So before we get into this, I got to ask the listeners and use something. So Jack, our friend Jack Smith introduced me to this guy a few years ago. And I don't even want to say what the service is. Yeah.
Okay. I think I could say a little bit. There's a ride sharing service, one of the ride sharing services. And what this guy does is he has, I think this is how he does it.
I don't exactly know, but you can buy discounted credits. Right. So you know how I pay 20 bucks and I get $40 worth of rides. Have you done it?
So he showed it to me years ago, right? This is like, I don't know. How long? Two years ago, maybe he showed it to us.
And I was like, Oh, great. I take rides all the time. We'd love to. Then as I went through the website, I was like, is this like a, is this a scam?
I don't think so because Jack said he's doing it. He recommended it. I've done it. But then I was like, is this going to get my account banned?
Like this is too good to be true. So my skepticism went off. I said, I didn't do it. I forgot about it.
And then he posted about it in the private, my first million Facebook group. He said, Hey, did you guys know about this? It's a really cool, clever hack and stuff that this guy's created. Jack loves those things.
Tell me more about what's got you right here. Yeah. So he has a service. Now he's doing it for a similar things.
And okay. So Jack was like, Hey, you should have this guy at the podcast. And I'm like, okay. So pros, this guy is a hustler.
He's doing amazing stuff. And I'm pretty sure. I think he's either set it or I figured out I'm pretty sure the way he does it. This guy's in India.
I think what he does is he has a network of like thousands of teenagers and kids. And he just gives them a first ride on on a ride service and he gets the $10 back like in referral and then sells it. Right. So he's gaming the it's not as far as I understand, it's not like legal.
There's no like sort of listening hacking or anything. He's just says, Hey, they have a referrals. They have a referral system, which is cool. You get a, you know, every time you refer somebody, you get certain amount of credits.
And what he realizes, he can do cheaper, maybe shorter rides in India. And that will count as a new customer that's been referred. And so he can give you in the US, you know, your full credit for a lightweight right there in the arbitrage. There's some money to keep some money and we get a saving and then the ride, the person who takes the ride gets a free ride.
So it's like a win, win, win for everybody. But the same to add to complexity. If you pay with Bitcoin, you get a bigger discount, which is what I've done. And if you like you, XYZ, it's, it looks incredibly shady.
Long story short, it's interesting. It's a cool story. It's definitely, it's not a scam, but it's questionable about the ethics. And so do we want to promote this or not?
Yeah, of course. I'm not promoting it. I am interested in this guy's story. And I think a lot of people be interested in it.
You can make your own judgment after you hear them out as to. Well, we can call that for promoting unethical behavior. Yeah, but people call you off or whatever. I don't think we're promoting anything.
It's one thing. Okay, it's promoting. If we say this is awesome, go do this. Okay, that's fair.
That's an opinion, right? But I think the right thing to do is to say, Hey, here's somebody who's doing something interesting. They're, they found a way to hustle and create, you know, create a business for themselves, as well as value for others. We should hear them out and then let people judge for themselves.
Is this like past the gray area and not cool for them? Or is this actually like, you know, fine? And so I think I think that's we should leave that up to listen. But our job is to tell the story.
And also I'm curious. So why not have a long who cares. Have a good day, journalists. All right.
Well, he's messaged you and I will set it up. I don't even know if he speaks English well enough. I guess we'll find out. Right.
Yeah, we'll find out. We'll bring him on. So I had some other of these. These are more like actual scams, but I wanted to talk about them.
I don't know why I wanted to just tell you some things that I've seen. OK, so recently, I don't know if you've seen on YouTube or if it's just in my recommendations, but all day, every day, there's a live stream of Chamath Polyapotilla, who's kind of like a known investor early Facebook guy, billionaire. It's like Chamath talking about Bitcoin and it has always like 40, 50,000 live viewers watching it at any given time and it says Bitcoin giveaway, Chamath Bitcoin giveaway. And what they do, what's that's doing, which is just totally a scam.
They have a stream going. They have a video embedded of Chamath talking about Bitcoin from like five years ago. It's not Chamath doing this, by the way. He's trying to get it down.
And then on the screen, it says Bitcoin giveaway, send your address and I'll send Bitcoin to somebody. And I think they're just making money off the ad revenue of this live stream. And it has like 40, 50,000 people. I'm sure some of that's bot traffic and some of it is real traffic.
But it's hilarious that somebody's doing this like, what a waste of time and be hilarious. That YouTube allows this to moths trying to take it down. But that's one little thing I noticed. Here's another one.
You know, when the US government came out with the kind of PPP, like, Hey, if you're unemployed or you're an employer and you have people, you can get access to money. So of course, the Nigerian sort of scammers came out and they actually took out a hundred million dollars from the system. I don't know if you heard about this. They just filed as either unemployed people or employers, or employers, or employers, the sort of Nigerian scam ring.
It's called the, what's it's called? The 409 scam, I think it's called? Is that the name of the program? Is that like the country code of?
So a lot of these guys are based out of Lagos, Nigeria, I think. And I believe that they're there because for some reason, it's part of, I don't know how it got embedded into that particular culture where they became a thing. But I think I also think that there's not really strict laws around like there's a lot of loopholes and law that you can not get punished. So this guy totally scammed, or these, these group of people scammed out a hundred million dollars out of the government, that the US government, well, the US government was giving away money for like, in a really intense two week, three week frenzy.
A brand you would just link some guy in from Wikipedia, Emmanuel Nuday, I don't know how you say his name, but he sold an airport for two and a 40 million dollars. He didn't own this airport. He just sold it, which is crazy. So there's that.
And then here's some other ones that I thought were interesting. So you know, super PACs, like a political fundraising thing, which sort of like gets around the normal donation limits for individuals. Yeah. It's like a, it's like a, it's like they like form a company or a fun and you give money to the fun and that funds allowed to donate a larger, larger quantity of money.
So the super PACs for every cause. So my, my friend who's, my friend Jason had this hilarious idea. He didn't do this, but he was just like, he's very politically minded. And he hated super PACs.
Cause he's like, Oh God, like it's the super PACs who get behind, let's say the gun lobby or whoever that like fund these things that I don't agree with necessarily. And I just think super PACs are kind of shady. There's lack of transparency. Well, and then he sort of had this idea of like, if you can't be up, join him.
So he was like, I know what I'll do. And I thought this was a hilarious idea. He's like, for every issue, I'm just going to spin up two super PACs, one taking each side and I'm just going to raise all the money I can for both sides. And I'm going to take a cut for every issue.
He's like, until they shut down super PACs. And I thought that was hilarious way to fight super PACs. Didn't do you remember at founders, dojo, right? He's to work out of it.
It was like this office that was kind of like early pocket on the TV show, Silicon Valley. I think Dave did something like this where he created a, a donation thing. Who was running Trump versus Trump versus Hillary? And he created like, he like created something where he was like, pleasure support to Hillary.
And then he also had a pleasure support for both of those things. Yeah, exactly. There's all kinds of crazy stuff. I don't know why I need to bring up a bunch of fake scams.
What, what's the wealthiest person who you know who got money off of like a shady way? I think about that. Do you have one? I don't know if this is shady, but I have a bunch of friends that have made a lot of money, like 30, $50 million off of what I consider to be borderline unethical internet marketing practices.
Like, for example, who have run call centers, like, you know how you get a phone call from like Marriott hotels, it's not really from Marriott. It's like, or, you know, if you I knew a guy who had a company. Hold on. So it's not really from Marriott.
And then what? I don't know how the scam works. I get the calls all the time, but they'll say like, you know, you won this. You won like it.
Basically, there's something you travel packages. I see. You were picked from a random drawing to get a discount on a all exclusive trip to Sandals. So that's not unethical.
It's obnoxious. And then I know a guy who made a bunch of money off a co-registration company. So like when you sign up on Expedia, they sell your email address to 18 other travel stuff. And he was the middle man and he made like $50 million and bet it all on in the stock market in one big.
OK, the closest I first thing that came to mind or the closest thing that came mind, I don't actually know this person, but I know know the guy's kid and this is the dad. So this guy, Naveen Jane, who I know him, CEO of this thing called Info Space back of the day. And like during the dot comp boom, Info Space was like, you know, right in high. And then, you know, sort of overnight, Info Space crashes, but he had sort of sold out or, you know, protected his own interests right before the crash and was like, you know, everybody lost their jobs in the 401ks in the company.
And this guy was like a billionaire. And so that was sort of shady. And then he started this thing called Intellius after the fact. I think that's the name of it.
Yeah. And it had a similar outcome. Yeah. Intellius is this like shady thing where you would sign up for a free credit check, I think, or it's like that you can find information from public records about people or about yourself.
I don't remember exactly what the product was because I don't spend too much time, you know, like thinking about the stuff. But basically, there was this tiny checkbox at the bottom, which was like, cool, you got this free credit check, but then we're going to charge you 20 bucks a month, just kind of on subscription after that for some bullshit. And so they were making millions and millions of dollars and people were all like, wait, what am I just paid like $200 this year for Intellius? What does that mean?
What is this? And people kind of screenshotted the flow and showed how like, you know, size four font, the fine print was that you're going to get charged for this thing. And so that was pretty bad. Yeah, that kind of claims to be a billionaire.
Yeah, exactly. And he's a pretty like crazy charismatic guy. He's now got this like company that's about going to the moon, like a rockets company and all kinds of stuff. But he's definitely behind that smile.
There's definitely like some skeletons or some baggage, like, you know, neither of those two stories of space or I think it's called Intellius. Neither of those seem to like the most up and up companies. Well, let's talk about some legit companies. All right.
So I'll do one. So this one actually comes also from Jack. So this is sort of the Jack episode. He's the guest, but we don't have him here.
So he was talking a little bit about baseball cards. And I know baseball cards are hot right now because Gary V has been really pumping baseball cards, talking about baseball cards all the time. And so baseball cards are like a collector's item. They have value.
They have, they appreciate over time. It's, you know, like many, many goods of that kind. Now, one thing that's a common problem for people who are buying, selling and trading baseball cards is the actual receiving of, you know, you receive a shipment, you have to open it up, you hope it's not damaged, you've to verify that it's real. And then if you sell it, you got to sort of go through the whole shipping process right back to the other person, hope that nothing goes wrong in process.
And so for people who are collecting these as a sort of financial asset in some ways, they don't, they're not like sitting there trying to carry them with them to school or something like that. You don't need the physical card. He was saying, why is there not sort of a central repository where you can like a safety deposit for the baseball cards? We're basically you buy and sell it online, but it never moves.
It just sort of exchanges ownership, but it's all stored in the central vault where it's cooled properly, so they don't degrade. They're all verified by a professional there who's centrally located. You don't have to deal with any of the shipping costs or potential issues there. Yeah, so I think it's a pretty clever idea and obviously could extend to sneakers, could extend to art, could extend to other things.
Maybe there's something like this that exists. I don't do baseball cards or art. Do you dabble with any of this stuff? Um, I got into shoes after I learned about them.
We wrote about it on trends of about a year ago and I've since gotten into them. Yeah, but not to the point of wanting to make money off of it, but to the point of like spending $300 on a pair. But I did do research on this and it seems as though there's not a great solution. So Jack's on to something.
We wrote about this actually heritage auction house. What I would do if I wanted to create this, which I actually think this is a wonderful idea. I don't, I certainly don't have time. So I'm not going to, but this is a great idea.
And what I would maybe do is contact a lot of the auction houses and be like, what do you guys do now? Right. What, why can't this work? And or collectors, you know, high-end collectors, people who have a portfolio of these things, because I think it is a very small, it's a small, it's a niche community, obviously.
This is a number of pieces you think. But my point is that the kind of circle of influence is pretty tight here, where the number of people you would need to convince and that you could go learn from to see if this is a real problem is kind of small. And that's great. It's like kind of like online poker where you just go get these 15 pros to do something.
And now they sway the rest of the casual community with them as like, oh, yeah, that's the best practice. That's how we do things now. It's pretty interesting. And I love it.
And I like it's, I wonder, I would have to imagine this has significantly better economics or maybe not in storage. So do you know how the companies like a clutter are doing? I always assumed that those companies are on the verge of failure. Now I don't know if they're, because I think Omni actually, it's like, everything's going great.
We keep raising money. We keep adding hyper football people and we shut down. Like that's how these companies tend to go or they break out, you know, but you know that public storage, you know the company, public storage. Yeah.
It's the most profitable company on the stock market. Is that right? By cool claim. Is that the margin?
So it like does four billion in revenue and like two billion in net income. Interesting. Yeah. It's like the most profitable thing.
Now they don't do what they don't do all this high cost shit that all the new startups do where they want to bring you your stuff. They just say like, here's a room. Bring your stuff. It's yours.
Give us $100 a month. But it could be a, it's a really cool idea. That's my point. And so also another thing, I'm sure a lot of people know this, but I didn't know this, but these storage companies, the real estate businesses.
Yes. Um, it's just a, it's just a way to get profit to buy real estate. A great book I read when I was in college that inspired me. I was like on the verge of going down the real estate track rather than entrepreneurial track or the sort of startup track.
Um, it's called confessions of a real estate entrepreneur. It's an awesome book. If you're a total noob and you're just curious about how to help people make money. It's not about the terms and the tactics and all that stuff.
It's this one guy being like, I want to make it real estate. So then he's like, my first deal, I had no money and I found this warehouse and I negotiated this and he just walks through deal by deals for like 10 deals, uh, confessions of a real estate entrepreneur. And one of them was about storage and, you know, the whole game with real estate is you sort of need to see value where others don't. So other people look at this 25,000 square foot store warehouse and they say, okay, warehouse is our value to X dollars per square foot.
So this building is worth a Y. And what you need to say is, Hey, if I subdivided this warehouse, it's just tiny storage units and I added all up. Now it's worth, you know, X plus Y dollars per square foot is more, it's worth more. So I can go buy it.
I can actually pay more than the next to me because I'm going to, I know I can get more value out of it than that person can cause I know how to change use or add value in some way. That's what we work did. They took office floors and say, Hey, what if you subdivided it and rented this out by the desk? And so that's like a common real estate strategy.
That's what storage units are. And if anyone listening to this, I think some people will get mad at me real estate as the highest ratio of rich and dumb people like, uh, how do you, what, you don't want to say? I think the highest ratio of low IQ rich people. Yes.
The very sure doesn't mean if you do real estate, you're low IQ. It means there are more wealthy people in real estate who are not superstar geniuses who, you know, work them, normal, normal, smart, hardworking people, a normal, smart rational person who obviously had some skills to some risks, but there are more wealthy people in real estate that way. If you just said, Hey, Sean, you know, in the next 10 years, you die. If you don't get wealthy, I'd be like, cool, go into real estate.
Like that's my best path. My highest likelihood chance of becoming wealthy is the real estate versus any other sort of venture. Yeah. It's the highest, it's the highest dumb people to rich people job.
I've ever seen my life. I love it. Okay. So that's my, that's, that's Jack's idea, which is sort of Fort Knox for baseball cards.
I like it. What else we got? Are we going to talk about, Hey, if you talk about, Hey, I don't think we did. We didn't go for it.
Um, okay. By the way, this, look at what I'm drinking here. I drink these all day. You see that?
It's called kind of consurial. It's not, not, it's not the same as non-alcohol beer. It's zero alcohol beer. They're awesome.
Wait, what do you mean it's not the same as non-alcohol beer? What's the difference? I don't know the legality, but then I drink a lot of non-alcohol beer because I like beer. The normal non-alcohol beer says it has less than 0.5% alcohol.
This has 0.0 and Heineken said that this is their fastest growing category. And you like it? I love it. I, I drink, I'll drink four day.
So what's in it that makes it taste, does it taste like beer or it tastes like something else? Uh, it's a, it's a, they called a malt and yeast beverage. It's a unique recipe. It has zero percent alcohol is brewed with pure malt and special A yeast, just like the original Heineken vlogger beer.
Um, it has the same taste, but without the alcohol. But that's hilarious. They sell the same product without the expensive ingredients. Can charge the same for it.
Like here, it will give you less ingredients, water, malted barley, hop extract and natural flavor. I thought it was so. Oh man, I love these. Uh, I, I drink them like crazy.
Um, they're awesome. Okay. Um, we apparently, we did talk about, Hey, a little bit, but what did you want to talk about? Uh, I just wanted to sort of call out the, the sort of marketing side of things, uh, of what they do.
So have you read the book rework, which is their 30 segels book years ago, but they basically say that like one of the marketing principles that they talk about is like, they haven't had an enemy, right? Yeah. I think there's a chapter called pick a fight. Um, and I want to read it.
So let me see if I can pull it up real quick. Okay. So here's a section of it. If you think a competitor sucks, say so when you do that, you'll find others who agree with you and rally to your side being the anti blank is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers.
For example, don't get donuts, but it's itself as the anti Starbucks. It, it's adds mock Starbucks, uh, for using, you know, these fake Italian words, you know, instead of just saying small, medium, large, or they'll do a campaign, like, uh, they made a site called dunkedbeatstarbucks.com, where visitors can send e-cards with statements like friends to let friends drink Starbucks. I would use another example. It takes on the old guard of car manufacturers.
On notice, like touting how it's first alternative Apple, Jabs at Microsoft with ads that compare Mac at PC owners, um, et cetera, et cetera. All these examples show the power and direction you can gain by having a target in your sights. Who do you want to take a shot at? You can even pick yourself as the opponent of an entire industry, Dyson's Airblade starts with the premise that the hand dryer industry itself is a failure and it tells it and then positions help as a fashion or hygienic option.
I can't believe it's not butter puts the enemy right in its own name. Having an enemy gives you a great story to tell your customers, taking a stand always stands out, people get stoked by conflict. They take sides, passion, sir, it's a good way to get people to take notice. What do you think?
Yeah. I'm down. I right now, my enemy is the New York Times a little bit. And basically journalists who say they don't have a bias, but like they can't admit they do.
So yeah, I'm down with that. And with hey.com, I call it hey.com, I think it's working well. I think that, So they picked, I think initially they picked just traditional email, like Gmail as the enemy for being like cluttered, you just keep getting spam by random things, you know, you don't want it to headache. And now they picked Apple and it was a way better fight to pick because it's a more novel story and it doesn't seem as self-serving as when they pick Gmail as the competitor.
And I like that. I actually like these guys a lot. And so I'm going to talk shit about them a little bit, but in general, I really like them and I respect them. But I do think that it's a little lame, what they, like some of these moves are a little bit lame because they also pick a fight with like main main stream startups about giving equity when they're like, make millions of these guys probably make 10 million, 15 million year in profit and they're very, very wealthy.
And I feel like it's a little hypocritical. So they, they, on Twitter people are calling this beef marketing. So just have a beef with everybody just to keep, keep your name relevant. And there's always going to be some people that agree with your side of the story.
So for example, against the startup industry, they are anti VC. Don't take fun. They're not going to get from Japazos. Right, but on the whole, they don't play this.
They are profitable and they don't play these sort of Rayza, A, B, C, D, E, like sort of big, big, big, big IPO. So they pick that fight. They pick the fight of you don't need to work 80 hours a week. Thirdies enough, be productive, just be smart.
Don't kill yourself. You don't have to be a work holder. We did the other day that they were working through the weekend to resolve all the issues. Right, but I'm saying in general, they, I'm not saying these are correct.
I'm saying these are the fights that they easily trigger people. Just like they trigger you just now. Then there's, then they also do like, they take summers off, which is part of their kind of workaholic thing. And then one more, which is sort of like, don't depend on any platform.
So like, don't be dependent on anybody and these platforms. I get it. And I like a lot of their philosophy. I just think it's stupid when you make rules.
You know what I mean? Like when you make rules around something, it's like, dude, not everything has a rule. Like a lot of times, like you can't say that you are anti-VC. I'm not anti-VC at all.
I'm just like pro, like, let's be logical and let's look at the variety of options. Right, but that doesn't sell. Right, so if you just looked at it in terms of like, if you just said they're doing all of this for marketing purposes, if you believe that to be true, then what they've done is incredibly effective. It's sort of like buffer, right?
Maybe you don't agree that you should transparently put all your company salaries and revenue and losses out there publicly. But if you look at it like marketing, it's been undeniably effective at marketing the company. No, I'm on board. I think, look, it's working for them.
I just think that some of their opinions are bullshit, but I like them a lot and I think that it's incredibly effective for them. So why don't you pick more fights? That's kind of my takeaway when I saw this. I feel like you guys could do way more of this.
I think we should. And so like, I think it's a complete game plan right now. So I just picked the fight with the guy today. Did you see my Twitter?
Okay, I'm looking at your Twitter right now. So you picked a fight with this two VDLDY, South person? Yeah. So what is this?
They copied my landing page. They copied trends completely. And I just, they're full of shit. And I emailed them and told them to fuck off and they like tried to justify it.
I'm like, no, you're lying. Like I just like you have a web archive. You just copied our page. Like I see when we launch in them and you launch you, word for word, remember it's off.
That's okay. So you picked to fight with them. But that's actually, if you look at like what the rules are of this game, that's actually a bad fight. You don't pick a little other than you.
You got to be right. Exactly. Well, you said New York Times. So first I was thinking, because you guys have as a competitor, like a morning brew, right?
So like they pretty similar, pretty, they're kind of similar size. And that's one that could be more like PewDiePie versus T-Series where the feud actually would help both sides grow. So that's more like wrestling where you could be like, cool, I'm gonna tech you. You attack me.
This is just gonna generate a bunch of buzz. It's sort of like the varsity color daddy thing where it's like both sides end up more popular and through the drama. So like that's one that I think you guys could do. The other one would be more like against the mainstream mainstream media, which could be New York Times.
Now there has to be some level of authenticity to it. So it's gotta be something you genuinely do believe. Like it could be the thing that like, why are you guys pretending like you're not biased? But that doesn't tell a great story about you guys.
What you do is not like, you guys are like, it's not that the value prop of the hustle is to be opinionated clearly and be subjective, not even trying to be objective. I don't think that's like what y'all do. So I think you gotta pick a fight that A, makes sense. B is polarizing and C, somehow tells the story of what the hustle is all about by being the opposite of the thing you're hating on.
I thought about making fun of the scam because I think they're like a joke. But then I was like, I don't know if I would that fight. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's something here like in general you do have strong opinions about things.
But I don't see that come through via the hustle. Maybe intentionally, maybe you've censored it, maybe you haven't. But I think you guys have been doing this. No, I'm not a favorite of censorship.
How about this? Let me, let me, let me, a small tangent. Something that I'm, we're testing and I'm thinking about launching is I'm pretty obsessed with the idea of expert opinion as opposed to journalist opinion. And one thing I'm testing is I've built this network of like a thousand experts and every day we're emailing them stories and getting their opinion and we're gonna just publish their opinion.
We're not gonna touch it. We're not gonna edit it. We're just gonna say here's a guy through what they said. And that's interesting to me.
And I'm gonna get people to pay money for it. Yeah, I think that's actually pretty dope. I saw the, like mock up you guys did, I didn't love that. But I love the idea of this because when I think about it, this actually what I care about, I care about what do the people who actually know their shit think about this.
And not the journalist with their opinion, the editor with their agenda, the journalist talking to an expert and then like siphoning off one quote and having that be, you know, that fitting into some narrative. I just like, let's say it's the like right now, the NBA is about to resume and there's big debate. Should they come back or should they not come back? Some of the players don't want to come back because the coronavirus, some of the players don't want to come back because it takes away from the Black Lives Matter movement.
And then all the ESPN talking heads that talk about this, like there's literally this guy, Brian Winhorse, who's like, you know, the opposite of a basketball player. He's like a short fat white guy who's never played basketball and he's always talking about what should happen, what shouldn't happen. And I'd rather just be like, cool, the, the ping goes out to all the NBA players. And here's the 80 responses we got back.
Lebron said this, I don't know if it's anonymized or if it's with their name, but that would be way more interesting to me. It's like, here's what they actually think. Yeah, so that's what I'm thinking about building or is what we're attempting to build. And in that case, the enemy to me is clear.
It's like journalism as a whole. Journalism because when you think about it, like, we don't need you. And the phone is a journalist. And I hate when I hate the fact that journalists, journalism is a circle jerk on Twitter.
Like they only want to impress each other. They don't want to impress their audiences. Like you have to, like what I tell our team, I'm like, guys, we don't serve each other. We serve our readers.
Like we are their waders. We are their servants. We exist to give them information. And my team who has worked at a variety of places are like, well, that's so different than other places because it's all about how do we win awards or how do we do this or that?
And I'm like, yeah, that baffles me that that that is the thing. So that's our enemy for that. Yeah, okay. That could be good.
Cool. Pick a fight. I have another random idea or thing to talk about. So we both like this comedian, Chris Delia.
And he was a funny guy. We thought he was great. I'll speak for myself. Yeah, I don't know how you felt.
But we thought he was hilarious, whatever. He's a comedian. I thought he was the best. I've seen him live a couple times.
And I listened to his podcast a bunch. That's one of the few podcasts I listened to. Anyways, last week gets exposed as sort of like a creep. And so a bunch of people come out and say, hey, Chris Delia was messaging me when I was 17, 16 years old and asking me for new pictures and all this bad stuff.
So hold the people come out at once. Chris Delia is creeping around or allegedly creeping around. And so this comes out. He's sort of getting canceled right now.
So two questions for you. All right, question for you. What was your reaction when that happened? And then I have an idea based on that.
My reaction was if I was even bummed that he was accused. And the evidence was pretty damn strong. So I believe it to be true. And in my head, I think, well, fuck you.
Like you're the worst. So I feel pissed off because I was a huge, huge, huge fan. And I don't know. I'll still listen to his jokes.
But I will not support him financially. Yes. That was my other question. Well, if you're listening to him, you're still supporting him in some way.
I guess so. But I don't know if I would pay money to go see him. Right. So that's not my other question is, and nobody really talks about this.
It's sort of like, cool. I'm a fan or you're canceled. But I think in reality, as so many people, this is two of my favorite comedians, Luci K and Chris Delia, both came out to be doing really creepy mess-up behavior. But there's also people who are clearly still fans of Luci K.
They're probably not fans of what he did. But they're still fans of him. They'll still listen to his stuff. They'll go to his shows.
And I was wondering how you deal with that being torn between what they did. And maybe you don't even like the person, but you're kind of like their art. I don't know. Do people still like it?
I still like the show. Yeah, I still watch the Cosby show. I listen to Art Kelly. I love Michael Jackson music.
Here's my logic. Here's with great people, people who achieve greatness, who are world class at the craft, are nine out of 10 times fucking weird and hopefully only weird. Sometimes they're also bad people. And I just accept that the people who I like are also good.
There's a great quote where it says, every great man is a bad man. And in this case, it is incredibly true. Where with all this great stuff, he just has also done a ton of bad shit. So I still will absolutely listen to his stuff.
But I won't. I think he's a piece of shit. Right. Isn't that weird?
I'm sort of in the same boat. I don't know how to feel. That's why I brought it up. That's not weird.
I mean, surely, I don't know. I don't even like in political, but maybe Chick-fil-A. It's like, dude, my taste buds don't know that you hate gays. Right, right.
So it's hard. I could disagree with you, but still enjoy your stuff. Yeah. And I think that with all that's coming out, everybody's going to have to figure out how they're going to deal with this because your favorite, something, musician, athlete, comedian, politician, one of your favorites is going to go down for being a total either asshole, creep, criminal, bad guy.
Something's going to come out. And I think everybody's going to have to ask themselves, cool, how am I going to deal with that? Am I going to still consume their stuff that I like? Or am I going to protest it?
Am I going to be conflicted? Am I going to be conflicted? What's going to happen? It's like, you know, Martin Luther King's one of my heroes.
But he also cheated on his wife a lot. Right. Or that's like the rumor. So it's like, what about that?
That's really crazy. Apparently, I just learned about this. But like, the FBI was tracking him for a while because he was seen as sort of like a potential enemy of the state. And they like bugged his hotel rooms or whatever.
There's reportedly, no one's seen this, I guess, but it's reportedly tapes of him sleeping with like 40 different women outside of his marriage and participating in some sort of sexually deviant activities. But he's Martin Luther King, right? He's got like a day named after him and everything else. Yeah.
So that's what my opinion is. It's like, everyone who's great is also bad in another person's perspective. And you just got to take the whole person. Right.
OK. So the idea I had off this was actually a wiki leaks for creeps. Because one of the things I was really disturbing that came out of this was not just, oh, this guy thought was cool. I liked, turns out to be not so cool.
And I don't like what he did. But it was like a lot of these text messages were from like 10 plus years ago. And so, and same thing with like a lot of people that get canceled, like the Bill Cosby stuff, a lot of that stuff, I think was happening in the 90s or something like that. And it takes sometimes decades for this stuff to come out.
And I think that's a shame because, you know, A, the person sort of gets away with it and continues to harm other people or sort of be a, you know, a menace in society is out on the loose as long as these things stay secret. But I understand why people don't expose things as in, they get tied up and wrapped up in it. And you know, you can see the girls who came out and said something about Kristalia, their Twitter, they're getting attacked by his fans who are like, you know, why'd you, why'd you send him the picture and like stupid stuff like that? And so I think there needs to be sort of a WikiLeaks for creeps where there is a, there is a way to dump anonymously evidence and claims against people.
And then there needs to be some sort of like verifying function, like a set of journalists kind of like the people who went and studied the Panama Papers and like dug into it and try to figure out what's real, what's not, but like a guaranteed sort of anonymity layer so that, you know, information can get out faster. What do you think of that? As long as there's a trustworthy third party to verify, I'm into it. It's just so easy to accuse people of doing bad stuff.
Totally. And that's the reason this can't be a company because you'll just die of sort of libel and slander, you know, like, because anything that turns out to be true, you get sued out of existence. I think there was like a, there was an app that used to rate guys, I think it's a Lola or Lala. I remember that.
I remember that. I remember that. I remember that. My roommate was rated on it and it said like, not like she did on me and like small dick.
And I was like, oh, dude, that sucks. I was like, I'm sorry, right? I mean, that sucks. So yeah, like, I think you can't really do this as a company, but I think for society, it would be good if there's a way for people to be able to come forward about bad behavior better for a whistleblower network to come forward.
And not just about like how WikiLeaks is about sort of documents around certain things, but actually around, you know, racism, sexual harassment, things like that. I think there needs to be something like this. And I'm saying I haven't put a lot of thought into this. I'm not an expert about this stuff.
But when I saw that, it takes 10 years to come out, I'm like, something's broken. Yeah, it is crazy that like Hannibal Burris joke about that Bill Cosby thing and his joke was something like, what? Everyone knows this. Everyone knows this guy.
Everybody knew that. Like everyone, we all talked about this. We all know this. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?
I didn't know this. I agree that I also think that there's a lot of room to deconstruct Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is I'm like, I wouldn't say I'm a hardcore libertarian, but I'm libertarian or I tend to be on a lot of topics. And I think that Wikipedia should actually be a nonprofit or some type of like owned by the government and should be like a national treasure that.
Yeah, the Department of Education should just own Wikipedia and fund it through, you know, what does the, look at the Department of Education funding. And I bet that would cover, you know, easily what Wikipedia needs to stay around. And it's doing a hell of a lot more than the Department of Education probably is. Wikipedia already a nonprofit.
It might be a nonprofit, but I want to make sure it never goes out of business. I think that Wikipedia is a treasure. And the same with Wikipedia, I'm like, Reddit, don't make money. You don't need to make money.
Well, this ask for a donation thing and just let us see your expenses and I'll just give you a little bit and everyone will. It's like one of the few things where I'm like donation or government funding is the way to go. Right on. Okay, I want to give people in the last four minutes.
Oh my God, Department of Education, 68 billion in funding. Yeah, they can afford to. How much do you think Wikipedia? I don't even know.
I mean, if you have five billion page views a month, how much will they say on their thing? We need this much to survive. I don't know what it is, but it's like, I don't think it's above two billion. I don't even know.
What do you think Twitch costs to run? I can't say. Okay, if I, or just for the hosting, I'm ignorant. I don't know.
Does it cost more than 10, do you think it would cost more than 10 million a month? Yes. I can't say about Twitch, but I would just say Wikipedia. Sorry, Wikipedia, you think it would cost more than 10 million a month just in hosting?
I think it's probably about that. That'd be my guess. So they need $200 million a year. AWS could just fund it.
Okay, this is powered by AWS. It could be on every page, powered by AWS free hosting that way. Wikipedia's funding is around 100 million a year. There it is.
Okay, so let's give one more idea before we go because we talked about a bunch of random topics today. Okay, business idea. I'm just out my new house and I'm renting this place. And as part of it, you need renters insurance.
And so I'm like, Oh, fuck, here's a task. I don't want to go do. Yeah, I go get lemonade. Yeah, I got to do whatever.
Then I was thinking about it. I was like, and the guy who's telling me to do the insurance is the broker, the agent who like rented me the house. And I was like, why isn't this just part of the lease? Where like, Hey, by the way, check this box because you need renters insurance and just do it through me.
And you have your registered insurance done. And so obviously this guy is not an insurance company. But what I think you could do is create a back office insurance company where the storefronts is actually just all the rental agents and brokers that already are talking to the customer just to enforce these terms and force you to have insurance. Why aren't they empowered?
So I'll give you an example of this. I have a buddy named Guy Gowl, great name, like a top five name. Guy Gowl. Guy Gowl is his name.
That's great. And Guy has this company, RISE, I believe, is the name of the company. And what he does is he's like, Hey, you know, all these when you go to sell a house and the sign goes up and it's like Caldwell Banker or like, whatever, KP homes or whatever it is. It's like, Oh, is the brokerage name?
And then like the agent is kind of like a very secondary footer thing. He's like, dude, the world is shifting where the agents really want their own brand. The agents are the ones who go to the marketing to sales. So what he did was he's like, and the brokerage takes a huge fee.
So when an agent gets their fee, I think the brokerage would take 50%. And so he was like, Look, through technology, I can make a more streamlined brokerage. And what I can do is I can be a hidden back office for any agent. So your name is Alex, you know, Alex Rompero.
Well, you could just be the Rompero group and you could build your brand as the sort of forget, Caldwell Banker. You don't need those guys. I will be the back office. I'll take care of the legal compliance and paperwork that the brokerage normally does.
And I will only charge you X percent fee and it's less than the 50% that goes. Isn't this exactly what Caldwell Banker does? Caldwell Banker does it, but they are the back office, but they put their brand first. And a broker can try to kind of put their own marketing front on top, but it's not their core model and they take a huge cut.
So what this guy did with rise really smart, he targeted the top 1% of agents in every market. He goes to them, he said, Dude, you're a top 1%, you don't need Caldwell Banker. You are the brand. And he said, Bring your book of business to me.
I'll do the same work that they do for you with the lower cut. And I'm going to, and look, you push a button, your website gets spun up automatically. I'll take care of all your sort of technology needs. And I take 15% or 50% or whatever it is.
And so I think it's really smart model. He's doing really, really well. How's he doing? I can't say, but the company's doing well.
And I think it's a really smart model attacking a very big space, which is this back in brokerage thing for home sales. I think you could do the same thing for insurance. I think you could build an invisible insurance company and have the brokers or the agents be the storefront and just say, Hey, you should just offer this to all your clients when they rent from you or buy from you. I know that Compass kind of did this in the real estate space, but there's somebody doing this for business insurance where they're trying to be a back office of service.
I think there's more that I think there's more companies that can do this that are not doing this today where you empower the agent who is already at the point of sale and you give them a thing to upsell that gives them a little bit of money and it makes your customer acquisition free and you just need to provide the back and service for it. So I think there's a whole class of business like this. Yeah, I need to go and research all this. This interests me a lot.
I'm going to go look up Caldwell Banker. I don't even know what they do entirely. Yeah, deep dive it and deep dive Compass because they kind of disrupted the problem. All right.
I got to run my computer batteries at 1%. I'm going to shut my computer. I got to go. See you.
See you.