He built a $1M/MRR dinner club app in 2 weeks with 0 employees

I can't believe we just agreed to do public math. It's like we only have like 2 rules here. One, don't get canceled. Two, don't embarrass yourself by doing public math. And we did it.

We did it a bunch of times, frankly. 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.

All right, I got a business that you're gonna love. Okay. So this is a business that in 10 months has gotten to $10 million in ARR.

I think I know what you're talking about. Okay.

So it started by this French guy and the business is called Timeleft.

Yep. I had it on my topics list too.

Okay. So check this out. You, I don't know. I don't know how deep did you go? Did you go into the backstory or?

I know it took a lot longer than it appears.

Yeah, exactly. It's a, uh, a multi-year overnight success as they tend to be, right? You've heard the word, the phrase like 10-year overnight success. It's kind of like that. So I want to show you some things about this guy. So the first thing is this graph. Here's the revenue graph. And if you're listening on audio, you should go to YouTube so you can actually see what we're showing because it's way more fun and you can also see what we look like. And by the way, I'm Sean. This voice, this is Sean, the Indian guy. Sam, talk. You're the white guy. You should talk now.

It's like they think that I would talk like a white, like alpha jock because of the way that I look. And I talk like an Indian nerd. And they think that you would talk like an Indian nerd, but you, you talk like a white bro alpha jock.

So exactly. And we need the record to be, to be clear on that. Okay. Who's who? All right. So check this out. So this is the revenue graph., already impressive. You could see it kind of starts super, super flat and then gets to now, you know, over a million dollars a month that the, this business is generating.

And what does it do? What month did it— describe that graph.

Okay. So this is, um, basically if you start in January of last year, it's like zero. You get to January of this year and it's still, you know, the ARR is still under, I don't know.

$500K or something like that. Tens of thousands, maybe a month.

And they claim that they have an algorithm where it's like, you, are you logical? Are you more emotional? Are you this? Are you that? That helps match.

Roughly what age are you? Are you, you know, kind of single and looking to mingle? Like, kind of what are you all about? And you say, you take this little quiz and you do that. Now the backstory. So I first, I found it pretty fascinating that this business, which is so simple, a dinner club with strangers is scaling so well. And this is not a new idea, obviously, like people have been doing this, not even as a business for a long time. I remember when I first moved to San Francisco, I used to use this app called, I think, Let's Lunch, it was called., and it was same idea. Every— you would just agree, hey, I'm down to get a lunch with a random person who's also in the tech industry. And I used it when I first moved there and I knew nobody. I used it to meet some cool people. And, uh, it's kind of a hit or miss first date without the romance.

Do you remember, uh, Grouper before that? I loved Grouper. Grouper was my favorite. It was you and two friends go on a group date with three other, uh, ladies and they tell you where to meet and you have a, you have a blind date. A three-way blind date, I guess a six-way blind date, right?

Okay. So now here's the backstory that I find interesting. So lemme just get you interested in this guy. And I know that there's really only one way to get you interested in a guy. Do you know what I'm about to show you? What's his calves look like? I'm gonna show you a body transformation.

There he is.

I'm gonna show you what this founder looks like without his shirt on. All right. So not only did he transform his business in 10 months, I think this is also like a 10-month body transformation where he went from the skinniest he ever was.

Did he have— was he sick?

He was trying to run an ultra race or whatever, so he got to less than 10% body fat, and then he was like, cool, now I'm going to try to become the strongest I could ever be. And in 10 months, he kind of transformed his body too. So this guy is pretty fascinating before doing all of this. So here's his story. So this guy starts out and he's a nightlife promoter, which, ding, ding, ding, is a bit of a pattern. Scott Harrison from Charity Water, before he, you know, went to save the kids in Africa, nightlife nightclub promoter in New York. There are several people who have this same sort of background story before they make it. So it starts off as a nightlife promoter. Then he's, he's decided to start a media company. And so like you, like I did, we start, he started a media company. Now his media company was the twist was I'm only going to say good news because the news is always bad news. If it bleeds, it leads. Instead, I'm just going to tell uplifting Good news stories every single day. And they did it. He grew the business to 90 employees, sold or kind of got acquired by this larger French broadcasting company and went through that whole process.

What was that called?

I think it had like a, it was called Buzz, like Buzz something, Millennium Buzz, something like that. I don't know. I don't know the exact name of it. And they, and he's written about it because they got acquired and they merged, but they had this horrible deal structure. It sounds like, which was, it was a 3-year earnout, but the way the earnout worked was year 1, we're going to make all these changes and invest in the business. Year 2, we're going to continue with those changes and invest in the business. It's going to be losing money. And then year 3, if it hits, if it performs, you get this big payout. And if by year 3 we haven't done that thing, you get nothing. And he basically, that was too aggressive of a plan, too risky. They did not hit the 3-year plan. It's kind of a messy divorce. He gets ousted by the majority shareholder and he basically walks away with nothing. It sounds like, uh, I don't know the exact details, but it, it didn't end well for him. I think they ended up settling and he got a little something out of it, but it wasn't the thing that he wanted out of this whole thing. Okay. And this was after creating kind of like this video-first, online-only news company that was doing hundreds of millions of views a month. And he was getting excited that, hey, we've, we've We've built something here. That's the future. And this traditional company was buying them and 1 1 is going to equal 7, right? And it sure didn't. So he goes through that experience and he says, okay, he gets the settlement. So he finally leaves and I think he's got some money, but he's got a lot of time. And so he goes and he decides to travel. Now, this is right when 2020 happens, COVID hits. And this guy basically, while everybody else is locked at home, he's traveling solo. He planned, I think, to travel for 30 days solo and it ended up being 700 days because he was like, COVID happened and he's like, well, I might as well just kind of travel around to different locations anyways, rather than being boarded up at home.

How old is he?

He's, I think, 30 years old at the time. And so he, something like this, 30-something years old, early 30s. He, during this time, he's posting on social media. He starts getting some pushback and people are like, dude, like there's a pandemic going on. I'm stuck at home. A lot of people are kind of miserable right now and you're out here posting pictures of you on a beach in Australia or scuba diving or doing these like kind of fun, exotic solo travel things. And so he meets somebody and a friend suggests to him, hey, you should, you should do a little shakeup. You should have coffee and meet with 100 strangers. Do 100 coffee meetings with strangers. So he does and he does, he accepts the challenge. He does 100 coffee meetings and something that happened in that changed his life. He's meeting with these people and what he realized is that the common denominator amongst 100 strangers was like, man, what stood out to him was I meet these people and I ask them what they're excited about or what they dream about, and their dreams have been snuffed. Jeff Probst at the tribal council has snuffed their torch. Basically, they've forgotten how to dream. They've been suffocated by everyday life, and they don't really even have like a compelling vision or dream for themselves. And so he decides to make his own bucket list. And you could see his bucket list on his homepage. He's got 100 things he wants to do before he dies.

What's his name?

Maxime Barbier, I think is how you say his name. French guy. And if you go to his blog, Daily Max, you could see 100 things that are on his bucket list. Things like swim naked in the ocean, number 1, crossed out, participate in a protest, do a live DJ set at a festival, you know, things like that. So he's got this, reach 12% body fat. He's got this Bucket list for himself. He decides he's going to make an app. So he says, okay, I got it. I got my new company, my new company. And this is kind of like idea one in 2020. He says, I'm going to create an app that lets people create their bucket list to create and share your bucket list. So he sets out, he draws the wireframes, he finds a coder, he hires a guy, they make the app and people upload thousands of their dreams to this, but Kind of goes nowhere after that. So he says, okay, uh, strike one. So he says, okay, maybe I'll try something different. You know, what was the problem with this one? I, I got people to create a bucket list, but they're not doing anything. What if I connected people over their dreams? So it'll be like Tinder for bucket lists. And so now this is 2021. So year 2, he says, I'm gonna make a, a dating app that's not dating, meaning, uh, you say what your dream is, I say what my dream is. If I, if I swipe right on a dream and both you and I share that, it'll connect us over our shared dream and maybe we could actually go and do it together., right? So that's aspirational. People message, but they don't actually go do anything.

And this is still under the same, all under the same name of Time Left.

Does this stuff inspire you as you're talking about this? I can't decide if I am like all in or if the old man in me is, is like, that's a lot of work. But like, I'm pretty sure I'm like 60 to 70% on the side of like, this is inspiring. I need to have a bucket list.

Yeah, I get what you mean. It's like I saw these kids that were like skateboarding and doing tricks by my house and I was like, this is awesome. This is great. Look at what they're doing. They're having so much fun. They're doing their thing. And then I was also like kind of out of breath from watching and I was like, okay, I should probably just move along with my days. It is a lot of work.

His list is cool though.

I'm inspired by it.

Yeah. Like he wants to go for a run around Paris. He wants to get his boating license. Some of these aren't crazy, but then he's like, I want a world record.

By the way, sick thing for personal website. I'm going to steal this, put this on my site, which is write your bucket list and start crossing them out publicly on there. I think it's great. And he links to the story behind each one once he does it. It's great. So anyways, he's, uh, he names the company Time Left because he realizes he's got about 600 months left in life and he starts doing this bucket list thing. Bucket list doesn't— so app one, but create a bucket list, fail. App two, connect people over shared dreams. Now they can message each other, also fail. Now it's year 3 and he says, okay, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to connect 2 people. So you have the same, you want to do the same activity. I'll actually like connect you and get you to go do the thing in real life. I'm going to get you off your phone. The whole point is find somebody to do the thing with. And it starts off okay, but then he realizes that women don't feel safe doing one-on-one stuff with strangers, right? So this is kind of like why Grouper worked. So that's 2022, another year. No traction. Uh, 2023, he says, okay, forget the one-on-one, small groups doing an activity in the city you love. And, um, he gets small groups together and he has one feature on there, which is like you upload a photo of who you are so that you, when other people are trying to create the group, they can just check you out before they do the thing, trying to make people feel comfortable. But what he realized is talking to users, as soon as you put photos in the app, they're thought of it like dating, even though it wasn't a dating app. Yeah. People immediately wanted to gravitate towards certain people. They started judging people. He's like, this is not at all what I wanted to do. So 2023 goes by, third year of no progress.

And he can't cross off have a winning app on his bucket list. You know, it's just sitting there uncrossed.

He goes, does he have any employees?

It's just him and a co-founder. And so he goes, I'm going to figure out how to do these without having to book the, uh, go visit the restaurants in person. Because what he was doing was he was doing this in his city. And he would go to the restaurants, he would talk to them, he'd say, hey, there's going to be a group of 6 strangers. They're going to come to a table. You need to seat them, you know, make it comfortable for them. And then they need to split the bill at the end and don't make that awkward for them. Okay. And he was checking out each restaurant himself. He says, I got to figure out how to scale this. So he takes a leap of faith. He says, we're going to do this without, without doing that, that pre-step. I'm just going to book the restaurant, book the table and see what happens.

Do they have like a, I guess like an automatically used, like a handful of like popular booking platforms or something like that?

How are people hearing about it?

Ads. So he's advertising about it and people are talking organically about it and he's getting a ton of free press. So he's been written up in 400 free press outlets because the narrative fits the zeitgeist of today, which is that people feel that people are too alone. They're too depressed. It fits the trends of people, you know, not getting married. It fits the trends of people being sad after COVID. Of people being incels, of all this stuff, right? There's all these other stories that you could piggyback and newsjack on. And on top of that, it's just a feel-good mission, right? I'm getting people together in person, not on social media, not on their phones, but actually in real life.

Listen to the ad. It's working. The ad from Facebook, it says, dine with 5 strangers, all matched by our algorithm, every Wednesday night in your city. That's all it said. It's nothing.

Very simple. And if you go look at their TikToks, go look at TikTok content about them, it's Really cool. You could see what's going on. And so, um, in one year now, he's exploded this thing. So it's now in 300 cities. It's— the app is translated into 18 languages. He's got 70 employees that are all ops people organizing thousands of dinners, 18,000 dinners a week they have to plan.

What?

This is great. How did he hire— I'm looking at his jobs page. How did he hire all these people that fast?

And that's it. Do you think this will, will this last?

Yes, I think this will last. I think that some ideas just take like the time when the time is right, the time is right. So in the same way that Calm, the meditation app, went from this kind of fringe behavior that not a lot of people were going to do, it seemed like outside of the mainstream, you know, we all had a buddy who meditated, but like, you know, it wasn't a behavior everybody did. And then only when we all got too hooked to tech, not technology, did the need for calm break through. And all of a sudden, Calm, Headspace, and these apps became mainstream. And I think that this like getting together with strangers thing, people are lonelier than ever. They're more addicted to their phone and technology than ever. And, you know, whether it was COVID or was other things that, that accelerated the need for something like this to exist. And so I'm a believer in this. I think this is like the new meetup.com. I think this is going to scale. And I think that you could build a kind of ritualistic thing. And I think there's going to be a lot of churn in this business. But it's a huge TAM. Everybody needs this and it's inherently viral. You're going to tell people you were doing this.

Well, it's, it's, they're charging now on a monthly subscription. It's not a month. It's not going to be a monthly subscription business, but it's still going to be an awesome company. I think, I think their branding is fantastic too.

Yeah, exactly. I think this is like an inspirational company that a lot of people are going to rally behind and you could see like, that's why the traction is what the traction is.

I went and read a bunch of reviews on Reddit. Uh, they're overwhelmingly positive. People love it. They'll say like, uh, we met up, I was so awkward and uncomfortable at first, but we hit it off and it, it was great. But then what they said was after their dinner, let's say their dinner went from like 7 to, uh, 10:00 PM at 10:00 PM. They said that there was like, uh, uh, I guess there's 8 people at dinner. So there must have been 10 other dinners happening in that city that night because 70 other people met up afterwards at the afterparty that was also arranged By time left and they were like, it was a little too crowded, but it was awesome. Like I got to meet these people and I ended up leaving early, but I had a fantastic time. And then there was even, I, we have a text group now and there was even an after after party where people were hanging out until 4 AM and, uh, I'm going to do it again. And so it sounded like people absolutely loved it.

Yeah, exactly. And this is a big city problem. Like, dude, it's so hard to make friends when you become an adult. Like once you're out of college, you don't really realize this till you leave college, but you're like, man. My number of new connections that I just get to stumble into per week drops dramatically because you're at home, you know, alone or with a couple of roommates. You have work, which is a static number of coworkers. And then you might go to like a bar or go to a, you know, go to someplace where people, you don't, people, it's not clear that people default want to meet you. And it's so different than when you're in school. Um, and I think that, yeah, particularly men shocks a lot of people.

Men just like won't talk to anyone. I was reading this thread where it says like, what's something that women should know about men that, that would surprise them? And the top comment was, uh, most men never get a compliment. Uh, and I was— and I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah, in their life. And someone was saying a story about how, uh, you know, they were with their boyfriend or something and someone else just like said they smell nice, or I don't even remember, just some like random compliment. And the guy was like very affected. And the woman was like, why, why are you like that? He's like, I haven't had a compliment in like 8 months. Like no one said anything nice about me in so long. And then, so it's like complimenting.

Should we change the world right now? You look great today. Should we create, should we create? Yeah, exactly. Thank you. I love your, love your jacket. Uh, love your Inspector Gadget outfit. Uh, oh wait, did it wrong. Um, should we just start like, you know, a, uh, you know, like a No Nut November? Should we start a new trend? Should we pick a month? And it's basically just bros complimenting bros. Yeah, it's like, hey, every day, your job, you gotta, you gotta give another guy just a solid compliment. Yeah, a one-way flight to feel good. And, uh, and that's, that's what, that's what, uh, what month has like nothing going on?

Just like, just a bunch of guys being dudes every May.

Yeah, the March of Men. Yeah, it's like, yeah, here we go, every March, every day, 30 days, gotta give another guy a compliment.

That's actually a great idea.

This is also what I wanted to to do with like, you know, people were hosting these MFM meetups in every city. This is kind of what I wanted this to be, which is like, I would love it if we could do this with, uh, like if we could basically have time left, create like a, you know, an MFM, an MFM button or whatever, or like a, or I don't know, somehow somebody create this for, for our listeners, which is like, if it was, you know, on the first of every month and it's always on the first of every month, there's a dinner in hundreds of cities around the world. Where you're going to meet with, you know, 5 other people, 6 other people who listen to the podcast.

We're gonna have to call it, uh, like, more than a nod, because that's basically like my interaction with most every man ever is just a nod. Uh, and it's like, so are we gonna— I'm gonna do more than a nod to each other now?

Is that— yeah, yeah, exactly. The nod is, is pretty effective, to be honest. This is— I see you. Yeah, I see you and I respect you. Yeah.

Can I ask you a question about your weekend. You— I have a strong— I have a strong opinion about something, but I have nothing to do with the industry and you do. How is— you are working the e-com world. Was Black Friday, and I guess Cyber Monday is still for you, miserable or awesome?

Well, for me now I have a full team in place, so it was awesome. I didn't have to do a thing. I didn't— I just looked at the app and I said, wow, that's a That's a great number right there. I was not, I was not on the hook. You know, it's like the perfect thing. I'm not, I'm not on the hook for the inputs, but I get the outputs. Now, to be clear, I sweated this business for, you know, 3, 4 years to be able to get to that spot. But like, now it's great. Uh, before that, I will say very stressful. And it's stressful in the same way that I don't love birthdays. I don't like forced fun and I don't like high expectations based You know, events where it's like, you, you need this to go well. You want this to go well. It seems like it's going well for everybody else because you'll just see screenshots of people just crushing it. And I remember in the first couple of years, I was so underwhelmed and disappointed by Black Friday, which was a combination of me not knowing how to do it. But really, when you start a brand, like Black Friday is basically people who already know about your brand, who kind of wait around for discounts, who like your brand to come back. Which for a new brand, you just have a very small pool of people that already know and care about you that want to shop, that are, you know, have been waiting to shop with you for your discounts. So the first couple of years just sucked. And now it's amazing. Now I get why they call it Black Friday. You know why it's called Black Friday?

It's called, yeah, let me tell you the background really quick. But basically in the '70s, originally Black Friday was negative. It was called Black Friday because, uh, for some reason, uh, there was a Uh, what was it? Army versus Navy, uh, football game.

It was the Philly police called it Black Friday because they hated it. They hated the Friday after Thanksgiving.

This is the day that all the bad people come in town and it's just gonna be crowded. And then retailers also use Black Friday because they're like, this is when our employees never show up because it's the day after Thanksgiving. Like, Black Friday sucked. And then like in the '80s or '90s, you know, it kind of got shifted to where Black Friday now means We're going to change it from, uh, this is the— your business, your retail business is in the red, meaning you lose money all the time. This is the one seat, uh, the beginning of the season, the first day of the season where you're going to switch to black and you're finally going to make a profit for the quarter.

Exactly. Exactly. They, they, they flipped it on its head, right? They, they, they lemons into lemonade it where this, this bad day where, oh, there's gonna be a huge rush in the city. Everyone's going to try to do their shopping at once. It's going to create traffic. Then there's going to be a bunch of drunk people because of the game. And they turned it into this like shopping event now that the retailers love.

And then in 2005, a consortium, there was like a trade group that included like Google and Amazon and a few other, other, uh, online retailers. They said, hey, this Black Friday thing, like that's, that's pretty good, but like we need our own thing. And they come up with Cyber Monday. And so they like collectively agree to do Cyber Monday together. And then once Amazon gets even more famous and more big, they kind of are like, you know, pushing it forward to where Cyber Monday is huge and now all the other retailers are doing it. But as an outsider, my opinion, and it's not entirely rooted in data other than there are numbers where like if you discount something like, you know, 20% and you only have a 40% gross margin, you gotta sell like 2 times as much. If you discount it 30%, you have to, you know, sell 3, 3 times as much. Like the stats are pretty crazy how much more you need to sell for each, uh, 10% discount. But from an outsider, I hate Black Friday. Like I just think that it like ruins people's brands. Like to me, like everything eventually is going to turn into J.Crew where it's like, I only buy it when inevitably they have their 50% off sale.

Would you say that's like a, that's like a J.Crew?

I think I prefer the last one. I like, I would hate to have to do this. I've been friends with you and I've been friends with, you know, dozens of other people who have startups in the e-com space, not established yet brands, some established, but, and like their Fridays are miserable and it seems like their entire year kind of is made, it makes or breaks this 2 weeks. Does that seem like accurate?

It is for a lot of people. It's not, that's not the case for us. Like I saw somebody who does their like 50% of their revenue for the year in this like 8-week sprint or 6-week sprint between, you know, Black Friday, the start of your early Black Friday sales to the Christmas, uh, shipping cutoff. Uh, by the way, can I give you 2 funny things? What? One is, um, Jack Butcher used to do this great reverse Black Friday sale. Do you remember this?

He always did some crazy stuff. He's great, man. He's an artist. What did, what, what, which one of his videos?

So he's an artist and he knows that kind of that positioning and count— positioning is all counter positioning, meaning you position yourself relative to the position of other things. That's how positioning works. It's all a relative exercise. And so he gets that. And so what he did was I think he had like a course or something like that and he would do a reverse Black Friday sale where he would start the price at a certain thing and then they would just go up. In the like 2 weeks leading to Black Friday, every day the prices are going to go up. So if you want to buy it, buy it now. Cause for the next 2 weeks, prices will go up every single day. And it wasn't even really that that was that effective of a sales tactic, but it's like, rather than do nothing or dilute your brand, he decided to use it as a branding moment, which I thought was cool. We also talked about the, uh, I don't know if it was Brooklinen who started this, but it was, uh, the, the old leaked email tactic.

Well, I stole, I, I did it and I stole it from Chubbies. Did they also steal from Brooklinen?

Yeah.

Or, you know, whatever. We'll deal with Jacob's, you know, mess up internally, but, but, you know, whatever, have at it. Well, we're going to leave it up for 24 hours. And then people go crazy because they feel like they got access to a leaked discount code. And it works, by the way. I did that too. It was super effective.

Right. From that email. Yeah.

From that email.

You love Black Friday. What the hell are you talking about?

Well, I guess like if I were to own a brand now, like a, like a, a particularly, I think Black Friday is mostly clothing or furniture, something like a normal retailer. I don't think I would do it, but I would be tempted to.

You're like those people who live in a gated community with 12-foot fences around their house and then want like an open border. It's like, bro, your house doesn't even have an open border. What are you talking about? It's like, you're like, oh, I hate Black Friday after you like, you know, totally leaned into Black Friday and did the like, uh, yeah, once I got rid of all of it, I was dumb. Yeah, exactly. It's dumb and beneath me now.

Yeah. Oh, you used to do that? Uh, yeah, no, it's, um, I, I do. Did you buy anything yesterday?

No. By the way, I find it so funny. There's a great meme that was like Thursday. Everybody's like, I'm so thankful for everything that I have and I just feel so full. My cup is so full with all the love and everything that's my life. My life is so, so full. I'm so thankful for everything. So grateful. And then Friday you're like, I need more, more shit. I don't have any. I don't have anything. I need, I need more. You know how much stuff I need right now that I don't have? It's like literally the clock strikes 12 and everybody's attitudes flips.

Dude, you want to do it? All right. You were talking about challenges. How about this challenge? What if you try to go one week, so 7 days without spending a cent on a consumable? So like your mortgage or rent is okay. Daycare is okay. But like coffee, food, but like, uh, no, it has to be like, you can't eat out, you know, you can't eat out. It's just like what you bought the week before at the grocery store. You think you can go 7 days without spending a cent? So, uh, you can't buy anything extra.

Can I? Absolutely. Will I? Absolutely not.

I think I'm down. I want to do that as the MFM challenge. We, you know, we get a whole week of not buying anything. They do, you know, dude, look, people do fasts. We got to do a money fast.

I'll tell you what I wanted to do that you're not. I'll tell you where I'm going to get your butt to clench. So I was pretty inspired by Burning Man and everybody—

you've never gone to Burning Man, have you?

No, but I'm just inspired. It's like, it's like a movie. It's based on a true story. So everybody, if you live in San Francisco, people will make you nauseous telling you how amazing Burning Man is. And what they're trying to do is convince me to go. But what they don't know about me is I'm like a cat where the more you try to pet me, the further I run away. So you telling me to do something only makes it less cool in my books. And so by this, at a certain point I was like, I'm definitely just not going. Why? Because I'm stubborn.

You're dug in.

I am what the French call dug in. And, but I was like, oh, what's cool about it? And I was like, I do like the idea of like, you go to this deserted place, you basically build a town. It's all barter and free love. You know, all that good stuff. And then they burn this thing at the end and it's sort of symbolic in this way. And I thought, what's my version of that? And I came up with this idea and I pitched it at this dinner and this, this guy was like that. So here was the idea. I go, we should do a money burn. I was like, so much of our life is based around money and wanting money and this attachment to money and people have unhealthy relationships with money and money has this power over you. And I felt it on me. Money has a power over me. It gets me to do what I don't want to do sometimes. It gets me to act in ways that I'm ashamed of sometimes. It gets me to, uh, it just takes up so much of my mind space that it really shouldn't. That portion of my mind could be used on other things. But money has this power over me. I go, you know what we should do once a year? We should do this thing where you take some amount of money. Then for everybody, it's different. You come with an envelope and it's an amount of money that hurts you to burn.

Oh my God.

And we burn it. And I was like, think of A, how it would feel. B, what it represents. C, how polarizing and how angry this would make people. How much, how much news and buzz this would create and how much of a conversation this could create. I go, imagine if the, the sort of like tech head up their ass, you know, elites in San Francisco do the, the most obnoxious thing possible. They go and they literally light money on fire and they say they're doing it for this reason, but it's going to piss off a bunch of other people. It's going to inspire a bunch of people. I was like, this is actually. A tremendous idea. And my friend was like, dude, this is one of the best ideas you've ever had. I'm hooked.

Who, which friend said this was a good idea? I have to make sure I never listen to their opinion ever again.

I'm not, I'm not going to say their name, uh, because I don't want to out them on this, but they were like, and for years, every year they text me the same thing. When are we doing the money burn? And I don't do it because I'm like, I literally already feel anxiety over that idea. Of like taking, I don't know, $7,000 and just burning it, just some amount of money that would feel horrible to burn. Like, what is that minimum?

So how are you going to say that you're willing to burn $7,000, but I'm just saying don't spend like $150 in one week on coffee?

Well, because I think it's like, if I'm going to do it, might as well do the more dramatic, impactful version of it. You know what I mean? Like, how good of a story is it if I'm like, yeah, and then for one week? I didn't drink coffee outside the house. Like, nobody gives a shit, right? It's like, okay, it's like doing a fast where you still eat sandwiches. Like, okay, well, that's not really that impressive. So if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do something that makes for a better story than your, like, consumables fast, which is not catchy and not buzzworthy and not brag-worthy.

Um, yeah, I mean, that sounds like a horrible idea, but, uh, I think you should do it. I would love to watch.

Imagine there was the money burn. Would you do it?

No, but I would love to watch you do it.

Our friend Sahil, he had a tweet and he said, what's the best one-shot prompt that you've made in the last 30 days? It could be for a recipe, a front-end developer, an image generation. The more specific, the better. The best answer gets $1,000. And it's all these pretty good like prompts that people have submitted that were amazing. Like the simple one that I actually liked, which is based off of everything that you know about me, suggest 3 to 5 books that you think I'd enjoy reading. It was, that was pretty good. And I went and did that and it suggested a book that I'm going to start reading. Another one was, you are a lawyer that specializes in working with startups. Please review this legal document that was sent to you by your client. And summarize each section in plain English and determine if that's good or bad for me. That's actually a pretty good one too. Uh, but there's like—

Are there like deep questions? It could be like marriage advice, or could it be like, what do I do with my life advice? Or like, I'm struggling with this person, help me solve it. Like things like that.

Yeah, because any of those, any of those personal things, I've used it with tax things because if you ask it a tax question or a legal question, it'll give you a generic answer, but there's high risk, right? Like it doesn't have all your context because you, you don't know how to give it everything you need. So it just gives you kind of a general answer, which could be totally misleading when it comes to tax or legal. But instead I say, here's my situation, ask me the questions that you would need to know if you were my lawyer. So then it asked me the question, then it, at that point, now it has the context. Then I say, give me an informed answer based on what I just told you. And then it knows, well, you could do X, but, but since you said you're incorporated here, Blah, blah, blah. Right. And it, it can give you a smarter answer that way.

Oh, that's pretty good. Have you used it for any other prompts that like are helping you solve like, just like life problems where it's like a, like a therapist would help guide you or like an executive coach?

Dude, that's amazing. I love ChatGPT.

That's why I got my AI tutor every, every week to teach me how to actually use these tools better.

I, uh, I have a friend that works at, uh, OpenAI, and apparently he was able to sell some of his shares, and he was like, uh, do you remember when I told you I was starting to work there, and I told you like if things go well, how much money I think I could, I could make? Add a zero to that. And that's how much— and that's just a percentage of the shares that I sold to achieve that number.

Wait, can you say, uh, like roughly the, roughly the level of seniority of this person and roughly the amount of money they made and roughly what time?

Nice.

That's crazy, right? And that's like not even all your shares because I think like they do, like they're known for paying people even more now that there's even more competitors.

And you didn't even invent artificial intelligence, right? Like, you didn't even have to do the incredible thing at that company in order to do that. You did good work, and I mean this in a good way. You didn't have to pull off a miracle in order to get incredibly wealthy.

And you were like the 1,000th employee.

And it's not always obvious. Like, for example, I think OpenAI raised money at a $120 million valuation recently. Is that right?

Uh, $120 billion.

Sorry, $120 billion. And I would imagine the majority of people listening to this are saying that's outrageous., but in 5 years, there's definitely a world where we look back and be like, that was a steal. How did I not like put my whole life savings into that? Like it, there's a round, there's a world where that's, that's definitely a possibility.

Yeah. Yeah. There's still a 10x jump from here for, for an OpenAI. They can be an OpenAI could become as a legitimate, a realistic chance of becoming a trillion dollar company. I think you can only say about a handful of companies.

I was listening to this thing. About Facebook and this guy was talking about working there and he was like, when I joined it was worth $78 billion and I thought like, this is peak. I'm selling, I'm selling everything. Like I gotta get out. Facebook's now worth $1.5 trillion. And so these numbers, they're really hard to comprehend. I mean, dude, have you ever thought about a trillion dollars? How much is it?

Honestly, have it.

A trillion dollars is $1,000 billion. That is like an insane number.

They should call it that. They should call it 1,000 billion and not even trillion. Trillion actually doesn't even do it justice.

That's so— and you know what, in about 5 years—

is that even right? Is that 1,000 billion or is it 100 billion? No, it's 1,000 billion.

It's 1,000 billion. Is that insane? Is that insane? That's insane. Not only is that insane, there's a world where in 10, for sure 20 years, that a human being is worth that. Because I think— how much is Elon Musk worth now?

$200 billion.

So if it just— if he just has a 7% annual growth rate, that's going to double in 10 years and then double again. So you're looking at $800 billion. Like, that's just so much money. $1,000 billion.

He's the betting favorite to become the world's first trillionaire.

That is so much.

So which would— I think he said that he thinks Putin might already be that, or he said that he's the richest man, but he's not on any of the lists.

So that would be like, let's say if you're worth, uh, the difference between, so $100 million divide. So that'd be like the equivalent of a $100,000. So, uh, a trillionaire to a, uh, a billionaire is the same thing as a $100 millionaire to a $100,000. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

That's insane. Right? That's insane. So like the $100 billion person and someone worth $100,000, they're not in the same ballpark. Like their lifestyles are like drastically different. Now to a billionaire, trillionaire, that's the, that's how different it makes a billionaire. Like just like a six-figure, like W-2 employee, like, like, like one bad medical bill to knock you out. Yeah. Where it's like, you know what I mean? Like you still use Wow Airline and you only did it because you got the voucher for $250 round trip. Like it's like ridiculous that I was thinking about like that, that math. It's crazy. And the reason I was thinking about it is because, uh, Warren Buffett just did this big speech or this big letter where he wrote that he, he, dude, he's such a good writer. He was like, Father Time always wins. And Father Time, he's a mean son of a bitch. And he like, that's basically, yeah. Like he said, like Father Time always wins and he's like a real fickle guy. And he took my wife Susie before me and our plan all along, we just assumed because, you know, he eats horribly. We were like, we just assumed that I was going to die first. And so the plan was that it was her job to give away all the money. Unfortunately, she died. And then we also gave the money to our children. But you know what's crazy? Our children are in their 70s now and they are not going to live long enough to be able to give away all of our money. And so when Susie died, they each got $10 million and Warren Buffett's currently worth $150 billion. So $10 million is nothing, but they each got $10 million and now it's their job when I die to give away the money. I don't think they're going to live long enough to be able to give away this much money. And the future generations, I don't know them as well as my current kids. And I cut— I trust my current kids, but you know, it's hard to say with my future generations. And so they have this monumental task to give away all of this money. And if they don't, it has to go to this foundation where everyone has to vote on it because this way each of the children, as well as the grandchildren, have an excuse to say something like, well, my brother doesn't think that's a good investment. So I'm so sorry, I got to pass on you. And so he wrote this letter explaining a bunch of tips and tricks. He's like, even if you're rich or you're wealthy, my opinion is you should discuss your will with your children before you die. It's a great way to bring the family together. Like he, and, and he also says, that's so funny, by the way.

Isn't it funny that will is like the surprise?

It is weird. It is weird.

It's like, ooh, let's open up the time capsule. See what was in it. Like, why is it a surprise? That doesn't even make sense.

Dude, there's so many issues with wills that like, uh, that I've learned about because we're setting up estates. Like for example, A lot of people, and he talks about this, but I've read about it constantly and I know friends, their wills aren't equal. So particularly women. So, and then like Vanderbilts did this where it was like the women get $400,000, the men each get $10 million, and it creates like all this like anger amongst siblings, which ruins families. And he talks about that in his letter. And so it was a really good letter that he just released like last week about how he's—

didn't he sign the like Giving Pledge though? Right?

Yeah, but he pledged, I don't think he pledged a percentage. I think he pledged an amount that he said in the letter and he's like, but the amount is now huge, so I need to give more. And so yeah, he's giving it all away.

He said 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Maybe it's just that the 1% is now huge. Is that what the, is that the issue?

I didn't understand. Well, I didn't understand because in the letter it was like, I am now gifting 150,000 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Previously we did this, but now we need to give more. So he didn't reference the Giving Pledge. It was like an absolute amount, not a percentage amount, other than saying he gave each of his kids $10 million. And he's like, that's all I gave them.

So he's selling, uh, these gifts I'm making today reduce my holdings of Berkshire shares to 206,000, a 56% decrease since my 2006 pledge. So he is cutting it in half. And so how much is that? 206,000 shares.

I think it's $1.5 billion that he just gave away.

I think it's more, dude. How much Berkshire A stock is? $700 grand a share. So $700 grand a share times 250,000, just to use round numbers, is almost—

oh, sorry, wait. It's like, dude, my calculator, like, yeah, how many commas is this?

Almost $200 billion.

Oh yeah. Well, that's a lot of money.

What's happening?

The point, the numbers are so grand that it's frankly incredibly hard to comprehend, but basically he's making like the largest gifts of all time.

I can't believe we just agreed to do public math. It's like we only have like two rules here. One, don't get canceled. Two, don't embarrass yourself by doing public math. And we did it.

Yeah, we did it a bunch of times, frankly. But dude, that's a, it's a good article, right? You gotta, you'll have to read that.

Yeah.

I'm going to read this thing. Buffett talking about giving away $150 billion, but he's doing it in a way that we can easily understand by saying everyone should read their will before they die with their children.

Dude, Buffett doing anything, I'm in. I'm so in on Buffett telling any story or talking about any subject of his liking. He is absolute blank check of attention from me.

Right? Yes.

Yes. Like Bill Simmons had this thing that he coined once called the Tyson Zone about Mike Tyson, where he goes, the Tyson Zone is when somebody reaches a level of crazy that somebody could tell you anything about Mike Tyson and you would believe it. Like, if it was like, oh, Mike Tyson got arrested because he's been eating sharks every morning, it's like, fuck, that's crazy. He bit an ear. He's going to jail. It's like, there's no story that is out of bounds on Mike Tyson. And I feel like the Buffett Zone is basically somebody who You have my undivided attention at will whenever you want it for however long you, if he's like, I'm doing a 16-hour livestream, I'd be like, okay, well, I guess I, I guess I better, you know, like get a comfy chair because I'm going to be here for 16 hours today. You know, like there is no, there is nothing Warren Buffett could do that I would not be interested in. If he was just like, I'm going to livestream myself, you know, like doing ASMR eating soup, I'd be like, all right, I'm in.

I'm going to start just like attributing facts and stats to him. Well, you know what Buffett says?

He says, yeah, Buffett says is the new Harvard study. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There was a study at Harvard to support whatever point I'd like to make. And similarly, you know, Buffett once said X.

Oh, really quick. Can you tell me if this is true? Is this Enron thing a joke?

I think it's real, but I'm not sure. All right. Which is, I hope it's a joke, which is, what is it? What's the story? They, someone bought Enron is relaunching it as a crypto token. Like, it's like worse than a bad, like Silicon Valley plot.

Uh, I don't know if, um, the stories is out, but the, the Twitter handle Enron, which Enron, if you are, uh, you know, under the age of 28, you probably don't even remember this, but Enron is like, oh, it was like FTX for oil. Yeah. It was like an oil energy company in the '90s. That, uh, was one of the biggest companies in the world. And then in a month's time it went bankrupt. And it turns out because the executives had all committed fraud and a bunch of them even killed themselves before they got sentenced. And a lot of them got, went to prison, whatever, horrible. Uh, on Twitter, somebody is now tweeting from the Enron Twitter handle with their logo saying we're back. And they are talking about their new decentralized product. And no one online knows, is this real or is this not? But it's the perfect way to say fuck you to the crypto crowd because that's basically what they're doing. They're just sitting in, they're sitting in a room. They're like, should we name our new crypto scam after a scam? Do, do, do two, do two wrongs make a right?

Like, this is like when a rapper samples an old song and they're like, yeah, it's like one, a new fraud sampling an old fraud.

Yeah, they're remixing crime.

Dude, can I just give you one rant real quick? I was watching this video that was like, uh, it's called— I was on YouTube, it's called the Elon Musk Learning Method. I was like, all right, click.

That's like another, uh, Warren Buffett says.

Yeah, exactly. Elon explaining how he does this, or like, you know, some, some backstory about Elon. Um, but one thing he says in it, which I think is just— it just struck me. This is an obvious point, but I guess The implications of it really just like slapped me in the face. He was like, uh, people say like, you know, we have to give people better access to education. He goes, he's like, that could not be further from the truth. Uh, he's like, you can literally learn anything. Everything you want to learn is available online at a world-class level for free to anyone who has an internet connection, which is almost everyone. And he's like, basically there is no lack of access. To education. And it's so true. Like, I could, if I want, if I was like, oh man, I wish I could have gone to Harvard. Okay, just Google it. Watch every Harvard lecture you want is online. You could sit there, you could get a Harvard computer science education today for free in your underwear at home. And nobody does it. And that's like the second mind-blowing.

I do it. I spent hours this weekend learning how different magic tricks were done on YouTube. Hours. I can't be fooled.

Oh, not even learning how to do them? No, just learning how they're done.

I just needed to confirm that David Blaine was just a human.

Yeah, uh, dude, that— when that show came out, Magician's Greatest Secrets Revealed, do you remember that?

They're so pissed.

I was— I remember literally thinking to myself, I was like, I was like, TNT, You sure do know drama. This is an amazing premise. They were like, this magician has to wear this mask because if his peers in the magic industry knew what he was about to tell you, they're going to kill him. He would be killed, ostracized. He could never show his face in a magic room again. I was like, holy shit, mom, mom, where's the remote? And I was like, it was like pre-recording. I was like, got a notebook out and I was like, oh my God, how do they do it? And he just showed you every magic trick and how they do it.

The greatest.

It's the greatest. It was an absolute greatest. Um, that's what I do.

That's what I do on YouTube. Like, you're telling me he didn't actually bite that quarter in half?

Oh, it's so insane.

What we said about Elon though, doesn't matter.

That's the pod.

All right, that's it. 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.