Kim Dotcom's Millions From Megaupload, Million $ Panic Attack App, and Million $ Waterproof Shoes

Here's the exact quote. He goes, do you want the numbers? All right, in, in year 1, we cleared $110 million in retail sales— sorry, $250 million in retail sales and $110 million gross internally. All right, we're live. What's up?

What's up, dude?

Uh, have you been following this Prime energy drink thing or Prime, I don't know what the fuck it is. It's just a Gatorade alternative, right? Have you followed it?

Yeah, I followed it because a while back, I don't know, like a month ago, uh, Ben, business partner Ben, he, uh, he told me he met some guy who was like involved with it. He's like, dude, the numbers are insane for Prime. Like they're, they're selling, you know, bleep amount of just this one SKU and like, let alone the main, the main drink. And I was like, there's no way. Uh, that's a crazy number. And then I think recently they came out and said, some more numbers?

You're off by half. Like, that's crazy.

Also, what the hell does $110 million gross internally—

what he's saying is they sell wholesale. So, uh, this— because they sell this thing, let's say, at Walmart. So in Walmart it did $250 million in sales, but to them, they're, they're getting bought at wholesale prices. So they, the markup is, you know, what, what's, you know, they basically sell at half price, right? So they sell it to Walmart. They sold $110 million worth to Walmart. So their company sold $110 million. The total product sold $250 million is what I think that has to mean.

Well, crazy, crazy that this is that big. I've actually seen a few interviews with Logan and, uh, he says what the numbers are and then someone from behind the scenes goes, No, no, no, it was this. And he goes, wait, what? Oh, my bad, it was this. And it's pretty wild that, like, I think Logan's a smart guy, uh, I would love to have him on the pod and everything, but it's pretty wild how he's really just focused on the content thing and probably doesn't know much about the business thing. It's pretty interesting. I've seen him, like, ask Mr. Wonderful or something about that, about, like, different stocks and things like that. And he's pretty— has a pretty rudimentary understanding of, like, certain finance topics that I thought for sure he would be Somewhat on top of, but I guess not. You can crush it without knowing that.

Well, uh, I don't know about that. Like, I think he, I think he's like anything else, like the way we are probably good at business, but, and we're just enough to be dangerous at, at the kind of like content, you know, like, you know, like when we see a YouTuber, both of us have had this reaction where we're like, oh, we're horse carriage operators and a Tesla just drove by. Like, this is when I see somebody on TikTok. You know, you might as well be, you know, it might as well be at Hogwarts with a magic wand.

I'm like, yeah, we're doing something.

I don't know how to do those things and I will never know. And like, it's awesome, but I just can't imagine myself really doing those things at the level you can do them. And so I think he's good enough to be dangerous on the business side and smart enough, obviously, to know what categories to go into and who to partner with. So like, if you look at their moves, Right. Like just zoom out so that you can't, you know, um, you know, hear what he's saying or whatever. You look at their moves, the transition from Vine to YouTube, great jump. The transition from YouTube canceled to YouTube, like, you know, rejuvenated. That's a good, good move there. Then from YouTube to boxing, celebrity boxing, he ended up boxing Floyd Mayweather.

And he did all right.

It's all right. Yeah. Like, and his brother's, you know, doing, he's one of the most, you know, high earning, uh, boxers out there. Maybe he's not a boxer. Yeah. So that's, that's incredible. Um, then the next jump, you know, for Logan was WWE. So now Logan is one of the big stars in WWE, but he does it on his terms. He then transitioned his YouTube content into podcast content. Cause he's like, you know, I'm maturing.

By the way, have you seen him in WWE? He's really good. He's really good.

Exactly. Like if I was 13, I pretty sure I would think Logan Paul is the fucking shit. Cause I'm 34. And I think Logan Paul is the fucking shit.

You know, like, he's good. Like, he's got the acting down. He's got the— he looks ripped. He's good.

And people love to hate on these guys for, you know, good— sometimes good reasons. They've done some things that are like, you know, whatever. He did the stupid video in Japan. He's got in some trouble for his like NFT thing. But like, I don't know. I think there's a lot to learn from and admire in these guys. I'm not saying they're great people are perfect people. I don't know them personally. I can't say either way on that. But I think from a marketing perspective, yeah, they crush it. 15 out of 10, right? Like from a brand building, from a sort of learning how to keep riding new waves and stay relevant. Um, these, I mean, these are, they're phenomenal in the same way that the Kardashians are phenomenal in some way. And you could disparage them for a bunch of reasons, or you could look at the things they do great and say, cool, I'm just going to take inspiration from the things they do great. Rather than hate on them in a very common way about, you know, the same stuff everybody else does. So, yeah, I think, you know, what he's done here is pretty phenomenal. I think they're kind of— him and KSI are kind of like minor partners.

I think it's business. I think it's like a, like a, like a third, a third, a third type of thing.

The operators get a third here.

Yeah. I mean, I saw an interview and it was either a third or like a 20%, but yeah, minority, but meaningful. I mean, this This can be a billion-dollar brand, dude.

I invited him to Camp MFM, by the way, and I was like, yo, you should come. It's going to be awesome. And he was like, uh, he's like, dude, I can't get hurt. He's just like, I'm doing the WWE. If I go play basketball, I'm going to get hurt.

Why did he reply to you?

I can't like sprain an ankle or twist the knee and like not be able to go wrestle at WrestleMania in a month.

What platform did you speak to him on?

You know, actually what happened was, uh, what had happened was, what had happened was I jumped into Twitter Spaces where he was there and I just started talking there. Um, and then he DM'd me afterwards and then, um, I was like, hey, uh, you know, you actually— he had talked about my Clubhouse or metaverse tweet on his podcast too. Um, and I was like, yo, you actually talked about my other thing, you know, that I'm that guy. And he was like, oh cool. Um, and so, you know, Twitter DM is kind of where we talked.

That's genius. It's just not the same without thousands of roaring fans chanting our name, signing You know, people's backs and shit like that.

Hairy backs.

Uh, hairy backs.

Sweaty backs. You want to do a recap? So basically the gist of this is, is Sean and I did a somewhat impromptu— it was supposed to be a meetup, uh, turned into like a live performance basically in Vancouver. I don't know how many people were there, between 1,000 or 1,300-ish, but we sold out this theater in Vancouver. It went pretty great. Uh, you want to talk about a few things that surprised you?

Yeah, let's, uh, let's do that. Okay. Surprising. Um, surprisingly hard to be on stage, even though we kind of at this point talk for a living. Um, there was a moment about an hour before where we're both like, like, how do you use your tongue? Do you touch it against your teeth when you're making sounds? What do you do with that? Um, and we just had no idea. What to say. Why did it— it was like, you know, that moment of panic where it's like, are these people even coming for us? Who are they? Is this— did they sell the tickets or did people just click maybe? Like, you know, we just questioned everything for a moment. What are we going to say up front? How do we make this amazing for people?

And, uh, there was really no thought that went into this. Like one hour we went and got sushi ahead of time and we were like, so what do you want to talk about? We talked about that for 5 minutes and then we started talking to each other about family and just fun stuff.

But yeah, we had like a 10-minute powwow to try to figure it out, but I think it turned out okay. Either— I think the content turned out— we, we basically, we're pretty tough critics of ourselves. I think we gave the overall event an 8 out of 10, and I think the— I think it was not— it was not a 10 because I think it was a little poorly structured. Like, the opening part was a lot of intro, welcome to our spot, thank our sponsors, that sort of thing. And also we weren't as well prepared as we could have been in terms of like, we could have come up with things that, that play better live than, um, than on stage. Like I had the moment of clarity afterwards. I was like, oh, it's a show that's live with the audience. We should be doing things like A, B, and C.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, and we didn't fully get that, but we did like a little Shark Tank pitch competition. We did Q&A. We did some stuff with the crowd. Do you think that was good?

All things considered, I thought it was actually a 9. I think like given the amount of preparation and the amount of fun people had, uh, another shocking thing was people came. I think the value in order was to see us, to meet one another, then to actually hear what we had to say.

Yeah. Right, right. Exactly. And I think there was some benefit in doing it in Vancouver where there's probably just not a lot of events going on for entrepreneurs or tech people that are like exciting. Versus I think if we had done this in San Francisco, we probably would have got more numbers, but they wouldn't have cared as much. Like, there was a lot of people at this thing in Vancouver that traveled from Toronto or from Portland or from different places to come see it because, oh, might as well, it's a couple hours away. And, you know, you know, there's not going to be another thing like this anytime soon where I'm at. So anyways, those are some quick, quick recap. I guess if people weren't there, what should we explain? What did we actually do? So it was me, you, and Andrew Wilkinson on stage. It was in this theater. So there's like a balcony seating. There was like a, you know, basically giant theater where like a comedian would normally play. In fact, backstage as we're walking up, it was truly humbling. And I mean humbling in the, in the most shit on myself way, which was we were walking up to the stage and it's like these framed pictures of guys who were in that same green room before us. It's like Jerry Seinfeld. Dave Chappelle. It's like all these like legendary comedians. It's like some of the best podcasters that you've ever seen in the entrepreneurship category on Apple Podcasts.

Dude, it was, it was humbling. Another thing that was humbling was after it happened, we left the stage and we went and just hung out with people and there was this huge line. And what it made me realize was that, so a lot of people don't realize this, but it's basically Sean and me and Producer Ben, um, Jonathan sometimes, and we are sitting here just recording, talking to each other. You forget all— we forget on a regular basis that it's being recorded. When the podcast gets published, we don't see comments. We don't know, like we could see the numbers, but it's just like an analytics screen. I don't know who's listening, why they're listening. I don't know any of that. And so you forget that this stuff actually kind of matters to some people. And it's really fun to go and meet people who consume your thing and realize, wow, this actually matters to them. That was humbling as well.

And that— yeah, there would be like a father and son be like, we always listen to the pod together and then we brainstorm. He's 14, but he wants to be an entrepreneur like you guys. So after we listen to the pod, we then brainstorm and do stuff. It's like, oh, that's really cool. This is like a, this is like embedded in your kind of like family a little bit. You know, there were examples like that that were very surprising to me, but but cool. Also, I should say, you were good at that. Like, you were really good on stage. Sam was— I don't know what happened. I think the nicotine pouch kicked in and Sam went to another level. I'm gonna start doing nicotine, dude. That was a great ad for, for that. Uh, Sam had great jokes. And then afterwards also, I feel like in the meet and greet, you were good at being kind of the celebrity. Like, I didn't know what to do with my hands. You know, people would come up, be like, can I take a picture? And my response was like, why? Oh yeah, sure, I guess. And then they would stand next to me and I would do this like point thing to each one of them. Like this guy. Like if you look, go look on the Instagram, every picture with me, I'm just doing, nah, it's about this guy right here, whoever the fan was. And you were giving them the billionaire hug, which, um, I don't know if people picked up on, but you, you, you taught me this afterwards. I didn't know this trick. Explain the billionaire hug.

I do that.

I'm not a Billy, but I did the Billy hug because I've learned from Billys.

Is it a, is it a sexual thing? Is it like, you know, you're, you're keeping your wallet away from them? What do you do? What, why does the, why do the hips need to be away? Is there even an explanation or it's just something that only billionaires would understand? It's just a time-honored tradition.

I don't know, I'm not there yet, so I don't know. But I just, I, you know, it's like singing in the shower. I copy my heroes, uh, so that, that's why I do it. Um, and this is a man and a woman thing, by the way. It's from the men as well. I've noticed that sometimes we have this relationship with people where they hear us talk and they think, oh, you're so approachable. And sometimes they'll come up to me and they'll go, dude, let's fuck, let's do this. And I'm like, whoa, you're coming on too hard to me. I know I say this stuff, but you're coming on too hard. So, so Sometimes you need to set some boundaries and that's my mini boundary. It's the crotch boundary.

Right. Uh, we, we, so we had our buddy Andrew on there. Andrew was really funny too. I gotta say Andrew, who's been on the pod a bunch of times, I'd never met in person. So I've talked to him on the phone. We've done Zoom calls. He's come on the pod, but in person, I gotta say he's got a lot more juice than I expected.

And tell the story about dinner or lunch.

So we go to lunch. So before the show, we're like, oh dude, we got to hang out, Ben. You're— he's kind of from this area. I thought Vancouver, BC is all the same thing. Actually, you got to take a seaplane. Yeah, or a helicopter. So he took a fucking chopper to come meet us, which is honestly one of the more big dog moves anyone's ever done to me.

Well, the reason we knew it was a big dog move, because he was a little— he was like 5 or 10 minutes late, and instead of saying You know, my flight was delayed. He said, I was late for my flight. And I was like, wait, what?

Yeah, that's subtle. I didn't pick that up. I just heard over what he called on the phone. It was just, I just heard the chopper going. And I was like, hey, wait a minute. Is there a fan on near you? What's going on? What is that? So he lands and before he lands, he goes, I'm going to be 5 to 10 minutes late. Again, I was late for my flight. And then he goes, um, just order me. And he had a list ordered to me. And Sammy goes, 8 oysters, 2 salmon nigiri, this, like, you know, whatever, Wagyu steak. Um, you know, a miso soup. I have a nut and shellfish allergy. I'll die if somebody does that. And then he just signs it off. Thanks, but just THX. And I see this. I was running late too, as per usual. I was in the shower at this point. I just started laughing. Sam replies, what did you say?

I was like, did you just say thanks to me? Like, yes, sir. I mean, it was like ridiculous. And he was like, sorry.

He tried to blame an autocorrect. We're like, nah, bro, you're just used to talking to people too much like that. You have people who let you get away with that. That shit might fly in Canada. But you don't bring that weak THC shit to the United States of America. We reject that. We send that back. We go to lunch and we're having a good time. We're just catching up again. Andrew's got the juice. He's got the juice in the way that my best friends who I look up to the most have that juice. You have that too. When you hang out in person with Sam, he's got a little bounce in his step and it just seems like he's eager, he's excited, he's got a plan. Wherever you go, there's not going to be— it's not going to just be a default normal experience. Something a little more fun is going to happen. Something a little extra is going to happen. A little more laughter, a little more, um, you know, learning. Something extra is going to happen. So Andrew had that, which I was— which was awesome to see because he's quite— I don't know, would you say like reserved or calm? He's got almost like a calm brand, but in person his energy was a lot more kinetic, freewheeling, and I liked it.

He had a very kinetic energy where he was physical, you know, he was moving.

Yeah. He was, that's a great way of putting it.

Yeah. He was kinetic. He had that. And I have that too. People always yell at me cuz I've got big thighs and I shake. And whenever I shake my thighs, the table moves and they're like, dude, you're too kinetic. So yeah, he's got that kinetic energy and we're having this wonderful lunch. It's probably an hour and a half in, and then we're not quite done eating yet, or at least it doesn't feel there. And then all of a sudden he goes, oh shoot. And we're like, what? Like, he like, it's like a panic. He goes, dude, my Uber's been outside waiting for me for 10 minutes. I gotta go.

Bye.

And he just stands up and walks away.

And we're like, no, it was even better than that. He just stood up like he was stretching for a second. And then he picked up his jacket and he's like, I'll see you guys at the place. And we're like, what? And he goes, yeah, sorry, I gotta go. My Uber's been outside for 10 minutes. We're like, when did you call an Uber? And he floated away like a balloon. Like he was the grandfather in Up and he just went away. The house flew away. And then me and Sam were like, okay, yo, was that weird that he just kind of floated away like a balloon?

Yeah. It's like, well, we'll work on conversation skills later, Andrew. Have a nice day. Yeah. He just kind of bounced.

Um, I had to blow him a kiss. He was running away so far. It was the only appropriate goodbye.

But in general, the thing was awesome. Now I don't, I'm not going to put you on the spot, But I would like us to do a 5 or 3, like, thing where, like, a day thing where we could do, like, you know, 3 dates in 5 days. I wanna go to, like, C and B cities. So not the New Yorks, not the SFs, something like Denver or Toronto or Kansas City, something where they're, you know, what did you call it? Small fish, small pond syndrome. That's what I wanna be. I wanna be a big fish in a small pond because these people were so—

A big piss in a small pond.

That's a hard word to say.

But you want to do it? You, um, uh, you have a little something on your shirt here. I think you got a little taste of fame, a little dribble of that fame that just stained the shirt there. You, you liked that taste of fame, didn't you?

Well, here's why I like it. We've talked about this.

We know why you like it. Yeah. Because being famous is awesome.

It is awesome, but it is exhausting. Now I understand why, like, the touring bands who last a long time, they show up, they do the concert, and they go home and go to bed. I was like, I couldn't sleep. Sleep because we were like, did we hung out with everyone? Then we had like a breakfast the next day. But anyway, I liked it because it was a challenge. I also think that in our little tech world, we assume that we're this little niche internet nerds, which we are, but it's actually cool to like flex and see the people on it. And, and honestly felt like a movement. And there was times where I, I felt it was you and I were great at what we do, but in reality we were just an excuse and like a steward of like a particular type of movement of these people who were like, You know, we're all on a journey. Some people are further ahead. Some people are not there yet. Some people don't want to go far. Some do. But they're all going someplace. And it felt like we were just an excuse to gather those people. And it really felt beyond and bigger than us. I know that sounds woo-woo and shit like that, but that's truly how it felt. And so that's why I thought it was cool.

Dude, I met a guy, like there was a couple billionaires in the crowd. I don't know if you know that, and I'm not gonna call 'em out, but I, I met one of them, or at least their, their stake, and they, they own multiple, they, they have large stakes in multi-billion dollar companies. And I remember I met one of them and he was like a typical like dorky guy. And then I met this other guy who had a sheetrock business that like, you know, it's like a blue collar thing and his hands were just so meaty and fat. And I remember shaking his hand and I told him, I was like, dude, I can't even wrap my hand around your hand and I'm not small. And that's, and I was like, dude, that's sick. We got, we got the neckbeards. They had the calloused hands guys. And, uh, and this guy, one of the guys, I go, yeah, just, you know, DM me on Twitter. He goes, okay, cool. You'll see me. My Twitter handle is called fuckingmanly. And, uh, that's what he said to me. And I was like, all right, that's badass.

I gave us a hat. Yeah, he's, uh, he said something. He's like, my wife has a big Instagram following for women's stuff, so I decided to create fuckingmanly to like counteract that. That was awesome. Um, I want to tell you about one woman who I thought was really—

had a really interesting story. I know her well. I know her well.

Drills and breathing exercises, exercise, breathing exercises, and so on and so forth.

And she said she has had 2 point something million downloads of this app. And I thought, okay, that's pretty great.

Um, that's not even the crazy part.

Then I was like, wow. Um, are you, are you just really good at Facebook ads or what? She goes, no, I don't do any paid marketing.

Yeah.

And I thought, did she tell you how big the team was?

Exactly. So I was like, I was like, she's already halfway to being my hero at this point.

And I go, and this is her first deal. This is her first.

I go, seal the deal for me. How big is your team? She goes, it's just me.

Yeah.

She said she meets them on LinkedIn. She goes, I just messaged them on LinkedIn.

Fantastic. So I thought, uh, Anya, you know, shout out to her. She's the, she's got the, I don't know, not Billy of the Week, not Blue Collar Side Hustle. She's something else, but like, you know, the Riches and Niches Award of the Week. Um, you know, it goes to her cuz I thought that was a pretty amazing story.

So this was like, and she just started monetizing. It's like most of the app is free. She's like, yeah, I want most of the app to be free. Um, you know, because obviously I'm trying to help as many people as I can. I'm trying to find that balance where it's a sustainable business, but also most of the app's free. And, uh, I just thought that was a badass story. There was a bunch of people there that had like really big stories, but to me that was, uh, a really, I'd just say incredible, incredible win. And she had a kind of a an intensity about her. Oh yeah, you could almost tell when you were talking to her, like, okay, even though on paper you got no attributes, right? And we all know the rule, you gotta have some attributes if you wanna win. She didn't have the experience, she didn't have the skill of certain things, but she did have a certain level of intensity. And you could see that, uh, just in talking to her, like, just the way she came across. She came across like a person to be taken seriously. And like she was like a, like a very small person. It wasn't like her stature was, she didn't have a natural knack at that. It was just the way she was talking that, that, that stood out to me.

Did you, uh, did you meet the Vessi guys? So V-E-S-S-I.

Yeah, we went out for lunch.

So, um, I, I don't know if I can say what, what they do. I don't, maybe you could say, but based, uh, if they told you the numbers.

No, I'm not gonna say any numbers, but, uh, Tony was the, the guy who was there as the founder and they make, awesome shoes apparently. I haven't tried them, so I can't say.

But they're hardcore in Vancouver. And so I, um, my, the lady at my hotel saw me, uh, wearing them and she goes, oh, you're wearing Vessis. Those are, those are happening. So basically this, she didn't say they're happening because she's not 60 years old. Uh, but you know, she said they're cool.

Those are jazzy French.

Yeah. Uh, but anyway, so it's this shoe called Vessi. They look just like tennis shoes, but apparently they're like waterproof, which is a big deal in Vancouver because it rains a lot and it's wet. And the guy bootstrapped the— bootstrapped the company. And he told me the top line revenue, which I don't know if we can say or not.

Just say it and we'll bleep it.

I went for a run and I like ran across the city and I don't run. So it's not that big.

Yeah. And it's like not that big of a city. It's in Canada, which I didn't realize how like Canada's kind of podunk. Like it's, it's a, it's like, it's like, it's like there's only like 30 million people in that whole place.

It's like, yeah, Canada has the same population as California.

It's crazy. In the same population as like the metropolitan New York area.

I mean, it's, but the size of, but it's bigger than the United States in terms of like the actual landmass. So it's like just has a lot of empty space or a lot of space per person.

Yeah. Like it's not that big. And, uh, it's a little behind in terms of like, it's not like a sophisticated place, which isn't, isn't bad. But like, I remember I went to the airport and they checked my passport in such an odd location. And like, I remember they checked it like as I was going through the security thing to like scan my, my body, not ahead of time. I'm like, oh, you guys know it would be way faster if you do this, this, uh, whatever. Uh, and so anyway, I met this guy and his company kills it. And so he, huge company in Vancouver, dominated Vancouver. They love the shoes there. Everyone was talking about it. Incredibly quiet and nice.

No like frills about it. They opened up a physical store in Vancouver.

You saw the video of that?

Yeah, the video of the line. There's like a line like half a mile long. And I was like, yeah, is this like a marketing stunt? You like paid people to stand in this line? He's like, no, these are like actual customers.

No, he's like, it's Monday.

I'll bleep this too, but he said they're gonna do outta there retail location this year. I was like, what the hell? That's an absurd number.

It's crazy. This guy was really, really cool. Uh, so I'm happy I got to meet him. Um, but anyway, good weekend. We had a good time. We'll do it again. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous.

I think I love our new CRM.

Our Software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. Do you want to talk about, uh, you have another topic or you want me to go?

Uh, I got one and then, uh, but let's do, let's do, okay, let's do this one first. So we went international, we went, um, abroad. Some might say, some might say offshore, you know, they'd be wrong, but you could say offshore. They got me thinking about offshore companies offshoring money and like, I don't know about you, but I've always heard about this, but if you had ever asked me to explain, yeah, how do companies like offshore— what is— what's a tax haven? Like, how do these things work? Do you actually know how this shit works? Because no, I went down a random rabbit hole last night and pretty interesting stuff, dude.

I have no idea what the word tax haven means.

I don't know really how this actually works.

I don't know what it means, but I like using it. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know.

I don't really want one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's, it's right under, uh, shell, shell corporation when people talk about—

Everyone has a Dublin. A Dubliner.

And I was like, wow, you know, okay, must— is it the great— is it the, the fantastic world-renowned engineering talent of Dublin? What, what is the reason for this? And the reason is because there was something called the Double Irish Strategy, which said if you have one, one Irish company that owned the IP and then another one that was, uh, you know, just like a subsidiary of it, and then that one had US directors, same thing, zero taxation. And so for, for 5 years, I think Apple made $30 billion through their Irish companies and paid zero taxes on it. And I just think this is—

are you going to do this?

How they do this stuff. And by the way, Tim Cook goes and he sits, he stands in front of Congress. There's this amazing clip where he goes, Apple pays every dollar that they owe in taxes. Um, we don't depend on tax gimmicks. We don't stash money in some Caribbean island. It's like, yeah, you stash it in Ireland instead. Like, what are you talking about here? Um, and then like, you know, they've, they've kind of shut that double Irish strategy down. And then the, uh, and then Apple goes, and this is all, this all got leaked from this thing that you probably remember called, do you remember like the Panama Papers?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That got leaked.

Yeah.

Do you know what actually happened there?

Uh, a bunch of Panama was a city or a country, sorry, a country where this happened. And I don't know how it got leaked. I think the accounting firm that did a lot of the work for people got hacked. Exactly.

The fourth biggest law firm was something called Mossack Fonseca. And basically this is the fourth big law firm. They're known for like creating shell companies and all this stuff. They got hacked or not hacked. Actually, somebody just leaked 11 million documents.

Oh my God.

Um, they don't know who leaked it, but somebody was like a whistleblower leaked this thing. And there was like these, this team of journalists that looked at it for a year before finally going forward and publishing the Panama Papers. Well, after that there was something called— and that's where like the sort of Epstein and Putin stuff came out of the Panama Papers. Then there was the Paradise Papers, which came after that, and that was leaked from this accounting firm called Appleby. And, um, you know, and so interesting name. You're familiar, you're a client of theirs.

Yeah. Is there a— is there a, uh, like a Hooters LLC that can handle my income tax? Like what?

Yeah. These guys do shell companies and soft shells, tacos.

We like all types of shells, shell macaroni and shell companies.

Exactly. So, so, you know, they, they basically, they got leaked too. And then that's when the company stuff that came out, uh, came out as far as, and then you could see Apple going to their law firm. Then they leaked the emails saying, um, we, we've, you know, the, the Irish thing is coming to an end. We'd like to find another country that has this favorable advantage. 'Can you find us something in the Caribbean?' You know, maybe in the Caribbean, like, pretty much the exact opposite thing as he said in front of Congress.

don't get canceled, don't get canceled, Sam. Well, we just got famous, bro. Don't, don't ruin this.

Well, they use these words and I'm like, that word, like, that's the, that's the point, is to exploit. We're going to use this in a very particular way and we're going to use it efficiently. And you, you just did that where you use these words, but it's like you're saying the word loophole as if it's a scam, where it's like, no, loophole is the opposite of a scam.

It's right.

This is— we are playing in the rules.

Well, I think that they do mean something, which is that they're within the rules, but not— they're within the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law. And I think that's the— that's the—

don't get all pro bono lawyery on me, bro. There's bro science. Now you're doing bro legal jargon.

By the way, Tim Cook actually even said that too in that same clip. He goes, we not only comply with the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law too, which was, yeah, that's a lie. Um, but yeah, I think you're right, which is there are rules of the game and you can play, if you play by those rules, you should not blame the player. You should hate the rule maker, right? You should hate the game. Um, and so I think that that's, that's where a lot of people go wrong, right? They hear this stuff when I'm explaining these, I'm not saying, Apple and Nike are evil. But when I explain it, I'm, I'm really, what I'm saying is I never really knew what this meant. I never knew actually how it works.

Dude, you're a capital, you're a capital J journalist. You're just saying the facts.

I'm a capital man. I think we established that myself. Um, so, so yeah, I think this is kind of interesting. And then it's like, what's the game theory? So one thing that Trump did, which is actually pretty smart, which is another loaded thing you can't say, Um, was he was like, dude, these companies have like hundreds of billions of dollars overseas. Cuz what happens is once they get taxed in the low, low, low tax place, they can't just move the money back into their, you know, Chase Bank here in America and like, you know, go, go down to the ATM and pull it out. Like it would get taxed when it comes back. So they leave it overseas. Um, so this is money that never reaches. And so what Trump did was he goes, all right, look, I'm gonna make a one-time exception for you to what's called repatriate the cash, bring the cash back to America. I'll lower the tax rate. It's like, kind of like, all right guys, get in here. You're kind of like, you know, the store owner like opens the back door, like get in.

It's like a 5 minutes. It's like a gun give back. You ever seen those where you can like, no questions asked, just give us your guns.

Right, right, exactly. And I think there's some, some value to those scenarios. Um, and so he made it like, you know, it's 15% tax on that cash. This is like one time, one time only. If you want the cash back in America so you can invest it here and use it in your corporate activities here. You know, here's your, your sort of like discount, half price. Um, come on in. And, uh, and then that brought like, I don't know, $60 or $90 billion back in, but, but not like the full amount. He thought $4 trillion would come back in and it, they just didn't.

Speaking of, uh, crazy people and huge men in terms of size and, and loopholes and tax evasion, I've got a cruel story for you. And I have a feeling, you know, about this person. This is, This is the— I don't know if he's a Billy, but he's, he's, he's close enough. Have you heard of Kim Dotcom? Do you know who this guy is?

Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's prolific, as you like to say.

Dude, this guy, that's the phrase here. I was gonna say this guy's a prolific freak. He's a total freak. So this guy named Kim Dotcom has all these interesting facts and I read about him because he, he's like 6'7", 350 pounds. This guy's massive. He's huge and he lives in New Zealand and he, him and his wife, he married like a Philippine, like beauty queen or something like that. And she divorced him. And these people thought that they were going to like, she was going to talk shit about him. She's like, no, no, no. Like, I have nothing bad to say about him. It just, the marriage didn't work out, but he was a nice guy. And so I started reading about him.

By the way, what's his real name?

So Kim Schmitz, but then he was known as Kim Tim Jim Vester. Or Kimball. And then eventually he legally changed his name to Dotcom. So the wife, the ex-wife, kept her married last name and her name is like, you know, like Sarah Dotcom. And so like the article refers to her as like Miss Dotcom. It's like, so that's her legal name. So this guy is like, I'm going to become Sean Worldwide, Mr.

Worldwide. This is my wife, Mrs. Worldwide. Nice to meet you.

Dude, the article referred to her as Ms. Dotcom. And so check this out. So this guy in the '90s, he starts in Germany as a hacker and he hacks something like $40 million— or he claims this, but this is not verified. He said he hacked into some, like, famous bank and he took $40 million and he donated it to Greenpeace. At least that's what he said. But TBD if that's actually true, because Greenpeace is like, no, that's not true. And then eventually he starts building all these other programs and all this, like, software that is, like, mildly successful. He's a hacker while he's doing this, doing a bunch of illegal shit. While doing this, he's trying to send a file to his friend, and the email that he's trying to send it through says, "All right, you've exceeded the limit. We can't do this." He creates this thing called Mega Upload, which eventually gets huge. Have you heard of Mega Upload? If you ever download an illegal movie or anything like that, you've probably come across Mega Upload. Have you?

Of course. Yeah. Never used it for textbooks, but definitely have used Mega Upload in my life.

The sign.

Yeah, the sign. And they say that he made close to $200 million in personal profit from this whole thing. And all during this, he's doing like this other crazy shit. So out of like 50 million Modern Warfare players, this guy was ranked number 1. He was the number 1 player for Call of Duty. Really? Yes. In 2012, he was the number 1 person in the world at Call of Duty. He also finished 1st in the Gumball 3000. You know what that is? It's like a—

It's a car race across Europe. He finishes first. Then he releases an album of original music with any, like, collabs with other articles— uh, other artists. It's called Good Times, and it's not that bad of an album, to be honest. Then he creates the Internet Party, which is a new political party in New Zealand, and it kind of gains some traction. And he's doing all of this while running Megaupload. Well, Megaupload gets sued, and he actually goes to jail for the second time. He's already been in jail for a few— I think a few weeks, a few months before for his hacking stuff. This time he gets locked up for a longer period period of time. And when they arrest him, they go to his house and his compound and they just swarm it SWAT style. And in the house they find all like 40 cars, like the nicest cars, you know, like these fancy Mercedes AMGs, Bugattis, all this shit. They find all this art, but they also find $175 million in cash. This guy had that much money in cash in like a, in a room in his house. He's kind of like a proper gangster. I mean, he's like a gangster of the gangster. And to give context, Megaupload had 50 million visits a day. It was like the 7th most popular website in the world at one time. It accounted for 4% of the, of total traffic in America, and it, uh, had 180 million users. And people were transferring 800 files a second on Megaupload. This thing was huge. He had— and it was ran almost like a proper company. He had 155 employees, you know, engineers, customer service, admin, all this stuff. And it was wild. And this is a wild story that like I just came across cuz I was reading about Mist.com, his wife or his ex-wife. Very fascinating guy. This guy's super prolific. He even created this thing called, um, a bit, a Megacar. So he was trying to launch a car company that was like internet connected and it didn't like work out wonderfully, but he built like a handful of the cars, but super prolific. Very interesting. Um, and I thought that you might have a little bit of stories about this guy. This guy seems like he runs in your world a little bit.

I'm going to send you this. I can't say this on the pod, but, uh, we've DM'd before and, uh, I just have to show you what's in this DM. We can't— this, this is not going to be good content, but you, you have to see this.

What, what, what was it? Just like crazy inappropriate stuff.

I'll send it to you after this. But, um, yeah, this guy is prolific. I feel like he's kind of like the, um, rogue Marc Andreessen.

Totally.

Like Marc Andreessen is also surprisingly massive, a prolific internet guy who was like, you know, had like a bunch of ideals and like took, took at it. Marc Andreessen just like sort of took more of the straight path and this guy went rogue. That's kind of how I think about him. I can't believe— I'm blown away by this Call of Duty thing.

Yeah. Like he like, like this isn't like a he said, she said thing. I mean, this is like rankings. Like you can actually see like leaderboards and he was number one.

But does he just have like a basement of like, you know, 15-year-old Korean boys that are playing for him or something like this? Can, do I really believe that this guy was the number one worldwide Call of Duty player? That is insane. That is so crazy. That's like, what's the story about the Uber guy, Travis, where he was the number one Wii tennis player in the world or something like that?

Uh, and so he's like the Lift of Wii Tennis.

7 out of 10. We'll give him, um, and so, uh, yeah, this Kim Dotcom guy, he's crazy, man. We got, I would love to have him on the pod. Uh, he's, uh, super interesting.

Interesting. Yeah, that's a crazy story. Um, also, he— I feel like he did— he didn't launch his own crypto token. Like, the odds of him not doing his own token in the last 5 years, like, that had to be like a 1 in 1 million chance of him not doing it.

He probably, uh, I mean, he was like— he died about it, but yeah, he probably had like— I bet you he was like banned for like, uh, you know, selling securities. I bet you he had some— I didn't look into like what his ban was and what the verdict was. But I mean, he was in like legit trouble. I mean, he was in prison. And so he probably can't. But what's crazy is number one, in Call of Duty. Number two, that he had $175 million in cash in a room in his house. That's wild. I don't even know— I would like to know how much like physical space that takes up, but that'd be a lot.

Isn't it like always disappointing? It's like, that's just two briefcases.

Yeah, dude, on The Sopranos, I was watching last night, they gave a guy $75,000 and it was in an envelope. Like not a, like, not a, like a manila, like not even the type that you've got to go to FedEx for, the type that you have in your home.

I can't tell you how disappointed I would be. Like, if I ever am involved with any kind of ransom or if I win some sort of prize, like I need the giant check if I win a prize. And if you're going to give me some cash, like, just get it in the smallest bills possible. I want duffel bags. I want, I want like a, you know, a Costco trolley bringing me the cash. Like, if I get something and it's in an envelope, I don't care what's inside, I'm throwing it away.

Yeah, if it fits in my jacket pocket, I'm out. And if like— yeah, exactly. And it was like the side pocket of like a suit where you reach in, so you know those pockets are small, and they fit— and that $75,000 or whatever fit in that jacket very— keep it. Yeah, just keep it.

Um, I bought a lottery ticket in Canada. I didn't win, by the way.

You buy lottery tickets?

Yeah, I, I have this moment whenever I get up to the counter where my brain just goes into an instant fantasy of like, and then this was the day. And then I'm telling people that I almost didn't buy it, but I just said, hey, screw it. And I bought it and I won.

Dude, that's the stupidest shit ever.

I do that at least 1 out of 3 times I'm at a counter. In the US, they require cash, so that just, that's what saves me from not buying it. But, um, in Canada, you could buy it on your card.

It's great. We're going to wrap there.

Yeah, we could, we could wrap there.

All right. That's the pod. We got to start saying the gentleman's agreement every time, by the way. I keep forgetting to.

Go subscribe to us on YouTube. That's it.