had your hands on a new you could actually become dictator of a country with tens of millions of people they would immediately instate you if you many countries would immediately instate you seriously I actually believe that we could do it I think that it would take finding the materials, getting enough funding and we would be able to network. You can't bootstrap this? We just need who could. It would just be difficult. That's why you take the VC connections.

1:29:47They have connections. These are, by the way, I just want everyone to document this and we should probably clip this moment. It's like a split in the table where it's like the extremely delusional and then like, I don't know, maybe it's too realistic, the pessimists. And we'll see long-term how this plays out. I know that for myself personally, I know that I'm backing half the table on this idea. You're backing it. I think I want to back the delusional guys. I mean can I have won every game in this house every argument every one V one to V two we've had we have one so Let's break it down break it down.

1:30:22Let's break it down. So how much older you guys 25 % order?

1:30:32Let's think about this let's see if we're on track to overtake okay well yeah If you guys don't overtake us, you're fucking retarded. Smoking pot and skateboarding. It doesn't matter, bro. We're ahead of you right now. Right now, and we always will. We will always be ahead of you guys. We will always just stay ahead, bro. You guys haven't realized that you need to learn more from us and listen to what we say. You guys are trying to nod your heads like, okay, I get it, and then you guys go fuck up what we just told you you're going to fuck up on. If you listen, you would overtake us. We want you guys to overtake us.

1:31:06We're going to put their apps. We are your boss. We are your boss. How is that the case? He's the CEO of Cal AI. I am not. I do not exist within the structure. I am a fucking grid master. Okay, well, listen. We're going to put App Mafia on pause for three years. We're going to go devote the rest of our time building a nuclear warhead. And we'll see who's laughing. Investing uncapped. Then we're going to leverage that nuclear warhead to take over the App Mafia. again. Okay, alright. Final question. What's the hardest thing you've overcome? Hardest thing I've overcome. Overcomer that. There's a quitter competitor, a quitter clone called Overcomer.

1:31:51Who made it? Landon. Landon and what's the other kid's name? I fucking hate those guys. What's the other small kid? I don't know, but they cloned Cal AI too. The reason I hate them is because he fucking applied to work for me and then build calai clone oh did he pull the whole like we go into the meeting and learn no no not that but man it's just like it's like he didn't even even attempt to innovate on anything it was literally just like exact same product yeah which like dude building competitors cool but copycat is not there's this entire company i think called uh rocket internet that basically for a long time they just cloned like uh what was it uh groupon airbnb and they would basically go overseas yeah they would go overseas clone one of the american companies that was like succeeding and then like force the company to buy it or else yeah brian talks about telling them we should yeah we we should answer this question the hardest thing that we've overcome um does anyone want i can start to be honest i'm trying to make these all short yeah getting rejected from the teal fellowship well all right no yeah i'll make this pretty short as i said previously like i had a lot of delusion a lot of visions and for many many years they just didn't come true and i got to a point where i thought i was crazy but i wasn't actually putting the work in and as soon as i started using that delusion to build instead of fucking think about things everything changed so very happy i overcame that that was very difficult for many years zach the hardest thing i've ever overcome is probably it's more of mental than well very physical actually is i i got jumped once it was last last halloween and broke my nose completely and to get surgery and i was just in pain for like two weeks straight in bed the same time we were actually taking acquisition calls with companies.

1:33:56And it was a lot of agony. It was something I would have have to overcome. Cause like, I'm not just going to sit there and die, but it, it like that was definitely the hardest, probably week or two weeks of my life. I'd say. Wow. Can I ask why do you, why do you get jump? Dude, it was honestly just retarded. I honestly, I don't blame anyone cause I didn't actually know these kids. I went to a party. Um, it was a party that I was invited to by this girl who knew the host and she she told me and a few of my friends to come but when we got there apparently we weren't actually wanted the girl just invited us and so the guys there was they were from a different town they wanted they wanted us not to be there wanted us to leave and we were leaving we were like walking out but there was like a riot forming around us so all these kids were very rowdy drunk and I honestly just write it off as consumer behavior that if you're in that situation a drunk high school kid with your boys and then boys from another town come it's just the natural tendency is to try to get into a fight so like it was nothing personal but yeah they um smash your nose on dude it was it was like a big brawl it was like seven of my friends and then like 50 other guys did you win well we got out of there i mean maybe surviving is winning i got a good hit i got a good hit in but yeah my i got really fucked okay blake honestly i would say uh doubt like yeah i think the hardest thing that i've ever ever overcome was doubt i think from when i was a child i always felt like i had um massive potential but as time goes on when you don't actualize that you start to ask yourself you're like why isn't this happening why am I not living the life that I always dreamed of um and you know I think the sad thing is most people never get out of that like I think that the majority of people spend most of their lives in that state especially nowadays you know I think that especially with social media and the internet um we all really romanticize um achievement and yeah i mean it was until i was 22 years old i graduated college and i had literally fucking nothing to show for myself the only jobs i had ever worked were doordash tutoring taking tests for other kids mowing lawns i didn't have an internship my entire life up to that point never had a w-2 never even got a fucking second round interview and i knew i was smart and that i was a high achiever internally but man there was fucking no data external indicators were just there was zero zero zero difficult so hard bro um and yeah once again like the longer it goes the more that that fucking grows

1:36:58and yeah i think that just like accepting that state and continuing to push forward is difficult but you do it and over a long enough time horizon it usually pays off was there any like moment during that you know first like 22 years or even closer to the end of it where you you could see some like inflection point or something happening you know there are a bunch of different like individual turning points but no dude it was just fucking failure after failure after failure and people always told me that i was smart and i always worked hard and so i just like i was like what the fuck am i doing wrong like i'm smart and i work hard like and i take risks what else do i have to do and it was just years and years and years of that these guys are lucky you know they got to hit it early 18 19 but i mean for connor and i i think connor probably experienced something similar so it's just like you know sure a lot of people going through the same thing i mean as i started with my thing i overcame exact same situation nothing to show for it what makes us or you specifically different in overcoming that rather than just getting defeated and just submitting to society and doing whatever else you're telling us to do.

1:38:22Yeah, I think all of us here and most successful founders that I know embody the trait, which is just perseverance, risk tolerance, sacrifice. It's like, get up, knock down, get up, knock down. The vast majority of people that I know, or I think the vast majority of people as a whole, maybe they take a shot or two. Sometimes they half-ass it. they kind of fucking uh you know give it an attempt and then the second that it doesn't work out they're like all right yeah back to uh back to the standard that's interesting so can i ask all of us real quick can i answer first yeah no just yeah we'll get to that just real quick

1:39:03don't smoke like that do we all have a vision for our future and are we all under agreeance that we will not accept any reality that isn't that like we're not stopping until we achieve the things that we want i think we just reject it i think it's a dangerous mindset because like my future and what i want for myself isn't like a materialistic like there's certain material things of like having enough cash and never have to worry about money every time my life making sure my family's taking care of things like that but for my future is just like freedom do you have the ability to do yeah i want one i would agree in that like step one to two in in getting to that point is just achieving freedom right it's like this narrow tunnel you achieve the freedom and then it's like this massive sort of you can choose whatever direction i would say i basically like i always my goal was to make a million dollars before graduating high school that was my goal and we did that and for context real quick for anyone listening or watching zach has a youtube video from when he was 14 years old we can link it which says how i'm going to make a million dollars by the time i'm 18 or before i graduate high school he's just walking around his house uh just talking to the camera just like nailing it yeah yeah it's just i i didn't have a plan i didn't know i just knew that was my goal that's what i wanted to do.

1:40:30I felt destined for it. And then getting to the point, I realized one night I was, I, it was, it was honestly, it wasn't something where we just hit the goal. And I was like, I achieved this now. It was slow for me to actually realize that we made it happen because everything with Kelly, I was moving so fast. But one day I just looked up and I was like, I, well, we actually did it. And even though at the current, like present moment, I had achieved my forest out goal, I wasn't done. I knew there was more to life. This wasn't like life wasn't just accomplishing this goal. So like having materialistic goals, I think you need to have goals that are always shifting, always that are, that are never just set in stone, or you should have a multitude of goals that you're chasing, but they should never be things that are truly achievable, at least not all of them, because then if you don't have any goals to chase, I think that's where depression comes from.

1:41:28Yeah, you're not like ambitious enough. I know I know that like at least for me, it took a very long time to figure out what is the journey that I actually just enjoy just beating the fucking pavement on. And that like the goal is not get a supercar for me. It's more just like keep on grinding and keep on, you know, getting more people to start awesome companies. I've learned I've learned a lot actually through Blake with this but I think like freedom is a Elimination of noise and having more bandwidth to do what you want and it depends what season you are You're in in life And so that could be building a product that could be reading that could be learning It could be exploring but as long as you eliminate the noise that are distracting you from that journey I think that's where the happiness lives.

1:42:07I don't you want to answer that? Yeah, I'd say for me I'm similar to Blake with the sense of doubt, but it's like building self-confidence it was in high school and I basically lived in this like middle zone of like not taking a ton of accountability even like playing sports because I didn't want to get in trouble I was afraid to get like yelled at and have the pressure and eventually just I remember my boy Clay came we started practicing after every practice and I finally got my shot to like playing a game and we were a top five team at the time in the nation and then COVID hit cut whole season was cut but it was like that confidence of putting in the work getting it done and actually getting something you'd see out of it that rolled in the college what I wanted to do with civil engineering build homes and I think that's exactly where I'm today because I had this even as funny as I told Blake like if you can do it I can do it because I genuinely believe like you can do whatever you want in life if you just put in the work and it was that simple confidence of being told I was in a play against our rival that was it from my coach amazing okay boys stay relentless