You got caught, okay, you got got. And okay, I think we should create a set of the Forbes 30 under 30. I think we need like the Madoff 1000 or all the grifters and con artists that are that are out there. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to be like a day's travel. Never looking back. All right, we don't normally let Ben have ideas but we let the man out of the cage, he's got an idea. Embed? What
You you texted us us this morning, you want to try something, what you want to try. We're doing a new
segment, fellas. We're just gonna we're going quick through the news and we're having you guys react. People want to know what the fellows think about what's happening. So we're going to, we're going to find out more
call it. I'm going to call this the boys react. I've been trying to make this the boys thing a thing for a little while now, and it hasn't happened.
But as I taught my daughter yesterday we never give up. And so the boys react is going to be we're going to react to the news here. So bend you have some news segments or news stories. I guess and Sam, Sam actually likes the news. Sam Sam's into into the news. I'm
like, dude, I read the news, like, crazy. You don't read the news, I'm an anti new user.
I just love drama. You know how some level are
Preppers. I'm like, whatever that is where you avoid the news at all
costs. Yeah, I just like gossip my life's pretty boring. So, I need, I need drama. I love the comment sections to
somebody said this the other day that I think it was like Nepal or one of these smart guys. They go. The goal of the media is to make every problem your problem and I was like oh that's pretty true. That's kind of like what the news is. It's like, oh, there's a flood in this County. I don't live in shit. I mean,
watch this for 20 minutes. Why do I care about this? This is nothing to do with me. All right, but anyways, sorry let's start use okay
with the the most interesting one. Then what is it? We're starting a little close to home. Your friend Nikita beer, his social app gas was acquired by Discord for an undisclosed amount. What do you guys think about your buddy Nikita being acquired by Discord? Give the background Sean about this guy like because it's a pretty he it's a caper I call this a
caper.
Okay
paper and I'm like, what is it? Go a caper, it's like a scheme but like it's like when you would rob a bank, you know, you'd like, what's that? Sweet Caper
fool. Me once shame on, you fool me twice. Shame on me. He just fooled. The tech industry twice, dude. He sold the same app so he built an app called TBH. That was like you know let a teenager go on and it basically quiz you about people in your school your friends and be like who's the most
Cute boy in your life or like, oh Sam, as I, who's the most likely to be famous. So, it's been right where you just do that, right? And then they would take in this like years ago. Yes, it was a queue, download my app and of course, that shit worked. He did that and like, it immediately went viral because it went viral Facebook, buys. The thing because Facebook has like a system internally that says, like viral Team app and it's like must acquire must acquire viral teenage app. You know, I get that young blood in here and so,
Acquired it. People had said a hundred million dollars. I don't know, it's not a hundred million dollars but but I think something more like 30 40 million bucks. And
and this was in 2017, that
him 17, he sells the app. Promptly the app gets shut down within like a year because there was never any retention in this app. He then sits at Facebook for four years at vest out the entire every cent of his earn out, which is just hilarious. And it's
Own right? And all he did was just tweet all day. Like he worked in the new products division and you know, half released the maps, I guess, and then he leaves, you know what's it called? Recidivism, Sam here. Yeah, your present guy. He leaves the jail of Facebook and he does the same goddamn thing. Again, he creates another teen app for compliments. He tells us this in advance, he goes, yeah, I'm going to, I'm just going to make an app that makes like ten million dollars in three months.
And we both kind of laughed it off and were like, is that even possible and then he pretty much did it. I think gasps app is made seven million in gross sales in like 3ish month. So you'll pretty much called his shot which we do respect. But also we have to clarify one thing Sam. Ben said he's our friend, is he still our friend after how insufferable he is in the group chat?
So he is insufferable, but I kind of like it a little bit.
I think it's pretty hilarious. I love a good troll. I think that you're missing some of the data here so he sold the company to Discord. There's no release on price or anything like that but some people can make guesses, but basically between leaving or being at Facebook and Discord, he creates this Mystique, I calmed the Jewish, Great Gatsby. He creates this kind of Mystique where he's got. This really lovely home and Lala. Is he single? Or, at least, he's not married, and he like, host, really fun.
Parties. And then he posts on Twitter about, like his opinion, on going viral and all like Legends likes or quote Legend start following him and they like message him and they he's created this Aura of sophistication and of like he knows what he's doing with apps, which is true. It's all true, he's very talented, but it was pretty cool. How it was like, kind of systemic. So he has the talent. He has the skill, but he did a great job of also flexing that he
Talent and he had the skill and people start flocking to him. And what he starts launching this thing,
and here's the analogy. He's like, he's like the guy who Moved he moved to a new high school as a sophomore and then didn't try to make a single friend but he just went to lunch. He was just totally content sitting by himself. He wasn't a loser. He was almost too cool to have to try and because of that, everyone's like, who is this guy? Does he have a his girlfriend in college? Oh my God. And you just be like, you know,
During his college girlfriend that you don't know but you know if they exist but he just built this Aura. This Mystique around him by almost not trying. Whereas everybody else on Twitter's like, hey, follow me for more threads about how great I am, right? And he's trying to do the exact opposite where he's just like only shitposting and you know, just hinting and posting a little screen shots that make you think he's up to something big at all
times. Yeah. You're like, who's this kid coming up to school as a 16 year old in a motorcycle? You know, like that guy's got a neck tattoo.
Like I can't confirm that he's a badass but like all all signs point to it. That that was his thing and he never he didn't deny that, he didn't confirm it. So could be true, it could not be true. But the fact is, is that he created this app, something happened to it, like there's a crazy rumor with the app that it was used for child sex trafficking, which wasn't true. He changed the name of the app, then he changed the name again, a third time and it takes off and he sells it, we're recording this on a Wednesday. I believe it was announced yesterday.
Turday. This is a wonderful Caper not to say that Discord didn't get value. I have no idea what the truth is. The truth is probably like they're going to make something cool of it, who knows? But he pulled it off, he called the shot, he pulled it off and he did it in such an obnoxious way. And that's why I love them. You know, I love guys like that.
I love what he did. And honestly, I love the way he did it too, but the problem is, he's like a fart a fartist amazing. When you're more than six feet away. You don't want to be too close to the fort
Thank you, the fort's, not funny when you're right up against it. And so that's the problem with this is we were too close to it. We got had to hear him
and he loves smelling his own sin.
Love smelling his own fart through and so, you know, he will in our group chat. Just post every like Twitter mention where somebody's like, oh my god, he has done it again but why the Kita is the best. As I bro I don't need your Twitter. Bedsheets posted here you know for me for me to see it is completely, he's an insufferable far.
Art. But I do respect what he's pulled off.
Yeah, it's pretty funny. So this is like an interesting thing. I can't believe he pulled it off, but he called his shot. I respect that. I think it's cool.
So he's done a thing, like, you know mr. Beast does this thing. Where, like, if you go talk to a pretty serious business person, they would like reference, a mr. Beast, and like a mr. Beast ISM. Or they're like,
well, Miss Abby said.
Yeah. Jimmy just says, you know, we just try to make great videos as if like nobody else tries to make great videos or
Be like or he'll be like, you know, we just were willing to put more into our content, try to make the best content possible ball, what it's like. And then if somebody goes and looks and they're like, bro, you you your your video is put your hand on this car and the last person to take their hand off, you know, last person with their hand on the car keeps the car. Like this is not like, you know, you're not Steven Spielberg over here.
But didn't we talk about this? We're we're like, look, we're gonna do this thing and we're going to send them a welcome letter and we're
Just going to make it really delightful. It's going to be a
beautifully. Well done, just beautifully time. And if you do it like that, people start to buy and they start to eat that little puppy chow and so similarly, he mr. Bestows. This reality Distortion where he makes you believe that he is the deepest thinker. He is creating the most epic. Beautiful, well done content, he's a cop, really thoughtful. It just don't, it's like, you know, watch me fart in people's ears.
It's true that people. I'm on a fart kick today but people do like it. The content would definitely works, but it creates this almost as Mystique around it and I feel like Nikita did the same thing where he'll tweet out shit where he'll be like just move the butthole a little closer. We don't like the underrated metric and social networking is density by far more important than spread and he's like you know like if you're still measuring K-factor you might as well still be using a BlackBerry
Right. And he has like three that shit. That makes you think like damn this, this motherfucker knows shit that I don't know about social networking. I hope you like there's only five people on Earth that can tell you about building social networks. The problem is they're all on the hirable because their name, our names are Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Nikita beer and so and and so by the way, I think
my levels to this, they had
levels. So so I think he does a great job of creating. It's like bro, you created an app that lets me say which, which
Girl, in my high school is the cutest and then a textured. Somebody said, you're cute, right? Like yeah, there's Beauty in the Simplicity for sure. But are they almost make it sound more complicated in artistic than it really is? And, and trust me, it's not, we're
not, we're not like every other social app. You see, we're changing the world one popularity contest at a time we are, we're democratizing popularity
he went on on, like, CNBC or in one of these like, views networks or whatever and they were
Like we have here, the founder of the hit teen at The Sensational app, the Kita, what inspired you to do this? And he's like, you know, we just believe that teens state of the world needed a little more positivity and that we wanted to create a safe space for whatever. And it's like safe space. They were showing a screenshot of the app and the screenshot shit said who's most likely to steal your girlfriend? He's like, you know, which one to read positivity is awarded the only
Spacey one. And what does it was a vacation home in time?
You wanted to fly private. That's your mission accomplished. I that is amazing. Yeah, his next steps gonna be called plebe,
but in all seriousness, he pulled it off. I think it's cool.
I make fun of them because because of how obnoxious has been for four months on this group chat but, you know, deep down. He's my kind of people I respect, I respect what he's dead and I also respect that the massive troll that he's played on.
Here. So, this is good.
All right, everyone today's episode is brought to you by marketing Against the Grain. If you want to know what's happening in marketing than this is the podcast for you, the hosts are kit bottner who's HubSpot CMO and Kieran Flanagan, who's Hub, spots SVP of marketing on the Pod, they share their unfiltered marketing expertise. One of my favorite recent episodes was called why creators are disrupting marketing Kip and Karen talked. To Steve Smith has been on my first million a ton about all things Creator economy. They asked her how you could find a niche audience, how to create great content for them and how to monetize that content.
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To go to our YouTube page, and you click subscribe. That's the gentleman's agreement. It's
have my pan here. Am I going to need this for the gentleman's agreement? Do I need to sign something? Or what do I
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Chase bought College financial aid platform, Frank for 175 million dollars. It has now shut down the website and claims that they fabricated more than 4 million accounts on their first email to their customer list. They got a 70% bounce back founder Charlie Javis. My name is pronounced denies that this is fraud and claims JP Morgan is just inventing. Reasons to not pay her fellows, boys. Who do you believe? Well, JP.
This lady was a Forbes 30 under 30, and they just like, a couple years later cells are at 499, figures hundred million plus, and it's pretty hilarious. They even found they tracked it down. I believe where they talk to the developers. It was a, it was like a, they hired one freelancer. I think who they said, hey, can you like, make some test data to put in here and he starts doing it? And there, the guy was like, I think this is fraud, I'm out. So they found those emails and then they did it again with another contractor. And who
Actually did do it and they convinced the contractor that it wasn't fraud and so they've kind of like honed in on this that it seems quite clear that it's fraud. But bold move. Very bold move, very easy to catch though. Really stupid like this seems like really a foolish mistake.
Yeah this is like the JP Morgan's. Got a little egg on their face for not noticing this because this is pretty easy to notice. I mean, the fact that they sent one email and 70% bounce back right? Like that that sounds
Like it was at this really sophisticated, you know, botnet that, you know, was simulating real users. It was just a bunch of fake. Fake emails in a, you know, in a database. So, you know, that sounds pretty easy. And also it says there's an email with her. She's asking to Professor who ended up doing this will, the will the fake emails? Look, real with an eye check, or is it better to use unique ID, right? So like you know, hand in the cookie jar as we say
Around here that have you, you got caught. Okay, you got got. And okay, I think we should create instead of the Forbes 30 under 30. I think we need like the Madoff. 1000, probably grifters and con artists that are that are out there. You know, I think that, you know, maybe the Caper Caper 20 or something like that, and we gotta come up with something here and we need to just annually. I think we should just do a show, but we just ranked the best cons of the year and and give them their to let them put that on their bio.
You dumb down and what's crazy is this is so, so when I sold the hustle, we had I think 1.7 million subscribers. We use this service, HubSpot paid for it and it was a service. I forget the name of it but I believe it. Did two things. We uploaded our whole email list and then I think HubSpot uploaded some of their email. I don't remember exactly how it work. I think they did it and it showed the crossover, like how many we each shared in a huge amount of emails? I imagine hotspot has like hundreds of million. I have no idea. A lot of emails and
Then I also think it checked for fraud and it was like a couple days to do this. It was pretty simple. There's just a few other services where they make fake data, and the reason they do this is, if you have a sensitive thing like a bank startup, you put a whole bunch of fake data in it and it like, makes up people and you can test your data because you can't use like, you know, obviously real Social Security numbers when you're testing certain things and they would make up fake stuff just to test the software and make sure it all works
on acai. Think it's called tonic dot AI. It's the
And then just the fake data company. We talked about them on the pot. I love this idea. I've been trying to, yeah, I forgot need to invest in this.
Yeah, I think it's a cool thing and so also with G PT 3 or whatever it's called. I was like thinking I'm like, dude, I should just I'm not going to do this, but maybe I was like, I should just make up fake fake reviews for all of my like products and you can just like, make up fake reviews or do you like makeup negative reviews for all your competitors products? But I was like,
are you looking for a nomination to the Madoff? On Thousand, we would happily be happy.
To have you do need to formally submit. Yeah but
you did. Yeah we have to make everyone pay a five hundred dollar application fee
to if there's no con going on in our sign. What are we doing
here? Yeah. Yeah. Well don't you want to win the award? It's an award did a thing
with milk Road. Where we had this philosophy which is like
We should be we should bank that in the future. We're going to cut out all advertisers and be our own Advertiser mean only promote our own product, our own service in this newsletter. That's the only way to hold yourself like accountable to not just acquiring like shitty subscribers and so we had started this new growth Channel. We're like, let's try this thing out. We heard there. You know, the rates are pretty good. We tried it out, we tried it for like a week and we're like, oh, the numbers look pretty good. We're getting cheap signups, they're opening the email that sounds great. And I was like, hey, Ben just, you know,
This for just a double check here. Why don't you just email all those people that signed up and just ask him like, you know, a simple quite like, you know, hey like ask them a one-line. Question, that would be a quick video here in, for the, for them to answer just to be like, hey, I just wanted to know, blah, blah, blah. I'm the founder of this thing. She wanted to know, blank because they're opening the thing daily. It looks like okay, fantastic. Surely. They would they reply to an email from their owner of the thing they read every day, right? And he was like, dude, guess how many? I forgot how many there was like that of a couple thousand people on this thing. He was I guess I'm people
Replied. I was like, well, you didn't say percentage. So of man, this is a number of people who replied. I was like, I don't know, like 400 500 and he was like to, we had two replies turned off the channel. My job was like, Wow. And I know a bunch of other people that are still buying from this trap this like, you know, this, this marketing player this traffic source and I'm like, well they're, they're just dumping money down the drain. If they're doing that
dude, seeing Billy McFarland and the theranos lady go to jail like this,
And potentially go to jail. Do they not think like, just like eight months in advance? It's like, man, this isn't like internet play games. This is like, go to prison games. Your this is really screwing up, a hundred plus million dollar acquisition and seventy percent of the users were fake. That is crazy. You go to prison for that type of stuff that is wild. And it's just crazy to think that no one's there and they're like, Charlie, you know, like are you do like generic Oreos and bologna sandwiches if yes?
Yes, this is great because that's what you're going to be eating for like the next nine months in prison.
It's great. Very Oreos. That's, that's nice,
well, not not when it's everyday and watered down Kool-Aid but like it's just it's pretty wild that people don't think ahead, but this is such an obvious scam. Also, JP Morgan you guys suck, man. You guys got to be on top of the ball. Like, this is such a, this is seems pretty easy to figure
out. Yeah, fair enough. All right, what's next? All right.
Bitcoin and etherium.
Our up 23% over the last week, Krypto is rallying. One, major cause is continue Rising inflation, 6.5 percent annualized. In December, the question for you fellas is crypto back
know what? To just end it there. I will give you that. That's a great answer. Sam.
I get to say, like, I told you something, I don't get to say, I Told You So. In fact, I might maybe take the other, the other L did I sell, but grow too early and I sell the bottom? No, I I think that a lot of things are rallying right now. Why? Because people did, I think it's just a simple answer. People do to end of your cell off in December for tax-loss harvesting and a lot of people will re-enter and then that creates some upward momentum and when there's upward momentum that makes people think.
Hey is it coming back? Is this the rally? Did we do we have the bottoms of time to buy back in? And so people are buying back in. I don't think it's because inflation and December because guess what? We had inflation in October and November and September. And now I guess to like where was, you know, if inflation was driving crypto up, it should have been up all year last year, not not down and so I don't think that that narrative holds. I think it's much more likely that the same way that tech stocks having a little brief rally.
It's it's kind of like New Year, optimism people being done with their kind of like in crypto. There's no wash sale rules, so you could sell book, the loss for tax purposes and by back in one minute later if you wanted to. And so I think people are just buying back in and I think there's a little bit of people chasing momentum. That's my guess.
Have you ever looked at the correlation between G-Wagon prices used Rolex market and Miami pet houses, and how it relates to crypto?
Got a big guy?
I have not got to be correlation there. We got the best data people on it.
Did you see ya, been Google? That did you say? I'm so start telling been just in Google random stuff that are ungoogleable. Did you see that? There was a guy in like, you know, we have this Facebook group for AM FM that. We don't really check often, but there was a guy who was like, posting in a bunch and he created this website where you can sell your nft at a loss for tax purposes is kind of interesting. It
was a great idea. Honestly, what
Called I forgot. I I'm not forget the name bit. Been might actually do it. It was cold. They advertised in the milk road. So I remember seeing it there and being like, oh, wow, this is actually a great idea. But I bet ya bitch at what do you say?
It was like a really is like a white guy with like blond hair looks like
unsellable and and what is it unsellable at ft's? Yeah. That's it unsellable and if T's and so basically, if you wanted a book a loss on your end of T, they would basically let you instantly get liquidity on it and get it right back.
Back I think is the is the idea which is just a very useful simple tool. So you know, get on that guy for creating that that was a smart smart idea.
So is this the segment Dem boys? Dem boys react? Is that
it? I think. I think we're not ready for Dem boys. Yeah, I think we're still the boys until until we get a little more street cred but hey, go to the YouTube comments and tell us is the boys, get a stick. Can I make it a thing?
Thing because I sure would like that. Yeah. Like it's time for a thing or not a thing in the comments. I just want to I'll do, I'll read the pole and if it says not a thing only continue for another three or four years, if it says, it's a thing, I'm totally validated. All right. That's
it. I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be
what I want to travel. Never looking back.
