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I'm okay, I just, I'm packing up all my stuff and I had all my trash which include garbage as well as furniture packed outside my house really nicely for the garbage people to come and I just got into a big argument with these crazies that were like digging through it and throwing it all over the place and I was like, can you guys not do that please? And they're like, this is what we do, we destroy trash and we throw it all over the place. I was like, don't do that. I got, put me in a horrible mood.
So where did you get out did you just walk away or do they stop? No, we got to do a little pushing match and eventually a pushing match. What? Oh my god, that's amazing. You push the guy. Yeah. They got into a fight or flight mode, man. It pissed me off. You are you're so easily triggered. It's amazing to me.
I'm on edge. I think that with Corona and the economy, like I said, I'm in fight or flight mode. And like, I think something changed. This was, I imagine this happened to you already, but like something changed when I got married. I was like, I'm in like, I got a. Dude, I'm the exact opposite. I thought that would kick in. I had a kid. I thought I'd kick it. It didn't. I'll tell you on my first date with my wife now, Sonya. First date, we go out. We get sushi. It's great. We go back to her place.
And we're, we're hanging out and the doorbell rings and I'm like, it's pretty late at night. It's 11 or 12. Who's at the door? So she just kind of like ignores it for a second. She's like, that was weird. And then the doorbell rings again. She's like, okay, wait, there's actually somebody there. So she's like, just wait here. I don't know where that wealth. I'm like, okay, whatever. I wait there. She goes downstairs. She opens up the door.
I hear like a brief conversation for a second. Door closes. She comes back upstairs. She's like, sorry about that. And I was like, what, what happened? Who was it? And she's like, Oh, it's nothing. And like, it's like a, you know, like a doorbell ditch. And I was like, Oh, okay. Kids doing pranks. No problem. We sit, we sit, we sit down for a minute. Doorbell rings again. She doesn't move.
I'm like, are you going to get that? And then she's like, no. And then the doorbell starts ringing like just nonstop. Like she's like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And I was like, okay, you gotta go get that. And so she's like, okay, hold on, stay here. And so she goes downstairs. Anyways, I hear a voice. I hear a guy's voice to be like, he's like, who's here? And I hear this guy coming up the stairs. And it's, it's an ex-boyfriend who has shown up on our first date.
You know what he had done? He was out, he was, he had come by the house to try to like pitch to get back with her. And he saw through the window that we were watching a TV show, Nip Tuck. And he's like, we've already seen that show. You wouldn't, you wouldn't be watching that show alone. He's like, somebody must be here. And so he was like, somebody's here, I know it. And so he comes up the stairs and I don't know who this guy is. I'm also not that invested in her at this point. So I'm just like, like, I'm not trying to, I was like, I'm not trying to, you know, getting any drama here. This is, this is already kind of messy.
So he, he comes upstairs and he doesn't know what he's supposed to do. He's like, he's here now and he's standing there facing me. And, um, so I just think of my hand to shake his hand. I was like, Hey, I, I'm shot. What's up? Cause I don't fully know what's going on, but I definitely know that something's up now. So he shakes my hand and then I could see he gets angry at himself for shaking my hand. And she's just like, Oh, horrified. She's like, Oh my God, you need to leave. Why are you here? And he's like, Oh my God, I knew this would happen. Oh my, this is the worst.
And then I start laughing because I'm like, this is a comical situation. First day, ex boyfriend shows up, angry little Indian guy. And I was just like, okay, I start laughing. And then this tilts him like crazy. So she's in between me and him. He swings, punches me in the face, but he punches me with his left hand. So it was like kind of like a, you know, like a doodly kind of punch. It didn't really do anything.
And so, and I again, I start laughing. So no fight or flight. I'm literally in a fight and there's no fight or flight. So I start laughing again. He gets really bad. So then he's embarrassed and he starts to come towards me. And Sonya just like body slams him while he's walking towards me. She just grabs him and throws him down. Now he's really embarrassed at this whole situation because he kind of got tripped up by a girl and and I just I just like, I grabbed him by the shirt and I was like, you need to leave. And um,
And then he like, whatever came to it. He was like, what the hell am I doing? And so he like got all angry and he left. And then so for five minutes, we're both sitting there, go back to watching NipTuck, like nothing happened. And then I was like, yes, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go home now, like I'm done. And she was like, I can't even speak. I'm so sorry. I don't know what the hell just happened.
Wait, I would have thought that like, you'd like just totally get it on and like it was love it. It was love. I was like, oh, your adrenaline was going. I was like, oh, this girl's shady. She's probably just trying to get with that guy. I had me at the same time forget all this. And I was like, I'm not trying to be involved in any of this. I'm going to go home now. And now she's the mother of your children. Yeah, exactly. So we ended up, but long story short, I don't even have the fight or flight, even when I'm in a fight. So, you know, there's something wrong with me. That's a great story.
Yeah, so I don't think most people even know that story, but now, you know, hundreds of thousands of listeners know that one. My family doesn't know. That's it. That is a good story. Mama Bear took care of it sounds like. Yeah, she, you know, snapped into gear in a way that I did not. So we both kind of don't talk too much about that, but we both know if a situation goes down.
she's much more likely to react than me. I'm just sort of like easy going like, Oh, this is interesting. That was good out here. Okay. Well, at least you know your strength. Yeah. Oh, this is okay. So let's talk. Let's talk about some things. It's been a little while since we we hopped on without a guest. What's been interesting? You let me bring this up. And this is incredibly half baked. We have a lot of topics here that seem like they have a lot more research, but
I met this guy named Ryan Beagleman, I think his name is. Do you know who that is? No, never heard of him. I met him in the trends group. So Ryan started biz now media. Biz now media was a it was basically what we do. I mean, we are what they are. They were first for real estate.
And it was a newsletter business he sold it for like fifty million dollars and then he went or in congruently he started summit series which is. Dude everybody fucking started summit series I've met nine creators of summit series how many of these guys are there.
Well, they all worked at BizNow. And so I think him and Elliot, I believe, were the guys. This guy Ryan was the CEO of it. Gotcha. So I believe he was the guy. Elliot's last name is BizNow as in BizNow Media. I believe I think they were the two guys and everyone else was also a guy, but not the other guy. And so he started Summit Series. For those of you who don't know, it's like
I don't know what it's kind of like a Southwest it's kind of thing and they'll rent like a cruise ship and people go It kind of turns into like an orgy it sounds like we're just people party you pay three grand It's not that good of a business, but I think it's okay like I think it just it affords a lifestyle created a sweet life for them
They bought up they bought the mountain that they did the summit series on and now they all Yeah They bought a mountain so they raised money from people and investors and you rich people Yeah, yeah would put in a million dollars and you bought a plot of land on this mountain and they're trying to build the city this town It's called powder mountain. I met him in our trends group and so I'm gonna go and stay with him for a week on Thursday and
He's got this big, yeah, in Utah. He's got this big house that he's gonna let me crash at. Really interesting guy, and I'll do a podcast with him, and we could do a threesome, do it all together, or we could do it just with him, but really interesting guy. And I also talked to Joe Lansdale. Did I tell you about him? I know about him, loosely. I've heard his name before. He's with AVC, so what was your conversation with him about?
I met him on Twitter and then we did a phone call. He's the guy. He was like an intern. He was like employee number 12 or something or some early thing at PayPal as an intern. Then eventually partnered with Peter Thiel and started Palantir, which is going to go public for like $50 billion, some crazy stuff. And anyway, when I'm getting at what we are all discussing,
And I talked to Joe about new cities. This is something that we've discussed a little bit, and it's something I'm very fascinated about. And what I'm noticing is, and I can't tell it's because I've got a lot of affluent friends who make a lot of money, but many of them are saying that they want to spend six months in one part of the country and six months in another part of the country.
And I can't decide if this is one of those things where you learn, what's it called, the yellow taxi thing where you know that taxis are yellow and then you start seeing them all over the place. Or this is actual trending. And so anyway, something that I'm fascinated about is these new planned cities. And it's so interesting to me. So was this the one, because I just saw one recently, we might be talking about the same thing, the five minute city?
Is this that so five minutes city so somebody's creating a little city and the core premise might not be in the whole city might just be like kind of a living community like a smaller version of town bigger than a neighborhood smaller than a town. But the idea is that everything is a five minute walk so everything you need groceries, the gym.
Whatever all the kind of basic things that people go do with regularity will be a five-minute walk from where you live and they want to create a walking lifestyle city Based around that one constraint and they're gonna build it out that way and they're gonna try to find people who want to live in that that manner And I like that I like all these experiments around new cities There are some that are trying to do it around self-driving cars. So they're basically saying hey
Self-driving cars, the tech can actually work, but the tech is risky when you have a whole bunch of human powered cars also on the road. And so if you could just start with a blank slate and have roads that are designed a certain way that don't have pedestrian traffic and don't have human drivers on it, you could actually have autonomous vehicles zipping up and down these roads and transporting people back and forth. It could be awesome.
And so some people are trying to start cities just around that. Some people are buying old ghost towns like in Nebraska and Wyoming where infrastructure all got built. It got abandoned for one reason or another and they picked it up in the cheap and they're trying to revitalize it. So I think these are awesome projects, like really, really awesome projects.
Yeah, I agree. And I think it's really cool. So a lot of times they call it a charter city and a charter city is a is a city that's granted I'm just reading the definition a city that's granted special jurisdictions to create a new governance system. And this isn't like a new thing. I think that even San Francisco is considered a charter city where you can like make your own rules a little bit within some type of constraints. I know and then there's like planned communities. One of those is
Dubinville in Ohio. It was started by two brothers in 1920s, where they just bought a large plot of land and they started planning it out. And they were very meticulous about what happened to what and people started buying homes there. Silicon Valley actually was a little bit like this. The Mark Andreessen's father-in-law actually owned is a bill. Mark Andreessen, the famous investor, his father-in-law is a billionaire real estate guy. And in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Silicon Valley was
farmland and they like said let's make this a town. And so anyway, it's kind of an interesting concept and I've been reading a lot of history about it. So like the reason I like reading about Titans and Vanderbilt and all this stuff is you can see how they did stuff and like a lot of towns in Staten Island and places like that were created because Vanderbilt was like let's create a ferry to go there and whole towns are built around it. So it's not like a new concept but it's incredibly interesting right now because
I can't tell if people are truly fed up with cities or if it's just something I'm fed up with and I notice others are too. So. Yeah, this is sort of like, you know, if you think about what are the coolest sort of, what are the sounds cool ideas? So a few years ago or many years ago, the sort of the sounds cool idea was I'm going to create a new school system. I'm going to create a new university. So you had like old school and you have Amanda school, you have make school, you have all these other schools.
And that was sort of like, wait, that's a startup. That's not a startup, right? Like that's different. And there's a whole bunch now that are in the like rockets space. So there's a whole bunch of rocketry and satellite startups that are like, yeah, we don't, we don't just make apps. We like, you know, launch shit into the into fucking orbit. And yeah, that's what we do.
And I feel like the sounds cool ideas of today, a lot of them are around cities, starting a new, a new jurisdiction that's either going to be different on policy or like the kind of urban planning and design. And that doesn't mean it's not actually cool, but you do have to be careful because some people are going to go into it just because it sounds like a cool project to be working on. But I want to meet some of the people who are behind this. I know why Combinator had a
I've had a project called New Cities that they were working on. I haven't heard anything about it, so I'm like, I don't know what's actually, I don't know if it failed or what, this was years ago. And we have a friend of a friend who I know has bought one of these. So I'd love to have him on and come talk about this. But it reminds me of a different thing I wanted to talk to you about. And we can come back to the cities thing if you want. But do you know who Wes Edens is? No.
So Wes Edens is a billionaire. So this Wes would be the billy of the week because he's doing something cool. So he owns the Milwaukee Bucks, but that's not obviously how he made his money. That's how he spent his money. And then he has, I think his investment firm is called like Fortress Capital. I think he's a private equity guy. I'd have to go confirm that. But yeah, I'm looking up. Fortress is like a really big name hedge fund. I think SoftBank owns it. Right. Right. Right.
Uh, yeah, he sold, he sold a stake of it to something. So he's just a big billionaire guy who made money. He goes for the finance world, right? So I saw this article a few weeks ago and, you know, somebody's going to know a lot more about this because I'm like,
When you're just reading the Forbes article, you're not really getting much info. But I understand the premise. So what this guy's doing is he's trying to revitalize the passenger train system of America. So you have something like Amtrak. Amtrak has been like a money pit, like I don't know, like $50 billion of government money has gone into Amtrak. Amtrak has never turned to profit. The closest they ever got was 2019. I think they're like 30 million operating loss. That was the closest they ever got to a profit.
And also the user experience is not very great, right? Like Amtrak is kind of cool and kind of this nostalgic kind of interesting way, but it's not like great. It's not amazing. And so what this guy realized was he was like, a
It's a shame we don't have like an awesome passenger train system here in the US to get from place to place. He goes, B, Amtrak is actually profitable on certain legs. It's just that they operate all these other legs because they're not profit. And so it's their other legs that are causing them to be unprofitable. But if you just look at their best routes and like he's like, you know, look at this one route from New York down to Washington or whatever.
It's actually extremely profitable because a lot of people want to go on that corridor. And so he's identified, so he started this thing called Bright Line. And so he's got this train system that goes from South Florida to Central Florida. He wants to do from LA to Vegas in 85 minutes. And so these are high traffic routes and he wants to build a for profit train company. So recently,
Richard Branson took a minority stake. So they just rebranded to Virgin Trains USA. But I love this idea for two reasons. One, I love the quote that he had in the article, which was the biggest ideas solve obvious problems. And I think that in many ways, that's true. There's obviously tons of counter examples, but I think it's one way to brainstorm ideas is to say, what are the ideas that are so obvious, so in our face, so baked into the way we live that we kind of just accept them at face value. We're not even trying to change them anymore.
Hey guys, I want to take a second to answer one of the most common questions I get, which is, hey, I got this great idea or, hey, my company's doing really well and I just need a developer. I need somebody who knows how to code so that I can either bring this idea to life or I can grow faster. And, you know, I've been there before. I've dabbled in the no code tools trying to make it work.
Sometimes that works. Most of the time it's not good enough. I tried to learn programming myself. That was a waste of time. I've looked at overseas platforms to say, hey, can I find an affordable developer? I can't afford somebody here in the States, in California, paying some Silicon Valley prices. But maybe I can afford a developer in the Philippines or in Eastern Europe. The big challenge has always been finding somebody who's
Actually like good like they're vetted like I never know if somebody's gonna just take my money and run if they're actually a good developer a bad developer And how do I know if I knew how to code I could judge their stuff, but I don't have a code
So what I really like about this week's sponsor, Lemon.io, is that they have a vetted marketplace of remote developers from Eastern Europe. So I know the founder pretty well, his name's Alex. And what they do is they filter and they test and they basically have a reputation system of any developer that they have on their roster. So you know, if you go to Lemon.io, you're getting a developer who is actually good. It's good quality. He's going to get the job done. And so what the way it works is you go, you type what you need, hey, I want to build this app or
I need to add an extra fund and developer to my team and I don't want to hire. Within 24 hours, they'll match you with the right developer.
If it's not the right developer, you just tell them and they'll switch it, you know, basically for free, it's a replacement guarantee. And they're actually cheaper than the other outsourcing platforms. So, you know, you get one big savings when you just go outside the US or outside of Europe and you, you get somebody in kind of an either Eastern Europe or in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, you know, you know, you save money there. But lemon.io is actually half the price of the other platforms that try to do this. And so it's stupidly effective. I would just kind of take advantage of this as long as they can offer these rates. It's pretty amazing.
And Alex basically told me that for any my first million listener, they will offer a 15% discount on the first six weeks of work that you have done. So if you want that done, if you want a developer who is vetted, who can build your projects, go to lemon.io slash MFM again, that's lemon.io slash MFM like my first million. All right. Enjoy back to this week's episode.
Cities is an example of this. Like, oh, this is how a city works. These are the rules. This is how cities laid out. Well, it's like, well, what if you change that? What if people were sick and tired of that and you could start a new one? Elon, I think did this great with obviously with Tesla, right? Like electrifying cars.
or the boring company, which is like, hey, two traffic sucks. Like, why don't we just have underground high speed tunnels? And so I think there's a set of ideas like this that are big, big problems that are so obvious that actually people have stopped tackling them or the rate of innovation is very low compared to how big the size of the prize is. And that's how I think about this train system. What do you think about this?
I am you're getting me all hot and bothered. I love this. I'm looking up. So I'm familiar with Virgin Trains. I'm looking them up. If you go to companieshouse.gov.uk, you can actually look at and see what they're. Yeah. So they've been operating in the UK for a long time because Branson did this. You know, basically Branson was like, okay, the government runs the trains. That probably means that they suck. We can take over and we can run it here.
So this is Virgin Trains USA, which is now the USA version of that that he's trying to do, but he's just invested into West Eden's project as a minority investor. I think this is awesome. So I've actually considered doing this. There's a train, I think it's Amtrak. Do they call it the Zephyr route? I think they call it like, there's like a route that you can take where you take an Amtrak from California, I think to New York. And it takes a long time, like five or 10 days, like takes a while, but it's like $200. It's really cheap. It's Chicago to the Bay Area.
and it goes via Omaha then for Salt Lake City and Reno.
That's yeah, so it sounds awesome. Um, it's pretty cheap and affordable at 2 p.m. Amtrak Wow Amtrak is something that I remember as a kid we used to take it every once in a while like and it was like something like like poor people would take like I would take it when it's like what you do when you don't have any money it's like it was almost almost like a greyhound right and It's so cool. I'm really into this another place. It's like Europe
I know in India, I've done this a whole bunch. You go on the trains there. It's awesome. It's like a hotel on wheels. You know what I mean? Like it's so fun to go on. You get your cool little cabin and the food truck. Charlie's come by and you're looking out the window and it's like a nice ride and you can go to sleep. You can sleep overnight on it. And I know in Europe, it's the same way. And I just don't, I never hear anyone doing that in the US. I'm sure people are doing it, but I don't think it's a big part of the travel culture here and how cool would it be if they made it happen.
So how's it going with this guy? I'm just looking him up as you talk. Like he's making a lot of press because this is a really romantic idea. It's a romantic idea. Exactly. And he's doing a good job because he needs the press because so the catch with this is like, oh, you need $5 billion to build out this track.
And it's like, OK, well, where the hell am I going to $5 billion? And so the reality is that a lot of this money comes from public financing. It's a combination of public and private. And so one of the reasons to get so much press is because it really helps you raise the money, raise money, and get access to capital that is in the public domain, that's sort of like
He has this tax-free bond that he released for Florida. He floats out this tax-free bond. He raises $1.5 billion on it. This is free money. It's in the same way that Elon will go and announce a car, and everybody puts down $100 bucks, and he gets a $5 billion loan, an interest-free loan from customers, essentially.
There's an art to the, the, the trick of this business is really the financing being good about the financing and there's the juries out whether they'll be able to pull this off or if they'll just get buried under debt.
So it looks like in 2017, they said in the first half of the year, they had about $10 million in sales and they had 400,000 riders. Virgin trains projected by 2019. It's ridership in South Florida with top 2.3 million riders a year and revenue would eclipse $112 million in revenue. Wow. So there's demand there. Wow. This is crazy. So over a million.
Wow, this is pretty crazy. And so this is cool. The cool thing about this is, I think, the most ambitious projects, the projects that are sort of frighteningly ambitious are awesome for talent. You can become a talent magnate if you're a Elanager saying, look, we're going to
build hyper speed tunnels under LA to kill traffic. You can attract capital because people want to get involved with being audacious ideas that sound fun and sexy. You can get free capital because like right now, one of the big reasons people hate on Tesla is because a lot of their, you know, they were subsidized heavily by the government. Now, some would argue, Hey, dude, it's good that the government subsidizes. It's the decarbonization.
of planet Earth through electrification and blah, blah, blah. There's an argument for that that says they should get access to this. And other people are saying, hey, you know, why is, why is the government footing the bill for this private company? But my point is these big audacious ideas attract the best capital
the best talent and sort of the best press because they make for the best stories and so in some ways these sound like they're harder than other ideas but in other ways they're actually less hard because there's less competition and you get all these rewards for being so ambitious and audacious.
I'm so into this. This is incredibly attractive to me. What's interesting, what I've learned as I've gotten older and seen people succeed is there's sometimes, there's these ideas that appear as the one thing, but it takes an entirely different expertise to do. So for example, this guy, Wes, is that his name? Wes Edens, he is from Fortress, which their expertise is all about raising money from rich people and rich organizations like governments or families or whatever.
And then his job is allocating that money. He's just like to kind of be disrespectful to him. He's a spreadsheet monkey, right? Right. Where he's like, well, if I change this by a little bit, and that's totally simplifying what this person does. And I understand that. But you think like, well, when I think of a train, I think of like a Richard Brady type where he's got to create this like amazing like experience with the purple lights inside. It's like, nope, it doesn't matter.
It's all about how are you going to financially engineer the funding of this infrastructure.
Yeah. And when you think about a business, you think, I have to know something that other people don't know and, or I have to be good, I have a skill set that other people don't have. And what's interesting and a little bit discouraging to me personally is when I see these things, I'm like, man, this isn't about having a good vision for a train. This is about being able to creatively finance something, which means coming up with interesting schemes and documents and strategies, not building a brand. I mean, it is also building a brand that people love, but it's,
the hard part is the adamant stuff and the strategy around it. But that's kind of neat too, it's just different. Yeah, yeah. I think it's really important to know what business are you really in? So for example, Peter Ciel talks about this with universities. Universities are not in the education business. You can't be hard by offering a better curriculum.
go try, right? Like nobody would even care if you had that, even if it was proven, even if every expert on earth said, this is a better curriculum than Harvard's curriculum, you would not touch Harvard's status and any student would pick Harvard. Why? Because what business are they really in? They're in the credentialing business during the insurance business of, hey, this is insurance policy for your kid. If you get a degree, you're going to have a job. They're in the sort of like, you know, social
You know, either babysitting or social development business of like helping you grow up and, you know, become an adult. And so you got to know what business you're really in. And I made this mistake a lot. I remember starting a dating, we were building a dating app during the idea lab phase. And we thought we had this great idea for a dating app and it was all about dating and we were like,
Look, this is the problem with dating apps as a way better user experience. We might have even been right. But what I realized six months in was, oh, dating apps are really in the business of local customer acquisition. You have to, in a small geography, within a 20 mile radius, you need to acquire a whole bunch of males and a whole bunch of females.
And success is not about what your dating app experience is like and the features of your app. It's about how well you can get enough males and females within a 20 mile radius over and over and over again. Do you have the acquisition chops to do that? Same with gaming. People are like, I love video games. I love games. It's like, well, cool. But just so you know, like, you have to, you're in the advertising business, though.
And a beautifully designed product or a really novel product helps, right? Because Tinder was really novel and fun. And so they acquired more customers because it was fun to talk about. It was buzzworthy. It was controversial in some ways to just swipe on people's faces, how shallow is this generation, whatever. So the product design definitely helps. And also, if it's sticky, if it's actually a really great product or a really great game,
Cool. That gives you more budget to acquire customers for because you know, you keep them around for longer and you're going to make more money off them. But like, you got to know what business you're in and you got to know what the table stakes of success are. If you're a game, the table stakes of success or customer acquisition, same with dating for this train thing. It's about finance, you know, the financing of massive infrastructure. And that's the business you're in, not the cool seats and entertainment system and the headrest. Yeah. Have you seen the movie founder by it's about McDonald's? I have. Yeah.
He goes, I don't think you know. So basically there's a scene where this business guy, I don't know who he is. Some sales guy comes in and talks to Ray Crock, the founder of McDonald's. And he goes, tell me how your business operation works. Well, I do this. I flip the burgers and we hire, we release, we lease the restaurant to the person. And the guy goes, wait a minute, I don't think you understand what business you're in. And Ray Crock goes, what are you talking about? I sell cheeseburgers. He goes, no, no, no, you're not in the hamburger business. You're in the real estate business.
And then he like his mind switches and then he goes, oh my god, you're right. The hamburgers simply get people to come to real estate and I own all the real estate. That's the move. And so it's like that one packaging switch changed everything. And by the way, sometimes you hear the opposite. This happens a lot in the startup world. It's like you roll your eyes. Somebody's they're in some shitty business and then they try to not be in there. They were actually a tech company.
It's like, no, you're not. You're a media company. You just happen to use technology or whatever, right? Like people love to say that they're not in a shitty business and that they're in this great business. And just with as much or more frequency than people who happen to be in a great business and don't even realize it yet.
And so you got to be wary for you. That's why I said you got to know what business you're really in. And so you can't just make up that you're in the real estate business when you're fucking not you're in this other business. And you just have to like you have to see the truth for what it is because lying to yourself doesn't really doesn't really work. Sometimes it does. I mean, well, like we work out of way with it for a little while. Like you could say like, well, it kind of it fell flat, but they it could have gone either way, maybe.
Yeah, if it fell flat, I would count that as eventually the truth catches up with you, right? Like or like this new company lemonade that went public It's a they're like I want to get valued as a tech company, but it's like well your insurance You're you're still just like an insurance business like like people are like
Or like, I know that there is criticisms around Flexport. So Flexport is this huge company in Silicon Valley that everyone says the greatest thing ever. And the guy who runs it is awesome and it totally might be the greatest thing ever. And what they do is you order a whole bunch of stuff from China and you've got to ship that to America. They help you track your shipment if you're a business. So you can trap your ship.
Track your shipping container and help with licensing or customs and all this whatever anyway They're like we're this revolutionary thing and I've read a bunch of comments in the trades in like the shipping trades and they're like Just so you guys know we've been doing this forever right like we have all this technology already like these guys are just what they're doing is just no different than what we're doing but Flexport has been like We're doing it new and I don't know the truth, but I do know that
I know the truth now. I've used other freight forwarders, and now I've used Flexport. Flexport is fucking awesome and so much better than the others. It is so much better than the others. Well, there's a little bit of the answer. Personally, as a customer, that... From a customer.
But these are the things that all the other people are saying. They're like in the comment section. So I only know what the comment commenters are saying. They're like, uh, we've been doing this just, you know, like, it's true. They didn't invent the industry, but, uh, yeah, it's so annoying. They're like, Hey, like, for example, somebody's going to be like, Oh, charter cities.
trains, you know, these other guys have been doing this or, you know, people have tried this for a long time. It's like, yeah, I know, right? I said something about SPACs on Twitter. I was like, Hey, I want to talk to somebody who really is super knowledgeable about SPACs, which are these special purpose acquisition companies. And I said, I feel like there's a growing trend towards this. I want to know, you know, why would I invest in one? Why wouldn't I invest in one? And, you know, how game changing is this trend?
And some, you know, 90% of the comments are great and helpful and inform me. And then 10% are like, dude, it's back to nothing new. Been around for a long time. Nothing new happening here. It's like, people are so excited to be like, nothing new here that they miss that there's actually new things. I'm not saying the whole fucking thing is new. I'm saying, maybe it's just more common now. Maybe it's back. I hear I see people talking about it and I don't entirely understand what it is. Okay, so example. So.
Chamath Polyapatia created a SPAC. What it is, it's a blank check acquisition company. He raises, let's say, $5 billion, $2 billion, something like that. I think he raised one or two. From private institutions or public? From institutional investors, that company is a public company. So it's a publicly listed entity that does nothing except for acquire companies.
But he acqua, but he gets the money from private people. I believe initially he gets it from private and then it's publicly listed and then there's public shareholders as well. So you can buy into his back. Okay. Then it searches for.
a great private company that wants to fast track to IPO. So instead of doing the roadshow and all that, the SPAC says, look, I can just acquire a minority stake or a majority stake depends. But let's say I can acquire 40% of this company and you'll be public tomorrow and the SPAC will be renamed as what you are. And then you'll be liquid and I'll take a fee, you know, sort of like an alternative to the IPO process. It is an actual IPO process. So Chamat's company acquired
Virgin Galactic and that it took Virgin Galactic public. And so they rebranded the SPAC as whatever, I forget what the ticker is, but it's like space or something like that. And so now now. Do they have any revenue? The SPAC is no revenue. No, it's just a holding company waiting to go buy a company. So now Virgin Galactic has revenue because they have bookings for like pre bought bookings for stuff. And I don't know if they do other kind of like industrial work to take satellites up or what, but
So the other one is Bill Ackman. So Bill Ackman, the guy who runs Pershing Square, you know, famous kind of investor, you know, up and down history, but very well known. He does great on TV, so people love him. He's the one who had that giant kind of like, it wasn't exactly a short, but he had basically the equivalent of a short bet right before coronavirus hit, and he made $2.6 billion in a month off that bet. So it was like one of the greatest sort of investments of all time.
And so Bill Ackman has created the largest spec. So he's created a $5 billion spec. And what he says is he goes, it's like a unicorn mating dance. He goes, we're a unicorn because we raised $5 billion. We have that money in our bank. And we're just looking for a unicorn to mate with a private company who is really special, really defensible, has awesome revenue as long term about everything you would want in a company, right? Long term defensibility, rapid growth is the winner of its category. And
is a private company and we will try to buy 30% of that company. So like, for example, they could go and try to buy $5 billion worth of Airbnb, for example, and take Airbnb public. And in doing so, one of the values is it's kind of like a Sequoia investing in your company. They would be signaling to the market that this is the, we could, we analyzed that he said there's 127 eligible companies we believe this year that we could mate with.
that are these private companies that satisfy these criteria. And we're going to find one and we're going to go hard on it. And when we find that one, it's a huge signal to the market.
that this is the company to buy. When I hear this, I think to myself, this is stupid. This is a scam. And then I'm like, no, it's not a scam. This is awesome. They're winning. I mean, maybe some people think it's a scam, but it's like pretty cool. And I'm like down on myself that I'm not smart enough to entirely understand it. Well, I didn't understand it fully either. And I'm sure my description here has some holes, but this is why I tweeted about it. And this is why I'm going to bring a friend on to talk about specs because he knows a lot about it.
But my brain immediately goes to A, how on earth are these people smart enough to come up with these plans? B, how are they so bold to think that this is actually going to work? But people think of you that way. They're like, when I hear Sam talk about these, bring some of these ideas or talk about media or talk about whatever growth and how easy it is to make money. People are like, how is Sam so smart? I only understand 30% of the gibberish he's saying.
Um, how is he so bold that he just, you know, creates the hustle and create, you know, buys this conference and creates this media brand and creates trends and then invest in his friends companies and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like people think you're very bold too. And it's just the same exact thing, but in a different field. So it's not even at a different level. I don't think personally. I just think it's a different field and it's like a new language. It's like when you don't know the language, you feel kind of dumb because you're not understanding. Yeah, I feel dumb all the terms, but like,
That's okay. You've now known about it for one hour versus like, you know, the shit you know, you've figured out over 10 years. And these guys have just done their 10 years on this.
So I, I'm going to bring this back to history because I'm a history fan. I'm on a kick and I know not everyone likes it, but I'll make it quick. So I'm reading about Jay Gould. Do you know who Jay Gould is? Nope. So he's, he was one of the, if you look at like who are the richest people ever, he's like in the top 10 or 30. He was alive in the 1850s all the way up. He maybe died in 1890. He was like, he ran around with Vanderbilt and all these guys. And what he did was,
He found some loophole where this idea of watering down stock. And so what he did was he bought in to the eerie railroad and he somehow bought into the point where he didn't put up any money. Then what he did was he went down on like a Monday to the government in DC like to some officials and he convinced them to change this law over three days that allowed him to issue new stock on a publicly traded company. But he didn't have to tell anyone somehow he got away with this.
And so he issued all this new stock and Cornelia's Vanderbilt bought five million dollars worth of the stock, which back then five million dollars times 20. That's about what it's equivalent to now. And he took all the profits and then sold that like anyway, he just like made profits from thin air and it's kind of it's definitely shady and sleazy, but he got really rich doing it.
And what you're describing is like what I just read about last night with Jay Gould. I'm like these guys who find these weird loopholes, part of me hates them because they're just like not creating true value for the world. Part of me is like, well, I gotta, you gotta like appreciate the hustle and you gotta respect the player who's just playing in the game. And it's just, I'm so fascinated by all these people. Like, what's his name? Chamath? Chamath, yeah.
Chamath and Bill Ackman, who are bold enough to come up with these ludicrous ideas that a simpleton like me is like, I don't understand. So what widget are you selling and how are you making a profit? It's just so fascinating to people who are bold like this. It is exciting and it is bold. I wouldn't say they invented it because again, it's been happening, but
Who are who's different to tone at different scale? Yeah, it's different to do. Like most people in their industry, like Schmoth's is from the tech world, right? Like no, no venture capitalist was doing this. He did it. It's sort of like, I really respect Chris Saka because what he did when he was like, you know, wrote an angel investment check of 25 K into Twitter.
and was not like super wealthy. Like he needed that 25 K to like come back and give the full stories. So Chris Saka is now this billionaire guy who's relatively young in his 40s. He's seen him on Shark Tank, you know, whatever. He wears like a Western shirt. He's probably worth two or three or met more billions. Right. And he worked at Google for a long time and he didn't have that much money. He probably had like one or $200,000 to his name. His story is crazy. So he before he goes to Google,
He, um, and, you know, I'm telling this story a second now. We should just get him on. He, he's a cool guy. So he starts, he goes to law school, doesn't attend class starts day trading in the stock market during the stock, dot, dot compo. Do you know this total story? Yeah. That's all, that's all the short version of it. All right. Starts day trading runs up like a small amount of money. Like let's call it $20,000 into, it's basically like a million bucks and he's, oh, you know, so he's making these, he's doing day trading. He took some money from family and friends.
to kind of lever up even more. And so stock market crashes and he swings from up a million or two billion bucks to down four million dollars. He owes four million dollars and he's a law school student who's got zero to his name and comes from a...
kind of a low to middle-class family. And he's like, oh shit, like what the fuck. And conventional wisdom is like declare bankruptcy, it's sort of getaway. And I'm not entirely clear why he didn't just do that. I don't know if it was pride or if it wouldn't have actually worked. I don't know the details, but the way he tells it's sort of like, no, I pulled up my bootstraps and I decided to solve this problem. So he does two things. First he negotiates the total amount down to $2 million of what he owes.
And then he sets about for the next few years to pay this off. And he starts off by doing, he's in Silicon Valley. He starts off by just doing like legal work on the side on Craigslist. Like, hey, I'm a lawyer, like I can do your, you know, startup documents and shit like like small deals, like hundreds of dollars. Yeah, hundreds of dollars a time. He's just hustling at night. And then he's going to meetups and he's like,
So he to get to famously sort of get some credibility. He creates this name, this business card called like the Carlisle group or something like that. Yeah, like saka, saka and brothers or something. Yeah, it was the something group is like the Clyde still group or some Carlisle or something like that. So he starts and people will be like, oh, I've heard about you guys. You guys do good work. And so he starts, you know, like consulting under that banner and making thousands of dollars, but like, you know, it's $2 million hill to climb.
So then he gets a job at Google pre-IPO, kind of like hustles his way around Google, ends up working on some cool projects at Google, like when they were buying all these data centers around the country under secret shell company names, because they didn't want Microsoft to realize how fast that Google was actually growing, but they needed the data centers. And so he gets to the point where Google IPOs, he makes mailer to bucks, he ends up paying off his loans that he owed, he gets back to net worth zero.
And he's like, you know, no better feeling in the world than when I had network zero. And so then he takes a little bit of money that he has left over from his job at Google and decides to angel invest an ex Google employee friend, have Williams, who's starting this thing called audio or Twitter or whatever. So anyways, he ends up as an angel investor in Twitter.
He I think he gave him. I think he in a I read he's like I had like $75,000 25 and I gave Twitter 25,000 right and so you know he And I love this because he's like most angel investors. They're already made it and so their money doesn't Doesn't matter to them. He's like I needed this money to work So he starts working for the company in a way too. So he's like hustling
making introductions, trying to get celebrities to use Twitter. He's, you know, helping them with their fundraising deck. He's trying to get his 25 K to grow into something. And so, uh, and, and, and some ways was two hands on the company sort of was kicking him out of the office. Like, dude, you don't work here. Um, and this happened to him with many companies with Twitter, with Uber, uh, where he sort of overstepped a little bit. But along the way, he realizes that the, the, the world has mispriced Twitter. They don't get it. He believes in it. He thinks Twitter is going to be a huge thing.
People are writing Twitter off as this goofy little 140 characters SMS toy where you talk about what you're eating for lunch. So he's like trying to convince people to invest in Twitter and is having a little bit of a hard time. So he's like, eff it. I'm going to raise my own fund and just invest in Twitter. And so he starts creating these SPVs, special purpose vehicles, which really just means it's a fund just for one deal. It's not like an ongoing investment fund where we trust you, Chris Sockett to invest in 25 companies. It's like,
Hey, I have access to this Twitter deal. Let's buy some Twitter stock. I need to raise money to buy Twitter stock. And he was just buying secondary. He's buying any, you know, employee wants to leave. They want to pay for their wedding. Cool. Chris soccer will buy your stock. And so he accumulated by the time the IPO happens. He accumulated, I think the second largest or the first largest ownership stake in Twitter. I think he owned like 8 to 10% or something.
of Twitter stock by the time at IPO. And that became like a billion dollar plus stake in Twitter. And along the way, he did, you know, also invested in Uber, Instagram. I forgot whatever else. It was like, is the greatest early stage fund ever created? Because he had Kickstarter in there. He had, I was like, MongoDB or something like that. He had a whole bunch of
of winners, a billion dollar winners out of this tiny little seed stage fund. So, to the point where it like, it can't be replicated again, even he couldn't do it ever again, but you know, really how so it can be replicated again. So, I'll tell you, I know this guy named, well, I'm a friend of a friend with this guy, and they have this thing called Gigafund. If you go to Gigafund.com, you can see it. What I'm going to say is all public, so I'm not like revealing anything. But from the looks of it,
They only invest, they have this fund and they only invest in Elon Musk. So they basically put, they're one of the early monies into SpaceX and I believe they're raising money just to invest into SpaceX. And it looks like on their portfolio, it says SpaceX and then it says the boring company. And so that's like all they're doing is like those, it looks like those two companies.
And that's the horse they're picking. They're like, we think that SpaceX is going to be like the greatest thing ever and we're just going to raise money. So Luke is ex-founders fund. Well, he also, Luke is one of the co-founders of PayPal. So these aren't just like noobs. They're a big deal. But, and this actually says it on TechCrunch. According to the Axios story, Gigafund will initially only focus on raising capital for SpaceX.
So they just found a company they like and somehow they got in with Elon, well, they got in with them because they work with them. And all the money is for SpaceX. And that's kind of fun. That's kind of a funny thing. Yeah, incredible. Okay. So by the way, so, so lowercase capital. So here's what they invested. Uber, Docker, Optimizely, Styleseat, Instagram, Twitter,
Let's see what else. I mean, those are all massive. So it looks like it's a good VC fund. A great return would be like a 5x return of the fund. So if you invested in their fund, they 5x your money over the 7 to 10 years.
Sequoia's like kind of top funds might be like 9 to 10x. So this one returned over 225x. So like, you know, you put in 100k, you got $22 million out. I like that. It's kind of incredible. So Lance Armstrong, we had him on the podcast. And I think before, after the podcast, he, he was an investor in Chris Saka's fund. And he said that he gave him $100,000 and that saved his family from all. He's like, when I went to all my lawsuits, I like,
It was almost going broke and that saved, uh, he's like that pulls me through. Okay, uh, business ideas. So I saw Josh Constantine, the kind of ex tech crunch guy. I saw him tweet this out and I thought it was a good prompt for startups. This is what he said specifically. There's 50 million creators across like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, whatever. People whose job is to be a content creator.
50 million creators now. This is the fastest and largest growing small business. What do they need? And I think this is a great prompt for startup ideas. So I wanted to quickly brainstorm what comes to mind here. So I'll start with one while you. I have the and I have the thread up while you think about it.
For example, e-commerce has been on the rise and one problem for any e-commerce startup was like, okay, you need capital for inventory or to run ads. You don't really want to raise from traditional investors because, hey, your e-commerce thing might not fit a venture scale return, might not be a billion dollar company, but it could be an awesome e-commerce company doing 30 million a year.
And the second thing is you don't want to give up equity just for this, just to buy Facebook ads and buy inventory with that. You really want some kind of debt. And so clear bank stepped up and basically created a bank for e-commerce because traditional banks like the Wells Fargo's and Chases of the World, they didn't really understand how to assess credit for an e-commerce company. Whereas clear bank was like, look, you connect your Shopify and I'm going to look at your last six months of sales data. And I know if this is, um,
I know how likely you are to pay back your loan. And the traditional banks didn't know what the fuck that would even mean. I could print them out my Facebook ad, history, and my Shopify history, and they would never know what to do with it. And so ClearBank came in and was a bank for e-commerce. And so similarly, I think you could have sort of a ClearBank for creators. And there's a YC company that's doing this. What else comes to mind? What would you do to serve this second? I mean, this is definitely a hard question.
The boring one is that surely some smart people have figured this out is. I mean, health, what do these people do for health care? I wonder. Yeah, that's where my brain goes to. Like, what are all the boring, but super lucrative businesses like health care, insurance, lending and try to build those for a brand? Are you, are you a freelancer at your company? Are you full time freelancer? Now you see full time. What do you do for health care?
Right now I technically don't even have health care. So I left like six months ago. I just took a bet like, Hey, hopefully I don't get them the next few months. So I started doing something else. So that works when you're 26 or 27 or whatever. But I wonder that's what I that's right. Immediately where I went to I'm like, what do you get? Yeah, health care is immediately where I go. So you're not on your parents anymore after 26. So yeah, that's like a big thing for people starting companies as well. You can't leave because you don't have health insurance.
Yeah, so that's immediately shown where I go. I don't know what else. I mean, it's a good question. It's a, it is a pretty crazy stat. What I want to know is all these people, so like sub stack is filling this void. They're giving something for creators. Um, it's my opinion that a lot of these people on sub stack, um, are going to fizzle out in about a year when they're realizing, fuck, I got to do this shit. Like every fucking day. Most of them, I'm not saying there's 50 million successful creators. I'm saying there's 50 million people trying to live the dream of become the next.
whatever on YouTube, on Twitch, on Substack, on...
podcasting, whatever, you know. I know I love think of the tools that they need to actually get their job done. Two of my favorite ones, one's they're both obvious, Figma. I like when I see that, I'm like, Oh my God, someone totally should have thought about this. Like I've shocked that that's so late. And then another like one that's actually crazy simple is Canva. You know, Canva? Yeah. Yeah. I love Canva. I use that all the time. And I'm like, I can't believe that this didn't exist beforehand. This is such a like blatantly obvious need.
Right. And it's like not like a calm, it doesn't appear to be complicated. Yeah, the other, the version of that that I think needs to exist is in the video editing space. So, um, YouTube doesn't have like the tool of YouTube to let you edit your videos. So people use, you know, something between iMovie, the like kind of Final Cut Pro, or if you're on Windows, there's like, I forgot the like name of that awful software. There's like Sony Vega, there's like all kinds of shit like that.
And that's still the best today. And those were built pre YouTube, even existing as a thing. And so like, even if you just took that as the premise, like, Hey, I'm going to build the video editing software. That's best for video for for youtubers and build it with YouTube in mind, YouTube is the output. And I'm going to build in all the things that everyone has to do for YouTube anyways.
I think that's a service you could charge for in a Figma style, Figma style tool because there's enough people and the existing tools, you know, I think you pay for Final Cut. I think you pay for some of these things, the existing tools I think you pay for. So it's not a fun project to build because it's so like technical, but I think there's a, there's a Figma type product there as well. But I would go for financial services or healthcare or something like that for the creator, for the, for the set of creators.
When you were starting your business, you have a thing that you're tinkering with a project. How did you file your LLC? Stripe Atlas. Was that good? Isn't it a bit slow and I think it's a bit more expensive than it should be, but it's really easy. So yeah, I've done it. I've done three Stripe Atlas companies because it's just the most convenient way to do it.
Hmm. I'm not sure. This is a great question that you actually need to like, I need to like think about, but it is incredibly interesting. I don't know. I feel I kind of feel like a little bit of a bum because I can't think of anything, but it is a great question. One thing I've learned from you is asking interesting questions actually changes how you think. Yeah. Forget the answer. I'd take a great question over a great answer any day because a great question can yield many, many interesting answers to explore.
Okay, here's, here's another topic that I think is interesting. Cool company, a cool company I just saw today, Daybreak Health. So it's a company that launched today. What these guys are doing is pretty simple. It's a mental, mental health and therapy app for teens. So, you know, anxiety, depression, and other sort of
I don't even know how you would describe it. I don't know if it's called mental health conditions or what, but I know for sure anxiety and depression are sort of the two big ones that they're trying to tackle. Extremely prevalent amongst teens, I think like reported is like 20% or 30% of teens experience it. That's reported. So like, you know, let's say 40, 50% is the real number, 80% never get any help for it. And there's a stigma around it. And there's like,
all these like complications. And so these guys have kind of a telemedicine solution. So anyways, I think this is a good idea. Yeah, I mean, put this on the list of things that is that it's obviously going to be, it's obviously going to be successful. How successful I don't know.
Right. The thing that I think will happen, the thing, the trend that I think I think will happen is I've now seen that companies are willing to pay as a benefit for meditation apps. So Calm has a bunch of corporate enterprise partnerships that are like crushing it.
There's another one called Ginger. That's for mental health that companies are paying for, especially during COVID. I know a lot of companies adopted it, but I think mental health is just this huge surging trend and topic that eventually
Companies will need to provide solutions for their employees for this, and it will become a total faux pas to not have this as part of what you offer your employees. And I think the same thing will happen with schools. I think because of suit team suicides and team sort of mental health issues, school districts and schools will offer this as a free counselor, essentially a digital counselor.
for expensive, though. And I think I'm looking, I think it'll get subsidized by either the federal government, by the states, or in some other way, I am, I am fairly confident that over time, this will become part of what's offered, just what's offered as a health solution for schools. It's $365 a month, which comes out to be about $4,600 a year. It's quite expensive. But that's how much this shit costs. Do you go to therapy? I don't.
Uh, I have for a long time. I'm not right now, but it like normally it's where I go and I don't think it's like a yuppie place. I think it's just like par for the course. It's $250 or no, $150 either. $150 or $250 a session. Yeah. You got to have money for it. And you know, there, there, right now these guys charge about half of what a, what a in person counselor would be. And they said that, you know, they're able to do that because the person doesn't need to have an office, the therapist doesn't need to have an office. And secondly,
There's like a geographic arbitrage that therapists live in low cost areas and then they serve clients in sort of all over on the world. So you get this like, you know, if you're in New York City, you have to pay New York City prices, but right now with this digital thing, with this telemedicine thing.
you know, your person might be in Arizona serving you in, in New York or whatever. So this isn't like a new thing. Like there's talk space has been there and they claim talk space is, um, they're according to the articles, they're preparing for an IPO. It's just online therapy. They say they have 5,000 therapists on its platform and 1 million users. Wow. I didn't realize it's preparing for IPO. I know talk space. There's seven cups of tea or some shit like that. Uh, this one, I know just targets teens. I don't know if the other guys like specifically brand themselves that way.
But that sort of... You know who talk spaces, um, spokesperson is, right? I think it's, is it them or is that better help? Is Mike Phelps, Michael Phelps? Oh, right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's right. Cause he kind of went through a dark period too. It's better help. I think is Mike Phelps's thing. So these are big things. Um, I would wonder what the churn is for a customer. I think on the surface, I'm like, oh, they never churn, but then I'm like, I bet you they do actually a lot. Um, but sort of like a dating app where in some ways,
The churn is a good thing. Like if you turn off a dating app, maybe because you found somebody and you're not on a dating app anymore, it could be that if you turn off of a therapy app, you feel like you don't need the therapy anymore because you've sort of turned the corner. Although I'm not sure if that's how it works. Maybe it's an ongoing practice. It never ends. This is fascinating. Better help claims to have like 70 or $80 million in revenue. Yeah. So I'm not saying these guys are going to be the leader. I just like that they're focused on teens. And I think that I also, you know, the,
The unproven part is, will this become baked in as a service available to students that's funded by somebody else? Have you studied Gen Z at all? I sound like an old man. I went to conferences and they had discussions on Gen Z and the stats were there. To me, it was shockingly depressed.
Shockingly and good for this business. They're super open-minded So like like when I was a kid if you said you went to therapy like I mean to be crude someone be like what are you gay like? Like you know what I mean? Like what are you like fucking gay? Like that's what people would say it right when you're 12 years old. Yeah Now I don't think that that's even close to a thing. I don't even think anyone would like You know, I don't think they would say that shit to you
Yeah, now it's like a status symbol in Silicon Valley. It's like, if you're not going to therapy, like, oh, it's like not you don't go to the gym. Interesting. Well, like when we were a kid, like that's what you say. You're like, dude, don't be gay. Like that's what they say. And I was talking to some nephews and I was like, do you guys ever like call each other gay? They're like, well, if they're if someone's gay, I'm like, yeah, but like you make fun of someone and call someone gay. They're like, you mean, because they like are homosexual? I'm like, yeah, they're like, why would we ever do that? And I was like, nice. You guys are different. I remember the first time
Yeah, when I was 10, 12, that was just part of the slang. I remember the first time I said it, and somebody was like, hey, that's not cool. It was a, I don't know if I ever told you this. When I was in middle school, I was in a movie. I was in two movies, actually. And they're like these small, like kind of like Indian American movies. They're like in English, but they're like, oh, Indian cast. They're about Indian stories or whatever. So the guy, Cal Penn, who ended up being Harold and Kumar, he's Kumar,
so he was my older brother in the movies and so no way and so we were hanging out and I was like oh my god that's so gay and again I'm 12 year old kid and he was like he's like you know that that's not cool to say that like you shouldn't you shouldn't say that here's why but why start telling me
And I just remember being like, what is this guy talking about? Like, everybody says this. And he was like, you know, from LA, I'm living in Texas at the time. So like, it took like a decade for the message to get from New York and LA, where people probably realized early on, like this is, hey, this kind of messed up to like get to Texas where I was at. Cause I remember literally it was 10 years, I remember that was one isolated incident. And then it's like eight more years, I said it. And finally I was like, Oh, oh, yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, my bad. Sorry about that. I didn't realize what I was doing.
Yeah, that's what I had that feeling when I was talking to our nephews. I was like, so you guys don't ever say that? I'm like, that's crazy. You're so open-minded and healthy and more mature. So I definitely learned that. I'm like, wait, you won't make fun of him? Why would you ever, what's wrong with being gay? I'm like, yeah, you're right. But that's just not how we would say that word.
Right. It's, it's actually funny because it's not only that saying, calling something gay, when, which are really trying to say is that's weird, that's stupid, that's lame or something, whatever. It's not only that that phrase is like revealed to be really dumb and hurtful and all that stuff, but all the activities that you were talking about as gay also became totally normal, mainstream, healthy, good day. It's like a therapy, meditating, yoga, like being a vegetarian or vegan. It's like,
Like what are you a game like like sharing your feelings? Yeah, I am a game game. That's awesome. I Guess we'll end there