#192 - Making Billions with Greeting Cards, How the FBI Took Down Thousands of Criminals, & Rich People (not) Paying Taxes

I think that you've said a lot of amazing stuff for the past 2 years. I think what you just said right there actually might be one of the most valuable rants in terms of just money that you've ever said.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back. What's up? It's me, Sean and Sam, the Vanilla Gorilla.

All right, we have a good episode today. Sean just said he thought this was an amazing episode. We talked about a lot of different stuff. You have a list. What do we talk about?

We talked about, uh, the surprisingly big business of greeting cards and e-cards. Uh, we talked about the crazy Chick-fil-A tech stack and some ideas around that and creating a consulting company around that. We talked about this crazy FBI takedown where the FBI basically tricked thousands and thousands of criminals with a, uh, a pretty genius app. Um, what else? You, you did a good Bumpboxes breakdown.

And a Bumpbox, a guy who's built a business that sells, uh, subscription boxes to pregnant women and, uh, their, their, their babies. And it's like $40 million a year. The babies don't buy it. They, they might, but it's meant for the babies, right? Um, that does $40 million a year in sales. And we talked about how this article that came out about rich people not paying taxes— well, we talked about how they actually get money to live, which was kind of mind-blowing to me.

—about one of my favorite childhood actors and childhood movies, how that young child actor has become a crypto billionaire. And then I got excited saying he's the Billy of the Week. But that's all to come in this episode.

And do me a favor, go to your Spotify, go to your iTunes. There's a button that says subscribe or follow. Follow if you're on Spotify, subscribe iTunes. Click that button because when you click that, we go up in the charts. We go up in the charts, we get more listeners, and we get more listeners, we could record more stuff. Please do that. Thank you and have a good episode.

Well, first, happy birthday. You are, uh, you're what, 31? 32. 32 now? Okay, great. Uh, good.

I was feeling bad.

I'm 33 and you're always like, yeah, we're basically the same age. We're both 30, 31.

I do it to slight you. I do it as a joke because you're only a year older than me, but I want to make it clear that you're older than me still.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in my head, I, I immediately stop listening to everything else you say and I just start thinking in my head, fuck, I'm older than Sam. And then I have to be like, why does that matter? Who cares? And then I get back and I don't even know what's going on.

Yeah, you're 35.

Okay, great. I do it. Dan will feel even worse now. My trainer, by the way, he's at 40, 41, something like that. And he looks great. Looks like he's 25. And anytime someone's like, oh, wow, I didn't know that. Once they find out his age or whatever, he's just like, I'm living till 105. And he's constantly watching videos of people who are like 105 but healthy or like 100 and they have like, you know, they're still like madly in love with their husband or wife and he's just constantly watching these videos, these outlier examples to be like, that's me, I'm going to have that life. Do you care about living till you're like really old?

Yeah, well, I tell everyone 130. I say, okay, great. I say I'm going to be 130, but I'm going to, I'm going to act like a current 70-year-old. So like my, like the 70-year-olds now, that's what I'm going to be when I'm 130.

Okay. Why 130? Where's that number from?

I just think it's a nice, ambitious but realistic number. I think that— so I went out with this guy the other day and he is a— a date? No, I'll name drop. Can I name drop? I went out with Lance Armstrong. I got dinner with Lance Armstrong.

Dude, you weren't going to say that. You were just going to say I went out with this guy the other day.

Yeah. Well, yeah. Amazing. The reason I'm saying that is like it comes from a reputable source. Uh, and he had this, uh, guy who worked at Adidas and Nike with them, this like huge ripped guy who was like, he's probably 55 or so. And he was telling me that there's a direct correlation between lean muscle mass and age. So like longevity. So the people who have more muscle at an older age are more likely to live longer. And so that was like a realization to me.

So, uh, anyway, that was, uh, so two for one, you get to be jacked now and live forever.

Yeah. But wait, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, living old age. But I, but I, so we just did this little thing. Let's get back into it. I got a card, an email from my aunt, my Aunt Debbie, who's in her 50s called, I forget what it was called, but it was American Greetings was the name of the company or the main, whenever I get like one of these things, I scroll straight to the bottom and it says like the name of the brand, but then it says like copyright American Greetings, the like terms and conditions part. Yeah. I'm like, all right, that's the good stuff.. So I always like Wikipedia it. And it was this company. It's a greeting card company that does—

can I pause you one second? That thing you just said, that this podcast has like rewired my brain where that's all I do now. I'm like, oh cool, this thing is in my life. Who's behind this? How much do they make? What's the company? What's the backstory? Is there an epic founder behind this? I was at the dentist and he's showing me an X-ray of my teeth yesterday. And instead of looking at the— he's like pointing out something in my teeth.

He's like, oh yeah, who makes that machine?

I'm looking at the name of the software in the top left corner. It's like VM, you know, VM Imaging. And I'm like, I'm like, hey, can you hand me my phone real quick? I need to just—

I need to write this down.

I'm going to go look up this company. I bet it makes like billions of dollars doing this X-ray software for dentist's office. Or like he was like scraping my tooth with some tool and I was just thinking, why isn't there like better device? This is the same scraper they've been using since like I was 10. If every dentist is buying these things, these things can't cost— they have to cost a lot of money. Who's— what's the company that makes these little devices and are they innovating? Why not? You know, blah, blah, blah. So my brain has been like, I have like this chip in my brain now that has to get to the root source of every product I feel, which is what you— whenever I see a building—

sent you a birthday card. Well, when I see a building, like a huge warehouse, if that— like if it's a massive warehouse and there's a sign on it, I always look up what's the story of that, right? I always do that.

So yeah, I was thinking like, you know, people are excited about AR or like when Google Glass came out. And they're like, oh, it's great. You'll be able to read your email, or you'll be able to, like, see directions. You know, like, the map will be in front of your eyes. And I was like, the killer app of this is I just look at somebody and it tells me who they are. Like, I can just, like, you know, like, when you, you stalk someone, you, you see someone interesting, you, like, try to look them up, you find their Instagram, you see what their life's all about. I think it's going to be amazing when we just have contacts or glasses and I could just look at you, it'll be like, Sam Parr, CEO of The Hustle. Blah, blah, blah, your last two tweets next to your face floating above you. You have no idea that I just have like, you know, interrogated you.

There's also practical stuff. Me and Sarah were walking on the street the other day and Sarah saw a guy with college shirt and she's like, I think we know that person, but I can't tell because all white guys with college shirts look, look the same to me. Uh, so there's some practical, there's some practical implications, dude. When I was a kid and I would use my fake ID, I had a fake ID and the guy was a white dude, but he had like a shaved head and it was like he clearly had black hair. But if you go to the Indian or the black stores with like a black clerk, like a different— a clerk of a different race, they all thought that like, oh, looks just like you. And so the joke was you have to go to like a person who's not white because they all think we look exactly the same. Did you ever do that when you were a kid? Like, you go to like—

you got to go to the white clerk. I didn't realize that hack. But that makes perfect sense to me.

You think all white people look alike?

No, not all white people look alike, but definitely like, you know, John, Jeff, and Jacob, you know, I might mix them up from time to time. Yeah. In the same way that, you know, I look like, you know, Aziz Ansari to everybody, you know what I mean? Right. Yeah.

But we were talking about American Greetings, American Greetings. And the reason I bring this up, huge company, and it's just crazy that this shit still exists., but I guess it's not that crazy.

It's just to explain in simple terms, they do e-cards, so you can send a digital card to somebody.

$20 a year. Yeah, $20 a year membership.

And, uh, they do above $1 billion in revenue. They own multiple smaller brands, so they own like Jackie Lawson. I don't know if you ever heard of Jackie Lawson, by the way. No. You should Google this name. So Jackie Lawson, go look at her website and, uh, like, welcome to 1982. So just, I mean, whoever's doing the video on this, you got to pull up the Jackie Lawson website. Oh my gosh, I love Jackie Lawson. Literally. Okay, so the profile photo looks like, you know, some bootleg Carmen Sandiego, and then it says Jackie Lawson. And then like, there's like, there's like a mouse, like a computer mouse is like, like part of the end because probably like when she invented this, it was like new to be like on the computer sending cards to people. And this thing is incredibly popular. People love Jackie Lawson cards. She's like really well known, sold her company, I think, to American Greeting. And I ran a company for a period of time, maybe a year or two. It's called birthdayalarm.com. And I didn't—

that's why I bring this up, by the way.

And wasn't it making like $5 million a year every single year?

Yeah, well, that's why I brought this up, is I knew I would get a story out of you like that.

There's also one other company that somebody who listens to the podcast had told us. I'll give them a shout. Have you seen this app called Givingly? No. So it's a, it's a new age version of the same idea. So Givingly, what they do, what they make easy is that they're like not just good looking cards, but a gift card to like any service. So like it was my trainer's birthday. I wanted to get him something. I had forgotten to give him a gift. And so I sent him a Givingly, which was like, a beautiful little e-card I made on my phone in like, you know, 5 minutes. And then I was able to attach like a $100 DoorDash pass to it. So it's like, oh, dinner tonight's on me is what I sent them. And, and so it was like so easy to send a gift and a gift card. And I was like, oh, this is actually kind of interesting. And so I talked to the founders and their stats are honestly pretty impressive. People send a ton of these and the way that they grew is a little unconventional. They grew as a Snapchat Mini app, which like you kind of don't hear anyone talking about. Like, do you ever hear about Snapchat Minis? No, I don't even know what that is. They released this like app platform called Minis and like you never really hear anybody talking about it. And then when they showed me their numbers, I'm like, dude, where are you getting like hundreds of thousands of users? And they're like, oh, Snapchat. Like people on Snapchat just send little cards back and forth to each other all the time. We're the number one mini. And it's like, what? And so I went and looked in the little mini store and sure enough, they were like one or two. At the time. So I thought that was kind of interesting and it made me think, oh, I should do a deep dive into Minis and see what else is actually working here.

That's, that's fascinating. And that's— we've talked about this like idea of like you need distribution first and if you have that, you have everything. And like, that's why I like Chrome plugins. That's why I like WordPress plugins. I didn't even know about Minis. Yeah.

And, you know, I don't know if you need it first. There is definitely like a case for that. Other people would say, no, you need a product people love and other people say, no, you need a great team. And like, The way I think about it is this guy Nir Eyal, who I think also listens to the podcast, he wrote this book called Hooked. Oh, he's a listener. That's cool.

I've read that book.

Dude, I dig it. I, and I completely agree with that. We have like a ton of ideas here. I'm really excited. Can I tell you something really quick though that I learned? Yeah. So do you remember, is it called ProRepublic? What was that article that got released with rich people? I think ProRepublic was the name.

It was like the billionaire taxes. I didn't read it by the way.

So I'm not much to say. You don't have to have read it, but there, okay. So there was something going, I didn't read it either, but it's not important because it's the general topic of, of this, of like how rich people pay little taxes. And they do that by basically, and like, I don't know how to bring this up without sounding like a total douche, but when you make little money, like You get access to loans that are like 1.5% or 1.2% or whatever it is. It's based off of like a lot of times the London—

people get the most free shit, whether it's products or cheap capital or cheap anything. Yeah.

Basically like when you sign up for like a big bank, you get a line of credit. Like I think it's 75% of your, of the amount of money you have in there, uh, at like a 1% rate or it's like based off the London Bond Exchange. And I was curious about this, but basically. A lot of folks like Elon and just most people who are wealthy, or a lot of people who are wealthy, they take loans and that's what they use to live on. But in my head I'm like, but you still got to pay that back. So how are they doing that? And I went and talked to some bankers and do you know how this, like, do you know what the expectation is here? The expectation is that you actually live on those loans forever. Yeah. And your estate pays it when you die. Is that crazy? Is that a crazy thing to think about? I kept thinking like, But how does the bank get their money back? And it's like, oh no, no, no. Like, we expect that it's going to be an outstanding loan for like 50 years and we're just going to keep loaning and loaning and loaning.

And then when they die, we're just going to take our cut. They're not trying to make their money off you, the wealthy person. They're trying to take all of your millions and millions of dollars and lend it out to other people who are going to pay higher rates. So they're like, okay, we need to lend money. Where do we get the money? Let's get the money from rich people. How do we get the money from rich people? We offer them amazing terms. Okay, then how do we make money? Well, we're going to take that money and we're going to lend it to people who don't have as much and we're going to charge them more. Right. Kind of sounds screwed up when you say it, but that's the business model here, I believe.

Yeah. It's just like something that I didn't understand. I feel like I'm just a dumb idiot.

If I'm wrong, I might be wrong because I'm not a banker, nor am I a bank, nor have I thought about this stuff.

It's just weird. I just thought that was weird. And that was totally like, that was one of those things where it's like, well, this is how the world works. I was like, I didn't know that.

I felt like, um, when I learned this, I felt like I was sitting, like I went to a fancy dinner table for the first time. They finally showed me like that small fork is meant for like taking crab meat out of the claw. I was like, oh, that's what that's for. Oh, well, goddamn.

I thought that was the kids fork.

Yeah, I was like, I just thought that was the little people. I don't know what that is. Anyway, I, that was like a, it's just like hit me in the head. I'm like, duh.

So that was the, so I had a call with a tax guy, a tax strategist. Um, I'm paying for this like tax strategist cause I'm like, okay, where do you figure this stuff out? Is it worth it? My brother-in-law had found somebody through a thing and he saved him a bunch of money and he was telling me about it. I was like, I gotta talk to this guy. So I talked to him, this guy Jeff, and he's like, okay, you know, so what are your goals here? You know? And I was like, I wanna learn what the rich people do to pay less taxes and then, you know, decide or try to do some of those things if they apply to me. And he's like, okay. And I was like, so walk me through here. Like, if I make this much money in a year, I'm just doing this, I'm just writing this huge tax bill, tax check, you know, every year. What do they do where they don't have to do that? And he was like, just kind of like amused at my line of questioning.. But in the end, he was super helpful. He really kind of outlined all the things. And then at the end, I was like, all right, how does attorney-client privilege work here? I was like, let's just say I tell you that this part of my house, that's my home office deduction. Sometimes I nap there, and also I store my dog stuff there, right? That's unrelated to my office. I said, how honest can I be with you? And he goes, you can be totally honest, and I recommend you do. "but there's no attorney-client privilege. I could be subpoenaed." And he goes, "I'm not going to do anything wrong because I don't have to." I go, "Okay, great." You basically just need to ask for red light, green light, yellow light. Now he'll be like, "Yeah, so are you active or passive on that?" I'm like, "Suppose I was active. What would the number be at the end? And then suppose I was passive, and then I will give you my answer by the end of this." And he's reading between the lines of like, "Oh, okay, I understand." We haven't even actually gotten into any of my stuff, but I wanted to ask all the questions upfront to him about like, like I'm more fascinated with how the tax thing works. I don't even have like a very complicated setup. There's not really anything I could do because I'm not like Elon. I don't have this like complicated structure and all these shares I can borrow against in that same structure. But I'm more— I'm paying this guy to tell me what other rich people do, and I'm fine with that.

I think that's a great trade. Do you want to talk about— you want to go? I've got one idea. So, so I, I will do yours. You want to do mine first? I mean, I can give you the summary and then we can get into it later.

Yeah, do yours.

Okay. Do you know who Paul Singh is?

I never met him, but I've heard about him and my buddy is his business partner.

Great. So Paul at Baby Bump? Bumpboxes. Bumpbox. So yeah, sorry. So you'll actually know more about this than I do. So I reached out to Paul because, uh, I don't even know how I contacted him, but Paul Singh is a guy who started this thing called 500 Startups. They're not really around too much anymore.

Well, he didn't start it, right? Did he start it? Dave McClure started it.

I don't know. Yeah, maybe he didn't start it, but he was like there at the beginning. And so, yeah, I don't know if he helped start, maybe is the right word. And he was just, he was a guy there. He helped make it popular. And somehow he started traveling in an RV. That was his shtick was like, I, he actually left San Francisco before it was cool. He goes, I just want to travel in an RV. And years and years and years ago, he started a hosting company, like a web hosting company. And he wouldn't talk to me about it too much because it's kind of private, but he's like, basically I make millions of dollars a year from cash flow from that. And I invest a large amount into privately held companies, both brick and mortar and tech startups every single year. And I would travel just to meet new potential investments. And at one point I met these folks who had this thing called BumpBox. It wasn't very popular. And so it sounds like, you know, the people from BumpBox, right?

Yeah, I know it super well.

Oh, well then you probably know a lot more than I do, but let me tell you what I know. So he met these folks and he bought into it. He didn't start it and he didn't buy it outright, but I think he bought into it. So for like $200,000 or $300,000, something like that, he bought a portion. I don't know how much it was, but basically the whole shtick was, we know statistically like where you should be in your pregnancy and like the feelings that you're going to have and the products that you're going to need. And so we sell you a monthly box for $50.

Well, let me simplify that part. I think it's more like when you get pregnant, especially for the first time, there's like all these new things happening inside your body, outside your body. You're trying to figure stuff out and there's like a million things that you're supposed to buy and get and do, but you don't know what they are. And even if you know what they are, you don't know which product to buy because you want to buy the one that's like safe but also effective, but also whatever. And so a lot of reading reviews, trying products. And so what Bumbox did, which is pretty genius was they just said, look, we're going to find the best products for every phase of your pregnancy. First trimester, second trimester, third, and then post. And we're going to package it up into a subscription box. So you're just going to— it's just going to show up on your doorstep. You don't even have to think and worry about this stuff anymore.

We might have to take this out. I don't know if it's out yet, but like, for example, a breast pump. So when you, when, when you're breastfeeding, you're going to pump in between feeds or whatever and insurance covers it. And so, you know, these things are expensive devices that you need, medical devices that the doctor sort of gives you that you'll use for the first year or so of your pregnancy, of your afterbirth.

And the other stuff they sell is they'll figure out that you want this and they're going to call you and one of their insurance agents are going to call you and say, here's the 50 best types of insurance companies that you should check out if you want to buy this breast pump or whatever. It's all covered by insurance. And then they make a cut off that lead. So kind of an interesting company that I wanted to talk about, and I wanted to talk about it because there's a few things going on here. First, this is a guy who has made a lot of money angel investing in tech companies, and he told me, I never want to raise money. I want to own as much of this business as I can, and we could either distribute profits to ourselves and our employees, or we could sell for a fuckload of money. And B, I just think that it's kind of interesting. It's not like it's out of my world. You know, I don't have kids. I'm not a woman. It's kind of interesting. What do you know about this?

And I said to Paul, I go, you know, like, this is great, but you are doing a lot of stuff that I think is a bad idea, but it's a great idea. I mean, clearly you're making it work, which is you are not just staying, you're not focusing exactly. You're, you're focusing on the mother category, but you're launching loads of different stuff. And he goes, yeah, that's actually our goal. And the reason we're doing that is, uh, our, our, our whole unique strategies that we're going to move quickly. But he's like, when you think about it, 100 years ago at some board meeting, the guys at P&E or Kellogg or whoever it is, the big conglomerates nowadays, they go, you know, like, look, we could start building— you could start selling more soap, or we could just buy all the soap and then buy all the razors and just buy everything that, like, you possibly use in your home and own the whole category, as opposed to just focusing on this one thing. And even though tech focuses on this one thing, let's just do the opposite and say, you know, why can't we build a family of companies? And I thought that was pretty cool. It broke my frame. It's a little different than what I've heard, um, or what I would have done. And I think it's neat to see something that's the opposite of what I like or what I would do.

The one caveat would be, I think they did focus on getting Bumpbox's core to work for a number of years, right? This is not new, obviously. So, so you, you buy yourself the right to try a bunch of new things by getting your core to work really, really well and get to scale. So I think they did that part. They weren't doing, I don't think, 5 different things before. The other thing is like, this idea is so simple. And but when you talk to Leland, you're like, oh, you're like a badass operator. Like, he's in the nitty-gritty. He's like, oh yeah, and Facebook ads, I can put— I can copy-paste this over here. And if I do that, it's like, it's just a little bit better. The platform doesn't really support it, but I can do it manually this way. Or like, you know, they'll use it, you know, like they're when they're marketing to people, they're like, yeah, we actually call. I don't know if you ever heard of this. Have you heard of like ringless voicemail? No. It's like this marketing tactic that he's like, oh yeah, we call our customers. I was like, don't people hate getting calls? He's like, oh, it's not a call. It goes straight to voicemail. I was like, what is it? Yeah, there's a way to call somebody that goes straight to voicemail. You leave a message. So it's a great way to like— that's brilliant— staying in the email inbox and you're buried under 5,000 other emails. The person might get 1 or 2 voicemails a day, and one of them can be from us. And people like hearing from us, and they hear a voice of a human being talking to them. I'm like, he's just doing 1,000 of those small operational wins every year. And I'm like, oh, that's why you win. Because this is a simple idea that I think 9 out of 10 entrepreneurs who tried this same exact idea would have failed. Same idea, same—

so why didn't he fail a portion of it? If he's a powerhouse, he just needs some help.

Early on, I think they needed some capital, and I think they met Paul, were pretty impressed by him, and I think he's been a good kind of partner for them. But if you offered them a deal now, I don't think they would take it, right? Because he's in a different position now than when it's just like— I mean, he started the company. Him and his wife were like, I think they were like at a conference or something like that, and they were just like walking. It was like the parking lot or the water, the hot dog stands, like far away because everything's inconvenient at an event. And while they were walking there, they basically had this idea. They're like, screw it, why don't we do this? Like, let's start a business. Why don't we just go for it? And they just like kind of decided to do it. And so, you know, at that point you're really green, you know, you don't know anything. And then now he knows obviously a lot because he's been doing this for, I don't know, whatever, 7 years or something.

Have you heard of— I'm making a quick pivot. Have you heard of this thing called the Anti-Galloway Index?

I don't know if it's a real thing. I know that a lot of people basically make fun of Scott Galloway for being absolutely wrong about all his investment advice and predictions.

So there's this guy—

someone turned it into an actual investable—

No, no, no. They've outperformed the S&P 500 and have the return itself is 61%. Uh, sorry. You know, during the time. And you know, even if you, it says, even if you exclude Tesla, which was one of his big bets that he said was fail and it took off and said even without that one, still 23%, uh, return. That's crazy, isn't it? This is hilarious. Who made this?

Let's give them a shout out. I don't know. I don't know.

Okay, that's hilarious. This is cool. Uh, yeah, let's— so, okay, here's an idea, by the way, which is, um, is there— I think there is— there's some new products that are coming out that let anybody create a basket of stocks that's like, like, for example, I think there's a company called Doji that's doing this. D-O-J-I. And what they do is, uh, you can go create, I can go create the Sean index and it's 5 stocks that I'm investing in and you can actually put your money into my index and buy it by those stocks. And then it'll show over time how my index has performed. Um, and I can make the tech index and I can make my like high risk, high reward index or whatever. That's my understanding. I haven't used the product, but my understanding is it's kind of like that, which I think is an awesome idea, by the way. What do you think of that idea?

Yeah. I mean, why can't you do that on, um, I've mentioned them before. I think it's called like Bull, Bull something. There's that one. Uh, there's a one Israeli Robinhood, uh, competitor and they've done this. It's called CopyTrader and you can create Webull. Is that what it is? Webull. Um, and you could do this on that platform. I think it's sick. I think it's awesome. Yeah.

That's really, it seems really cool. I don't know if I get some incentive by like sharing my basket, but that would be like a really cool model where. Essentially, I get a small cut of the assets that are invested into it if we perform or something like that. And then you could see like who's right, who's wrong, and not just people who cherry-pick, oh, I invested in this one thing and it's done great, but they don't tell you about the 5 losers they had. Here it's like all on the record what you picked. And then, you know, you can see like the Gallo Index. I think it's amazing.

So you want to talk about some of your ideas?

But why were they paying for that versus like the other things like Telegram or whatever it is?

It's amazing. So do you think— okay, so I think that— I actually think this is an amazing idea, by the way. It sucks that people were using it that way, but I think it's an amazing idea, kind of like Silk Road is like an amazing idea where it's like, yeah, like it's cool to create like a marketplace where you can sell anything, but it's kind of shitty.

Like, I don't want to support anything where like, you know, who are the people that want a marketplace that'll sell them anything, even different stuff than I can sell on eBay? Oh, you know, drug dealers and like, you know, assassins, weapons dealers.

I'm not like in favor of actually everything, you know, I'm not actually a true libertarian because I do think that like some stuff should be illegal. Right, right. But I am incredibly bullish on things like, what's it called? So there's DuckDuckGo. Do you see DuckDuckGo? They just took a bunch of funding. I didn't see that. No. Yeah, they sold $100 million worth of secondary shares and they're doing over $100 million in revenue. Right. And then also, do you know Proton? Is it called ProtonMail? Right. Why are you laughing at me? Did I say it funny?

I totally agree. I thought it was stupid. I'm like, DuckDuckGo, what are you talking about? Now it's my— it's what I use. You use DuckDuckGo as your default? I use it often and I'm starting to use it as default.

Yeah. And do you use Brave? Because Brave is the new one that I think fits into this category. Brave browser?

No, I haven't yet because switching from Chrome is shockingly challenging. Right. But switching from anything, switching from mail, messaging, they're all, they're all a bit challenging. Well, Google's a bit easier. Is it? Why? Like switching my search thing? Yeah. Uh, I mean, I could probably get good results on Bing or Google. I mean, I, I, I'm just really trying to go to the Wikipedia or Quora or Facebook or Twitter. Right.

Uh, I'm pretty sure that, uh, private browsing, basically, you know, like a Brave, Brave or a Brave-like company 5 years from now, we're going to look at it and it's going to be just like DuckDuckGo or Signal in that it just takes over slowly but surely.

I agree. And I think that 10 years from now, we're going to say, like, I can't believe you used to use X, Y, and Z, and you would just do that.

That's shocking to me. You used to just give up your location to anybody to be advertised to, right? You used to— like Alexa, right? You used to just have a hot mic on in your house all the time. Right. So those are going to seem like strange, strange situations.

Right, right. You know what to look for and you know what's going to look strange now, right? We talked about Guardian, that app on your phone that is like an auto VPN for your mobile apps. Brave browser, I think, fits into that. When Mike Maples was on, he said something really fast that I thought was actually super insightful that we didn't really go into. He goes, every kind of era of tech, the old valuable thing becomes completely commoditized and there becomes a new valuable thing. So what does that mean? So he goes, back when it was like, at first you were selling PCs and all the money to be made was in the hardware. And then you had like Microsoft and others basically come up and they're like, cool, IBM, you be the hardware, we're going to be the software. And then like all the money shifted from being made in the hardware to the hardware became completely commoditized and all the money was made in software applications. And then it was like, oh, software applications are, you know, like where all the money's made. And then people started making services like Google and Facebook. It's like, wait, it's a free software application. So then how do you make money? It's like, because data is the valuable thing. You don't realize that, right? Microsoft doesn't realize that they're going to charge you for the software. We're going to give away free software, but we're going to make all the money on the data. And it's like, okay, great. And the shift that's happening now is that data is the thing that makes money. We're going to make our data open, open source. We're going to make our blockchain open. Anybody can build on top of it. And we're going to go open data. So then where's all the money to be made? And then you have like kind of like a new answer that comes after that. And so I thought that was like such a spot-on observation. And it's like, that's how you observe. That's how the next, you know, $100 billion, $500 billion company looks nothing like the last one. If you're just looking to match what's the next Microsoft, you're never going to think it's Facebook, this college social network that's free, right? You're never going to think it's Google, the search engine that's free. You're going to think it's supposed to look more like, more like Microsoft, this like enterprise paid software thing. But no, it keeps switching because they react to it in that way. And so that's why I got kind of made fun of when I was talking about BitCloud. But BitCloud, I think, is an example of this where they took the most valuable part of Facebook and Twitter, which is the social graph and the data that's underneath it. And they were like, nope, That's gonna be freely available. Anybody can take our data. You can make a better version of BitCloud. You can like, you can make a new skin, make a new client. You can make a fork off this. Um, the data is all open, open chain, which Facebook would never give you access to their database that shows you every person, their photos and their friends. You can never get access like that. It's their most prized possession. And BitCloud basically says that's now free. Instead, we're gonna make our money on these Creator Coins, right?

It's a different method. I think that you've said a lot of amazing stuff for the past 2 years. I think this little rant right here might be the most like, not valuable in the sense of like, whenever you talk about like fluffy bullshit, that's useful of like, I need to have confidence. Yeah. Like that is useful. I call it fluffy, but it's incredibly useful. I think what you just said right there actually might be one of the most valuable rants in terms of just money that you've ever said. I think that, um, I think that I do not have the ability to build pretty much any of the things that you're discussing. I don't— you might have the ability, but I certainly don't. I don't think you do either. But I think that if you are listening to this and you think you have the ability to do some of this, some of this stuff, I think like we've very clearly just said a thesis of what like the world's going to be like in 10 years. And I would bet my own personal money that that actually is going to be true. And I think it's going to be not just true a little, but like true a significant amount. Right.

And there's not just one trend happening at once, right? Like I remember talking to Alex too, the founder of Calm, and he just believed that like mindfulness and being and, you know, calm and meditation was going to become a bigger thing. And there was multiple years where it was not getting— it was not growing very fast because it wasn't a thing. And then sure enough, people started to feel really fatigued with technology. They started to feel really busy and constantly on and the mobile phone was too much. And then Wow, there's this app that like is actually designed not for me to constantly use it and check it, keep checking the notifications over and over and over again. This app is to calm me down. And mindfulness and mental health became a thing. And it's like, yeah, mental health became a thing and he was prepared. He was ready with a solution for that that he had been baking for years.

Yeah. So I think it's bullish or bullish. I think it's amazing. I think it's going to be a thing. You want to do a couple more? You want to do this Chick-fil-A thing?

So I read this blog post or this article that the Chick-fil-A tech team put out. And if I'm not the biggest Chick-fil-A customer, I'm top 5 easily in the country. So, you know, so anything Chick-fil-A, I'm going to read. And what they were talking about was like Chick-fil-A using AI, machine learning, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, let me see what this is, some bullshit. And I started reading it. It was actually pretty interesting. First of all, 90% of it was just over my head, but I thought it was pretty fascinating what they were saying. Well, first, two things. They kind of like they put their stake in the ground, which I appreciate. They go, Chick-fil-A is, you know, a restaurant that's sort of different than others. We're only open 6 days a week, but we do more sales than people that are open 7 days a week. And I was like, baller, strive to be Chick-fil-A. You know, like, I want to be the Chick-fil-A. I want to work less and make more than somebody who's working more. And the other thing I thought about was like, a lot of people hate Chick-fil-A because they're like, overly Christian and like, have like, they're like anti-gay marriage and stuff like that. And I'm like, oh, that sucks. But like, this chicken is so good. I'm going to eat here. I, you know, like the chicken wins in the end.

What I would always say, it's like I can like R. Kelly's voice but not like him. Like, I can admit that I Believe I Can Fly is like a banger and also say he's a horrible human being.

Also, you're not invited to my daughter's birthday party.

Yeah, like I could do both.

And that's kind of what this whole podcast is, is we just said, like, They just, they just, it just, it just bump boxes. All they do is they just sell shit that like women need. That's all. They're not like expert at Facebook ads or experts at like deal making for like supply chain stuff.

Like, I think you'd be surprised. You know who crushed it with tech stuff, or relatively speaking, was Walmart. Walmart had this amazing thing called the Walmart Innovation Lab in Silicon Valley. Yeah, it was pretty sick. And I went to, I was reading the other day about the most beloved brands amongst young people. And it's like Target. It's like Vans, Starbucks, one other one. And like the number one most loved brand is Chick-fil-A. Right.

I think maybe some Stanford graduate is going to work for Chick-fil-A and they're cutting against the grain. But I think most people are going to go towards more traditional brands, which really told me The way most companies are going to solve this is not by having as much in-house tech talent as consultants that basically take good tech talent, but like hypercharge them to get them to go faster. And so I'm curious, I bet this exists, but I'm curious who's building like a McKinsey type of company, like a badass consulting company that is only tech consulting. It's hardcore engineer, it's engineering specifically around like the new age stuff of machine learning and AI., and I think that you could build a new McKinsey, Deloitte, PwC that is basically when your company needs tech, when your company needs tech answers, you basically hire this high-priced consulting firm that comes in and these guys are not suits that are great talkers, these are, and make great pitch decks. These are engineers who come in and they actually build, and they teach your team how to build and they build themselves.

Wouldn't you know that Venture or all these guys offer that?

You think they do offer it, but I think their brand is not branded as this. And so I think there's an opportunity to come in and say, we dress differently, we talk differently, we don't even do— we don't have these 10 other offerings that McKinsey has. We are actually the best. If you really want to hire the best when it comes to engineering, you know, all of our guys are straight out of Facebook, Google, Stanford, Harvard. That's our crew. And these— everybody's got a computer science degree. This is our CEO. Look, he's a nerd. He's got Cheeto dust on his shirt. That's who you're dealing with here. Whereas today I know that McKinsey and others are offering these as part of their services and in addition to tax planning and 10 other things that they're going to do, like financial audits and other shit. So I think there's an opportunity to create a Big Four type of consulting company if you just went all in on engineers.

I'm on board. I think it's cool. I think that any engineer who's smart, though, would never want to start this business because that would be hard as fuck. But I do think that there's so many cool things that started as agencies that eventually they create their own software and it becomes badass. So for example, I do think it would be cool to do this for 5, 10 years and then eventually just make the software and you could become— it would be a really easy way or not easy, straightforward way to have a bootstrap software company.

So have you ever heard of Consensus?

No, what is it?

So Consensus is a, uh, it's, it's a, it's a version of this. Um, it's in the crypto space. So it was started by this guy, Joe Lubin, who was like one of the first kind of like 6 guys backing, uh, Ethereum. So he was like, he was like Ethereum pre-launch. I think he was one of the main funding sources. Essentially, he came from the finance world and, uh, he believed in, in Ethereum. And so he, he's known as one of the co-founders of Ethereum. Guy basically became a billionaire off of Ethereum, takes the billion. He, he takes that, he basically spins off Ethereum launches, and instead of sticking with the Ethereum Foundation, he creates ConsenSys. ConsenSys is like, we have an office in New York, LA, Shanghai, whatever, right? Like Tokyo, whatever. They like kind of a traditional consulting model. And, um, but they weren't just doing consulting, but what they do is they, they had like in-house projects. So for example, MetaMask, which is like the most popular Ethereum wallet, I think, that's built into a browser, was like either incubated there or they like kind of like found the guy who built it and brought him into ConsenSys. And that was one of their projects. But they basically, they make like, they'll go to like Mastercard or Visa and be like, you guys keep hearing about blockchain, right? Don't you need like just a group of blockchain like specialists who can come and teach your company how, how you should be using blockchains and we'll consult with you, that we'll build projects for you, and we'll be kind of this hybrid agency incubator consulting company type of thing. And they do— I think they said they forecasted like $60 million of revenue in 2021. Now, I should say, I personally think ConsenSys is kind of a shitty company. They hired like 1,000 people. I don't think they had the business fundamentals to support any of that. So I don't think ConsenSys itself is going to be that successful. But that's an example of somebody who said, Cool. All of the Fortune 500 is interested, is curious and interested in this new age technology. We can brand ourselves as the like de facto group of if you're a big Fortune 500, come talk to us about blockchain.

Dude, this ConsenSys company is fucking nuts. Started just recently, right? Oh no, 2014.

Yeah, it started right after Ethereum. They do.

Did this guy Joseph Lubins help create Ethereum?

Yeah, like I said, he was basically one of the big kind of like financial backers early on and kind of helped when they were pre-launch. He was involved when there was like this group of 7 or 8 people that were helping build it and they each had a different role.

The amount of wealth that this shit is creating in such a short time is crazy. Do you know that one guy? Okay, so what was that Disney movie called? Like the Secret Service Kid or the First Kid.

You remember First Kid? Okay. Yeah. I don't know where you're going with this. Okay. You remember that movie?

You remember the kid actor?

I don't remember him. Like, he was also in the movie Mighty Ducks.

Oh, which one was he in Mighty Ducks? I don't actually know what he was in Mighty Ducks, what the name was, but his name's Brock Pierce. Okay. Do you know who Brock Pierce is?

He's also in Sinbad.

Yeah. Well, no, Sinbad was the lead secret service.

He's the security guard. First kid. Okay. Do you remember? I remember this movie. I love this movie.

Yeah, it's great, right? Okay. This guy's name is Brock Pierce. He's a Bitcoin billionaire now. What? Yeah, dude. Google Brock Pierce. So he was a kid.

He was in Mighty Ducks. He plays young Gordon Bombay. So he's not one of the kids. He's, he's the flashback of Gordon Bombay as a kid. Yeah.

But he was like a well-known actor. Like he was in, um, First Kid was a thing. He was in Little Big League. He just did all like the '90s, like kid movies.

Yeah. Every movie.

If you, if you are born in, um, in the '80s, you recognize who this kid is.

If you're 31 like me and Sam, then you, uh, you recognize who this guy is, dude.

Google him. He's a bit— he's worth like a billion dollars. You'll recognize him. He's got— he's a Bitcoin crypto guy. He wears that stupid hat.

It's a stupid hat now.

That's just great. Google it. Go to images.

Go get Brock Pierce. Oh, okay.

Yeah, I see him. Is that— yeah, he's that stupid hat leather vest guy. That's what he wears. He goes to Puerto Rico. Dude, that guy is a billionaire now because he was in on crypto in like '12, '13, '14.

He's like, he's like, hey, I need it. I need all those royalties from the first kid. We're putting it into ETH, put it into the crowd sale. Let's do this.

He's the Billy of the Week. That's it. Is that not it? Two of my favorite things in my life were Mighty Ducks and Bitcoin.

And this guy's involved with both of them. Now, I don't know, but I read his Wikipedia the other day. He's got like some shady shit going on where, I mean, obviously, if you kind of look at him, he kind of screams shady. But he like, his partner was like raping kids. I mean, it was pretty fucked up. And like, if your partner's doing that, I'm not saying you're guilty, but I'm saying like, you probably like are involved. Like, I just— yeah, like where there's smoke, there's fire type of thing. It's kind of fucking weird to me. And so there's like a— this guy's got a lot of— this guy's going to be like the modern day McAfee, you know, like, yeah, McAfee, he's like, became a billionaire and then also like, like did some crazy shit in Botswana or where the fuck he went. That's what this guy's going to do. But anyway, Brock Pierce, crazy, right? That's crazy.

Um, okay. By the way, I also have this little calculator in Excel that I should publish, which is, will the Winklevoss twins get the last laugh? Which is, what does the price of Bitcoin need to be for them to end up wealthier than Mark Zuckerberg for taking, uh, taking their idea and making Facebook? And, uh, and then I thought about it and I was like, I wonder if Zuck just owns some Bitcoin as a hedge to be like, you'll never, you'll never pass me. But I don't think he's got that petty streak.

I'm thinking about selling my Facebook stock because I think, like, I've totally done a 180. I think Facebook's whack as fuck now. But, uh, why? It's just lame. Like, who uses that now? I mean, Twitter's just kicking— it's just whack. And Instagram, I think, is even stupid now.

I love how you're like, who uses that? It's like a billion people could raise their hand and be like, me, every day, multiple times a day.

I just think that, um, it's just lame. I think TikTok is so much better and more positive. I like it more. But I think that Zuck is someone I would never bet. Like, I just think that he's just the greatest in terms of—

did you see the video of him spear hunting recently?

No. What is he doing?

Oh, dude, you got to Google this. Google Mark Zuckerberg spear. And there's this video. So he, like, went hunting or whatever, or he went on a hunting trip. I think that might be separate. Then he's like at this little, like, kind of like a throwing range. And there's like a giant target. And then you see Mark Zuckerberg in slow-mo running up at it with a spear and then launching the spear and getting a bullseye in the target. And it's just like, it's everything you would expect out of a Zuckerberg video, which is like, you know, two parts awkward robotic, one part like sort of fearsome and weird at the same time. Um, yeah, I'm looking at it now.

I mean, this is just— yeah, wow. He got it. By the way, you said TikTok.

You should follow this TikTok account. It's amazing. It's called Vitalik Doing Things. So Vitalik, who's the co-founder of Ethereum, he's also like Zuck, like hilariously awkward. I really love the guy. I think he's like, when he talks, yeah, he might have like kind of an awkward way of talking, but I love his thoughts. I love his brain, basically. And he seems like a very genuine guy. He doesn't just like shill Ethereum and like crypto and say it's the best thing ever and all that. Like, he's just like way more reasonable and clearly like mission-driven.

I'm looking at it now.

His story is kind of amazing, by the way.

Like, what's he like? Like an adopted Russian kid or something?

Where's the name come from? Russia. What's that mean? Oh, the name Ethereum?

Oh, I don't know why he named it Ethereum. Ether is like kind of like, it's sort of like, I don't know if you know what ether is. It's sort of like this, it's like out of the ether. It's like this, like it's like the substance of the world. It's basically like, I don't know how you describe ether really. It's like a, it's like matter. It's like, it's like a word like matter in the universe. And so I don't know why he called it ether. I think it was like, I don't know, I don't know the backstory. I shouldn't really speculate.

Well, you should have figured that out. I thought you're like betting your life savings on this.

I saw, I took one look at this guy and I was like, I'm going to hitch my wagon to this nerd.

This, this guy's taking me to the top. I think that's a good, I think that's a good bet to be honest.

But the TikTok channel Vitalik Doing Things is amazing comedy. Um, because he's just a very unintentionally comedic guy.

Dan posted it. So he goes, I immediately realized that I liked it better than all the other alternatives that I'd seen. I suppose it was fact that it sounded nice and it had the word ether referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel, right?

Yeah, see, that's the guy you want to bet on.

Um, all right, I think that's the show, right?

Yeah, that's it. Uh-huh.