#115 - Selling An Erotic Newsletter and AI That Leaves Us Speechless

Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

Oh yeah.

Feeling like gold.

I know I'm on my—

All right, we live? Yep. All right, we have Alex on the pod just for a minute. Alex works with our advertisers and stuff like that. Okay. So Sean, this morning we had like this thing we do, crew review, where we like do a company update. And I got a big shout out because apparently Square loved the ad read.

Okay.

And they gave me all the credit. It said Sam did the best ad read. And I like, everyone was like congratulating me and I have a confession. So by the way, today we had OurCrowd that was our sponsor today, or, or if you're just starting the podcast, you'll hear them in like 10 or 15 minutes. So check them out. But in the future, we're going to have Square as an advertiser. Sean did all the reads for yesterday and I got all the credit. So I just wanted to come clean. I didn't, I didn't do it.

You did. Wait, so they shouted you out where? Square shouted you out somewhere?

They like told Alex who, right? What did they say, Alex?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I got an email from them or from the agency that they work with and they just said, this is the best ad read we've had. Ever out of all the podcasts that we've run. So they're super excited about it. And I think—

triple our prices, that's all that means.

I think unfortunately our internal teams just assumed that Sam recorded it.

I didn't—

that's not the case.

I did not correct me. Sam or Juan, it doesn't matter who says what.

So Alex, thank you for, uh, I, um I'm sorry I didn't spill the beans earlier. And it wasn't me, though.

That's okay. We'll give Sean a shout out in our next crew review.

Yes, but I wanted to come clean live so they could— everyone could hear the truth.

What is this word you're saying that you guys do? A career review? What is that?

Crew. Crew review. Like, we have this— our whole company is like pirate ship themed. Like, so it's like there's like, I don't know, I just— I said a long time ago that we're a pirate ship and every email that we collect is like a little bit of wind in our sails. And it kind of like someone ran with it. I don't know who ran with it, but someone—

you get fired, you have to walk the plank.

Which, yeah, we should do that. But like, so we've had— we have pirate ship themed meetings. It's just a fun thing. Anyway, Alex, thank you for filling us in. Tell Square and, and by the way, OurCrowd that we're happy they sponsored us. And if you're just now listening to this, you're only like 2 minutes into the podcast. When's the ad? When's the advertisement come in? At 10 minutes or 15 minutes?

Somewhere, somewhere there.

All right. So keep listening to the 15-minute mark and you'll see exactly what we're talking about. You'll hear Sean with his wonderful ad reads. Great. All right. Thank you, Alex. You can click X. We appreciate it.

All right.

Bye. Okay, Sam, people want to know, where are you in the world now? You're in— you're in New York. Is that the latest stop? Brooklyn?

Okay. So as of right now, I am currently sitting in a brownstone that I rented, um, and I'm in— where am I? I'm in Cobble Hill. It's like a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I've already been stopped by 2 or 3 times— 2 or 3 times. I've only been here since Saturday— of listeners of the podcast.

So, uh, that's amazing. They stop you on the street?

Yeah. Wow. And dude, the, um, I guess I'll tell the story. So the, uh, he doesn't know I know this. I hope he's not listening, but the guy— so I went and rented a a house a few days ago and the owner was like, wait, are you Sam Parr from The Hustle and The Pocket? I was like, yeah, what's going on, man? How are you? And I, and he's like this baller guy and I went and Googled him and it's Tyra Banks's old boyfriend. And I was like, the reason that's important to me is that was like my, my, uh, she was like the number one in my life as, as a teen. Yeah. So, but anyway, uh, I'm currently in, um, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. It's pretty cool.

Okay, I like it. Do you like immediately Zillow any house you're in that you rent to be like, how much would this house be to buy?

Yeah, this house that I'm in now. So my budget throughout this whole experience is going to be $4K a month. Okay, but because I stayed in St. Louis and because I stayed with family for a month, it's like my budget can double for the next month. So for the month of— for the next couple months, because I'm going to move to Texas for a bit, I'm I'm like kind of balling out and spending like $8K a month, $10K a month. So I'm in these like $5 million single-family homes, which is pretty baller in Brooklyn and it's great.

And does it make you wanna live in a baller place or are you like, oh, you know what, it doesn't actually matter. The small place and the big place, they're all kind of the same.

No, so it matters. So the layout matters more than the size. But I think for a couple with me and Sarah, I think 2,000 square feet is like the sweet spot. I don't need anything more 'cause it just gets messy. But what's essential is a front porch. That is like the most fun I've had, is just sitting on the front porch and saying hi to people.

I saw you say that, I was like, don't you need to be like a smoker or something to like— what do you do on the porch?

Well, I have a dog, so we just sit there and I work.

But having a front— you're on your laptop.

Having a front porch is awesome. And another thing that's awesome that people like to hear, owning nothing is sick, dude. It's so fun.

I love how you said that people like to hear, because people love to hear that shit. People love to hear about how minimal you live. They love that.

It's sick, man. I only own— so I have 2 bags of clothes and then Sarah has a couple bags. I'm going to reduce it to 1 bag, like 1 carry-on. That's really all I need. And then I have a coat and I'm good to go. But I like— I went and I splurged and got a ton of Lululemon stuff and I'm like, I can wear that for every occasion, right? But man, it's wonderful not owning anything. I have so much less stress.

Yeah, I agree with you. I— the one thing that gives me the most stress that I own is a car. And I feel like a car is like probably the worst fucking thing you can buy. Like, you know, and I did the worst way possible. I went with my wife and we just— I wanted to buy a car like that day and get it over with. So we just went to a dealership. We went to 4 dealerships. We were like, okay, let's test drive BMW, Audi, Porsche, and whatever else. And let's just pick one and let's buy it. And so we just bought a new car off a dealership, which is like the ultimate sucker move. And then we drove it off the lot, lost half its value.

You bought it brand new? Yeah.

And then, you know, in general, just decided like, I'm going to like, you know, I'm going to not care about this car. So I basically, although I bought a car that was kind of a nice car, I decided the stress is not worth it. So I just treat it like it's a piece of shit car that I don't have to worry about. Like, I don't care if it gets scuffed.

Didn't you pay $80 grand for it or something?

I did, but I— the, the— I didn't want to double the mistake by then stressing out about an expensive car. So in my mind, I treat it like it's a, it's a free car that's not mine. It's my neighbor's car that I could just— don't have to worry about it no matter what the situation is. So like, the mirror is cracked, the mirror is cracked, and I'm like, whatever, who cares? I, I have no, no sweat.

That stresses me out. How are your immigrant parents not like kicking your ass about that?

They do. They're just like, this is crazy. Why are you so irresponsible with how you spend money? Because I'll just spend money like crazy. Like, I'll order all kinds of shit. I'll buy stuff online. I order food. Like, I'll order like $300 of groceries from Whole Foods and then I'll like DoorDash while it's on its way because I don't want to wait for it. You know, like, I'm just like, I want a meal too. And so they just view me as like kind of like a crazy, irrational kid. But they also see like how much money I make. And so they're like, okay, whatever, I guess it's working for you. And so my mom has now like backed off and my dad has like given up. He's just like, you're ridiculous and I don't want to be a part of this.

And you were— you've been like this though for years and you haven't been making money for years, right? I mean, for a long time you were just like normal, like—

yeah, but I really stepped it up and I'm real blatant about it now. Like I'll buy something and then it doesn't work and I'll not return it. I'm like, I don't want to deal with it. And so that like, you know, so I've definitely like just like taken some liberties now that I wasn't taking 5 years ago. But yeah, I've always been more like I'd rather learn how to make more money. I'd rather focus on making more money than saving money at any given time of my life. And now I'm just more disrespectful about it towards money.

That's funny. That's— I'm— we're not cut from the same cloth at all. I am not like you at all.

That's great. I agree with that. But then if you're going to do that, also consider buying a $20,000 used minivan.

Yes, that's for sure. That's— again, I'm not saying my way was smart. I'm saying my way was dumb, but I didn't double down on my mistake. I should have done it smart, right? But hey, the good thing is there's this tax law that basically— because I use this car for business, and so I bought a— I looked at this ahead of time, which is if you buy this car that's like a heavy commercial vehicle over whatever it is, 6,000 pounds, then it classifies as commercial vehicle and can pretty much be completely written off for your business. And so, so that saved me a lot of money because I had enough write-offs, I had enough income to deduct against.

That, um, let me tell you one more story before we get into it. Is, uh, I met up— did I say this last time? I don't think I did. I met up with Tai Lopez the other day.

You did talk about this.

I did.

It was cool. Yeah, you said you went and grabbed a drink or something like that. He was cool.

Yeah, I, I, uh, I couldn't remember if I brought that up anyway. Then fine, it's not interesting.

But I feel like there's more interest. Like, you didn't just meet up with Tai Lopez for a couple hours and not have a little nugget to share. So give us a nugget. What happened?

I make— yeah, I do that all the time. I've never like done an interview properly.

So he taught me a lot about that. So that was cool. Um, um, he was telling me about the Pier 1 and Modell's acquisitions and it just like sounds like great deals, uh, if what he— if assuming what he says is true, which I have no idea. Um, We— I don't— I'm not gonna say actually which hotel. It was a nice hotel, so I got to go up and hang out with them. I don't know, it was cool.

Okay, sweet. We'll leave the story. Yeah, you went up to his hotel room. All right, great.

He says that he gets— he told me he gets recognized like walking down the street in New York like constantly, to the point of like he has a bodyguard.

Yeah, that's cool. I can imagine that. By the way, when I say that's cool, I mean that's fucking annoying. That must suck. Okay, so what do we got for ideas? We kind of bullshitted around for a little bit, so what do you want to talk about? What's interesting?

Let's talk about the nurse shoes, 'cause I actually had multiple people talk to me about it.

Yeah, I'm pulling it up. Was it a Kickstarter or something? Like, can you see the live sales?

I thought so. I thought when Jim sent it to us, he was saying they did $750,000 in kicks in their Kickstarter campaign, but, um, I went to kick— there's no Kickstarter for it. So I think he meant they launched this, uh, YouTube, like, this ad campaign basically. And so there's a YouTube video that he sent over that I guess is how they announce themselves to the world.

So I'm pulling it up now. I think it's awesome. I think it's badass. So there's another company that made scrubs. We talked about them, right?

We've— I think we've talked about before. What's their name again? Do you remember?

I don't know. Abreu, can you maybe find it? It's a—

they're doing well, like $100 million a year.

Yeah, north of $100 million. So it's a scrub startup. I don't know if I Google that one. Is it called FIGS?

I think it is FIGS. Yeah, that's right.

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Love it, love it, love it, love it. I think that's a great move. I think this— shoes are a little bit more challenging. I think, um, I I had a— where did I— I went to a holiday party at a shoe company and they had like a shoe startup. I won't say who it is, but it's a popular one. They— popular startup that sold shoes. And I went to— I'm not going to say— Allbirds? Yeah. If I went to their holiday party, I live in San Francisco. That should narrow it down. But I— on their board was like the return rate and their metrics. And I think like what they would do is take like, let's say they make $100 in revenue. They would discount it by I think 30 to 33%, and then it would say like expected revenue. And I was like, what's that percentage? And they go, that's how much returns we're gonna, we expect. And so that's which, yeah, it's crazy high. And with shoes, shoes are the hardest thing maybe to buy, probably pants for men and shoes are probably like two of the harder things to sell online. So I think it's a cool thing. He just has to nail the fit, like making sure that it fits exactly.

Why are shoes hard to sell online? I feel like shoes are easy to sell online because—

no, dude, look at Zappos. Like, shoes are the hardest thing. I mean, there's a lot of different categories and types, which is great, but it's all about sizing. Like, whenever I order shoes, I order a 10.5 and an 11, and I send one back because sizes—

Yeah, I'm looking at FIGS right now. Their website's freaking awesome. I mean, it makes you like kind of want to become a nurse.

Yeah, seriously, the, for the home page, if you go to wearebala.com, have you seen that? Like This woman walking out of these doors, like, I wanna walk out of every door like that. This is a great little landing page. You could tell this guy worked at Nike.

Yeah, and FIGS is really cool too, so I love this business. Did they raise money or is it just a bootstrap?

It's bootstrapped. I kinda reached out to be like, yo, what's the deal? What else is like this? What other markets are like nurses, right? So nurses is like huge workforce plus unique needs. Um, is there another one that's like this that, that you could—

oil workers, oil workers.

And it might be like jeans or it might be boots or it might be something like that.

Yeah, oil workers are quite— okay, so there's, uh, not quite the same. There's 2.8 million nurses in America. There's probably only half a million oil workers. But oil workers are interesting because the, um, for nurses the barrier to entry is somewhat high, but it's obviously less than a doctor. Oil workers, the barrier to entry to become an oil worker is definitely Like it's, I have to come up with like a ratio of like how many jobs there are multiplied by barrier to entry to get that job multiplied by the income that they pay you. Do you know what I mean? And like oil workers is like one of those unique ones where it's like, you can make $80,000 to $90,000 to $100,000 a year without being, you know, 4-year education. Um, so oil workers is interesting. What's another interesting one?

Um, I was thinking restaurant-like workers because I remember when I worked in a restaurant, literally the line cook guy was like, yo, you need to get these shoes. I was like dying. You're just standing for 16 hours straight and you're just— you can't sit down. There's no sitting down in a kitchen. And he's like, oh, he's like, we have these mats on the floor that are these like special mats. They just used to buy the hospital shit. They're like, yeah, this is for surgeons to stand on. And so we stand on these and like these shoes, these are like doctor shoes, doctor's clogs. I forgot what they were called. They're like, there's some specific brand, they're like $250 shoes, but he's like, you need these, otherwise you can't last in this business.

I agree, that's a great idea. And what I would do with the branding, until I saw this, when I saw this nurses thing, I'm like, oh, you can make that cool. Is I would have this like, 'cause restaurant workers are slightly more masculine and slightly more edgy, like, 'cause like, you know, when you go to a restaurant, after you get done working at a restaurant at 2:00 AM, you just wanna get fucked up, right? Like with your coworkers.

That's exactly what they do, yes.

That's what we would do when I worked at a restaurant. And so I would say restaurant workers are interesting. I would have this Anthony Bourdain-ish look. I think that could be cool. That would be a great one. What else is interesting? Mm, I don't know, but that's a good idea. I'll tell you something a little bit similar. So long story short, this company Bala, so into it. Go to the website, check it out. I really like that. Another thing that I've been thinking about is, well, there's this company called RigUp. Do you know RigUp?

We've, we've talked about it before. I don't know it well, but I just know they crush it. That's the only thing I know about it.

So what they're probably valued at, $3 billion. They've raised a lot of money from Andreessen Horowitz, which is a signal, but not necessarily means that it's great. It's kind of to be determined. But I believe they make money by like they have like resources for oil workers. Are you going to the website? You can tell me what they do. I think it's like they have job listings, but then they also help with payroll, right? What do they do with oil workers?

So I thought they were a job like, I thought they were kind of like a marketplace for jobs, but it looks like they do a lot. So solutions. So they have— I think they're basically building a network of vendors, workers, and like, hirers or employers that does everything. So it's like, this is a way to hire, this is a way to do safety, this is a way to do the kind of paperwork of onboarding all these workers. I think it's trying to do all the things.

Yeah. And I love that business. And I was thinking that you should— I would want to do this for nurses, particularly travel nursing. You know what travel nurses are?

No.

Right. That's cool. So what else we got? So let me go to a different one. This was kind of cool. So we had talked about in the past how there's a—

Which one are you on?

so I didn't know he sold it. Awesome to him. Um, he, uh, when he was telling me about this, I was like, dude, fuck your other business, do this.

Yeah, go for this one.

Yeah. Um, who did he sell it to?

Uh, he said he sold it to some private buyer on MicroAcquire, which is like one of these little marketplaces for buying and selling businesses.

Yeah, good for him.

And so yeah, good for him. I just love the little like super simple success story, right? He heard when we were talking about because we talked about, um, novelty or the idea around kind of the, the softcore porn market for, for written fiction and whether you go like actually into erotica or you just kind of like get close and it's more like Fifty Shades of Grey. Um, so heard that part, heard us talking about newsletters as a simple wedge to start businesses. Um, I don't know if we were the, the main inspiration for it or whatnot, but oh, definitely. But yeah, we, we will say that we were for sure. And, um, And yeah, good for him.

I love this. Yeah. So this guy, how do you say his name?

I think it's Lotana.

That's right. Yeah.

And Maybe more, or maybe I forget how much, like a lot of money.

And all he did— one thing he's doing a good job of is he's been working in public. So even when he was like, yo, um, he heard us talking about the digital tithing apps, or maybe he sent it in and then we talked about in the podcast, and he's like, I'm gonna do this for, uh, for the UK. Um, there's no great service doing this in the UK. I'm gonna build this. And every week he was posting these videos talking about his progress. And so we saw it, like both me and you, I remember, commented on these because He does a great job of working in public and getting, you know, energy behind what he's doing.

That's crazy. I'm going to write this down. I'm going to tweet at him.

Um, his main company, I think it's called XPO. It's like a marketplace for influencers. So the same way Cameo, I think it's the same way you can buy Facebook ads. You can buy, you can do like branded deals with influencers. I think that's what he's going for in the UK market. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just Cameo. Like, and Cameo now does this too where you just pay for a shout out as an influencer, um, rather than like a personal video message. Um, and I think— I don't know if he's differentiated it by the European focus or different set of influences, I'm not sure, but I saw a bunch of like British rappers on his thing and I don't know, cool.

That's crazy. This— he's a young guy, I think like 24, right?

Uh, I have no idea, but I know in some of his videos his mom was in there, he was like talking to his mom, and I don't know. It's hilarious, but shout out to him.

That's awesome. What's, um, and by the way, if you're listening to this, I think everyone should, not everyone, a few more people should start this. I think that I genuinely think this, this could be as big as Crunchy, what's the thing called? Crunchy, Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll, which is like a billion dollar company. I think this could be as big.

Uh, yeah, that's actually just a great point. I don't know if this could be as big or not, but regardless, I think you could literally just restart the same business and build like, like learn a whole bunch, building a hundred thousands of dollars or million dollar business, uh, if you just focused on this. Like, I think he did it in his super spare time and he sold it, but like, I think somebody else can just do the next one of this and pick the next niche.

Yeah, I'm into that. What's, um, let's do, uh, revisit all— let's do the streaming solution.

Okay, so I don't know how long ago now, maybe 6, 7 months ago, I talked about this idea which was I think there should be an app for company all hands. Yeah. And I said this because, you know, when we were— I was trying to, I was trying to export ideas of or import ideas. So I said, I'm at a big company. What are the things I see? What are the problems I see we have? What would we pay for a solution for? And so I felt that company all hands were this like critical moment that happened every single week. We did a full company all hands, plus each individual department did their own all hands like every month or so. And— oh, sorry.

You really are in the suburbs.

Yeah, well, I didn't— I know, I know, I didn't read that, but I know it's a problem and it sucks because like you can't be like, why would a CEO ever tell the truth to their—

exactly. So a few days ago, Casey Newton, I think is his name, he's a writer for The Verge or something like that. I don't know, maybe that's not The Verge, maybe it's not Casey, but whatever, fuck it. Somebody wrote an article and they said, hey, for the last year I have had basically spies inside Facebook sending me recordings of the all-hands. God, that's so stupid. For the last 6 months, and I'm gonna write, you know, kind of an article. And what he did was he wrote an article about the things that were being said with audio snippets from Zuck talking at all-hands that this person had recorded, because now all the all-hands are done virtually, so people just record on their computer like we're recording this podcast. And And it was all about like, oh, Facebook employees want him to be harder on Trump and here's his response about why he's not gonna do it. Or, you know, doesn't Facebook have an obligation to do this? Or like somebody asked a question in the all-hands like, "Can we just buy an island so we can all just go back to work and just make it a bubble, like a bubble island for Facebook?" And Zuck's like, "Well, you know, like I don't think it would be a great idea for us to just like, you know, isolate ourselves from society. I don't think that would be good in the long run even if we get back to work." Taken out of context, all the things he's saying, it's just so easy to paint him as like evil suck. So anyways, that just to me highlights even more all that's going to happen now is that companies are going to dilute their all-hands. They're not going to be transparent. They're going to like corporate, you know, PR wash all their answers in the Q&A and everybody loses. Like the CEO has to be stressed about it. The employees don't get real answers and shit's still probably going to leak. Yeah. So. I think you need to find a— create the killer feature now for this is leak-proof, uh, all-hands.

I, uh, I, I, I've researched this a bit and let me tell you what I would do. But first, a funny story about someone. I used to talk to my friends at Facebook and they— Zuck would do an in-person all-hands every Friday at like 2 o'clock and like 50 people or 20 people would show up. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, Can you, if you're telling me that I could go talk to John Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie or something like every Friday, like get your ass to that all-hands and ask a question every single week and then just maybe Zuck will be like, you know, you've been asking a lot of good questions, talk to me after this, let's see, like, you know what I mean? Like that could happen. And apparently, like my friend made a joke, like it wasn't a joke, he just told me, he's like, yeah, someone today asked why the men's bathroom don't have tampons. And Mark's reply was like, I can answer that question, but like, are you sure this is how you want to spend your time? Like maybe the head of HR is over there. Maybe you'd like to talk to her directly. But, and so like people would ask these questions like, why is there, why is the line for the pizza too long? And it always like baffled me. I'm like, why are you not there every single week talking to this guy? Anyway, I've thought about this. So Washington Post, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, he came up with this thing called ARC. It was their publishing system, and a lot of publishers have tried to sell their CMS, and it's mostly a fruitless thing to do. It's pretty stupid. No one does it right. It's hard. It's a hard business. Yada, yada, yada. Well, they pivoted, and what they're doing is selling to Morgan Stanley and large banks, and they're creating like an internal high school newspaper. So it's like a Morgan Stanley gets like a media or gets like a WordPress that's only for their employees. So like all memos goes on there. Um, All Hands would go on there, and I think that's a great idea. And I would model this sort of like a high school newspaper where it makes it easy to like give updates on the whole company very succinctly and easily, uh, where you're, where you're, where you're, um, All Hands are almost recorded like a podcast and they're uploaded very easily on. That's what I would do. I would make it all— I would try to figure out how to make it all very password protected, but I think it's a great idea.

That's what I would do if I was these guys. I'm like, look, I've tried to be transparent with everyone, but like, you know, you really screwed up and you actually hurt yourself if you're an employee who owns shares. Like, It makes us look stupid, and you legitimately are going to lose money by talking about this shit because you make us look dumb because it's not— it's all out of context, right? So fuck y'all, like, I ain't telling you shit. Like, when you, when you hear about stuff, that's when— or when everyone else hears about stuff, that's when you're gonna hear about stuff, right? So I'm on— I agree with you, and I think it's an— there is an interesting thing to do, and I have seen bigger companies make their own stuff during quarantine. So there are companies who have this need, and like Airbnb has an internal team building something like this.

Interesting. Uh, building it with the privacy protection or just like, uh, the in— you mean the internal high school newsletter type thing?

I would say that like hacking together like tools to make, uh, like all hands internal comms work, all hands, specifically all hands easier. Yeah.

Right. Um, that's a good one. I'm gonna write something down here. You know it's good when I get an idea during the thing. I'm like, oh, I gotta write this down. Um, okay, cool. So, uh, what else is interesting?

Well, you did most of the heavy lifting this time, so let's just keep going down yours.

And oh my god, I'm looking at this.

You can see some examples on their website.

So, oh dude, this guy, this guy who created it, I knew I recognized his name's Phil. I think he's in our My First Million group. He's for sure a trend subscriber. His name's Phil. He's a young kid. Like it, like it looked like it looks like a kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know this, this is badass, but is this—

I think this is something that is awesome and probably exists in the future given how many people I've seen working on this. But, um, I bet it sucks out of the box. I bet it like doesn't, like you can't actually trust it to write emails. That's kind of my guess. What do you think?

Who, surely they didn't do the artificial. Is this slapped on top of OpenAI?

It might be. I'm not sure if it's a GPT-3 or whatever, uh, thing or not.

It, because if they made that, that seems like incredibly complicated.

No. Um, maybe, I don't know. Like it, it's always surprising to me, like as a non-technical person, it's surprising to me. There's some things I'm like, oh yeah, just make it auto green, auto cut out my background. And then people are like, well, that's, you know, like, that's a bad example, but you know, some people like, well, that's fucking impossible. You've asked for the impossible. And it's like, then other times they're like, look, we made this thing talk like Obama and you can now make Obama say whatever you want. And it's like, what? How is that possible? It's like, oh yeah, that's actually pretty easy. Just use some open source libraries. And it's like, well, what the fuck's going on? So I'm not technical enough to know what's easy and what's hard.

Yeah, that's kind of weird to me. I think that as an email sending tool, it's only like a, it's like a toy to me. Like it's only okay. But like, I would love to know what is the technology behind it. That is what is most interesting to me, to be honest.

Oh my gosh, this is awesome.

So this is like, you want to— instead of hiring somebody to do an explainer video for your product or whatever, um, you just have this like, you know, AI human, um, saying your thing on demand. I thought this was kind of cool. Although when I tried it, it's like, input this, we have to approve it so you're not like abusing it and making this person say racist shit. And then we'll email you a video in 2 days. So I'm like, oh, that's kind of lame, but I understand.

Uh, I don't understand. I would say let them do it. Um, that is badass. So I, when I went to CES 2 or a year ago, um, they, maybe it was this company, but one of them had this thing where they like had people, they had like life-size screens and it was a person like a park ranger as if it was like at a Yosemite, like explaining, you know, like how you have park rangers who like tell you like, you know, this part of the park is closed, whatever. And it had a park ranger welcoming you to the park and it looked totally real. And they said everything, everyone on here is made up. And that was like the exhibit and it was amazing. And I thought that was the most impressive thing. So I think this is badass. I think this is totally awesome. Um, scary and awesome. Have you, um, Sean, have you played with OpenAI at all?

I don't— I know I don't have access myself, but Furqan and a few friends do, and I've sat with them and they've showed me a bunch of demos of what they're working on.

Okay, so I won't pull mine up because I have access too. It is so sick. It is so scary. Like, I'll like say like, like I'll tell you, like, and I'll type like a speech, like I'll type like Donald Trump. Or like I'll take quotes from his speech. Like I'll find a New York Times article written about it and I'll just find some quotes and I'll just put it in there. And then it like writes a speech that Donald Trump would say. Or I'll write like, I'll write like a manifesto, like Hillary Clinton is going to ruin the world. She is evil and women should not be in power. White people are the supreme race. Like I'll write something like that and it creates like a manifesto about like It's like nuts. It's nuts. And it's like, I mean, of course I did that because like everyone's mind goes to evil. Or one time I wrote, I went and found the lyrics to California Love, a Tupac song, and I just put like the first like stanza of lyrics. Oh no, I did it with WAP. You know WAP?

No.

What is that? It stands for what? Yeah, it's—

how does that go again?

It stands for Wet Ass Pussy by Cardi B. I took the lyrics of WAP. You've never heard that song, dude. It's the most raunchy song ever.

And I put— but I hope somebody cuts this part and sends this part to Square.

Oh my God. I took the lyrics of WAP and I put it into the thing and it auto— and then it like started writing this raunchy rap song about fucking dudes. Anyway, it's awesome. It's, it's just amazing. Sorry, we don't have to talk about WAP, but I mean, It's the name of a song. Like, I'm not— it's a name of a song and I'm just telling you what I did.

So what are you doing with it besides, you know, these, you know, experiments? Two things. Use it.

Nice. Was it good?

It was so good. And so I would also do like, here are our 10 viral headlines and I would read it or you don't have it pulled up. Yeah, I'll pull it up right now. Here are, I would say, and I would also say like, here are, uh, uh, here are, uh, 10 10 viral headlines and I would write the first viral headline that I had the idea for and then it would make 9 more that was similar to it. But like, then I'd be like, oh wow, number 8's way better. Okay, so check it out. Here's exactly what I told it.

Great. So, so same thing as you said, you said I found a famous Volkswagen ad, told the machine to do it. You put the whole ad in.

Great. And it said, uh, the Volkswagen, I won't read the whole thing, but the Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemish and must be replaced. Every shock, whatever.

And it like says about how, um, how, uh, the Volkswagen, how, what it's like, it's like about how they look and how they're, they're focused on every little detail. That's kind of what they're trying to say in the ad, right? Yes.

And then here's, and then I go Airtable. And then I said, now here's a great ad about Airtable. Check it out.

Okay. So first, okay. So all you said, so, so hold on, go up a little bit.

This is all I said.

All you told them about Airtable, you said, here's a great advertisement about Airtable colon. Now you fill in the rest. So you didn't even tell it what Airtable is. So it goes, Airtable, a new free service for collaboration on spreadsheets. Accurate. But here's the thing. You're working on a spreadsheet. You need to collaborate with someone on the spreadsheet. That's easy, right? Question mark. Just email it to them. The problem is it's a spreadsheet, so you attach it. But what if you need to change it? You need to send an update. What if they need to update it? You need to send another update. But what if you're both working on it at the same time? You have to send an update, an update, an update every single time. No wonder we hate spreadsheets. That's why we created Airtable. What the fuck is going on? Hold on, it's not over. Uh, we took the best of what spreadsheets are good at and combined it with the best of what collaboration tools are good at, and we did it in a way that was so easy it makes you wonder why you haven't been using spreadsheets for collaboration all along. Airtable is a new free service for collaboration on spreadsheets. What? Yeah, this—

I had to do many of them.

Airtable must have taken— that must be an actual Airtable ad that they just took off the internet. Is that an actual— if, if that was created by AI, we're all out of jobs. There's no jobs left.

I have not found it anywhere. Like, this is literally a— oh my God, this is a copy and paste of what I put into it. Like, it's exactly what I put in.

You know how when a fight breaks out and somebody's like, WorldStar? That's what somebody needs to start doing for all these fucking OpenAI things that are amazing. It's like your mind gets blown. That— my mind is blown right now, dude. Did you not tweet this out and share this? This is crazy.

I, I didn't want to give it away. I don't know when I was— my mind was, was definitely blown.

Um, like, oh my God.

Oh, you did a second one?

What is this?

Yeah, it's another one.

Hold on. We have to do this, this one too. This is, this is incredible. This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. All right. So is this just, you pushed enter again or what happened?

I, then I wrote, I go, I wrote, this is another advertisement for Airtable.

Okay.

And it starts here.

Can I read this one too?

Yeah.

Okay, this is a spreadsheet. What do you wanna do with your life? Whatever it is, chances are you're not doing it. Why? The problem is you're stuck in a rut. Okay, this one's a little different. You have this one thing you wanna do and you're getting a little closer to doing it, but then something happens. You have a good idea, but you have no way of recording it. You have a brilliant plan, but you can't organize it in a way that's useful to you. You're losing out. But if you could make a spreadsheet, you'd be on your way to achieving your goals. But you don't have a spreadsheet. You're probably working on a Google spreadsheet and you don't even have that. You're probably working on a Word document or worse, a Notepad. We think you deserve better. That's why we created Airtable. It's a spreadsheet that you can organize however you want. You can use it for your side hustle or for your startup. You can use it for keeping track of your book club or your Dungeons and Dragons character. You can use it to plan holidays or plan your funeral. You can use it to build your online store, your tax returns, blah, blah, blah. All right, it does a bunch of these. You can use it to keep track of your money or your emotions. You can use it to create a spreadsheet or to create a spreadsheet about spreadsheets. It's the first and only spreadsheet for the rest of us.

Now you see how it like—

it—

the cadence, it's like it— like it doesn't understand like some stuff, like why a funeral— like you don't want to play— like why you don't plan your funeral. But it stole the cadence from the copy that I gave it.

Yeah, this is like a great copywriter who like, you know, is a little too drunk.

Yeah. Or like a copywriter who's like English as a second language, right?

Oh my God, it's sick, man.

It's sick. Like, and so what I'll do is I'll say like, here are 99 headlines that are about to go viral. And then you could just like, it just makes random stuff and you'd be like, all right, do that one, do that one, do that one.

We need to do— okay, every open to our podcast should be OpenAI written and every ad read should be OpenAI written. Like, we should do nothing else besides this.

They yelled at me, so I tweeted out about it, or I put it in The Hustle. Like, I, I like said like, This was written by OpenAI and Sam Altman DM'd me and was like, hey, can you please not like tell everyone you're doing this? We're supposed to do it in a certain way. And so that's why one of the reasons why I haven't done it. He said like, like there's—

I see public things all the time from—

I don't know. He yelled at me. I mean, he didn't yell at me, but he was like, hey, can you please, you know, he calmly DM'd me. Yeah, he figuratively yelled at me. And so I have to figure out how to get around it. Like, and play within the rules. But, uh, they got pissed at me.

That's interesting because I've seen tons of people showing demos on Twitter and whatnot. Okay, so we'll figure that out.

But, but I have access.

You, you just blew my mind. I can't— there's no other topics. I'm not doing any of the topics for the rest of the show. I'm stopping. I'm going to get some water. I'm going to walk around, and then I'm going to think about how my life just—

Here, I know that's what I just stepped into the post. That's what just happened. I just walked into the post and now I'm in this other world.

Watch. So what do you want me to write, like hate speech? Or like, I mean, that's what everyone does.

Yeah, let's not do hate speech. I like that's where your head went.

Well, I automatically think like, how's Russia going to use this?

Okay, so Sam's right. He's in the OpenAI, what they call the playground, which is just like a text box where you fill in, you give it a prompt. Or you give it a little bit of a premise and then you can prompt it to like fill in the rest. So he's saying Sean Perry is a podcast host. He's a great dude, pretty funny, and has a popular podcast called My First Million, a podcast about business ideas. Uh, here's what he told me about starting a business. Can you make, can you make it more specific? Uh, like starting, uh, like say what type of business, like starting a, um, a newsletter business or, uh, a, um, business that sells scrubs to nurses. Yeah. Okay, here's what AI Sean says. I was working in— I was working as a nurse in a hospital in small town Kansas, and I would always see these nurses with these scrub tops and pants that had their name on them. It looked like a great— it looked like a great marketing opportunity. I was sitting on my computer one day and I had a few extra bucks in my checking account, so I decided to do a Google search for scrub tops. I was like, there has to be a lot of money made, money to be made here. This is awesome. I was able to find a company that was not just scrub tops, but scrubs for the whole hospital. And so I thought, even better. I was like, I can sell scrubs to the whole hospital? That's amazing. It has my like bro idiot cadence down perfect. I started reaching out to different hospitals and clinics in the area, was able to get the ball rolling. How do you, how did you know you were on?

I get it, it's an interview. So, oh, interview, it's interviewing you. It's interviewing you. Oh, cool. So it says, okay.

Okay. How did you know? Oh yeah, you do that part.

So it says, how did you know you were onto something, Sean?

Well, I went to a seminar where they were talking about the mind of the buyer. If you could figure out what the buyer wants to hear, you can say whatever you want and they'll believe you. So what I did was I put up a website, I used a video on the website and I told the buyer exactly what they wanted to hear. I said, hey, I can't believe it. I just found a company that makes scrubs and scrubs for the whole hospital. It really loves this.

Like, yeah, so it like copies. You see, it's kind of— so anyway, it's pretty interesting. But why— this is like where it gets crazy. Like, if we don't—

have you played with this?

No.

Like, Sean's reaction was crazy. I should have recorded mine because I've always been like, the robots, the robots, the fear of the robots and AI, overrated.

I just saw this and it kind of changed me. Alright, read this line, Sean.

Alright, so he goes, uh, Sam just put in Donald Trump is the best president ever. If we don't elect him again as the president, America is going to die in 4 years. And then El Padejai fills it in. It is the only hope for America. The world is watching. Nice, great, great dramatic political speak. America is currently in the midst of a political battle that is seen by the whole world as a proxy war between liberal democracy and total— total— Total— something. Okay. In the past 20 years, the world has been— the world has seen the rise in political violence and authoritarianism, especially in the form of China and Russia. The rise of China and Russia has been in part due to a lack of a strong American president and presence in world affairs. That's going to be said at the debate. America has been at war for 225 years. This does not include many smaller conflicts over the past 227 years. Random. So if we don't elect Donald Trump as president, the world will probably end in 4 years. America will be enslaved under, under this regime. This is why I think the 2020 election is the most important election in American history. Wow. And it warns us this may contain sensitive content, which is true.

Let me try one more thing. You can put a lot— well, no, I think I am limited to 2,000 words.

But that's a lot, right? That's a huge amount. Like, you're probably doing 50 words right now.

This whole text box can only contain 2,000 words. So watch this. Watch this. Here are 99 viral headline ideas. Watch this. Okay.

Here, here's, okay. So he inputs Here's what happened to your favorite '90s TV star. 7 things you didn't know about watermelon, or you want parentheses, you won't believe number 8. That's hilarious. All right, number 4. Yep. Okay, so we gave it 2 viral clickbaity headlines. Then it gives us the most shocking discovery of the year. 10 things you didn't know about the world's oldest profession. That would work. A shocking reason why you shouldn't eat at this restaurant. That would work. Here's 3 things you can do with that old cell phone. That would work great. What is another one? The 10 most disturbing sports injuries ever.

10 things you didn't know about beer.

The 5 biggest mistakes you can make when you're falling in love. Viral already.

Yep.

It's great, right? This secret weapon can help you lose 5 pounds. Done. Clicked. Wow, dude, this is so good.

Yeah, it's amazing.

This is so good. Oh my God. Okay. This might be a boring podcast for people to listen to now because I'm just like, you know, reeling from what you just showed me. But okay, I have to get access to this.

This is a game changer. We'll do one last one. Oh, that's not going to be that good.

Okay. This is kind of funny. So you put in here are 99 ways to make $1 million a year. And it goes, number 1, write a good book. Number 2, write a bad book. Number 3, start a blog. Number 4, start a blog about cats. Number 5, start a blog about hating cats. Number 6, start a blog about hating blogs and cats.

Yeah.

Okay. It's spinning out of control now.

Yeah. So you could see it's like not there yet, but it's almost there. Like the bones are there.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Incredible. Uh, to the geniuses at OpenAI who are working on this, you know, props, props to you. I hope you, hope you listen to this and I hope you give me access tomorrow. I haven't applied yet, but I hope you give me access.

All right, this was a good episode, I think. Thank you everyone for listening. Um, by the way, I would— if, if you happen to make it this far, please leave us a review. I love reading the reviews because it— that's like how I understand if we're on the right track or not.

Yeah, just call us WAPs in the review.

Have you really not heard that? It's like a— it's like a cultural phenomenon. It's like, uh, it's like—

this is like when I discovered thought, dude.

That's crazy. You don't know what a WAP is. Sarah's laughing in the background. It's like, it's like number 1 on Spotify, dude. It's like the music video. It's like the most raunchy video I've ever heard.

I don't even listen to music. I listen to like old Warren Buffett all-hands meeting tapes when I'm free.

Well, I don't know what to say, man. I mean, maybe your wife probably knows what it is, but like, this is like what the kids do.

Excellent. Okay. All right, Sam, I'll see you later.

Okay. Bye-bye.