This Year's Best Twitter Accounts to Follow
like they use a thumbnail that I looked stupid or a title that made me sound like an idiot. And I was like, Ben, I don't like that. He goes, oh, you thought that selling out to the algorithm was going to feel good? All right, we're live. Let's do this. You want to get right into Twitter or no?
Wait, let me tell you something really quick. I just remembered I was going to tell you about this. I did a body fat scan the other day, yesterday. Okay. Bad news for all of us, man.
Why? What happened?
I was 15%.
Why is that for all of us?
Because if you're 15%, if I'm 15%, like, yeah, if I'm 15%, like, that sucks for everyone else. I felt like I was like 11.
That's just because people bullshit. Like people who are like, oh, I'm 6% body fat. And then like doctors are like, no, you, you are not 6% body fat. You would be like, you know, sick if you were 66% body fat. That's just not the case. So I think like what people say is 6 to 8% body fat is actually 12 to 15 or like 12 to 14 or something like that. And, uh, so I think 15 is great. I, I was 26 last time we, I did a DEXA scan, 26, 27, something like that.. And my goal was actually, I don't even remember what it was. I think maybe my goal was to get under 25 and I was 28 or something like that.
I was amazed at how high my—
I do it every 3 months.
That's good. I, I was amazed, amazed at how, how high mine was. It, uh, because like, I don't feel like completely ripped, but I feel like fit. Like I don't have a stomach anymore. And I, and it was still 15.
I was shocked. We've all seen the picture. If you go to my Twitter, we've all seen the picture. You're ripped. You're actually, the perfect amount of ripped, uh, because you know, there's an obnoxious ripped where if you look like, oh man, this guy's just, he's just, it's like a girl who's like, uh, got like hair extensions, eyelash extensions, uh, nail extensions and like tons of makeup caked on. It's like, oh, they're sort of trying too hard. And it's like a high maintenance person that I don't really want. Like, I don't really want to go out to dinner with you cuz you're just gonna order like broccoli and, and you know, like raw chicken or whatever. So, you know, you're like the right amount where it's like, oh man, he might live an active lifestyle. Like, maybe he surfs and like, maybe that's why it doesn't look like someone who is like, you know, gym bro who just lives in the gym 4 hours a day and everything centers around that in their life.
Well, the point is, is that it just shocked me at 15%. But I just wanted to let you know that that happened. You know, let's talk about— All right. So we're going to talk about—
You're officially canceled as a fitness influencer. You can't be a fitness influencer.
15%. I know. 12 is okay. Anything above 12, I got to get my shit together.
Let's— Well, you could do it. You could just do it as the start of your fitness journey.
Is this— am I— I'm still a before.
Now you're a before.
I feel like I've been a before picture for the past 5 years. I'm still a before. Fuck.
Damn. We already said there's before before. I'm a before before. And then there's a before. You're a before now. No, I'm just kidding. You're more like an after. Uh, I'm now a before, but I was a before before. You just gotta know your system. You just gotta know the ranking system. It's not about body fat percentage. Um, all right, let's get into it.
All right, so we're gonna— what's the, what's the topic of— what's the, the title of this segment?
The title of the segment is Sam and Sean cross 1 million downloads a month for the podcast. They get intoxicated by the growth. We're on pace for 1.3 right now, smashing old record highs of 900,000. And with this intoxicating growth, they say we're gonna whore out, double down, and we're gonna make a list. And so we're gonna do list episodes. That's what's actually happening here. Now, what list did we decide to start with? Well, We didn't go ultra tantalizing, ultra drama-filled list to begin with. We're going with our favorite Twitter followers. So I think we're gonna have like 12. Is it 12 total? So our 12 Twitter followers that we recommend. Now these are gonna be, I think in most cases, not the obvious people. So you're not gonna hit— my goal is even— there's a lot of people that aren't even on Twitter. So if you're not on Twitter, maybe start or not. Uh, you know, just subscribe to my 5 Tweet Tuesday newsletter. If you're not doing that, if you're on Twitter, I bet at least half of these are gonna be people you don't already follow. That's my guess. That's my goal if we do this right. So they should be kind of under the radar rising stars, and we're gonna talk about why we like these people's feeds and some stuff that we've seen from them that's pretty cool. So we'll go back and forth. Uh, let's start with, uh, candidate number 1. I, are we going in order of like, no, the best?
No.
Okay.
So mine are a little bit more popular than yours.
So, okay. Are you gonna go, how many do you have? You have 5?
No, I only have 3.
Okay, I was like researching.
Well, no, here's the problem.
I was a bonus from Sam.
I was researching. I was trying to find ones that people— the, the ones I love are people that everyone knows, but— and so I was trying—
well, you might have to bring up a few, or I think— I bet when I say some, you're gonna think of some others just based off that. Okay, so we're just gonna name 12-ish of them and we're gonna go back and forth. Let's trade off until Sam runs out. So, uh, I'll go first. Because you're going to run out faster otherwise. So, okay, the first person on my list of Twitter, Twitter people I think you should follow is Post Market. Do you follow Post Market? It's post_market.
No. By the way, you follow thousands of people. I follow— up until recently, I was following zero people. Literally zero. Now it's like 40.
Cool.
I just, I was getting addicted.
Okay, so I have a list and this person's on my list. So it's a— Post Market is an anonymous account and, um, or like a pseudonymous account, I should say. So it's not like a— this is not their real name or whatever. Post_Market. We're going to put the full list in the description of this podcast, so if you want to find them, uh, you could do that. Or maybe what we'll do is we create a Twitter list that you can just subscribe to, uh, that, that might be easier. So, uh, who is this person? I don't know what they do by day, but there's something in the financial world, stock, you know, a trader, hedge fund person. Uh, I don't know what it says exactly in their bio, but Basically what they do is they have like hot takes on the market. Uh, and it's not like hot takes like CNBC where it's like, oh, you know, um, the Dow is up 5 points today. It's like basically they'll take a stock and they'll just rip it to shreds if it doesn't make any sense. So like for example, the, like one of their, um, one of their ones that they were killing right now is something called the, called Grove Collaborative. I don't know if you saw this. It's like a, it was like a D2C brand. It was like one of the winning D2C brands. It was a unicorn. It goes public, and then here's the tweet. It says, please make it stop. Here is a mostly D2C organic cleaning products business. It's doing 6% revenue growth at $2 billion valuation, has no plan to make profits anytime soon, and a greater than 5x sales multiple. Grove Collaborative, not going to make it. And then it basically pulls out things from their investor presentation that show a fairly slow growth, low margin business that is overvalued.
What does Grove Collaborative make?
I've never even heard of that. They're kind of like a subscription, almost like a Whole Foods, Costco type of model where you can go buy products, uh, from them, I believe.
And what, what valuation are they trying to get?
They're not trying to get— they're publicly traded at, you know, $2 billion or whatever.
Yikes. Okay.
That's—
let's see what they find.
Um, and so, and so this person, because they're pseudonymous, they can just kind of um, talk about whatever they want. They're not really— they don't pull any punches. And so like, they'll go after, um, they'll go after like Chamath for— you know, most people are kind of afraid to like poke the bear in a way, but Chamath in reality had a bunch of really shitty SPACs where he made a bunch of money and people who invested in his SPACs on the whole like just got ripped to shreds this year. And, um, and so this post-market account will like call out basically bad stocks, bad behavior, um, across the board in the stock market. So I like that. Like, for example, um, our buddy Moise tweeted something. He goes, Honest Company went public in 2021, uh, it raised $400 million that day. The shares closed at a valuation of $2.7 billion. Since that day, it's lost $2 billion in value and is now worth less than $800 million. And then he says, public markets are brutal. Be careful if you IPO. And Postmarket replied and said, Public markets are not brutal. Private markets are a facade. And it's like, I like the, I like the, the hot takes. I like the intelligence and I like that they don't pull punches.
All right. I like this one. Yeah, I'm going to subscribe. I'm going to follow. All right. I'm going to give you one. See, some of mine are popular, but I'm going to give you 3 examples of why I like them. Ramit Sethi. Do you follow Ramit on Twitter?
Yeah. So there's—
we came on the pod. I was following.
There's two reasons why he's amazing. The first is when people criticize him, he'll sometimes say, that's a good, that's a good criticism. Other times he'll be like, no, you're an idiot for these following reasons. Right. And he also, that's reason number one. So he's an entertaining follow. And reason number two is he tweets out loads of personal finance stuff and he'll find an article that's going viral. And if he disagrees with it, which oftentimes he does, he'll explain why it's bullshit. For example, A lot of people, particularly people who aren't necessarily wealthy, have financial advisors who charge 1%. And he'll tweet out a whole thread about why that's total bullshit and you shouldn't pay 1% advisor. The second thing, everyone talks about buying a home and how it's a wonderful investment, and he'll tweet out this awesome math saying, no, buying a home is not an investment. Buying a home is like buying a car or something like that where you should just use it and not do it for financial reasons, because more often than not, it's not a good investment at all. Um, and finally, uh, he's got this really cool tweet on how to automate money. So I actually linked to it in that sheet and I actually set up my, my accounts based off that tweet.
So what do you mean by how to automate money?
What does that mean? So click, um, so click, I believe it was this one where it says, uh, how he like, like where the money goes. Like for example, where do you, do you have your bank account set up? So like a percentage goes here, a percentage goes there, or like your, um, Your paycheck?
No.
Really? So where's your money go to?
Well, I don't get a paycheck.
But you get paid for the HubSpot Podcast. You get paid for your business. So where's your income go to? Straight to a checking account?
Straight to a checking account, and then your boy moves it into whatever investments I wanna make. Really? Yeah.
I think you need to read some Ruby Sethi stuff, because like, the way it should work is like, all your money should go, or not, you could do however you want, The way oftentimes I think it's easier is your money should go to a checking account and then it takes money out. And like, let's say that you have a really simple setup, put this much in Wealthfront, put this much in a mutual fund, put this much—
what do you even use to do that? I don't even know that's a possibility that you automate the like clawing out of your checking into various other services.
Oh, you go, okay. So what you do is you go in those services, you go into Wealthfront and you say, I'd like to do an auto saver plan and you just ACH connect.
Yeah, exactly. And you just set it up so it's all automated. So it's just like basically like, you know, based off of your monthly income roughly that you want this much cash in your checking account at all times and it automatically— and you kind of know roughly the intervals of when you're going to get cash and just funnel it into—
okay, so, so one of the reasons I didn't do that was when I was getting— the last thing I had, last job I had when I was at Twitch, one of the major sources of income was just stock RSUs that were going into Amazon stock like automatically. So that was already that was already there, and I wasn't selling because my basis for when I— when we got acquired was lower than the amount at the RSU grant. I didn't want to sell and rebalance because it was going to trigger taxes, uh, on those gains. Um, as, as the price kept—
Have you sold any of those shares?
Uh, have I sold? Yeah, I sold a small amount, maybe 15%.
Are you ever gonna sell any of them?
I hope not. Uh, yeah, I'm on that beg, borrow, die shit now. So, uh, you know That's that. That's the— that's that new game plan.
It's awesome, right?
Yeah, it's awesome till it's not awesome is probably the right answer, like most things. Okay, I'm just going to read these Ramit's Money Rules. All right. Have 1 year of emergency fund cash. Okay, fair enough. I don't, but yeah, you can save 10% and invest 20% of your gross income. You do that or you go higher?
Much higher.
Yeah. Um, pay cash for large expenses, 20% down minimum on a house.
Okay. Fair enough.
Yes, I do that. Uh, never question spending money on books, appetizers, health, or donate to a friend's charity raiser. Agree completely. Business class for flights over 4 hours. Agree completely. Um, no limit for spending on health or education. Agree completely. Buy the best and keep it for as long as possible. I disagree with that.
Really?
Like a razor?
It's like a barbell. Like, uh, I'll give you an example. Uh, for Black Friday, there's this brand called 32 Degrees. Do you know them?
No.
So they're like— I'm gonna buy stuff from that now. Is it awesome?
They make like, they make like athletic wear and, uh, it's actually like pretty good, but I don't think it lasts as long as Lululemon.
It doesn't last as long.
Like Gymshark. Yeah. Like it's, it's just not gonna have that same durability, but I like their stuff. Uh, like I like it when I wear it and it fits well, uh, on my, whatever fits well for me. So I, you know, for Black Friday they have this insane deal where like everything goes down like 85%. Uh, they just like wanna move all their inventory. So you'll go buy like whatever, like athletics, you know, like a hoodie or like a fitted, you know, athle— long sleeve shirt or whatever. And it'll be like $4.99. And so I just load up. So I buy like almost $1,000 worth of 32 Degrees stuff that day. You could just see on my floor here, there's just piled— the boxes came and there's piles come out. Like, it's as if I'm a wholesaler for them. And so I'll buy like 15 of the pants I like. I'll buy like 25 of the shirt I like. And because of that, I don't worry about like, A, losing anything, getting a stain on anything, something wearing out. It's like, no, I, I bought this.
There's so much laundry you have to do though.
Gotta clean it for the laundry, bro.
Oh, all right. All right. You're good. All right. Your turn.
I know it's bad for the real argument is it's terrible for the environment and like, you know, fair enough. But, uh, you know, birds gotta fly. So here we go. Uh, here's his last two, his last three rules. Earn enough to work only with people I respect and like. I think that's a great rule. Uh, marry the right person. Okay. Fair enough. Doesn't seem like a money rule, but I get it. Uh, prioritize time outside the spreadsheet.
What does that mean? Um, so like when you're— I do, I have a problem with this all the time. I'm constantly— I have a spreadsheet with all my net worth and my finances and I'm constantly optimizing it. And I'll like do different scenarios. Like, oh, in 5 years, if this happens, then we're going to be here. If it goes worst case scenario, we're going to be here. Therefore we should do this, this, and this. So I'm like constantly tinkering with it and doing— I'm like, oh, 3%, uh, if you only spend 3% of your net worth over this many years, but it grows by this, that means by the time we're 50, we're going to have this. Right. And that takes like— that's— it takes up so much time. It's so fun though.
I see. Uh, and also this wealth advisor thing. So we both have the same advisor, but he doesn't charge us any fee, right?
Correct? No, he only gets paid if we buy, uh, some of the funds that he's gonna sell us.
Right.
Okay, fair enough. It's pretty sick, right?
So I think that's kind of a hack. I think that's, that's a pretty good hack.
I think it's a great deal.
Um, okay, so let's do, uh, let's do another person. Okay, so you got— we have Post Market, we have Ramit. Uh, I'm gonna do another one. Let me do, okay, I'm gonna give you a, a double, a double dose cuz they're kind of the same, same type of account. So, um, my buddy George Mack, and then, um, there's this account called Marketing Examples. Do you follow these?
No. What is this one?
Marketing Examples. So Marketing Examples, this guy I would say is one of the best content creators um, on the internet.
What's the handle?
I think it's just Marketing Examples.
Is it good?
Harry Dry, he works with us sometimes. I think we, we, I discovered him a long time ago and we tried hiring him and, uh, it didn't work out, but we love him.
Yeah, I, uh, I really, really respect— I don't know this person. I don't, I don't know him well. I've DM'd him just kind of showing respect. I don't think most people know him. He's not like widely— he's young, you know. You know, there's like the circle jerk of like we all kind of like the same things in the same circles.
I think he's like 18 or 19.
Yeah, I think it's probably a little older than that, but if he— whatever he is, he's amazing. His content is so good. I, I think most people, when I see their content, I'm sort of cocky where I'm like, I could do better if I like— if I wanted to, I can do better. I see his shit and I say, oh, I should be copying things he's doing. So that's like a very, very high compliment in my book, uh, where I want to copy your shit because I think you're doing such a good job. So, um, so I think he's, his account's really great. And, um, and then George, George Mack is similar in that George Mack basically tweets out kind of like cool marketing hacks, mental models, um, just interesting stories. And, uh, and so George is really, really good as well.. And he's also kind of like outside the scene, meaning like he wasn't, uh, he's not a Silicon Valley person. He's not a founder or VC that like isn't super well connected in this area, but I think has, uh, earned a lot of people's Twitter respect. You know, he's probably got, I don't know what, like 70,000 followers, maybe 100,000. I, I don't know what it is. Um, so George is really good also. So they're, they're the ones I would say to follow if you want examples of what good content marketing is as well as kind of like, uh, marketing/psychology hacks is what I would call them.
Yeah, this guy Harry Dry has some of the best stuff. He's like, he just basically takes landing pages and he goes, this is why this is good. And he does it very simply.
Have you seen his, his Kanye West thing?
What did he do? I remember something like that.
Ben, pull this up. Go to, go to thekanyeweststory.com. I think that's what it's called. So basically this is like a blog post that he just like tricked out. It's like Exhibit knocked on the door and was there to pimp his blog. And, uh, maybe I got the domain wrong. Maybe it's not—
it's thekanyeestory.com.
Yeah, thekanyeestory.com. And, uh, it's basically this epic website blog post that's just like a scrolling story about the day he got in touch with Kanye West and how it all went down. And so it's like, it starts with— it starts with this like epic photo of Kanye, then you scroll and it's like a slide. It's like from lying in bed With, with zero ideas to negotiating with the biggest superstar on planet Earth. And then it's got this little like outline on the left. It's like the idea going viral, coding it, launching it, reborn, billboards, Yeezy. And then it says that those are the chapters of this story. And he just tells a great, a very simple, you know, hustler story. But I just love this like domain, the way he designed this blog. Again, this guy's an artist and I'm like, I really respect him. And when I come up with shit, I think, I like use him as one of my mood boards of inspiration of like something that I'll copy or I'll steal inspiration from at the least.
This kid's amazing. Yeah, he's 25 years old. I was way off. I think when we—
I want to do something with— I want to like launch something with this guy. I don't know. I, my new thing is like I find people who are just awesome and I find an excuse to collab with them. And I would put both George and Harry in that bucket. All right, your turn.
Um, all right, we're gonna go with, uh, the pessimistic. What's What's this called? The Pessimist— what's the full one? The Pessimist Archive. That's what it's called. Uh, the handle is like just pessimistic— pessimist. Uh, so basically what it is is it's incredibly fascinating because it's a Twitter handle that looks back at history and brings up topics that people complain about today. So for example, there's a, um, a tweet from November 16th, 1918, or a news article. And it says, I would rather spend the rest of my life in jail than wear one. And it's talking about a guy who doesn't want to wear a flu mask. And then there's another example of someone saying like, uh, oh, here's a quote from Martin Luther King saying like, you know, there's too many books out there, people are trying to write too much and become famous. And it's basically, he's talking about like influencers, uh, and it's kind of funny.
And then there—
this is great. There'll be another one where it's like, technology is just gonna kill our brains, and they're like referring to like a telephone. And so it's, yeah, it's real. And so if you read just the tweet part, you would think that they're talking about now, but then they show you a different year and then they show you a picture of the article and it's from a newspaper from the 1800s. And so it's kind of cool because people complain about the same shit all the time. And so you'll think like, oh, our country's more divided, but divided than ever, or like the wealth gap is like crazy, or— right, same problem, same narratives. That— it's like, yeah, all those things could be true, but like oftentimes people think it's worse than ever before, and maybe that's not the case because people have been complaining about the same shit forever.
Like, okay, there's one with school shooters, and it's like, um, the— you know, these guys were addicted to books and they were reading these, these gory books, and that's why they shot up their, like, their local town. Instead of video games, they're blaming like this on The novel, the dime novels, whatever those are.
And it really— and my takeaway here is two, two things. The first thing is that we react this— oftentimes human beings react the same through for, for centuries. And if you study why people react the way they do, you can begin to predict, to predict this. And so if I can, if I figure out in history what have been some of the common reactions to action X, Y, and Z, I can kind of look into the future and, or at the present time being like, okay, I think people are going to react by doing blank blankety blank because that's just how we're wired. Um, the second thing that it does is it like brings you to like senses a little bit where you're like, okay, I need to be calm. People have complained about this literally for 150 years and we're doing okay. And, uh, so that's interesting. And I was reading this book, Human Nature by Robert Greene. Ben, I don't know if you've read this or not, maybe you could tell me, but I'm almost positive. Somewhere in this book that they said that one of the very first bits of written language that they found was of people complaining about the younger generation and how they aren't going to keep the cultures that the old— or keep the traditions that the older generation has created. You know what I mean? So this idea of like old people complaining about young people being lazy, like one of the very first pieces of evidence of written language, it was a story of complaining about that. So anyway, I like seeing those patterns. So that's mine.
Yeah. That's, uh, you know, what's, what's the phrase? History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Yes.
And, uh, that's, that's like what this account is, you know, in a nutshell. There's some really great ones on this. I have a similar stash, uh, in my swipe file that I've been keeping for, for years. I, I kind of forgot to update it recently, but it was called Smart People Saying Dumb Things. And I would store anytime somebody who is clearly smart and successful said something that was very wrong. So for example, Warren Buffett was very, very dismissive of certain technologies, Bitcoin today, but before that, internet technology stocks, that he just didn't understand them. He didn't understand them, and so therefore made some disparaging comments.
Or like Ray Dalio predicting a crisis in the '80s.
Yeah. Or Steve Ballmer laughing and saying, and he's cackling and saying, Nobody will ever buy a $1,000 phone. Like they just don't get it. Apple, you know, Apple will fail or whatever. So I did that partly because there's like a, in the moment there's like a junk food fun of it, which is like, ha, yes, wrong. You know, there's, there's a joy when, when somebody successful is pointed out to be very wrong about something. But there's more than that. The real reason I did it was to remind myself that like it's very easy to kind of go into hero worship mode. And to idolize certain people or put them on a pedestal. And just because you're smart in one thing doesn't mean you're smart in another, or just because you're right a lot doesn't mean you're right all the time. It's a very important lesson cuz I've made big mistakes. Like for example, I think I've missed out. I, I bought Tesla stock very early on. I think I bought it at under $100 a share. And I think if you, uh, if you adjust for the splits, I think it's now over like $5,000 a share. So I think I've, I would've made about $5 million on a stock buy that I had. Really? If I just held. And, um, and the reason I didn't hold wasn't because I wanted to take profits. It was because I got spooked by— first, there was like a lot of people at a given time that were called Tesla Q. Do you know about that?
Uh, was that the thing where they said that like the— it's fake, like the factories are fake?
It's not that the factories are fake, but that there's sort of like fraud, deception, that the fundamentals don't make sense, and that Tesla's going to go to zero.
Yes, exactly. So Josh, so there was mostly anonymous accounts on Twitter and Reddit. And so I had read it and I was like, okay, I always wanna learn what is the other side. I was so bullish on Tesla. At this point, Tesla wasn't even anywhere near where it is today, right? And so it was like, okay, you know, Tesla's gone from $90 a share where I bought it to $380 a share, great. But like, you know, I still think it's got a lot of room to run. And I was reading, I always wanna know what is the, what do people who disagree with me say and what's their argument? Do I believe it? And so I read it and I was like, oh, there is some weird stuff. Like, wow, they've gone through 25 CFOs. Like, that sounds strange. Like, why does the CFO keep leaving? And like, people would have this like drone footage of like parking lots just full of Teslas that they're taking. Like, why are they stashing Teslas in these parking garages? Look at this. Every car in this 6-door car garage is a Tesla. Why is it here? Why are they, are they faking deliveries and sales? Like, What is this? So there was a lot of like, if there's smoke, there's fire.
Was there any truth in any of this?
Honestly, well, here's my honest take. I actually think that there was a lot of truth to what was going on. I think that— and the reason why I say this is I don't think it's as bad as they said, but I also don't think it's as good as Tesla portrayed it. Meaning, I think there actually was a period of time where Tesla almost died, where it actually almost did go bankrupt because, um, of like the combination of the production ramp up was going too slow. They had the production line was not moving fast enough. Uh, the subsidies were there, but they could have gone away and like all this stuff. And I think there was like a lot of, um, kind of like, you know, fake it till you make it going on there. And Elon has even come out and said in the past, he goes, he was talking about when, um, when clean tech was big and the government was giving money to this, I think it was called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, uh, same thing happened with Enron where it was like, 5 weeks before it went under, they were like not just saying everything's going to be okay, they were saying everything's better than ever. And he— and Elon came out and was sort of like, what do you want people to say? He's like, you know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship, to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, oh, we're so close to our destination. Basically, he was like, they're never going to come out and say, yeah, we don't know, we might not make it. 'Cause then that will guarantee you don't make it 'cause people will sell the stock. It'll put so much negative pressure on the company, it'll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can't ever come out and say, I don't know, we might not make it. So you always have to say, make it, of course we're gonna make it, we're thriving. And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read, and I was like, I feel like he's describing what actually was going on inside Tesla.
That's amazing.
And so anyways, long story short was I didn't believe it, didn't believe it, didn't believe it. I was sort of like, reading it, but I didn't pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolfe, this guy's a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who's like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point I was like, you know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I'm wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like go going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence.
How much did you buy?
Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes— Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100x, uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And, uh, and so, yeah, I do regret— I actually turned out to be wrong. I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable.
I didn't buy $100 grand. I think I bought like, I don't know, I don't even know what it was. It wasn't $100. I don't think that's— that's not what I was buying back then because this was like, I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It was a long time ago. And basically I think I bought like $30 or $40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I remember— because I remember doing the math and thinking, okay, they're valued at like $5 or $6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at? Okay, they're valued at $25 billion. Okay, on one hand That seems crazy that they're only 5 times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, I really think like the cars are gonna go electric, that these old fucks are never gonna switch. And he's got this like vertically integrated, it's like actually a battery and energy company. It's not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. It wasn't, so it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So egg on my face. And by the way, on this note of the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was, um, I don't know if you heard about this. Few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this?
Uh, yeah. Basically he got some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened.
Yeah. So he had, he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely, it's his entire compensation was tied to the, um, the market cap of Tesla and like it was at $50 billion I think at the time when he had done it. And it was like every $50 billion increments he was gonna get more. And so it was like, if I get us to $100 billion, then I get X, I think he would get like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I should have, I didn't know we were gonna talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically he was gonna get a percentage more of the company for every $50 billion they go up in market cap. As they also have to hit certain, um, like revenue and earnings, uh, at that time. And he had no guaranteed income. So basically if Tesla just went from $50 to $99 billion, he would get zero during that time. And he had 5 years to do it. And the top of the compensation plan was if they became a $600 billion company, then he was gonna become like, he was gonna get this, like he would own like 10% of it, whatever. He would own some ridiculous amount. That would get unlocked for him, and he would be essentially the richest man in the world. And there's all these— there's this clip of, uh, what's his name, Andrew Sorkin or whatever his name is, the guy on CNBC Fast Money or whatever, um, of them— they're outlining the plan and they're laughing. They're just laughing at him. They're like, I don't even know why they included these tiers. Like, for Tesla to get that would be— I mean, there's no way. And they're all laughing. They're like, there's no chance. And they're like, this is such a weird thing. Why did he do this? And they're like basically laughing at him and saying how outrageous the top end of it was, where it just made no sense. It's like, well, to do that, Tesla would need to become like the 5th most valuable company in the world, or 3rd most valuable company in the world. And they're like, that's ridiculous, but I guess, you know, aim high, I guess.
Hahaha. No guaranteed compensation of any time, of any kind at all. He gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. Uh, he only gets equity that, that vests over time, but only if he reaches these hurdle rates, which are, dare I say, crazy. So right now the company's worth $59 billion. They run at $50 billion increments. So if he gets the company to $100 billion—
you're just talking market capitalization, not based on revenue, not based on the number of—
there's going to be production. There's going to be two metrics at each step. So the first step is he has to get the company to $100 billion and reach these operational and adjusted EBITDA and revenue number. If he doesn't get either of them, he gets nothing.
That's kind of a weird way to break it down based on market.
If he gets to $150 and has to hit the operational numbers—
I mean, the market can be irrational, so you can't control that.
At each $50 billion number, he collects 1% of the company. If somehow magically he would get the company to $650 billion, which is literally what the plan calls for, if you can believe this, uh, he would collect the equivalent of about $655 billion in compensation. Otherwise he gets absolutely nothing.
Okay, what if you get it to $650 billion and then immediately— And then sure enough, he, he's like, I think he just hit it or he's about to hit that, that last final thing. And sure enough, he's the richest man in the world now.
That's badass.
Bet on yourself.
I, I need to go bet. Well, if you're him. Um, all right, I'm gonna tell you a, a handle that would've helped you. So you know who Ryan Holiday is definitely, right?
Yes.
Uh, Ryan Holiday is an author. Just kind of like a personality, but mostly an author. And he does stoicism stuff. And I included him, but I'm gonna actually tell you the one you should follow. So I like Ryan Holiday because he's got these things that are not business related, but help me in business and help me in life. And so he's got Five Lessons from Seneca. Seneca was a, is he Greek? I actually don't know what he was. Uh, he was a philosopher. Uh, and so they are, we suffer. What was he?
I think he was Greek. I, I didn't look it up.
He was Roman. Ben, thank you. Uh, we suffer more in imagination— or 5 Stoic lessons from Seneca. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Associate only with people who improve you. The greatest remedy for anger— this is the best one— the greatest remedy for anger is delay. Nice. Value your time more than your possessions. And death is not in the distant future. We are dying every day. And he's got these amazing things that I love, but he's got this other Twitter handle called The Daily Stoic. I love The Daily Stoic and they just like tweet out all these like interesting stoicism tidbits.
That's his, right? It's his brand.
It's his. And it's incredibly useful. This stuff is like, it's one of the— stoicism is one of the few philosophies that's like actively, um, it's practical and you could use on a daily basis. And so I like following this account. It reminds me to do certain things.
So, so correct me if I'm wrong. So, uh, I had heard about stoicism from Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss, a bunch of others. So I go, I buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I sit down, I start to read it, and I'm, I'm sort of just trying to understand what the heck is this philosophy. And there were some things I thought were really cool, like the tweet, like that tweet you just read out, those 5 principles, like that resonates with me. But there was like a part of it which was sort of like, feel neither the highs nor the low. It seemed almost like a philosophy, and I think I'm wrong, so I want you to correct me. Uh, it seemed like a philosophy which was sort of like feel nothing.
Yeah. And I think that you're almost right.
And feel nothing doesn't seem very fun. Why do I wanna feel nothing?
Tell me why. So that's my big, that's my actually a really good criticism in my opinion of Stoicism. And it's my criticism of Stoicism, which is a lack of joy. And a lot of Stoics, this is me steelmanning by the way, a lot of Stoics will say, no, like there's joy. Like if you read it differently, there's room for joy. Or they never say you can't have joy. And they're not wrong, but oftentimes it's how to deal with pain and misery. And the idea is basically you accept the fact that you're going to come into contact with a bunch of idiots all day who are going to want to hurt you and steal from you. But that's okay.
You do like a negative visualization, right? You like imagine things going wrong, which again, just feels very not so fun for me and not the way I have— not, not— that's not a formula that's worked for me. In fact, the exact opposite has worked for me.
That formula has worked for me actually. So what I do is like, all right, today I've got cancer. I can't get out of bed because I'm like harsh.
You do this every day.
I do it a lot. Or I'll be like, look, like, Like if I'm feeling sad, I'll be like, my, I just got my leg cut off. Like I can't walk. I wish I could do it on sports. And then I'll be like, wait a minute, I have both legs. I don't feel sick. Let's go celebrate and exercise. Or you know what I mean? Or like, you know, I'm happy my dog is not dead and I'll go and it makes me appreciate him. Yeah. It's called negative visualization. I think it's incredibly useful.
There's a, there's, this is, this is to me. So I will disagree with this. There's a, This to me is the argument of, well, there's kids starving in Africa. Like in any given moment, you could just sort of remember, oh, there's kids starving in Africa. There's kids starving in Africa. I, my boyfriend broke up with me. Well, at least I'm not starving in Africa. And, um, and I, I get the utility of it. I've used it myself, but in my experience, I've learned that it's a bit of a roundabout way to a destination of gratitude. And like, you don't have to go to feeling the stress and the pain and the suffering of bad in order to feel the gratefulness around the good. And so I found it, I guess my personal experience has been, I think it's a roundabout way to gratitude. And like, I might as well just go straight to gratitude. Don't need to, uh, don't need to think about all the bad things. But think about like— worry about all the bad things that could happen and go there. This is, it's not been useful for me.
I remember like when I get a sore throat, I always feel this way. And when I get like a toothache, I'm like, I wish I could go back to the days where my tooth didn't hurt. Like, if you're like, a toothache is like the most pain you could be in, or sometimes. And I'm like, I like— you're like, I don't remember. Like, sometimes at my—
if I— all the women who have given birth are like, what the fuck is he talking about?
Yeah, but like, a toothache is the worst pain you could feel. Or like, I like— in my— like, whenever I get earaches and toothaches, I'm like, you know, it's like, it's like this internal pain. It's like I can't make the pain stop, and I just have to deal with it until I have an appointment in 3 days. And then you get like 2 days in and you're like, I don't remember what it felt like to not feel feel this pain. And so I got into the habit. I would be like, I would be so thankful if I could, if my throat didn't hurt today and I could just swallow food. That would make me so happy. And days when I don't, I'm not sick, I try to think back. I'm like, this is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel happy that I'm not sick today. And so I, I think about that stuff all the time. So anyway, Ryan Holiday and the Daily Stoic is a good follow. You're up.
All right. Um, by the way, I know we didn't do stoicism justice for people who are like, Diehards, sorry. People should look— I don't think it is no emotions. I think it's like more subtle than that, but that's a really good— I think your criticism's great, which is like, I think it's what a lot of people run into, a lack of joy, and then they're like, wait, wait, is this what I want?
Yeah, it's like, where's the room for fart jokes?
You know, I'm gonna give you two niche experts. They're in different niches, but I like them. Okay, so I should link their accounts here for you to this first guy, I don't know exactly how you say his name. His name is Aviral Bhatnagar, and I'm going to link you his Twitter. It's Aviral Bhat, and I'm going to put it— where do I put it? I put it on the sheet that we have. Okay, you got it. So this guy, Aviral Bhatnagar, he is a venture capitalist in India and his blog is ajuniorvc.com. This guy puts out really, really high signal stuff around what's going on in India. Um, like for example, he has a tweet that he put out yesterday, or that, that was India now exports more software, 133 billion, than Saudi Arabia exports oil, 113 billion. We are the, uh, India is the largest engineering population in the, in the world. Uh, what an amazing story that's come, come out over the last 40 years.
How'd you find this guy? This is the best. This one's the best one though. This is the most, helpful one on the list.
Yeah. And so like, I, I do a lot of investing in Indian startups and I was like, okay, if I'm going to invest in a startup, so I'm not on the ground, I'm not the like local domain expert. So what did I do? I invested in a fund. I became an investor in somebody else's fund that's India-focused. I was like, okay, cool, I'm going to get insights from him and I can bounce any deal off him to see if he wants to participate. And maybe he has a local view that I don't understand. And then this was another guy that I thought was really smart.. So I wanted to find who are— I wanted to basically see who's the thought leader in that space and then how do I subscribe to them. And so his, um, you know, his like blog I think has 50,000 subscribers now. So he's not like, you know, a no-name, uh, but he's very niche and he talks about kind of like the Indian tech scene and what's going on, you know, at a macro level or whatever. So I found this guy to be, I think he's doing a really good job of content creation. So I'm gonna pick this guy. Is there—
is there such a thing as this for China?
Uh, I'm sure there is. Actually, this is a good idea. I should just, um, like find this person for like LATAM, for Europe, you know, for different parts of Europe, and for, for India, for China, and for Australia maybe. Um, and if there is none, be this guy. This guy, there's a valuable position to become.
Super valuable. There's this guy named Bill Bishop, I think his name is. Bill Bishop had a newsletter, uh, called Dynism, I think it's called. You know what I'm talking about? No. Sino— Sinocism. I don't know what that means. Sinocism. S-I-N-O-C-I-S-M. For a long time, he was the most popular guy on Substack, and his entire newsletter is— it's called Get Smarter About China, and he just tells you about the business of China, and you can see all the latest trends coming out of China.
It would be really great arbitrage to do, by the way, if instead of trying to compete in the same pond as everybody else, like go provide a really useful bridge into one specific market or one specific, uh, geography. Um, like, uh, I, I, I've told the story before, I think, but like one of the most influential people in my life was this teacher named Lisa Keister at Duke University. And she taught this class called Getting Rich. And her story was she graduated.
That was the name of the class?
It was the name of the class. Yeah.
Did everyone take that?
It was the, it was one of the hardest classes to get into because it was a great name, great title, right? So you already know This person's not just like every other professor. Like she understands like her customer, her market. The second thing was it was, she was the highest rated professor on like ratemyprofessor.com and greatest thing ever. She had a chili pepper next to her name. So she was like hot too. It was like, oh, it was everything. So I, I wake up, it's 5 in the morning. We go to the library to get on the highest speed internet connection. And as soon as the course listings open up, we like jumped on it and we got into this class and I go in and she was, she tells her story. She goes, actually, I was a student at Duke 10 years ago. Or 11 years ago, whatever it was. She goes, I graduated with a degree in Mandarin, 'cause that's just what was interesting to me. And at the time, everybody was making fun of me. Actually, she was older than this now, but she had started teaching back when she was like 32 or something. Now she might be 42 or 52 or something like that. But she goes, I graduated with this degree. All my friends were like, good luck with that. How's that Mandarin degree gonna help you out and get a job here? Because I'm gonna go to med school, I'm gonna be a lawyer, I'm gonna be a consultant. What are you gonna do with that Chinese degree? And she's like, well, I bet I can get a job in China. And they're like, what? And so she bought a one-way ticket, just goes to China, and she just starts waving her hand. She's like, hey, people in China, like, I know English, I know companies in the West. Um, and I would love to learn about you. And then I'd be a bridge. And she became a bridge basically between companies in China and companies in America. If an American company wanted to do business in China, they would do it through her. 'Cause she like could translate the, not just literally the language, but like she knew who to talk to. She became like the local expert there. She be— and this, like, to me, this guy on Twitter, he's my bridge into knowing what's going on in the scene in India. And so she, what her story was, she made a killing doing that cuz it was really valuable. Companies in China really wanted to do business with the companies in the West. Then she invested all of it in the tech, in the tech stock market. Cause she's like, oh, I can tell tech companies are the ones that are doing well. So she, and then right before the bubble burst, she pulled it all out to be like, oh, I wanna do real estate now. And she like just timed it perfectly accidentally. Invested all in real estate from 2000, 2008, right before the real estate crash happened. She took it out again because she just wanted to do something else with her life. And basically by 32 was retired and like, you know, uh, was like, what do I wanna do? I wanna go teach and teach kids what I wish I knew back then.
How wealthy do you think she got?
Uh, I think she made like, you know, a few million dollars at least. And like, you know, probably like $5, $7 million and like, Um, you know, she, she lives in Durham and she teaches at school. I mean, I have no idea.
So what was the class about?
I'm totally guessing. So the class was basically, it was, you know, like Ramit Sethi, it was like personal finance, which is like, she's like, you probably need, she wanted to teach what she wished she learned when she was in school. So she's like, I wish they taught you about how to manage money. So she would show us like the power of compound interest over time, like why you should save early and versus saving more money when you're 30 versus saving even a little bit of money when you're 20.. And then like, what is a mortgage? And like, how does that work? And like, then so, and then every other class she would just invite in someone who made it, like someone who's successful financially, but doing a completely different thing just to expose you to like, look, there's like 50 paths, dude.
This is like, it's like this podcast pretty much.
Yeah. One would be this girl who started a t-shirt company licensing university logos and she would tell her story. Then she, she got Jamie Dimon on the phone and like, Jamie Dimon is like, you know, the head of whatever, Morgan Stanley or whatever. Uh, and like then she had this hedge fund guy from San Francisco come out and he's like, yeah, here's what I, he's like, he surveyed the room. He goes, do you guys use, uh, Microsoft or Apple products? And they're, and people are answering. He goes, uh, he asked like 3 questions and we were like, why did you ask that? He goes, because then I'm only going to make one decision this year and it's whether to invest like hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple or not.. And, um, and he's like, so all I'm doing is I'm just trying to figure out what is the right decision on that. And I was like, whoa, that's a job. That's a, that's epic. And he, he had said in his, when he was in the class, he goes, by the way, uh, all you guys are gonna just have the same resume. He goes, you're all trying to do the same thing. You're all trying to get grades and then like these internships. He's like, so the first 3/4 of your resume, think about it. It's gonna look the same as everybody else in this room. Like, I'm not really gonna be able to tell the difference. He goes, the only thing that's going to differentiate any of you is that bottom section where it's called other, like other interests. He's like, so at this school, everybody's going to teach you to like work on that top 3/4 of the resume. In reality, you should be working on the bottom, the bottom 1/4 of that resume, because that's what guys like me look at. Everybody's got a degree, everybody's got good grades, everybody went to a good school.
I've never— wait, have I told you about the bottom 4th of the resume?
No. What is that?
That's so funny that you, you even use that fraction. I always tell my, when I owned the company, I would say, I just care about the bottom fourth. I'd always say, just tell me this. Wow. And I would always say that. And I'd be like, one of the greatest people would ask me, how do you find good writers? I was like, well, here's one really easy way. Ask 'em about the bottom fourth. And they go, what do you mean? I was like, well, just, it doesn't matter what they studied in school. Ask 'em, um, okay, so you majored in philosophy. What was your favorite, uh, philosophy class or favorite philosophy teacher? And if they can't tell me a story, uh, about something that they spent 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they're just not gonna be a good writer cuz they're not interesting enough. Right. And so I would always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume for all types of roles. Cause I'm like, if you're just, if you can't entertain me for this conversation and then you just don't have any passion and I don't wanna be around you.
Right. That's amazing. Uh, okay. So maybe this becomes one of the, the core frameworks. That's a, that, you know, one, one person saying it, that's just a dot. Two people saying it, that's a line.
I interviewed, um, it, I got that from, uh, Gold— Brian Goldberg who founded Uh, Bustle, and he has this amazing article and he says it's headlined Losers Exist, Stay Away from Them. And it's basically like how to only hire winners. It's from Pando from years and years ago, and he's a brilliant writer, but he doesn't write anymore cuz he's kind of a loose cannon. But it was titled Losers Exist, How to Avoid Them. And it talks about, uh, one of the best ways to ask about the bottom fourth. And if you're a, you're a loser, if you can't like be passionate about something that you spent 4 years studying.
Uh, no, dude, this article is gone. It's, is it pan— you know, like Pando died. Let me see if there's a cached version. There is a cached version. Uh, okay. We, we are, we're back in luck.
The headline is Losers Exist, Don't Hire Them.
Yeah. Awesome. Um, okay. Let's do, uh, let's do a couple more. I'm gonna give a couple quick ones. Uh, okay. This other person who I think is a niche expert is this guy, Willy Woo. Do you follow him?
No, I'm looking him up now. I'm following all these people. The, the Indian guy's the best one so far. But let's look at Willy Woo.
Yeah, I don't think you'll like this one 'cause it's very crypto specific, but this guy Willy Woo is I think the leading crypto analyst. And, um, you know, in most things like these people who analyze charts and stuff like that, they're like, it's a little bit like horoscopy. They're like, ah, look, the trend is going this way. And like if you draw this T shape, it's gonna be the iron cross pattern. And like, you know, so buy, buy, buy. And, um, in crypto there's one unique thing, which is that all the data is, there's a lot more transparency. All the, you know, everything that's happening is happening on a chain, on a public blockchain. So you can actually go analyze it. So like he looks at all these metrics that are like, um, you know, it's, he won't just look at the price. For example, there's things like what is the actual average buy-in price? Because it's one thing for the price to go up or for people to like not be selling because they bought it in 2013 and they, you know, their cost basis was like $5 and your cost basis now is $50,000. So it looks at like what the actual price people are buying in, what is the average price people bought in for? And that tells you like if it's low versus the actual price, you're like, okay, um, you know, it's mostly, you know, it's mostly just like same coins and old hands versus if it's higher, you, you realize that people are buying in at the current price levels and that's pulling the average up. Um, and so there's, there's a whole bunch of things like that. Like um, coin age. Like, um, are old coins moving? Meaning like, if OG believers start selling, that's kind of a signal. Like, it's like when a CEO starts selling their stock, it's like, wait, why are you selling your stock? That doesn't seem quite right. Um, what's the reason? And so like, when a bunch of old hands start selling, that's actually a signal that comes before the price changes. It may not even affect the price yet, but it's an indicator of something to come.
Damn, all right, I just follow them.
So this guy's got all kinds of analysis and he's a lot more reasonable. So crypto is full of— especially crypto Twitter is full of like just propaganda artists, and they're good at it. They're like, they will make you believe that some random fucking NFT is the hottest shit because it's like one guy controlling 55 bot accounts and they're all replying to every tweet that uses the word, you know, art with like a link to their freaking project. There's so much propaganda, there's so much noise, and there's somebody like just believers who, if you say, if I, if I just go out there to say, and I say my price prediction for 2022 is $6 million a coin, um, I'll get a bunch of attention because people want to believe that like, ah, number's going to keep going up. And so this guy's a lot more reasonable. Like he's still obviously a big believer. He's super bullish on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general, but he grounds it at least in like real analysis. And I find that to be quite valuable.
All right, I follow them. I think that's cool. Is he— what, what does he like actually make predictions?
Yeah, he'll make predictions, but it's not— he's not like— he doesn't get just like intoxicated with just prediction after prediction. It's more like, let me explain the way things are moving, and then when a move happens, he'll explain what actually happened. Who actually— was it a big one whale dumping? Was it a lot of old hands selling? What's causing this bear market? He'll say, look, there was actually a lot of leverage in China and those got liquidated and that's what drove the price down. And like, you can get an explanation for like what otherwise feels like pretty arbitrary price movements.
That's badass. All right, let me give you one. Um, yeah, Rohin Dhar. I actually don't know how to spell Rohin's last name or say Rohin's last name. It's D-H-A-R. So this guy, uh, founded this company called Priceonomics. Do you remember Priceonomics?
Yes, I've followed this guy. This guy's good.
Okay. So he's interesting. Priceonomics was interesting. We actually recruited a bunch of people from there and I love that company. I don't know if it's really around anymore, but it's just a blog, but his new, like, started as a side hustle. Now it's kind of like a full-time thing. And I actually showed you two examples, even Suli's commenting on it. And this guy, he owns, I think, 12 or 10 or 8, somewhere in that 8 to 12 range. He owns 8 single-family homes, uh, in New Mexico. In California, Hawaii, wherever. Um, and you can go and look and he'll kind of show you where they are and I'll show pictures of them. And he rents them out on Airbnb. And sometimes when his kids are on vacation or not school, he'll go and stay in his homes and he reveals all of the numbers and all of the updates. So on December 6th, he tweeted, these are my monthly mortgage payments on each of the homes in my small, uh, portfolio of vacation rentals. Uh, another one is he'll say like, you know, currently we're seeing this type of occupancy rate and we actually just added a surfboard to our house in Hawaii and we noticed that we could get more money for it or something like that. And he takes screenshots and he shows all of the revenue that he's making as well as how much money things have cost, cost him to buy. And he'll even do things like recently he posted a couple of listings. He's like, I think I could turn this into an Airbnb and he'll just like link to the Redfin house listing and he's like, I think I can get these numbers. So it's actually really cool to see him in real time make it all happen.
Yeah, I like this. This is awesome. Uh, I didn't realize that he was doing this. This is kind of new.
Yeah, he's been at it for a while. He's been at it for—
now his new shtick, he's been doing it for 6 years, but I don't think he was— I don't think he was as public about it.
He wasn't as public about it. He was not as public about it, but now he's like all in on it, and it's so fun. Uh, it's a really fun handle to follow because sometimes his properties are like a quarter of a million and he puts down 20%, so he puts down— or sometimes even less, I think. So he'll put down like $40,000 or $50,000 on these properties, and that's pretty attainable for a lot of people. And so it's kind of interesting, right?
Um, okay, I have a— okay, let's do a couple funny ones. Um, okay, have you heard of this account, James Friedman? It's @fjame013.
Uh, is it on this list? No. So what is it? James Friedman?
James Friedman, or I don't know, maybe it's Friedman, but it's F-R-I-D-M-A-N.
Uh, no. Who What is this?
So he is, uh, he's got 2 million followers. He's definitely popular. He's the Photoshop guy. So basically people will Photoshop like, uh, hey James, my boyfriend's wearing this Calvin Klein, the same Calvin Klein t-shirt in every, um, in every photo that we, I take with him. Can you just remove the logo of Calvin Klein? And then like he does the request, but he doesn't, he's not actually just Photoshopping it. He makes it hilarious. So like It's very visual, so you know, you need like YouTube to be able to see what I'm saying here. But like, he photoshopped the— the— this guy's wearing Calvin Klein shirt of like, you know, just says across the chest Calvin Klein jeans. And so he like photoshopped it with that ripped off, so that little section ripped off. Now you can just see his chest. And so it's like, fuck, it actually like fucks up the photo. It doesn't make it good like the girl wants. And it says Calvin Klein tattooed on his chest now instead of on the shirt. And so it's like, like, people will just be like, you know, you know, we— here's my wedding photo, but we forgot to wear a mask during our wedding photos. Can you Photoshop a mask on instead of photoshopping a COVID mask? He'll put like, you know, the green mask from Jim Carrey's like The Mask on their face. So it's just like people request it and then he does the— like, he does the request, but he does it wrong in a way that they're not happy with. They'll be like, you know, my, my arms look too big here, and then he'll make them like absurdly tiny or whatever. And so it's just hilarious.
Like, I look funny with one arm, and then so he just— or you can't see my other arm, so it looks funny with just one arm. And so he just deletes the second arm.
So the person's armless. Exactly. And I think he has like a book or something like called The Joy of Photoshop. It's, it says, uh, asking the wrong guy for help.
This is awesome. This is cool. I've never seen this. I'm gonna follow him. Uh, you want to go do a few more quick funny ones?
Uh, yeah, let's do another one. Uh, we have a friend Nikita Beer. He's pretty funny in like the tech world. Um, what do you think his account?
Hilarious. He's a shithead. Yeah, I'm actually amazed that he does some of the stuff that he does, and that's why I like him.
Well, it's kind of like the Donald Trump rule, right? Which is like, you say one offensive or weird thing, um, you know, you're canceled. But you say all offensive and weird things You're— you get like, you know, you get the pass.
How did he get away with it?
That's the key, is like if every post makes fun of something, that's cool. If only one does, then you're an asshole.
All this stuff is making fun of something, so I think it's a great follow. And his profile picture is hilarious.
Yeah, his profile picture is— it is good.
All right, you want to do one more?
Um, Yeah, okay, I like this one. I don't know if you know this guy. I don't think you do. I don't know if you'd be interested in him. His name is Haralobob.
What's he do?
So Haralobob's story is kind of crazy.
Is this the crypto guy?
So he's actually— he's transitioned from being the, the one thing guy to the next thing guy to the next guy. Okay, so he started off— he got famous because he was a big sports bettor, and he famously one year, and I think the year 2000, like just absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found an arbitrage, that he could bet on, and he just like milked it. And, uh, he realized that like, I think it was something he's had a few of these where he basically finds, he would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market, and that's how he made like millions of dollars. So he found like one year of that, what they would do is, um, let's say that, that they would have an over-under, a total points for a game, and let's say it's 200 points for the game. Um, now Vegas is like weirdly accurate with over-unders. Like, they will get it like so spot on. It'll come down to like the last possession and like it'll flip over or under. So they're very good at doing that. It doesn't seem like there's much inefficiency there. But like in basketball, what happens is that the first half of basketball you just play and then you go to halftime. But at the end of the game, there's often the situation where the losing team will start fouling the winning team to like stop the clock, make them shoot free throws, and then try to like They're trying to make threes while the other team could only shoot two free throws at a time. So what it led to was that the second half had more points than the first half. But Vegas had this small bet called the— they would take the over-under and it would say you can bet the first half over-under and it was just dividing it by two. So it's like dividing the total by two. So the total was always really accurate, but the first half over-under was underpriced. It was, oh, it was like too frequently too, uh, too high. So he was just betting the under. So you'd find these like little inefficiencies.
How much did he make?
Certain refs are really foul-prone. Um, and so he would know that, okay, when that ref is reffing this game, that team is going to score more than their normal average. And so he, he would analyze the refs when nobody was analyzing the refs, and he would just bet for a whole season on just the refs. Um, and he actually uncovered— I think he figured out before the NBA uncovered that that ref Tim Donaghy was like cheating, basically, because like it was always weird shit happening on that guy's games. Uh, and he— and so I'm paraphrasing because he doesn't like totally out his whole strategy, but like he's talked about it before. Like, you know, the Lakers in one year were undervalued in a way, and so he was able to bet them. So he made millions of dollars doing that. And I think he then— he became— then he gets hired by an NBA— Mark Cuban hires him to be his like secret weapon for the Mavs.
Yeah, but he only worked there for a few days, right?
No, he worked there for like a year or two, and then he famously you know, left or left slash got fired this year. He left, but like an article came out saying everybody in the company hates Haralobob because he has Mark Cuban's ear and like, you know, he has too much power for like his like random position as special advisor and stuff like that. They made him seem like this like master puppeteer and then whatever, he left. Uh, and now he's like big time and he's been in, he's been big time into crypto recently. And so he's just like the intersection of all my interests, like sports betting, poker gambling, NBA games and like NBA personnel stuff, franchise management, and now crypto. And so I just think this guy's like kind of a baller, degenerate gambler type of dude, and he kind of looks like a shithead.
So I like him automatically.
And he's not afraid to talk shit because he's not like employed by, you know, somebody or whatever. So, you know, he, he basically like he's kind of like a one-man band, which I think is great. I think those people tend to be the most interesting because they could speak their mind. And he's kind of like a shithead degenerate gambler type. So he's got, you know, the sense of humor that you find when you run in those circles, which is like, you know, part like smart aleck because you're just like actually really fucking smart and clever and you're finding like the edges, but also part shithead where you're just like, you don't mind just making fun of people and calling them dumb.
This episode turned into like the Slumdog Millionaire of Twitter where like we name— we named 10 things and then a super in-depth story on each one and why it's interesting.
I think it's gonna be cool. Ben, what do you think? Are people gonna dig stuff like this? People are gonna love it. People love lists. Like Sean said, we sold out, but you know what? This is a good thing to sell out for because a good episode. We, um, we had one title the other day. Either it was the title or it's the thumbnail. Like, they used a thumbnail that I looked stupid or a title that made me sound like an idiot. And I was like, Ben, I don't like that. He goes, oh, you thought that selling out to the algorithm was gonna feel good?
Yeah, I had them change the title also for the Hasan Minhaj episode. It came out, it was like, reveals all his comedy secrets. And I was like, I don't even— we didn't even talk about that. And like, we didn't— he didn't even talk about his comedy secrets. And, uh, you know, I feel like That's a guest I'm trying to look cool with, man. You kind of like making me look dumb in front of my friend I'm trying to look cool with. So can we like change that? Like, you can make me look dumb, but don't make me look dumb in front of somebody who I care about.
Are you guys friends now?
Yeah, we're buddies.
Great. That's, that's pretty— I feel like that's a big, a big thing, right? Like, you're, you're friends with like a guy who is almost a hero.
Almost a hero. What a strange description.
Well, like, I don't know how— didn't know how much you looked up to him, but I knew you looked up to him a lot.
Okay, there's there's definitely like a part of it which I think, you know, is kind of like the embarrassing part of anybody where it's like, you know, like I find it really embarrassing when people see a celebrity and they fucking lose their mind and they go and they like take a photo with them and they like ask them for an autograph. Like, can you please write your name on this piece of paper? Like, I mean, it's real like bitch move if you think about it. It's very strange, you know. If I had my memory wiped and I came back into society, I'd be like, you just did what? Like, you know, why did you make yourself seem like such a loser?
That's how I used to think when I would see people with like Trump flags or any other politician flag, or they're like his face. I'm like, it's kind of weird to have a grown man's face all over your body.
Yeah, exactly. And then like, you know, I fanboy about UFC and shit like that. I get super excited. So there's, you know, there's still people that like I still can fanboy about. So there's definitely that part of it, which is like, ah, it's kind of cool that someone, someone that's kind of famous is like your friend. But that wears off after like, I don't know, 10 seconds. Um, or at least for me, I'm like, this is like a lame feeling. Um, the thing I like is that he actually is super helpful. Like, uh, he asked really interesting questions. Like, first of all, we was like, okay, let's take, let's take, uh, his career and my career completely out of it. If you have a conversation with this person, do you like them? Do you get along? Like, do you, do they say interesting things or is it just boring, same old, same old commentary that everybody has? Like, no, dude's super interesting, has really good questions, has cool opinions. Then the second part of it is, um, are you gonna like, like I told you this framework, which is good friends consume together, great friends create together. And so I told him, I said, dude, a dream of mine is to like do like a 10-minute comedy set someday. Like I just think that would be such a thrill, such a challenge, you know, like that's one of the few things that I can make, you know, make me, you know, nervous or scared.
Is he gonna help?
Is the idea of doing that. And so he, like, I didn't even ask him for help. I would never, like, I wouldn't really ask him for help. Like, dude, your time's a lot more valuable than helping me with my like hobby dream, you know? Um, like, yeah, I'm that like kind of outta shape guy who wants to wear the jersey and dribble up and down the court in Madison Square Garden. Like, yeah, I, I want that, but like, you don't need to help me. But he has, he texts me like really interesting kind of like the stuff I'm, you know, you, you know, I'm a nerd about, which is like frameworks, kind of like techniques, tactics of like Okay, what's behind the laugh? The laugh doesn't just happen. You know, like there's a, there's like, there's a, there's a, there's a way to consistently recreate the laugh. How do you do that? And so he's been sharing some ideas with me.
And so you have to ask him, be like, can I share this tweet? Or can I share this text?
I did ask him. I was like, dude, you should charge for this. Like, this is unbelievable. He's like, he's like, A, don't share my shit. I was like, okay, I'll go to the grave with it. And then B, so I haven't told nobody. No, not even, not even my right-hand man. I don't, don't, don't even let him take a peek. Then the second part was, He's like, there's this feeling in comedy and acting, which is like, you could teach it, but if you teach it, that's sort of like this signal of like, I couldn't do it, so I became that acting teacher in New York or whatever. And I think there's that same thing in tech, which is like, are you teaching it because you couldn't make it as the operator? I think there is that stigma in tech as well, but much less so. Because in tech, people figured out if I start blogging about my shit and tweeting about my shit, I get— my reputation goes up, I get better deal flow, I get to invest in better, more badass companies. It's like actually strategic, right?
And it's not like that with comedy versus like a fallback plan. Well, I'm very eager, Sean, to hear about your friendship with, with this famous comedian.
Fuck you. Fuck you for doing that.
Congratulations on making a new friend. Ask Hasan to, to to tell you a text on why that was funny.
Yeah, for some of us it's natural.
Yeah, dissect that, buddy. All right, that's the episode.