yeah so got a crazy story for you guys so you might have seen the app wordle recently have you guys seen it yeah your time just bought it you play yeah so new york times just bought it but about two weeks ago one of my friends he's a great mobile app developer bootstrapper he basically was like oh wordle is going viral and there's no mobile app that everyone's using so like the wordle guy had put out this crazy story he put out this story about how he was pure he didn't want to monetize it it was just a toy for his girlfriend it went viral out of nowhere which i don't know if i believe because he works at mischief and like i'm not sure i totally buy that story uh but that was a story to the media so my friend was like holy there's a huge opportunity for someone to build the mobile app uh this guy doesn't own the trademark of the name uh it's kind of like ripped off an old game show so my friend built an app over the weekend called it wordle the app uh went viral so basically like over the weekend got like 30 000 organic downloads was top of the app store and my friend's one of these guys who likes to build in public so he tweets everything he always has he used to like put his portfolio up so you could see everything he's doing and sam by the way this is this is gonna support your build and public thesis uh by the way this is like the perfect case study of why of how you feel about building public which is i like it in theory it's like the face tattoo thing right i like that other people do it i don't want to do it and here's why here's the cautionary tale like when you know when the dare officer brings like you know someone who's like been in jail for drugs to the class before and after of meth like it's like sean explain what wordle is because all i know i don't play word games i play real sports and so uh i'm not i'm not trying i don't waste my time with that so when when people are what is this game it's a game okay so this it's a simple game you you literally if you just the way i get to it you just google wordle first link you click it and it's just five um empty like letters like five squares where you gotta guess guess a word there's no clues it's not like a crossword it's literally just like guess guess a word so you type in a word you might type in like i always start with irate because darmesh from hubspot said the word irate has three vowels plus the letter t plus the letter r so you're getting a lot of common letters there so it's a great start word so you type that that word in and then it'll tell you either it'll either show up gray which means the letter's not in the word yellow which means it's in the word but you got it in the wrong spot or green which is this is the right letter in the right spot and then you have i think five or six guesses to be able to um to get the word in the end and then the beauty of it is at the end it's like you got it you feel the sense of accomplishment the whole thing takes you like two minutes to play the game so it's like really easy to play in that sense and then if you get it right it lets you share that you got it right but it doesn't share what the word was it shares like the like imagine what you're looking at now which is like the word and all these colors but take the letters off it just shows the colors so it'll show somebody else oh man i started off not having any of the letters then i got the t at the end then i got one letter at the end so that's what that's like fourth one i got it right so that's why you see that grid of green uh squares posted on twitter and it started going viral on twitter and again and what what's like the score okay so i'm sorry i just got it moist and did you really just play that are you watching a video i think i heard you this morning i was trying to just do like an illustration you know just trying to get some accurate b-roll all right so i understand so people have been sharing this like crazy and darmesh the founder of hubspot he plays a daily and he even built a competitor to it as well and so your buddy ben levy what's what's this guy's name his name's zach shakheed and what's the name of the app it was called wordle the app so part of the story basically so he goes and builds its app uh he tweets like holy this is the fastest growing app i've ever built you know i've built 10 other businesses they've all done really well but this is the only one that's like growing organically like crazy uh and he basically the wordle creator sees it and he's like yo uh he gets on the phone with them he calls him and he's like hey this just doesn't feel the way by the way this whole thing's just happening in a twitter thread ben sends me the first tweet he's like yo zack's uh because i've met zach through ben he's like yo zach actually cloned wordle next tweet look at this he's tweeted out a graph it's going crazy third tweet um someone someone says dude you just ripped off wordle like you're gonna get whatever suit or something and you know you don't know the trademark for this he goes what trademark and so i'm seeing the tweets in real time and he's bragging he's bragging about how good it's doing and he's like ha like there was no app now i'm dominating this i'm getting all these free free downloads this is amazing he's just tweeting update after update okay so ben pick it back up so then somehow the world guy gets in touch with it so the wordle guy dm's him and he's like yo let's get on the phone and my friend zach is like hey like you don't own the trademark i know nobody owns it there's a bunch of other apps called wordle before this uh but like let's partner or something and the guy's like uh i don't like you know he basically said some version of like i don't do this for money this is just fun uh you know ironically he sells the new york times like a week later but that's separate so my friend gets off the phone with him uh and he's like all right i'm going to talk to a lawyer i'm going to figure out what i should do like clearly there's no ability for us to work together here uh and then like 20 minutes later some big tech reporter dunks on him pretty aggressively and he's like dunks on who your buddy or the original creature jumps on zach my friend and he's like uh he basically says something like wow like app developer has no ethics clones wordle bragging about how he's at the top of the app store uh and then you know when that happens everyone goes and looks at zach's past tweets and he ironically had two tweets so like six months ago he tweeted i hate app clones like someone's cloning my app and i'm gonna like come you know he basically like disputed every app that was cloning his old app and put posted a big threat about how app clones are the shittiest people didn't he call them like scumbags or something yeah he was like there's the scums of the earth that you're copying my app uh and then wait you said you said the word ironic so was he being serious no he was being serious it was ironic that he tweeted that and then he was doing you know and then he was being opportunistic uh and then he also tweeted like at the beginning of the year i have two goals for j for 2022. it's like be more vulgar and make 10 million dollars this year uh so he just gets like proceeded to get dunked on really aggressively and people start buying his domain and or like you know i'm gonna start like i'm gonna dispute every app you've ever made i'm like gonna make sure that everyone knows you're the worst of the worst uh and like so basically that's what happens apple ends up pulling down every single word he calls you right somewhere in the middle here he calls you for some advice right yeah so he calls me in the middle of this and he goes hey this is crazy like app is doing really well i think this is a big business like you know i know bait i know how much these apps convert like free to paid this is just growing organically this is a 10 to 100 million dollar mobile app here what would you do and i was like well i think you know ethically i'm not sure i think you did kind of copy him but i get that like this is version one and you're gonna make it better uh like i could buy that uh but right now you're probably stuck like the mob has you uh but he's like well maybe there's a trumpian version to this where like you know i kind of own that like this is my approach and like i'm doing it there's no change apologize apologize uh put up the white flag take it away right these are options on the table right i can just say sorry i did wrong i could say you know sorry i said what i said and i'm gonna make these i'm gonna change the name i'm gonna make some concessions and then there was go full trump and full trump was like just lean into it and yeah but you could do that and then back down in a non like douche way what you could say is um yeah like look we're not claiming to be innovators here but we are we're executors and so we find things that are great and we make them available for the masses sue me like you know that's like the way that you could take this that's what that's what racket internet says they go we're not innovators we're executors we're operators so how did the conversation go ben when you guys talked about these options yeah so basically i was like you know i think those three options are on the table and he was like yeah but i don't think you know i don't think we're really doing anything wrong like you know yeah there is no mobile app uh so like while people can think that i think it's fine so he basically was like i'm going to double down you know i'm by the way this other guy didn't create wordle there was like you're saying there was a game show back in the day that was the same game he created a web version of it is that right because i think that changes it too which is yeah this guy also copied this show right like and it looks like this guy zach did he re do the app but call it word love well that that's later in the story that's like after wordle got shut down in the app store he recreated a new you know another word game uh let's literally just shut down all the clones yeah they shut down everyone that was using the name wordle after that uh and to clarify yeah there was there was a game show that wordle was based on and i think the guy's story was like i did this for my girlfriend it wasn't for profit so he didn't get crucified for it so and what did apple say why did they say they could just take down all these things or you don't know you don't know why they just there was no statement they just took down every word a lap and said you know you don't own this trademark like you're being taken down because we do decide what we do with you yeah so i'm i'm not a lawyer here obviously but i've done some trademarky stuff and i'm almost positive that someone's going to correct me but i'm almost positive that even if you don't own the trademark if you're like and you can make the argument if you're like the first or the most popular and if there's like a general consensus that like yes when people think of this name they think of you and these other clones or these other people are trying to like steal you know like uh act like they're you the courts tend to favor your side even if you don't own the trademark yeah like yeah just because they don't literally have that trademark there is probably some like you know you would probably win yeah i think i think that's probably true and like he he knew that uh like there was some argument that there's been other apps called wordle but it was pretty clear that like they would have a good case uh so he proceeds to kind of double down on it gets dunked on aggressively like basically you know he doubles down a little bit like says like no like this is based on the game show you don't own a trademark i'm looking at it now uh versions of that and then it goes completely viral like 10th out you know it gets like 10 000 people in the tech twitter circle are dunking on him there's an article why why was his goal be more vulgar for 2020. why was that a goal that's such a random you said that and my mind is still wondering why was that his name does that mean like be more aggressive i think he meant like be more aggressive like when he sees opportunities be more assertive and like you know be as aggressive as possible when opportunities present themselves uh okay which clearly was what this was uh so he went he went hard he got dunked on and basically what happened was uh people bought his dome people squatted on his names zachsterked.com they were like we're going to go vote down every single app you own we're just basically going to attack you oh and so how's this how's this end so i mean basically it ended with him shutting the app down as you'd expect and now he's like making a new word game uh because he likes the word game space but i think his like when i was talking to him about it earlier he was like you know the biggest thing for me is building in public is not always good you know like the fact you know by building in public like i just assumed i you know this was great for me and this is the really dark side of me building in public well dude let's be more specific he had 10 million dollars in his hands and decided that the tweet love for talking about what he was doing was was worth that because if he just stayed as an anonymous developer he just put it under some shell company developer name left it in the store didn't brag about it it wouldn't have got picked up by journalists as like the story isn't that other people there are apps in the store called wordle that are owned by different people that's not the story the story is look at this guy cloning this thing ripping it off bragging about it and then getting on on twitter that's the story so if he just didn't do that then that doesn't get to apple like i think there's a pretty good chance he gets away with it because i know there's a the app store is full of clones like flappy bird had tons of clones every slot machine game there's people don't know this like random apps like slot machine apps are what like produces the most revenue in the in the app store and um and you know nobody really cares about it they're under these like random building company names because you don't talk about it you're just crushing it you shut up yeah it's when you're not crushing it that you want to talk about it as soon as you start crushing it yes when you're doing well you only talk about it when you're not doing that well or when you are doing so well that you think that like you know you can't catch up that's why people are always like why don't you talk about your e-commerce thing like why it's working what do i need what do i need to tell you guys about it for yeah and i also think but transparency like yeah cool i favor transparency uh with people i trust not strangers on the internet like i don't value transparency well it's like if it's my wife or my family or my co-workers all right i'll give you transparency i don't owe you my twitter follower or even my podcast listener to tell you about every detail i'll be very honest with you i tell people things when it's beneficial to me and i don't when i don't and i actually recommend that strategy to anybody there is no like a force that is there's nobody forcing you to tell everybody everything uh when there's no gain to be had for you yeah and there's actually clear downsides and this guy just totally screwed it up if you should have shut up you just got to shut up sometimes and that's really hard this it's the building and public thing man and also it impacted the wordle guy now he got all this competition and he had a lot of stress i think that like when you're doing well you just shut up you don't talk about it you know i think you know part of it becomes your identity like i'm the building public guy so like i do everything in public uh and i think he was just like you know type of guy that's like i'm a really good at growth and i'm really good at building apps and wanted some love for it you know and by the way i recommend this guy's blog or sub stack because he actually uh he does a good job of building in public like he uh ben what was the one that we were we were reading and i remember telling you i was like dude this guy's stuff is actually really good he had like no followers but like uh or like you know not no followers but he had a very small following but i thought his content was actually really interesting he would talk about like all right i'm gonna build this product because of this reason so first thing i'm gonna do i'm gonna go to you know lean domain search i'm gonna get a name generator for this okay i got the name boom now i'm gonna go do this boom here's how i do this boom all right i'm gonna fire up some paid ads look here's the dashboard and like he was actually making progress so he wasn't just like you know stuck in he wasn't just talking theory like he was actually getting users getting revenue and he was very um again he was giving out a ton of value and so i was like oh cool i like to learn all this stuff great thank you very much and uh in those projects the trade probably worked right he got interest and respect and attention and he gave up you know just a little bit of knowledge uh but in this case it did not pay off yeah and he like openly shares all of his app numbers like that link i just dropped zak dot so slash dashboard you can see all of his app numbers all the churn uh so it's a big part of his identity and he's really good at it but you know sometimes it doesn't always pay to be pop to build in public dude cornrows and face tattoos it's cool that other people do it but not for me yeah the other thing is like identity be real careful what your identity is because your identity comes with like you know some serious trade-offs people have an identity and then they'll like uh you know they use it to build a little prison for themselves here's here's my walls and chains that i put on myself by like labeling myself in this way i like to i like people be like oh i thought you said this the other day i'm like yeah change my mind speaking listen you know done speaking of prisoners and building an identity i saw that um someone did a survey like a like a reputable source but i forget who did a survey and they asked they did a survey and they asked young folks gen z who they follow for crypto and nft advice and it was like i think they surveyed hundreds of thousands of people pomp was number one for the most trusted person pomp is like our friend and started out like just a guy on twitter now he's like pretty official how on earth does this guy do so much so he's got a 200 000 person email list who he talks to i think every day every day he's got a daily business show and i think he has like multiple hours of three hours it's a professionally produced morning show meaning like he's there on camera with his brothers they had an agenda a rundown of stories they're gonna cover it's like a news show business news show i think it's called the business news show or some like the best business best business show um and he does it for multiple hours in the morning every morning and i think i was with him and his wife a while ago and she was joking she's like man he writes all of it i don't know how he does it but he writes really fast how on earth does this guy have this much output i uh i have a tremendous amount of respect for that because i know how hard that is and i know there's there's not usually people i look at and i say i can't i couldn't do that and i know when i look at that i couldn't do that um there's no way i could maintain that level of output um at the same time i would not want to do that that is not a problem i want to build for myself i don't think he's going to be able to keep doing it he won't be able to sustain that for more than two or three years yeah that's crazy his he's got like an empire what do you what do you how big is his empire you think you think he's making more money from selling stuff as opposed to actual bitcoin we've speculated on this before so let's i don't know if we we've kind of done this before you want to do it again yeah okay okay fair enough so he's got a couple components right he's got the paid sub stack so he's got the free there's like a free version of it but the daily one i think goes to a paid group ben do you know roughly what the paid size is i think it's like i think it's something like 70 000 people paying like 10 a month or something like that i want to say it's like 70k uh ish so that would be what 700 000 um by the way the the i don't do public math that was stolen from pom pom said that i thought it was hilarious and stole it because i think it's amazing it's amazing rule to live by so he's got about 200 000 people total on his list and he's got i think 70 that are in the paid group so let's just call it that then he's got a job board i think the job board we had heard either heard or we had kind of investigated looked like he was doing about a million dollars a year that's cryptojobs.com or something so then he said all right you learn about crypto for me you want to work in crypto boom uh he also has sponsors on all the new on all the newsletters so at the end of every newsletter it's like thanks to these 10 companies he like rolls the credits and if i had to guess that would be if he has 200 000 free subscribers that would be around between a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars a month in sponsor revenue so we're at um that i think i think what we've just added up to is about two to two and a half million dollars a year and then that stuff the his videos he does about a million dollars a year on his bitcoin course um which i don't think he even shows up for or maybe he does but like i think i think he's got teachers it's like pretty automated um so let's add another million there that's let's say three three and a half million on the course then there's uh investing so investing is probably where the real money's to be made very hard to say kind of what both crypto investing so like buying bitcoin and other tokens as well as investing in companies that serve the crypto economy that's kind of like and he had a fund the fund was pretty big ben how big was the fund uh but he closed he returned hundreds of millions of dollars 100 no that that was the fund he was at before though i think sorry his personal fund which is like the pomp rolling fund or whatever oh yeah i think was like 25 million a year or something like that which is the equivalent of a 100 million dollar fund um so i think he was doing 20 to 25 million a year again these are all plus or minus 50 percent and then youtube got 4 million views in the last 30 days and then his podcast i bet is around where we are but dude youtube at four million views is uh that's like four thousand dollars or something youtube pays like nothing on just the views but maybe his sponsors he's probably because i think his best business show has a main sponsor that's like uh yeah it's so fine because one time i got in trouble because i i disrespected them when they were they well they're not a sponsor anymore right so can you tell the story yeah so basically one time um the the hustle wrote an article about sofi's ceo getting in trouble for i don't remember what it was sexual hurt was it a sexual thing or was it fraud something like that and he in the headline we wrote so fine more like so and they bailed as a sponsor and i told that story on his podcast and he got really uh he wasn't mad but uncomfortable yeah i was like well you just tell him i said it you know you didn't say it i said it so so if i can't you're like a menace yeah the sofa like marketing team so like god everywhere we go this guy comes in so at this point i would say he's in the huge range of five and seven million a year just off like pomp that's income right they're not even counting the sort of equity value that's because there's also bitcoin pizza which was his like uh ghost kitchen he launched what else has there been he's got merch is he a merch i think he's got merch yeah he's got marge what are the other part of his empire of his uh his pomp empire he's got his brother so he's that i really respect that anybody who takes you know anybody who's got the uh when i eat we all eat mentality i respect that and he brought his brothers along so one brother joe he does awesome content about the business of sports his other brothers are his co-hosts for the best business show because when i asked him i was like dude why are you signing up to do this morning show like there's so much work to do youtube show every day for multiple hours he's like yeah but i'm just like it's me hanging out with my brothers shooting busting each other's balls and talking business like that's kind of what i would if i just said what's my ideal life it's like i'll just hang out with my brothers and like you know like i mean i get it i can do that the problem is like let's say you want to take like a three week vacation you know yeah there's a difference between uh i like to do it and i have to do it right and he's he's gonna have to do it it seems like right now with where uh you know you're committed to a schedule um all right you want me to tell you about an interesting company yeah actually one plug there so while ben's here so we uh i don't know when we're gonna talk about the milk road i want to talk about my new new new project that me and ben have launched a new company uh but there is a version of this which is the the one we were like all right this is a great idea but there's one drawback which is you have to write this email every day and it's the same thing it's a prison it's like and we were very conscious about it it's like ben you want to sign up for this this is the prison we're going to choose uh to be in like if this is if this is what we choose fine but let's not get here and be surprised because uh because that's the commitment we gotta make we are every night and so ben at you know midnight after the babies are asleep or whatever it's like you know he's like hey here's the draft for tomorrow morning's email and then i i was up until 2 a.m last night editing the thing and so there's definitely a pain in the ass component to it that's uh you know that i'm experiencing which is one-tenth of what pomp does but it's more than enough for me and you did the same thing man it's hard i like i loved it i mean it to me it it's like i think i told you it's almost like running a marathon or like being in a fight or something it's like you're scared to do it you do it and you get in the thick of it and you like kind of enjoy it and then you get you get to a point where you can take a break and you're like this is horrible i never want to do this again which is how i felt like last year and then you get like six months out and you're like i miss the i miss the action i need to get i need to get into it and so it's really hard to to write a newsletter every single day to do any type of content creation every single day for more than a year is very very very hard really tough uh and we're only what less than a month into it ben what's the uh where are you at in the grind like i think we're giving it a year for like how long you you could tolerate this and and sustain this pace where are you at right now you're only in month one i'm at the still exciting still fun to research and write but i am at the holy shawn's a way better writer than i am point uh but i'm still it's still fun yeah sometimes i i i go into edit i'm like let me just touch up this little wordsmith and then like i overhauled the whole thing because i'm like oh no i think this could be better and i'm like actually it was fine before but like i just can't help myself like last night actually this is an interesting point to talk about at sam actually so so we should say two things one we'll talk about what this company is and why we started it basically every year me and ben have started one company um last year's company was the e-commerce company and we grew that from zero to about 10 million in revenue profitably uh and we and to do that like never had done a physical product before never like never knew how to get things manufactured and all that never had been spending like you know 200 000 a month on facebook ads and being responsible for that return and making sure you don't grow broke so so that was the adventure last year this year we were like what do we want to do and we basically were like whatever it is it's got to be in either crypto or like kind of like teaching slash audience building that's the stuff i like to do crypto's like the topic me and ben are obsessed with and that's why we came up with this thing called the milk road which is basically it's an email you get every day and we just say it's kind of like um it's the way i got it's the way i got good at crypto which was my buddy fer khan who's way smarter than me um he was like he you know he bought ethereum and the crowd sale he bought he was mining bitcoin back in the day like this guy's just been ahead of the curve on stuff he's an engineer and every day he basically just sends me like three links he's like yo check this out you seen this i'm always like no i haven't seen it and then i'm always like wait what is this why is this interesting and he's like oh so the reason this is cool is because abc and he just breaks it down super simple for like a dumb ass like me and i was like dude if i could just take that idea and provide that like as a newsletter like furcon doesn't care he's never going to create a sub stack or a newsletter he's like too smart and too cool for all that but i was like if i could take that idea of like a smart friend just showing you one or two cool things a day that's going on in crypto and explaining it in simple plain jane english i think that that would actually be useful how many subscribers do you guys have so we've been doing it for i think three weeks now and we're at 16 and a half thousand as of today so it's grown like last week we're at 10 000 so this week alone we've grown about fifty percent what was the cause two things we turned on uh paid ads and so you referred or you have you know a guy who uh is good with this stuff he's been helping us out he's really good actually like wait i've tried like five agencies for facebook as this guy's like better than all of them how much are you spending to acquire an email um right i don't want to say that right now but it's in the good range remember when you were like dude back in the day it used to be x now it's y we're getting it for x still but we also aren't spending a ton so maybe as we spend more that's going to go down um but honestly there's such a big appetite for learning crypto because people know people kind of know all right this seems like the next big wave like you know there was the internet there was mobile phones there's iphone and now like crypto seems to be the big wave super hard to keep up with and i know there's money to be made so i think the appetite is there where i think we're going to keep getting subscribers for pretty cheap because the appetite i've never seen an appetite for content like this in my in my life because i've been trying to make content that people want and i'm always talking about i'm into and like you know it's often like the name is good i think the name's pretty good and you're using that platform beehive is that any good beehive's pretty good it's pretty new so like there's a lot of features we need where we're like yo we need to be able to for example if i um do a partnership with somebody or what or somebody plugs us in their newsletter or let's say facebook ads we pay for facebook ads i need to know is that subscriber like worth the same as an organics like are they still opening it 20 days later you know i need to know like based on where they came from are they still opening it to know where i should put my energy spreading the word and so they don't have features like that yet but we're kind of working with them to be like yo help us like good we need x can you build it we'll be your best customer if you can kind of like help us uh get what we need sick i think is i i think it's going to work it just um i think that you'll start seeing well you've already seen progress after one year you're gonna see a lot of progress and then if you continue to do it for three years then really starts to accumulate the media really does compound i didn't believe that it did compound because i'm like well it's not like subscription revenue necessarily but then i realized like yeah but if i like just continue doing this and i get known you like it becomes it compounds in terms of cultural relevance and that usually translates to revenue that's a good point and i've always said this and i've always this up that's the reason i keep saying it as a mostly as a reminder myself like the best advice i get the advice i give the most to others is the advice that i've had this the lesson i've had to relearn five times because i just can't like get it through my thick head and that's that what you work on and who you work with matters way more than how hard you work and put that another way is the most important decision you make is what project to work on and so like i'll tell you like i've worked on some really shitty projects like uh we did a hackathon and we built this app called beer hunt and it was like every time you drink a beer you like take a picture of it you check it in yeah but you don't give a about that and it's like and people got excited why because oh beer everybody loves to like it would get a big reaction any time we told somebody about it they'd laugh and they'd they'd be like oh that's cool i'll send it to my buddy or whatever and so p people liked it who were especially craft beer types but i wasn't a craft beer type and also like i didn't have the filter of like dude if i'm gonna do anything it's gonna basically take up all my time for like three years minimum is this the one right and um and i was treating it like a you know like a hookup and i should have been treating it like marriage because projects are more like marriage really when they like once you decide to do them you're going to do them for multiple years right like and so so i've chosen a bunch i did a sushi restaurant horrible project beer app horrible project tried to build the next big social network and messaging app worked so hard built cool but like the hardest industry to like you know you're just running around with a bottle trying to catch lightning so my project selection has been horrible to date the best project i ever selected was this podcast and then you know the e-commerce one was okay not not great like it's successful but it's more successful just because i got better at business it's still a really hard business to be in and kind of a roll up your sleeves type of business to do i think this is probably the next best like i think i finally did project selection right and the reason why is i think that crypto is as important as like you know mobile apps and iphone was in kind of like 2009 2008 um 2010 maybe and as important as like the internet was back in like 1999 i think that's true and when there's a huge wave happening it kind of doesn't matter exactly what you do you just need to make sure you're out in the water paddling with your board and i had been kind of like i'd been investing and thinking about it but like it wasn't my job it wasn't my job to think about it every single day what this newsletter does like i don't know if the news i don't know if the media business is going to be amazing i think it could be but even if it's not the fact that my job is that every day i have to learn two amazing things like two interesting things about crypto and be able to explain it to tens of thousands of people um that is like that is a job that i think is going to pay off in weird ways i could think i think we're going to get into good investments because people are going to be like oh cool yeah you guys got that big distribution yeah we want you in this project yeah i mean i'm going to find that's what happened with the hustle right and it's like i'm going to find cool projects because i'm literally i have to say something interesting tomorrow morning at 7 am when this email goes out uh i'm not going to say something boring so that means i got to learn something every day so that means i'm turning myself into kind of like a learning machine so that is why i think this is the right project and the reason i share this is because i think it's the most important decision you make in any project you do in any endeavor you do is just at the beginning what project you decided to go go for dude i i i that's wonderful i'm reading three two two books on this topic the first is called wanting um which is uh andrew suggested it that's why i bought it he suggested it on this pod it's called wanting and it's about mesmic desire um genetic sorry memetic desire um and the second one is the daily laws and this it's this daily it's about uh the 48 laws of power and mastery and all these great books by this guy named robert greene but you read just one page a day and the whole first section that i'm continuing reading is like how do you find what you care about and it's really great because the the the thing is is you want to find you want to find stuff where you are able to when you get into it you actually get more energized and i've done a lot of stuff like uh copywriting stuff which i think is fun sometimes but when i do it i'm like ugh i gotta like i'll be like fine i'm gonna get this done by one o'clock on monday i gotta get this done and then i realized one time a couple years ago i moved apartments and i remember the mover coming and i planned for a week so i was like all right we're gonna get all these box we're gonna stack these box here this is how we're gonna move it the move is gonna come at eight o'clock i'm gonna be there i'm gonna lift this up and then i was i i got up at 5 00 a.m because i couldn't go to i couldn't sleep i was like i'm so excited to move and to like physically move these things and set up the new place and i was thinking about that when i was figuring out what i'm going to do next and that's one of the reasons why i'm getting into short-term rentals right now is because i just got it and i think that the the point i'm trying to make is when you're thinking about what gives you energy it doesn't have to be you said it but i don't actually think you meant this this way you said i think this is a big deal and i don't think that's why it excites you it excites you just because the the i don't know why it excites you but like the um literally just like it's a new money that's kind of interesting i don't think it would matter if like everyone's talking about it or not like i i don't know if you if that's what excites you what excites you is like literally the tiny minute details for some reason it's it's just if maybe the math maybe like you're over overthrowing the system something about that is really interesting to you right and so for me i was like i just love moving these boxes and moving into a new apartment i don't know why i love doing that but like i love going out on the street and hunting for places and talking to the guy at the bar like what do you think about this neighborhood are all the hipsters moving here like i love it i get obsessed with it and like i what i was trying to do what i should do next is i was thinking about what do i just get so much energy of and i remember i cannot sleep the day before i've got to move because i'm so excited that's so funny but i think most people hate that but you love it which is why it's even more valuable uh when the thing you get energy from is things that drain other people's energy like bingo you're going to out-compete everybody because for them it's going to be working for you it's going to be play like my co-worker this guy paul gemheim told me this month he goes he was like um i hadn't really thought about this i was really young at the time maybe 24 24 25. and he goes he goes yeah so you should um you should go talk at this event and i was like why is it gonna like give growth to the to our app or like are we gonna recruit people he's like no you should go talk because you love talking right like he's like talking gives you energy so you're gonna love it and i go what he goes he goes yeah it's like um you know for most people if they had to go give a talk in front of a bunch of people they would like they'd be drained by the time they even get up on the stage and then afterwards there'd just be like finally some relief from the anxiety i've been feeling he's like you're the opposite he's like i noticed that he goes he goes yeah he goes he goes it's like going to the gym you know you go to the gym and like if you just look at the math it's like well there's a lot of energy expended working out but how do you feel after you work out you feel yeah you feel physically a bit tired but you feel like your actual spirit feels energized uh like you go give energy and somehow you get energy in that moment and he's like so you know there's some stuff that's energy drains and even though it's not that taxing it's like just thinking about your good think about filing your taxes for like the next 20 minutes watch you'll feel awful by the end of it you're going to need a nap or a drink and it's like on the other hand if you do stuff that gives you energy you know blah blah blah and so you know you can audit your calendar and say i'm a highlight in green the things that i do that give me energy and put in red the things that that suck my soul and um and you know if i want to have a better life i should probably just do more of the green i think that's that's great i think that my i i've talked to a ton of people right now who are messing they're like you know i've made a little bit of a name for myself should i do it in my career but like i don't even like it what the do i do and i'm like ah yeah it's tough but you gotta find where where you have to find what gives you energy that doesn't necessarily mean what makes you happy by the way but what gives you energy totally because it can be really challenging and frustrating at times and you know uh it'll have highs and lows in fact i i i add this channel to every slack that i do so like i just put it in our e-commerce one because we just had like a big low where we got effed over by this like crazy unforeseen circumstances like oh well here's another one and so you know my team they get so bogged down by these highs and lows and i was like guys remember like we we stood in line to get on a roller coaster why are we surprised when there's highs and lows that's what a roller coaster does like if you didn't want the thrill like you know we can go sit in the grass over there we don't have to be on a roller coaster line i'm stealing that and it's like you know so i create a slide channel called highs and lows and i say well now we have a place to put it which is in itself like therapy it's like ah dude this is gonna be an epic low that i put in there and we went we wrote the low and then we started riding some highs that we've had and like it just it's what you should expect don't be surprised when the roller coaster goes up and down when you you stood in line to get on the roller coaster you were excited about going on this roller coaster um you know that's that's what you wanted you wanted the adventure and so um and so you know that's how i think that's like a good tip for really any business that's a great line with the milk road which milk roads the name of the the crypto email that me and ben sent out every day um and like you you go to milkroad.com i bought the domain by the way for 2000 i think it's pretty good pretty good buy right it's a good buy two grand for milk that's a great buy we had milkroad.xyz and it was like such like people couldn't even like the thing wouldn't even load i don't know why but like milkgrove.com so when we started writing this i was like all right i found my thing now i found my thing when i was probably like 32 or something like that right so it took me 12 years maybe to figure out what's the thing that gives me energy and mine was i just want to get paid to be curious and it's like what does that mean it's like i don't know like ever like every day i hear about different stuff or reading about things i'm talking to people wouldn't it be great if just like going and learning that thing was somehow how i got rich and fam richard famous like wouldn't that be dope and like the podcast does that it lets me just be curious i can be like oh someone's making a bunch of money selling turnkey tailgates to universities how does the economics of that work right like that shouldn't be something i'm i get to i get the license to go spend three hours figuring out but the podcast gives me that license and cool it gives me money and fame for for doing it i get power and influence great uh as a byproduct then the second thing the ecommerce one for example does not give me this and that's why i don't think long long term it's for me because it's not me being professionally curious it's like more of an opportunistic thing milk road is that because every day i'm like i like for example yesterday this guy came out with this thing i think you'll find interesting so most of the time people talk about the prices people tell us about a lot of time talk about price of crypto which is kind of annoying once you stay in it for a while but like let's say the price of ethereum right now is about twenty six hundred dollars per per each and um it should be five thousand yeah people people come out and they should be they're like oh like ethan's going to five thousand is going to ten thousand eath to the moon and like nine times out of ten this is you know either hopes and dreams or it's like just click bait like if i say i think bitcoin's going to five million a coin guess what that's going to get covered by a bunch of people and like a bunch of people are going to share it because it's outlandish and hey you know please don't hold me to it what are you going to do i'm just making some far-fetched prediction about the future and the last one is they are like using some weak ass logic like like people do this with bitcoin all the time they're like there are 55 million millionaires in the world and there's only 21 million bitcoin there's not enough bitcoin for the millionaires to all have one so price is gonna go way way up and it's like okay like i understand the general idea of what you're saying but like that's so unsophisticated compared to and this is why like warren buffett comes out and says bitcoin is rat poison or it's pure speculation there's no fundamentals that was like the that's the common narrative so what i thought was kind of cool was um was that um ben just linked an article in the chat where i did the clickbait thing where i said i'm putting 25 of my net worth into bitcoin this is like you know a year and a half ago or something like that and i was like because there's a there's a wave of institutional capital coming in i'm going to front run the wave and it just sounds great and guess what like you know these these news websites you know look at this like cringing with my face with a big one what was the thing that happened all right so this guy came out he's a cr he's like a kind of like a crypto quant uh investor he's got like his own fund or whatever and he said you know i actually think that there's a way to value ethereum like you would value any stock any stock of a company he goes so how do you value a company you value a company based on its cash flows well guess what ethereum has revenue so what's the revenue of ethereum ethereum has revenue because there's transaction fees and um you know peop this is not new but there's something new of like ethereum changed what it does with the transaction fees so now you can value it so for example bitcoin has transaction fees but the transaction fees get paid to miners so as a bitcoin holder you don't get that revenue and the miners all have different expenses one guy's in greenland his expenses are low because the electricity is cheap there whatever so you could never really get the profits the net profits of bitcoin transactions or the bitcoin network because it really wasn't that's not enough it wasn't it was apples to oranges but ethereum has changed what it does with the fees which now lets you create a valuation model so what happens all right ethereum transaction happens let's say it's a hundred dollars for the transaction fee um 70 of that it's called the base fee and do you know what they do with the base fee you know where that goes no i don't know anything what you're talking about to be honest okay so you okay well i'll explain in the most simple terms when there's an ethereum trait when there's a transaction ethereum there's a fee right that's cool visa mastercard everybody has a fee when you do a transaction the ethereum fee gets broken into two parts there's the base fee which is just burned so they take 70 percent of the transaction fee and they just get rid of it why would you do that well this is like when a when a company buys back stock it's a share buyback they basically buy stock on the open market and just get rid of it what does that do it makes le it shrinks the supply of the stock which makes the price go up right there's less supply but there's the same demand so price goes up so so ethereum started doing this thing last year where it takes the fee and it just buys back ethereum and gets rid of it which drives the price of drives the supply down price up okay cool that's the first bit the second bit is there's like a tip that's 30 of the fee uh today that goes to miners but there's a like the way ethereum there's like ethereum 2.0 coming out when it does that that's going to go to the holders of ethereum to the long-term holders of ethereum so that's like a dividend being issued out so now you have now ethereum has revenue which last month that was 1.3 billion in fees so real significant revenue and we know that that go that accrues the value accrues to the two holders of ethereum so what price target did did he put on it so he does a model he does a discounted cash flow model and he basically says based on this revenue based on this multiple and based on the this discount rate the price target for ethereum right now right now the present value of ethereum according according to this model is ten thousand dollars per each ether is trading at two point six thousand two point six k if you believe this guy's model he's under value currently by about four x and he put the model out there so anybody can go change it you can say name uh his name is google to read it what was his name ryan alice and um and so you could say okay maybe he's got really like aggressive assumptions in his model um well actually he just used the average price to earnings multiple of the s p 500 um and he assumed 25 annual growth uh for the ethereum message over the next 20 years which is not like super aggressive right it grew like a thousand percent last year 400 this year like you know it's growing much faster than that right now so you've used pretty conservative estimates now there's always risks right any i i have this phrase i put in my i put in the newsletter this morning which is that you know more fiction gets written in excel than in books um you know because uh you can you can make a excel model dance and make it look great just by tweaking two little variables so you always have to be careful with the stuff you got to do your own homework but i found this to be really interesting because the common narrative is oh it's all speculation it's got no intrinsic value there's no fundamentals there's no analysis you can do on it uh you're just guessing what the next guy is going to buy and that actually is true for most coins and it was true for ethereum until now and one of the best things you can do as an investor is spot when something a common narrative is now no longer true uh those are usually pretty big opportunities so anyways that was i'm up till 3 a.m last night because i'm learning what this guy's model looked like i'm kind of checking it for myself does this make sense to me and i'm putting that in the newsletter it's like hey let me make this simple for you to understand like this is kind of cool um and so even though that's a lot of work that's a prison of my own making that i'm happy to do because i i would rather you're going to be into this though for years i think you will be um that's the big tbd but that's the that's the i think you will for now i'm into it i'm providing a out of value nine months from now 28 months from now am i gonna feel the same i don't know but hopefully we can hire a writer who doesn't feel the same i think with most people even the they love it does get boring sometimes and then what you do is you walk away or you chill and then you you fall in love again i mean i have to imagine that even steven spielberg is like i don't want to make a movie this year right you know what i mean uh i i think is that how they feel i wonder what like nadal or what's what's the tennis player or the uh um rafael nadal yeah i wonder like what he thinks about like tennis or something like that i mean i like usain bolt was like i don't even like training man i'm just doing this because i'm good at it and it like i i like winning but i don't really love i'm not in love with this right now um and like that's normal i think that's natural and you see even like fighters like dustin poirier when he beat conor mcgregor he was like man i'm over this i don't even like doing this anymore i don't even like this anymore tom brady just retired yesterday right and he's like basically he's one he's 44 now so he's been doing this for like you know 20 plus years um professionally and he was like football is he's like i still love the games but football is a 365 days a year commitment for me i don't know if you know about tom brady but he like sleeps every day at like eight p.m i mean he started like the t12 or whatever his thing is called the tea body or whatever his thing is called wanting to come on the path oh really his trainer yeah the guy alex i don't know if his trainer or business partner but like he branded himself as the guy who started it the tv12 method um so uh yeah i think people do get burnt out tony robbins has this thing he says which he goes people's number one need in life is certainty so like you need to know where your next meal is coming if you've got a roof over your head where you're gonna sleep that's why we love relationships because we love the certainty and comfort of knowing who's gonna be there who you talk to what you do every day we love routines he goes but you know god in her infinite wisdom made it so that uh the second biggest need we have is uncertainty which is variety which is it's like a see-saw what do you do as soon as the thing is balanced you start jumping around to mess it up right and like you got to know that about your nature and um and there's like you know it's it's completely normal to enjoy a structured routine and then at the same time crave variation doesn't mean you don't like the thing or it's not cool anymore it's just that that's how humans are wired all right sick let's wrap up here because i've got i've got some stuff that i wanted to cover but we didn't get through today and so we'll save that for monday right okay cool producer ben what did you think of the app good episode uh uh good episode ben levy good edition good story uh yeah solid episode ben your your meme was amazing he did this meme which is like walks into shaun's office for interview is your name ben yes you're hired we're putting together a team if your name is ben and you're talented get it get at us how's your uh what was your what was your numbers in january ben oh i need to look it up it was uh it didn't beat my best month which was um like just below 100. my best month was 97 or something like that and this was just below that what's the latest uh who are you profiling right now what story are you telling uh well i'm still in the middle of walt disney i haven't put out part two yet um so i'm in the middle of that also i'm i'm a bigamist i'm a cheater when it comes to research so i'm also doing a little research on other stuff too yeah so i know a fair bit about walt disney what's like give me one tidbit that's like bet you didn't know this or this is super what i found super fast give me one i haven't listened to that he's optimistic and he went broke and bankrupt a few times right yeah i mean that was the most amazing thing to me um actually the tidbit that like has blown my mind the most um is there's a story where basically they're inventing cartoons with sound and like they're showing it to this audience the audience is going crazy right so they keep showing it to him again and again and again and finally a couple of his animators are like we can't do this it's six hours they've been showing it to him it's two in the morning so they just like go outside of the theater a little bit and they're like smoking and talking and he comes out and he goes yeah what are you guys gonna do you stand out here talking about babies or you're gonna come inside and change the world and it blew my mind because i was like if you just told me that that quote out of context i would have told you it was steve jobs like it was it's so similar and then i just like started putting it i would have thought of sampar when he said uh do you want your kids to have braces so those those are just like two stories that i'm breaking this down now in the second episode the similarities between their stories are actually like kind of uncanny they have a lot of weird similarities yeah isn't it i've always thought that like you could with all types of people that you could basically there's like i i was always trying to think how many categories are there of people because i remember meeting some people i'm like oh you are this you are exactly this human being and after listening to your podcast i remember listening to edison and i'm like oh elon is exactly like that and if i study edison i bet you i can like make sense of a lot of what elon's doing and help predict what he might do and i wonder if you could do the same for like a jobs and a uh a walt disney where you just put them in the same category like i can understand a lot of stuff because of ben this is perfect for your your uh consulting business that you've created off the pod you know those disc personality surveys where it's like you're a dominant you know indifferent or whatever you know like some like that you're a red blue and you can get along with greens uh you just need to do that with like great great people in history it's like you're 42 jobs and actually like you know you're 42 jobs and you're 60 um you know like whatever uh you know walt disney and it's like what does that mean it's like well you're like jobs in this way and everybody just gets a compliment it's like oh yeah i'm 82 percent edison actually and i don't work well with disney's i'm 32 percent wozniak i need to find my job yeah yeah do some like myers-briggs over the top of it i like that um i'm all about making up fake personality uh quizzes i think that's great i gotta run i gotta go get my workout in it's about to snow and get freezing in austin like the first time in a long time so i gotta go doesn't austin like shut down when it snows yeah it's stupid like last year we were shut down for like a week but i didn't have power in water for six days and it was like 20 degrees so it was kind of warranted by the way speaking of one-liners you said an amazing one after we recorded last week uh like like he was just saying that walt disney quote what was the one that you said that our our buddy said he goes remember the lime he goes and this guy's like worth a hundred plus million dollars he said um people hate on get rich quick schemes are they crazy getting rich quick is the best way to get rich why would anyone hate on that i love getting rich i only want to get rich quick yeah he goes you got a good get rich quick scheme for me i love that and this guy like sold his company in like two years so like it was a get-rich-quick scheme it worked that's so funny all right see you guys you