00:00
He quit his job. And in the first year, he does it. He hits actually five grand a month. So he even surpasses his his one year goal, and he just keeps going. So he first year sixty k. Second year, like, a hundred something k. Third year, two hundred fifty k.
00:12
Fourth year, seven million fifth year. You know, it it just keeps growing. Today, this business does over thirty million a year. No way. Are you kidding me?
00:28
Sam, do you wanna,
00:30
do you wanna start with Updog?
00:34
Am I slow?
00:38
God, I'm like, can't you sleep in there?
00:44
That's like You should've just gave it to me. That's way below you. You should've just gave it to me. Alright. Before we start, I wanna dedicate this podcast, Sean.
00:52
Oh, to two groups of people.
00:54
Because I've had run ins with the these two groups of people, and I've taken for granted.
00:58
How special these two groups of people are. The first one.
01:02
People who start businesses and are English speaking as a or or, not not native English speakers.
01:09
It's insane.
01:10
I, like, have hung I hung out recently with a few friends that, you know, are entrepreneurs and they don't speak English natively. That's so impressive. I take it for granted so much until I've gotta communicate someone of a different language. That's amazing. So I wanted to dedicate this pod to that, the second group of people,
01:26
People who start businesses and they're not wealthy, and they're just starting their businesses trying to make their dreams come true while they have
01:33
newborns or little kids. How impressive is that? Like, I didn't take I I kinda took that for granted. My parents did that when I was younger. I don't realize now now that I have a kid, I realize how scary that is. I wanna dedicate this podcast to those two groups of people. Wow. Good guy points. Okay. I like it.
01:50
Dedication accept it.
01:52
Set up to all those groups.
01:55
I have a few interesting things to share with you today. Do you have a few interesting things or or what? I have two things you're gonna like. What do you got? I'm gonna take you on a journey. So, Sam, buckle up. Cause I got a little something for you. I'm gonna tell you about a journey I went down. And the journey starts with a tweet I saw that was very interesting.
02:10
You know, Bitcoin hit an all time high price. Ais taken off. My I wasn't in I'm not interested. What I was interested in. Is a picture of a guy holding a giant avocado.
02:20
And I was like, what is this? And he says, usually he said, he goes, these are the best avocados I've ever had. They were grown by my ninety three year old Japanese neighbor.
02:29
I have had to use Google Translate to talk to her about the variety, and she thinks it might be one that just grew from this, this specific scene. If that's true, this could be a new landmark variety.
02:39
The Has Avocado was discovered in similar fashion. And is now the most popular avocado in the world. This avocado that I found cannot be propagated with normal methods. It doesn't take well to air layering. I don't know what this means. He said, so I'm gonna have to start with the seed. I'm gonna have to grow it out the tree. I'm gonna have to cut it from the mature tree, graft it onto its own seed. I don't even know what any of this means. But then he's like, And then I'm gonna try to recreate this avocado. It will probably be a three year experiment wish me luck.
03:07
And so I saw this, and I
03:09
What a noble quest? I said Your life. What does this avocado teach me about life? No.
03:14
What is life led me to to make my life about this avocado, because I am so fully invested in this three year journey. About this guy who's gonna try to grow a better avocado, and it led me down a rabbit hole. About him and about the avocado. So the guy is this guy named Kevin Espiritu. Do you know this guy he's calls himself the plant daddy on Twitter? No. But I'm in.
03:33
You don't know this guy? No. Yeah. I think you do. When I just started to describe Google. So he's got a pretty amazing story. And I'm gonna first tell you his story that I'm gonna come back to the avocado. We're gonna tarantino this a little Alright. So this guy, basically, he used to work at scribe, the, like, book in a box company that they help you produce books. So he's working at scribe. He's like an early employee there. And on the side,
03:53
He,
03:54
used to have hobbies of, like, video games and online poker, and he was just playing nonstop.
03:58
And so to get away from kind of his online addiction, he's like, you know what? I'm a start gardening. Like, him and his brother, they're
04:06
this is the quote in the article. They go, Hey, let's go hit up a nursery.
04:10
They go to a plant nursery.
04:12
They are like, alright. We don't know anything about gardening, but, we wanna do something. We wanna do something away from a computer outside with our hands.
04:19
And they go buy a bunch of stuff, and they're trying to figure it out. They go online. They're looking at blogs to learn. And
04:25
along the way, he starts blogging his journey.
04:27
And so he's at scribe, and he his little blog starts getting, you know, a little bit of traffic because he's posting his experiments. He's very relatable because he's an absolute new beginner. And so people who are googling are also absolute new beginners and they start to like this. And eventually, he's like, you know what? I'm gonna quit my job. At the time, the blog is making I don't know, sixteen, seventeen thousand dollars a year. So roughly
04:49
two two ish grand a month, a little bit more than that. Right? So a little less than two grand a month. Sorry. So he's,
04:55
he quits his job, and he's like, I'm gonna go all in on this thing. And at the time, he's all about this one type of gardening called hydroponic garden. Is that, like, where the the plant is, like, raised?
05:05
Is that right? Yeah. It's, like, not in the soil. And It's, like, in water. Something like that. I said exactly,
05:11
I have no idea. Alright. So
05:13
he's he creates r slash hydro, which is like a Reddit community. So he starts just building a community around other people who are interested in the same type of thing he's doing. Along the way, he's like, oh, dude, I think this hydroponic
05:23
thing is a little too niche. It rebranded into something called Epic gardening.
05:27
Epic gardening today is huge. He's got Dude, I'm on the website, and I'm looking at his social numbers. Holy crap. He's got, like, two million on TikTok, two million on YouTube, a million people here. His his Twitter pops off So he's done really, really well with this epic gardening content. He's just a dude in the baseball cap, super, like, relatable. When you watch his videos, he's like, he's just very likable guy. He's he's got the gift
05:49
that you need when you're gonna do this type of content. And so he keeps going. And he basically, for ten years, essentially bootstraps his company. So it starts with, like, a ten dollar domain,
05:57
pays five bucks for hosting.
05:59
And he was like, alright. I'm gonna try to get this thing. His goal was I'm gonna try to get to three grand a month. Because three grand a month means I can live off of this, like, blog revenue. He quit his job. And in the first year, he does it. He hits actually five grand a month. So he even surpasses his his one year goal, and he just keeps going. So he first year sixty k. Second year, like a hundred something k. Third year, two hundred fifty k.
06:20
Fourth year, seven million fifth year. You know, it it just keeps growing today. This business does over thirty million a year. No way. Are you kidding me? And he just raised a huge amount of money from churning, the same guys who backed We talked about eater, bar stool, others. They have this content to commerce idea, and they're like, this guy in the gardening niche is gonna be able to do big things. In fact, and he had already kinda proven it. So what he did was he was doing pretty well with the content. He was just, like, learning. So he's like, dude, I've been on YouTube for so long, you know, since, you know, basically ten years now on YouTube, and stuff, just keep evolving with whatever the new meta game is of YouTube.
06:55
And what ends up happening is that in twenty twenty,
06:58
shit takes off during COVID. So COVID was the big, like, inflection point that, like, really took this from moderately successful to very successful. Two things happen. COVID first where his channel, all of a sudden, he said he started adding, like, fifteen thousand subscribers a day. Cause the same thing he had when he was, like, dude. I'm just so sick of being inside on my computer. I wanna get outside and do some gardening. The whole world basically felt that when COVID hit. And so a lot of people got interested in in this. And then he's like, cool. All my money up till that point was
07:29
ads and affiliate. Right? So just like YouTube adsense, YouTube ad revenue and then, you know, affiliate links to products.
07:35
And finally, he's like Was he doing thirty million that way? Thirty millions of ads? No. No. No. Way less than that. He was doing, like, you know, less than a million doing that. But then he decides, alright, I'm a launch of product. And he's like, I'm gonna create the gardening product. So he imports a product from Australia
07:50
And immediately, it works. And so he's like, oh, this this is kind of a good idea. And he starts to,
07:55
sell that product And, you know, the beautiful thing about these creator businesses, right, we've talked about mister Beast, we've talked about Logan Paul with Prime, mister Beast with Feastables,
08:05
You know, the the mass creators, what they do is they take a mass market product, like, you know, gatorade or chocolate,
08:12
And they're like, cool. We'll sell this commodity product using our branding, and we'll use our branding to get into retail. Well, for, like, the medium, like, they're the mid tier creators like this guy or, you know, like us, for example, you have to actually create a niche product that's gonna be higher ticket, higher value,
08:26
and you're gonna use your audience to do it. And so what's cool about this is You create something that's called negative CAC. So what does negative CAC means? Every business, otherwise, has a sales and marketing company. Talk dirty to me, baby. I love negative tech. Keep going. Which is customer acquisition cost is the amount of money you have to spend in marketing or sales to get a customer. And for most businesses, this is maybe twenty percent, thirty percent, forty percent, fifty percent. For some companies, it's eighty percent of their revenues are just How much it costs to go market to to to acquire a customer.
08:56
With a media business like this, what ends up happening is you get negative CAC, meaning He gets paid one to two million dollars a year for his YouTube stuff for his content, right, his blog and his YouTube stuff. He's making money on that.
09:08
And that's his customer acquisition channel. So it's, like, kind of an unfair advantage. This is what the churning guys are really smart about doing. Shout out to my current over at at at a turn in. Where they recognize they identify that, hey, some of these creators have high trust. They have high authority in a niche, and they actually have a business model where instead spending thirty or forty percent of your revenue on acquiring customers, you actually have negative CAC. It's actually you have not only zero, it's better than zero. You actually have a profitable media company that is being used to acquire these customers. That's the beauty of it. And so then he jumped and he was went from making, you know, let's say a million bucks a year to seven million seven million to twenty million. And then now he's over thirty million a year in in revenue. And the other cool thing is he's bolted on some acquisitions.
09:50
Alright, everyone. A quick break to tell you about Hubspot, and this one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm gonna show you a real life example. So I've got this company called Hampton, join Hampton dot com a community for founders doing between two million all the way up to like two fifty million dollars a year in revenue. And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these cool surveys. And so We have a lot of founders who have high net worth, and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask, but provide a lot of value. So things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like. If they're optimistic about the next year and their business, all these questions that people are afraid to ask But, well, we ask them anyway, and they tell us in this anonymous survey. And so what we do is we created a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool, and it basically has a landing page here's all the questions we asked. Give us your email if you want to access it. And then I shared this page on Twitter, and we were able to get thousands of people who gave their email and told us they want this survey. And I could see did they come from social media? I can see did they come from Twitter from LinkedIn. Basically, everywhere else that they could possibly come from, I'm able to track all of that And then I'm able to see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became a member of Hampton. In other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey. Much revenue came from each traffic source, things like that. But the best part is I can see how much revenue came from it. And a lot of times it takes a ton of work to make that happen. HubSpot made that super, super easy. If you're interested in doing this, you could check it out hubspot dot com, the links in the description, and I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the page and how it works and everything like that. I'm just gonna do that call to action then.
11:21
And it's free. Check it out in the description Alright. Now back to MFM. Hold on. What's he selling? He's got, like, a seed product. So they, like, some tray seed crap. I don't know. I don't I don't know anything about this. What's called botanical seeds.
11:33
And he bought that company, actually. That's not the one he started. He bought that because
11:38
they had retail distributions. They were in, like, four or five thousand stores. So he's like, cool. Let me buy this because I know that my audience will help grow this. Right? This is what I did with shepherd too. Right? It's like, let me buy this company that I
11:49
is already a good business, knowing that my audience will acquire a bunch of customers for it. And, like, that's what happened with Shepherd. We basically tripled the business using this strategy. He's doing the same thing in the gardening
11:59
And so he bought the seed business, and then he bought this, like, house plant business,
12:04
which is actually a cool story. So he's, like, he gets into he's, like, during COVID, everybody wanted, like, house I think you guys talked about this with trends too, like the trends. Dude, we were we talked about this, year and a half, I think, before the pandemic
12:15
about,
12:16
like, succulents
12:17
or, like, people are wanting to buy succulents online, and there's not a lot of options. You were totally right. You were ahead of trend. What he did was, he was, like, Cool. Should I start creating this content? And he realized,
12:27
a very, like, you know, in the in the, the growth of any entrepreneur. Eventually, you to realize that, hey, sometimes it's actually easier to buy than build. And so what he did was, like, well, I could try to create all these articles ranked for them in SEO or
12:40
He found this website that was called, like, you know, your houseplant dot com.
12:44
And he's like, this actually has, like, good content and it's good SEO. They just don't have any business around it. And so he's like, I think I could make this product a lot better, but I could, like, get this off a head start. So he he does a who is lookup. And it's some Indian VC owns this as a side project, he buys it for a thousand dollars. And then immediately, like month one, he's making more than a thousand dollars off this thing, and then grows that property. And so he's done this a times, and he raised money from churning to be able to go do more of these. And so I think this guy is amazing.
13:11
I've asked him so many times to invest because I'm like, dude, this is You are gonna win, and you're gonna win in such a big way. It's gonna shock people. Like, I think as I'm saying it now, it sounds like pretty cool, pretty obvious. And as his growth happens, but, like, Ten years ago,
13:25
so so non obvious. Even four, five years ago, even when COVID started to get more popular, it's like, okay. Cool. You're a youtuber. Okay. Cool. You're a YouTuber with the ecomm shop. I say, no. No. No. You are gonna be the most trusted influencer
13:39
in the gardening niche. And the gardening niche, you know, look at how many you know, there's full retail brick and mortar stores that are selling fertilizer and different things like that. Like, he can take this huge if he does this right And now it's just gonna be a question of how fast his kinda business development can can level up with the content skills he already has. And he's got the look. I'm looking at his Instagram. He's wearing flannel. He's got a nice smile. Like, he's got it's he's basically like,
14:03
what's the what's it called chip and Joanna?
14:05
Yeah. Gaines. Yeah. The games. Yeah. He he's got that type of vibe where I look at him and I'm, like, you're relatable. I trust you. You're somehow
14:12
a little bit aspirational a little bit. Sounds like an install. I didn't mean I didn't mean for it to sound like that. But this is awesome.
14:18
And, dude, these guys at Curnin have done this so many times. Did it with Meteor who we or was it Med eater who we talked about a few podcasts ago. They did it with cars and bid and Doug tomorrow. This is, like, When people say they're gonna do this, I often think it's, like, at a small scale. These guys are doing it at multi multi multi billion dollar scale.
14:36
It's really cool.
14:38
Yeah. Exactly. So I think this is this is amazing. Now let me circle back to the avocado thing. So he says I'm gonna do this three year avocado mission, and he says something with the haas avocado. So I go look it up. I'm like, where did this has avocado come from?
14:50
Learn a couple things. Number one,
14:52
it's not pronounced hass. It's haas.
14:55
So we're all saying you wrong.
14:56
That's the first thing I learned. Second thing, do you know this story? Have you heard the story about the the haas Avocado?
15:02
No. I why would no. Alright. So, basically, avocados were avocados were absolutely not popular back in the day. So nobody ate them. They didn't taste very good. Not even like in Mexico?
15:13
No. They were not they were just not a popular fruit. They were these it was a green product. It was not very, popular. It didn't taste very good. And it had oh, it wasn't even branded very well. So some people called it avocados.
15:24
Some people called them alligator pairs.
15:27
Some people called them, like, in Mexico, they called them the I don't know how you pronounce the word, but it was the, like, the Spanish word, like, the native word for testicle. Like, they're just like, yeah. You wanna go go eat a testicle? And so nobody really liked this this fruit.
15:38
So
15:39
enter Rudolphhas.
15:41
Rudolph has, basically, is a mailman from Milwaukee. He's now living in California, and he decides he wants to plant an avocado tree. So he goes and he buys some seeds and he tries to plant it, but, like, you have to, I guess, do some grafting process or whatever to get things to, like, take. And it didn't work. And so he's like, it didn't work. Whatever. He thinks about just cutting it down, but he just doesn't get around to it or whatever. So he just lets the tree grow. And he lets it grow for, like, a year or two. And then his kids, like, notice that there's fruit on it. They poke they pluck it. They open it up, and the kids really like it. This is how the story goes. Kids really like it. He's like, oh, why are you eating that? That's that's not good. And they're like, no. It's great. He tries it. He's like, oh, this is actually really good. It's way creamier. It's got, like, kind of a nutty taste. And there was way more space between the seed and the peel. So it was, like, softer, creamier, and there was just more of the actual, like, filling.
16:28
And he's, like, whoa. These are actually really good.
16:31
And so he starts eating the, you know, words are spread. He goes, and he partners with a local nursery, and he's like, hey, can he help me grow more of this tree? Because this tree is, like, bearing this amazing fruit. And so the nursery is, like, cool. Yeah. We'll we'll do more of this tree and we'll give you, you know, some royalty off this thing. And then now,
16:48
house avocados are like eighty percent of worldwide avocado sales.
16:52
These trees are planted all around the world. Ago and China and everywhere. Like, this is the dominant fruit. And it's not even that old. So he patented it in nineteen thirty five. So we're talking avocados, as we know it today, are less than a hundred years old. So now here's a couple of interesting things I found from this. So number one,
17:09
a lot of fruits are like this where they actually start kinda shitty. They don't taste very good. And then through a process of artificial selection, so, like, not natural selection, artificial selection, you find the good tasting fruit, and then it becomes the dominant species because That's the one everybody wants to eat. I just didn't really think about that too much. Yeah. Like,
17:25
like a banana, like an old banana from a hundred plus years ago tasted like a carrot. They weren't as sweet. That's happened to that's happened with a lot of our fruit. It's gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. So they're, like, the honey crisp apple,
17:35
there's, like, a cotton candy apple right now. And a lot of, like, health advocates are, like, Dude, you shouldn't even eat modern fruit because it's, like, it's not ex exactly how it used to be, and and the health benefits are are aren't Yeah. It does have the same properties in it because it's a different thing Right. Optimized for taste.
17:50
So,
17:50
couple couple more interesting facts. Number one, this guy, even though he said he got, like, a fruit patent, which I was like, what the hell is a fruit patent?
17:57
Didn't make much money off the stick. I don't think he really had the patent. I don't think he really benefited from it. His son, Charles, came out and told the LA Times that
18:05
even though he he goes, my dad created the greatest avocado in the world, and his total royalties lifetime are forty eight hundred dollars. Less than five thousand dollars he made off off of,
18:15
of of discovering this. And I I say discovering because he didn't invent this. He didn't mean to do it.
18:20
He didn't, like, you know, like, manually try to create this. He discovered it. And even he says as he goes, it was an act of god that I discovered this that this fruit. And so,
18:29
I found that interesting. The third thing I found interesting is the marketing behind this. So
18:33
even though this thing tasted good, it didn't take off right away. And one of the reasons why is that An avocado doesn't look
18:40
like most fruit. So most fruits are colorful. They look very appetizing. Like, the reason they called it the alligator pear was because, like, the skin was basically, like, all wrinkly and, like, tough, like, like, the way an avocado that we all know looks. And so nobody wanted to eat it. They were like, this thing looks bad. And so nobody would even try it. And so the, like, fruit association of California comes together and does probably what the greatest, like, greatest act of any committee ever. They were like, look. Couple things. Number one. We can't keep calling the shit testicles and alligator pairs. Like, we gotta come up with one name that we like. Alright. We're going with avocado. Everybody needs to call this the same thing so that this can spread in popularity.
19:18
The next thing that they that they did, that was very, very smart. They were, like, cool. Why aren't people buying these? They're, like, well, because they look like they've gone bad. Right? They're dark It's like black, basically. It looks like fruit that's gone bad. So they're like, alright. New new marketing campaign. We're gonna put stickers on every one of these that says ripe tonight. Basically that this is the this is perfectly ripe. It's ready to eat tonight.
19:40
And this is already true. It says that consumers don't understand this. And so they put stickers on on every avocado. And suddenly avocado stay sales started to boom. Because once you try it, you like it, but people weren't trying it because they didn't they thought it had gone bad instead saying, this is ripe ready to eat tonight. That was the second thing that they did.
19:57
The third thing was that they were, like, they needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually a bad avocado, and that this was a good avocado. And so they did all this marketing to make it work, which you never really think about with fruit. Like, you don't think about fruit marketing, but
20:10
everything around us.
20:11
Is the product of some ad guy try to boost sales. And, like, once you realize that, you can learn two things. You can learn a lot about marketing. And you can learn a lot about,
20:21
you know, what the products that you see are not as they appear. You're gonna become a little more skeptical and a little more jaded. Towards all products when you realize that even avocados were basically, like, you know, they were just someone's some drop ship or somewhere had a great idea. Dude, we first of all, this is awesome. This is very interesting.
20:37
We should do an entire episode
20:39
on Fruit
20:40
and marketing. It's actually really interesting,
20:43
Plan at Money have a had a podcast on the Honeycrisp Apple. You know, it's most pop up. Right. You know, before, a lot of apples like that existed, it was red delicious.
20:52
It it's, like, kinda fascinating. I met a guy who had done a venture backed startup.
20:58
It was, like, raised a bunch of money, was trying to grow,
21:01
business blows up.
21:03
And we check-in with him. We're like, yo, like, what are you thinking for? What's next? And I think he's gonna say some AI crap, some, like, crazy, you know, whatever. Some some big idea.
21:12
And he's like, I'm trying to invent a new fruit.
21:15
And I was like, what? And he's like, yeah. He's like, you ever had a a mango? Oh, yeah. He goes, you think you've had a mango. What did you try my mango?
21:23
Like, I'd love to try your mango. Send it to me. He sent it to me. And, basically, he was he was cut, like, he was basically, like, the shape of the front really matters. So, for example, like, the ease of eating. So he had these, like,
21:35
his mangoes were in, like, circular spheres, basically, there's like little balls.
21:39
And his little mango balls were ready to eat. They were super juicy.
21:43
The texture was perfect. I was like, wow, this is genuinely an amazing mango experience. Thank you for this. What's it called? Well, he kind of pivoted, because he's like, the logistics of it are so hard. He's like, to get fresh He's like, it tastes really great when it's fresh. He's like, but just the logistics to get this, like, to customers is so hard. I would have to go about this in this way, this way, this way. So he pivoted off that idea in the end. But And then you have to I feel very fortunate that I got to try that mango. And the crazy part is, and this is, like, actually kind of like an interesting mode is that it takes ten or fifteen years to do. Because imagine if you're building a website and you could only make a change once a year to that website and see the results and be like, oh, shit. That didn't work. Next year. Let's see. Because you have to, you know, you gotta wait for it all to grow. It takes a long time.
22:25
And so
22:26
we should do a whole thing. Compatible.
22:28
Right? Like, Yeah. You know, I guess, though, there's some rules around the patent. So the rules that I read were basically, like, you if you wanna do a fruit plat patent, you can't,
22:38
You basically, like, it has to reproduce asexually.
22:41
It has to be created by breeding or grafting. It cannot be discovered.
22:45
If it's already in the wild, it can't be patented. Like, there's a bunch of rules like that. So, like, you know, the first fruit plant for the first plant patent was this guy Henry who planted the the climbing
22:55
ever blooming rose. And, like, He created that rose, and he patented that plant, and then he gets to benefit from that. So I think when we do our fruit and plant episode, I think we gotta go find, like, the greatest for the brewers to ever live.
23:08
Yeah. We I I just looked them up on Twitter. I have had some interactions with him. You know, what's funny about Twitter is
23:14
these there's so many people, like, I remember I was talking to this woman named Shelby Church, and they're, like, YouTube celebrities. They'll have five or ten million subscribers on YouTube, and you go to Twitter, and they've got ten thousand followers. And on Twitter, they're just trying to learn, like, the rest of us to get business in insight and things like that. This guy is not that popular on Twitter, but he's got ten million across all of his other socials. We could just DM him and get him on here. That's kinda cool. Yeah. Let's do it. I would love that. So I'm gonna,
23:42
show you something here. So I made a video of CampM FM that I wanna, I wanna show So originally, by the way, this is my debut of of vlogging. And you'll notice that the video is not a vlog. Why? Because your boy sucks at vlogging. It's hard. I learned that. It's really hard. I learned that the hard way.
23:59
He'd be like, alright. So I'll just gonna shout at you, walking into the house. And I'm like, just walk into the house. He's like, no. No. No. You can't just walk in. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you gotta say something, and then you gotta walk in kind of a interesting way. I was like, that I don't walk interesting or say that I just walk into places. There's no one here to talk to. What am I supposed to say? Anyways, it didn't work out so well, but we have a cool video.
24:19
We are playing for the Rolex. Come on.
24:22
This is Camp MFM. The once a year retreat I host with Mr. Beast, and we get twenty entrepreneurs for three days living in one house together where we play basketball, play poker. What the fuck? What's that? It just have a whole lot of fun. And this year, I asked my buddy few come with us and record the whole thing. Always have to have a camera on. Have a long time.
24:42
Man,
24:43
there's
24:44
a
24:45
lot
24:46
of
24:47
good.
24:47
Not
24:48
as
24:49
much
24:51
It's basically some championship. Yeah. Cool. The team has to do a cold plunge in the pot.
24:57
Yeah. They go down and screen it.
25:01
Hey, the the the buzzer went off.
25:24
Really deep breaths.
25:35
Well.
25:39
Straight to the top.
25:42
Never going down. Don't wait for the drop. Ever since the other day. I'm gonna do a super chill. We had a great time and can't wait for next year.
25:52
Alright. So two things. Number one, number one, if you're just listening to the audio version, you gotta go to YouTube to see it. We're not even gonna put that in the audio version because it's not gonna make sense. So go to go to the YouTube video if you wanna actually see the video. Sam, I have three questions for you. What do they search? What do they search? Oh, they searched my first million. You can just search the greatest podcast of all time. Either one should show up if Google is doing their job. Right? And you search by first million, click on this episode, and you'll see the video,
26:16
here. So
26:18
Say my three questions for you. Number one, how much Foma are you feeling right now knowing that you skipped this year's camp m f m. In fact, we may need to not even name it camp m f m. Just name it camp Sean. I didn't skip it. I could I had a newborn child. I was committed
26:33
to being with her for a certain period of time. I didn't just skip it. I couldn't go. But It was a hilarious moment when we were there. Everyone was like, dude, where's Sam? And I was like, oh, he can't come. He, he just had a baby.
26:45
And then everyone's like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then nodding. And then one guy goes, wasn't that two and a half months ago?
26:51
And then we were all like, yeah. What the hell?
26:55
You can totally go for two days and it's two and a half months in. And so then we all laughed at you and then moved on. It was two and a half months ago, but I committed to three months. Committed to three months. I had to stick with it. So that's point one. What's point two? Point two.
27:09
What do you think of my not vlog video there? What could we have done better?
27:13
So I was I wrote this down to let you know, I don't think you could have any of that music on there. You know, I think it's gonna take it down. No. I think it's pretty fun. Connor that's Connor Price's song. He was gonna burst. And the the champ is fine. The the first song was dropkick Murphy's.
27:28
The first song is fine, and it's gonna be absolutely
27:32
fine. Nothing's gonna get taken down. This isn't like a, like, I just gotta ask for a mission type of thing. Like, it literally won't, like, like, the algorithm's gonna, like, prevent this from going live. So I think you have to change that song, but it's great. I thought it was great.
27:45
Okay. Nark.
27:47
Okay.
27:48
Third third question. Third question for you. Have you noticed this trend?
27:52
Right, part of this is me just showing you a vacation photo album, basically. But the other part is noticing that,
28:00
I think you started a movement, dude. I think I just fucked around and started a movement. So I didn't mean to do this. Did you just invent blogging?
28:07
No. Not the blogging.
28:09
This the movement is of these kind of, like,
28:13
mancamp
28:13
active conferences. I don't know. I don't have a good name for it. I'm thinking this comes up like a man business camp type of thing. So I did this. Camp m f m thing. Then I started noticing other people who heard the podcast. I was like, oh, you know what would be cool? Like, Sean them did it for basketball. Let's do it for something else. And so I I have a few of these that are now started. So, a boy Danny Miranda has, like, a running club type of thing. Yeah, dude. I see them out there all the time. There's, like, fifty of them. Looks like a blast.
28:39
Pat Walls from starter story,
28:41
was like, hey. What if we did this for tennis, pickleball, whatever? And they called it the MRR open. The month of every revenue. Oh, great name. Yeah. That's a great name. Better than our name. Shit.
28:52
This guy, this guy in Hampton messaged me, and he goes, hey, heard about kept them so so awesome. Had the same idea. This guy Victor who's like, I'm gonna do this for poker. And so he did a poker getaway weekend, rented a house, invited a bunch of people, and they just played poker all weekend.
29:06
I think this is the new new wave of, of getting you can either just get together for drinks, but guess what? The cool kids don't drink anymore. Everyone sober is dude, isn't it insane? Did you did you see, Whole Foods announced the most popular beer that they sell? Do you know what it is? It's athletic brewing Okay. Non alcoholic beer. Yeah. A non alcoholic beer is the top selling beer right now in whole foods. Is that insane? No one drinks. Yeah. No one drinks. So nobody drinks anymore. So what what are we gonna get together and just, you know, sucker thumbs. This is not gonna work. So next thing, Nobody,
29:39
wants to just sit at a conference or, you know, like a lecture hall and just sit there and listen to speakers, kinda boring. You wanna weave it in with these things. So I think this kinda active conference thing
29:49
is cool. I think more people should make these.
29:52
You can invite me. I would love to know about them and then politely, politely passed just because I don't like to leave the house that much, but I think more people should do these. And I'm hoping that, I'm just hoping that I get credit for starting
30:03
this I know people are gonna go out and say, no. No. This been going on forever.
30:07
But that was the past, but I'm the present future. And I just needed to tell you that. I think it's awesome. I, wanna go to the next one, and I'm gonna make it a point to go there and make a big deal out of it because I do have FOMO,
30:20
after seeing that video. Good job. And vlogging I don't really care. If you're given birth next year when it's happening, you better be there. It, dude, Vocking sucks, by the way. Did mister Beast made fun of you in that video or he made fun of you. He was always camera. Was he giving you guys a hard time for having a camera there? Yeah. Because I showed in, you know, with a camera following me, basically. And, the funny part is always with the camera. That's the first time I ever done done vlog.
30:42
Evidence by the fact that I at the end, I was like, that's vlog kinda sucks. Let's just make a hype video out of it.
30:47
But it was really fun. I actually having a guy there, this, buddy Mack came, and, he did a great job. It's really embarrassing. I see a lot of people, like, vlogging and walking around, and they have a guy, following them on camera. It's it's quite embarrassing. It draws a lot of attention to you. I find it to be very very humiliating.
31:04
The upside, you might get famous, the downside. You're immediately humiliated.
31:09
Alright. Let me tell you about something. Yeah.
31:12
I'm gonna talk a little bit about the best business in the world. Now this business
31:17
Chamath, who I think is coming on the pot actually, has said, it's the singular best business model in Monopoly ever created.
31:25
This is easy for you to guess. Right?
31:29
Ritz crackers. No. It's it's gotta be Google. Google. Google. Yeah. Google.
31:34
And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Google and search engine and stuff because I've been interested in this for years. I've been interested in duck, duck, go, which I called that shot. I think I missed it. I thought it was gonna grow a lot faster than it than it, actually has, but it's, like, slowly coming about.
31:50
This is by the way. This is gonna be the episode where we take credit for things that we had absolutely no part in and actually didn't call our shot. And in fact, kinda doubted it earlier. Yeah. It's like, hey. Do you like making right hand turns on a red light?
32:03
I invented that. I was doing that. I was doing that when I was sixteen.
32:08
Permit. I've created it. I've created that.
32:12
And so the reason let me tell you why I've I've been interested in it. Type four, athletic fitting,
32:18
dress pants.
32:22
Hey. The auto complete didn't even had no idea what I was doing there. That's not a common search.
32:27
Thick boy pants. Yeah. Alright.
32:30
I was searching for this the other day, and I had to scroll down so far to get to a website.
32:36
Because if you look through, like, the first, it's it's like tons and tons of images. Is that what you see? So I see tons of images. So I see a whole shopping carousel,
32:45
Then I see,
32:47
a couple of ads, and then I scroll down. I see Amazon.
32:50
Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. So you gotta scroll down a ton to get to a website. It it's actually quite annoying.
32:55
And so Google's been pissing me off. And that well, you just talked about how they, like, have gone through some stuff, and you still believe in the company. I'm slowly to loo I'm slowly starting to lose face faith in their company because the search has been really shit. And it's starting to piss me off. And so I've been looking for all their other alternative Did you Google for that? Did you just Google search for alternatives? Yeah. I mean, I it's, like, it's, like, even though I hate it, I use it. You know? Like, it's like an an abusive lever. But I was doing some research on when they first started. So Google started
33:24
in the late nineties. And when they did, Sergei and Larry, the founders, they created paper called the anatomy of large scale, hypertextual web search engine, riveting riveting stuck.
33:35
But
33:36
please take our power riding course, Larry. Yeah.
33:40
That title is awful.
33:42
And in that paper, they talk about, like, what they think is possible with a search engine and and and they kinda started from an academic point of view, which is pretty cool though to see, like, their their predictions.
33:53
And there's this one line. It says, in general, it can be argued from the con consumer point of view. The better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.
34:03
And then he goes, he says the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. So, like, thirty years later, they just went back and edited it, and they're like, nah.
34:18
The the subtext on their, like, the sub headline is just psych. Like, they just, like, change it.
34:24
And then and they said, for this reason,
34:26
as well as for this reason, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers
34:33
and won't be aligned with the consumer's needs, and they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service,
34:39
search engine is actually the answer.
34:42
Of course, that is the opposite of what they've eventually, have become. You know, Google is a
34:48
one point five trillion dollar company, market cap company, and ninety five percent of the revenues come from search. And it's the greatest business model of all time. I would I don't know how many people work at Google exactly. I think I think over a hundred thousand, but I would I would imagine that you could basically fire everyone, but like a thousand people, and the company would just thrive. It would be the most profitable company in the world. And
35:10
the crappy part about Google, well, I guess it's good for them, bad for us, is that their moat is quite simple, which is the more people who use the search engine, the better it understands, like, which results to give you. And so it's just gonna get better or supposedly better and better and better, but harder for a new person to create a, an alternative.
35:28
Now, ultimately, I think actually Open AI is gonna be an alternative.
35:32
Gardner had this report
35:34
where they said by two thousand twenty six, they think twenty five percent. Google search is gonna be reduced by twenty five percent because of,
35:40
AI. But I found a new alternative that just launched, publicly a few days ago or about a month ago. They've been around quietly, but they, like, kinda made they had, like, a big, like, launch coming out party the other day. And it's kinda cool. So it's called I actually don't know how to pronounce it. It's kaggy.
35:57
Yeah. Sorry.
35:59
I mean, how do you say this word? K a g I? Yeah. Kaji.
36:04
Kaji. Kiki Kjji? Yeah. I don't know. But it's got an interesting premise. So it was started by this guy named Vladimir.
36:11
And the premises is that there are zero ads, and it's five to ten dollars a month. For a subscription.
36:17
And
36:18
I think that that's, like, an interesting premise, but I don't think that that would work that well. However,
36:24
This guy's story is pretty interesting.
36:26
So he started bootstrapping this business in two thousand eighteen, slowly started making progress. And at this point, he's got about thirty thousand people who pay for it. And if you go to kagie dot com, k a g I dot com slash stats, he reveals all of his stats. And so you could see the number of paid members. You can see how many searches are happening per day. You all of this stuff is pretty transparent. And I love when people do that stuff. It's so fascinating to see.
36:52
And the reason he had this, like, big, like,
36:55
launch recently is because they just raised eight hundred I think it was eight hundred thousand dollars.
37:00
And very stupidly, they it looks like they're spending that eight hundred thousand dollars to buy twenty thousand t shirts to send to their thirty thousand members
37:08
So
37:10
so
37:12
Vlad,
37:13
Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to, finances.
37:18
Yeah. Yeah.
37:20
So they blog, like, all about the business. So if you go to their, blog dot blog dot k g dot com, they blog about, like, everything that's going on in the company. And so they're actually pretty transparent. And in the thing, he was, like, yeah. And we're,
37:32
we're gonna be sending out twenty thousand t shirts. And I was like, doing the math. And I was like, oh, that's that's like eight hundred grand. Like,
37:39
so so so that's questionable.
37:42
But they had he has, like, this whole manifesto online, and it's pretty fascinating. And and this this is the type of entrepreneur I really like because he's got this blog his personal web website. He says, I'm dedicating the work. By the way, be honest. When you found out the founder's name was Vladimir.
37:57
Already you were pretty biased to like this thing. Right? Yeah. I'm in. You can add an extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir. Yeah. I'm in. General rule, and I have no arguments with that. Yeah. He's he's he's born in Yugoslavia,
38:09
and he, like, had all these, like, little, like, indie hacker projects for a long time, worked at GoDaddy. So he's got he's a very technical guy seems very sappy. He's a VP of product at GoDaddy.
38:18
He had another company called Manage WP, which was a web application that helps users manage, WordPress sites, and that got to a couple of million revenue. So he has some experience, but he has this blog where he goes, I'm dedicating this work on Kaji to my three children,
38:33
while I try to make the web a more humane and friendlier place for them. And I re started reading that. I'm like, okay.
38:39
I'm really fascinated by this guy. I'm very interested.
38:42
And so
38:43
on his blog, they talk all about the company and, like, how it's working and things like that. And he's got all these, like, great lines about how he's, like, paying for search engines unusual, but that's the only choice if you wanna build an independent search engine that isn't ad supported. You could do donations, but I don't think it's gonna work. Five billion people use a search engine, ninety nine percent of people are never gonna pay. The thing is the tiny minority of people who think differently, the one percent that we'll pay, it's still quite a large number. That's fifty million people. And he talks about twenty years of ad supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search, but a lot of people are already coming to the realization that predicament that they found themselves to them with ad supported search is not good for them. And my point through all this is, I think I agree with this guy. The issue is that I don't think I don't think he's gonna win. I think I agree with all of his stuff
39:29
about subscriptions that I'm on board with that. And, Open AI is really good for that.
39:35
But I'm very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment. There's been a few. There was you dot com.
39:41
Which I don't think is that intriguing.
39:44
There is niva dot com, so n e e v a, that was one. And there's a few others. And this is a type of idea that if you told me that you're gonna launch this, most people, as well as mine, got reacted as like
39:56
there's not a chance you're ever gonna be Google.
39:58
But when you start thinking about it, I think it's really interesting. And I wanna know what's your opinion,
40:03
of these people trying to build these search engines? And do you actually think that any of them will work other than OpenAI.
40:08
Well, I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts, which is that,
40:13
Google's search over time has become more and more just use you search for something and you get an ad. And they add the result the top half of the page is ads, and that's what that's what you get. Google, I think, in Kaji's website, it says that Google, if you just take their revenue, divide it by the number of users, on average,
40:30
I believe that they make like, three hundred bucks a year off of each customer. I think
40:34
it's, like, two hundred seventy seven. And so that's twenty three bucks a month. And that's, like, what you're worth to Google. So what this guy's doing is basically saying, hey, instead of Google make three bucks a month off you, you pay us ten bucks a month and we'll have no ads. And I think that I agree with you, which is that the big threat to Google
40:49
is obviously
40:50
the AI
40:52
driven,
40:53
inches. And Google's trying to become that themselves,
40:56
So, you know, whether it's chat GPT or it's Google or it's Bing or it's some new one that we haven't heard of perplexity or whatever else, that is the big thing, which is it's a better experience. And so they're trying to win with better experience.
41:08
Then you have duck, duck, go, which is basically like, we are the anti Google.
41:12
Right. We're gonna and Kaji's in that same bucket. We're the anti antenna, whatever. I would say, Doctor. Goss is the surprising success, the amount of traffic they have. We we did a whole thing on them, you know, and a few episodes ago, which was looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were. What I think is cool about Kaji is that it doesn't need to beat Google.
41:30
This is just like, I'm gonna build this I'm a cockroach. I'm gonna build this business, and you can't kill me because I'm gonna be supported by my customers. Right now, it sounds like he's probably making, like, what, two to three million bucks a year in revenue. I think it's closer to one to one point five of subscription.
41:44
Let's say, one point five million in revenue
41:46
And he's probably able to run the thing, break even or profitably at that rate. And, you know, he'll just keep crawling. He'll be, you know, next year he'll be at forty thousand members. And then next year he'll be at sixty thousand members or whatever. Just keep growing. And he's not even worth it's not worth killing if you're Google. It's
42:00
too small to matter.
42:02
And he doesn't have to become huge. I think what he's saying is, like, my mission is for people that, you know, believe in this, the the point he says the one percent who would pay. I don't think it's one percent. I think it's, like, point one percent that would pay.
42:14
Here's your option. And now the question is how good is this? Like, for example, you're into this. Did you sign up, hey, are you using this now instead of Google? It's so hard to you're sending this out instead of Google because they're the default everywhere.
42:25
Yeah. And,
42:26
basically, my frustration with Google is
42:30
borderline
42:30
to the point where I'm like, alright, I'm out. But the thing is is that I'm like, so it's seven more times Google, and I am out of here.
42:40
The the issue is, like,
42:42
I've logged in with everything, like, on Chrome. You know what I mean? I'm like, shit. I gotta type in all these passwords. This sucks. But, I mean, I definitely, you know, chat GPT has definitely taken away at least thirty percent of my, like, Google time, which is a pretty insane number, actually.
42:58
And I, we're gonna have to do an entire episode on Sergei Bernon Larry Paige. These guys are crazy fascinating. I was reading a little bit about them when I was, like, researching how Google started, and
43:09
they were, like, huge shit heads. And like Sergei Brent. Dude, dude, they were shitheads. You don't have to explain that one to me.
43:17
So, Sergei Brent, he's got this He had his resume online. And in the code, he he put, if you expect the source code of his website, you'll find Brin's hidden objective laid out bear. Which is and this is in quotes, this is exactly what he had in the code. I want a large office, good pay, very little work. Frequent expense account trips to exotic lands would be a huge plus. Is that real? That's insane.
43:40
That's on. You could go to the website right now and find it. You would never expect somebody who's, like,
43:46
Intermost goal is a big office, no work,
43:49
expense accounts to create
43:52
fucking Google.
43:54
Yeah. It it it's it's funny. It's funny.
43:56
It's funny. And then there's stories of Larry Paige,
44:00
where he
44:01
he was just kind of like
44:03
they they had this, like, combination of just, like, being really blunt and where,
44:07
blunt and just, like, not totally understanding normal human emotions. And so Larry and Sergey,
44:12
they took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other. And they would call each other stupid. It'd be like, your idea is so stupid. That's dumb. Why are you and they would, like, fight and fight and fight, and then one person would win. And then the other person would, like, concede and be like, oh, your idea is better. And they would bond over that. And then they're like,
44:28
to all the other employees because they're like, that's what you all need to do. Unfortunately,
44:31
when you're at, like, fifty or a hundred or three hundred people, most people aren't like that. And there's these crazy stories of, like,
44:39
apparently, do you know how, like, a janitor when they take out the trash oftentimes and they replace a bag. They'll actually leave an empty bag at the bottom of the trash in case someone else wants to take it out and they're like, well, there's a bag already there for you.
44:51
Larry saw this. And he was like, that's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone clean. That is brilliant.
44:56
And he made this whole, like, memo about how the janitor does that and how brilliant that is. And he's like, why can't you guys be like this? In fact, everyone in the office needs to be like this. Here's the new rules. And he laid out these, like, eight rules, and it was like,
45:08
if you think that your idea is right, go straight to the person who's in charge and tell them exactly what you think and don't hold back. Or it would be like, if you are working on a project and you are not providing value, leave that project right away and go and let the doers do what they need to do and just get them coffee and, like, just, like, serve them. And, like, he would do all these things that are very logical. And, like, you disagree
45:28
some more. Yeah.
45:29
Like, he would say these, like, crazy things that you you hear them. I mean, I mean, that's more productive. Unfortunately, like, this whole thing called human emotion kinda gets in the way. And so it's probably not practical when you have five hundred employees. But there's all these stories about how these guys would behave, and it's very fascinating. And they were they were shit heads when they first started. I think Google right now is going to this, period where their CEO kinda I think it kinda sucks, to be honest. And so I think they're gonna, like, come back. But right now,
45:56
I'm not bullish on Google. I think they're gonna be around for a whole a real long time because they're so big, but I'm eager to see something come and kinda crush them.
46:05
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the the funny thing about all, like,
46:08
crush them type of ideas is that
46:11
when a company is really successful, it's like a giant castle with a huge moat, And everybody who tries to, like, siege the castle, it's like the Cajis of the world. They're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle, and it's too hard. The castle's too big. Too strong, the boat's too big, etcetera. And what ends up happening is that you
46:29
the thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land. It's somebody who just walks over, like, two miles. I was like, hey. This is actually, like, this is fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring. And they build a new castle over there. And, actually, the thing that diminishes the castle is that that original castle is just no longer as relevant. Like, the world and the attention has moved, the new plants that everybody wants that grow on this other land over here, and nobody took your thing, but,
46:56
you know, you became less relevant in the world. There's no one wants that thing anymore. Like, Microsoft didn't defeat IBM or whatever by making, you know, by beating them at their own game, they were like, oh, actually, the game is software.
47:06
It's operating systems. And then the things that beat the op the Microsoft monopoly and, like, Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world got then beat by The Googles and the Amazon and the Facebooks of the world, which were like, hey, okay. Cool. You can keep the operating system. We'll take the internet.
47:21
And Microsoft missed the internet. The internet was the place. Anyone the internet was replaced, then it was, like, the companies that made it on mobile were the ones. They were like, oh, cool. Yeah. You can have that desktop app. We're gonna make you know, Uber, and we're gonna we're gonna create these new mobile companies, you know, Instagram, WhatsApp, and they outpaced
47:38
the growth of Facebook And so now the quest now the thing is, well, AI is here,
47:44
and crypto is here, and these are the the new lands, and then the big projects that are getting built here, they're just comp they're just competing for something in a different game altogether. And I I think that's really that's really what ends up happening more so than somebody overtakes, you know, a company like Google that Google becomes less relevant. You don't need search. Why do you not need search? What cause the AI just does it? Why would I go? Why would I go search for links?
48:05
That doesn't even make sense anymore. I don't need that. Just, you know, I need the answer or even better than the answer. Oh, I just need this little AI agent that's just gonna, like,
48:13
look at what I'm doing and then, like, do do jobs for me. Right? Like, I don't even have go search for an answer, it knows the answer, and then it does the task. Right? That's where this is going. And so whoever does that is gonna actually be the one that is the next Google without even creating a new search engine. Right. And that's
48:28
nine out of ten times. It seems that's how, like, big innovative things come about where it's like, you know, all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car, and they're trying to make a a v six turn it into a v eight. And then we're gonna turn into a v ten. We're gonna put more cylinders in, more horsepower. And then you're, like, Oh, this electric car just, like,
48:44
went way faster to has zero cylinders.
48:48
You know what I mean? That that's exactly how it works. Did I tell you about the,
48:51
my boss who his boss was Larry Paige? And what he told me? So he didn't tell me many stories, but he told me one, which was I came in once And I was like, yeah.
49:00
I was like presenting my goal. I was like, yeah, our goal is to do, you know, nine point one
49:05
this year. Well, I remember what the metric was. Like, nine point one million users or something like that. And he's like,
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you know what Larry Paige used to say when I would, present to goals, like, I'm gonna do nine of something?
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He's like, he would just say, that's a woof goal. If you could do nine, you could do ten. He's like, never set a goal at nine.
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It's like and then I was like, what? He's like,
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I just said what I said. If you could do nine, you can do ten. Saying nine is just a wussy way to go about things. I was like, he told you that. He said, yeah. He would tell everybody that. And so I stole that. And I I made the change. And then now in my companies, I do the same thing. If anybody ever comes to me, like, We're gonna do four and a half. Now you're gonna do five. Yeah. We're gonna do nine point two. No. No. You're gonna do ten. Like, if you can if you're gonna get nine point two, you can get to ten. Trust It's like when, five ten guys lie and they say they're five eleven. It's like dog, just say six one.
49:56
Be the real thing.
50:02
Yeah. Act as if, my friend. Act as if.
50:05
Alright.
50:06
That's the part.
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