#62 - Lambda School for Secretaries, Billionaire of The Week, Deepfakes & More

Okay, we got a friend of the show, Jordan Harbinger's here. Jordan, how you doing, man?

Thanks for having me on, man. I'm just chilling, self-isolating, you know, the usual.

We are all isolating, but I appreciate you dropping in on the show, just parachuting in just for a couple minutes. It's always fun to have you. You know, this is a crazy time. 2020 has been a crazy year. We got coronavirus, and we also had, you know, the sad, tragic passing of Kobe Bryant, who was a guest on your show. How did that happen? How do you get Kobe?

Yeah, that is intense, high-stakes interviewing, to say the least. And was he like an idol of yours before you did the interview?

No, man, honestly, I— look, who doesn't love watching basketball? But I wasn't even— I'm just not a fanboy of athletes in general. So it was a great unique opportunity, but I wasn't nervous because of that. I was more nervous because you just never know if your audio equipment's going to screw up. So I was more nervous, like, make sure it's recording, than I was nervous to be sitting in front of Kobe Bryant. Honestly, he's so— he was so friendly and unassuming and not very loud. In fact, we even had audio issues recording it because we're like, hey, we got to turn him up really high. And I said, You're really quiet. And he goes, yeah, I'm just not a loud guy, man. And I was like, oh my God, can you be loud for like the next 45 minutes? So it was, it was a really unique experience. I'll, I'll be thankful for that for a long time to come.

That is amazing. You know, when we started this show, we were doing the interview style thing and I made a bucket list, a wishlist of all the guests that I would want. Uh, you know, Kobe was on there. And, uh, when I look at your show and I've been going up and plowing through the archive of episodes that you've got. You've had a bunch of them. So you've had Tony Hawk, you've had Kobe Bryant. Who are some of the other awesome episodes that people should check out if they, if they do binge your show like I'm doing?

Sure. Yeah, Howie Mandel was really good, the comedian. He, he was very open about things like mental illness and how he doesn't shake people's hands. I've had Dennis Rodman, Malcolm Gladwell, and I also had Frank Abagnale, which a lot of people haven't heard about or from, but he's at the Catch Me If You Can. He is the Catch Me If You Can guy. So he's the real guy that was played by Leo DiCaprio, and we talked about the psychology the psychology behind how he was able to trick so many people. And now he teaches, of course, FBI and intelligence agencies how that's done as well.

That is amazing. So if you're one of the listeners to the, to the show who misses when we used to do the interviews and bring in guests, well, this is, this is my recommendation for you. You should go check out the Jordan Harbinger Show. He's got tons of interviews from guests that we were, you know, hoping to one day have on our show. He's already had them on. Check them out on iTunes, on Spotify, wherever you can find it. Jordan, appreciate you as always. In on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys.

Uh, Sam, how you doing, man? Why are you so angry?

God fucking shit, nothing works. I hate everything. My Apple TV's not working, QuickTime's not working, I hate Zoom.

God damn, I hate it. But your mohawk's working.

That didn't even work. I meant to shave the whole thing and I just forgot that up there.

You did not forget the top.

Dude, I hate working from home. I hate it so much.

Don't worry, just like, I don't know, 6 to 8 more weeks of this and then we're back.

If we're lucky.

If we're lucky. Okay, so let's do this. What do we got? Let's jump right in. The people need entertainment.

Okay, we were supposed to talk about Y Combinator stuff today, but I found I want to talk about something that I think is more more interesting, but you wanna talk about some lighthearted stuff, which is what's the Sway thing?

Yeah, what is the Sway thing? I saw you, I saw a video of you dancing.

Was that the first time you'd seen this?

Dance pretty well? No, I'd seen it, Ryan Hoover had posted one of him dancing and when he posted it, it looked very real to me. Yours did not look as real, I think, 'cause where you were in your room. But when I saw that, I was like, holy shit, Ryan can dance? And then I saw the comments and everyone was like, nice app. Nice. How do I get the beta of this app? And I was like, oh shit, there's an app that makes you dance. Wait, so you have this app?

I think it's pretty popular. It's called Sway. And what it does is you record yourself for 10 or 20 seconds. You just stand there and you like walk around and move. And, um, then it uses AI or I don't know what it is, but, or not AI, it's called, um, is it augmented reality?

Yeah.

And it, um, makes it look like you're dancing, like really good. And I send it to my family and some of them, I made it like 20 of them. They thought I was dancing. It was hilarious.

Yeah. It looks pretty funny. If they actually just made it a little bit less good of dancing, it would look real. People would believe it, but it's like so good that you're like, no way. No.

It's pretty amazing. And so when I downloaded it, it was number 50 in the App Store. And like, as I was playing with it, I saw it's been climbing up the charts.

Did you just download it because you were browsing the App Store or you saw somebody do it?

So I do, I browse the App Store and I like to see the fastest growing apps. Yeah. And I like to figure out what's going on. I do that with gaming all the time. So I like to figure out the games that are growing fastest. So yeah, I was just browsing.

Gotcha. But it is viral, like when you see somebody post it, you're like, oh, this is great. I can, like, I should do that. So it has this kind of like monkey see monkey do virality that I like.

Well, do you remember that app that, You would take a picture of your face and it would make you look older. Right. Didn't it turn out that that was owned by a Russian company and they were like doing funny stuff with your pictures?

I don't know if they were actually doing anything, but people were definitely sketched out by it. They're like, wait, I just gave my camera roll access to some random Russian developer. And so did like 50 million other people, like just to make this like old filter or baby filter on my face.

Yeah. So download that app. It's called Sway Dance. Is it called Sway? It's called Sway for sure.

Yeah. Well, she works in the DA. Public defender. And then she's a public defender in the Bronx.

And people— now it's like, if you can't trust what you see, Right? If audio— like, we already have photos that could be Photoshopped. Audio now that can be like Live Bird, I think is the name of it, where basically you just talk— you can train this system to where you can just type anything and it'll say it in your voice or it'll say it in Donald Trump's voice. So if you can't believe what you see, what you hear, or what's in video, then how does that like mess up the world? Like fake news is going to become a bigger problem Yeah, it's going to become a problem, but why are we defaulting to that?

Why are we worrying about— I mean, yeah, it's going to be a problem, but also let's think about all the amazing things. Like, like, act— like, there's going to be fake actors.

Like my dance vid? Like your dance video?

Yeah, like, it's going to make movies amazing. Like, like, Brad Pitt won't exist. It'll be— it'll— well, it will be— it'll be AJ Pitt, and it will be some fake person, and I think that's awesome.

So here's a future world. You literally are just looking at your computer and instead, like today, if you wanna make a movie or an animation, you have to like be an animator or a movie editor or an artist to be able to draw. You're just gonna be able to say things and it's gonna be able to create what you're saying. So you're gonna be able to say, okay, what if Donald Trump was talking to, you know, whatever, Barack Obama, and then Donald jumped in the air and he said this, and then literally it's just gonna be able to animate. That's how far this is gonna go and that's gonna unlock the ability to create stuff to people who don't have the technical skills to do it today.

Yeah, I mean, I'm— but I'm not too worried about how they're gonna, um, regulate it because like if you have a political ad now, it— like anyone could run an ad on Facebook or on TV and it says Donald Trump, I'm Donald Trump and I hate Mexicans. Anyone could do that now. But I mean, like literally the tech, like, you could buy ads, but there are ways to say like, well, no, that's not allowed, and it has to say like, I'm Donald Trump and I support this. You know what I mean? Like, there are ways to like prevent— like, if you run a TV, a political TV ad right now, it has to say who pays for it. Sure. It has to say, is this—

but it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a political thing, right? This could, this can go for anyone. Someone in high school can just bully somebody else. Like, right now, the thing that— yeah, I think deepfakes got famous because people were putting other people's faces on porn actors. And you could make it look like— I could take a photo of your mom, and I could put it on it, put it into a porno, and it would look like your mom's in the porno. And people were doing this with celebrities, people were doing this with their classmates. And, you know, the Reddit, the subreddit for this got huge, r/deepfakes, r/deepfakes. And so this is how it got popular, because it was like this incredible bullying tool. Like, forget about political ads. It's just like slander left and right.

Did it get taken down, that subreddit?

No, I think it's still up. I'm gonna— I haven't been in a long time, but when it first blew up, you know, it got really popular because people were, you know, if— oh yeah, it is banned from Reddit now because it was like, it was becoming a problem. Oh yeah, but that, that didn't stop the actual, the actual problem. I just stopped the subreddit where people were sharing it. So I think there's gonna be a massive, massive problem for evidence. I think it's gonna become a massive problem for for just like slander and spin. Like, I could, I could take a video of you and make it say that you hate Mexican people and it's not Donald Trump, and people would believe it because they would see your face and they would say, I saw him say that, you know.

Yeah, I don't know.

Who's working on that?

Well, the problem is a startup can't do this, right? 'Cause it's actually Apple that needs to implement it. It's actually Samsung that needs to implement this. And so luckily Apple's a pretty privacy conscious company and they know that like, if their tools are being used for evil, they usually actually do stuff about it. So hopefully Apple is working on this, but I have a friend who was doing a startup trying to do this, and he was running into this problem, which is like, look, the people who need to do this are all the camera makers. Like, you know, the security camera itself needs to do this, and that's the only like decent solution. Now, some technical people will say, oh, there's nothing that's actually tamper-proof, you can still, you can still, uh, you know, get around it.

Sure, sure, but it's better.— and they are right, but there are still things where it mostly works.

Right, exactly. So I think that's the world, that's the way the world is going to work later, where you're going to need to see this little, you know, icon that says— it's like, you know, it's the gluten-free icon, it's the organic icon, it's going to be— this is legitimate, and there's going to be a legitimacy icon on any photo or video.

The icon business, that's a good business. You know JD Power?

No, I mean, I've heard of it, but I don't know what you're gonna tell me right now.

But you know what it is though, right? It's like all I know, 5 JD Power, JD Power and Associates.

That's all I know. What does that mean?

Okay, so JD Power, the reason I looked into this, because I wanted to create a business like this where I was like, because I was like, this is a fucking racket. And I'm like, it does sound— it does give a little— it does give value if they're— if you— but you have to be like a, uh, benevolent dictator where like you can like rule it, but you really gotta be honest otherwise.

Trust as a service, right?

Yeah, if you could be in the business of being the rating agency, that is gold. In fact, one of the problems is, if people remember during the subprime crisis, I believe what happened was these subprime mortgages the bonds that were the securitized housing bonds, mortgage bonds were rated AAA. And people were like, well, how is this rated AAA? This is like a junk bond. Why would it be rated AAA? And I think I believe this, the companies, I think it was the banks that were funding Standard Poor's, right? So Standard Poor's was the rating agency and they were the ones sort of funneling money.

Exactly. It's the same thing. It's the same thing.

And so they lost their— they didn't actually lose it. They're still around. They're still one of the kind of main rating agencies. But that's a breach of trust when the only thing you're providing is trust as a service.

Right. I've really been wanting to do the same thing. I would like—

you have—

I've been wanting to create a credentialing agency. So either in the standardized testing world, so like, you know, the way SAT and No, these things are a racket because they can charge whatever the hell they want because you need that credential to move forward. And these credentials were, you know, for the most part, all these credentials were just created at one point in time. And so I was looking into like, is there another credential that I could create that literally all I'm providing is a stamp and I just get paid for the stamp?

Well, you know what I've always wanted to do that's similar is a vendor's list. So Like Sean, if you're launching something, you're going to come to me because you think I know a little bit about copywriting and you're going to say, do you know any copywriters? And I'm gonna be like, I know one or two, but like, they're hard to find. And so in my head, I'm like, I just got to create Sam's List where it just has like approved vendors. And now this is the best.

What are you saying? This is the best. Are you saying these are 10 that you should check out? Or are you saying this is the best one, like Wirecutter?

Well, I don't think you could do the best one because if you have the best copywriter, that person will always be busy. But like there are definitely like dozens or hundreds that you can approve. I mean, I guess Angie's List was something similar and that's huge. But like I've always wanted to do this for copywriters in particular. I almost bought Sam— I almost did Sam's List because people are always like, which copywriter should I do? I'm like, I don't know, man. I could post on my social media, but like it's a lot of work for me to go and find them for you. But like the same thing with law firms, the same thing with accountants, right? I'm like, man, I got to just create like a vendors list of people who I know and approve of.

That's cool. The version of this I wanted to do was around either IQ. So I was like, oh, okay, like Mensa IQ. Like, can I basically create some bullshit test that essentially labels people? And then, you know, if you're in the top 5%, you get this extra little certificate. And so people would pay to basically have that as a— as a bragging right or I was also thinking about it for developers, like is there a, just an extra credential you could pay $39 to get that basically says, yes, I know X language, or I am competent, I have this level of competency at this thing. And I'm really a big fan of, if anyone's out there creating a credential, credentialing agency or trust as a service, I'm very, very interested in those, 'cause I think those are beautiful, beautiful businesses, extremely easy to run, low cost, low risk. And the more you do it, the more powerful they become, because the more you're— the more times you see JD Power, even if you don't even fully know what it is, it's like, oh, we need to go get that. That's the, that's the standard.

So I just looked up Mensa while you were talking. They have 150— they're a nonprofit. It's 150,000 members, and they do about $4.8 million a year in sales.

Interesting.

Not that big.

I wonder the backstory. Yeah, but like, as a nonprofit, you never know, like, what's the what was their motive, how are they doing things.

Well, but you do know, dude. You can go and look up at all their— they have to file a form, a government form, and you can see how much they pay themselves, how much revenue, and what their expenses are. Right.

What's my vertical? I did that when I was a kid. When I was in high school, I did the same thing. It was called SPARQ. And, okay, uh, S-P-A-R-Q. And the guy who created it was a ex— uh, he was a college— a very elite college runner in the '70s and '80s. I think his name was Rudy. Um, I forget his last— Rudy Chapa. I'm remembering this off the top of my head. Rudy Chapa. He was a, uh 2-miler from California in high school. He— I think he had the high school state record, high school national record for the 2-mile at like 8:30-something, right? And, um, his name is Rudy Chapa, I think. Am I right? Is his name Rudy Chapa?

Uh, I'm on their website right now. I don't see— I haven't looked at his name, but yeah, this looks interesting.

Maybe 400 Fitness test. And he was a Nike executive, and then he created the SPARK test. And what you did, it was very similar to a combine, and it was— and I did it, I crushed it. It was a 40-yard dash, a broad jump, a vertical jump, how far you can throw a medicine ball, right? And maybe that's it. And they would give you a score, and that score— and I went to this place called Velocity Sports, and Velocity Sports was created by the coach of LSU track and field, and it was a chain of gyms that you can go to for high school kids and run and shit like that. And the Velocity Sports must have paid Spark money to use it. And then when you applied to college, I would put my Spark score to get a scholarship.

Yes, dude, that's exactly what I'm thinking about. And I'm looking at their website now, it looks very basic. But, uh, yeah, this is interesting. I think there's a lot of unused facilities, uh, like track, track and field, uh, that are unused so much of the time that you could do this without CapEx, probably, as long as you say, like, you know, when you run a race and it's like As long as the wind conditions are under this, then it's an official— this counts in the official thing, right? So I bet you could use, you know, in the summertime, schools that are empty, you could use their track and field facilities and build a program like this. Because now people with sports are— parents with sports have become so crazy where people are doing travel sports at like age 6, age 7. You're paying thousands of dollars for your 7-year-old to play baseball. And be on this elite team. And this is like a multi-billion dollar industry, the travel sports industry. And I think all those people would be people who would wanna get their kid tested and you could drive Facebook ads to say, "Hey, get your kid tested. Here's your score, what's your score?" And then every year you want it upgraded because it's like, "Oh, I've gotten stronger and faster and taller.

So I want my official measurements that are sort of ratified." And here's another example of this is, this is kind of funny, we're kind of ranting on this. I did zero research on this other than, like I didn't prepare for this, so. Me neither, I just thought of this idea while we were talking.

Talking. That's how fucking great we are, dude. Just take a minute to appreciate that.

You know, um, Gallup?

I do know Gallup, yes.

Okay, so, uh, wait, did my microphone— is— are we— is it good? Um, okay, so Gallup is, uh, is a, um, polling service, right? Polling company created by this guy named Joseph Gallup, I think. And the— another company, or like a smaller company, bought Gallup, and it was a family-owned business. And the founder of that company that bought Gallup, his name was, um, I forget his name exactly, but do you remember, um, StrengthsFinder?

Yes.

The guy who owned the family business that bought Gallup, he is the author of StrengthsFinder.

I see.

And so StrengthsFinder— it's hard for me to say— they have a book that is popular, but it's— even though it's popular, it doesn't make nearly the amount of money that the company makes. The company makes about $1 billion or $2 billion a year. It's privately owned. It's probably one of the largest privately owned companies in America, like top 200. And they have a quiz. So if you Google StrengthsFinder quiz, it's a $29 or $49 quiz, and it tells you where you rank on StrengthsFinder, right?

I've taken it, uh, because somebody sent it to me. Jim Clifton's the name of the guy.

Jim Clifton. Jim Clifton His dad, Jim Clifton, was the CEO of Gallup, right? And this was his thing. And so it was like a survey. They make hundreds of millions of dollars a year off that quiz.

But you have to— that shit works really well using that book. Because like I said, I've kind of talked about this, me and Ramon, we own this software for to-do lists. And we get all of our signups practically because one guy who has a book mentioned our service and it gets signups and the book's not even popular.

That's amazing. Also, like we had talked about that person in our Facebook group, the My First Million Side Hustles Facebook group basically, who is doing a chess tutoring service. Any niche sport or niche, niche thing like chess, I don't know, there probably is already because chess is so widely established, but probably is already some sort of benchmark or test you take.. But if I was him, I would basically create my own anyways, which is like, oh, by the way, for all my students, like once a year we do this $100, you know, test and you get your ChessCube score and what your ChessCube score tells you, your adaptability, your, you know, recognition, cognition, whatever. And, and so it's not like total horseshit, you actually are testing to see how good they are at certain things. But I think it's a, it's just a very simple way to make a lot of money off of kind of vaporware. There's nothing physical you're doing there.

Vaporware in that it's real, but it's, uh, it's lightweight.

It's very simple to create. It's very simple to maintain. There's no, like, employees or assets you need to buy in order to—

Well, because, Sean, someone in the reviews, our latest review, says that you and I are unethical and that you have to check your ethics at the door if you're going to listen to this podcast, which is totally bullshit, but I just want to make them aware that when you say vaporware, you mean it's real or it's substance.

But yeah, vaporware is the wrong word for it. What I meant is, uh, very lightweight thing to create and maintain and very low cost to create.

Another example of this is Doug Score. Do you know Doug Score?

Never heard of it, dude.

It's just this guy named Doug D'Amoro. He's this nerd, uh, like, he's like the nerdiest guy ever, and he's got like 4 million subscribers on YouTube. And like, he's the type of guy who wears like a collared shirt, but like you can see his white undershirt sticking out from like the sleeves, you know, people like, he's like, I know exactly what you're talking about. Just like a sloppy dirty guy, but he's amazing. He has a thing where he reviews cars and he creates a Doug score, which is based off of like, is this fun for a weekend car or is this fun for a daily driver? And now at this point, he's got 1,000 cars that he's ranked. And I'm— when I'm buying my car now, I check it. I check the Doug Score.

Ah, I like that. Okay, that's cool. Like Kelley Blue Book for value and then Doug Score for sort of enjoyment. I like that.

And Kelley Blue Book, great example. So it's a multi-billion dollar company.

Yeah, but they provide a little different thing. They have just like a data set that they're able to use to, to give you a price comparison, which is like different than sort of an aptitude test. But nonetheless, I'm curious, do you think we are low ethics? Do you think you have a sort of a looser ethical criteria than most people for business?

I think that we have a looser attitude.

Yes.

But by the way, I think it's significantly above the line of like good. Like, right. Like, for example, most people are like, I can't pre-sell product that I don't have. And I'm like, in my head, I'm like, Who cares? Just refund the people. And like, you haven't— it's not like I'm not saying steal money. I'm saying advertise something that doesn't exist so you can get demand, improve demand, and then you refund the money. You don't— I'm not saying you steal from them, but yeah, you are lying. And so I think that's ethical, right? Yeah.

I think we definitely have a looser definition than the average person. I would say the average, um, maybe the average business person even. Um, But there is, you know, I think the problem here is there's no standards, right? There's no definition for what's ethical, what's not. It's completely subjective and judgmental. And so the hard part is, you know, for us, we think there's a line between right and wrong and we're on the right side. We think we have a safe margin of buffer where we're in the right. But for other people, their line might be in a different spot.

Yeah, but that's because most people aren't aggressive. But anything that I do I would suggest to my mom that she buy whatever I'm promoting, or like, it's like, do I want my family to use this? Or if I told them about what I'm doing, would I like, do I want to hide this? Right. And I don't, I'm, anything that I do, I'm not afraid to tell everyone.

So I met this guy once, this guy had reached out to me about, we're building this product called Blab, and Blab was getting popular. This guy reached out, he said, hey, "My name's Billy, I'm from," I forgot where he was from, like Santiago or from Mexico or somewhere in Latin, and he was like, "I'm coming up to California, I'm coming to San Francisco, I wanna meet you and I wanna talk to you about this company." I was like, "Okay, I don't know about that." Most of the people that are users of a product are not usually people I wanna do meetings with necessarily, but he said a bunch of stuff in his email that made him sound amazingly legit. He was like, "My family started the first television station in Mexico. I own all these different music festivals." and he sounded like super legit, but his email was written with blue text font and like different sizes of text. Oh, copy and paste. Yeah, so I was like, well, no, no, no, not like that. Like, it was like he had chose, like, no, I'm gonna, my emails are blue, and not the like copy paste little purple thing. It was like, this was just his style. So I was like, I don't know if this guy's a joker or not. Anyways, we go out to dinner and I have very low hopes. We go to a sushi place and I walk in And I see probably the most handsome guy I've ever seen. And this guy, Billy, was extremely well put together. He's like in a suit and tie. He looks legit. We sit down at the table. He orders the omakase, which is basically chef's choice, like $200 each sushi dinner. And he's like, I got this, don't worry. And I'm like, okay, I'm starting to believe, but I, you know, could be, could still be someone who's faking it. And he starts telling me a story, and this guy is completely legit. He's probably the most charismatic guy I've ever met in my whole life. I was like, you know, if I swung that way, I'd be in love right now. Like, this guy is amazing. So at the end of the dinner, I asked him a question. I said, hey, you know, you're a very persuasive guy. Like, this was— you clearly are good at this, right? You're clearly very persuasive, very charming. I said, I used to think I'm that way till I met you, basically. I used to think I was in the sort of top tier of that, but I always sort of had this hesitation of like, you know, should I use my powers for good or evil type of thing? Like, Where do you draw the line on using this?

But this guy's legit, he was a real person, completely legit.

I completely agree with him. And if you study, you know, like persuasion and charm and I use it in the form of copywriting. That's all. Some people are born better, but it's a teachable skill. And I always tell people, like, what I'm going to tell you, it's going to sound like evil. Like, I'm going to teach you how to manipulate people, but make sure you use it for good, right? Because you can easily use this for bad.

And you know what, here's a weird counter to this. This is where, you know, people are gonna be like, okay, this guy's actually evil. Okay, so the other way of doing this— so one way, one of the things to say what you just said, which is use these powers for good. The other thing I've been able to do is the opposite, which is when I see somebody do something for evil but it works, I try to learn from it. And so, for example, I remember the first time I saw— I'll give you a recent example first.

No, I completely agree.

So Trump is somebody who I'm not a fan of. I think the guy is bad in all these different ways. But when I watch him, the guy is an incredibly effective communicator., and he's not polished. He doesn't use fancy $15 words. He doesn't have a lot of substance behind what he's saying, but the guy is like a master of communication. The guy knows how to get his point across in a way that resonates with people.

I completely agree.

well, he, he— and he called out that he was going to win.

He called that he was going to win months before anybody even took him seriously. When FiveThirtyEight was like, this guy's got a 0% chance, Scott Adams was like, this guy's gonna win. And of course, if he was wrong, nobody would ever even really pay attention to it because, you know, but when you're right on a contrarian prediction, you get all the credit. And the other example of this was Hitler. So Hitler, when Hitler was rising to power, I studied how did this guy get so popular? What did this guy do? Because when you watch him speak, he's not a very compelling guy, but they did a lot of things. So one thing I remember that stood out to me, I was in 7th grade and I remember learning about this. And when Hitler was trying to rise to power, all the political campaign posters were all like full color, lots of text, people trying to explain their position on things. And Hitler went the other way. Everything he did was black and white, which would be normally it would not stand out. But he was like, well, I will contrast everybody else who's using tons of color on their stuff. I'll go black and white. The second thing was he would use only like big images and like really powerful images and not a bunch of text. And then he would use movies as propaganda and, you know, fill the cinema with people to watch a movie, but it was very much a propaganda thing behind it. So even though he used it for evil, those techniques and principles are interesting to learn from for me as somebody who wants to, you know, have a strong toolkit that I can use for good.

I completely agree. I was reading— I've been going on so many Wikipedia holes now that I'm home so much. I was reading about, uh, I read Hitler's Wikipedia because I was reading about World War II and it let me, like, I was reading about the mafia and then World War II and then like, and it was like, he's, they're like, his rise to power was because he, uh, like would speak at these, uh, I don't know what, what the equivalent of is now, but just like halls where he, like bars, like veteran halls. And I'm like, wait a minute, he started as a speaker? That's it, right? It was kind of crazy.

Um, so, okay, a couple of things. We'll switch topics because people now are like, what, these guys are saying Trump and Hitler are good? I don't understand. Um, okay, so I have an idea for you. So, um, I call this my new Lambda School idea. Um, have you ever— do you guys have like an office administrator or office admin? I don't know if you guys are—

we have, yeah, I mean, we have someone who handles stuff, yes. And do you Like HR and things like that, right?

Fucking love it. And I'm looking it up right now. Orgorg.co. Have you heard of Orgorg?

No, that's a hilarious name though.

We use it. Let's see how big their team is. That can kind of tell us how big they are. But okay, what Orgorg is, is it's a community slash community slash job board. It's like a— I don't know how you would describe it in one word. It's a— Org Org is a 100% volunteer-run organization. Uh, we have job board, blogs, resources. We have private groups and email lists, and it's all for HR and executive assistants, office manager, HR departments, and DIY, uh, admin assistant, like, you know, whatever. It's— and so My, uh, our old EA was on this and it was an email list and they would send out blasts like, hey, I'm looking for, uh, the best IT person. Our company's small, we only have a budget of $2,000, who do you recommend? Or like when I wanted to hire a new EA, I had a friend post a listing on there and I got tons of applicants. What I would do with your idea is I would either Buy this company, man, these, these, the lady who runs this, I forget her name, but she could be making millions off of this, but I don't think she is. I bet she's making hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I would buy that.

Yeah, I would buy that. Buy it or become the platinum sponsor for a fair rate and use it for the sort of the user acquisition. And there's this powerful thing because once you build the brand that, hey, yeah, this is like a staffing agency, right? But it's a big internet version of a staffing agency. And once you place some people, two good things happen. The first is you get a reputation that says, hey, our EAs have been hired by Company A, B, C, D, E, and we become a trustworthy source for good EAs. But then also right now, all the candidates in our current pipeline came from our existing EAs, people they knew from their network. And so your alumni become your hiring— become your hiring partners. And so the more alumni you place, the more opportunities you have for your own graduates. And so I think that's like the real power of the Lambda School model. And unlike—

okay, so the Lambda School model, you got to break that shit down. Lambda School model, you're saying you train them for free and then you get a percentage of their salary?

Yes.

You do love that model for everything?

Let's— oh, why don't you bring up this Xavier Niel story?

Okay, yes. All right, so Xavier Niel— I'm sorry, I feel like I've been talking most of this.

That's okay, it's really interesting.

So Xavier Niel is my new favorite billionaire. So this is my second section, this is my segment of the show called My New Favorite Rich Guy. So this guy is essentially like an Elon Musk type of dude in France, but instead of trying to send rockets to Mars, this guy just operates in his own style, but he's got the same kind of what I call like no-fuss lux-given attitude, like a Branson or an Elon Musk. And I'd never heard of this guy, so I'll tell you how I discovered him. So I discovered him because he created this thing called 42. Have you ever heard of the school called 42?

No. So wait, so he's in France?

I'm looking him up now. This guy's my favorite person ever.

Yeah, I'm looking it up now. They have 2,500 students.

Yeah, and it's actually closed right now because the physical facility closed here. But It was a wild idea. I don't even know how successful it's been. I don't think it's been a wild success, but I love his bet. So he was like, yeah, I'm gonna put $150 million into this. So he built one in France and he built one here in Fremont for $100 million in California. And, um, it was just like, so what a, what a radical idea. What a way to bet your money and try to like change the world over and over and over again. And then he did this thing in France. He's like, okay, how do I build the like startup ecosystem here? So he created this thing called Station F, and if you look at this thing, it's like the fucking NASA facility. It's like this huge, huge, like, I don't know how many football fields long office or hangar or coworking space. And he's like, "All right, I'm gonna make the dopest place for any investor to come when they're in Europe. Here, here's some space to go hang out. Entrepreneurs, you're starting companies? Come over here and build your company. Here's some office space. Restaurants? Come here at the bottom, fill this place up. You know, gym, whatever." So he created his own little oasis, kind of like Tony Hsieh did in Vegas, uh, this guy did in France.

This guy's amazing. What, what I'm—

I just love this guy's style.

So first of all, I've looked it up now, he's not perfect. 2004, he was indicted and detained for a month for misuse of company assets, which occurred in several of his sex shops that he was a shareholder in. And he ended up getting a 2-year suspended prison sentence for misuse of company assets. So he's certainly not perfect. I, I don't know, I'm just reading off this one thing though. In addition to all this, he owns the rights to the song My Way by Frank Sinatra, which I love. He owns one of the largest newspapers in France. Super interesting guy. What I'm curious about people like this, and Andrew Wilkinson is gonna be on the pod. Is he gonna be on this Tuesday?

Yeah, next, the next episode basically.

So Andrew kind of, Andrew, not exactly, but kind of does it in the same way as well. And so we have to ask him about this. What I want to know is how do these people manage so many freaking freaking projects, right? Because like, I can't even manage what I have on my plate.

And like, right, so for example, prolific. So, so they, you know, they hire, they hire people to run their shit, right? So like, I worked with a guy, Michael Birch, who's kind of like this, like billionaire type of dude, and he created this incubator with this totally different model where everybody owns all the equity in all the projects. And, you know, he picked me to run this, run the show for him. So he trusted me. He's pretty hands-off. We checked in. But like he let me run the show. So I was looking at this guy Xavier Niel, and he's got somebody, this woman from Google who runs Station F, the big facility. He's got somebody who runs his investment fund. And the guy, that guy was telling the story, he goes, you know, we don't have board meetings, but I was like, Xavier, don't you want to know what I'm doing with your fund? And he's like, yeah, yeah, for sure, tell me. And he's like, he goes, I told him, I said, hey, we invest in all these companies. I think we should double down on these winners. And make less small investments and do more on the winning companies.

And what did he say?

Okay. He goes, I'm not doing this to make more money. I'm doing this to make more companies. Invest in more companies. And I was like, what? He's like, you could double down, but don't stop investing in new small companies. And then the other thing that they talked about in his thing, kind of like what you're saying, how do you manage this? They're showing like, the guy showed his email inbox, all the emails from this guy. And I've noticed this. A lot of wealthy, busy people, their emails look like text messages. So like this guy will write them a long email about like, hey, we're thinking about this plan, here's what we could do, here's—

And their reply is like, okay, cool, or like—

Literally it's, up to you, all good. It's like up, the number 2, the letter U, and then all good.

Wait, where do I see this screenshot?

There was a story, I think it was like a Forbes or Bloomberg story or something about this guy. They put that in there. But I think this is a pretty common thing amongst the people who do a lot of stuff.

I guess it's kind of like if I buy like, uh, like I've talked about how I'm gonna buy like just a toy car, like a fun car. I guess it'd be like the equivalent of me buying like a $10,000 car and like letting someone use it, and it's like, dude, I don't care, just make sure it comes back in one piece, right?

So, you know, the thing I guess, the thing I want to clarify, because when Andrew's coming on on Tuesday, I'm— I like Andrew for the same reason I like this guy, and they're totally different, right? Andrew's not gone to jail and didn't start a sex hotline and is not a billionaire.

Like, well, we don't know that for sure. Yeah, this guy has about 20 years on Andrew, so give him time.

But I guess like the thing, the thing that stands out to me is I respect above all else people who do shit their own way, people who have their own— they are original thinkers and decide to live life on their own terms. That's kind of what I got out of this guy is I think I feel like this guy, Branson, Elon Musk, The thing I like about them, and they definitely have lots of flaws and lots of messed up things that they do, but I just respect that they don't just follow a normal societal playbook. They live life on their own terms. They basically march to the beat of their own drum or whatever. That's what I like about them. That's what I like about Andrew. He's done it completely his way, which is very non-traditional.

Do you think this guy speaks good English?

This French guy?

Yeah.

I bet he's all right. Let's fucking email him. Yeah, let's do it.

I'm looking at him now. I mean, if you're French, I mean, if you're a magnate like this, I would imagine you speak some English, but is he— I don't know if he speaks good enough English to be on this.

I'm sure he speaks. I'm sure. We'll learn French, dude. We will make it happen if we need to.

Yeah, we'll be like Yoel Romero on Joe Rogan where he just has a translator on the podcast. I'm down. I would love to do this. And this guy's in cahoots with, uh, this other guy who I don't want to say his name because it's too embarrassing if I pronounce— if I try to say it, say it because he's French, but it's Bernard Arnault. Do you know who that is? He owns LVMH. Uh, okay, I'll tell you really quick. He usually goes back and forth with Gates and a few of these other guys as the richest guy in the world. LVMH, it stands for Louis Vuitton something, but they own Chanel, they own Louis Vuitton, they own— it's the largest luxury group in the world. They own Fendi. What's the Rihanna—

Yeah, they own that. So the way he started it was his father was wealthy and they owned a construction business and it was big, but it wasn't like billionaire big, but I think I think they sold it for like $20 million in the '60s, which is a lot of money. I mean, that's probably the equivalent of $100 million now. So, it's a lot of money. And so anyway, he convinced his father when this guy Bernard was in his 20s and he goes, "Dad, we got to sell our construction business and buy luxury goods because when I went to New York, they all knew what Chanel was, but that's not even a big company." And so he goes, let's fucking buy Chanel. And so they bought Chanel for a small sum, millions of dollars, but not what it's worth now. And then he runs it and he starts buying more and more and more. So he turned a construction company into the owner of Louis Vuitton.

And dude, they own a lot of shit. So let me just throw off some names. So they own Belvedere, they own Hennessy, they own Dior, they own Fendi, they own Fenty, they own TAG, um, they own Hublot, they own Moët, they own I mean, this is, this is like, uh, like I don't know a luxury brand that's not on this list.

Yeah, they own it all. Like, do they? But then like Gucci, I think Gucci is its own brand.

Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, like the AB InBev where it's like two companies own like all the other sub-companies.

Yeah, well, this freaking guy did it and he— it started as a construction business, right? And this doesn't happen that much anymore, but this is what I love about business before. For some reason, it seems like this happened— this had used— this used to happen a lot more. The Chinese are notorious for doing this, where they diversify like crazy.

So I don't think this doesn't happen more. I think this is just something that happens on like a 50-year horizon. And so it's just hard for us who like, we're just for 5 years, we've just been furiously looking at this, or 10 years, uh, to see these things that are playing out over 50 or 100-year arcs, right?

I agree, I agree, I agree with you. But I've studied a handful of Chinese companies that were launched in the '90s and 2000s, and they are like crazy about doing that, right? Where like they would start something and like 2 years later they own like apartment buildings. It's like, what the heck? That's not even like— and the Japanese have done it as well. They have a name for it. I don't want to pronounce it because I don't want to butcher it. I don't even know how to say it. It starts with a K. Keikazu, I think. Okay, and it's basically, it's kind of like how, do you know how Yamaha makes motorcycles, pianos, and chainsaws, and power blowers? It's kind of like that, like they like are known for doing that.

And so what do you, okay, so I was saying what I respect the most, SoftBank did it too, right? So what I was saying was what I respect the most is people who, who, you know, create their own playbook on how they want to live their life. And I agree, what, what would be your, because like I think you kind of like the like mogul types. You love researching. What do you think is like your highest, highest bit thing you respect?

People who— the same, you said it best. I agree with what you said. People who, um, people who look at the world and be like, yeah, I get it, the world's this way, I'm gonna bend the world to make it my way though.

And have you, uh, like in your own small way, do you think, have you done that? Like what's an example of where you've bent the world into working the way you want it to work.

I think that— I'm from Missouri. I think that some of my friends from Missouri think that I have done that. Um, I do not think that I have done that, right? But I think give it time and I will.

Dude, I have a video. Like, I'm, I'm normally, I try not to brag on myself because I think I got a lot of flaws, but the way our company is shaping now, I made a video in 2015 and I outlined what was going to happen, and it is 100% happening exactly like that.

Where is that video?

Stay there.

All right, so I'm off camera, so I'm gonna show you why. You're gonna see what I'm doing.

All right, so Sam just dropped his pants. I'm looking at a giant pirate ship tattoo on his thigh. When did you get that?

In 2000, like right around when I was telling you about the company. I got a pirate ship and it says Bold, Fast, Fun.

So you basically tattooed your business plan onto your thigh?

Yes, I love it. I tell everyone, I go, email list is our pirate ship and every email is a little bit of wind in our sails.

I love it, that's great. Okay, we gotta end on that. That's a classic. I should have taken a screenshot of that one. Okay, so we will see you guys Tuesday. We're gonna have Andrew on When we say Tuesday, that's when we record.

These come out different. I look like a freaking loose cannon right now with a mohawk and tattoos. I'm not actually like that.

All right, man, I will catch you later.

Okay.