#154 - Making Millions Anonymously, How Pornstars Clean Search Results, & What is Gayburgers?
Okay, we're live, we're live, we're live. We're going to talk about how we're going to make this podcast better. And I guess we'll like brainstorm publicly, but Sean, I'm in Austin right now. Is it?
Hell froze over, bro.
What happened? What's going on in Austin? Is it national news? I haven't been to like—
I think it is national news. I don't listen to the news, but I have heard about this through Twitter and whatnot. So here's what I know. I know there's some kind of crazy storm. Texas has no power. You have no power. What's going on?
Yeah. So I woke up Monday morning and it snowed 8 inches and it was like 10 or 15 degrees, which in itself is no big deal. But they don't really have snowplows here. And also all the power shut off. So I haven't had power since Sunday night. But I also haven't had— so no power, no water, no heat. And it's been like 10 degrees and all the grocery stores are closed. So it's a little apocalyptic. It's no big deal for me because I've got friends and I'm sleeping on their floor. But if you're broke or you don't have a family member to rely on, it's a bad situation for a lot of people.
Yeah, that's crazy. So what are you— what are you doing? Is it like just— just wait it out? Is there like any solution?
I'm at the office now just chilling. I've been eating like macaroni and like peanut butter, like whatever, like office, like the office scraps that are— it's a— and it's all good. But, uh, I'll tell you something cool. So I have a good friend named Noah Kagan. Noah Kagan was on the podcast. Noah Kagan runs this company called AppSumo. And my best friend, uh, one of my best buddies is Neville Medhora. And so Neville, Noah, and then this guy named Andrew Chen, who's a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, they were all supposed to go to Puerto Rico. On Monday and they were all down at Neville's house and obviously their flight got canceled and Neville had power. And so me and my wife Sarah and us three all are just chilling at Neville's house. And it's actually pretty fun because I'm hearing all these cool stories and I could actually tell you one or two of them, but it turned out to be pretty fun.
Yeah. You had like a slumber party, adult slumber party.
Yeah. And it was pretty cool.
So what were the stories? Because that's a good group of people. Those are people who each are very interesting alone. So I want to know what you hear while you were slumber partying over there.
And Dreesen Horowitz is like this, like really cool firm, right? I don't know what they have, like maybe $15 billion in assets, like some huge, you know, they're like, I think less, but yeah, something like that.
Crazy multibillion.
They're like a tier A or tier 1 firm and it's cool. And I was like, I asked him, I go, Andrew, tell me about angel investing. Like, how do you do it? And he goes, there's a lot of like, it's, it can be complicated and it's hard and it's a required and it's a learned skill set and all that. But he was like, I'll try to summarize like a few of my rules. And he told me his rules and those were only invest if it's Bay Area or Bay Area connected, which is interesting. The second one was only do it if it's growing 3x a year. If it's hot, like a lot of people see something like Clubhouse or something else that's hot and trendy and they run away from it. And he said, no, run towards it and don't care if it's overvalued. Don't care if it's expensive. Run towards the heat. Don't run away from it. Even if it's expensive, do it because that's actually a good sign and it turns out more likely not to be right. And then go for quantity. So do, if you can't, if you have to choose between a few more money or less money, but more quantity, do the quantity one. What else? I think there's a few more, but that was my takeaway. Kind of interesting, right?
So it is interesting. So I don't know if you were paying too much attention when they first came out, but they were, they had an interesting kind of like splash in the market because Mark Andreessen himself, very popular dude, and they came out and they had a16z and they basically, it was kind of like, shots fired at the venture capital industry. So they came out and they had this there. So they're a16z, they got Marc Andreessen, who's a big dog, and, um, they came out, raised a bunch of money. And what they did was kind of interesting. They first said, you know, to differentiate from all the, all the rest, they did two things I thought were kind of interesting. First was they hired a bunch of people on staff. Like most venture firms are just like the partners who invest and then like some analysts who kind of like go hunt and do like analysis and due diligence on deals., and they hired like a huge marketing firm, like a, a marketing staff and like PR and recruiting and like whatever else. Cause they were like, we're gonna offer all these services to our portfolio. And that's like more popular now. But at the time that wasn't super popular. And these guys took it to like the next level where they had like 50 people on payroll and they're poaching like someone high up at Google to come work for their fund in service of their portfolio companies. So that was kind of interesting. And a whole bunch of other venture investors were like, Yeah, that sounds good, but like, that doesn't matter. It's just like, it's just for show, basically. The second thing is that they bought their way into a whole bunch of good deals at the overpriced valuation. So they were like, look, if you're a fund, you kind of need to have this track record of, oh, we invested in A, B, C, and D, and A, B, C, and D should all be really big, successful companies. But how do you do that? Takes time. And so they were like, all right, well, here's the shortcut. We're going to go and we're going to invest in all these companies. We're going to offer top dollar. We're going to buy in kind of late stage if we have to. We're not going to try to be making money on all these deals necessarily. We're doing these to like add the logos to our page. And a lot of investors do this, but they did it at like a pretty big scale. And so they went and they got into a whole bunch of big companies this way. Some were misses like, you know, Rap Genius and stuff like that. Those didn't work out. But then I think they got into a couple other big ones like GitHub and some others that that totally panned out. And so I like that when they came in, they kind of came in guns blazing and Ben Horowitz came in and was like, all right, cool. If you're a portfolio founder, you get to come to my barbecue in my backyard once a year. And, you know, it's all rappers and athletes and that's, that's how we roll, right? Very different than I would say the, the stereotypical dorky VC wearing a vest, not connected to like the NBA.
And I'm sure they're dorky and wearing vests. It's just that they like hang out with like, they have cool friends.
So they're like, oh yeah, we would love to get into this round and therefore, uh, and you know, Kanye will invest as well, or Andre Goddala will invest with us alongside us. And so as a founder, you're like, oh shit, that's cool. If I, if I go with these guys, Kanye's on board too. That's happening right now with Clubhouse, right? So Clubhouse was the hottest deal, right? It was the hottest girl at the dance. Basically everybody was fighting over it. And I don't know if you noticed this, but you could see when they were raising money just before they raised, you could see a whole bunch of different funds like Benchmark, which is another big tier 1 firm. All of a sudden started doing these Clubhouses. And Bill Gurley, who's like their top dog, their Marc Andreessen, he was on there and he's telling all these stories you've never heard before on Clubhouse only. And it's like all the partners, you know, after work were hanging out on there because they were trying to win the deal. And, uh, Andrew Chen, who you were, you know, hanging out with, actually was the one who ended up winning the deal. And I think as part of it, I'm sure they agreed to host some shows. So they have like They have the Good Times show, which, uh, that's the one that Elon Musk came on the other day. And then just yesterday, Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz started the A to Z show or something like that. Like those two guys just doing a, doing a show once a week, you know, that was part of their throw-in. Like, if you let us lead the round, I think we'll be users, we'll be very public users, and we'll be introducing this to a bunch of our friends. So like there's a whole bunch of like famous rappers and athletes that are on the platform because they opened up their Rolodex to get in.
We started by talking about the bad stuff. Definitely. There's definitely bad stuff going on here, but it's pretty cool to, you know, these guys are out, they're actually right out the door right here. Just, we're all working and, um, it's cool to just be around, you know, be on a fly on the wall a little bit and just kind of listen and share stories. And it's been, that, that's actually pretty neat. It's pretty cool. I mean, I don't know what else to say other than it's cool, but you wanna talk about some ideas?
Yeah, let's do it.
Can I go first? Yeah. So I wanna tell you something that's been incredibly interesting to me, and I was gonna ask you to send me the tweet to, so I could find the exact one, but he, he talks a lot about it. There's this guy named, what's the guy's name? Ba— Biology. How do you say his name?
Biology.
Biology. You brought this up a while ago and I got crazy fascinated with it and I couldn't find the exact one that you referenced, but something to the idea of that when people are working remote, they're gonna have, they're not gonna use their real face and name. And I was thinking about that and that's kind of neat. And I'm gonna sound like a big douchebag right now, but when I launched my company, The Hustle, I used my face, I used my name, I even put my phone number out there. I'm not even remotely famous, but like there is a little bit of like, you know, you get a bunch of cold emails and I get, you get recognized every once in a while, once or twice or 3 times a month. And I kind of regret that. I regret it because I feel like, like the other day I was walking down the street at my house and I was shirtless because it was hot outside and I was just like kind of being a redneck with Sarah. And this guy goes, hey, are you Sam? I was like, yeah, what's going on? He's like, oh, I listen to the podcast and I'm part of Trends, yada yada yada. And I immediately put my shirt on and I was kind of embarrassed.
He's like, nice nipples.
Yeah, I was like, what's up? And Sarah was like yelling at me. She's like, dude, you can't walk around shirtless. You're going to like— no one's going to come and talk to us because like it's kind of gross. Anyway, I kind of regret doing what I did, but it's hard to complain, right? Because we got the result. But I do think it's quite fascinating about building anonymously. And I wanted to bring up a couple of examples of this. The first is, have you read the book American Kingpin?
No, but you've said it's amazing.
It's really good. So it's about the company Silk Road. I guess it is a company. I mean, it was basically like eBay, but with Bitcoin, and you could buy guns and drugs. And because of the nature of the business, I think they had 10 full-time employees. All anonymous, never videoed, never knew the real name, paid via Bitcoin anonymously. And it worked out, it seemed. Well, it didn't entirely work out because it ended, but it was, while it lasted, quite harmonious. Harmonious, whatever. Harmonious. Harmonious. And it kind of is interesting. And I started thinking about what do I read? What do I consume that's written by anonymous? And I wanna tell you some examples. Do you know what, uh, Financial Samurai is?
It's a blog, right?
It's a financial blog. And because the guy reveals a lot of his finances, he doesn't say his identity. If you do a ton of digging, you can kind of find it. And his name's Sam. He actually lives in the Bay Area. He came to HustleCon, so that's kind of how I knew who he was. But you can read his work, and I based a lot of my life off of his feedback and tips and stuff like my financial well-being. I've based off his stuff completely anonymous. Another example is Mr. Money Mustache. Until recently, he was just Mr. Money Mustache. No one knew who his wife was, who his kids were. No one knew like what he looked like. And that's kind of interesting. Another example is David DeAngelo. Have you ever heard of David DeAngelo?
He's the pickup artist guy, right?
Yeah. So years ago there was this guy named David DeAngelo and he would write these emails on how to meet girls for like basically nerds like me. When I was 16, you would buy this book for $20 and he would teach you how to have confidence to talk to girls. And he kind of invented or was one of the inventors of this whole pickup artist thing. Well, his real name's Eben Pagan and he's shitty name. Yes, his name's Evan Pagan. I think he's from Israel or something, and he's like a really cool, nice guy, whatever. But for years, everyone thought that David D'Angelo was a real guy. He's not. And I gave him my money and bought stuff from him.
And if any guy has ever come up to you and done the cube test on you, uh, it's because they were a customer of David D'Angelo.
Yeah, and it was like a big deal. And then the third example, or the fourth example, is Michael Masterton. So Michael Masterton, I actually bought a book by this guy. We've talked about Agora. Agora is, I'll call it like a pretty scammy company that does like a billion dollars a year in revenue. And the CEO and publisher was this guy named Michael, I think it's Masterton or Michelson, Michael Michelson or Michael Masterton. I forget the last name, but that's not his real name. That's not a real person. And he actually writes books and I bought 'em and they're actually really good books, but he like runs his business as the publisher of Agora under a fake name. They probably do that because partially it's kind of scammy, but regardless, this idea of being anonymous is really intriguing. And I think that there's going to be a world quite soon where I hire someone and they work at my company and I don't know anything real about them. Like, do you have— I know I have friends this way. Do you have friends that you talk to only on Facebook Messenger or on Twitter and you've never met them? You don't even know what their last name is, but you would actually trust them with a significant amount of information?
Yeah, definitely. There's a few different kind of, either Twitter friends or kind of groups that I'm in where I knew 3 of the people in the group, but the other 3 I didn't know. But over time I'm like, okay, all 6 of these people are great and trusted and I will, you know, I'll invest in them. I will, you know, take their advice. I will share things with them, you know, like almost always in the business sense. It's never really anything else. But yeah, it's weird. It's weird that you have these like online only, you know, username only Friends.
Yeah, I have this guy named Joe Speiser. Joe Speiser started Little Things. He started all this. He's a very successful guy. He invested in my company. I consider him one of my closest top 15 friends. I have hung out with him in person or talked to him on the phone twice. And I like will tell him all— like, I consider like a really good friend's like when I give him the PIN number to my bank account. And I would do that. I've talked to him. I've heard his voice, I think 2 or 3 times. And I think that this is just kind of fascinating, something I've been thinking about. Um, I guess I'm kind of rambling here, but it's incredibly interesting. Oh, let me give you a few more examples. We can actually parlay this into talking about reputation.com. Do you know reputation.com?
I know it because, uh, Furkan, who's my co-founder of my company, used to work there. And so he's told me some pretty crazy stories about it. Explain what it is. So if somebody doesn't know.
So it's kind of secretive by nature of like what it does. It's a little bit secretive, but it's called reputation.com. I think it started in 2014. So it's been around for 15-ish years. It's, it's not a new thing. I don't think it's huge. I don't think it's small. Maybe 500, 600 people work there. And I first heard about it because The Hustle, we did a story about Sasha Gray. Sasha Gray is a porn star who became a normal actress, like a Hollywood actress. And she wanted to— when you search her name, instead of porn coming up, she wanted her, like, new work to come up. So she hired Reputation.com. In The Hustle, we wrote a story about that, and all of a sudden it became the most popular article on our website. Because reputation.com saw that and they boosted it hardcore. And so if you Googled Sasha Gray, that article came up number one and reputation.com was like, oh, this is free advertising, let's boost this. And so what they do is they help you dominate search results for your name. They help you dominate reviews for your name and for your brand and a bunch of really kind of odd and secretive stuff like that. But it's incredibly fascinating reputation.com. And I don't think there's that many companies out there doing similar stuff.
So I'll tell you a couple of stories that I had heard about it. So what happens is famous person comes, basically has some scandal or they use a homophobic slur or they get caught cheating or whatever it is, or they're accused of something they didn't even do, or they're accused of something they didn't even do. Whatever the case may be, when you Google their name, which is your reputation as far as the world goes, is the first thing anybody does when they when they hear your name or don't want to know anything about you is they Google you and you get unflattering articles coming up. Now, how do you prevent that? That's hard to prevent because, A, you don't know how Google's search engine works, and B, the most kind of juicy scandalous articles or kind of like stories will actually get linked to and shared the most and actually, you know, like perform the best. And so they created, you know, a whole bunch of different tools to be able to change those results. So the promise was, all right, you know, famous NASCAR driver who doesn't like that story that comes up when you Google your name, $100,000 and we'll make it go away. So they're like the fixer of the, you know, of the internet. They're like the, uh, the wolf in Pulp Fiction. And so they, what they would do is they would figure out like, and I think back then they were doing maybe a million or two a month. So let's say like $25 million a year annual revenues. That was like 10 years ago. So I would guess that that's probably closer to 100 million or more now. But basically they found a way to like manipulate the search results. And the biggest innovation he told me was, you know how Google does an autocomplete? Like you start typing Sam, it's like S-A-M-P-A-R, and then it's like Sam Parr racist or whatever. And so they figured out how to, how to use those autocomplete suggestions to like change the results basically for you. That was like the big moneymaker at the time. And so very interesting company for Reputation.com. I find it to be fascinating.
I have a friend, a very close friend who was accused of doing something and it was not— it was a horrible accusation. And he went to court and he won. It was proven, you know, this is not true. Like they went through all the evidence and the person who accused him of it actually dropped the suit and they're like, you know, it's not true. And their name still shows up. There was like an article set number 1 that says blank is accused of Y, and then there's much fewer articles that says blank has been dropped from— or, you know, this person is no longer accused and was found innocent of Y. But the first set of articles still are the ones that show up number 1, and they were trying to hire Reputation.com. It's incredibly interesting. And I think it's interesting because I think this problem is actually going to get worse and worse and worse.. And when we sold our company, well, just the other week, I didn't do anything wrong, but I was so nervous about, like, I saw articles written online about me that were like positive articles, but they weren't true. Like they were, you know, no one was being mean, but they were saying stuff that just simply wasn't factual. It's kind of messed up, right? Because what if I was being accused of something horrible? How do you solve for this? And it's kind of interesting and it's just something I've been thinking about. And listen to this, I went and got a, um, COVID test recently. I won't even say what it was, but a huge chain. And they were like, hey, do you have any ID on you? And I actually had lost my ID. And I go, no, but watch this. And I googled my name, and then I clicked images, and I go, look, like, that's me. And they accepted it.
It took—
wow, they took it. And that's probably actually—
it's actually better, right?
I'm like, look, there's like a checkmark, or I don't know what I had. I had something. I go, look here, look, I just googled my name. And I'm like, look, there's my wife in the pictures too. I'm right here next to her.
Yeah, and it was kind of interesting. And so anyway, long story short, I've been thinking about this constantly. And the last thing I will say is when you go to the grocery store and they ask for your phone number or your email, do you give it to them? No, I refuse to give it to them. I'm not giving it to them. And I think that that sentiment is not just amongst dorks like you and I. I think that that sentiment is actually becoming far more popular amongst normal average people. And so the sentiment of privacy, the sentiment of you want to control your data, not someone else— for years it was just like nerds like you and me. I really think that something is going to be continuing brewing in this space. And I know I'm rambling and I don't have the answer for how to solve the problems, but it's incredibly fascinating.
So, all right, so you brought up a bunch of different things. No, that's all right. Uh, but what's the most interesting? So there's, there's the idea of like privacy, and what are the ideas and what's cool in that space right now. And then there's the biology concept of you're going to separate your real identity and your work identity. You brought up some cool examples, you know, like the most popular one now is Satoshi Nakamoto, right? Like whoever created Bitcoin. If there was a person who had created Bitcoin or a company that had created Bitcoin, I would bet anything that it would not have had the success it's had so far because there would have been a sort of central point of attack where you could go shut it down. You could question their motives. Almost $1 trillion.
$1 trillion asset was created by someone and we don't— and it was a fake name.
Yeah.
No, this is— and so this is straight out of a movie, right? And it's not important. It's not important, your real identity. And it's probably actually cooler if you don't use it.
Yes. Preferred, right? If you can keep your real identity out of it, you would, right? What you did with the hustle, same thing I do with putting my name fucking everywhere is if you use a name and you use a real name, there are some benefits to you. You, you, it helps you gain audience. It helps people like you and connect with you and trust you and jump from one project to the next of yours. But we're kind of dumb because we're accruing all that on our private key, as they would say in crypto, right? We're putting our real name on every single thing that we do. That has a lot of consequences because let's say we do something wrong. And this is kind of Balaji's point, is you can get canceled not just socially, but also professionally now. And okay, lame example, but do you watch The Bachelor? Is that a thing you do? Yes. Have you seen this controversy right now that's going on with Chris Harrison, the host of The Bachelor?
He made a comment like someone liked a race— someone liked a tweet written by a racist person 3 years ago, and Chris made some comment like, well, 2019 was different.
It's a little different. It's a little different. So, okay, a contestant on this year's— this season, who is, by the way, the one who's— so this is the season with the first Black Bachelor. The girl who's his favorite, they found a photo of her, you know, a couple years ago at, uh, what's called an antebellum party. I don't know what this is, but it's like an Old South party. Basically, it's a party on a plantation and you dress up kind of like they used to do back in the old days. But what that means is you're dressing up essentially like somebody who used to like own slaves back in the Old South. Now, that's not why they're doing it. They weren't— they, you know, it's not like the party was, yeah, we love slavery. That's not really what it was. But there's definitely like kind of like a racist undertone and kind of like context to what they were doing anyway. So this photo comes out. People are like, oh, that's messed up. They start, you know, trashing her online and digging up her parents' like voting records. And they see that her dad donated to WinRed, which a company we talked about that is the donation platform for Trump. And they're like, oh, he donates on WinRed all the time, blah, blah, blah. And so she starts getting torn apart on social media. So there's an interview with this former Black Bachelorette and the host Chris Harrison. Now, Bachelor's been one of the most popular shows for like, I don't know, 20 years or something crazy., and this guy's been the host the whole way. So he's pretty like, it's like kind of like a staple of the franchise. And she goes, what do you think about the controversy? And he was basically like, well, you know, I think people need to just calm down. Like she hasn't had a chance to come out and say anything, like either apologize or defend herself or explain. And people are just taking it too far. And you know, he started calling everybody the woke police. He's like, I'm not the woke police. There's plenty of people out there that will do this. And he was basically like, I think we just need to give her some, some patience and some time.
Kind of like it was kind of a non-answer.
It was a defense of her. And on top of that, he goes, I don't know, it's a photo from 5 years ago. And then the interviewer's like, well, it's 2018, not 5 years ago. And then he's like, yeah, but like, you know, I get it in 2021, that's wrong, everything's wrong. But like in 2018, was that the same thing? I don't know. And like, I don't know, like 50 million girls in the country went to a party of that theme. Like, I don't know if we can put them all in the box of being racist. Frankly, I agreed with everything he was saying. You know, he was kind of like smug about it 'cause he's kind of a smug prick, I think. I'm also pretty anti-cancel culture, so I tend to defend people even if I don't like what they did. I don't like the cancel culture stuff. So I understand what he was saying, which was like, look, I don't think she's racist. I don't think we should rip her whole life apart because she went to this party. She probably just got dressed up and went to a party. It really wasn't much. There was no more intent than that behind it. Anyways, he gets canceled. He has to step aside now from the show. After that, he got canceled basically by the mob. The mob was waiting with the pitchforks out. And this is something that I didn't really pay attention to until I got a little bit of a bigger following because of this podcast and Twitter. And then the mob hasn't really come after me, but definitely everything you say, you're going to get some kind of reaction to it. And usually the loudest reaction is the most outraged person.
Dude, a guy on Twitter yelled at me today because I said What's going on in Austin? Like, I kind of have like fear, almost like I did during 9/11 where you're like, not sure, like if something else is going to happen or who's going to— who could help you. And someone said, dude, do not compare this to 9/11. Like, he like yelled at me. I was like, well, I mean, that's what comparing is. You take two things that aren't equal and you just kind of like, like compare them. Yeah. Like, I'm not saying one's worse or one's, you know, I'm just like saying like I felt like of a similar— anyway, it was kind of funny.
By the way, I tweeted out this thing, this Ricky Gervais picture where it just says Oh, you're like, you're outraged. I thought it was funny and that's why I'm happier than you. Like, that's how I feel all the time on Twitter. You know, I think that you, you're seeing because people are getting canceled left and right and because they're losing their careers over it, right? Like Louis CK and some guys that we like in the comedy world, like, you know, you like the show The Fighter and the Kid. Well, Brian Callen got accused of something from 20 years ago. No proof, no real like legal precedent for it, uh, got canceled. Can't do his show anymore, has to just like not do his show. He can't get a job anymore because of that. And so there's definitely like this— I'm interested to see what happens. Now, what Balaji kind of suggests is, hey, the solution is you're not going to get the mob to calm down. In fact, they're just going to get louder and angrier and be more excited about their power to just— who's the next target? And so instead, the solution is to to decouple, to detach your real identity and your work identity and be more like Financial Samurai, be more like Mr. Money Mustache, be more like Growth Guy Sam and not Sam Parr, right? Is that the answer? And I actually think that it kind of is the answer. I don't think everybody is gonna work this way, but I know that if I'm gonna create another thing, it's very tempting to me to just create it under some idea or pseudonym. Like, or some brand rather than my personal name.
I'm 100% going to do that, or it's just not going to rely on me. And the best example I can think of that is like Daft Punk. Like, would you rather be Daft Punk or Celine Dion? I'd way rather be Daft Punk because like anyone could be under that mask. Daft Punk, I don't know, I barely listen to them, but it's basically—
No, but it's the same thing with the DJs like Marshmello, who's got the big thing on his head.
Deadmau5, you know, with a helmet on, with a mask on, and you have no idea like who they are.
By the way, way catchier, way easier to actually build a brand because you're a fucking DJ with a mouse head or a marshmallow head.
It's actually a lot more memorable there at any point. Like, how often do you think that that guy is actually in there? I would actually, I bet you not a lot.
That's crazy. I would love to ask him. I met Deadmau5 once. We did a call and I should have asked him because that's totally right. Of course. Does that guy want to go on tour constantly for like 10 years straight? No. Like, he's gotta be sending a stunt double up there. And especially for DJs where you're basically just hitting a play button and then you're kind of, you know, jumping around. Like, that's like the easiest thing to do to send a body double up for.
There's another example of this, which is, um, I remember a long time ago, WordPress— WordPress is still obviously like runs like a third of the web, so they were quite popular, but they tested this thing called, um, well, it's not popular anymore, but I think it was popular called the, uh, what was it called? Was it called Gravatar?
No, I don't know what that is.
If I remember correctly, they were trying to make it so you have like a universal avatar. Yeah. Like a universal— yeah, Gravatar. That's what it is.
It basically was a globally recognized avatar, globally recognized. So Grav—
Gravatar. Yeah. And it was— the idea was like, look, we control most of the web. We're going to give you one comment, one name to comment on every single website that uses WordPress. And it's pretty fascinating. And I started thinking about that and I started thinking about like when I use my Google Images, for my ID and it just, something's brewing here and I gotta figure it out. And I'll give you, hopefully this is, you guys are gonna find some value in this. I know I'm rambling, but I'll give you one more data point, which was Tim Westergen. I think I've said this many times, Tim Westergen, the founder of Pandora. Pandora's used by, I don't know how many people, but probably hundreds of millions. So his data size is quite big and it's used by normal people. It's not used just by like Silicon Valley techie people. It's used by the world. And he told me, that the average Joe, like, you know, someone in my hometown of Missouri, dentists, were starting to not use Pandora because they didn't wanna click the button that said, "I agree to your terms of services," which says that you can control, like, some of my data. And he said the average Joe was actually worrying about that. And in my head, I'm like, I constantly like to think of, like, what's not popular now that will be in 5 or 10 years? Something is brewing here, and I'm gonna be keeping an eye on it, and I don't know how to pounce, but something's here.
So I'll tell you about an app that I think is kind of cool in this space. It's called Guardian. Have you ever heard of this?
No, but I'll pull it up.
All right, I'm gonna hold it up. So it's an app called Guardian. You open it and there's one giant button and it's just a guardian shield. And what this app is, is it's a VPN for your phone, but it also acts as like ad block. So it basically lets you, it does 3 things as far as I understand. And I'm not super technical, but the guys behind this are like, the most hardcore of engineers. These guys are the ones who like went the deepest with like jailbreaking iPhones and stuff like that. Like kind of like these guys understand this device in my hand and what it's capable of and how to like navigate it. They basically have like 10 of like the smartest hackers around jailbreaking. Like I talked to Furkan who's extremely technical and he was like, dude, this team is like the all-star team of who you would want for like privacy focused. They're kind of like freedom fighters. That are like hardcore, hardcore engineers. And, uh, he's like, this is like an all-star team. He's like, I don't know if the product's gonna take off or not, but this is like an incredible team for this. And so what they do, the app does 3 things. So the first is it's a VPN. So when you're browsing, it's not easy for any app or any kind of packet sniffer to figure out that it's you who's browsing all these different things and where you are, where you're located, what's your device ID, all that good stuff, right? So it kind of like it masks your traffic. The second thing is it basically acts as ad block for your phone. The way that you have ad block in your browser, this does it for your phone, for all the different like apps that you're using. And then it tells you, hey, this app was trying to track you doing X. This app was trying to figure out your location doing Y. Uh, it's pretty cool. And so you can see what, how much, like I used it for like a day now and I have 213 alerts. New Relic was trying to collect device information. AppFlyer was trying to do this, uh, Scorecard Research was trying to do this, and it basically— Firebase was trying to check this, Branch was trying to check this. And so it kind of like blocks all those different ads.
And how many reviews does the app have?
Uh, reviews, I'm not sure. I can check real quick, but it has users. So I actually talked to the founder and I'm looking at investing in it. They actually have pretty good traction, so I won't say too much, but—
well, uh, Bray, you just said they have 4,000 reviews.
They have hundreds of thousands of downloads and they have, uh, you know, like tens of thousands in monthly recurring revenue, growing pretty fast.
Rarely.
So I have 8 different handles. Yeah. And they all have like personas that represent like a different interest. So like one persona is San Francisco. So like I comment on a lot of the San Francisco political and or like I'll just like comment on all like bear, like where's a good place to hike or I'm angry about this. What can we do about yada yada yada? Now I have one for Austin, a different username. I have another username that will comment on like true crime stuff, which is weird. So I have like these like personas.
Have you noticed that on Twitter recently there's these things trending like it'll say Facebook-0 or Twitter-2? Have you seen this on issues? So what it is is there was this meme which was how many accounts do you have on each of these services? It'll be like Instagram 3, and that means that this person has 3 Instagram accounts. They have one that's like what they're just their real friends and there's their real identity. Then there's one kind of like for their public thing, but they don't post their real shit. That's kind of like the curated. And then they just have like a Finstagram, like a total fake Instagram where they just stalk people and just talk shit. I found it really interesting just to browse like tons of Facebook zeros because people are like trying, you know, the people who respond to this are trying to like delete Facebook type of thing. And then so many have multiple accounts on Twitter and Instagram and Reddit because they want to do exactly what you're doing, which is like be free to say what they want and be who they want in the moment. And like not be like one boxed person who has like a lot to lose and a bunch of like, you know, disparate things all tied together.
It's cool. I do it as well. I have so many different usernames like that are different personas that are all me, but like different interests.
I wish I had built this podcast, uh, not with my face and real name, but instead, you know, made up some John B. Rockefeller, you know, random ass name, right? Mr. Millions instead of, uh, of My First Million by Sean, right? Like That would've been more freeing to do that.
Do you remember like in kidnap movies where there's like a voice decoder who's like, I'm gonna kill 'em. You know what I mean? Like unmarked bills at this location. You can get one of those, but make it sound like a normal woman or normal man.
What's the service that does that? You mentioned there's some service that just does that, right?
I forget what it's called, but it would be fun to have like a whole podcast and you could be a woman if you want to. And you could be a totally different person and just use that real voice. And I'll actually tell you a story. When I launched The Hustle, in order to appear as though I was bigger than I was, I actually had multiple personalities. So I had Sid Finch, I had Steph Whitfield, I had Steve Garcia, which is— so Steph Whitfield is a combination of two friends. Sid Finch is a famous April Fool's joke that Sports Illustrated made, a fake person. I had Steve Garcia, which is Steve Jobs and Jerry Garcia. That's the person who does drugs. I had like 4 or 5 different names and I had all these like personalities. For example, one personality, Steph Whitfield. I noticed that if you go to LinkedIn and you click like a blonde-haired woman, the recently viewed profiles all are other blonde-haired women. So it was clearly like dudes or like someone just like clicking through like all— it's like kind of creepy and weird. And I was like, this is kind of messed up. This is really bad. And I wrote like from Steph Whitfield's point of view about how odd this is. I would have all these personas and it was actually quite fun. And you know who else did this? Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin did this when he created his first newspaper. He would have like a conservative point of view and then like the equivalent of a liberal point of view. And he would make these arguments and he would write a post in the newspaper. And then the next week he would be like, Dear Mr. Blank, I think what you said was so stupid and yada, yada, yada. And he was the author behind all of them.
I love that. That's a lot to juggle, but it's kind of like, you know, it turns it into like WWE or like some kind of like method acting thing where you have to like stay in character and you have to, you know, hold that character. What would that character say here? You know, in order to pull it off. I think the Reddit guys did something similar at the beginning where they, in order to make the subreddit feel not like, to make Reddit not feel dead, they had, I think, you know, 20 or 50 accounts and they would just post one article and then each account would comment on it and they were faking the entire user base at the beginning. And then, you know, the magical day was the day that they went on there and there were real accounts posting and it wasn't their fake accounts.
You and I have a friend who has a pretty large business, like a $50 million a year, like some number between $20 and $50 million a year, very large business. And I'll tell you afterwards, but there's no about page and there's no pictures of the team. It could be anyone. And it's incredibly successful company. I always thought that you had to have an about page. You had to like say who your personality was, but no matter who, like, If you go to this person's website, you will not see anything about who they are, who works there. I don't even think you'll find anything on LinkedIn. And it's a— the business is— could potentially be worth 9 figures. Yeah. And so I remember I seen that and it totally changed my opinion of like, oh, I don't need to like use my real information.
I think we could say a little bit more, which is that it's a dude. The product is for white women and this is a non-white dude. If there was— it's not that just that there's not an about page, it's that if there was an about page, literally this probably wouldn't even work. I think they had their girlfriend do something once when they had to like show a face behind something because, you know, it just wasn't going to work.
And this is the second or third time the same person has done this.
Yeah.
And the other time it was another big thing. It's kind of cool to see that. Anyway, we're talking about anonymity. Uh, we're talking about Privacy.
I don't know where we'll go from here, but we should also say the downside, right? Like, the downside is once you start to build a reputation, right? If you wanted to go do your whatever, launch your next newsletter or do another thing, any new thing you wanted to go do, doing Sam Parr is going to be way easier for you now. If you actually want to start anonymous now, it's like tying one hand behind your back. You're not going to use your reputation.
It's not entirely that though, because what if you saw and tweeted out I just found this new thing, but I have no idea who makes it, but it is awesome. And you're constantly promoting it. I mean, you could, you know, you could still kind of use it. And here, let me give you a really specific example of this. When you bought your house, can someone search the San Francisco assessor's office and find your information?
I don't believe so.
Did you get an LLC? No. So I can go to that assessor's office. I can use your last name. And I actually knew your, I know your address, right? I've been to your house. So I could look up your address and it could tell me, your phone number. It could tell me who the owner is. I think you could even find how much loan you got and who loaned you money. Right. Um, buying a house, I like wanted to use an LLC and do all this privately so no one could find me. Not that anyone's probably looking for me, but I had one time recently where somebody sent me a package because I took a picture of my house and I blurred the address and they said something like, think about how hard I used to find where you live. How, like, you know, how good I was. Well, they were, they said, they're like, like, I worked this hard to find your home. I can like do all this stuff as like your intern or like something like that. And I was like, that's nice, but that's weird. And so I got really nervous about this type of stuff. And that's why when I got my house, it was actually really hard to hide all my information. And so maybe there's some cool opportunities in that space as well. And also if you buy your house, I think the way it works is if you buy your house and you didn't use an LLC to hide your information, I think that you cannot switch it to an LLC to hide it, right?
Yeah. I think domains have, you know, there's like a WHOIS thing for domains as well. That's very similar. So here's one that— here's an idea that's like in this space. Do you ever worry about like old stuff you posted on social media like 5+ years ago?
Sarah, my wife, found something that I wrote in college. I don't want to entirely say because I'm not— I'm kind of embarrassed, but I took a test and I was like, Man, that test really effed me. And I was like, oh, that's so vulgar. And I was 20 when I wrote it and she found it. Yeah.
So I think about this 'cause I once got pitched a company that was like, we give companies a tool to basically every time you hire somebody, it searches their social media and it'll surface for you anything that is like not, you know, like anything that is a risky thing. And so you know about it as an employer and you can offer you know, the employee a way to one-click kind of like remove all of your like flagged posts that we thought were somewhat dangerous. And I was like, that is a great idea. Now I don't know what happened. That idea like didn't go anywhere. Maybe somebody else is doing it. I know, I know that entrepreneur who is a talented guy and I thought it was a great idea. I know that it didn't go anywhere for some reason, but I think this is critical. I think that companies in the same way that like the Bachelor example I was telling you earlier, a lot of people are mad at the Bachelor. They're like, why don't you vet your candidates? This took us 5 minutes on Instagram to go see this picture, you know, like that they liked a picture of, you know, their friend in front of the Confederate flag or whatever. Like, why aren't you doing better vetting? Well, the same thing's happening for companies, right? Companies are hiring people and not being, not vetting their social media, right? And a lot of people say, oh, you don't need to do that. The reality is that this stuff is all public and people get pissed about it. And so like the reality is that that shit is a liability for people. And so I like this idea of a tool that will flag any like dangerous red flag, kind of like vulgar, potentially insensitive, like tweets or Instagram pictures for you or whatever, give you a one-click way to delete it. I went and tried to delete all my old tweets, not because I even thought something was there, but just as my Twitter's been growing, I was like, oh, I should just make my feed only good tweets. So I stopped tweeting about like—
maybe what you tweeted 5 years ago doesn't represent—
well, that's true anyways. And I'm sure I did something stupid or said something stupid, like I think I've had Twitter for 7, 8 years, 9 years maybe, something like that. I don't know how long. And if it's not Twitter, then it's whatever platform I was on before that.
I was—
I definitely was dumb from the ages of like, you know, 0 to 32, which is, you know, last year. I don't trust my own past. And so anyways, I wanted an easy way to delete it. So I went and I found that there's some bootleg. The best way to delete your Twitter is like this one website called Tweeter Deleter or something like that. And it's this old school looking website. It barely works. You have to like pay for premium. I actually think this would be a fantastic little business to buy because I think it just prints money. But also I think in general there should be better tools to like clean up your social media.
I use this one tool and I don't use it anymore, but I did where it would delete, it would auto delete any tweet that was 25 days old.
Yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. It's not like I really want my old tweets to like stick around. That's not really the nature of Twitter. Twitter's like, you know, here's a thought I have in the moment. This might be funny, you know, like it's not meant to be like some blog post.
When your daughter was born and your new baby coming up, did you buy her domain name or register her usernames on a variety of properties?
Yeah, my wife did. I thought she was crazy. She got her Gmail for her. She, I was like, you know, everything's gonna change, right? She was like trying to get her Instagram and like, I was like, I don't think Instagram's gonna be the thing necessarily. Like when she's 13, you know, that's 13 years from now. It might not be the main thing.
That's kind of interesting. It's also interesting that because if you created a Facebook for her, you could tag her on stuff, and then when she's older, you can write her. Like Ramon, our friend, I think— is it him or someone where he created a profile for his son and he would write him messages?
We do that. It's kind of corny, but like, she was like, all right, she has the Gmail, let's write her letters. And when she's like whatever, however years old— so we have two Gmails. We have one that's just her name And then we have one that's letters to blush, and it's basically when she's 18, she'll get all these letters and she'll be able to read it from the day she was born. I only wrote one so far because, like, it's an easy thing to procrastinate, but I think it's a cute idea. Like, it's— I think it's, like, sentimental. I like it.
I have a buddy named Nick Baum, B-A-U-M, and he started this company called Storyworth. Have you seen Storyworth?
Is Storyworth the—
no, I mean, it's a pretty common name.
Is this the one where, like, interviews your family or something?
Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of like Midwestern American, like it's pretty common not to talk about your mom or dad. I don't know my grandparents or I don't really know like where I came from. That's like pretty common amongst, um, like in the Midwest. Like you don't talk about like who you're, it just, I don't know, they're more stoic and they just don't talk about what they were like growing up. And it's a pretty sick service that emails them a question every week. Like what's something that you regret as a child? Or like what was the most fun you ever remember having with your father? Or when you were in 4th grade, what was like a really cool story? And my aunt would do this. And over the course of a year, I now have close to a whole book of cool stories about her and my mother growing up. And it's an awesome, awesome service. It is a good business. I don't know if it's a big business, but it's a pretty sick service.
Yeah, that's cool. I like that a lot. I actually been trying to do something similar. My mom's visiting my house right now, and actually tonight I told her, I want to do a podcast episode with you. It's not going to ever get published, but I just want to sit down and talk to you kind of like with a mic, good quality audio. And I want to ask you about your life because like, you know, who knows? Anything can happen anytime. And I want to like have this one great archive at least that like, you know, I can remember you by and like my kids can remember you by as well. And I think that's just a cool idea for anybody to do with their parents. I actually was watching last night Uh, you know who Lex Fridman is?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know why he's great, but I know that many people are obsessed with him.
Yeah, I actually don't know how he got popular either. He's insanely popular. We should actually have him on. He's got a cult following. And what's funny is he's got this YouTube channel, uh, Lex Fridman, I think.
I don't know. He's like a Russian MIT scientist.
Yeah, exactly. He's a, he's a, I think it was like a student when he started this. He's basically like into AI and technology more broadly. He's had like Elon Musk on this podcast. He's had like a whole bunch of like legit people who respect his work. They've listened and they like go on there because it's like a very thoughtful thing. And he talks very slow and he's very intentional about it and he's kind of nerdy and, uh, he's very deep. And so anyways, he did an episode with his dad and his dad looks like Albert Einstein. And so it's just this awesome episode, two Russian guys They both have a bottle of vodka and they do this like multi-hour podcast with his dad. And by the end of it, they've drank their bottle of vodka each and they like toast and it's like, I love you, dad. It's like, I love you, son. And there's this clip online about like, it's called Build Your Rocket: The Meaning of Life. And it's basically like he asked his dad like, what's the meaning of life? And his dad, who's a Russian scientist and he has like a Russian accent, he's awesome. His dad is like an awesome character. He looks like Einstein and he goes, I don't know what to say. He's like, I want to tell you, son, like, just enjoy your life. Like, the meaning of life is to just live your life and enjoy it. That's it. He's like, I want to tell you and your brother that. He's like, then also I want to tell you, like, go for it. Do something great. Whatever you think would be the great thing to do, whatever. He's like, I told you, he's like, I told you the story about this guy who said this couldn't be done, and then I built this little mini rocket and it didn't work, but it kind of like exploded and it kind of worked. That was also an amazing part of my life. And I kind of want you to do that too. Like, I think AI is your rocket. You should build your rocket. And like, he's just, he like, he has these 3 paths that he lays out for him and he's like, I don't know, but I don't know, son. And, uh, I just thought it was a really fucking cool episode and, uh, I really liked it. And you get the comments were like insane for it. Like every comment was like, why am I crying type of thing? And I think that's one thing that Lex has done very well is like, Nobody who watches this show hates him. He has a pure I love you audience, uh, from what I can tell. Otherwise, once you get bigger like Joe Rogan or whoever, there's just a bunch of people who every episode have something to complain about. And, uh, Lex is in that— he's in that sweet spot where he's big, but he's big and loved. He's not hated yet.
Well, I hope that's where we are. I had a guy who created the sham par, and he just has been tweeting, making fun of me.
Well, hold on, we got to read my favorite review. We got to do our review of the week. You sent this to me.
Where is it?
It's a 4-star review. Yeah. Okay, here we go. So the review of the week, 4 stars.
Make sure you say who his name is.
FUDude is his name. And he says the title, all 4 stars are for Sam. He goes, I just listened to the pod about The Hustle getting acquired and Sean won't stop talking about himself for more than 10 seconds or let Sam or the guest talk. I'm happy for him that he loves himself so much., but it is not good for the pod. I've been listening for a long time, so this is not a one and done review. I actually really appreciate that he put that in there, or she put that in there because Sean's response was great, which is this guy is 100% correct.
Yeah, I do love myself.
I love myself. Yes. You know, spot on. I'm glad that's coming through.
I thought that was a wonderful reply. Uh, I don't think we've had any reviews where you've read it and we were like, that asshole. It's always been like, yeah, like they're wrong, or yeah, they're kind of right.
Yeah, but mostly it's like, okay, sick burn, and there's an element of truth there, you know, fair play.
I can't— I don't think that that one's true, but we have had people in the Apex thing or whatever that— I hate Apex, whatever that— yeah, those guys are assholes. Assholes, but they're funny, and so that's like the worst.
Go to this website. So go to gayburgers.com.
Gay burger.
Gayburgers.com. Here, I'm gonna put it in the chat.
Is that us? Are we gay burger?
No, it's just a cool idea that whatever you just said reminded me of it. So this is a cloud kitchen done by, remember we talked about cloud kitchens when MrBeast did his restaurant? So this is some other YouTubers, I think, got behind this one. It's an LGBTQ-themed burger joint and the landing page is great. So the first thing is the picture, if you're not looking at it, if you're driving.
And Burger King making out.
Yes, exactly. So that's the background. And then it says, meat between buns seems pretty gay already. Let's make it gayer and for charity. And so 100% of the proceeds go to the Los Angeles LGBT Center for Homeless Youth. And it's a burger joint with a gay theme. So you can get the Love Me Daddy, You can get the Help Me Daddy, you can get the I Like Chicks, which is a chicken sandwich. You can get the No More Milk Daddy, which is a vegan burger. And then you can get your side of gay fries or extremely gay fries. And so, you know, I just think this is hilarious.
I love this. I'll order from it.
They're only in LA, San Francisco, and New York, unfortunately.
I love gay burgers. This is wonderful. I want to get a gay burger t-shirt. This is great.
Yeah, exactly. So whoever's behind this, send us some swag. We will rep it. But yeah, I think we should, uh, I think we should launch our own burger chain.
We can wrap up with this, which is we had this— me and Sarah had this joke that like whenever we saw these big tough guys wear MAGA hats, we're like, oh yeah, make America gay again. Let's do it. It was like, yeah, take your shirt off as you walk by them. Yeah. Hell yeah. Let's make it gay again. I'm down. You want to make America gay again? Let's do it. And we're like, let's gay it up.
Have you done it yet or just the idea?
No. Like, that was my joke when I would see these guys. I was like, they would say MAGA and I'd be like, Hell yeah, let's make this son of a bitch gay again. I'm down. And they would just look at me funny.
I love it.
I don't know, we went from privacy to gay burgers to make America gay again to, uh, yeah, I'll bring you—
I think that's the topic. I think the title of the episode is, uh, Privacy... Gay Burgers.
That's awesome. And then me and Sean, we're gonna be doing some more stuff with this podcast over the next few months. I want to make it, I don't know, top 5 in the category. Who's the top 5? Like Dave Ramsey, maybe?
Yeah, dude, we should smoke all these guys. These guys are stale. They don't do anything interesting. We should do, uh, we should win. We should be at the top of the charts.
That's what's the category? I'm looking it up now. What's our category? Dave Ramsey is pretty good. I mean, like, objectively, like, he's like done it.
By the way, we did a thing once. We should do this again. We should do it for real this time. We're gonna put a phone number in the description of this podcast, in the, in the show notes. And that's going to be a voicemail line. And you can ask us any question we're going to do. We should do like Q&A episodes, but basically you call in, you ask your question, we'll play your recording on the pod, and then we'll respond to it. And if you want to give us some shit in the recording, you can give us some shit, no problem. I want the fans to be able to interact. And so I want to do kind of like a mailbag where basically we take questions from the audience.
Dude, who's this? Jay? I almost said Gay Shetty. Who's Jay Shetty? This guy's everywhere. This Indian looking guy.
I don't know, dude. You know how I feel when another Indian dude is doing better than me at what I'm trying to do. He's got like green eyes.
Fuck. Yeah, he's really good looking. Jay Shetty. He's everywhere. And then also there's this new thing called Pennies.
Yo, what happened to colored contacts? Have you seen anyone wearing colored contacts in like 15 years? I feel like that is some D2C bro needs to make a colored contact company and just come back with that. I don't think people stopped wanting to have better colored eyes.
I know a couple Indian guys with hazel eyes. That's pretty common, right?
It's not common, but yeah, it happens, and it's like, oh, it's always like, oh wow, that's amazing. By the way, this article about him says Jay Shetty, monk turned millionaire. Come on, bro.
No, I think he's an okay guy. I think he's a little cheesy. I think he's a good dude though. He's like the Oprah for like dudes.
Oh, actually, I've seen this guy's video before. I think I do like this guy.
Jordan Harbinger Is the top.
It's our boy.
So we can talk to him and, and then Shane Parrish, who we know, and then Earn Your Leisure. I like those guys.
So what we'll do is the next episode, we'll do our brainstorm live of how we're gonna grow the pod. I think people would find that interesting. So we'll add a 15-minute segment where we brainstorm how we are gonna take this pod from whatever it's doing now, 3.5, 4 million downloads a year to over 10. Let's basically do the brainstorm live.
All right. I gotta go. I'll talk to you guys soon.
See ya, bye.