The 2 businesses AI can never make obsolete

0:00All right, Sean, I'm going to make the case that if you're not an AI person, which I'm not, there's still a lot of money to be made by building businesses that will grow with AI and they won't actually be AI. And what are those businesses? Communities. So here's two different communities I want to show you that crush it. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no day's off. On the road, let's travel. Okay, I want to talk about two businesses that I think are AI proof and they fascinate me. Hard F on that, on that fascinate. That's a P8 almost. All right, let me give you the first one. So I was talking to a friend. One of my buddies has a company that is selling to auto dealers.

0:39And he's been telling me all about the auto dealer like industry. And they're kind of like, as you'd expect, cowboys a little bit. Like they're like, think of like an auto dealer, Midwestern guy wearing loafers and like baggy jeans. And he like probably makes $5 million a year, but he's like, you know, kind of got hillbilly energy a little bit. And so I enjoy hearing these stories. Not only can I see his face, I can see his crack also, just in my mind's eye. Yeah, yeah. Like have you seen that picture of the guy in the airlines where he's like sitting down with both hands on his big jeans and he's got this fat Rolex and he's kind of fat and overweight? And it says, like, you know this guy's about to win the negotiation.

1:12That's, like, sort of how I think about them. But let me tell you about this, like, interesting company. It's called Nata 20. Nata 20 Group. Learn from the best. Your peers, supported by world-class 20 group consultants and NADA, driving you to your dealership success. Okay. Yeah. Horrible marketing. Just absolutely horrible marketing. Okay. So NADA, I think it stands for National Automotive Dealer Association. It's a big association for auto dealers. And they do this thing called NADA 20 groups. And it started, I believe, in the 70s to where if you are an auto dealer, you want to grow your business and get better. And so what they do is yous to where if you are an auto dealer, you want to grow your business and get better.

1:46And so what they do is you apply to join and you pay something like six or eight grand a year to get in. And then they put you in groups of 24. And the groups are non-competitive, meaning people who aren't in your region. And you fly to the same city three times once a year. And it's very simple. It's the most simple peer group ever. All you do is you bring a P&L statement of your business, of your dealership, and you sit down with 20 others, and you go line for line and you explain your profit and loss statement. And other people can look at you and be like, Oh, you're killing it. I'm going to copy that. Or you suck. Have you thought about doing this? And eventually, they've started letting in founders of HVAC companies,

2:25people who own marinas or boat repair shops. And the whole premise is very simple. Just share their P&L. If I had to guess, it probably does like $13 to $15 million a year in revenue because they say what the member dues are and they say what the price is. But as you saw, when you go to the website, it looks horrible. It's horribly marketed. And I think if I'm listening to this and I'm not like an AI nerd, I would do one of two things. By the way, the Natta guy was so excited that he's getting featured on the podcast today. Out of nowhere, his friend sent him this clip, he's listening and then he just gets the, looks horrible, ugly, terrible. Well, I think it's like a, I think it's a good nonprofit.

3:01It's either an association or a nonprofit. Okay, okay. And I would do one of two things. With all due respect. Yeah. No offense, but here's the next five minutes of insults. Yes, as long as you say that, you can say anything. I would either copy this and just do it a little bit better and run ads, because I don't think these guys are ever going to run ads. It says for 100 years they've been running. Yeah, that's why it's interesting. They could last forever. Like for the taking. I think that you could do this. Do you remember how you had this thing called Club LTV? It was like a community for e-com owners. Yeah. I mean, you could do e-com, but I would do something a little bit less competitive.

3:39It's like dentist practices, lawyers, whatever is like boring where like the average person makes a million dollars a year or like in take-home income, whatever is one of these boring things where it's just someone in South Dakota who is just a normal guy, millionaire next door type of energy. Yeah. And I would create one of these and I think it would be a great, great, great business that could last for decades. This is like white coat investors is kind of like this in the doctor's space, right? I love white coat investors is kind of like this in the doctor space, right? I love white coat investors. You want to explain what that is? Yeah, it's basically like, it's a community of doctors, maybe dentists also, but I think it's

4:15mostly doctors. But it's for them to talk about more of like their finance side of their life. It's not about sharing, you know, the latest and greatest research and how they're applying it in their practice or anything like that. It's more so like, hey, I'm thinking about buying a rental property and, you know, the cap rate is this. Like, what do you guys think? And, you know, there's a lot of that going on. They do media. There's Facebook groups. There's like, it's been going for a long time. It started as a blog. Yeah, it's a successful business. And there's many, there's actually a few others in the doctor space. I think like, I think I might've talked about this on the podcast before. I think there's a pretty big opportunity to just do that.

4:49But new age model, because media has changed a lot, right? Like what blogging was, well, today there's a whole new set of media tools and a whole new set of doctors and dentists that you could reach and build like a 2.0 version of this. But basically every profession kind of has these. There's even another one. You might every profession kind of has these. There's even another one. You might know the name of it more than me, but there's a version of this that's not for the same job. Have you seen this one? It's like local chapters and cities. BMI. Wait. No, that's body mass index. BNI. It's BM something. What is it? BNI, buyer network. By the way, they were just acquired and I heard rumors it was in the

5:23billion dollar plus number. And so explain what they do. So they bring together folks with different jobs. So you'll get like the local accountant with the HVAC guy with whatever. And it's like a, it's kind of like, hey, we're all local business owners. We have some shared problems, but we also have shared opportunity, which is we can share leads with each other. Oh, you're, you could be my guy, refer people to when it's landscaping, and I'll refer you people when it's about, you know, whatever, legal services. Yeah, basically. And I used to go to the YMCA, and I would see them have their BNI meeting. And there'd be like 30 people in the room, and everyone has to go through and say some type of like lead.

6:00So like, for example- They would meet at the YMCA. Where do they meet? Like in the yoga room? Like what do they do? Yeah. The YMCA is not a co-working space. You're right. What's going on? Yeah, they just figured it out. Because it's like a community-based thing. And so it'd be like a realtor with a garage door service with a lawyer with a landscape business. So things that are non-competitive and they share leads. And they just go in a room and you have to say, like, this person just moved here. We're doing the garage doors. Who wants that? and they just go in a room and you have to like say like, this person just moved here. We're doing the garage doors. You know, who wants that? And they just sold, I think they have 800,000 members

6:30and it costs low digit, thousands of dollars a year to join. I hung out with the CEO of it, really nice lady from Texas. And they just got acquired. So are you going to do just Hampton for every vertical or are you just keeping Hampton as what it is? You're saying, you know, that's not the move for you. But basically there is some version of peer group for most professions where people have enough disposable income and, you know, you get the dynamics right where either it's they can share because it's fundamentally not competitive or you match people, like you said, from other geographies where it's not going to be competitive. So the reason why I've been learning about investing is because I think that over the next handful of years, no time soon are we going to do this. But I think

7:09that what we'll eventually do is buy other communities because I think we know how to operate them well. And I think that the way like my goal is to build a multi hundred million or sorry, a multi-billion dollar company. And I think that we can get there by owning a variety of communities. Was that a Freudian ambition slip right there? Being like, my goal is to lose five pounds. No, no, 50 pounds, 50 pounds. You know what I mean? Well, hundreds of millions a year in profit. Steve Jobs didn't get on stage and say, 100 songs in your pocket. No, he said a thousand, Sam. You can't do that. Can't invest that out. We want to do, when I say hundreds of millions, that's the profit and billions is the revenue. Gotcha. And so we do say like, we think we could

7:44do like hundreds of millions of profit. Is that a classic slip? But because there's a few businesses in our space and like the threshold of like, you're killing it is do cross nine figures a year in free cashflow. And so, yes, I think that there's a bunch of these businesses that can be combined and be awesome. And so I'm interested in it. Do you want to hear another one? Yeah. Same industry or different? Totally different. Okay, so type this in. Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas

8:23that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. So it's called Moda Communities. So the story is basically this. There's this guy. Well, tell me what you see first. Buy right, sell better. Moda runs 23 Facebook communities where a bunch of people buy, sell watches, cars, gold, and jewelry. So I was talking to this guy. He's based out of Sioux Falls. Is that North Dakota or South Dakota? I'm gonna plead the fifth on that question. Not strong on my Dakotas. Yeah, I'm sorry, guys. South Dakota, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, okay?

9:02And he, in 2018, he was like buying a watch or selling a watch. He was doing both. And he thought, I don't really have a good place to do this. And so he created a Facebook group of buyers and sellers of watches, basically a community of watch enthusiasts. And at this point, he has grown it to where he told me... I messaged him and asked him. He has over a dozen full-time employees. And they have 600,000 members across 20 or 25 different communities. They have communities for watches. And they have it broken down into watches under 10 grand, watches above 10 grand. And then there's also a community for the superfans, which is above 100,000, I believe. Then he has groups for collectible cars. He has groups for

9:42gold and a bunch of stuff. And in order to get in, it's all trust-based, meaning you have to talk with him if you're a dealer and you have to do a vetting interview. And then another person in the community has to vet you. And then you pay $1,000 to $5,000 to $10,000 a year in order to be a dealer on there. And then you could list the watches that you have for sale. And people love it. And what's interesting is I think that they probably do somewhere between $5 and $10 million a year in revenue. How do they make money? You pay to be a member or you... A dealer pays to be a member. Okay, because they're accessing this buyer pool of super enthusiasts. A dealer pays to post there. And in order to post there, you have to do a vet check.

10:25And I think it's awesome, A, because Facebook communities, Facebook groups have built this guy a huge business. And this can be applied to so many different ways of selling stuff on the internet. And I think that when it comes to moats, Peter Lovell has been talking about what moats are going to go away with AI. And previously, technology was a moat. That'sll has been talking about what moats are going to go away with AI. And previously, technology was a moat. That's not a moat anymore. And I think communities, networks, and marketplaces are still a really good moat. And this is a really interesting business that this guy started on Facebook groups. Yeah, this is fascinating. I mean, it's always dangerous to build a business

11:00on Facebook groups just because the Facebook platform has changed so many times where you lose reach or you lose, you know, the ability to add new members, you know, things like that. Like they change the rules quite often, but at the same time, you get the benefits of plugging into such a huge network, right? So kind of give it and take it the way. But I really like this idea of aggregating super enthusiasts, whales, whales drive.ales drive just a shocking amount of the economy. If you've ever been on the inside of any of these businesses that are especially a collector's business, but even not a collector's business, like a mobile game, right? You might see Candy Crush or something, and it's got millions and millions and millions of players,

11:40but the bulk of the revenue, 80, 90% of the revenue will come from just a tiny sliver of those players who are spending thousands of dollars a year each and make up for all the free players, the players who will pay $2.99 to remove ads, that type of thing. And so whales, whether it's in video games, it's Pokemon card collecting, you know, any kind of marketplace. Like when we were at, when I was at Twitch, same thing. Twitch has these whales, and the whales go through, and they have subscriptions to tons of channels. They'll go, and they'll just make it rain like the club. I don't know if you've ever seen this, but one of the best features they launched at Twitch was not a very fancy feature, but it was called gifting subs.

12:16So you could basically say, like go into someone's channel, and from the chat, you could give away 200 subscriptions. So that would be like $1,000, right? Your $5 a month subscriptions. You're giving away 200 to random people in the chat, you could give away 200 subscriptions. So that'd be like a thousand dollars, right? You're $5 a month subscriptions. You're giving away 200 to random people in the chat. And everyone thinks you're the man. And it's literally like buying a bottle at the club. And then, you know, the streamer shouts you out, you would get this whole thing. And it dramatically drove like, you know, revenue up per channel because it just turns out that the whales were ready to spend more. You just needed to give them new ways to spend. And this is true with like pretty much all luxury products, but also

12:50a lot of gambling products where there's certain people with a certain level of, you know, addiction and, you know, disposable income that makes for an incredibly lucrative customer. That's awesome. How much did that sub cost? Well, like I think the average like five bucks or six bucks a month. Have you ever worked with a gaming company? Because I know that you were around those guys. What do you mean? I didn't work for one, but you know, I work with like, did you have like insight? Like what percent of people drive the bulk of revenue? Candy Crush has 82 million monthly actives and all the revenue comes from 4% of the players. So 96% of the players are just kind of the cost of doing business,

13:30just the cost of finding those whales. And so like, for example, you know, my co-founder at Bebo, Furkan, he was the CTO of Applovin. Applovin is the biggest advertising network for mobile games. So he saw under the hood, basically, you know, these games are paying to acquire players. So he knows how much they make off the player. He knows how much they pay for the player. And he knows what types of targeting gets them to spend more. And really what you want is essentially a whale. You want somebody who spends a bunch of money in Candy Crush because they're highly likely to spend a bunch of money in Block Blast. It's the same player and Farmville and all those things. So if you, you know, I talked to the guys who started Farmville and, you know, the guys who make the big

14:07kind of like Candy Crush style games. And they would explain to me the game economy and how it works and sources and sinks and hard currencies and soft currencies and how you nurture the whales and like all this. It's a total science, right? Like it's literally like talking to a slot machine operator when you talk to them. It's like, but there's no rules. It's not like a slot machine where Vegas says you you must have this kind of 89 payout rate it doesn't matter you know in mobile gaming you set the payout rate to be whatever you want it to be and there's a trade-off of churn and growth versus you know frustrating the player versus whatever there's actually a very interesting guy who he basically looks at the source code of various apps

14:44and will be like so good tinder's matching matching algorithm works. Oh, I love that kid. But I don't know exactly how he's getting the code. Like the code's not public for somebody. So there's something a little bit, my understanding is either off or he's a little bit off. I don't know exactly what's going on, but he's explaining like, you know, for example, in these games, if you're a player who's paid before, but you haven't paid in 30 days it'll optimize you to have this like run of success and then you'll hit a wall and that wall will be so frustrating for you but it's optimized to get you to get you know click the button to pay again right this is like when people say the greatest minds of our generation are sitting inside these companies

15:20trying to figure out how to get people to click ads like you know this is kind of what they're talking about it's like some of the smartest engineers and builders in the world and designers spend their life trying to figure out how to get people to put a few more coins in the slot machine. Sad in a way, but also just from a pure business point of view, it is fascinating. I was just looking at when I DMed the guy who ran this community business. It's the same thing, Wells Fundit. He goes, virtually everything we do is for free and the top 1% or even the top 0.001% pay to keep everything running. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually

15:58create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. There's a huge trend growing right now. Have you seen this trend around ripping? No. It's like going to a store and you would buy a pack of Pokemon cards and you would open the pack and you would hope to find a holographic Charizard inside because that's going to be really valuable, right?

16:34That's kind of the brick and mortar way of doing this. Well, these guys just reduced friction. So, you know, the Ev Williams quote of you want to build a billion dollar business just to find a universal desire, ideally one that's been around for a while and remove friction. Well, this behavior already existed amongst collectors. And what these apps have done is make it where you open the app, there's a pack on the screen, you tap it to open the pack, you open it up, you didn't get anything, maybe you got some junk. So let's say you paid 50 bucks for the pack. Then it'll say, you want to sell back the pack for 43 bucks right now? You're like, yeah, give me my 43 bucks because I didn't get anything. Maybe you got some junk. So let's say you paid 50 bucks for the pack. Then it'll say, you want to sell back the pack for 43 bucks right now?

17:07You're like, yeah, give me my 43 bucks because I didn't get what I wanted. Let me buy again. This app has done a billion dollars in revenue in like the last year. And so there's like, I mean, just an app you've never heard of. An app you've never heard of that's doing a billion dollars. How does revenue calculated? Because that's not, would that be considered as a marketplace? So would that be like real revenue? It's a bit of a mix. So it is like GMV in that they're spending to buy the cards. And obviously the cards have a cost. You have to fulfill the cards. But they're reselling it. But the genius of the thing was the buyback. The buyback changed everything. And so the trick with the buyback is people want

17:46the it's um they want the treasure hunt right they're looking for the treasure and what they realize is if i spend 50 bucks and i get nothing i feel like i'm out 50 bucks but if i get 43 dollars back i'm kind of just like i just got 43 bucks to store credit should i buy another pack for 50 yeah it's only seven bucks more let's go again let me give me another shot and for the company what they did was they booked so they they got 40, 50 bucks of revenue. They give 43 back. Seven is free. They never had to sell to give you the card. They just put the card right back in the deck and shuffled. They'll sell that same card again to somebody else. So the guy who started it was a quant at Citadel and Bridgewater. Yeah, no surprise. But there's a bunch of these dudes like

18:24Logan Paul launched his own called Rip It. This is like a bunch of these, dude. Like Logan Paul launched his own called Rip It. This is like a mega, mega like, you know, fad right now. Collectors Crip, what he did was he kind of was, I think they might have been the first, but definitely they benefited from this, what they call the vending machine thing where they buy it back. They were doing something like 50 grand a month and now it's 25 million a month now. How did you hear about this? I was at a dinner and somebody was talking about Triumph doing a billion dollars in revenue. Now, for an app to do a billion dollars in revenue is extremely rare, especially an app I've never heard of. You know what I mean?

18:59Like Snapchat does what, like 4 billion something like this is like the size of the social apps that you can count on your you know on two hands that you've we've all heard of household names and so I was like how is this app I've never heard of doing this in a year and then when I heard oh they're basically doing the gotcha mechanic so have you ever heard of gotcha games no but it's not gotcha like gotcha but it kind of is it's gotcha g-a-c-h... And it's not gotcha like, gotcha, but it kind of is. It's gotcha, G-A-C-H-A. It's a Japanese term. Oh. So basically what they would do is they had these kind of mystery unboxings. So you would buy like a mystery ball, you would unbox it, you would get something, and then you would kind of go again,

19:39and you'd try again. And it's a sort of like toy form of gambling. And gotcha got so popular in Japan that they had to ban it. I think it's like outlawed by law at this point. Now, American games started to steal this. So if you've ever played like Overwatch or different things like that, they would have loot boxes. Same thing. You open up a box, you might get the rare skin, you might get the common skin, but it's very easy to, very addictive to just put in some credits into the machine and start opening up a bunch of packs. And FIFA started doing this a bunch of people started doing this all these games started copying this gotcha mechanic well the mobile games have figured this out even more and

20:11the thing with the collectors is they attached real money to the other side because if you happen to get a real thing it's not like getting a skin in overwatch where it's this purely aesthetic like you kind of know some part of your brain that this is somewhat stupid, right? There's no real value to it. But when you do it with collecting and you say, well, I could get this rare card that's worth, you know, like the top Pikachu card will sell for like $15 million, right? Like these cards can be worth a lot. And so they attach the kind of gambling mechanic of, I might make money to the very addictive gotcha behavior. And so that's like the, you know, the underlying psychology that's worked in many, many different form factors.

20:51Toys do this now all the time. LOL surprise doll, right? What is it? It's a, you know, all of the squishies that are super popular right now. I don't know if you've, I don't know if your kids are old enough to be in this squishy craze. No, but my wife is. The dumplings and the squishies and the mystery boxes. Like my daughter just loves to open these dumplings, right? And like, you know, tries to get a rare dumpling, right? It's like this crazy thing, but it's the mystery ball mechanic that gets you to spend way more. I actually have a friend who's in the toy business and showing me the data of before, when they're in Walmart or Target, they were just selling where you pick what you want. And like, here's a shelf. Here's all the different things. You could pick what you want.

21:29And then they just took the same things and put it in a mystery box. And it was 7X the revenue. And literally like with, which sounds like the opposite, right? Like, well, the consumer gets less choice. They might get something crappy. And I heard him on the phone. He was talking to one of the major IP holders in the world. Wait, this guy just called you while he was negotiating I was hanging out with him he's like just join they just like just listen in like sit right next to me it's fine like no problem they don't know who you are it's they'll just assume you work with me and um he's talking to them and they were like yeah well like our customers really like choice and he puts up on the screen he's like yeah I, like everybody thinks they like choice,

22:05but here's what the data shows across category one, two, three, four, five, like over and over again, this overperforms, this kind of gotcha mystery box mechanic. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have.

22:38So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC. Can I give you one quick app update before we move on from apps? Do you remember about three years ago, you and I, maybe you brought it up, I don't remember, talked about this thing called private photo vault. It's basically where you hide photos.

23:19It's like, to put it bluntly, it's like where people hide like nude photos on their phone, and you have to like lock it. Yeah, i think this is one of my drunk ideas right hiding behind a calculator we talked either you brought it up and i said this is a thing or somehow it got brought up well look at the reviews do you see how many ratings it has a million so it has a million reviews. So it's called Private Photo Vault. Also, then it says like dash pick safe, like a safe for pictures. And I met the founder. He came to a Hampton event and I started talking to him. And I was like, he's like, yeah, you guys talked to me, talked about me like three or four years ago. And I was like, how's it going?

24:01And I can't, this is going to be like such a tease. I'm sorry. I can't reveal the numbers, but he told me the numbers and how many people work there. It's a behemoth. This private picture sending thing? Yes. Yes. It's not a picture sending thing. It's all it is, is storage. It just stores photos that you can delete off your photo roll and keep in this photo vault. Right. So why do people want that? For nudes. But they're not sending them. If you are sent to them and you want to store them. All right, do I have to walk this guy through this? I'm just trying to understand the mechanism here. You receive one, you save it here, you delete it off your photo roll. That's it? Or you're taking it, saving it here?

24:43The first one. The first one. All it is is a place on your phone. I've never received a nude. I'm unfamiliar with your game. I've always been curious. I've always wanted to. Yeah, you've always wanted to participate. I don't think it's ever going to happen unless I've got a rash. But this app has f***ed and is doing over f***ing in revenue and has been doing that for a long time. That's impressive. Are they also in Eastern Europe? I feel like these are all Eastern Europe companies. Nope, just a guy. American? Just a nice guy. I'm proud to be an American if that's an American doing that. This is normally the work of somebody in the Czech Republic or something. Nope, just a guy. Just a nice guy.

25:28He does live in Vegas, but he's a nerd. So he was raised there. He didn't move there. By the way, the collect crypt thing that I was talking about, I just pulled up the data. They do 100 million a month right now. And this is like, it's like a blockchain thing. So you can see like the actual fees that are credited out of this thing. Do you think the... Are the crypto guys... You're formally known as, but you still are a little bit... Folk. Are you people... Are you guys emo now? You're so pissed off at AI for taking your thunder? No, we're AI guys now. What are you talking about? It's the same guy. You transitioned. You guys are trans. Seamless transition to becoming an ai guy don't worry i would have thought that you would have been like shut up everyone the

26:11people left that are like true crypto only are the incredibly smart high conviction diehards who deserve to get rich and the idiots who still think like the vietnam war is still happening and nobody told them like hey man we all moved to AI we're gone it's over we can move on now there's a new thing to be excited about so there's like the idiots and the geniuses that are still there are the meetups like empty now I don't know I honestly you know I don't go to meetups so I can't say for certain but there's a lot of talk right now that you know AI hacking slash quantum is going to like, basically break the encryption protocols. And so that's kind of scary because, you know, for Bitcoin, you know,

26:53it's like Bitcoin started with like a hundred risks and is down to kind of like just a couple left. You know, if, if Satoshi woke up and started moving the coins or we, or, you know, or the actual encryption gets hacked, you know, it'll cause extreme panic. Like Binance got hacked for $5 billion last week. Yeah, I saw they said they're just going to pay it. They're like, we're just going to give you the money back. That's how much money they have. He's trying. So they had a hack in 2018. And after that, it was a much smaller hack, like maybe, I don't know exactly how much, but nowhere near a billion dollars. And they created a fund called the SAFEU fund. I don't know what it stands for, safety of funds for users or something like that.

27:35And they started taking 10% of all the trading fees that they were collecting and started putting it into this like kind of rainy day fund in case they ever needed it. And that was up to about 2 billion, which was the 10% of the funds collected by the company since 2018. And this hack was for 5 billion. And so they need to cover the spread. And who got it? Like, obviously, no one knows, but it was like one wallet. Last thing I read was uh north korea took it and the way they did it was they had a woman who was in a romantic relationship with an engineer and just physically got his laptop nice and they had they had two they had enough in their hot wallet to be able to transfer out like you know that amount and so i think like you know a certain amount is certain

28:23amount is gone a certain amount got frozen they got the other protocols to like freeze it don't let them withdraw but it's like you know the thing with crypto is the ethos and the premise of the whole thing is it's like gold bars or dollar bills like once you have it in your possession it's yours but it's trackable so like it seems like someone who does a heist or like it's kind of hard to get that into actual money you could spend. Yeah, yes and no. So there's all kinds of things. There's these like tornado cash, which lets you kind of like wash the money a little bit. There's like offense and defense, right? So there's like ways that they can split it into a bunch of different wallets, transfer, transfer, transfer.

29:02You don't know what's going on. There's one of the things they did is they immediately took the money, put it into like a DeFi protocol. So the way that DeFi works, which is kind of like a, DeFi, by the way, is awesome. And I think people are completely overlooking this and it's going to come back with like the vengeance in the same way that prediction markets were a very like common thing in crypto that people were working on and lots of money got raised and smart people tried to go build prediction markets back in like, I don't know, 2015, 2016, 2017. And it was called like Augur. And there was, there's a bunch of prediction markets that are now all dead and you never heard of them. But then Polymarket and Cal,

29:37she broke out, you know, eight years later doing the exact same thing. I think the same things that happened with DeFi, but what they did with what you do with DeFi is like, it's like a bank, but you don't, there's no physical bank you need to go to. It's like a permission same thing. I think the same things that happen with DeFi, but what they did with DeFi, what you do with DeFi is like, it's like a bank, but you don't, there's no physical bank you need to go to. It's like a permissionless thing. So you put money in just like you would a bank and then you can borrow some percentage of that, not like five times more than you have. You can borrow like up to 50% of what you put in as collateral.

29:59And if the price of that thing ever dropped, it'll automatically like sell it so that you're like, you know, you're, you basically cover like sell it so that you're like, you know, you're, you basically cover whatever you borrowed. You can't like, it can like self-sustain that way. So what this hacker did was they put the money and right away they took the money, put it in a protocol and borrowed a stable coin and got the stable coins out and left it. So now, even if that money's frozen, you know, cool, take that. You could take my collateral. I got the, I got the stable coins out on my side and I, you know, washed it, you know, cool, take that. You could take my collateral. I got the stable coins out on my side

30:26and I, you know, washed it, you know. Dude, we got to interview the guy and figure out if it was worth it. The North Korean guy? Yeah. What was she like? Yeah. Oh, the engineer. Yeah. He needed a pick safe account. Yeah. This did not go well. All right, that's it. That's a pod. All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit.

31:22So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.