3 Crazy Billionaire Stories

This may not be the best acquisition ever, but I'll be damned if it isn't up there. Yeah. Right. Like, I think that he bought this.

I don't know that I don't know the exact number, but he bought majority of only fans for, I think single digit millions of dollars, maybe low double digits, possibly low double digits. But let's even say it was 10 million dollars. This is now a more than 10 billion dollar company. I want to start the episode with a survey for the listener.

And we'll actually let John and Ben chime in. So just Ben, turn your camera on so I can see your face. All right. So we're going to start with the survey.

So on Monday morning at 730 AM, I wake up from a text from Sean. And here's what the text says. It goes, Hey, you got good topics for tomorrow? I just texted Emmet from Twitch to do a pod and he said he'll do it tomorrow.

So I'm going to drive to San Francisco tomorrow and record an interview with him. And so when I want Jonathan and Ben, turn your cameras on, what I want you to do a thumbs up if you think that's the first one, a thumbs down if you think it's the second one. Do you think that this text means, okay, in lieu of Sam and Sean recording together, I'm going to do one with Emmet or do you think that this means in addition to the recording tomorrow, I'm also going to do one with Sam and Sean thumbs up for the first one, thumbs down for the second one. All right, great.

I just wanted to make sure I'm not crazy. Oh, Ben, the betrayal. You too, Ben. You too.

So I thought that that's what it meant. And when I heard that, I was like, all right. So I have some free time between 11 noon. Ladies and gentlemen, the jury, let me just say this.

When I say do you have good topics for the pod tomorrow, if we weren't going to do a pod with a good topics together, I don't know. Seems like that might be something that, you know, that we're going to do. All right. Well, I just want to see what the audience thinks.

So whatever. I have a bunch of topics today. What do you have? I got you got a bunch of topics.

I got what have you taught me to have? Add one. That's how many topics I got. Well, I see a big list.

You have like an interesting, you have a few interesting things. You want to kick us off with something? Let's start with this. Yeah.

So we've talked a lot about one business on this podcast, probably more than any other podcast I've talked about this business. I would say we are the champions of this company. We are the ones out here letting people know that this company is legit, that this company is big, as a company is very interesting. Everybody's overlooking it.

We've been saying it for years. Are you even a paying customer of this company? I'm not a paying customer because I'm a married man, but. Well, you can be a married man.

You're a paid customer. But I've never paid. I'm not a paying customer because free porn exists. And I'm talking about only fans.

So only fans is annual numbers leaked. And not leaked, actually. What happened was actually kind of interesting. You know this, but maybe a lot of people who are listening don't, which is that any company that is based in the UK has whether it's private or public, has to report at the end of the year of the financial summary.

And the bigger your company is, the more data you have to include. Basically like a public company you have to report like. Like a public company. So in the US, if it's public, you can go look up their information, maybe the quarterly earnings or you can go find their S1.

But if it's a private company, you're just like, you're just guessing. But if you go to OnlyFans.com and you scroll down to the privacy policy, click Privacy Policy, you will see that OnlyFans is run by a company called Phoenix International Limited. And what is Phoenix International Limited? It is a company based in the UK.

So if you go to the entity called Companies House, and Companies House is where all of the company information is housed. And so if you go there, you can find, you can look up Phoenix International Limited, and then you can look at filing history. And you can see that there are several reports, several reports about this director replacing this director. But the one you want to care about is the one that basically says, here is the 2022 financial summary, your end financial summary.

And when you go to that, you're going to see the following picture of the business. OnlyFans is a business that generated or collected 5.6 billion in revenue in 2022. It's taken on that, it was 20%. So their company took $1.1 billion.

So for every $4 a creator makes, they make $1. On that $1.1 billion in net revenue, $525 million of profit. So this company is spitting off half a billion a year of profit. Pay a little tax, after tax profit, still $400 million.

And then the beauty of it, because if you scroll down to the balance sheet somewhere down, right off the P&L, it says dividends. And it shows that the owner, Leo, took 338 million in dividends last year. And here before that, he took like $200 million. This guy's taken out $550 million of dividends in the last two years off this business, which is just incredible.

Because, let me remind you, this is a company that he bought in 2018. This is five years. What did he bought it? He bought it.

What did you know what he paid for? Non-public information. He bought 75% of the business at the time. What I believe was low millions of dollars.

Was he wealthy before that? Yes. So Leo is a kind of a gangster of the internet. And he, by the way, if you just go to his website, his website's awesome.

So there's really two things I love about the website. He's a listener, I think. Well, that's one of the things I love about the website. If you go to his website, which is just his name, leo-redvinsky.com.

If you go to things I like, so he's got things I like. And then the very first category, podcast, the very first one of two podcasts is my first really. So he's a listener of the podcast, which is just a cool thing, fun to find something to see. But I love his website because I love when people sort of put up their flag and they're like, yo, this is what I'm all about.

And they just make it really easy for you to just understand, here's who I am, here's what I'm into. And if I'm into this, if you're into the same sort of thing, we'll probably get along. So his main thing says he's a software company, Architect, Angel, Investor, and Open Source Software. This guy gives millions of dollars a year to open source projects.

That probably would have died had he not done that. He's a huge supporter of open source software and sort of like a, like a sort of freedom entrepreneur. He wants projects that are increasing the overall amount of freedom in the universe. So whether it's, he'll fund these open source social networks that are like a mastodon type of type of social network that are not owned or controlled by like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, like one private company, closed source owned by a mega billionaire.

He funds projects that are alternatives to that. And listen to that, if you go to his, so you see like, he has sections about me, projects, open source, things are like, if you click projects, only fans isn't even number one of the listed projects. It's number two, number, and he just says like one paragraph and it says what it is, but number one is some open source project that's what he has listed. Before X, he's like, before X is like tools for rapid prototyping, development, you know, Microsoft discontinued visual basics and before X stepped in to try to make this happen, probably would have died.

Basically, like when I looked at this, it probably would have died. And then 2019, he decided to put a ton of money into it just so that's project could say a lot. And so then like under giving, he's like, yeah, I don't, I've done a bunch of my time effort money to causes I care about, including open source initiatives and traditional charities. My goal one day is to sign the giving pledge to sign the giving pledge.

You need a billion dollar network. I'm pretty sure he has like a multi-billion dollar network now. I think he's achieved this goal because in the five years, and you can go look at the company filings, but like 2019, 2018, the company has like, he pulls out like 1.5 million in dividends. And so in like a three year period, he went from pulling out 1.5 million in dividends to 250 and then 340 million dollars in dividends out of this company.

So this accelerated extremely quickly. And I think like, you know, there's all these great tech acquisitions. There's like a, you know, Google buying YouTube for a billion dollars, probably worth 50 billion now. Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars, probably worth 100 billion now.

This may not be the best acquisition ever, but I'll be damned if it isn't up there. Right? Like, I think that he bought this. I don't know the exact number, but he bought majority of only fans for I think single digit millions of dollars, maybe low double digit, possibly low double digit.

But let's even say it was 10 million dollars. This is now a more than 10 billion dollar company. So he turned, let's just pretend it was 10 million dollars into essentially 10 billion dollars of value. Personally, not a fund, not a company.

This is him. This is one guy who owns the other 25%. And is there a story of him buying this and like what he saw? Because like, I would, if this was me five years ago, I would have been like, dude, this will never work.

Right? I mean, everyone would have said that. So it was already kind of, it was already working in a small scale. So this guy, Guy Stokely was the founder.

If you go look at Guy Stokely, he looks like an Instagram model. He is like a, like every picture of him, he's flanked by seven women. And the story is that Guy Stokely is that's in the finance world. He takes a small loan of like 10,000 pounds from his dad, starts only fans, and they kind of co-own the business or whatever.

Father and son was like sort of the origin of this guy. Good bonding. Yeah. Some guys like golf, some guys like fishing.

Some fathers and son start only fans. Like that's amazing. And I don't know why he sold or when he sold, but yeah, Leo approaches them and they buy any buys the business. At the time it was reported that he bought 75% of the business.

I don't know if later he bought the rest. I suspect he did because there's one of these filings that Guy Stokely has removed as a director in the company. So maybe he just volunteers that down. I don't know.

Some players reading a bunch into these statements. He can't say for sure exactly what happened. And this whole thing was very secretive. In fact, when I first found out about Leo owning only fans at the time, nobody knew who owned only fans.

It was not clear. There's nothing on the internet. This was several years ago. And I was trying to figure it out.

I couldn't figure it out. And then I get a message from somebody who's like, Hey, I know the guy who owns only fans and he loves the pot. I was like, whoa, that's cool. I'm trying to find who owns the thing.

I want to do invest in this. And anyways, that's how we kind of like we ended up having a chat. You know, I want to be this guy someday. He's got a really interesting story.

So now there's like a photo of him on the internet and there's a very private guy. But now a little more information has come out about him. Very early on, I think when he was a teenager, like 15, 16 years old, he got into the business of first, I think, like domain. So he would basically buy and sell like hundreds of domains, like maybe thousands of domains.

In fact, there's like a some you got sued at some point. Some there's like a court filing of like, here's a thousand domains that this guy still owns. And it's like every variation of like, you know, sort of like websites that you can imagine, many of which were sort of in the adult category. And then he creates My Free Cams.

And My Free Cams basically took over the camgirl market. And I think that site still makes great value. That's how we think got very, very rich was off that site. And he used that money then to invest and to correlate that into other businesses.

But he owns a portfolio of these businesses. And now Phoenix International, which is only fans has become a major, major one. This is amazing in a lot of different ways. One it's amazing that companies house, it's always a weird name.

I hate saying that. It's companies, plural companies house. It's amazing that that exists. And it's one of my favorite places to do research.

It's amazing how fast this grew. Would you would you invest in this company or do you not do like? Yeah, I tried to several times. The problem is they didn't need any investment or making so much money.

So I was like, hey, I can add value. And I was like, you know, I might really get you crushing it. What are you going to do here? Right?

Like, hey, I'm a fan. I think I'm a good hang. Can I invest? That's really what my pitch was.

It's like, I'm a fan of what you're doing. Unlike most people, I don't just like at the time when I was saying this, like, oh, guys, it's over time become more and more mainstream, over time become more and more accepted as a thing. That's legitimate. At the time, it was seen as very sketchy.

It was sort of the butt of the joke. And yeah, so I definitely would have invested in this. I wanted to. They were doing so well.

And I don't think they ultimately needed any investment. Now, the one thing they do need is liquidity. Like, you know, he's taking massive dividends, which is great. Like, you know, they could realize a several billion dollar liquidity event if they could go public or if they could sell, but there's no buyer.

And it's hard to go public with business like this. And so I think, you know what they're going to do with it. But, you know, it's not a bad plan to just suck out hundreds of millions of dividends every year. It's fine.

Yeah, I would say is that what he wants. I don't know why you don't want to go public with it. I don't know if he wants that, but you always want the option, right? Like any business person will want the option, whether you take it or not.

A secondary. In fact, most of the things in my life I'm pushing for and people are like, do you want this? And I'm like, oh, I haven't even gotten there yet. All I want is the option.

And if I have the option, I'll then I can think of what I definitely know is I don't not want the option, right? And I think that's just a better way to operate as a business person is to make sure you have the options on the table for you. At $400 million a year in a dividend, there's probably only five or 10. I would imagine people getting have who have in the world, or at least in America, who have higher income.

Like I remember Steve Schwartzman from Blackstone one year made a billion dollars. And the other guy is like, what's the guy saying? Is it Griffith or Griffin? Like it's usually just like, it's usually like the top five or 10 hedge fund managers who make this.

And they're actually the best. They're it's barely reliable. But they're like, those are the guys who are buying the $100 million apartments in New York, you know, like the Bill Ackman said there's probably only 10 of them. Maybe 20, but like that income you'd be the highest in America on the top 30 or something like that.

You know what I mean? So like, I don't know, man, I would probably still own that. Well, this is cool. One thing that's cool about this guy, by the way, when I talk to him, like, you know, 80 90% of our conversation was not about only fans at all.

It was about these different open source projects. He's interested in he was just he's very like, he's a technical guy. He's very curious, very interested. So he was showing me like, oh, check this out.

I'm sending this link, you know, like try this, try this side out. It's kind of like this fringe niche site open source project. But like, I think it's really cool for these reasons. And I just love that.

I love, you know, one of the things I love the most about tech is that it redistributed wealth to a bunch of people who had different interests. So like when the wealthiest people were all from finance, you just got this like one homogenous pool of rich people. It's like, here's a bunch of rich dudes that live in the same place. Like the same stuff.

White guys, white suits. Alpha New York, you know, power suit, watch wearing, art buying. Great is good. Yeah.

And then like crypto made a whole bunch of other people rich, right? Because it was like, you know, a different type of person got rich through that. And they had different interests. They're like, yo, I'm going to spend money on this digital swiggle and this board aid.

And I'm going to donate to this other thing. And I'm going to fund these types of projects and these types of this type of worldview. I'm going to fund and, you know, tech companies are started by like Mark Zuckerberg. You know, this guy didn't, he wouldn't want to start a hedge fund.

He wanted to do something else. And because he does that, now he can spend his money doing other things or Elon Musk. He's like, I'm going to fund companies that will do space travel with no investor would fund it myself. And so I love when wealth gets distributed to new pockets of people who have different interests, different values, because they're going to bring some new, like, it's not the thing they created.

It's actually all the stuff they do with their money that creates a hundred new things. That's kind of interesting to me. I've emailed back and forth with them just a few times. I've asked them to come on.

I think you have to. I don't know if that will ever happen. He's like, I'm a pretty private person. I don't think I'll make a very good guess.

But, you know, well, okay, fine. We'll talk about your dividends then. You either come on as a guest or we find you in company's house. That's the rules of this podcast.

Dude, let me tell you about another person that is hard to find information on and is really fascinating, but really evil. Have you ever heard of the Sackler family? I saw that there's a documentary or a movie out on Netflix about them or a show, but I don't know anything about them. So I'm in the perfect spot.

I'm interested in aware but completely ignorant. So there's two documentaries, one on who or they're actually fictional shows. They're both really good. One called I think dope sick one called painkiller one on who wants an Netflix.

The story is about Purdue Pharma. So Purdue Pharma is basically, I'll tell you a little bit about that and I want to tell you about the early, even before that because that's more interesting to me at this point. But basically Purdue Pharma started by three brothers. It was Mortimer, Raymond, and Arthur Sackler.

They were in the- Can you be named Mortimer and not be evil? He's one of the evil ones. And so basically these three brothers, I'll talk about their background in a second, but basically they were in the medical industry forever. Since they started as doctors and then they worked at psych hospitals where they did lobotomies.

And they're like, all right, let's start making these medicines and drugs. And so after 50 years of doing this, they eventually start or buy Purdue Pharma. They buy it for not a lot of money, but they evolved over 40 years to where they create this drug called Oxycontin. Oxycontin was basically an opioid and it wasn't popular at the time.

It was kind of unknown. They had a drug previously that was similar. They kind of changed it. And the big change they did was they called it a time released technology, I guess.

So and they threw a lot of just shady practices. It seems like they bribed the FDA. They hired lots of ex FDA people after they approved the drug and they promised them all the stuff. They got the FDA to approve Oxycontin.

And the big thing was that they called it time release and they said that it was believed that that word believe is important. So first time the FDA ever said that it's believed that less than 1% of people who take Oxycontin will ever get addicted. So what they do is they go and hire literally 2,000 sales people who go to all of these hospitals, these doctors, these clinics and they say, look, we have this new drug. It's for a moderate pain.

It's you can use to prescribe, vike it in, only if someone had surgery and had major pain or dying from cancer. We have this new drug. Very few people get addicted to it and has a time release capsule, which means that it's really hard to get addicted to. So you can give us people if they just have like a sore back or if they have headaches.

Like it's not that big of a deal. And they train these sales people and they're very aggressive about training. They hold contests where you can win a trip to Bermuda if you sell a certain amount of drugs. You can do all these types of things where they would give like watches.

They would throw parties with hot girls like they did all this stuff, but it was for medicine, particularly in opioid, which is incredibly controversial and might be very unethical. And so they make Oxycontin popular to the point where the company is privately owned. It's owned by two families, each Mortimer and Raymond's family. I believe Raymond's son Richard, Richard Sackler, becomes CEO and they grow this company to be doing like $30 billion a year in revenue.

And they're also famous because in order to help their reputation, they donate billions or hundreds of millions, maybe billions that added up to two art museums. And so the Met in New York, they have a Sackler wing, like the Louvin Paris, they have a Sackler wing. These guys never went to Harvard, but there's like the Harvard School or the Harvard Museum that's for the Sacklers. There's the Columbia, there's the NYU.

They've donated so much of their money to arts and it's basically what they call a reputation laundering. So they try to get into high society even though they're selling this drug. Turns out two years ago, I think, the government finally cracked down on them, made them go bankrupt. And I'm not sure where they are now, but they're very private.

So that's the story of Purdue Pharma, the book Empire Painsbury. So the end was the government cracks down on them and it goes bankrupt. So the government did what? Because does it actually still like everywhere?

Well, so what's I don't know much about these types of drugs, but there's OxyContin, that's like a brand name and then there's Oxycodone and I think that's the generic drug and then there's Hydrocodone and then there's all these forms of opioids. I think you could still get OxyContin, but basically at first the government made them pay a $10 million settlement and then people spent five years trying to track them down and like find like one thing that they did that broke the law because it was very weird because they weren't actually breaking the law or if they were, it was very hard to find which law they were breaking because the FDA kind of colluded and allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff. So technically, they kind of weren't breaking the law. They got hauled up in front of Congress and what the government eventually does is they're like, oh, you lied to Congress.

Because you said you didn't know it was addicting, but we found this email from four years ago where you did say you knew it was addicting and so that's actually what they got charged with sort of like how Al Capone got charged with tax evasion, not killing people. It was sort of one of those things and that led to a domino effect where eventually they had to pay something like an $8 billion settlement. The Sackler family had to kill control of the company and they were no longer allowed to be involved in this industry. And so that's kind of where we are today where Purdue Pharma, it still exists but not as it did before, but we'll see if there's any actually long lasting change with all that.

But it's a really fun story like in the sense of it's thrilling and that they were just horribly unethical. They did a lot of crazy shit. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, this basically killed hundreds of thousands of people, right?

Like just through addiction. It killed hundreds of thousands of people directly and that hundreds of thousands of people just taking that medicine were killed. But then what it led to is what we experienced this difference going all the way to places. You take oxy and then you're like, I love this, I need more of it.

Now I need something cheaper and something more accessible, heroin, and then which leads to fentanyl. And so it creates this huge opioid crisis where Purdue was like, hey, we didn't do that. We just prescribed oxycodone. These guys are dying from heroin.

When everyone's like, man, it's such a clear, like, there's such a clear transition here. Like, you guys are definitely responsible. So that's why it's like a thrilling story. At Harvard, there's still this building is still called the Sackler, whatever the Sackler Museum or whatever it's called, still up, which is kind of crazy that they haven't sort of canceled the name off the building.

So here's where things get interesting. And this is what I want to talk about. So I mentioned there was three brothers, only two brothers own Purdue. So the eldest brother, his name was Arthur, he died in, I think, the late 80s or mid 80s.

And basically, he was the eldest brother and he got them all into the industry. When he died, his estate sold his portion of Purdue to the other brothers and the other brothers are the ones who Purdue eventually created Oxycontin. And so Arthur's heirs are like, look, we had nothing to do with this. It's the same name, but we had nothing to do with this.

And Arthur was the one who liked to donate a lot of money to museums. So same last name, but their argument is that it's different people. But Arthur was incredibly shady. And I want to tell you his background, this is where things get really interesting.

So check this out. So this guy Arthur Sackler, he was the eldest brother. So he was a patriarchy guy and he brought in his two brothers into the business. And he was originally a doctor.

But his first hit was as he was a doctor, he started an advertising agency, a medical advertising agency. And he studied copywriting. That was his thing. He learned about copywriting through a traditional agency where he would work at a traditional agency at nights and weekends in order to help pay the bill.

And he was like, copywriting is awesome. I got to do this for value or this other drug, this other drug. And so all these huge pharmaceutical companies at the time, this was in the 50s, 60s, and eventually 70s, like what's that big one? Rosh ROCHE.

I believe that they were the inventors of Valium. And they start saying, Hey, Arthur, your little agency, we hear you have good ideas. What are your ideas? He's like, well, we have to hire a sales force.

Then we're going to create these ads. We're not allowed to advertise towards consumers, but we can advertise towards doctors. And they popularize Valium by making it like an everyday drug. Like, oh, if you're a little stressed, and you know, just like you were taking Advil, just like a V, you'll be calm.

And they have like housewives, vacuuming and pearls, like with a Valium, like logo, or he also popularizes tranquilizers. So we make some popular. So he builds up this agency, but in secrecy, he does two things that are interesting. One, he finds his competition.

There's another medical pharmaceutical ad agency, and he buys half of it. And so what he does is he eventually corners the market for pharmaceutical advertising. And he owns the other one secretly. And he'll say, look, you don't want to work with us.

Fine. Go to our competitors. They sound like they're a good fit for you. And they collude together on how to like market together and like which techniques are working.

The second thing that he does is he creates this thing called the medical tribune. It's a bi-monthly newsletter for doctors. So he's in the newsletter industry. He gets a free thing, a free newsletter that is eventually read by 300, 400, 500,000 doctors.

And he does is no one knows at the time that he owns it. But he starts using his original company, MacArthur, for advertising, buys ads in the medical tribune. And through this, he creates two huge companies. And that is how he creates his original fortune.

And I found I went and like dug through the newspapers.com. That's one of my favorite sources. You can find old newspaper clippings. I found some of the numbers to check this out.

So McAdams, sorry, I called it McArthur. It's called McAdams. When he died, the company was doing $170 million a year in revenue. And that was in 1985, I believe.

It had 170 employees. And in his other company, medical tribune, it was not sold for a significant amount of money. It actually sold for around $70 million to Axel Springer, who also bought Morning Group, our friend, Austin's company. So I've been given a hard time about this.

Austin Sackler. Yeah, for sure. Austin Sackler. And so annual revenues for medical tribune range between $50 to $80 million in the last few years of existence.

This was in the late 80s and adjusted for today. That's around $150 to $200 million a year. He also, Arthur, while he was doing this, he was buying, he owned like three New York City town homes. He was making seven sometimes eight figure dollar donations to museums.

And he had an art collection value at $60 million. When he died, I think he was 75. That was in the late 80s. He was worth around $150 million, which today is around $400 million, maybe five or six years after that.

That's when Oxy was created. But besides the fact that these guys are, you know, do illegal, horrible, unethical things, what's crazy as this guy owned two companies that were doing close to each of them over $100 million a year. And it was medical advertising and a medical newsletter for doctors. And he owned, it was him and his wife, owned the whole thing.

So like super fascinating background story about how this guy originally got wealthy. Wow. Prolific, prolific family, for sure. That's crazy.

That's a crazy story. It's crazy. So a lot of the stuff like the Purdue family or the second family is about OxyContin. And I thought that was interesting.

But what I thought was really interesting was just like, I was like, well, just from an entrepreneur's perspective, how did it get started? And so I did all this research like Doug deep. And then I went into like a, I used this thing as a historical money calculator. And so it helps you calculate how much money is for today.

I then looked at real state prices from the 70s and 80s in New York City. And I found out how much he was paying for homes. And I found, and I basically like reverse engineered like the income from this medical newsletter. Because I was just curious how it works.

I think, by the way, that still works today. There was another company, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a company that used to give out free TVs to doctors, TV and these TVs had like skeletons on them. And you could like, you could like move the skeleton around in order to like show like, all right, your colon is actually right here and we'll zoom in on that. But on the TV was ads for drugs.

And this company eventually got in trouble, interestingly enough for fraud. It turns out they were lying about a lot of stuff. But the pharmaceutical industry is so interesting to me because it's something that we're supposed to trust. Turns out it's a lot of its bullshit.

And it's just as shady as someone would say that this MIFRE CAM's website is or even worse. And it's really fascinating how this whole industry works. But medical newsletters, super fascinating. A legit company, Axle Springer, which is a $5 billion German newspaper company bought it.

And so I actually think these still work today. And if you go on TV, running by the way, no, they shut it down. I believe they shut it down. And like everything involving Sacklers, like people don't have anything to do with it.

But if you're on, you ever watch cable TV? Yeah, sometimes. Dude, it's only car commercials and drug commercials. That's like all it is.

It's like Sea Alice. And like it's, so anyway, this pharmaceutical advertising industry, I would never enter it. But it's really fascinating how it's done. And it's incredibly lucrative created this fortune.

And I think it's still great more. Well, I put this out there before, which was that we get asked a bunch about, hey, I'm doing a newsletter. Can you help? Can you invest?

Can you advise? Whatever. We basically, I think both of us say no to pretty much all of them. The one that I think is interesting still or two, the two areas that I am interested is who's doing an amazing job of this in real estate, who's doing an amazing job of this at the newsletter for Doc?

Those are the two that I really care about. And I'm like, I really want to find whoever's doing a great job of that and, you know, I'm a advisor partner with them to like help make that bigger. Because I think those spaces are amazing spaces. If you have the right person going to do it the right way, there's a lot of nuance to it.

But yeah, I still think this idea would just work again. And they sell for huge multiples. So aging media did this for nursing homes. So somewhat related.

I don't remember the multiple, but I heard rumors that was like 15 times profit, which is really great. And so these businesses are still super lucrative. And I think what Arthur did, whether you think that's good or bad, the way that he did it, I think it's bad inherently. I don't think it's bad, but the way that he did it is, I think it's still incredibly lucrative.

So let me tell you, let me tell you another story about it. Smart weirdo. All right. So here's a smart smart smart weirdo slash maybe bad people.

This guy, I don't think is considered bad, but he's my billion the week. That was cool. Not cool. A billion dollars.

So we have we have some actually multiple contenders. This is a billion the week run off actually. Maybe this is actually a campaign, but this guy is his. His name is Steve Davis.

You probably don't know who that is just because it's a fairly generic name, but. And if you Google his name, it's a professional snooker player. What is that pool? Yeah, it's like a pool.

Some kind of like pool, if you had like the wrong color balls or something. So this guy is Elon Musk's long trusted like right hand man. So let me tell you about this guy. He joined SpaceX back in 2003.

So very early on, crazy background. He got a twin master's degree in particle physics and aerospace engineering. Right? So you know, guys got a dome on him.

And he, but I think he was doing something like a little bit unrelated because one of the first employees that ended up getting hired by SpaceX. For somebody's like, I remember he wasn't like working in the industry doing something else. And then he got it. And the stories about this guy are kind of legendary.

So when Elon bought Twitter, people were like, who's he going to make CEO? And a lot of people were like, it's going to be Steve Davis before he put the lady from NBC in charge, which was sort of a weird pick. It seemed like it was Steve Davis. Why?

Because Steve Davis was living and sleeping in the Twitter office with his wife and their newborn child. Oh my God. I do. What a brown nose there.

Intense. So this guy, if you go read the stories about him, it's like it's like folklore. So one person said he's been working six hours a day every single day, seven days a week for years and years. Another person said he's insane.

He gets more work done than 11 people working together, just himself. One time, Elon Musk, they were doing something with the production of a part in the part of the rocket, I guess. And this was $120,000 part. And Elon's like, we need to get this down to $5,000.

And nobody was like, what are you talking about? Like, yeah, of course, I wish I was free too. But like, that's not how things work. He's like $5,000.

And he's left the room, right? And Steve Davis takes us as a personal challenge. He's just working for months and months to try to figure out how can we do this for 5k instead of 120k. He ends up getting it done for $3,900.

He figures out a way to do it. He emails Elon so excited. We did it after months. We figured out a lower price of this part down to only less than $4,000.

You said $5,000, we got it out less for Elon just replies, okay, period, doesn't matter. Steve Davis is an undeterred from this. And he just keeps going. He's become now he's the CEO of Boring Company.

So Elon's like a third company or whatever that he created after all that. And that company's legit, right? Boring company. They actually are making stuff for it.

Does a future company? No, they are doing things, but there's a lot of criticisms like cool. How's that tunnel going? What's going on?

You dug this tunnel, but it's only compatible with Tesla's and they have to put roller blades on before they go through it. I don't know. This seems kind of shitty, right? Dude, I used to look like Swiss cheese.

What's going on? You're just on flamethrowers. On one hand, they have improved the speed of boring, actually taking the tunnels. But the reason I found this guy interesting, not only is he Elon's right-hand man that you haven't heard of that.

I find that interesting. Not only is he probably worth maybe a billion dollars at this point, like based on his basic stock, I appreciate it like crazy since 2003. But this guy's totally weird. So he's got a great sense of humor that he takes it.

Basically, Elon sends him, Elon trusts him, right? He's like, hey, we need somebody on the ground in, you know, he's got this city in Texas. And at one point, he sent him to DC for a lot. They needed to be near DC because a lot of their contracts are government contracts.

So it's like, Steve got to DC from California. And Steve's living there. He's doing his job. He's like, God, you know what I miss?

I miss just having great frozen yogurt. He's like, they don't have that DC. He's like, all I got is this crap. I miss the California frozen yogurt.

You know what? So as a side job from his very important job at SpaceX, he opens up a froyo shop called Mr. Yogato. And he not just opens it up.

He goes and he works there after work for fun. And so he goes and he works there. And he starts to make it fun for himself. He creates just a bunch of ridiculous policies.

So if you go to Mr. Yogato, if you can stump him with a Seinfeld question, you're froyo's free. If you come in dressed as Bjorn Borg or whatever, like tennis player, or not, I don't use the terms of business or something. You get 25% off.

If you let him stamp Mr. Yogato on your forehead, 10% off. And so he created this long list of rules essentially on the secret menu for what he could do. And then when he had to leave, he had to move away, you know, SpaceX needed him in some other places.

And oh, shit, I'm not going to be able to go work in my yogurt shop after work. Okay. Hey, whoever comes to Mr. Yogato today, one of you is going to get the shop for a dollar.

He just gave the shop to some guy for a dollar at the end. He's like, here's the keys. The only rules. I want to keep, you know, being able to come here and eat half off and, you know, and also you got to keep some of the rules alive.

Like if you can recite a speech from Braveheart in a Scottish accent, 20% off. And so he does this yogurt shop. He also did that at one point. The headline if you Google make Mr.

Yogato is it's from an article in the watch Tony and says, Twitter's next CEO might be the Mr. Yogato dude. Yeah. He goes, the rules are amazing.

Just to go look at the rules of this rule number eight. Anyone wearing a kickball uniform and has played hard evidence by dirt underneath will automatically receive 10% off the yogurt. Anybody who can reenact the 47 second Michael Jackson thriller dance 20% off. If you perform a shorter choreographed dance, you get 10% off.

This is actually genius. By the way, order a yogurt for 30 consecutive days and we'll name a flavor after you. I mean, this guy's awesome. Yeah.

So he's having a good time. So then he opens up a bar called Thomas Foolery, short name Tom Foolery. And same thing. Instead, you know, every bar has a happy hour.

He created the angry hour where if you shout your order of the drink to the bartender angrily, you get a discount on your drink. You know, they serve like cookies and ice cream at this thing. And he's like, this is a place where we're going to take you back to being a kid, but with alcohol. Oh my God.

And I was like, dude, I love this guy. This guy is hilarious and weird in all the best ways. And I just went down this rabbit hole because his this guy kind of fascinates me. There's nothing about this guy really on the internet.

Nobody does interviews with him. People discovered this mystery. I got to think but there's not much out there about him. How'd you find the bar?

Only a few times. That's like, you know, part, you know, just digging in like what are some of the other crazies things that this guy does. When they announced the boring company, it was a press conference with Elon and some guy. The some guy is Steve Davis sitting next to him during the talk.

And what they did was to make their point is I kind of love this marketing to make their point that like, why did you create the boring company? And he was like, well, in like whatever, 100 years we haven't gotten any faster at drilling. Like we're still the same speed we were like 50, 75 years ago at digging these tunnels. Nobody's done anything innovative and to do it when they did the press conference.

It's them talking. But around them is a circular track. And on that track, they put us little like a snail or a slug or something. And it was just walking around the track super slowly to represent how slow this industry is and how slow other people are drilling.

And at the end of the two hours seminar, it was still only halfway around the thing. And they're like, you know, that's the industry today and we're going to change it. I love these little nuggets, these little sort of like marketing gimmicks that make a point in the sort of simplest, most memeable viral way possible. You know, I got to give you on credit and see credit for how they do that.

Where did he work before? How do you get a job with Elon? Well, just early on, you know, if you're twin masters degree in particle physics and aerospace engineering, there's not that many places to go work, you work in NASA or you work, you know, Boeing or you go work here, right? So he got a job there early on and just like started grinding like crazy.

And that's why even now just sort of grinds like crazy, sleeping in the office with a new board child that was just like, just like, just a bird. I have a rule. We have a rule in our house in the in the power house, where I will only sleep under another man's roof for one night. And if it's my father, if it's my father in law's house, he gets two nights.

I don't like sleeping at another man's home. It's the most emasculating thing on earth. I can't imagine moving my wife and newborn baby into the Twitter office. Can you go to my boss?

Yeah, my boss's office. Like, he likes like, Hey, how's our wife doing? Like, you're like a billionaire. You're not like an intern.

Yeah, you're like, I don't even like, I don't stay at another man's house. I don't even like say I got my father's law's house, let alone saying at the Twitter HQ, can you imagine with a newborn with a newborn or a baby? I can't imagine that's not for me, dog. What's your phrase?

Cornrows and face tattoos? Yeah, it's not for me, but I'm glad freaks like you exist. So I've got it exist. Sleeping at the office with my wife and baby, you can have that.

I'm happy you exist with that for me. Is there any part of you that is envious of this guy because I don't find any amount of envy other than I appreciate his sense of humor? Oh, yeah, I think this guy is great. I think I do I want to be him?

No, that's what I mean. Do I think that this guy's probably, you know, this guy's interesting. It seems like he thinks differently and I think I could learn or be inspired by it? Sure, for sure.

For example, I went deep. So one of the things he did while he was working at SpaceX and they moved him to DC, in addition to the other shop, he went to George Mason and got like a PhD. And his thesis, I found his thesis paper and I read it, which was very hard. I don't want to go into which you find this.

When I'm googling him, I can barely find anything. It's the same like four photos. Just a lot of grit and determination. You're the steam, you're the steam Davis.

Exactly. I applied to researching other great men more so than being one myself. You slept under a count of literally hours to buy this. It was literally six hours.

So I'm going to read you today. So first, the paper, the reason I like it is it's about the debasement of the US currency. I think he wrote this in what year was this. It's basically like very early Bitcoin days.

So let me just say this. So yeah, 2010. And his paper is called the trend towards the debasement of the American currency. And he talks about the bottom.

Does that mean that devaluing? So he talks about the history of like, basically, I don't know my notes are from me now, but like one of the things he talks about is you know, did you take notes on this basis just for yourself? Yeah. So I was like, you know, he's like $1 or whatever.

One ounce of gold was worth this many dollars before. And now that same ounce of gold requires whatever, like, you know, 100 X more dollars. Like basically, like, we used to be pegged to gold. We got off the gold standard and look at how, look at how much the dollars devalued relative to gold in that time.

And he's basically like, there's a trend towards the debasement of currency. And he talks about like, people think this is like a, you know, over time, slow, slow thing, but actually like 95% of the debasement has just happened in the last like 40, 50 years or something like that. Like it has accelerated quickly. And this is not just like, yeah, this is not just like, you know, a slow thing.

All right, here we go. So 98.3% has occurred from 19, 1792 to the present time. But even if you shorten that, like still 90% of it happened in a very short window of time. And he talks about why he talks about like what that why that's such a big problem.

And this is basically like a cryptocurrency like, like, pre-curtainer. He's not talking about Bitcoin in it, but this is like, this is crypto is a solution to this problem, right? Like Bitcoin, it's like, could not be debased, exactly, which is like the mean, but it's also like the truth. It's like, these things are cliche because they're, there's an element of truth and that's why they stick around in his acknowledgments in this paper.

So he says, oh, I want to think this professor, this professor, I want to thank this person. And he's like, I want to think my mom and dad is like, finally, thanks to the unknown chef that makes great brownies at small enterprise Hall cafeteria. Hopefully they will one day become a topping at Mr. Yogato or a successor, little yohai.

I'm like, this guy's just hilarious man. This guy is so funny to me. And yeah, there's like a hundred page paper for you guys. The most impressive part of it is that you read this guy's thesis paper and you got as far as to the acknowledgments at the end.

No, no, no, the acknowledgments at the beginning was from my friend. That's like the, the thank you at the beginning of a book. So I didn't read the whole thing. There's 162 pages.

I read like 40 pages, maybe step by step, step by step, where the debasement started and how it happened. And I'm like, wow, this is fascinating. I can never knew any of this. Is that what we have to do to become a digger PhD is to write a 140 page like original work on something?

That's amazing. I didn't think, I didn't know that thesis was that long. Not only do we not have a PhD, we honestly don't even know what the hell PhD is or what it takes to get one. I don't even know why I had my PhD.

I thought I meant poor, hardworking and driven. That was my joke. I didn't realize that you have to write a 100 plus page report on this. That's amazing.

I'm not that hungry and driven. Yeah, definitely not. That sounds really challenging. By the way, one of the great get-to-know-you questions in the business world that's sort of dorky, but actually is a good one, which is if you had to give an impromptu 45-minute talk on a subject, what would you give it on?

For you, it might be like copywriting or newsletters, something like that. The history of denim. What? I'm not joking.

I can do it. You weren't talking about denim. I got you. What would yours be?

There is no answer that is better than that. I don't want to critique the podcast. You see, the thing about looms is in the pre-abortion of the chore. The shadow looms pre-1944 were particularly special, but no, I could talk all about it.

Then post-war, when Japan was rebuilding Hiroshima, they needed a ton of machinery and that's what the shadow looms of America went to Japan. I mean, I can do it. That's the same. All right.

Your turn. What's your topic? Where do we go from here? You want to post-pilot?

I like post-pilot. All right. Let's talk about p owner. His name is Drew.

He bought the company. The reason he bought the company was because he owned, he used to buy software companies. We bought DesigninPublic.com. He bought Karma Loop.com.