The Reddit Revolt, Turpentine, & Shaan's Latest Business Venture

So, so that was the other thing that sparked drama. Now you got leaked phone calls, you got the CEO calling a guy crazy. He said, she said. And so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing. As the thing on Reddit, small things can turn into big things. That's like part of the beauty of Reddit. And that's what was happening here, dude.

I, first of all, your energy is getting me psyched. This is a, this is a great story.

You can't fire me. I have a little more for you here. Are you ready? This is the part that— that's the background. Okay, now let me give you some foreground, right? Let me give you a little future, future play here.

Okay, sure.

Play.

Um, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

All right, what's up? We're here. Um, dude, have you seen this Reddit revolt that's that's happening? Are you aware of this?

I am aware of it. And, uh, is it going to matter really? So basically what happened is there's this app called Apollo, right?

Apollo. Yep. Here's kind of the, I would say the zoomed out version of the story. So what's happening today is if you go to Reddit right now, the whole site is down. So they broke all of Reddit. What they were trying to do was just a bunch of subreddits. So these communities on Reddit were trying to protest some new Reddit policies. So it started with a few of them that said, you know what, we disagree with this policy change that's going on. You know, we're gonna do this 48-hour blackout. We're gonna go private, we're gonna go dark. And they called it Reddit Go— this subreddit's going dark. And more and more started joining to the point where 7,000 subreddits, including some of the biggest ones on there, like r/funny and r/pics and stuff like that.

And I believe that's 30% of Reddit. That's what I read.

So to do that, they needed to to basically paywall the data.

Well, so wait, hold on. I want to ask you a question about how the word got out, but first we have to get background here, which is even though, so I just looked it up. Reddit is like the 9th most popular website in America. And even it's like, you know, it's like when someone says, uh, no one you know says they use it. Well, it's like, uh, you know, no one goes to that restaurant anymore. It's too crowded. It's kind of like that. So Reddit is It's basically a, uh, uh, I don't even know how to describe it, but basically 100,000+ forums all on one website. And the reason why this matters is because each forum, which is called a subreddit, and there's basically a subreddit on any topic you can ever imagine, and most viral news in America or viral memes start at Reddit. And it's, subreddits are forums that are owned by volunteers. So someone comes up with one and they create it.

And then they run it.

And then they run it. And I didn't realize how much autonomy they are giving, given. And the reason why this is important is now, like, this has happened before. Apparently Reddit fired one woman named Victoria like 8 years ago, and she was a community moderator and everyone loved her. And so all these other subreddit forum leaders like did the same thing, but where they shut it down a little bit.

Now, by the way, the result of that was the CEO got fired. They got 200,000 people to sign a petition saying Ellen Powell needs to get fired. And so she stepped down, like, I don't know, a week later or days later after that happened. So they, you know, they, they do wield a lot of power.

They wield a ton of power. So, but here's what's crazy. A, Reddit doesn't make that much money for how large it is. It's one, it's, if you look at the top 30 websites in America, I bet you, I, I'm not a researcher, but I would make a bet that it's on the very, very low end of revenue or even value created per user, per user. And part of it's because people are anonymous and Redditors are typically horrible with clicking ads and things like that. Uh, and the other part of it is that they're kind of, in a weird way, this guy Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, they created this company, Reddit, and it's amazing. And their users own the platform a little bit. And that's what we're seeing here is these people basically set their channels or set their subreddits to private so you can't access them. So that's what's happening. My question to you is when this guy, we'll call him Apollo, when Apollo guy announced that he was going to shut down his app, how did he get word out? That it happened and how did all these people rally around this?

Well, again, the people that use his app were power users. And so when he said, hey guys, you know, here's what's going on. And it actually happened in multiple steps. So the reason this got so much heat is because it happened in multiple stages. He said they announced the, they announced that they were gonna update their pricing. He's like, hey, we're gonna have to keep an eye out for this, but I'm optimistic. Like, I'm sure Reddit's not gonna, they're not gonna like just do something that, that doesn't make any sense. And Reddit's like, for sure, for sure. We're obviously gonna. Take this and take everybody's needs into account, but we will have to update the pricing. And he's like, you know what, that's reasonable. I can't wait to hear back what you guys have in mind. That was like post one.

And he shared that, but where did he share that?

He shared it on subreddit, on Reddit, and maybe in the Apollo subreddit plus some others. And so like the mods subreddit, because again, a lot of moderators like Apollo because it helps them do their job faster.

Um, because these guys, do subreddit owners make money?

No, they make nothing. So Reddit has this huge fleet, like, of the moderators that are in the dark one. I think right now there's 28 million moderators. I think that was the number, uh, that are, that are like participating in this. Some, some insane number. Let me see.

Uh, I had a subreddit, it was called like Apartment Hacks, and I was like trying to get people in it, and it very quickly got like 1,000 people, but I, I quit working on it.

Sorry, I got the number wrong. 28,000 moderators on the 7,000 subreddits. So that are participating in the in the, in the blackout, basically. So these moderators, basically, they're constantly fighting spam. So when you have a site that's as popular as Reddit, there's a huge amount of people that are trying to get you to buy their crap, that are trying to get you to subscribe to their OnlyFans, that are trying to get you to click this link and install this virus. And, um, or just doing clickbait, like just making it where they post something super outrageous just to get clicks and engagement, upvotes, and a big battle in the comments. But then it kind of turns off people who were there for like, you know, they wanted, they wanted the entertainment without it getting ruined, without the party getting ruined. And so the moderators were the people that were keeping this house party working where it's like, yeah, we want people to come here and have fun, but no dude, you can't bring 17 kegs in here. No, you can't just come here and flyer your own party inside my house. Like, no, no, you can't do all that crap. And they're fighting this constantly and they do it as a giant unpaid thing. Now, What they pointed out during this protest very reasonably was that, dude, Reddit's one of the only networks that's all run by unpaid volunteer moderators. So for example, Facebook has a huge moderation program. They spend about $200 or $300 million a year just on content moderation. Twitter spends a bunch of money in content moderation. And so content moderation can be a very big cost center. And so the moderators are like, hey, you're trying to save $10 million by shutting off these third-party apps. Have you thought about what happens when we stop doing all this free work and like now you have to pay for content moderation or this whole site goes to shit? Like, uh, what's going to happen then? Maybe you should listen to us. And so that's the, that's where this has escalated to. But I'll, but just to finish the story. So he goes, he said, he says upfront, okay, Reddit announces change. It's going to affect us, but hopefully it's all good. And some people in the comments were like, dude, you're being naive. These corporations are— they're like, just like Twitter killed all the third-party clients, Reddit's going to do the same. These guys want to go public. They're going to want to own all— they're going to want to own the user experience for all, all users of Reddit. They're going to kill you. And he's like, no, no, no, they've— they said, like, you know, they said they're going to be fair. Okay, a couple months later it comes out and they're like, here's the pricing. It kills you and it takes into effect in 30 days. And he's like, what? Like First of all, ridiculous pricing. Second of all, 30 days, like I couldn't possibly try to like change my app to maybe make less requests to your server or like I couldn't do anything in 30 days. Like you're just gonna kill my whole business. And I took yearly subscriptions, so I'm not only am my app gonna die, I'm gonna have to refund like $250K to people who paid for a year subscription cuz my app's no longer gonna work. So he was in a world of trouble. So he contacts Reddit and he does a call with the team from Reddit and he records the call., and after the call, which state is he in?

You can, you can, you're allowed to do that in some states, but not in every state. Did he do it the right way?

Dude, in neckbeard nation, it's all good, baby. It's all legal. You're the little guy fighting the big guy. You can do whatever you want. And so, so he, uh, at first he doesn't do anything with it. Then Reddit comes out and says, this guy's crazy. He's making outlandish claims. He tried to extort us for, he asked for $10 million., in order to like keep supporting the app. We can't do business with this crazy guy. And they basically like kind of like just, you know, slandered him a little bit. And he's like, what are you talking about? That's not what I said. And what do you, what did I say that was so outrageous? And he's like, here's the recording. People can listen to it themselves and decide.

Oh man. Did you listen to it?

I haven't listened to the whole thing, but there's a part in there where he's like, look, like, does he sound reasonable? Yeah, he sounds reasonable. And he's basically like, look, um, you know, obviously I'd love to just keep going independent. But you guys are saying it's too expensive. You wanna raise pricing. That makes it untenable for me. But people like this app and they're gonna be upset when this app goes down. He's like, you know, you guys bought Alien Blue back in the day and you made that the Reddit app. Like, have you considered just buying this app so that you can, like, you don't have to pay for all these extra, you know, it's not some external party that owns it. You guys could own it. Of course. But at least it lives on and like, it's a win-win solution potentially for, for all of us.

Did they mention price?

And so he was like, you know, Um, he said something like, you're saying this costs you— this will cost me $20 million a year. You're saying this costs you tens of millions a year. Like, you could buy the whole thing for $10 million, and that's, you know, 6 months of my operating costs. And, you know, like, it could work out that way. And, um, Steve Huffman on the call is like, look, like, you know, I don't, I don't appreciate the threat type of thing. He says something about like, that's a threat. He goes, wait, what's a, what's a threat? What do you mean? Because the guy said something like, he goes, um, "You know, if you don't want all this noise about this, like you could just do this." And he kind of took it as a threat, like, "Oh, you're threatening you're gonna make a bunch of noise if we don't pay you $10 million?" He goes, "No, no, no, I'm saying, you're saying I'm making too many API calls. So if you don't want all this server noise for the API requests, you could just own it and just use your internal systems to do it instead." And he's like, "Oh, sorry. Like, okay, my bad. I didn't realize you're talking about API requests. Like, I apologize, I didn't mean to." like say that you were threatening us. And he was like, okay, no problem. Like, I just want to like, glad we're clear on that. Then later he comes out and says he threatened us. He's like, dude, even on the call you apologize saying, saying, uh, sorry, I misunderstood you. And then you took that out of context and tried to make me sound like a guy who's trying to profit out of this, um, or like trying to make unreasonable requests. So anyways, that caught— so, so that was the other thing that sparked drama. Now you got leaked phone calls, you got the CEO calling a guy crazy. He said, she said. And so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing. As the thing on Reddit, small things could turn into big things. That's like part of the beauty of Reddit. And that's what was happening here.

Dude, I, first of all, your energy is giving me psyched. This is a, this is a great story.

You can't stop firing. Well, just wait, 'cause I have a little more for you here. Are you ready? This is the part that, that's the background.

Okay.

Now let me give you some foreground. Right. Let me give you a little future, future play here.

I'll give you a little foreplay. Um, so Reddit may have forgot, but this is how Reddit started. So Reddit started because the popular forum site of the day, Digg, made this big update and everybody hated it. And Digg said, screw you guys, this is better. And they said, see ya. And they went to this little site called Reddit and Reddit blew up. And that's how Reddit became what it is, is that that DIG fumbled the ball, released this anti, you know, this, this anti-user update, and the users were sticking it to the man. Yeah, they stuck it to the man. Well, who's to say that doesn't happen again? So I have a little proposal, uh, somebody should run with this idea. I bought this domain and, uh, I think somebody should do this. If not, you know, this is what I would do if I was, uh, if I was a little, little younger and hungrier than I am today. So here's what I think somebody should do. I think now is the perfect time.

The younger you, the equally conniving, just a little bit more ambitious you.

Just my T levels were a little higher back then.

Yeah.

I'm a mellowed out dad now. You know, my daughter paints my toenails. I can't be doing all this kind of stuff.

Yeah. If you, if you woke up at 10 AM this morning and you wear a hoodie all the time, uh, you know, this is for you. Neckbeard nation. This is the callout.

It's on to mayor. Okay. So I want you to just check out this little website here. So. Sam, I don't know if you know what, uh, the CEO Steve's, um, handle is on, on Reddit. Do you know what his username is?

I used to, yeah. If you said it, I would remember it. Dark something.

Uh, what was it? So it's S-P-E-Z. And so I don't know, I just woke up this morning, 6:00 AM, and I just looked at GoDaddy and I just saw that spezless.com was available. And I thought, huh, 1 cent for spezless.com. So I bought it and I said, what's Spezless? I think it's, It's Reddit without spes. Would you like Reddit without Steve? Well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a Reddit that's very, very, very, very, very similar looking to this website, but with one difference. There's, there's no Steve.

There's no corporation that's going to do the tagline needs to be same, same, but different.

Same, same, but different.

Same, same, but different. Exactly. So here's, uh, Ben threw this up while, while we were talking, cause I gave him a rant this morning. I was like, dude, here's what someone should do. And I think he just bought. He told me right before we went on air, he goes, I'm gonna buy the domain, I'm gonna put it up. So he goes, um, it says, I love Reddit, I just don't like, don't like spazz. Uh, so I'm gonna create a newsletter, new Reddit, it's called Spazzless, it's Reddit without Steve. Uh, here's the master plan, it'll be a very, very, very similar website to Reddit. Um, it's gonna be a nonprofit and any revenue that it makes will get funneled back into the communities or moderators. Um, because this blackout, like this, this 48-hour protest that they said it's cool, it's gonna get headlines, but Reddit really doesn't care. They're gonna lose about $3 million by being down for 2 days, and then they're just gonna move on with life. And the, the protesters made a big error, which is they said how long they would protest for. They said the pain will stop at 48 hours. So all Reddit has to do is just ignore it for 48 hours. Uh, they're gonna keep doing what they want. So when your, when your voice doesn't work, you gotta exit. And, uh, so here's it, here's a little, little exit boat for you. It's, uh, it's basically Reddit without the bullshit.. And, um, there's a little email signup box. So if a million people sign up, then, uh, who knows, maybe we can create something here. And so, you know, why do this as a nonprofit? Your boy's already rich. We don't need to, we don't need to make a profit on this. We just create this for fun cuz it's fun to, to see something burn down. I don't even have a problem with Steve Huffin, by the way. I think he's, you know, it's, I like Steve, smart guy. Uh, I think he's, he's fair in his opinion, but also this is the internet. And in the internet, you, you really gotta know who you're pissing off. And I think he's pissed off too many people with this move. I can't believe that nobody's making the alternative to this. Uh, the people that are trying to make alternatives, they're all trying to do it so different. You don't want to do different. It needs to look almost exactly the same. Change the shade of red by like 2 hex, you know, like little hex color over to the right. And then, uh, it needs to be the same site with the same structure. Everything's the same. Except for who decides what happens, how the money flows. And if you just change that, you could do this as a nonprofit thing. And I think it would be very entertaining.

In lieu of your morning cup of coffee this morning, you had a cup of rage and I, and I, and I dig it, dude. First of all, a few beautiful things. Neckbeard Nation. That was nice, right? That's our new—

that's our, that's our fan base.

So we hired this woman to help us with some t-shirts. If she's listening. Uh, she, dude, this lady, by the way, hilarious, hilarious thing you did. So listen to this, this woman, this woman sent me this beautiful, uh, no, no, say the whole thing.

What does she do? So you get something in the mail.

I get this thing in the mail and it's like this beautiful, like 10 or 20 page outline. It's clever. It says what she's going to do for us to make t-shirts.

Is it beautiful? It looked like a giant PowerPoint deck that we just printed out because she knows like, ah, he might not click the link. So let me just print the PowerPoint out on white and black. You know, paper and just put it in an envelope for him.

It's beautiful. Like when you see like a neckbeard guy doing very neckbeard thing where you're like, I'm just happy this exists. This is a beautiful display. In that sense of beautiful. It wasn't physically beautiful, but it was very, it was, it was very clever. And she said, you can reach me at myfirstthought@gmail.com or something like that. Or DM, right? Yeah. T-H-O-T thought, which stands for that hoe over there. And, or she said, you can just DM me on @myfirstthought. And so I talked to her and I was like, this is awesome. Let's do something. We'll work together. It worked. I email her with you on the line and I go, I think I said, dear thought, or comma, dear thought. And she was like, great. I mean, by the way, you should look up what thought means. And I was like, I know what it means. I thought that you, you said it first. Yeah, you said it first to me. That was your Twitter handle. I don't, I'm not trying to She's like, you, you said it, not me. I'm just repeat, I'm just playing the game here.

Yeah. Yeah. No, no. By the way, the funniest thing is you go, all right, thot, let's do this. Yes.

And she was like, I don't think you know what thot means, otherwise you wouldn't have called me that.

She goes, LMAO at being addressed as my first thot in your email. Urban Dictionary below for your amusement. Yeah.

And I immediately replied, I was like, I'm sorry, I thought, I thought I thought this was a shtick. You're right.

I'll call you your real name.

My apologies. So we didn't get off to a great start right away.

All right, Thought, let's do this.

So, dear Thought, we're going to—

This is why we only have 4 female listeners, because of this type of behavior.

I was trying to— I, you know, I was trying to relate. I was trying to like show that I read. Yeah, it didn't work out well. Yeah.

It's like when you hear someone call their friend, they're like, yo, Nikki. And you're like, What's up, Nicky? And they're like, it's Nicholas. And you're like, oh, okay. Just cause he— Nicholas, got it. Yeah, sorry, I was just—

I was in LA this weekend and I went to like the LA Tech Week thing and we went to this event and there was like 300 people and I'm not exaggerating. I had 30 people of like the 300 people come up to me and like say like, hey, love MFM. I'm a total man. And so 2 episodes ago or 1 episode ago, Sean came up with this idea of this total man. We got a lot of flack for it. I don't know if you saw it, but people loved it in general. And I had literally 20 or 30 people like in a row come up and be like, dude, I'm the total man.

By the way, you're doing it wrong. It's not total man with like a space in between. Cause then it's like, yo, I'm, I'm the total man. It's, I'm a total man. It's like one word. It's like, it's a, it's a thing. You're a noun. It's, it's a different type of noun. You got, you got, you know, mammals. You got humans and you got total man. It's just like a separate species of a couple of people.

Yeah, get rid of the space. It's cleaner. I got you. Yeah, we're going to get rid of it. And, uh, so total man, that, that's a hit. I think Neckbeard Nation with you being the mayor, I mean that, or you being the president, that, that, that's, that's our new, that's the new thing.

That's that. We did it. We got a new thing.

Um, totally agree. Um, question, which side are you on? I think I'm team Reddit on this one, but they screwed up. They shouldn't have done it this way in the first place. They're a venture capital company. They've got hundreds of employees, probably thousands at this point. They fumbled the bag here, not on the PR press or PR front, which they did, but like letting this get out of hand the way it has in the first place. I mean, you gotta pay the bills. Why are they, what are they doing letting people build this stuff on their land?

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. I get where they're coming from. I think they like many tech companies, fumbled the communication and execution. Um, but I'm also horrid at that. So, you know, I would have done this twice as bad if I was in their position because I'm always like, I'm a very much rip the bandaid off type of person. And also like, because I'm very far on the spectrum of not easily offended, like it takes a lot to make me feel like mad or upset. I severely underestimate how easily I can make other people mad or upset. And so, uh, I, I get their position. Um, I think, you know, most likely, unless, unless Bezos becomes a thing, they're just gonna be like, cool, nice protest, we hear you, we'll take you into account in the future, continue using Reddit, you know, like, life will just go on and nothing bad will happen from this. Unless literally somebody seizes the narrative. That's the thing, there's a narrative right now, and somebody could come in If they could surf that momentum on the narrative, that's hard though. We are the thing.

That's hard. Uber had the same thing. Do you remember when it was trending delete Uber? Like, I think these things come and go.

Like this happened in the crypto world. Crypto world is like the most like ruthless. It's like just like knife fighting in the streets. And so OpenSea had some policy issue or some change. I don't, do you remember what it was? It was like fee change or something. Why did you get people get mad at OpenSea when they I forgot what it was. They changed something. They changed something with royalties. Yeah, they changed like the royalty take rate or something.

Worst podcasting etiquette ever to ask the guy in the room who's sitting like 10 feet behind you with no mic or headphones to ask his opinion.

Well, I don't, I mean, like your energy, I don't know how to like one-up you here. You know, like they say when you're like supposed to like meet people, you're supposed to match their energy to like make them feel comfortable. I don't know what to say. I don't feel like we're going, I feel like, I feel like we're going to a monster truck rally, like Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

Like you're Gravedigger right now.

I'm just in the stands trying to keep up with earplugs. You know what I mean?

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. That's so on point. How do you even remember or know that? That's like their radio ads, right? Yeah.

Monster Jam.

Have you been to a monster truck rally in the last 700 days?

Is the Pope Catholic? Of course I have. Yeah. I go to monster truck all the time. I've gone like 5 or 6 times. Dude, they do backflips now. I'm not not gonna go see a big-ass truck do a backflip. Um, all right. Let me talk to you about something that you actually are, know more than me about, I think, because you're friends with them. Yeah. Uh, and then I want to talk about—

that's a lot of stuff.

Okay. And then I want to talk about, I want to talk about this second thing about Milk Road and that thing and we'll leave time for that. So, uh, Terpentine, is that what it's called? The Terpentine?

Terpentine? I think time. Yeah.

Uh, so basically there's a guy named Eric Thornberg. He's been in the game for a while. He's just done a bunch of stuff on the internet, including founding a company called On Deck. He launched this new thing called Turpentine. It was very nice. He gave us a little shout out. Uh, but basically what I believe it to be is just a podcast network for business content, particularly some type of like startup-y related stuff. So there's like one on media. Yeah.

Yeah.

Tech. There's one on media. I think there's one on, uh, on fintech, uh, a few other things. And he announced it. Have you seen this? What, what, what am I missing here?

Yeah, I've seen this. Uh, so Erik Thornberg's behind this. Erik's awesome guy. Um, did he talk to you about this before he did it? Cause I feel like if I was going to do something like this, you're my phone-a-friend, right?

No, he didn't talk to me.

You're my phone-a-friend on that.

I've never talked to him.

Oh, you never talked to him. So you don't know each other that well. Okay. Gotcha. Um, he's in our like friend group, I guess. Um, okay. So I'm curious what your take is on this. Cause I think you know a lot about this.

I have a strong opinion, but I want you to explain it.

Yeah. So here's my opinion. Um, I don't think anyone that you mentioned or anyone out there is really doing it perfectly, but this is beautifully done. Uh, you go to his website.

Wow. I thought you were going to be anti, you're pretty anti most media things.

So I'm surprised you're— Oh no, it's going to come. It's going to come.

Uh, you're doing, you're doing that sandwich thing. Yeah. My bad. I stopped you with the bread. Yeah.

Yeah. Sandwiches always have, it's not, it's not meat. Love your logo.

Hate everything else.

Like a sandwich is not meat, cheese, bread. It's bread, meat, cheese, bread.

Okay.

You gotta, it begins and it ends with that. No, I, I do like it. So here's the thing about these companies. I think if he doesn't raise money, I think it's awesome. I think so long as he doesn't raise money. I think this could be really, really cool. I think owning this outright is amazing. I think that's really cool. I think when I go to his website, I think he borderline, like if it was done a little bit the other way, it would be really douchey. But the way that he's done it, it's actually quite awesome. Like for example, he quotes Pablo Picasso and, you know, that could go either way.

That could go either way.

He went the right way. I think when you go to the website, I think the name is nice. It's all like pretty slick. It's upscale. It actually looks really good. I think that if you, if you, if you did that a little bit differently, it would not work. But he's like, what's the, what's the quote for Pablo Picasso on there? Do you see it?

Uh, yeah. It says, when art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

Cool. I think that's cool. I think it's cool. And it's got a nice little picture of Pablo. I think it's awesome. Yeah.

Uh, dude, so on my next company, I'm gonna get a quote from Benny Blanco.

What's it gonna say?

I don't know. Just, he got Pablo Picasso. I'm going to get Betty Blanco on the other side.

We can do Bugs Bunny next too. I mean, I think it's good, man. I think it's good branding. So my opinion is I think it's cool if you own it. I think it's cool if, so I don't know if you know this, you probably don't because who cares, but Business Insider's writer, the writers are on strike. Do you know that?

Yes. Well, a lot of like, isn't Hollywood also on strike right now?

I think they're totally unrelated other than maybe they inspired each other. I think there was like a contract up. Insider formed a union or something like that, and they are protesting and they're doing this thing called a digital pick line, I guess it's called, where a digital picket line where they're like telling all the customers like not to click on Business Insider links now, which is crazy. I mean, someone who follows a Business Insider journalist is probably not also someone reading Business Insider, I would imagine. So I don't know if that's going to go well. But if you have to, if, so if you're going to start a media company, I think you have to be incredibly careful not to hire folks who will unionize. I think that is actually an existential crisis to a lot of media companies right now. And I think that that's like a real, so if you're, so here's the takeaways. I think A, it's awesome. So you're going to do this. I think it's cool. I think you should own the whole thing. B, look out for union types. C, him going B2B, that's 100% the way to go. And I want to give you an example.

But is this B2B? I don't think this is B2B. What makes you say this is B2B? I think he just has, uh, I think he has, uh, probably he's probably going for like high-end customers more so than B2B, right?

Yeah, but your ad salespeople could spin that nicely to Salesforce. Uh, like it's not like true crime, you know what I mean? It's borderline. It's kissing cousins with the, with the B2B, uh, Real B2B. It's close, but let me give you an example of a real B2B one.

B2Bish. B2Bish.

Yeah, it's bish. Um, have you heard, by the way, did you see that guy who's getting in trouble? His name is George Santos. He's like, clearly, I think he's like from South America, but he was, um, I'm going to butcher it, but he was some type of elected official out of Long Island. And, uh, he's getting in trouble because he did a bunch of fraudish stuff. But one thing that's funny is he told everyone he was Jewish and he goes, well, I didn't say I was Jewish. I said I was Jew-ish. Like I'm friends with the Jews. I was Jew-ish. Like, you know, like I'm buddies with them. Have you not seen that?

All time. All time excuse.

He like stole $500,000. So he's actually a crook, but like the funniest part, he goes, I'm Jew-ish. And you look at him and he's, uh, uh, like from Brazil or something like what? So that's pretty funny. But anyway, I think that instead of going B2B-ish, you got to go all the way. Have you heard of Aging Media? No. Okay. So type in Aging Media. It's started by this guy named John. John's a member of Hampton, but everything I'm actually about to say, I just kind of stole from SimilarWeb. But I have heard some rumors about them. But basically, if you go to Aging Media, what's the—

You mean on his Hampton application where he had to write his revenue, profits, names of all his children, and Social Security number? You may, you may have some info on this.

He's in the meat.

Look, I just clicked SimilarWeb on their site. No info. So I know you ain't getting shit from SimilarWeb right now.

Oh yeah. Yeah. So here's why. Here's, I'm going to explain it to you. You gotta be a pro. But no, listen, Aging Media is their like corporate website.

So what's it say? They have like their brands, like Senior Housing News, Hospice News, Skilled Nursing News, that sort of thing.

This is, yeah.

And I love it. I love it. I love this.

You just did this guy such a disservice by sticking 4 to 40 copycats on him by talking about how good of a business this is on here.

Well, no, so like I didn't—

People who listen to this podcast are like, if Sam Rashawn say the N-word, I don't mean the N-word, I mean newsletters. If they say that this is a good newsletter business, instant copycats, bro. They saw what you did with The Hustle. They saw what I did with Milk Road. They're instantly looking for a new newsletter to clone. I apologize on behalf of whoever this guy is.

I DM'd him in the Hamptons. I go, hey, don't tell me anything, but just can I talk about your company? And I said, here's what I see on SimilarWeb.

He didn't know what he was saying yes to.

No, I got permission. I go, here's, here's what I see on SimilarWeb. This is what I'm going to say. Are you cool with it? And he gave me a thumbs up, like literally a thumbs up emoji. That's how I roll. I get that emoji. We're good. Um, that's a hardcore B2B media company. So anyway, my point with this Turpentine thing, I think it's cool. I like it.

I think it's cool. I hope he pulls it off. I've thought about doing this idea actually in the past. I ruled it out for a bunch of reasons, but, uh, that doesn't mean somebody else can't do it. I think, I think it'd be great to do. It takes a lot of energy and I'm totally with you that I hope he didn't raise money. He's in his tweet thing, uh, announcing it. He didn't didn't say, he didn't say like, so happy to have Marc Andreessen investing in this. So, so I think there is, uh, I think there's probably a good chance he raised money, but he didn't raise, okay. He didn't raise money. So, so I hope he is taking it that way.

Speaking of screwing up your money, can I tell you what I did post-Milk Road with the money that we made?

Well, I do know that you sent me a text. I would have to go look at when that came and you said, I've sold all my equities. I think it's going to go to the— I think the market's going down. And since then, you've— it's doubled. It's about doubled.

Yeah.

A lot of that. So I know you did that with your money. So what else did you do?

Can I tell you about my next best decision?

Yeah. What else did you do besides not make money off your money?

For the record, for the record, uh, I've actually— I would be about even from where I was with my equities on that, because I kept Well, I kept a portion of it, but I also, uh, the stuff I sold has not doubled. You just look at HubSpot stock because you're like, I got HubSpot. So you're like, HubSpot is the market. HubSpot is not the market exactly. So, uh, so I'll tell you that. So let me, um, let me tell you about what I did. So we got this money, so we sell Milk Road, now there's cash hitting a bank account. Got a couple options. So it's like, do we just buy treasury bills, make 4% on that?

What bank did you use?

What bank did I use?

What do you mean? You use Chase or one of the other ones that got screwed up?

I'm not— there's no upside in answering this question.

Did you use one of the ones you were using? One of the ones that got screwed up?

Did you ever read the, uh, Tiny annual report? Well, We'll have to talk about it next time.

Yeah, I, I, I read his annual letter. Um, yeah. So, so I've, and I, we have a few other friends that have been doing this as well, uh, that are less public about it. So I said, okay, well let me do that. I said, but I don't wanna buy these companies and operate them. So I thought, what if I bought 30% stakes? So it's sort of like, uh, can I buy a minority position in companies so that they keep running them, but I give them capital? So basically like the founder oftentimes was like not taking a lot off the table, or they were kind of always worried like, Should I put this in my pocket and spend this? Well, I don't know. What if the company needs it? Even if we're profitable, they were kind of worried about that. So I said, here, let me give us some money. And then could I help them grow? And so I went through this exercise. I don't think I've told you about any of these, but I talked to about 25 companies in the last, I want to say, 6 months.

Dude, every company that you talk to DMs me and they say something of a variety of, I was talking to Sean and now we're not talking anymore. But they like, they like message me to like talk to you and I just ignore it.

Yeah. You're like the wingman who refuses to wing.

You, you don't have to tell me which companies I already know. Probably half of them.

Yeah, there's no way you're gonna get 30% for that long. Right. Do you actually think that's possible?

What do you mean for that long? That long means what?

I don't— I mean, I don't know anything about markets. I haven't read like a Warren Buffett biography, but like, what's he compounded at every year?

Oh, yeah. He's been at 20% for like 50 years or something.

Okay. But if you—

but if you got to predict 10 years, he's putting billions and billions of dollars to work. And that's very different.

Right. Okay. I think that's smart. Do you think you're going to enjoy this? I think you'll enjoy it, right?

I'm not sure.. So this was a test basically to see like, is this fun to do? It's definitely fun on the learning side. Uh, now that we made the first acquisition or the first, like kind of, I would say not acquisition, like kind of minority investment. Um, and it's different than startups. Like we, we've done startup investing. Startup investing is very, very different. Startup investing is you look at a business, you're trying to figure out, is this, are these 3 dudes in this bedroom gonna be able to build like a multi-billion dollar company, right? Like, is this husband and wife couple gonna be able to pull off this just gargantuan exit. And like, kind of right now they have usually nothing, just an idea, a product, maybe a little bit of traction.

It's way more of a lottery.

It's a lottery, and you put in $100,000, and then you do that with 40 companies, and you know that 38 of the companies are going to be kind of like just a write-off or cost of doing business. And 2 or 3 of those, those 30 or 40 companies are going to be your winners. But hopefully they're winning at 100x or 1,000x or more, uh, returns. And so it's very lottery-like, and you, you spend very little time with them. So you're not like, um, They don't want you advising them. You answer questions when they call. You could proactively nudge them a little bit, but you're more mostly hands-off, I would say, as angel investing. Whereas if you buy 15, 20, 25, 30% of a business, uh, you're a little more involved. Um, you know, you, you're, yeah, you care. You're a little more active. These businesses are not like all or nothing businesses. They're like, oh, this is already a good business. It's profitable and it's already growing. So the question is, can we accelerate the growth, right? So like the one business we bought is, I don't know, super profitable. It makes millions of dollars a year in profits. It's, you know, more than 50% margins. And, you know, we were able to buy a piece of that. And I think that, that's just so different than every startup investment I had ever done. You know, it's probably not going to become a multibillion-dollar business. I would almost guarantee that. But it doesn't need to. It's not supposed to. It's a cash flow business.

And so isn't it funny how You have mocked me for like the last 8 years about my slow and steady approach. And now you're, you know, look, you're still, at first it was like laughing at 8%. I'm going for 10x every year or whatever. Right. Now you're, now it's, it's, it's coming down. Now 30% is really attractive, which I agree, that is really attractive. Before you know it, you're going to say, nah, dude, that's, that's not true.

Even in a startup fund, even when you have your winners that become billion-dollar companies, the overall fund, like a great fund, is doing 30% IRR or 20%. I'm just saying you're getting more boring. It's still the same boring. No, it's down. I don't know. I reject that. I reject that premise.

I would say you used to make a live streaming app and now you're looking at a company that sells parts to Boeing.

But cash flow is always interesting. It's always been interesting. And now it's more interesting than it was in the past. I really didn't, I really didn't have a lot of exposure to these types of business. I lived in San Francisco. You say cash flow and people think you're talking about like, you know, I don't know, like a leaky faucet. Like nobody knows what the hell, the hell that means. And so, uh, once I started doing this podcast, we got a lot more exposure to like, most of the people who listen to this podcast are entrepreneurs all around the world. And so when they reach out about their business, it's like, oh, this guy in Minnesota with this, you know, marketing agency that does this per year, or this person sells parts and this person does whatever. Uh, you know, they're rolling up bookkeeping services. And so you, you learn about different types of businesses more through this. And, uh, so I've been getting my like MBA on, on non-Silicon Valley businesses for the past 2 years.

Look, the cool thing is, is that, you know, we research stuff and like if I really dive deep into a topic, I'll research it for 8 hours. And I, that's not enough to make an investment, but it's enough that I say to myself, oh wow, this space is really intriguing. You know, I could see myself doing this. You're doing that, but instead of 8 hours, you're doing weeks. And so it's oddly in the similar vein a bit. Of course, you have to do more due diligence and actually look at the numbers and get to know the people. But yeah, it's like getting used to the space.

which is what I have, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. It was, we all make this, this mistake, but I think you were at least looking at it the right way where you were like, maybe I could do a bunch of these. You talk to people that had 50 of these in their portfolio and you have to do one to know if you want to do 50. And so. We got really far down the road with this one that like, if it all worked, it's like, dude, we could be making $200,000 a year off this. It's like, wait, what are we doing? Why, why are we doing this? Like, yeah, it's a great deal and it's highly likely to work, but it's highly likely to be very small and like not worth the mindshare of even doing this. And so we pulled out on that one. The one that we did was basically a company people probably know. So it was in a cat. So this one was not, are you gonna name it? Yeah, yeah, we can name it now. It's, it's official. So we first looked at the category. So I was super bullish on companies that let you hire internationally. So specifically like how to hire the Philippines and LATAM. And you know this.

Why, why were you interested in that? What insight did you have?

Like kind of scar tissue. Like, dude, you came to my office. I remember you, you came to my office in San Francisco when I was doing Bebo and you were like, what's your burn rate? Which again is like a question nobody asks somebody else out loud. It's like, you know, that's like asking somebody, that's asking a woman their weight. Like, ask a founder their burn rate and see how they feel.

In my head, I was like, that's bubbly. You had a bubbly burn, man.

And I was like, $3 million a year. And that's what we were, we were basically a startup that was burning $3 million a year pre-product market fit. Cause that's what it cost. We had, we basically had a team of engineers. So we had like, you know, I don't know, 10 to 12 engineers.

It's like $200,000 a month.

$200,000, I think we were doing like $240,000 a month in burn.

So you get like, and that's net burn. Does that mean no, does that assume no revenue?

Do you get to know?

Yeah, yeah, of course. I'm talking to them all the time. The one good thing is, especially with the Philippines, uh, this sounds terrible, but I'm going to say it anyways because it's honest. Um, I hate managing people and I love hiring people in the Philippines because they need so little management.

Like I, uh, why does that sound horrible? What did I miss there?

Because I think what people want is for you to be like, I'm a good manager and I talk to my people and I'm like, dude, it's fucking great. I only talk like, for example, my assistant, I only talked to her on Fridays. And people are like, well, that's kind of mean. Or like, it's great. They don't want one-on-ones and like career trajectory coaching. And they don't want like, like the same, like in San Francisco, I had, let's say I have 8 direct reports. That's 8 weekly one-on-ones I had to do. Well, dude, I've had essentially 8 hours out of the 160 hours a week that, you know, that I have that I'm like, uh, you know, I'm spending doing basically like touchy-feely stuff, which is fine. I understand it. But it's really nice when you don't have to do that because it's not the baseline expectation.

There's a bunch of roles where you don't want someone who's entirely ambitious. Like with an assistant, it's like you don't want someone that's like, no, I don't want to give you all these other opportunities. I want you to be great at this thing and not bail. Like, I don't— this is what I need. This is the tool that I need. And I want you to be that. I don't want to have to promote you tons and tons of times.

I've hired a couple of people, uh, for like our holdco basically. Um, and They're, they're cool. They're, they live in San Francisco. They're awesome. They're, they're super motivated to work with me. I'm like, great, what do you want? Like, I wanna be you. And I'm like, wait, what? And then I'm like, cool. Like, you know, someday they're like, yeah, but I'm also spinning up my own newsletter, my own podcast, my own investment arm. Like, I'm like, okay, well, like, that's great. You could do that, but you, that makes for kind of a shitty person to hire onto my team because like part of being on this team is being down for our mission, not like your own mission necessarily. And I totally get if you wanna go do your own mission, but you gotta like, go do that on your own. You don't get, you don't get to have both. Um, you know, at the same exact time, you could do one and get mentored for a bit and then go do your own, but you can't do them at the exact same time. And so it has been very nice to have people that are just like, they like literally like our, our management style is they log in, they say logging in, here's what I'm doing today. If you have any adjustments needed, you say something. If not, you just don't say anything. At the end, they say logging off. Here's what I got done today. Here's everything I did. Here's the files. Here's the, here's the info, log it off.

So how much are you spending now on, on these, on these folks?

I mean, dude, I have like in my own companies probably almost 15 to 20 people that are international now.

And so, and what's the average salary?

Um, it ranges. So like on the low end, uh, 800, I think about it in months monthly, cause that's like when I push payroll, that's what it says. So like, you know, 800 a month would be the low end and that's like, I would say most common. So that's like customer support, personal assistant, things like that can be that low. And then, uh, the higher roles will be like 2,500 to 3,000. And then there's one guy who's just amazing and I've promoted him up twice now. Now he gets paid like a US employee because he makes the impact of somebody who's like driving a ton of growth. So I'm like, oh great, like you keep getting rewarded. You're at some point you break, break through where you're, if you're driving growth, you get rewarded for driving growth.

And you also, I got an email, you, you have a course on this now too.

I have a course on the personal assistant side. Yeah, I just created the, it's not even a course actually. It's just, uh, I don't like, I don't go and teach it. It's just a system. It's like, yo, basically the best hire I made this year was I hired my personal assistant and I had thought, okay, personal assistant is, uh, um, you know, personal assistants like for rich people for like mega, it's like for Jeff Bezos. It's like mega busy, mega rich. And, uh, and I also was like, ah, I don't wanna have to tell somebody what to do all the time. Like that sounds like its own pain in the ass to come up up with shit to do. And then I heard a few friends talk about theirs and I was like, maybe I'm wrong. Let me open my mind to the possibility that I'm wrong about this. 3 people tell me, 3 people that I trust tell me that it's like been a huge game changer for them.

Let me try it. Dude, send it to me. I want to use it. I, I need to use it.

Yeah, I'll send it to you. So I basically created the whole thing last week and I was like, here's my system. So for example, like here's my, my email system. Like I used to be terrible with email and now my email system's like super organized on top of shit. Here's exactly what I do. Here's the exact scope of work. Here's how it, here's how it works.

I just texted Ben. I go, I said, send it to me.

And so how big are those companies? How big's Athena? I heard they're huge.

The branding on their website. So it's supportshepard.com. Yeah, you have to be one of the testimonials. You need a testy on there, but it looks good. It's cute branding. So Marshall Haas is the guy who started it. Marshall, I've known Marshall since 2012, maybe. He's the type of guy who Whenever he does something, it's awesome.

It looks cool.

Uh, so like, if you follow him on Instagram, on Twitter, he's got showmanship. He's got showmanship. He's got the juice. He's got the juice. So whenever, like, for example, I think he just bought a new house and I'm like following the build of the house. He also like, he likes cars. So like, I saw him like redecorate his garage.

He owns like a boutique hotel. He did this like e-commerce thing that was like super simple and actually was like a really good, like, you know, a successful business, successful e-com business that was just like like, it was like a phone case and like, you know, it was just that. And like when COVID came out, they came out with this little like hook thing, like your Captain Hook. I was like, you can use this to open doors without having to touch the knob like a peasant. I was like, dude, this guy's great. He just makes these like simple little businesses and he runs all— the reason he did this is he ran his businesses using international hiring as his like workforce. So then he partnered with this guy in the Philippines, opened up an office on the ground there with a bunch of recruiters to do all the vetting locally on the ground.

Is he going to the Philippines?

His business partner lives there and has the office open there. So that's like how you, that you got to commit if you're going to do these types of things. And so he basically partnered with the guy who was doing that. And that's how they created Shepherd. And it started off just like, you know, solving their own itch, but turns out like a lot of people have, have this itch. And so, and myself included.

So, uh, so if he, I found, I've not used it, but I will, I will use it. I would like to use, I'm going to, I'm literally, I just texted Ben. I'm, I really actually want your course. I want to figure out how you do this because I want this. And maybe I'll use these guys. But if his business is going so well, why would he sell a portion to you? Like, my head is, I'm greedy. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. Because I mean, obviously we're going to drive him a little bit or a lot of bit of traffic. The pod will. Is that the only reason why he would do this?

Uh, yeah, basically they don't spend any money on marketing, um, at all. And so the way that it spreads is just word of mouth, people coming back. And then the other one is like entrepreneurs who have an audience saying, saying the word. So they first did this with Nick, uh, Huber and Nick drove, Nick has drove them a ton of business because Nick uses it, uh, for all of his businesses. And so he, when he talks about it, they get a bunch of, uh, they get a bunch of traffic. So I think he saw the success of that. And, um, basically, you know, we have a large audience now, like through Twitter, through this pod, through other things. And so there's obviously a benefit of I don't know, like the brand association, like as well as like, you know, the ability to reach, you know, reach a large audience that I think was appealing to him. But I bought in, I didn't get free shares, right? Like I bought, I bought into the, to the equity pool. But I agree with you, when you have a really good business, you're always hesitant. It has to be like the right fit. And so I think the other benefit was he listens to the pod. And so he's seen, you know, if you listen to this, you know how we think and you can agree, be like, this person's great or this person's an idiot. You know, if you want to, if you would want to do business with them. If you've listened to the pod regularly, you, you, you have a very good idea. There's no hiding our personalities on this.

Do they have a MFM, like coupon code? Is it coupon?

So first I want, if you're into this shit, I have no stake in this by the way, uh, but go to Support Shepherd. I do want them to sign up because here's what I want. I want you to report back and I want to hear if this whole influencer buys company thing actually is good. I want it. So I want, I want the results to be reported back in like a month. And so I am curious to see like what the demand is. I bet it's going to be quite good. Number 2, what I'm curious to see is if you like this. Uh, I don't know if you're going to like it or not. I could see going 50/50 either way. So far, how do you feel? I mean, look, if this deal works, then this is like the greatest thing on earth. Well, this one is a no-brainer, right? But that's not the hard part.

This is already a successful company. I'm already religious about hiring internationally anyways, personally in my own business. Businesses, it's like I didn't have to be convinced that this is a good idea. Like I already knew this is a good idea. The question was, am I gonna start my own of these or should I invest in one that's already working that I like, that I use? And I was like, okay, cool, let me just do the second one. That seems like way less work, you know, to do that. So I think this one is kind of a no-brainer in that it's kind of a proven business. I am a genuine believer in it. And whether we actually drive extra traffic to them or not, I think is, is sort of like, I don't know, like, obviously for them they want that and I would like that too. But for me it was already— it was already a working business.

What percentage are you— is that too much to ask or to reveal publicly?

Yeah, I don't want to disclose that here because I think, you know, it's their business. I don't want to— I don't want to give that away too much. But, you know, it's a— it's a good chunk.

I think— but do you think they'll ever sell the company or do you make your money just through dividends?

You did? You got one already?

Yeah. It was fantastic.

This is going to be your See's candy, maybe. I mean, if this works out, that's exciting. I'm curious to see if you're going to like this because on one hand, I can actually see you loving this because you get to spend time seeing how things work and you get to use your skill set, which is content, to tell people about it. Like this segment that we just did, I'm actually interested. I want to keep talking about this just because I want to hear the story behind it. I think that's interesting. And so it's kind of a win-win in that regard. But I'm curious if you're going to enjoy all the due diligence. Like when I talked to Andrew Wilkinson, he actually, I don't think does a lot of the due diligence. He's got a team to do that. If you are able to pull that off, I think you'll be in a win situation. So as long as you like, like doing that.

Yeah, I'm going to try it with 2 or 3. This one I knew was a slam dunk because I'm just like, just a total believer in it. What's going to be interesting is what happens with ones that aren't like perfectly in my zone of like, I get it, I used it. I believe in it. Like, it's like this one was like bullseye. I don't expect every business to be exactly bullseye. So the question is, what happens when it's not exactly? Is it still fun? Do I still believe? Do I, am I still willing to talk about it? Like this one I'm willing to talk about cuz I'm like, I literally wouldn't have my e-com business work the way it does, or Milk Road work the way it did if I didn't use this strategy. So I'm like, I could talk about that. Now what happens when it's like one degree separated from that? Am I still gonna wanna to, to tell a story on it? Maybe it's not even that interesting of a story and I'm not gonna do it. Like I'm not gonna come on this podcast and bore everybody with like a story that's not that great. So I can't, I can't commit to that yet, but I don't know if somebody wants me to buy, you know, a minority stake in their business, hit me up. Let's see, let's see what happens. I'm gonna try 2 or 3 of these and see, see how it goes.

Was there anything, uh, that you learned looking at the 24 other than what you said about the, uh, like fix me shit? Like, was there anything, any other revelations, not necessarily about what they had wrong with them, Or but maybe what they had right with them, any commonalities between the winners.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I would say that the, the businesses that I was most interested in were ones that had a clear, a clear sales model, I would say. So they knew how they were going to get their customers now and in the future. And, um, I don't want to say moat because it's like you're just trying to be Warren Buffett. Like, it's not like something they had a moat, but they had, you know, either recurring revenue or they had something that was like they're, they're actually the category leader. They're the go-to leader. And that there's some reason why they're not just going to get copied into oblivion by everybody else. Maybe it's, maybe they have operational advantage.

Maybe they— what's Shepherds? I mean, I think branding is actually, uh, that separates them here. I think that they look cool. Is there anything else?

Yeah, I think Shepherd's, uh, real advantage is that they're, uh, they picked a business model that's actually more customer friendly, like I said. So like, um, if your two other options are spend a bunch of time, have a bunch of uncertainty, hire somebody unvetted and you save a little bit of money, or pay a 3x monthly upcharge, like you're kind of nuts to do the 3x monthly upcharge for a long period of time, especially if you're going to hire multiple roles eventually in your company. Like it's just not a sustainable path. So to me, Support Shepherd's choice on the business model separated them from the current competitors. Now somebody else could try to do it, but what are they gonna have to do? They're gonna have to go set up boots on the ground in the Philippines and in LATAM and really be good at, you know, recruiting recruiters who are then gonna recruit the talent to actually deliver on these roles and hire high-quality people because they, they don't really, like, the money's not made in your first hire. The money's made when you're like, you see the light and you come back to them for your next 6 hires. Like what I did with e-com is like, I started with customer support and I was like, cool, I need somebody who could do inventory forecasting. People in the US really expensive for that. I need $140K for that, that role here. Could I find somebody overseas that could do inventory forecasting? Can I find somebody that could do, can run our Amazon, uh, ads? Can I find somebody who could do wholesale as a channel? Like, can I find people that do influencer? Like, you start to be like, oh wait, this isn't just about what it used to be, which was like, VAs equals low-cost labor. Now it's like, dude, they're pretty talented people that could do these things. They got 3 or 4 years of experience doing that at another company. And so you're able to just pluck from the remote talent pool versus just your local talent pool.

Dude, I'm excited to see how this turns out.

At Hampton, do you guys have any overseas people yet or no?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We have like the guy who made our website is overseas and he's on staff. We have our accounting folks who like, they're called Fuel Finance. They're overseas. If you go to, like, we have this whole backend thing built where people can log in. It was built by a guy in Hong Kong. Yeah, we have a ton of overseas and Marshall's a member. And so we're going to actually thinking about starting to use them for some data analytics stuff. So yeah, it's like a lot of overseas stuff.

When I was using for our e-com thing, a lot of e-com people use agencies. I, uh, I'll hire an agency and then they like, they're like, great, let's add, can you add these 3 people to Slack? And all of the—

and you'll tell them their names.

Uh, when are you gonna go there? When are you going?

When's the Philippines?

Yeah, where do you— when's Neckbeard Nation going to the Philippines?

We should host the next live pod there.

Do we have a following there? I have no idea.

Uh, unfortunately, I don't think we do. I don't think they give a shit.

Dude, you got to go there.

Um, I've been to the Philippines. It's awesome.

Very hot tonight. And I've never been. I'll go tonight and tomorrow. I'm taking a, uh, 15-hour road trip in my Tesla uh, my first time doing it. We're gonna see if I love it or hate it, so I'm gonna report back on Wednesday.

15-hour, you said?

It normally takes 12, but you add 3 hours for charging.

Yeah, I did a charging road trip.

It's horrible.

Where are you going from? Where are you going to? What's the distance?

Uh, Austin to St. Louis. Okay. I'm gonna visit my family.

Uh, would you get the X or the Y? Which one are you doing?

X, long distance, 350 miles.

Is it a new one? Because the thing I screwed up was the one I rented on Turo was 5 years old, and it just needed charging every 90 minutes. It was an awful experience.

Well, how fast you go?

I mean, it's like highway, right? So you're going like whatever, 75 miles an hour.

I mean, I speed usually, so I mean, I'll go 85 or 90, so we'll see what's gonna happen.

Crushes the battery. Uh, it absolutely crushed the battery. At least that one that I had, it absolutely crushed it. We had a terrible— we did a 7-hour ride, 14 hours, because we had to charge so many times. And by the way, you know the charging thing, it's not like like, you can't just like charge, like there's like certain chargers that are fast and some that are slow, you know?

Like, don't you just use the thing on the screen that like tells you what to do? Or tells you where— tells you where—

tells you where the chargers are. But I'm saying some of the charging stations and some of the spots are fast chargers and some are slow. Like there's a, a, like it's like a gas pump where one will fill it up at twice the speed as the other. So make sure when you do it, you know that. So you go only to the fast chargers, uh, and none of the slow ones. The slow ones are like You, you had to be like, I wanted to go watch a movie so that I could do this slow charge.

No, I, I use, there's this app called A Better Route. I think it's called this guy like has built this whole like thing just on routing out people's electric charges. And so I'm going to use that. But my wife's, my wife's flying and I was like, I'm driving. I want to drive. I want to see what it's like. And so I'm driving and I'm going to report back on Wednesday to see how it feels. I did it. So I, I'm going to leave tonight. So I'll get a few hours in and then tomorrow that way I can Like I plan my life around this pod because I was like, it's, we record 11 my time. It's like, I can't arrive that morning. Otherwise I'll be like tired. I won't have time to research. Right. So I have to plan it. So I get there Tuesday night, but I need a full night's rest so I can like wake up and like research and shit. Do you plan your life around this pod?

Uh, yeah, to an extent, right? Like, you know, this is, uh, this is the one unmissable appointment on my calendar. Everything else is flexible. This is the one non-flexible thing.

It's no days off.

I think, I mean, we've recorded on We missed last week though, so I guess we can't really say that right now.

Well, wasn't there like an issue?

Yeah, we had a sound issue, but, uh, we were like, no days off. People were like, you missed last, the last episode.

That was like a technical error, but we've done like, whatever the most recent holiday is, we were recording whatever. I think we've done Christmas Eve before. We always record.

Big thanks to everybody who listens. This is a fun thing for us to do. Thank you for listening. Uh, yeah, this is like one of the, one of the, the dope parts of our life. And I think it's attracted a bunch of like, uh, I mean, Neckbeard Nation, right? So it's attracted a bunch of people whose brain is weird in the way our brain is weird. And, uh, I think that's a lot of fun.

I want to end with this. So I was at this, I'll tell you a very, very, very quick story. I was at this LA tech meetup. First of all, our fans are, that sounds weird, but our listeners, they come in all shapes and sizes, man. All colors. All, I like, I love it.

Like, what does that mean? What are you trying to say there?

Dude, like I had this guy that looked like he was 7 feet tall guy, like basketball player, and I thought he was like a famous guy, and he comes up and goes, total man, and he gave me like, you know, like the black guy handshake of like, when you're a 7-foot black guy, you are a total man.

Like, you didn't even need to say it, bro. We know. Yeah.

He gave me like that type of handshake. You know what I'm saying? And, uh, and then I had this like 55-year-old woman who was with her kid at the airport say what's up. And I just want to say, first of all, if you're a fan, thank you. And second of all, I can tell like walking by if someone listens or not, because if they're wearing like Lululemon ABC pants or like if they look like they go to like Columbia, like university, and they like make eye contact with you in a particular way, I could tell. And I would love for you to come and say what's up. So long as it's like a quick, like, what's up, total man. Like you could say something.

Here's the etiquette. You come over, you fist pound, not handshake or hug. So let's do knucks. That's the way we do it. We're not trying to get a little too, too much, uh, I'm not trying to be palm to palm with anybody. And so, uh, Give me the nucks. You can say, uh, you could reference it. You can know small boy stuff, uh, total man. You could use any of the, any of the isms that you want. That just means I know you and I'm like, I'll give you the head nod back. Like, yep, you're one of us. Take the selfie together. And then, uh, and then we kind of, you know, we keep the show rolling from there.

But here's the shtick that I need to announce to people and they, and we, we gotta put this in every episode because Oftentimes if they see me with my wife, they'll say, what's up? If they see me with like my in-laws or out to eat with friends, they won't say what's up. And every once in a while they will. And it makes me feel so cool. Oh my God.

So the more people I'm with, the more I need you to be over the top with it.

Yes.

My wife doesn't listen to this podcast. She never heard a single episode. So she doesn't think this is cool. She thinks this is me playing video games up in the bedroom right now. So only when she sees someone come up in person. And then even, you know, I was with her mom there and they were like, wow, what? My dad was there and he's like, he, my dad literally goes, he must have thought you're someone else.

We are famous enough that like our friends and family actually understand. And so if you see us out there, please come and say hi. Give us a hug. Particularly if we're with friends, you have to do it. That will make my day. As long as it's a short thing. I was out to eat and like 3 different guys when I was out to eat, I was with my coworkers, said what's up. And I played it off like, oh man, I can't go anywhere.

You know what I mean?

Like, and in my head I'm like, I hope there's a fourth. I hope there's a fourth.

And so on.

And my coworkers were like, does this happen all the time?

I'm like, ah, I gotta say the most embarrassing version of this. So, uh, when we were selling the Milk Road, I went to meet up with the the guy, uh, who bought it, Kendall, at a coffee shop. And we're at the coffee shop for a bit and I see someone kind of like looking like, I think they recognize you, but I'm not sure. And I'm like, come over, just come over right now. Because he doesn't listen to the podcast and I'm trying to do this deal. And I'm like, I think it would help if he felt like I'm a big deal. I was like, I think that'd be a little nice.

Yeah.

Yes. The guy doesn't come over. Right. So we go outside, we say, I say bye. He starts walking away., and the guy comes over and he's like, Sean? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, hey man, I literally go, I was like, oh, Kendall, I want you to be my house. I was like, hey, uh, have you met Kendall? And you guys like, no. And I was like, Kendall, yeah, um, this guy just, he listens to the pod, he's, I just wanted you to, I know it didn't even make sense. And I was like, I forced it so bad, dude, so bad.

Validate me, please validate me.

How do you take a cool moment and make it the slame was me being like, hey, wait, you didn't hear that? He recognized me.

Come here.

Have you guys met? He's like, no, of course not.

Oh my God. I, uh, I've said that before where I'm like, hey, say what you said again, but do it in front of my in-laws.

So I just—

this is the public service announcement. If you think you know us, or if you think it's us, even if you only think it's kind of us, uh, just take a chance and say what's up. And, uh, feel free to be over the top. Like, you know, it's awesome. We love it. It makes me feel good and it more so makes me look cool, which is what I care about more than anything. So anyway, that's awesome. That's the pod. Good episode. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.