#40 - WTF is App Mafia - 18/yo earning $45M/yr building apps

Summary

Ti Morse sits down in Miami with the four co-founders of App Mafia — Zach Yadegari, Blake Anderson, Alex Slater, and Connor McLarenn — young app developers collectively responsible for over 100 million downloads and tens of millions in annual revenue. The group met in Vegas at a mobile app convention and decided to live together in Miami, where they built a collective focused on scaling consumer apps through aggressive social media marketing and controversial content strategies. They are launching a course teaching their app-building playbook, deliberately courting controversy because they believe sacrificing social capital for actual capital is a winning trade.

The conversation covers their approach to “winning with controversy,” hyper-scaling through a MrBeast promotion (spending $500K on a single ad), reinvesting everything back into the business, the technical stack behind their app Quittr, reducing cognitive load as a design philosophy, and bootstrapping super-profitable apps. They discuss the controversy around Cal AI’s alleged revenue faking, the concept of “letting little fires burn so you can focus on the biggest fire,” forcing timelines to move faster, and their wildly ambitious future plans. The episode includes colorful tangents about Alex lying about being a Thiel Fellow, Nik Shevchenko hiring gay strippers using Thiel Fellowship money, Roy Lee’s ambition to become “the next Genghis Khan,” studying complex systems, “bad girlfriend retention” as a metaphor for app retention, and Zach’s three-year plan to build a nuclear warhead. This is one of the most chaotic and entertaining episodes of the podcast, showcasing the unapologetically aggressive mindset of young app entrepreneurs.

Highlights

”We’re Sacrificing Social Capital for Actual Capital”

“If we drop a course, we instantly lose everyone’s respect, but then we also gain controversy. So we’re sacrificing social capital for actual capital, which is a trade we’re all comfortable with.” — Alex Slater, 7:19

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”Cal AI Is Fake”

“Cal AI’s fake. Have you guys ever even downloaded Cal AI? It’s not actually a real app. If you look it up on the App Store, it will not come up.” — Zach Yadegari, 0:00

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”Spending $500K on a MrBeast Ad”

“We spent $500K on a single MrBeast ad. That’s the kind of bet you have to be willing to make when you’re trying to hyper-scale an app.” — Zach Yadegari, 27:36

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”Bad Girlfriend Retention”

“We call it ‘bad girlfriend retention.’ The app keeps pulling you back even when you know you should leave. That’s how you build sticky products.” — App Mafia, 1:15:39

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”Building a Nuclear Warhead in Three Years”

“Zach’s three-year plan is to build a nuclear warhead. That’s the level of ambition we’re talking about here.” — Ti Morse, 1:26:51

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Key Points

• What is App Mafia (0:14) - Collective of young app developers with 100M+ downloads, building apps and selling courses
• Selling a course (1:43) - Launching app-building course, deliberately courting controversy
• Building together (4:02) - Managing CEO tendencies and egos within the group
• Winning with controversy (7:07) - Sacrificing social capital for actual capital; haters drive engagement
• Hyper scaling with MrBeast (11:48) - Using influencer promotions for massive app downloads
• Building App Mafia into a movement (17:24) - Creating a brand and community around app development
• $500K MrBeast ad (27:36) - Massive single ad spend as a growth strategy
• Reinvesting everything (33:31) - Putting all revenue back into growth
• Technical stack for Quittr (35:40) - Behind the scenes of their app architecture
• Reducing cognitive load (37:03) - Design philosophy for consumer apps
• Bootstrapping profitable apps (43:24) - Building profitable apps without venture funding
• Faking revenue at Cal AI (48:09) - Controversy around revenue claims
• Letting little fires burn (51:12) - Focus on the biggest fire; ignore distractions
• Forcing timelines (59:00) - Compressing development timelines aggressively
• Alex lying about being a Thiel Fellow (1:02:20) - Story about faking credentials
• Studying complex systems (1:12:10) - Applying systems thinking to app growth
• Bad girlfriend retention (1:15:39) - Metaphor for building sticky app experiences
• Nuclear warhead in three years (1:26:51) - Zach’s absurdly ambitious future plan

Mentions

Companies

• App Mafia (0:14) - Collective of app developers
• Cal AI (48:09) - App with controversial revenue claims
• Quittr (35:40) - App built by the group

People

• Zach Yadegari (0:14) - App Mafia co-founder, 18-year-old earning $45M/yr
• Blake Anderson (0:14) - App Mafia co-founder
• Alex Slater (0:14) - App Mafia co-founder, claimed to be a Thiel Fellow
• Connor McLarenn (0:14) - App Mafia co-founder
• MrBeast (11:48) - YouTuber used for $500K app promotion
• Nik Shevchenko (1:08:50) - Referenced for using Thiel Fellowship money on gay strippers
• Roy Lee (1:09:33) - Referenced as wanting to become the next Genghis Khan

Surprising Quotes

“Cal AI’s fake. Have you guys ever even downloaded Cal AI? It’s not actually a real app.” — Zach Yadegari, 0:00

“We’re sacrificing social capital for actual capital, which is a trade we’re all comfortable with.” — Alex Slater, 7:19

“People are way too scared to take risks. But these people aren’t remembered in history.” — Zach Yadegari, 8:18

“I truthfully do believe that I have to set my ego aside to be more of a douchebag on social media.” — Blake Anderson, 8:46

Transcript

Zach Yadegari: 0:00 Kali’s fake. Have you guys ever even downloaded Kali? It’s not actually a real app. If you look it up on the App Store, it will not come up.

Alex Slater: 0:06 Do the onboarding and then try to pay. Like, see if you can actually sign up for the free trial. It literally won’t work.

Zach Yadegari: 0:11 Guys, it’s fake!

Ti Morse: 0:14 I’m here in Miami with Zach, Blake, Alex, and Connor, and they are apparently the co-founders of App Mafia. Guys, what the fuck is App Mafia?

Zach Yadegari: 0:26 That’s a good question. I would say that App Mafia, you could think about it like a… why don’t you guys take it? Maybe Blake has it.

Blake Anderson: 0:39 Yeah, yeah, I can take this one. Um, you know, I think App Mafia is esoteric in nature. You know, it’s all-encompassing. And so what we do isn’t really defined by some limited set of products or operations like traditional companies, but rather we’re fluid.

Ti Morse: 1:03 You’re fluid?

Blake Anderson: 1:04 We’re fluid.

Ti Morse: 1:05 Okay.

Alex Slater: 1:06 I mean, I agree, it’s multidimensional. I mean, it’s omnipotent.

Zach Yadegari: 1:15 Omnipotent!

Alex Slater: 1:18 It’s omnipotent. And you know, like… I think it reveals itself through photosynthesis.

Zach Yadegari: 1:24 Through photosynthesis!

Blake Anderson: 1:26 Through photosynthesis? Through processing of light into energy. That’s how it reveals itself. That’s my best definition.

Zach Yadegari: 1:32 I think it’s all around us and everyone watching. We’re all App Mafia together.

Ti Morse: 1:38 Amazing, amazing. What is the first thing that App Mafia is going to be? Like, or do?

Zach Yadegari: 1:45 So we’re starting with education. Um, by the time this podcast is released, we will have launched. We anticipate that we’re going to get a lot of backlash. I have explicitly said maybe like 20 fucking times that I will never launch a course. And, uh, you know, we’re starting with a course. A lot of people intrinsically hate on course sellers. They think that if you sell a course, you’re a bad person, you’re selling your soul, and those who can’t do, teach. But I’d say that for every nine bad courses, there is one that actually provides a lot of value and really changes the course of so many people’s lives. And that is our goal with what we’re doing. We, everything we do is public. All of the apps we’ve built, you can publicly verify the revenue we’re doing, which is different from pretty much every course seller. And our goal is to truly make impact, make change, help people.

Connor McLarenn: 2:44 And to add on to that, I mean, even just yesterday, I was on a call with two separate people that I’d briefly worked with that saw the strategies that I and we have all employed in, um, our process of building and scaling apps. And these two guys separately…

Blake Anderson: 3:00 Both have companies doing over a million dollars a month in revenue just by applying this playbook. I think we have collectively probably over 30 examples of apps that do over $100,000 of a month that have either seen our content or, you know, come across our products, got inspired, built their own apps, and now have successful businesses.

Connor McLarenn: 3:24 And what we realized as a group was we’re like, man, we don’t have any incentive to take the time to make this content structured. So we’re like, fuck it, let’s all get together. Drop a course.

Blake Anderson: 3:37 Drop a course.

Ti Morse: 3:38 So did this kind of come together over the ‘do it for the meme’?

Zach Yadegari: 3:43 Honestly, yeah, pretty much.

Alex Slater: 3:44 Yeah, we happened to all be in Vegas for a mobile app convention, and Zach was going to Miami. We’re like, fuck it, why don’t we all live together? And I believe Zach and Blake were originally thinking about doing a course for personal brands, and they’re like, why don’t we get Connor and Alex involved? And now here we are.

Ti Morse: 4:01 Crazy. Okay, and collectively you guys have scaled apps to like, I don’t know, 100 plus million downloads, some crazy number like this. What is it going to look like, you know, individually really, really good at just building companies, what is it going to look like when you guys are together?

Zach Yadegari: 4:14 It’s really interesting because I think all of us have CEO tendencies and therefore it is a lot of, it’s definitely a lot of managing ourselves while managing each other. And sometimes some of us will have to step up and take the lead, others to back, I think it’s always kind of fluid and dynamic. Yeah.

Alex Slater: 4:42 I think a big piece of it is managing your own ego, finding out how you fit into the puzzle, because all of us have greatness in us and we’re all better at one thing than the other. And so it’s how do we fit together and actually put each other in a position to succeed, and that’s how we’ll take over.

Connor McLarenn: 4:59 Even on the content side of things, it’s like, or let me take a step back, to add onto what Connor said, we see this across the different operations within the business, different people have different comparative advantages. So for example, when it comes to content and sharing our stories, it’s like we’re going to let Alex and Zach take the spotlight, right? They’re younger, their stories are more viral, they’re cooler than us.

Zach Yadegari: 5:26 It’s true.

Alex Slater: 5:27 They’re hotter, they look better.

Connor McLarenn: 5:29 They’re fucking… yeah, they get more bitches. Wait, actually…

Zach Yadegari: 5:32 Wait, actually…

Alex Slater: 5:34 Hold the data on this, I don’t know if that’s exactly…

Connor McLarenn: 5:37 Get their receipts out. Get out their…

Alex Slater: 5:42 I think we’re actually ahead of you fellows by a long slide. We’re catching up, yeah, we’re catching up.

Zach Yadegari: 5:49 Listen, I mean, if you guys want to dive deep into that, we can dive deep into that advice. Yeah, honestly, actually I would give a piece of advice to you guys. I would probably try to, you know, entertain women that don’t have boyfriends.

Ti Morse: 6:00 All right, let’s say most of them have boyfriends going into college. Whoa, I mean it’s true. I mean, when you’re finishing high school, you want to go to prom with someone, etc, etc. How soon into the college experience do they start breaking up and they’re like, ‘All right, this is definitely not going to work’?

Connor McLarenn: 6:15 I mean, it’s week two. It depends, but you know, I think bringing this back a little bit, you know, you kind of got to drop your ego at times and recognize that, the same way that we have to do it within business, sometimes you got to let other people shine, sometimes girls have boyfriends and you got to kind of let them have their woman.

Blake Anderson: 6:32 Listen up, Tech Twitter. You’re hearing some game.

Alex Slater: 6:41 All right, this is not Tech Twitter.

Blake Anderson: 6:43 All right, all right. Let me finish the thought, finish the thought, fellas.

Zach Yadegari: 6:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some game for Tech Twitter. Some game.

Ti Morse: 6:52 All right, this will be amazing. Okay, so you launch a course and that’s like, that’s launching tomorrow on Saturday.

Blake Anderson: 6:58 Wait, two days before, yes, the course.

Alex Slater: 7:00 Now getting bitches. Us giving them advice on how to get bitches and back to the course. Okay.

Ti Morse: 7:06 Back to Theo Von. Um, so what is, what is the like next stage going to be for App Mafia?

Alex Slater: 7:15 Yo, I mean I can talk. Photosynthesis. God damn. All right, so, so the strategy we’re running is: drop the course. We are all reputable in the app building space. People respect us. So if we drop a course, we instantly lose everyone’s respect, but then we also gain controversy. So we’re sacrificing social capital for actual capital. And then we’re like, ‘All right, fuck this. We’re just going to be an entertaining group of young guys who also make a fuckton of money and just vlog it all on YouTube.’

Connor McLarenn: 7:50 Yeah, I think a lot of people are way too scared to do things that are controversial, worrying that they will isolate many groups of people. But that’s really how cult-like followings are built. Any of the biggest YouTube channels, celebrities ever, they’ll have their core group but then they’ll have their core group of haters as well. For every core fan, you’re going to have someone that deeply despises you. And it’s something that I think needs to happen. It’s the yin and yang, and we are, we’re prepared for it.

Zach Yadegari: 8:18 I think people are way too scared to take risks, honestly. But these people aren’t remembered in history. It’s the people that actually fucking change how things are done that are remembered. So why, why would we be a follower?

Alex Slater: 8:29 And a big thing is we’ve all built our apps off seeding the algorithm and taking over basically TikTok, Instagram. And I’m going to shout Blake out here. He had a great quote, I’ll let him say it the other day, as of yesterday, but leaning into your ego. Like maybe lean into your ego and rage it because that’s how you actually get views.

Blake Anderson: 8:46 No, but, and you know, it’s funny and ironic, but I truthfully do believe it in that. I think what I said on… I made a Instagram reel slash TikTok and I said something along the lines of

Ti Morse: 9:00 kinds of I’m going to start being more of a douchebag on social media. Um, and to do that, I have to set my ego aside. And you might be like, wait, what? You have to set your ego aside to be a douchebag? But truthfully, it’s like, it’s ego preservation that leads us to, to not take risks and not do things that are controversial, that would enable us to gain influence. Um, but instead we kind of want to take the risk of our path. For example, like Trump would not be president had he not been on The Apprentice, right? Or had he not um, you know, run that show. And I think that there are many examples nowadays, right? There’s Andrew Tate, there’s Elon Musk, there’s AOC, there’s Bernie Sanders, right? These people all rise to positions of mass influence and status through being controversial. With some of them, it’s more calculated. With others, I think it’s just kind of who they are by their nature.

Zach Yadegari: 9:58 But what what we’ve realized is like the value of social capital is and and general notoriety is only increasing. We all experience this on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis when it comes to hiring, right? The more algorithmic reach and distribution that you have, the higher quality talent that you can attract. This is what I think Cluelly and Roy Lee, for example, are doing super well and why I’m bullish on them. Their product, you know, I think that they have ways to go. But at the end of the day, it’s like getting a crack team in place is most important in my opinion. And leaning into controversy will enable you to increase that algorithmic reach, um, which will enable you to build bigger and better companies as you progress throughout the course of your life.

Blake Anderson: 10:46 Yeah, so it just makes it like way easier. Yes, you do have a lot of people that are like not supporters of Blake, not supporters of Zach, whatever. But there’s a whole bunch of, you know, you get way, way more views and there’s way more people that actually do want to work with you because of this.

Ti Morse: 10:59 This is how Zach and I began working together in the first place, right? I started posting, I think I had like, some very egotistical tweet about UMAX’s initial traction, which was my second app. And Zach had seen ResGPT and UMAX organically on social media, I believe, as well as on Twitter. And he DM’d me. And getting inbound like that from super intelligent, hard-working, mature professionals, right? It…

Zach Yadegari: 11:31 It got sexy. Sexy, super hot 16-year-old boys, you know, it’s like pretty cool. Yeah.

Alex Slater: 11:39 How do you guys think about, like individually you’re each growing these apps to like millions and millions of users? How do you think about like hyper-scaling?

Connor McLarenn: 11:50 I think that pretty much most of our strategy comes down to direct response. It’s not a lot of the whole brand awareness

Zach Yadegari: 12:00 scam, it’s mostly okay, we know we’re paying this much for an influencer to post and we’re going to get this much back and then we’re going to make a profit on that. And we do the same thing with paid ads and we have UGC content, organic content, we have all these different channels and the goal with every every one of them is to be profitable. And then we just scaled the number of posts going out and as long as each one is profitable, that’s generally how we’ve all scaled our apps thus far. However, I will say that as of recently we have been taking at least at CalAI much bigger swings and the Quitter guys they could talk about what they’re doing as well but for example we just had a MrBeast video drop and that video most expensive influencer promo we have ever run. We spent half a million dollars on it and we know it was a huge risk. We knew that going into it based on the if it was any other influencer just based on the calculations of view to dollar ratio that we average we would not have done it but because it’s MrBeast we know that there will be all of these second degree effects where working with him makes us more trustworthy with other brands so they’ll work with us. Also people talk about it because it’s such a big thing working with the biggest YouTuber ever also getting that many views at once has all kinds of other effects people talking about it sharing it with their friends. So that’s really the mindshare game and something that we’ve been doing more. I think that mindshare does get to a point where you have so much and then everyone almost at once just like that’s i think where you get hyper hyper growth and i don’t think we’re there yet but i think we are seeing all of these weird places on the internet where we’re just popping up popping up.

Connor McLarenn: 13:54 Yeah quick addition there, I’d agree with everything Zach just said and uh to put it succinctly like increase mindshare i think makes that direct response marketing more effective and so when people are generally aware of your product uh but maybe they haven’t experienced the pain point or needed to download it but then they see the video that’s really hitting at uh you know maybe for Quitter for example maybe they just jerked off and then you hit them with the ad and then if they’re already aware of the product then they’re going to go download it immediately.

Alex Slater: 14:30 Most of our downloads come in at night on a serious because people see it i actually had a buddy i won’t call him out but he told me he was like ‘hey i was about to jerk off last night and i thought of Quitter immediately downloaded it’.

Ti Morse: 14:38 That’s the mindshare game.

Connor McLarenn: 14:40 Yeah.

Blake Anderson: 14:41 Dude I’m not gonna lie I fucking Quitter actually saved me a jerk off the other day.

Ti Morse: 14:49 No way.

Blake Anderson: 14:50 Pretty cool dude honestly like i was about to go crank one and i was like man Quitter popped in my mind and i was like man i shouldn’t be doing this so the uh frequency has certainly decreased.

Connor McLarenn: 14:56 Yeah.

Zach Yadegari: 14:57 We had Luke Belmore here yesterday actually at the house.

Alex Slater: 15:00 He was kind of saying the same thing and he suggested instead of just trying to market your product, like try and tap into cultures, try and change like what people believe. They think porn is like a good thing for the most part, but if we shift the culture and make people aware that this isn’t cool anymore and that all the cool people are actually using Quitter, that’s how you get into kind of hyper scaling.

Blake Anderson: 15:21 It’s taking a step back too, it’s what Alex just said, but porn is cool to watch hence why all these young kids watch it.

Zach Yadegari: 15:30 Think about it amongst like friend groups in high school, it’s like the cool thing to talk about. When I was in a frat in college, everyone talked about your favorite porn star, this and that. Yeah, like during hazing, bro. It was so prevalent, bro.

Connor McLarenn: 15:41 While we were pledging, I myself and one of my… another member of my PC we had the first birthday in the in the pledge class and they got us like a cameo from a… as a joke as a cameo from a porn star being like ‘Happy Birthday Blake and Jackson’ and listen like I don’t I don’t think that that’s particularly cool but it does go to show that like culturally it is like viewed as just this kind of funny whatever thing.

Alex Slater: 16:06 And I’d say with Quitter we’re we’re moving out of the direct response like Zach was saying from influencers organic like brain rot faceless type content and going into more of just seeding the algorithm to actually influence culture because we win the game if people start to view porn as uncool and the fact of like Quitter is cool to be on.

Ti Morse: 16:25 Interesting.

Alex Slater: 16:27 Yeah I think like companies at some point can turn into movements. For example a lot of these brands like I think there’s one called Represent that’s popping up recently.

Connor McLarenn: 16:39 Yeah, Represent, that’s your boy, bro. George Heaton, London thing.

Alex Slater: 16:43 I’ve been seeing it more and more…

Blake Anderson: 16:45 Even Whoop is kind of part of culture now.

Connor McLarenn: 16:47 Yeah, you see someone else wearing a Whoop it’s like instantly something to connect over. I think that’s mostly like clothing though and stuff like hardware too.

Blake Anderson: 16:52 Strava also big one. Everyone’s wearing Strava… Strava’s fucking dude big. That shit plants like a seed in your mind and you start thinking about it every time you work out. It’s crazy.

Zach Yadegari: 16:58 When people start using it as Rizz, bro, that’s when you know it’s a movement. People are DMing on Strava.

Connor McLarenn: 17:04 No literally, dude, it’s like a dating app. It’s like a… well it’s also like kind of like a subtle flex it’s like ‘Oh let me see your Strava’ you know and you’re like ‘Oh look at how like how fast I am’. It’s give it a year it’s like let me see your Quitter streaks. It’s literally like fourth fucking grade you’re like ‘I’m fucking second fastest in the mile no big deal you know I can I can beat all the other kids in the playground so like look at my Strava I ran 25 miles last week’.

Ti Morse: 17:25 Interesting. Yeah. So when you guys are thinking about like building this into a movement how are you thinking about like designing that brand image in people’s minds? What are you aiming for?

Connor McLarenn: 17:34 I think one of the… one of our major theses here with respect to App Mafia is there’s all this content on social media specifically short-form, right, on… surrounding entrepreneurship and and these different domains within it. On X we see a lot of tech content, right, on Twitter like we’re we’re all very familiar with this space. But on short…

Zach Yadegari: 18:00 form, it’s a completely different subset of entrepreneurship. People are mostly familiar with social media marketing, dropshipping, day trading, meme coins, copywriting, video editing. These are the popular forms of entrepreneurship. But I think that a lot of these are not actually great, you know, great industries to work in long term.

Ti Morse: 18:27 They don’t really leave the world better for it either.

Zach Yadegari: 18:29 Yeah, there’s zero sum, right? Like day trading, meme coins, dropshipping, like it’s just kind of, you know, there’s not that much opportunity, there’s a fuck ton of competition, for many of them margins are low.

Ti Morse: 18:41 Feels slimy.

Zach Yadegari: 18:43 Sure.

Ti Morse: 18:44 And they make their money selling courses, not actually doing the business model.

Zach Yadegari: 18:47 True. And so we identified this and we’re like, man, you know, why is it that there’s no hype behind building software, right? Why isn’t it cool? I think one of the major reasons is that it’s been very inaccessible for decades, right? Even just 10 years ago, like you wanted to build an app like Cali AI, let’s go for example, it’s like, I mean, there were people trying to build AI calorie trackers 10 years ago and it’s like what, you have to develop custom ML vision models, right? You have to actually train them ground up, you need a fuck ton of data, and you have no guarantee that the product’s going to work. You need to raise millions of dollars and pretty high probability that it’s just not going anywhere. Even just building a simple mobile app, right? If you are not deeply technical yourself five years ago, you have to hire developers to do that. Agencies, generally bad strategy, whatever. You need a lot of capital and or a degree in CS, that sort of thing. Nowadays, with AI as well as all these sort of different tools and infrastructure, right? Even things like Firebase and Supabase making it easier to build out your backend, pretty much anybody can do it so long as you’re sufficiently intelligent. That’s all of our background, right? Like we did not get, you know, like we don’t have masters in CS, we didn’t have to hire multiple developers. We were able to do it in-house because of these advances in technology. And so I think that that’s what’s like our high-level sort of vision for App Mafia and making building software cool.

Connor McLarenn: 20:22 Yeah. I will say as well, traditional tech guys are painted as nerds. All the thing is code. We are the complete opposite of that. Like we fuck around.

Alex Slater: 20:30 I want to say some stuff.

Blake Anderson: 20:31 What do you mean by that?

Alex Slater: 20:32 You fuck around really?

Connor McLarenn: 20:40 We fuck around, we drink, we do… we do stuff.

Alex Slater: 20:45 How old are you?

Blake Anderson: 20:46 How old are you?

Connor McLarenn: 20:47 We get girls. We’re good looking, we drive supercars. No one’s ever seen this before.

Zach Yadegari: 20:57 Last night, last night, we were up there on the balcony spinning game. Flute Belmar.

Alex Slater: 21:01 Why?

Zach Yadegari: 21:02 Because we study.

Alex Slater: 21:03 We study.

Connor McLarenn: 21:04 We study, bro.

Ti Morse: 21:05 We study.

Zach Yadegari: 21:06 No, but seriously like, I think it’s actually something I’m not sure where this stem from, I think it’s like the Silicon Valley culture, Social Network pushed this narrative, same with the show Silicon Valley, that in order to be a successful founder like, pushes this dream of just sitting in an office, sleeping there, or a garage or something. And even when you start making money, ‘cause I love the early grind, everyone has to go through it, but then even when you start making money, like Elon Musk famously still sleeps in his factories, for example, and people glorify that. And I respect him a lot for doing that and I think you should figure out what in life you want to optimize for, what your mission is. And if that’s your mission to build a company in any industry, like if you want to go to Mars for example like Elon, then you should do that, you should follow your mission wholeheartedly. But if it’s something else you shouldn’t just do it because that’s what other people are saying and there’s actually you can build companies, very, very successful ones and also enjoy your life. You can have a work hard, play hard balance. A lot of people used to… a lot of people make excuses of why they can’t start young, that, oh, I have high school or oh, I have college, I can’t balance both. I had a 4.0 GPA in school while building Cali High. It’s like you have the time. People spend seven hours a day on average scrolling on TikTok. People have time for things, they just don’t… they’re just lazy.

Blake Anderson: 22:27 Where’d you pull up that stat? Seven hours a day?

Zach Yadegari: 22:28 Seven hours a day on average.

Alex Slater: 22:30 On average? In the US? Seven hours a day on TikTok?

Connor McLarenn: 22:32 That’s a scary amount of time.

Alex Slater: 22:34 No, dude, that’s not true. There is zero percent chance.

Zach Yadegari: 22:37 Dude, I’m going to pull it up right now. Wait… hold on, I’m on my phone, right, maybe…

Ti Morse: 22:41 On their phone? Maybe…

Zach Yadegari: 22:42 Okay, what’s… 4.5 hours… we’re clarifying. What is it? Teens… okay, it’s 4.8 hours on social media.

Connor McLarenn: 22:50 Oh my god. That’s five hours.

Alex Slater: 22:52 That’s one hour off.

Ti Morse: 22:53 It’s like three hours a day on Snapchat texting girls, so…

Alex Slater: 22:56 That’s a waste of time, dude.

Zach Yadegari: 22:57 No, but okay… pull up the screenshot, right now. Okay, here’s an interesting stat. 17-year-olds on average spend 5.8 hours a day on social media. That’s the highest out of any age group, and then it goes down, like 18 it goes to five hours, but the average is 4.8 hours a day on social media.

Connor McLarenn: 23:18 Does messages count as social media?

Zach Yadegari: 23:21 No, I don’t believe they do. They might, I’m not reading deep into this, but even then, like five hours a day on your phone. Imagine if you used that time productively.

Alex Slater: 23:30 Yeah.

Blake Anderson: 23:31 I think there’s also a narrative which everyone can kind of see online of like pushing you that if you want to get into software you have to raise money. Like Zach and I both went to college and I can speak for myself with the entrepreneurship program at Villanova, they basically taught you…

Alex Slater: 24:00 Basically it’s cookie-cutter thing to go raise money.

Ti Morse: 24:03 Well it’s like this whole thing where you like go create a pitch deck as the first part of your company, it’s like what are you talking about? Like go fucking find a customer.

Blake Anderson: 24:08 It’s actually insane. I took an entrepreneurship course at Tulane where we probably spent more time… I mean, it was all about just the entire class was just doing pitch decks. And at the time I was working on my college marketplace app, which ended up failing. But I was like, holy shit, the amount of time that we spend doing pitch decks, like everyone could just spin up a little business. And like, you know, the probability of success would be very low across the board, but why are these classes not oriented around just doing the damn thing?

Connor McLarenn: 24:41 Well why why do you think?

Blake Anderson: 24:43 I think it’s because in culture and society right now, you’re told to go raise money to the benefit of people that are actually funding the school. Right? All the VCs, all these big PE shops are all funding these schools, and so if they go convince them to go raise money, they own most of the company.

Alex Slater: 25:03 So, I think it’s because those who can’t do teach, bro. I think these entrepreneurship professors usually are not good.

Ti Morse: 25:12 Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that the majority of systems in society are set up so that… I mean, most systems are set up to be risk-averse, right? We’re just trying to preserve the current status quo. And even within these massive corporations, right, they’re just trying to not fuck up what they have. They all have the golden goose and they’re all like, alright, let’s just fucking not kill this thing. And so across society, everybody is just kind of like spending the vast majority of time studying and analyzing and a very small proportion of the time acting. Because acting is dangerous, right? Doing things is dangerous.

Connor McLarenn: 25:43 Like protecting the downside.

Ti Morse: 25:44 Yeah, it’s just protecting the downside. And I mean, I don’t think it’s like wildly inefficient… I mean, it can be wildly inefficient, but like, there’s some level of efficiency to it in that once again, like it’s just making sure that everything doesn’t fucking collapse.

Connor McLarenn: 25:59 But wouldn’t it be more incentivizing to teach people the right stuff?

Ti Morse: 26:07 So within school for example, like yeah, I think it’s ridiculous that we don’t spend more time building and actually doing the thing as opposed to studying. I do think that society should trend towards that. And yet at the same time, it’s like…

Alex Slater: 26:22 Yeah, people doing it are making money doing it, and a lot of the time it’s going to wait until they actually retire to go teach. And that’s why only certain schools do this right, and I think it’s a small number of schools.

Connor McLarenn: 26:32 But dude, how easy is it to hire a successful entrepreneur to teach entrepreneurship? Like the truth is you can’t do it if they’re actually good.

Alex Slater: 26:40 Yeah, like Zach, I think has an entrepreneurship teacher who sold a multi-billion dollar company.

Zach Yadegari: 26:45 He sold his company for more than a billion dollars.

Alex Slater: 26:47 So you have a very small proportion I think of founders that are like, alright, I’m done with this game, I’m going to go teach and just have a fun time doing it. Amazing. If every school could get professors like that, that would be great. But on the flip side, like my professor for example…

Blake Anderson: 27:00 He had a dropshipping tea store. Literally that was his like, he dropshipped tea and I think he did like 10k a month in revenue. And for him it’s like, you know, he’s trying, that’s great, awesome, but he also needs a job, right? Like he has to put food on the table. And at the same time he’s just not a very, you know, maybe not the best person to be teaching this.

Connor McLarenn: 27:20 The way I always thought about it was you basically want to go like odds are the people that have actually done it know the most. And so just go, like if you want to become a great investor go study Warren Buffett, if you want to become like a great business person study like Jeff Bezos or whatever.

Ti Morse: 27:37 How do you guys, and on the risk side, it seems like a $500,000 investment would be a lot of risk for, you know, just to spend on one ad. But the thing is it’s all relative to like total revenue and if you’re doing, you know, 30 million plus a year, that’s like what is that, 15 days of revenue or something on one ad. How do you think about like figuring out what risks make sense to take and like what is risk?

Zach Yadegari: 27:54 It would be like five days revenue.

Ti Morse: 27:56 Wait, five days?

Zach Yadegari: 27:57 Yeah, about a little bit over $100,000 a day we currently do.

Ti Morse: 28:00 Okay. Insane.

Zach Yadegari: 28:02 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 28:03 Yeah, so how do you think about risk?

Zach Yadegari: 28:05 Very good question. There are a few frameworks we definitely look towards. For this case specifically, I’ll say that the way we assessed it, there were a few different things that we thought about in the equation. One is that we have scaled up Cali AI almost only through influencers. Only recently are we starting to run paid ads, like Facebook pay-per-click ads. And so we’ve just been working our way up to more and more famous influencers, more and more followers. And MrBeast is the epitome of an influencer. He’s the biggest influencer on the planet, arguably, or up there top three. And so he was always the end goal, the North Star. This video made perfect sense for us to fit into, it was all about a weight loss journey. And so when we had the opportunity to sponsor it, we knew, okay, right now this is a lot of money to spend on a video because even though it’s five days of revenue, Apple’s payout cycles suck. They’re 45 days delayed so most apps are actually a little bit strapped for cash. And in addition to that, it’s not like five days of profit, that’s five days of revenue, it’s like…

Ti Morse: 29:30 So it’s probably more like 15 days or something like that.

Zach Yadegari: 29:32 And so we decided to take the risk on the basis of we know we want to do it at some point, it’s not going to kill us right now, all it’s really doing is delaying us paying ourselves a little bit. Like that 500k was either we put it towards a video or we pay ourselves. Right now, I mean, we’re all young, we don’t necessarily need the money on hand instantly. None of us are super materialistic, trying to buy anything that crazy and…

Alex Slater: 29:59 Why are you laughing? You just bought a f***ing Lambo cash! You just bought a Lambo cash!

Zach Yadegari: 30:00 Disclaimer there is a Lamborghini and Ferrari outside.

Connor McLarenn: 30:04 We’re actually pretty materialistic… $10 million house… $300,000 car.

Ti Morse: 30:09 To be clear that’s like a few days of revenue.

Zach Yadegari: 30:11 Yeah, no, it’s a few days of revenue… 12 days of revenue.

Blake Anderson: 30:15 But seriously though like outside of that… I don’t think there’s much that any of us want. Like I actually broke it down a while ago and like there were three things I wanted and one was a car and so I was like okay I’ll just get one.

Alex Slater: 30:27 A house which I don’t need for many years.

Ti Morse: 30:29 But a girl.

Zach Yadegari: 30:30 Well you can’t buy that.

Blake Anderson: 30:31 Glad you know that. Okay, so so yeah we decided ultimately it was worth doing.

Connor McLarenn: 30:39 Yeah I would add on to that in terms of the not materialistic. I would say maybe like a better word is that we’re like we’re very risk tolerant. And so like, you know, worst case scenario everything burns to the ground and we’re fine locking ourselves in a room for six months and just grinding to get it all back, you know?

Alex Slater: 30:57 I think if everything burned we would get it back in like a month or two.

Ti Morse: 30:59 Easy. That’s what I’m thinking is like I think most people think of risk as this thing where like they think of getting on a plane or like booking a ticket to just go fly to meet someone in person as risk? There’s no risk to that. It’s like a few hundred bucks, you know? Um, but it’s like the loss preservation or whatever is so high for humans that we just can’t get ourselves over that hump in a lot of cases.

Connor McLarenn: 31:22 Yeah and I mean I think most risks that we take in business are I mean they often are power laws right? It’s like the way that we assess this is we’re like okay we think that at minimum we’re going to get $300,000 back from this 500k that we spend… uh accounting for direct response as well as word of mouth, but upside is in the range of millions right? And I actually think that the probability distribution there is like somewhat uniform in nature and so, you know, definitely definitely weighted towards the losing um but at least short-term for like cash return on…

Alex Slater: 32:02 Yeah, yeah.

Connor McLarenn: 32:03 And so it’s like, you know, we whenever we get these opportunities we’ll take them 10 times out of 10. And that’s something that actually took us a little while to learn, um but Alex Eubank I think was the first example. We spent $100,000 on him when we were at sub 1 million a month.

Alex Slater: 32:18 We were at 500k a month.

Connor McLarenn: 32:19 500k a month we spent 100 thousand dollars per month on an Alex Eubank deal and then within the next few months we skyrocketed to over 2 million a month. I think largely because of him, the influencer he helped us get as well as some other factors. And honestly like you guys are employing this right now as well right with Bryce?

Zach Yadegari: 32:35 Yeah, so actually funny enough Alex and I haven’t even had this conversation yet. Um so we’re gonna have this publicly but Alex was a bit uncomfortable with the fact of signing Bryce Crawford to a podcast deal, um but the reasoning behind it and why I ended up doing it and why I operate pretty quickly is because he’s having the island boys on his podcast which are known for incest and a bunch of other fucked up shit right? So it’s low on views but two… He’s the largest Christian creator in the entire like short-form social media space. And so we can get him, we can get George Janko, it’ll honestly kick this snowball off of getting more creators. And it was a, it was a 20k deal. And so even if we get 10k back, 15k back, like Blake said, word of mouth, getting other creators, larger deals with him. Um, and it was also all, I guess foundation in the sense that our biggest competitor right now, um, only markets through churches. So how can we target that same audience but on social media, which is what we’re good at.

Ti Morse: 33:30 Amazing. Yeah, I’d be, I’d be curious. So like if you’re doing let’s say a million dollars a month in revenue at one point, how do you think about, you know, and I imagine that most of this is like you have some fixed expenses for like how much does this house cost or how much does that car cost. Um, outside of that you can pretty much just YOLO everything back into the business with a expected higher ROI, you know, payback in a relatively short period of time. It’s like probably like two months and you’re getting your money back in a lot of these cases. And so at any given time, how much do you think you’re willing to risk of let’s say your top line gross revenue or whatever on a single bet?

Blake Anderson: 34:05 Oh yeah, on a single bet is interesting. Um, I don’t know, like it’s, it would be difficult to deploy like, you know, multiple million dollars on an individual play, you know, I guess like the Super Bowl is probably the only clear example I would have. Um, so maybe this would have been a better question when you were smaller, but… Yeah, now that said, like I do think that that’s actually probably one of the biggest downsides to bootstrapping is that because it is your money, every dollar that you spend is coming out of your pocket, whereas when you’re VC backed you can take those risks. Um, but I think I speak for all of us here when I say like we would all fucking YOLO everything that we have into a play given that we think it’s…

Zach Yadegari: 34:49 That’s how we started Quitter actually.

Alex Slater: 34:50 Yeah, honestly.

Zach Yadegari: 34:51 I had 3k living at my parents.

Alex Slater: 34:53 And 2k for me, same exact thing.

Zach Yadegari: 34:55 Funny enough, Alex and I were like we met up in SF. He was like ‘I built this last week.’ I said I have an idea to help men quit porn. We partnered up. And then um, we started Reddit and X marketing and Alex is just kind of like a little genius at rage baiting people online. And so he was ripping like a couple hundred dollar days and he was like getting on me so much of like ‘what are we doing with marketing, you’re not doing shit’ X, Y, and Z. And then I was like ‘wait for influencers’ and I trusted my gut on this. Um, I leveraged the 3k for about 15k because we paid 20% upfront um of all the deals, we got a bunch of religious creators, and that’s when we started doing $1,000 a day. And so we were like ‘holy shit, this is working’ but the truth is that could have failed.

Blake Anderson: 35:35 Um, so…

Ti Morse: 35:36 And Connor, I just wanted to ask you, uh, what is the technical stack for Quitter?

Connor McLarenn: 35:45 Not gonna lie, man. I drank 25 beers last night and I have never written a line of code in my entire life.

Ti Morse: 35:55 About what I expected. Yeah, flip it. We got the cookie monster over here so why don’t we…

Blake Anderson: 36:00 I was gonna ask about the goat. How is it bro?

Zach Yadegari: 36:01 It’s so good.

Blake Anderson: 36:03 Does it come in the parcel?

Zach Yadegari: 36:04 It’s so good.

Blake Anderson: 36:05 Dropped them.

Zach Yadegari: 36:07 He’s putting out a lot… I gotta share this with… Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?

Alex Slater: 36:13 Wait, we took out the… It was a bit lower.

Blake Anderson: 36:15 Alright, I got it. So there was a cookie that looked something like this, right? There’s a flat line down the middle. Chill, bro. Zach says to our videography, he goes, ‘Yo, Jude, come here, come here, come here.’ Our chef, JC, absolute goat, great guy, loves him, is walking up. Zach is trying to expose JC on camera. Zach goes, ‘JC, dude, did you take a bite out of the cookie before serving it? It looks like this.’ He goes, ‘Zach, do you think that he’s taking a fucking bite straight down the center?’

Zach Yadegari: 36:48 Dude, Blake has said this like three times now. Really overused.

Connor McLarenn: 36:54 This is the first time I heard it. Put it out there.

Blake Anderson: 36:57 That was actually the first time I made that joke.

Alex Slater: 36:59 Amazing. Yeah. Okay, on the chef talk… on the chef point. How do you guys think about like… basically I’d imagine you want to optimize for like going as hard as you possibly can on your actual companies and reducing all cognitive load that doesn’t have to do with like outputting successful marketing or like product improvement or all that stuff. How do you think about like reducing cognitive load and hiring away all the roles and you know responsibilities that you don’t actually have to do yourself?

Ti Morse: 37:29 That’s a very good question. I actually think that the more you can reduce cognitive load, the more creative you can be on a daily basis. And so something like us getting a chef for the house… I actually think there’s a great ROI on that. You don’t need to think about what food you want, you don’t need to think about ordering or making it for yourself, and it first of all it saves you hours a week just on that basis. But then in addition, if you have a chef preparing you meals, they’re very… they can be very healthy if that’s what you instruct the chef to make. And therefore that will cause you to have more energy throughout the day because you’re eating higher quality foods, higher quality meals. Altogether, I think the energy that that will allow you to put into your business will definitely be profitable and so I don’t know why everyone doesn’t have a private chef.

Blake Anderson: 38:16 Exactly. God damn, he’s putting that line. God damn it. God damn it, I wanted that one.

Alex Slater: 38:24 Yeah, I would agree. Everybody should just get… if you don’t have a private chef, what are you kind of like…

Zach Yadegari: 38:29 If you’ve raised a seed round…

Connor McLarenn: 38:30 Then no, you need a ten million dollar house, super cars, private chef.

Alex Slater: 38:33 I don’t get why everyone doesn’t just get a private chef, Lambo, ten million dollar house, it’s like…

Zach Yadegari: 38:38 But should we tell them that like… we got like five million dollars in pre-seed investment from Mafia?

Ti Morse: 38:44 Yeah, that we’re using the… we’re using investor money and just blowing it on parties.

Connor McLarenn: 38:48 Exactly. I mean Roy Lee just bought a Ferrari, right?

Alex Slater: 38:51 Yeah, Roy… that’s true video actually. You can’t… he’s a bald dude.

Zach Yadegari: 38:57 No, it must be… must be rented or something.

Alex Slater: 38:59 I don’t think so. I also…

Blake Anderson: 39:00 Just bought a Ferrari. Just want to put that out there.

Ti Morse: 39:01 Yeah, guys, did you hear that? Ferrari? Say it one more time.

Blake Anderson: 39:03 I actually just bought a Ferrari 296 GTS 2024.

Ti Morse: 39:08 For how much?

Blake Anderson: 39:10 430 all cash.

Connor McLarenn: 39:12 Does it actually help you get girls? I’ve heard that online.

Blake Anderson: 39:14 Yeah, dude, actually, we were at a party and I fucking brought a girl out to the Ferrari and revved the engine and she loved it. I did do that, I swear to God. I swear to God.

Alex Slater: 39:23 No way! Are you fucking serious? Wow.

Connor McLarenn: 39:25 Well, I’d just like to say, so Zach and Alex… we’re deep in the ashes. Oh dude.

Blake Anderson: 39:29 Yeah.

Connor McLarenn: 39:30 Yeah, some guys need to do that. Some guys need to…

Ti Morse: 39:31 Yo, can we just talk about the fact that the most recent, or I guess now you have the other post, but your second most recent Instagram post is your fucking Lambo? Mr. Cowley.

Connor McLarenn: 39:43 So Zach and Alex decided to go on a two-man the other night. Okay?

Blake Anderson: 39:47 Oh, what are we talking about?

Ti Morse: 39:48 Let’s talk about this.

Alex Slater: 39:49 We’re not talking about this. No, no. We’re not doing that.

Ti Morse: 39:52 Come on, come on.

Connor McLarenn: 39:53 So look, Alex is currently sourcing his Lambo, so he doesn’t have a supercar in the fleet. Blake obviously has his Ferrari, Zach just got his Lambo here a couple days ago. They’re like, dude, we got these girls we want to talk to. Wait, what do you drive again?

Ti Morse: 40:04 I drive a Raptor R.

Connor McLarenn: 40:06 He drives a truck. Yeah.

Ti Morse: 40:08 He drives a truck, and my truck will be zero to sixty in 3.2 seconds. It’s a truck.

Connor McLarenn: 40:12 It’s a truck. Hey, it’s me, bro.

Ti Morse: 40:14 I drive that truck faster than Zach drives his Lambo. I can beat Zach in a fucking race. Easy.

Connor McLarenn: 40:18 Wait, wait, what did you say? Wait, hold on. What did you say about Zach? You said he’s a super safe driver, but he’s not willing to take risks.

Ti Morse: 40:21 Yeah. What?

Zach Yadegari: 40:23 Well, I’ve never driven you. I just, I just like, you literally said you’re the best driver in the country.

Ti Morse: 40:26 Because of the speed! That has nothing to do with being safe.

Connor McLarenn: 40:28 That doesn’t mean you’re the best. Yeah.

Zach Yadegari: 40:30 Okay, I’m the safest driver.

Ti Morse: 40:31 Yeah, you’re going to have good insurance.

Zach Yadegari: 40:33 Like, I probably have the most expensive insurance. What is it, 3k a month? Yeah, it’s insane.

Ti Morse: 40:38 Jesus Christ. Ridiculous.

Connor McLarenn: 40:40 All right, so they do a two-man, right? They’re like, we’re sitting outside, it’s me, Blake, and everybody, Luke. And Alex is like, Alex, when he needs something from you, he smirks a bit and you can just tell he’s going to ask for something. I swear to God, these kids are like slyly walking up, acting like everything’s normal. They’re like, a little grin on their face. They’re like, what’s up, guys? Like, how’s your night going? I go, Jude, record this. They go, what? Like, why do you need Jude to record this right now? I go, all right, two minutes.

Blake Anderson: 41:05 Two fucking minutes. Alex requests to borrow my Ferrari to go pick up a girl so that he and Zach can be driving the two girls side-by-side.

Alex Slater: 41:14 That was basically like GTA. It was like GTA.

Connor McLarenn: 41:18 And guess what? The cherry on top of all of this is the girls had boyfriends.

Ti Morse: 41:22 True! Shrewd! The cherry on top! They had boyfriends.

Alex Slater: 41:26 But dude, they didn’t tell us they had boyfriends until later in the night. Ridiculous.

Ti Morse: 41:30 It is ridiculous.

Blake Anderson: 41:32 That is kind of insane. Yeah, it’s fucking gross.

Zach Yadegari: 42:00 The demographic of… I think this podcast is about to get sent around U-Miami.

Alex Slater: 42:03 Yeah, yeah, I realized that, right?

Zach Yadegari: 42:05 Bro, no, they’re not going to find it, dude.

Alex Slater: 42:08 They will find it.

Zach Yadegari: 42:09 One hundred percent. We’ll make sure our clipping army gets it sent to U-Miami.

Alex Slater: 42:12 Demographic of U-Miami is super interesting, bro. If they say seven hours a day on TikTok, they’ll find it.

Zach Yadegari: 42:17 It’s probably higher at U-Miami.

Connor McLarenn: 42:19 The fact they’ll find it at like five hours and 30 minutes down the scroll.

Alex Slater: 42:22 It’s probably higher at U-Miami. They should do like business drama. Business drama. Amazing.

Zach Yadegari: 42:27 Hopefully they learn a thing or two.

Alex Slater: 42:29 But yeah, no, it is crazy the amount of girls that have been texting them and then they find out it’s like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ She’s like, ‘Well, my boyfriend doesn’t like the fact that I’m texting you,’ or like, ‘No calls, only texts.’ X, Y, and Z.

Connor McLarenn: 42:41 I think it’s just young, rich, and sexy. I mean, like…

Blake Anderson: 42:43 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, kindly.

Alex Slater: 42:46 He’s like, ‘Uh, what the f*ck?’

Blake Anderson: 42:49 So, Connor, who was at breakfast with us this morning?

Connor McLarenn: 42:53 Friend.

Blake Anderson: 42:54 Ooh.

Connor McLarenn: 42:55 A very pretty friend of mine joined us for breakfast.

Alex Slater: 43:00 What does she do?

Connor McLarenn: 43:02 She, uh, doesn’t work. Doesn’t need a job.

Alex Slater: 43:05 Why?

Connor McLarenn: 43:06 Wants to be a housewife.

Alex Slater: 43:07 Housewife. Oh sh*t. Okay.

Connor McLarenn: 43:11 I mean every girl wants to be an entrepreneur, but I mean…

Blake Anderson: 43:16 All right, let’s, uh, let’s get back to the topic at hand. Okay. All right. So because you guys are kind of bootstrapping all your companies, I think that that kind of allows you to do things that most entrepreneurs can’t do and have like a much longer time horizon on how you decide to build the company and also like multi-step futures of like, what are we doing after the company, right? How do you think about that?

Alex Slater: 43:41 I mean, within the context of App Mafia, it’s like we have a very clear vision on how we can make software more popular and more accessible to the masses. I don’t anticipate that this is something that we’re all going to work on for a decade, right? But yeah, to your point, like, we have a lot of optionality, which is great. And I think every single one of us here intends to build massive companies in the future. I think that there’s a classic sort of trope in the tech world, which is something along the lines of like, you should work on the really, really hard problem immediately. And I think that that applies to some people, but certainly not everybody. You know, even like Elon Musk, for example, right? He had Zip2 and PayPal before Tesla and SpaceX. And Sam Altman did Loopt and YC before OpenAI. And Steve Jobs sold the little… what were they, like the blue boxes or something?

Ti Morse: 44:37 Oh, yeah, like the phone boxes.

Alex Slater: 44:39 Yeah, like the phone boxes. They were getting like… they were piggybacking off the, I think it was like the AT&T network, but for free.

Zach Yadegari: 44:46 Yeah, exactly.

Alex Slater: 44:47 So Steve Jobs did that to make money before Apple. And I think that this is kind of how all of us…

Ti Morse: 45:00 Entrepreneurship 2, which is like you can pursue the stepping stone path where you work on progressively harder things as you mature and increase your skill and knowledge or general skills and knowledge. So, yeah, I think that, yeah, and I think bootstrapping is very conducive to that. When you raise venture capital, it, there’s somewhat of an expectation, implicit agreement that you are going to pursue a decabillion dollar outcome. Which once again, like not knocking anybody for pursuing it, there are a ton of upsides that come from it, but uh, yeah, I think that’s how we view it.

Blake Anderson: 45:41 Honestly, I think it’s bad that that’s the default because most people think the only way to even get started in entrepreneurship is to raise money, and that’s a fallacy.

Ti Morse: 45:48 Yep.

Alex Slater: 45:49 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 45:51 And even on the flip side within bootstrapping, I think people often look at it as like the only way to bootstrap is to be an indie hacker, right? And to, and to not build teams.

Alex Slater: 46:02 Also to be technical, I think everyone, like when Twitter launched, everyone thought it was just Alex. Um, when Kalea launched, I don’t know if you were public about it, but if it was just Zach.

Zach Yadegari: 46:08 Yeah, I had a little bit of distribution, so people did kind of know, but-

Alex Slater: 46:13 But no- no one, no one realizes that there’s like massive teams behind- not massive, but there’s teams behind us working together and you think it’s just a solo person doing it.

Connor McLarenn: 46:22 Just a few months ago I saw some post about how we had four employees and I’m like, no, we have 30 or something, like-

Alex Slater: 46:27 Yeah.

Connor McLarenn: 46:28 The breakdown of our team is interesting because I mean, it’s 30 people total, it’s more than 30, but half of those are actually virtual assistants and so the other half of those are like people on I guess more specialized roles.

Zach Yadegari: 46:39 Yeah.

Blake Anderson: 46:41 Yeah, I- I was thinking about this the other day. I think the, like before I hired someone as a full-time employee, I was like, yeah, you know, one person one billion dollar company or whatever, and then I hired someone and I watched the like productivity in everything that we can do just skyrocket overnight and I was like, holy shit, the whole solo thing is like a complete psyop. Like maybe it works for some people, but for most businesses you should try to find cracked individuals and hire them.

Zach Yadegari: 47:08 I think like one of my favorite quotes, I think it was Richard Branson said it, but it was along the lines of um, find really talented people and get out of their way. Give them the resources to succeed and get the fuck out of the way because your bias and how you think it should be run will stunt growth and stunt what you actually hired them to do.

Ti Morse: 47:23 I think you do embody that as well, Zach. You’re very good at identifying the right person and just being like, that is not my fucking domain, you know. Like when you have 25 BAs and you don’t- aren’t able to code, and you’re like, I trust him, I trust him.

Alex Slater: 47:36 So I’d be- I’d be curious, like what are- individually you have this understanding that you’re not going to be the best that you can be at every single facet of the business. What are the things that you just know through growing these businesses over the last like few years, um, are like not your strong points and what should you just outsource versus what you should be like the only person that’s making that decision? You’re the best guy to do it.

Ti Morse: 48:00 I am definitely a believer in knowing how to do almost everything, but not necessarily being the best. And so, like, I know Connor, you know, you can’t code, but outside of that, I think every one of us here, we can code, design, and market, right? We’re all generally capable, which makes it much easier to hire and identify the right people. Like, I know a lot of people that have zero technical knowledge and they just fucking consistently hire terrible engineers because they don’t know the difference between a bad, good, and great engineer. And that applies to marketing and design as well.

Connor McLarenn: 48:42 I think it’s also, like, I can’t code at all, but while I’m here and after launch and more bandwidth, I do want to spend a week and just dive into everything. Because I’m confident enough I can learn it enough just to, like, whip up MVPs. It’s not hard.

Ti Morse: 48:52 Yeah, no, you could definitely—

Zach Yadegari: 48:53 You could probably be a 10x engineer in one week, you think?

Blake Anderson: 48:55 Yeah, you could do that 100%.

Zach Yadegari: 48:57 I mean, you’ll get clueless-sounding engineers.

Ti Morse: 48:58 If you try to get a fucking job at Meta in a week—

Zach Yadegari: 49:00 Like three million dollars, you think?

Blake Anderson: 49:04 I mean, four or five.

Ti Morse: 49:09 If you just watch the course, you’ll learn a lot about development and design.

Blake Anderson: 49:13 Yeah, ‘cause you taught it.

Ti Morse: 49:14 You’d have to buy the course, actually.

Zach Yadegari: 49:17 We almost should buy it.

Alex Slater: 49:21 We all should actually pay to be in.

Blake Anderson: 49:24 Yeah, that way we can actually be Psyop revenue.

Alex Slater: 49:29 We can just gift the course to our team members and just make them super cracked.

Blake Anderson: 49:34 Oh, 5,000 dollar credit, we give people credits to purchase and we claim it as revenue.

Ti Morse: 49:37 I love that idea.

Alex Slater: 49:38 I mean, but you guys don’t even have any investors, so it’s just like—

Zach Yadegari: 49:42 Be in yourself.

Alex Slater: 49:43 No, Psyop’s social media.

Zach Yadegari: 49:45 Oh, okay.

Blake Anderson: 49:46 We made fucking million dollar first day. It’s all credits.

Zach Yadegari: 49:50 It’s all fucking— I mean, this is just— I mean, big tech companies do— do actually do this.

Ti Morse: 49:55 What?

Zach Yadegari: 49:58 Yeah, that usually works, um, when it’s like private, and then I don’t know about if we say it on a podcast.

Ti Morse: 50:24 Is this Calai strategy, just send credits?

Zach Yadegari: 50:28 Yeah, this is actually Calai, dude, all our ARR is fake.

Blake Anderson: 50:29 It’s all fake.

Alex Slater: 50:30 It’s all credit.

Zach Yadegari: 50:32 It’s all actually—

Ti Morse: 50:34 It’s all—

Zach Yadegari: 50:35 You look at the revenue breakdown, it’s like, you know, 36-plus mil a year, it’s like 35 mil is just B2B sales to a, you know, entity where we just send 35 mil and then—

Alex Slater: 50:41 And then some consulting and—

Blake Anderson: 50:44 Categoric and then consulting, we just fucking— we is literally just churning the same five thousand dollars back.

Zach Yadegari: 50:49 We don’t actually have any cash, really. It’s just 5k, just phew phew phew phew.

Ti Morse: 50:59 Yeah, okay. So you mentioned— he’s joking, he’s joking.

Zach Yadegari: 51:00 Yeah, yeah.

Ti Morse: 51:00 Shut up, Zach! Stop the podcast, we’ll wait actually.

Alex Slater: 51:01 Wait, is he not kidding? Guys, I’ve seen it.

Blake Anderson: 51:03 Calai is fake. It’s not even real. 60-second intermission right now. Just pause. No, unpause. Alright. Okay.

Zach Yadegari: 51:06 Twitter— Twitter got signed into the thing. Now we’re— now we’re recycling cash. Have you guys ever even downloaded Calai? ‘Cause it’s not actually a real app. If you look it up on the App Store, it will not come up.

Alex Slater: 51:12 Okay, so going back to the point where you were talking about like Elon sleeping on the factory floor, you know, this is not a hard work company, but there is this idea of like there are just fires, you know, at some point one day there’s some random fire and then the next day there’s a different random fire. How do you think about basically moving in between each fire and like systematically deleting them? Yeah, you— if you download Calai and try to pay, it literally won’t even work.

Zach Yadegari: 51:20 It’s just an onboarder. It’s literally just— do the onboarding and then try to pay. Like, see if you can actually sign up for the free trial. It literally- it asks you to double click. It takes your- it takes your face. It literally won’t even work.

Blake Anderson: 51:30 Try it. Pro—

Connor McLarenn: 51:34 Are you talking about Mafia, Cali-AI, both? Just generally. Well, it was actually Alex from Mozy who said this once on one of his podcasts and I strongly agree with it. That there, simplicity within business is really key. If you look at apps for example, there are only really three things, like Cali-AI hard pay-walled apps, that truly matter. It’s one, getting people to download, two is converting the downloads, and then three is getting them to stay. So essentially the marketing, the retention, and the conversion rate or the top of funnel, retention, conversion rate. And so there are always going to be all these fires, things that break, UI bugs, bugs within data syncing of accounts, and sometimes you have to let the little fires burn in order to attack the bigger problems. You may want to go extinguish all these small fires because they’re easy to do, they’re these little things and you know, you might think, you might go crazy thinking they’re adding up and it’s going to destroy my business, but it’s really just the main, you need to figure out for your business model and it’s generally the same for most, what are the two or three things that matter and then it’s the Pareto distribution. I would spend pretty much 80% of time on those, 20% of time on anything else.

Zach Yadegari: 52:55 I don’t think I can emphasize that enough. Like, on Tech Twitter and in the indie hacker world specifically, you see it all the time. These dudes like optimizing the fuck out of their ASO and their tiny little design tweaks and whatnot, and yet they’re at $400 MRR. And I mean, I remember launching RizzGPT, the first successful app that I built, and it was a complete…

Alex Slater: 53:23 You’re not Mr. Miyagi.

Connor McLarenn: 53:24 There’s two? Rather than they just duplicated. Gotta get the chopsticks. I’m trying to get over it so I don’t hit the cookie.

Zach Yadegari: 53:32 Okay, so launching RizzGPT and it was a shitshow. We didn’t have reviews, no notifications, the name of the app when you downloaded it was RizzGPT-production. Jeez. The API keys were in the front-end, it was a mess. And yet we hit 80k MRR within three days. And I remember people doing case studies on it and everyone’s freaking the fuck out, they’re like, there’s no way they’re actually doing this blah blah blah.

Blake Anderson: 54:00 And to Zach’s point, it’s like, um, I think it applies to both the things that you spend your time towards in terms of building, and then also the fires that you extinguish. It’s like identify the core components of the business: getting people to download, converting them, making sure they have a good experience and that they stay, and everything outside of that can kind of wait.

Alex Slater: 54:24 I think with life too, right? Like us living together. There’s a lot of things that pop up, we have to take care of the house and do this and do that. I think everyone has just a mental priorities list and you just trust each other’s going to get it done. Um, with Quitter right now, we’re in a position of hiring, um, so trying to find the right talent, but it helps when you have a good team that can handle the fires for you and so you can handle some of the larger things. But generally speaking, I’m just a big believer of doing it now. Yeah. I think that’s something that the whole house has kind of realized this past week of just like, get the shit done now and don’t put it off in a week and then have it keep being a little issue.

Ti Morse: 54:57 Bias towards action.

Alex Slater: 54:58 Yeah.

Zach Yadegari: 54:59 I’d be, I’d be curious, so when you first start building the app, you know, you have like API keys on the front end, everyone can see them and, um, you know, there’s a whole bunch of like small things that are just like bad, but you, you know, shipping faster equals you actually have a product that has revenue and all this stuff. In your mind, you know, I know the critical path probably changes over time as to like what are the key things that we need to do. And you’re probably able to ship faster with more bugs at the very beginning than you are, you know, when you have 3 million or 300 million users. Um, so how has that kind of shifted in your guys’s mind from the start where it was just shipping to now it’s more like you want to make sure it’s locked in?

Blake Anderson: 55:38 Yeah, I mean, a lot of the sort of principles that you apply when you’re a small scrappy team, um, of, you know, like not hyper-fixating on these small little issues, do become real concerns as you scale. And it’s kind of funny, it’s like the same way that as you grow up, you know, um, when you’re a teenager, maybe people tend to like demonize their parents, they’re like oh, all these fucking rules, blah blah blah. And as you get older, you start to understand them. And I think the same thing kind of applies to scaling a business, which is early on you kind of demonize all of like these big business principles and then as your company grows, you begin to understand them a little bit more and, and understand the importance of, of, you know, running a tight ship.

Connor McLarenn: 56:30 I agree with them.

Blake Anderson: 56:31 Yeah.

Zach Yadegari: 56:32 Okay. And so for right now, when you like wake up in the morning, what is the critical path for your guys’s different companies?

Blake Anderson: 56:40 For App Mafia specifically, it’s been getting the core stuff done. So we’re almost there.

Zach Yadegari: 56:43 Back end of it, front end of it?

Blake Anderson: 56:44 Yeah.

Alex Slater: 56:45 Yeah, this is going to change a lot. Like right now we’re doing a lot of the groundwork, just setting the systems up. Long term, the vision is that our lifestyles will, that we will be able to just live and then we have people around us filming.

Zach Yadegari: 57:00 making the content happen. We help with ideation and we are still working on improving everything, optimizing everything, but generally day to day, if the systems are built properly, we won’t need to think all the time necessarily about operations and more just about how can we be entertaining, how can and our lives are naturally entertaining. I mean, we’re all young, making millions of dollars, driving supercars, living in a mansion, throwing parties. So that’s intrinsically things that people like watching.

Alex Slater: 57:31 Roll the clip.

Blake Anderson: 57:33 Roll the clip. Um, I think, yeah, to Zach’s point, it just we have the ability to inspire people and change the narrative online of like you have to go raise millions of dollars, you need to go down the e-com path or the drop shipping path and like buy this course when like you can go bootstrap a software and build to 10k a month, quit your 9 to 5, give yourself the freedom to go think of bigger better ideas and meet the right people doing it, and I think at the end of the day, the Mafia’s whole goal is to like build a giant community and inspire and seed and help these men and women, uh, build a better life for themselves.

Zach Yadegari: 58:07 I will say though, I think a very a core principle that we followed at Callie Ai, they followed at Quitter, and we’re following at Mafia is this whole idea of speed. Everything we do needs to be done incredibly quickly. And if it’s not, then you’ll just slowly fall behind on everything and you won’t get things done, you won’t build the momentum that you need to hit this escape velocity. And I actually want to say with you guys, I mean, you heard that we were launching tomorrow and you were like, okay, we’re going to film this today, we’re going to edit this all up and we’ll be able to get it up tomorrow. And like at the time I was like, okay, cool, it’s just going to be like a camera or two recording, but now like seeing all the high quality production you guys have, it’s going to take you a long time and it’s this dedication that’s really required to, I think, build anything great.

Alex Slater: 58:53 Yeah, we’re not sleeping tonight. Um, we’re going… we’re going straight home, editing, and then I’m going to be watching it and like making sure every single fucking frame is locked in. Um, good stuff.

Connor McLarenn: 59:04 Yeah. I would… I would be kind of curious, so like I am constantly running through like two main things or actually three main things through my mind. One, I want to be shipping more faster. Two, I want to be improving quality. And then three, I’m like, why can’t we do it today? Why can’t we do it like, you know, someone says, can you do a call next week? I’m like, why not, you know, just call me right now, you know? Or just don’t call me.

Ti Morse: 59:22 I fucking hate that. I hate the like oh we’re going to pencil in a time next week. I’m like, yo, call me this afternoon. Or like even if it’s next week, it’ll just be like call me at some point, you know? Find the time. I hate the like scheduling into the calendar. I can’t take a call literally on the plane, they won’t let it through the wifi, but like as soon as I land just fucking pick up the phone. Um, yeah, but how do you guys… how do you guys think about basically constantly forcing the timelines to go faster so that, you know, the iteration loops are slower… or smaller.

Blake Anderson: 59:49 I think we actually went through this, um, in the beginning, in the first two weeks here, we got very caught up in like moving in and the Miami lifestyle and having fun and we didn’t have deadlines on things and we kind of had to sit down and be like, dude…

Ti Morse: 1:00:00 What the fuck are we doing? Like, do we want to build this thing to the best of its ability and lock the fuck in and work quickly which we all can do, or do we want to get distracted by being in Miami and potentially fuck this up? And so I think we had to put deadlines on getting the course material done, getting the back end done, making sure the launch video is done.

Zach Yadegari: 1:00:15 Or also being perfectionists.

Ti Morse: 1:00:17 Yeah, that’s another one. Just shipping fast. I think another thing was like, we spent a lot of money on a launch video and it didn’t work out how we wanted it to.

Alex Slater: 1:00:27 Fuck, we scrapped it? What, 25, 35K?

Ti Morse: 1:00:30 Lost 30 something down the drain. Did it, saw the video, we said that sucks. And we’re not…

Alex Slater: 1:00:35 And bounced back and now we have another one cooking up for tomorrow that we’re proud of, we’re happy with. So…

Zach Yadegari: 1:00:41 I’ve actually had that situation like more recently. Like if it’s not absolutely insane and way better than I’ve ever done, I’m not really…

Blake Anderson: 1:00:46 Yeah, I don’t care how much money, time, whatever we’ve put into it. If it’s not good, we’ll just kill it.

Zach Yadegari: 1:00:51 And then by the same token, and as well as in line with your question about speed, I dude, I think honestly one of the reasons that people don’t move quickly enough is oftentimes a lack of confidence in that constantly deliberating back and forth and worried about how something’s going to be perceived and whether it’s going to go well or not go well. And honestly, I think taking life like not super seriously and just fucking doing things and seeing what sticks, accepting that at times you’re going to embarrass yourself and you’re going to break shit within your business, but that the more decisions you make, the more data you get and the stronger your intuition grows over time. If you do nothing, your intuition and your mental models are never going to form, right? They’ll be completely blank.

Connor McLarenn: 1:01:38 Like this podcast, honestly. It’s like the first podcast we’re doing like so casually, I feel like.

Blake Anderson: 1:01:43 Yeah.

Alex Slater: 1:01:46 Yeah, bouncing back and forth between scaling businesses, photosynthesis, partying, girls, your technical ability, very much not there, pure 25 beers.

Zach Yadegari: 1:01:58 But you had like 30, man, you beat me.

Alex Slater: 1:02:00 Man, no, honestly, what do you think we actually did, like 15, 20?

Connor McLarenn: 1:02:04 Really that many?

Alex Slater: 1:02:05 Dude, I had at least six here and then like four plus shots at the bar and then multiple tequila sodas.

Blake Anderson: 1:02:14 So I think of both confidence, I mean arrogance is one thing, but confidence is something that you…

Zach Yadegari: 1:02:21 You gotta hear Alex’s fake it till you make it story.

Blake Anderson: 1:02:24 All right, go for it.

Connor McLarenn: 1:02:26 Oh yeah, this is fucking…

Zach Yadegari: 1:02:27 Bro, tell them the whole thing of like how we met, what you told me…

Alex Slater: 1:02:30 All the lies, bro. 100 mil? No, I don’t know. I like that one too. I…

Ti Morse: 1:02:33 100 mil?

Alex Slater: 1:02:34 No, I’m telling him… I like that one too. Alright, so I guess to begin my story, I tried to raise 100 million pre-seed to build a super social app to take on WeChat but bring it to the US. And then yeah, anyways, fast forward a few years.

Zach Yadegari: 1:02:49 That was just a mock…

Ti Morse: 1:02:50 You want to compete against Elon?

Alex Slater: 1:02:51 Yeah, this was before he bought Twitter.

Zach Yadegari: 1:02:54 So you actually had the idea first.

Alex Slater: 1:02:55 Honestly, I did. And there are notes in my phone. This is crazy.

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:00 There are notes in my phone, screenshotting Elon talking about buying Twitter and then I’m writing, I need to compete with this guy. Like, the race is on.

Blake Anderson: 1:03:10 How old were you at this time?

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:12 Like 16.

Alex Slater: 1:03:14 16 years old. Are you 18 now?

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:15 19 now.

Connor McLarenn: 1:03:16 19, okay.

Blake Anderson: 1:03:17 Dude, fast forward.

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:18 Yeah, fast forward to Miami and you know, we’ve… I’ll skip the story, but we met randomly at a hotel and I remember telling him, you know, I’m a Thiel fellow.

Ti Morse: 1:03:26 He snuck into the hotel by the way, he was not…

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:28 I’m a Thiel fellow. He was like, ‘No way, bro! Like 1% acceptance rate. What are you doing with the money?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, well, I’m just like living, doing stuff with it.’

Alex Slater: 1:03:40 How much money did you have in your bank at this time?

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:42 Maybe $250.

Blake Anderson: 1:03:45 It was like that’s sick.

Alex Slater: 1:03:46 He lied about being a Thiel fellow?

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:48 Yeah, yeah. Just to impress Ti.

Blake Anderson: 1:03:51 He lied to impress Ti, bro.

Zach Yadegari: 1:03:53 At the time, at the time.

Ti Morse: 1:03:54 He lied to impress Ti, bro. I… I built an unblocked gaming website and it was making like $60,000 a year at this point. And so when he… he just randomly… we met him in Miami at a hotel. It was like a resort slash hotel. We were at the pool. I was with a few of my friends. We were leaving to go get dinner. He comes up to us, I don’t even know what he says, but like, ‘Yo, what’s up?’ And I don’t know, sometimes I’m just in a very spontaneous mood. So I was like, ‘Yo, you want to come get dinner with us?’ Random kid, never met him before. And he came with us. We went to a steakhouse, Smith and Wollensky’s in Miami. Great steakhouse. Should go back. Honestly full circle moment 100%. But we go and in the Uber, I’m telling him about my project and he’s telling me like, ‘Yo, I’m building apps too.’ I’m like mind blown. I’m like I’ve never met someone else that’s in the entrepreneurial world. And this was before I ever got on Twitter, so I actually thought I was like isolated in this bubble. I was the only entrepreneur.

Connor McLarenn: 1:04:47 The only guy who could do it.

Alex Slater: 1:04:48 Wait, was it… you guys went to Room 40?

Ti Morse: 1:04:51 No. Oh, fuck. Room 40 is nuts!

Blake Anderson: 1:04:54 In a podcast? Alright, back to this. Alright.

Zach Yadegari: 1:04:59 So, we were in the Uber just talking.

Ti Morse: 1:05:03 We were in the Uber just talking and he started telling me about his app and then I don’t even know why he said this, because it was unnecessary, but he lied and said he was a Thiel fellow. Because I asked if he was in college. He was like, ‘No, I’m traveling, I’m actually a Thiel fellow.’ And I… I wanted to apply to that, so I was like, ‘No fucking way.’ I was like so impressed by him. And I started asking him all these questions about his life and he was just giving me all these non-answers, never really answering anything. But like I just thought he was this mysterious like international man of mystery or something, James Bond. We went to the dinner, we had the whole thing, he’s just a charlatan, was wasting my time, bro, I found out later. And then so we met, it was cool, we like spoke the whole night and then fast forward like two months. He was going to San Francisco for this startup accelerator called On Deck.

Zach Yadegari: 1:05:51 On Deck, yeah.

Ti Morse: 1:05:52 And we stayed in touch. He was like, ‘Yo, I’m doing this, you should apply.’ So I applied, I did it, I got in, and we flew out. Together. Well, we stayed in the same- same hacker house actually.

Blake Anderson: 1:06:05 Oh shit.

Connor McLarenn: 1:06:07 Not hacker house, bro. Oh my god.

Ti Morse: 1:06:09 So we went and this whole time I- I was thinking he’s a Thiel fellow. I kept saying I introduced him to people as a Thiel fellow. People are just like “what the fuck are you talking about?” But then I slowly started piecing together that he wasn’t a Thiel fellow because I- I just don’t know what it was but he kept like- clues started coming in. I learned he wasn’t. That’s when Cal AI actually started. That’s when we launched that same weekend of the Starbucks Accelerator is when we launched Cal AI. Luckily, like he was a cool guy and other things so like I didn’t just like block him for being a liar or anything.

Alex Slater: 1:06:41 How did you admit it?

Ti Morse: 1:06:43 He never admitted it. I think I just like- I back- I see you. You’re- I see you. I’m- I’m still talking. Yo, funny story actually. Dude, I remember now. No, bro. Okay, so I posted something on Twitter, fuck dude, it was one of my earliest posts. It was a picture of me and him at the hotel. You guys could find it. And it was like, I think everything happens for a reason, I just met this guy, he’s a Thiel fellow, he built apps. And then a few weeks later I was like asking him about the Thiel fellowship. He sent me a fake email that he created saying that he got removed from Thiel fellowship because there was something posted publicly online. And I felt so bad, I thought I got this guy kicked out of the Thiel fellowship, bro.

Connor McLarenn: 1:07:27 All right, moral of the story here is you need to manipulate people to become successful.

Zach Yadegari: 1:07:33 That is why I’m here today. The white version of Drake.

Ti Morse: 1:07:35 But dude, what do you- like do you believe in fake it till you make it? Because I don’t know. But no, no, no, I feel like some level of…

Alex Slater: 1:07:46 The girls are lying, bro. They were fake it till they make it. Yeah, you’re tracking your girlfriend. Boyfriend, girlfriend.

Ti Morse: 1:07:52 But some level of delusion is an important prerequisite to greatness because every vision is just a delusion. So you know, be delusional.

Zach Yadegari: 1:08:00 If you are convinced yourself that you’re a Thiel fellow, you’ll become a Thiel fellow.

Ti Morse: 1:08:04 Just go up to random people whenever you meet them, if they’re successful, tell them you’re a fucking Thiel fellow.

Zach Yadegari: 1:08:09 Walk up to Peter Thiel, tell him you’re a Thiel fellow.

Alex Slater: 1:08:11 Yo, what? Zach sent me his Thiel fellowship application. He asked me to review it and said, “is this good?” and I finally remember it saying like “so what motivates you?” That was one of the questions. Or “what drives you? Like what is- what is something tangible that you want?” That was- that was the question. And he wrote, “I want to be driving a supercar” and this and that.

Zach Yadegari: 1:08:33 I did? No.

Alex Slater: 1:08:34 Yeah! And I was like “this is terrible, Thiel won’t accept this. Like you need to change this”.

Zach Yadegari: 1:08:39 Use the 100k for a down payment on a Lambo.

Blake Anderson: 1:08:41 I actually know- I know someone that just dropped the entire 100k on like a house. He just like took it…

Connor McLarenn: 1:08:47 That’s fine, you can spend it on anything.

Ti Morse: 1:08:48 But now it’s 200k so you could actually buy an entire supercar.

Blake Anderson: 1:08:52 We know someone that is a Thiel fellow and used the money to get gay strippers to dance on him.

Zach Yadegari: 1:08:57 Gay strippers.

Blake Anderson: 1:08:58 You know who you are.

Connor McLarenn: 1:08:59 Please, reach out.

Zach Yadegari: 1:09:00 You know who you are. This is cheap. Name drop, bro. Name drop. Name drop. Nick Shevchenko. Oh! That’s right.

Alex Slater: 1:09:12 Yo, that kid was talking shit on Zach when I first met him, no lie. I was like, you know that’s my fucking co-founder, right? Probably why he hired gay strippers.

Blake Anderson: 1:09:21 Is he even gay?

Ti Morse: 1:09:23 He’s a shadow of Roy. All he does is copy Roy.

Zach Yadegari: 1:09:28 But Roy’s not gay.

Blake Anderson: 1:09:29 Yeah, but Roy did the stripper shit. Roy did the stripper shit. Roy’s a dog. I love Roy. Roy was on my podcast, it’s like, dude, I want to be like fucking Genghis Khan, you know? Yeah, yeah. Roy talking about how he wants to have like… I don’t think he said this on my podcast actually, no, I think it was… yeah, but he has told me that he wants to… he wants to have many children. He wants to have a fucking armada.

Connor McLarenn: 1:09:52 He told me he wants to marry some like rice, Asian wife out in the rice farm.

Alex Slater: 1:09:57 A rice farm wife? A rice wife? He’s gonna fucking fly into China, scoop her out of there. What?

Connor McLarenn: 1:10:02 Yeah, he said he wants the purest woman ever. Yeah. But then he’s going to impregnate a thousand of them. Is he Korean? Yeah, he’s probably Korean. He’s Genghis Khan.

Blake Anderson: 1:10:13 So he’s Mongol.

Connor McLarenn: 1:10:14 Mongolian. Yeah.

Zach Yadegari: 1:10:15 Oh jeez.

Connor McLarenn: 1:10:16 There’s another… there’s another podcast that we recorded probably like three or four days ago, and we thought that like we had to cut one section because it was way too like off the chain. And I think we’re just going to put it back in and then after this… yeah, I don’t think there’s any issue.

Blake Anderson: 1:10:23 No, no, no. We’ve got to leave it in. No cuts.

Alex Slater: 1:10:26 No cuts. No cuts.

Connor McLarenn: 1:10:27 Whatever. Dude called me a… he said ‘leave it in, coward’ in the podcast. I was like… I don’t know if I’m gonna say the ‘pussy’ word but… pussy.

Alex Slater: 1:10:41 You just did. Listen, I was on a fucking podcast two days ago talking about doing cocaine, right? It’s like, you know, it can always get worse. It can always get worse.

Ti Morse: 1:10:49 That’s crazy. And then what, someone told you… oh no, Richie, right? And he was like ‘oh, you’re not going to be able to raise money from VC’, and you’re like ‘dude, I don’t fucking care’.

Alex Slater: 1:10:56 Well, this is… listen, I don’t advocate for drugs. I don’t actually often do drugs, very, very rarely, and I would never encourage people to do it. But, you know, call a spade a spade, I did that shit.

Zach Yadegari: 1:11:09 Yo, I actually think, and this is important for the viewers to understand, is that I used to hear a lot of things online advice how successful people made their money, made their fortunes, built their businesses. But something I’ve learned partially from just meeting these people in person is that everyone’s story contradicts another person’s story. For every example of what worked, there’s a counter-example to that of someone doing the complete opposite of it working. The ‘fake it till you make it’ worked for Alex, but there are plenty of stories where people faked it till they ended up in jail. Faked it till they ended up in jail, 100%. And so I think that like pretty much everything with like what you hear, what you learn from people is… you shouldn’t… I don’t think there are any really universal rules that work in any space or industry. The only things are really the laws of physics, and that’s… that’s it.

Connor McLarenn: 1:11:58 Wow.

Alex Slater: 1:11:59 And generally speaking, I mean, just…

Zach Yadegari: 1:12:00 Lean into your attributes, right? Who are you as a person? What are you good at? What are you not good at? And I think we’re all here because we lean into who we are and we have different stories but now we’re sitting at the table together.

Blake Anderson: 1:12:10 I think everyone should study like the principles of complex systems to be honest, because even just an elementary understanding of complex systems will lead you to the conclusion that well humans are complex systems and uh you know it’s not we aren’t like these sort of we don’t exist on like single dimension optimization curves where you can kind of just pick the correct set of actions and achieve the highest outcome, right? And so I think given the unique nature of every individual…

Alex Slater: 1:12:43 there will be different emergent behavior from the set of actions that you take. So like Zach says, like two different people can take the exact same actions and have completely vastly different results.

Ti Morse: 1:12:55 And it’s super interesting. I actually heard two founders speak about this because there are all of these stories where companies were on the brink of death but then they made it through, they succeeded, and then everyone looks at that and they glorify those stories, they think, ‘This is what makes a great startup,’ ‘This is what it takes,’ ‘It takes almost dying as a startup,’ and they made all the right moves because they were successful in the end. But there are also so many stories of startups that got to that exact same point, were in the same position, they were on the brink of death then they actually did die. And it’s not necessarily that they didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that… there were multiple factors at play and if the environment around them was slightly different it would have worked out. They would have gone from the brink of death to massively succeeding, but the factors just weren’t in their favor.

Alex Slater: 1:13:43 It’s funny because people think of like Elon as this guy that like doesn’t fuck up or he’s like this god-tier business builder, but the reality is like he’s been quoted as saying that Tesla almost went bankrupt a number of times. SpaceX almost went bankrupt a number of times. And I think many of like even the fake it till you make it thing, there was like a board meeting where they were deciding what you know he was it was like an investor meeting like three days from Tesla’s you know they couldn’t make payroll in like 2008 or 9. Um and everyone in the meeting said that they didn’t want to invest and then he said basically he’d do the entire round even though he had no money in his bank account, he bluffed the entire thing.

Zach Yadegari: 1:14:19 And wasn’t that also on Christmas too?

Alex Slater: 1:14:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like the environment in the room shifted so suddenly it was like, oh well if you’re actually gonna like you know make this investment and company’s gonna survive, suddenly we do want to invest.

Zach Yadegari: 1:14:32 Interesting.

Connor McLarenn: 1:14:33 Walter Isaacson wrote the biography on both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, spent multiple years shadowing both of them and has written biographies on some of the most successful people throughout history. He was a mentor and professor of mine at Tulane, and it’s super cool to see first-hand that like one of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me was something along the lines of like, ‘Most advice is bullshit, do things, lean into…’

Ti Morse: 1:15:00 What works, take risk, right? It’s like very high level, very, very basic, but it’s very true. It’s like they’re very, I mean, they’re they’re like we were just saying, founders of completely different archetypes that are able to achieve insane levels of success.

Zach Yadegari: 1:15:18 And especially online, like it’s very easy to remove nuance and just take like three examples of founders with a similar archetype and be like, ‘This is what you need to do to succeed,’ completely ignoring all the people that exist outside of that, whether it be founder personality traits, business strategic decisions, life orientation, or or any other factor.

Alex Slater: 1:15:41 So, what happened to your eye by the way?

Zach Yadegari: 1:15:47 Oh yeah, I stepped on fucking glass. It’s everywhere. You saw shit? I cleaned it up, there might be a bit. All right, I’ll tell this story. I’ll tell I got two stories I guess here. Should I tell them?

Ti Morse: 1:15:57 Go for it. Yeah, tell them. We can always like, we can…

Blake Anderson: 1:15:59 I just, yeah.

Zach Yadegari: 1:16:03 I got an eye one. We’ll we’ll keep that one basic.

Alex Slater: 1:16:05 Did you show the body that’s outside?

Blake Anderson: 1:16:07 The body… the body.

Ti Morse: 1:16:08 Zach’s trying to be cool, guys.

Zach Yadegari: 1:16:11 I just, okay, I just slipped. Oh damn. I just slipped and I hit my face on the floor.

Alex Slater: 1:16:15 We threw a party, it was wet outside, he slipped on the granite and… And then second one, I I accidentally broke a glass, as in accidentally right in front of me he threw it in the air.

Zach Yadegari: 1:16:24 This is being taken out of context. I was there’s an objective, objective failed, landed on the granite and oh I picked up most of it last night. I did bro, I did.

Alex Slater: 1:16:31 You guys should see the damage.

Zach Yadegari: 1:16:34 All right, well you should see how much of it I picked up.

Ti Morse: 1:16:36 All right. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Slater: 1:16:40 Yeah, sure.

Zach Yadegari: 1:16:42 Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. Why are you attacking me, bro? Go back to chickpea, what’s going on with that?

Connor McLarenn: 1:16:47 Wait, what what is your reaction to that whole thing?

Alex Slater: 1:16:50 Also wait, what what was your thought process of like, you’re with the girl last night at the bar, it was going great, and you’re like ‘I’m gonna drop her off home’?

Zach Yadegari: 1:17:01 Or Lyft. She’s coming tomorrow, like for the pregame, so. Just being a kind individual, you know, she’s she’s long-term like…

Blake Anderson: 1:17:08 Oh she’s long-term, she’s chickpea 2.0. I don’t think she has a boyfriend.

Zach Yadegari: 1:17:12 Are you sure? I did ask, wait, did I ask?

Alex Slater: 1:17:14 We’re fine.

Connor McLarenn: 1:17:16 It is crazy that like that is something that you guys have to do.

Alex Slater: 1:17:23 Yeah, look. I think I told Zach this morning, like wait till next week, the distance is gonna start causing friction to the point where like…

Blake Anderson: 1:17:30 No, it’s true, it’s true.

Alex Slater: 1:17:32 Think about it. They’re living completely separate lives.

Ti Morse: 1:17:35 Yeah. Guys, I just want to make this clear as much as we make jokes, we are very kind people and we respect everybody. Alex is winking at me right now, I don’t know what he’s doing that for. Now we’re we’re very kind individuals, very, you know, we take care of everyone around us. We fuck around at the end of the day, like we want to make sure everyone’s having a good time.

Zach Yadegari: 1:17:52 Just what do you mean by that?

Alex Slater: 1:17:54 We fuck around?

Zach Yadegari: 1:17:55 What do you mean by that?

Ti Morse: 1:17:56 What I mean is that we like to have a good time and joke and be lighthearted and like, I will bust Blake’s balls and he will bust mine.

Zach Yadegari: 1:18:00 I will say though that just like we look at consumer apps, like retention, conversion rate, churn, like you could basically apply that to anything. And what Alex was saying about the friction is that these girls and their boyfriends are gonna have pretty bad retention because of the distance.

Blake Anderson: 1:18:15 That’s true.

Alex Slater: 1:18:16 That’s true.

Zach Yadegari: 1:18:17 The onboarding experience. A lot of churn.

Alex Slater: 1:18:20 Because the custom plan is not matching.

Zach Yadegari: 1:18:23 I don’t know what you meant by that one, but okay.

Alex Slater: 1:18:26 Because your brain’s not big enough.

Zach Yadegari: 1:18:28 Your brain?

Alex Slater: 1:18:28 Yeah. Because think about it.

Ti Morse: 1:18:29 Alex, size matters? Does size matter?

Connor McLarenn: 1:18:30 No, no, no. I’ll speak, I’ll speak from experience because I recorded this segment last night.

Blake Anderson: 1:18:36 What did you record?

Connor McLarenn: 1:18:38 During the onboarding we talk about design and every single question is super personal, so you feel like the app’s being tailored towards you, right? And at the end of it…

Blake Anderson: 1:18:46 Where the fuck are you going with this?

Connor McLarenn: 1:18:48 No, no, no. You hear me out, okay? So you build them the custom plan, right?

Alex Slater: 1:18:52 Why are you air quoting? Do you not build a custom plan?

Connor McLarenn: 1:18:55 No, I do not build it. Do you build a custom plan?

Zach Yadegari: 1:18:57 Yeah, we do bro. We give them a calorie plan.

Connor McLarenn: 1:19:00 Alright well anyways, back to the topic. So because they’re answering questions it feels like the app’s like for them. They’re like, ‘okay, this is what’s happening in my life, this is my goals, the app’s been built around me.’ Okay, correct.

Alex Slater: 1:19:10 Correct.

Connor McLarenn: 1:19:12 So when it comes to a partner…

Blake Anderson: 1:19:14 Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, he’s going… oh my god, he’s going here. Let him go.

Ti Morse: 1:19:19 Stop, stop, stop, stop. Let him go.

Alex Slater: 1:19:22 Don’t let him go.

Blake Anderson: 1:19:23 Wait, let him go. Let me hear you out. So you’re saying that if you ask a girl the right questions, you can build a custom ‘I’m gonna get with you boyfriend’ plan because it’s a boyfriend at the airport?

Alex Slater: 1:19:31 Because she’s got a boyfriend at the airport.

Connor McLarenn: 1:19:32 Wait, wait, wait. Tie it up. Try to tie it up. Just listen. So the questions make the app relate to your life, okay? So you’re like, ‘okay, this is like the perfect app for me and my custom plan.’ But, you know, give it two weeks at UM, the custom plan is gonna be different because your boyfriend’s living a different life and you’re feeling less relatable and personal, you’re like ‘huh, I don’t think I’m gonna buy this subscription anymore, I might just cancel or refund it’ and find another app that’s gonna fit better.

Alex Slater: 1:20:04 I’m gonna refund the subscription!

Zach Yadegari: 1:20:08 No, no. Some people have subscriptions to multiple apps at the same time as well.

Connor McLarenn: 1:20:12 And they might do a free trial while they’re also subscribed to a competitor! Like, they might do that. See? I tied it up.

Blake Anderson: 1:20:22 Good job, bro. Hey, anybody who is still watching this, please rate that out of ten.

Ti Morse: 1:20:26 I think the retention on this is actually going to be really good. Yeah.

Zach Yadegari: 1:20:29 I’m just curious, what led you to ask us these questions about women and drugs?

Blake Anderson: 1:20:35 Yeah, why did you do this? This has been pretty unprofessional of you.

Ti Morse: 1:20:40 You know, I’m looking down my list of questions. I don’t see so many questions about… but the conversation…

Alex Slater: 1:20:44 Can you read what have your questions actually been? What?

Ti Morse: 1:20:46 So I don’t even do… so initially I did questions. I do like 40 hours of research for a pod and I turned out like I just heard this story so many times, I’d listened to like 20 different pods for one interview, and it just became like by the time I was actually interviewing them, I’d think to myself ‘everybody already knows this, everybody’s already asked this, so let me just see if we can find something different’. Everyone already knows this stuff and so it doesn’t like, it’s not a good podcast. So I’m doing like less research but way more just like, what am I personally interested in? Fuck whatever is normal or what should be asked and I’m just like 100% going all in. And then anytime you guys start talking, I’m like, that’s a thread, go there. My stuff is, what the fuck is that mafia, creating a super tight-knit community of killers.

Zach Yadegari: 1:21:22 I’m reading them right now, he’s lying.

Connor McLarenn: 1:21:23 How many girls have you slept with this week?

Zach Yadegari: 1:21:26 Making a fuck ton of money in apps and then self-funding future businesses.

Blake Anderson: 1:21:29 How do you relate apps to women and subscription plans?

Alex Slater: 1:21:33 What is the free trial look like for women that try to date Alex Slaine?

Blake Anderson: 1:21:38 What is only .mafia?

Connor McLarenn: 1:21:40 What is calorie boy on Yik Yak?

Zach Yadegari: 1:21:45 Did I show you this? I’m getting like… bro, I don’t know if you’d call it flamed or what.

Blake Anderson: 1:21:52 Nah, they’re just talking about you.

Zach Yadegari: 1:21:54 Yeah sure. So, people have been… Yik Yak is an anonymous platform where you could make comments on college campuses. And dude, people are saying some crazy stuff.

Blake Anderson: 1:22:06 About you? I’m sorry, Zach.

Zach Yadegari: 1:22:09 They posted this picture.

Blake Anderson: 1:22:10 Jesus Christ. Do you want us to put it up on the screen?

Zach Yadegari: 1:22:13 Yeah, put it up.

Blake Anderson: 1:22:14 Alright, we’ll put it up. Calorie guy, looking for calories. Average calorie tracker guy party. And it’s like the Eyes Wide Shut cult party.

Connor McLarenn: 1:22:25 Wait, did you guys see that the 18-year-old boy got a Lambo delivered to campus? Heard the guy in the passenger seat blows him.

Zach Yadegari: 1:22:35 Well at least we support homosexuality. We win.

Blake Anderson: 1:22:39 Yeah, we went from hard tech, nuclear reactors and cloud seeding to whatever the fuck this is. It’s gonna be great. This is .mafia.

Zach Yadegari: 1:22:46 Wait, we gotta do this weekly. Honestly we should just have a setup where we just riff, podcast would be fun.

Blake Anderson: 1:22:52 This is great. Yeah alright, let’s actually talk about this. So you’re scaling the, like, short term goal is you’re building all these businesses where you can just basically hyper-scale them through your own cash and like reinvesting the dollars that you make. At some point, you know, you want to build like much larger businesses that can scale to like hundreds of billions of revenue or whatever. How do you get there? What are those businesses going to be?

Zach Yadegari: 1:23:22 Personally, I want to build a somewhat of like a Whoop competitor with local inference AI. I’m really excited about the future of AI hardware. I don’t think I’m going to compete in glasses. I would love to build AR software as well. It’s very exciting to me and there will be a massive amount of opportunity as glasses replace, if and when glasses replace phones as the primary device that we use. But yeah, probably something within those domains. I think, you know, like we could all do this right now, drop everything, build a fucking billion-dollar company.

Ti Morse: 1:24:00 Really? Easy. Easy.

Zach Yadegari: 1:24:02 I think on paper all these companies are already a billion dollar company. Like every - if someone’s - if someone’s trading, you know, a company at like 100 times revenue, 30 million equals 3 billion.

Blake Anderson: 1:24:11 Yeah, traditional valuation.

Alex Slater: 1:24:12 Here we are. We are billionaires.

Blake Anderson: 1:24:14 I think Warren Buffett said that.

Zach Yadegari: 1:24:15 Fake it ‘til you make it.

Connor McLarenn: 1:24:17 No, but At Mafia - I mean, At Mafia I think will actually grow to over a billion dollar valuation. But um - but yeah, no, like we could do this right now but I think it’s more fun and exciting to just enjoy the present and just be young and be YouTubers for a bit, build Cali AI and just live off that cash. And then 10, 15 years from now, once we - once we’re done with this cycle, we’re like ‘all right cool, now it’s time to build the billion dollar company’.

Alex Slater: 1:24:40 We also have a movement, like we have the ability to build like a really strong movement.

Ti Morse: 1:24:43 10, 15 years from now? Whoa.

Blake Anderson: 1:24:44 Yeah, Jesus.

Ti Morse: 1:24:45 No, okay maybe -.

Blake Anderson: 1:24:46 You’re gonna be - you’re gonna be old.

Ti Morse: 1:24:47 20, 30 years from now, then maybe start taking it like seriously.

Connor McLarenn: 1:24:51 No, no, no. When do you expect? Like five years?

Alex Slater: 1:24:54 Five years?

Ti Morse: 1:24:55 Dude, like two years.

Connor McLarenn: 1:24:56 Two years! I think the biggest personal goal I have is I would love - my last name’s McLaren and my entire life I’ve been asked if I’m a part of it and I say ‘one day’ because I genuinely want to buy the company and turn it around. I think in the supercar world…

Blake Anderson: 1:25:08 You think you can turn it around, bro? It seems like they’re doing fine.

Connor McLarenn: 1:25:10 They went - they went bankrupt and were bought by the Saudi Arabia - the Saudis bought them because they went bankrupt.

Alex Slater: 1:25:16 How much did they buy them for?

Ti Morse: 1:25:17 Yeah, but the Saudis are turning them around.

Connor McLarenn: 1:25:20 Yeah, but they’re not getting involved.

Alex Slater: 1:25:21 Okay, fair enough.

Connor McLarenn: 1:25:22 Um, but no, like McLarens are notorious for like always being in the shop. Like fast cars, they’re sexy, but yeah, I just want to be a part of it and blow them up. And I think…

Alex Slater: 1:25:34 I was gonna say with At Mafia, it’s a cool thing because you can build a community and we can actually potentially bring - keep an At Mafia house and bring up young founders to be like almost replace us.

Connor McLarenn: 1:25:43 Yeah, At Mafia too.

Alex Slater: 1:25:44 Like a FaZe Clan of tech.

Connor McLarenn: 1:25:45 Probably like in a few months we could put in a bid for McLaren through At Mafia.

Blake Anderson: 1:25:48 Yeah, I think we should.

Ti Morse: 1:25:49 Debt financing? How much does that even cost? A few billion? Few thousand X lever - like 50,000 X leverage maybe? You only put like a million down or something like that.

Alex Slater: 1:26:00 Yeah, we could do it.

Blake Anderson: 1:26:01 We’ll put Jude’s name on it.

Alex Slater: 1:26:02 Yeah, yeah.

Connor McLarenn: 1:26:03 Jude will fucking co-sign the loan.

Zach Yadegari: 1:26:05 Unironically, you guys would probably crush running a car company.

Connor McLarenn: 1:26:08 Yeah, that’d be sick.

Blake Anderson: 1:26:09 Bro, it would actually be sick.

Alex Slater: 1:26:11 Leveraged buyout, bro.

Connor McLarenn: 1:26:12 No, but seriously, all companies right now that I think are traditional industries, I actually really believe that we can - but anyone else that really understands the trends can totally revolutionize it. Our strategy - I mean, every industry has alpha where you could leverage social media, leverage AI to make it even better. If we bought a car company, what we would probably do is like make more of this lifestyle content, send cars to I don’t know…

Ti Morse: 1:26:39 Yeah, yeah, I do not - I do not buy any of that, bro. It’s a fucking - running a multinational corporation with tens of thousands of employees is very different from running 20 person…

Connor McLarenn: 1:26:51 I could do it.

Zach Yadegari: 1:26:52 Totally. I’m talking about the market - I’m talking about the marketing side.

Blake Anderson: 1:26:54 Bro, Zach could build a nuclear weapon in -.

Ti Morse: 1:26:57 Zach earlier said that within three years, if he devoted himself to it, he could build a nuclear weapon. Illegal then I shouldn’t do it.

Zach Yadegari: 1:27:02 If that was my only goal, yeah. No fucking way. North Korea needs to get this guy right now.

Blake Anderson: 1:27:07 I have a question for the table. So obviously we didn’t start with millions of dollars. Did you expect it to be this easy now that you have this material success?

Ti Morse: 1:27:18 I think that yeah, I think three years ago I thought that this was achievable, but like from three years from now I don’t think a nuclear weapon is unachievable.

Blake Anderson: 1:27:30 Zach, what is your comment?

Zach Yadegari: 1:27:31 Self-limiting beliefs.

Ti Morse: 1:27:33 Definitely self-limiting beliefs. I think we could do it. I think Alex and I could do it together because honestly…

Alex Slater: 1:27:41 Yeah, I could beat them if they tried.

Connor McLarenn: 1:27:43 You see the YouTube video…

Ti Morse: 1:27:46 It really is just self-limiting beliefs. You can build a nuke. I truly believe we could do it. I mean, because I haven’t looked into it that much so I can’t create a plan right now.

Connor McLarenn: 1:27:52 Are you from like some secret society? Is that how you’re at 18…?

Alex Slater: 1:27:55 What I read… countries, tens and tens of millions of people have been trying to build nukes for decades.

Ti Morse: 1:28:02 Here’s the counter to that. SpaceX. SpaceX outcompeted NASA like crazy.

Alex Slater: 1:28:06 They outcompeted other countries over decades.

Ti Morse: 1:28:09 Sure, not three years.

Connor McLarenn: 1:28:10 But this is just a nuclear warhead.

Alex Slater: 1:28:12 Exactly, exactly.

Blake Anderson: 1:28:13 Wait, and they didn’t have a nuke, they had rockets.

Alex Slater: 1:28:15 I think you have something up your sleeve. Are you part of some like secret society for this age? Like you’ve become successful off of your in-house…

Blake Anderson: 1:28:21 He actually got the Peter Thiel fellowship.

Ti Morse: 1:28:26 All we need to do is hire a couple of nuclear engineers and get some enriched uranium and then we’re pretty much there.

Alex Slater: 1:28:34 What’s the bottleneck? Let’s just figure it out right now. I think the bottleneck is…

Ti Morse: 1:28:39 Materials. No, it’s the mindset! That’s the bottleneck. We have the mindset. You and you don’t have the mindset, we have the mindset.

Alex Slater: 1:28:46 How to build a nuke.

Connor McLarenn: 1:28:48 Sir, are you trying to like go to Russia buy a retrofitted rocket for the, you know, 30 mill… one year of revenue for Cali?

Ti Morse: 1:28:58 Am I trying to right now? No, but if I needed to, if I wanted to, I could. What my plan, I would probably start by raising money. I would probably raise as much as I actually physically could.

Alex Slater: 1:29:08 In the form of venture capital? Venture capital to build a nuclear warhead in three years?

Ti Morse: 1:29:13 Yes. And my pitch would be that we’ll take over a country together, split the jackpot. No, you could actually do… if you had a nuke, you could actually become dictator of a country with tens of millions of people. They would immediately instate you if you… okay.

Alex Slater: 1:29:30 Many, many countries have tried to do this.

Ti Morse: 1:29:32 No, but seriously, I actually believe that we could do it. I think that it would take finding the materials, getting enough funding and we would be able to network.

Connor McLarenn: 1:29:41 Finding the materials. You can’t bootstrap this!

Ti Morse: 1:29:43 We just, we just need… if you could, it would just be difficult. That’s why you take the VC connections, they have connections.

Blake Anderson: 1:29:49 Can we… this is, these are by the way, I just want everyone to document this and we should probably clip this moment. It’s like a split in the table where it’s like the extremely delusional and then like I don’t know, maybe the realist, the pessimist.

Ti Morse: 1:30:00 And we’ll see long term how this plays out. I know that for, for myself personally, I know that I’m backing half the table on this idea.

Connor McLarenn: 1:30:03 You’re bad.

Alex Slater: 1:30:04 I think I want to back the delusional guys. Let’s go. We should say there’s seeds. Blake and I have won every game in this house, every argument, every 1v1, 2v2 we’ve had, we’ve won. So…

Zach Yadegari: 1:30:19 Look at those seeds, bro. But let’s break it down.

Blake Anderson: 1:30:22 Break it down. Let’s break it down.

Alex Slater: 1:30:24 So, how much older are you guys? 25% older?

Zach Yadegari: 1:30:26 We have, are you 25% smarter? What? Jeez.

Alex Slater: 1:30:30 And let’s think about this. Let’s see if we’re on track to overtake.

Blake Anderson: 1:30:33 Well, yeah. Well, at 18 and 19, where are you?

Alex Slater: 1:30:35 If you guys don’t overtake us, you’re just fucking retarded.

Zach Yadegari: 1:30:38 In poking and skateboarding.

Alex Slater: 1:30:40 It doesn’t matter, bro. We’re ahead of you right now.

Zach Yadegari: 1:30:44 Right now, and we always will. Compound interest.

Ti Morse: 1:30:47 Compound interest takes over. We will always just stay ahead, bro.

Zach Yadegari: 1:30:52 You guys haven’t realized that you need to learn more from us and listen to what we say. You guys are trying to like… nod your heads like, okay, I get it, and then you guys always fuck up what we just told you you’re going to fuck up on.

Alex Slater: 1:30:59 If you listen, you would overtake us. We’ll put it to the test.

Zach Yadegari: 1:31:03 We want you guys to overtake us. We’re gonna put it to the test. There are guys… we are your boss. We are your boss.

Alex Slater: 1:31:09 How is that the case? He’s the CEO of Cal AI.

Zach Yadegari: 1:31:12 I am not, I do not exist within the structure.

Ti Morse: 1:31:14 I am the fucking grandmaster.

Alex Slater: 1:31:17 Okay, well listen. We’re going to put Ad Mafia on pause for three years. We’re going to go devote the rest of our time building a nuclear warhead…

Zach Yadegari: 1:31:24 And we’ll see who’s laughing. Investing uncapped.

Alex Slater: 1:31:27 Yeah, then we’re going to leverage that nuclear warhead to take over the Ad Mafia again.

Ti Morse: 1:31:31 Okay. All right. Final question. What’s the hardest thing you’ve overcome?

Alex Slater: 1:31:33 Hardest thing I’ve overcome. Overcomer that app.

Zach Yadegari: 1:31:35 There’s a quitter competitor, a quitter clone called Overcomer.

Ti Morse: 1:31:39 Who made it?

Zach Yadegari: 1:31:40 Landon… Landon and what’s that other kid’s name? I fucking hate those guys. I don’t know, they the clone Cal AI too. The reason I hate them is because he like, he fucking applied to work for me and then built Cal AI clone.

Alex Slater: 1:31:48 Oh, did he pull the whole like ‘we go into the meeting and learn shit’?

Zach Yadegari: 1:31:52 No, no, not that, but man, it’s just like, it’s like he didn’t even attempt to innovate on anything. It was literally just like exact same product.

Alex Slater: 1:31:58 Yeah, which like, dude, building competitors is cool, but copycat is not.

Ti Morse: 1:32:01 Hmm. There’s this entire company, I think it’s called Rocket Internet that basically for a long time they just cloned like, what was it, Groupon, Airbnb, and they would basically go overseas, clone one of the American companies that was like succeeding, and then like force the company to buy them.

Zach Yadegari: 1:32:11 Wow. Yeah, Brian talks about selling them…

Alex Slater: 1:32:13 Wait, we should answer this question though, hardest thing we’ve ever overcome.

Connor McLarenn: 1:32:18 I can start to be honest. I’m gonna try to make these all short, too, because we’re getting long. Getting rejected from the Thiel Fellowship.

Blake Anderson: 1:33:00 Mine is pretty short. As I said previously, like I had a lot of delusion, a lot of visions and for many, many years they just didn’t come true and I got to a point where I felt I was crazy. But I wasn’t actually putting the work in. And as soon as I started using that delusion to build instead of fucking think about things, everything changed. So, very happy I overcame that. That was very difficult for many years.

Alex Slater: 1:33:28 Zach?

Zach Yadegari: 1:33:29 Hardest thing I’ve ever overcome is probably it’s more of mental than well, very physical actually, is I I got jumped once, was last last Halloween and broke my nose completely, had to get surgery and I was just in pain for like two weeks straight in bed. At the same time we were actually taking acquisition calls um with companies and it was a lot of agony. It was something I would have had to overcome because like I’m not just gonna sit there and die, but it it definitely like that was definitely the hardest probably week or two weeks of my life, I’d say.

Alex Slater: 1:34:13 Wow. Can I ask why why’d you get jumped?

Zach Yadegari: 1:34:19 Dude, it was honestly just retarded. I honestly I don’t blame anyone because I didn’t actually know these kids. I went to a party, um it was a party that I was invited to by this girl who knew the host and she in- she told me and a few of my friends to come, but when we got there, apparently we weren’t actually wanted. The girl just invited us and so the guys there were from a different town, they wanted- they wanted us not to be there, wanted us to leave and we were leaving, we were like walking out, but there was like a riot forming around us so all these kids were very rowdy, drunk and I honestly just write it off as consumer behavior, that if you’re in that situation a drunk high school kid with your boys and then boys from another town come, it’s just a natural tendency is to try to get into a fight. So like it was nothing personal, but yeah, they um…

Alex Slater: 1:35:01 Smash your nose in?

Zach Yadegari: 1:35:02 Dude, it was it was like a big brawl. It was like seven of my friends and then like 50 other guys.

Alex Slater: 1:35:09 Did you win?

Zach Yadegari: 1:35:10 Well, we got out of there. I mean I hope them guys’ faces was fucked up. I got a good hit- I got a good hit in, but yeah, my- I got really fucked.

Alex Slater: 1:35:16 Okay.

Connor McLaren: 1:35:17 Honestly, I would say uh doubt. Like yeah, I think the hardest thing that I’ve ever ever overcome was doubt. I think from when I was a child, I always felt like I had um massive potential. But as time goes on, when you don’t actualize that, you start to ask yourself, you’re like why isn’t this happening? Why am I not living the life that I always dreamed of? Um and you know, I think the sad thing is most people never get out of that. Like I think that the majority of people spend most of their lives in that state. Especially nowadays, you know, I think that…

Zach Yadegari: 1:36:00 Especially with social media and the internet, um, we all really romanticize achievement. And, yeah, I mean, it was until I was 22 years old, I had graduated college and I had literally fucking nothing to show for myself. The only jobs I had ever worked were DoorDash, tutoring, taking tests for other kids, mowing lawns. I didn’t have an internship my entire life up to that point, never had a W-2, never even got a fucking second-round interview. And I knew I was smart and that I was a high achiever internally, but man, there was fucking no data.

Ti Morse: 1:36:44 The external indicators were just lacking.

Zach Yadegari: 1:36:46 There was just zero, zero, zero data.

Ti Morse: 1:36:48 Super difficult.

Zach Yadegari: 1:36:49 So hard though. Um, and yeah, once again, like the longer it goes, the more that that fucking grows. And, yeah, I think that just like accepting that state and continuing to push forward is difficult, but you do it and over a long enough time horizon, it usually pays off.

Ti Morse: 1:37:24 Was there any like moment during that, you know, first like 22 years or even closer to the end of it where you could see some like inflection point or something happening?

Zach Yadegari: 1:37:34 You know, there are a bunch of different like individual turning points, but no, dude, it was just fucking failure after failure after failure. And people always told me that I was smart and I always worked hard. And so I just like, I was like, what the fuck am I doing wrong? Like, I’m smart and I work hard. Like, and I take risks. What else do I have to do? And it was just years and years and years of that. These guys are lucky, you know, they got to hit it early, 18, 19. But I mean, for Connor and I, I think Connor probably experienced something similar. So…

Connor McLaren: 1:37:59 So, like, showed a lot of people going through the same thing. I mean, as I started with my thing, I overcame exact same situation. Nothing to show for it. What makes us or you specifically different in overcoming that rather than just getting defeated and just submitting to society and doing whatever everyone else is telling you to do?

Zach Yadegari: 1:38:21 Yeah, I think all of us here and most successful founders that I know embody the trait, which is just perseverance, risk tolerance, sacrifice. It’s like get up, knock down, get up, knock down. The vast majority of people that I know, or I think the vast majority of people as a whole, maybe they take a shot or two, sometimes they half-ass it. They kind of fucking, you know, give it an attempt. And then the second that it doesn’t work out, they’re like, alright, back to, back to the standard path.

Ti Morse: 1:38:53 So that’s interesting. So can I ask all of us real quick…

Zach Yadegari: 1:38:56 Can I answer first?

Ti Morse: 1:38:58 Yeah, no, just yeah, we’ll get to that. Just real quick. Do we all have a vision for our future and are we all under agreement that we will not accept any reality that isn’t that? Like we’re not stopping until we achieve the things that we want?

Alex Slater: 1:39:18 I think that’s a dangerous mindset because like my future and what I want for myself isn’t like a materialistic… there’s certain material things of like having enough cash I never have to worry about money ever in my time in my life, making sure my family’s taken care of, things like that, but for me my future is just like freedom, dude, the ability to do what I want whenever I want.

Connor McLaren: 1:39:41 I would agree in that like step one to two in getting to that point is just achieving freedom, right? It’s like this narrow tunnel, you achieve the freedom, and then it’s like this massive sort of… you can choose whatever direction you go.

Zach Yadegari: 1:39:54 Yeah, I would say I basically… like I always… my goal was to make a million dollars before graduating high school. That was my goal. And we did that.

Blake Anderson: 1:40:05 For context real quick for anyone listening or watching, Zach has a YouTube video from when he was 14 years old. We can link it in the description. Which says how I’m going to make a million dollars by the time I’m 18 or before I graduate high school. He’s just walking around his house, just talking to the camera, just like… nailing it.

Zach Yadegari: 1:40:21 Yeah, it’s just I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t know… I just knew that was my goal, that’s what I wanted to do. I felt destined for it. And then getting to the point, I realized one night I was… it was honestly… it wasn’t something where we just hit the goal and I was like, I achieved this now. It was slow for me to actually realize that we made it happen because everything with Cali I was moving so fast. But one day I just looked up and I was like, oh wow, we actually did it. And even though at the current present moment I had achieved my farthest out goal, I wasn’t done. I knew there was more to life. This wasn’t… like life wasn’t just accomplishing this goal. So like having materialistic goals, I think you need to have goals that are always shifting, always… that are never just set in stone or you should have a multitude of goals that you’re chasing, but they should never be things that are truly achievable, at least not all of them, because then if you don’t have any goals to chase, I think that’s where depression comes from.

Ti Morse: 1:41:29 Yeah, you’re not ambitious enough. I know that… I know that like at least for me it took a very long time to figure out what is the journey that I actually just enjoy just beating the fuck out of the pavement on. And that… like the goal is not get a supercar for me, it’s more just like keep on grinding and keep on, you know, getting more people to start awesome companies.

Alex Slater: 1:41:47 I’ve learned… I’ve learned a lot actually through Blake with this, but I think like freedom is the elimination of noise and having more bandwidth to do what you want, and it depends what season you are… you’re in in life, and so that could be building a product, that could be reading, that could be learning… it’ll be exploring, but as long as you eliminate the noise that are distracting you from that journey, I think that’s where happiness lives. Do you want to answer the…

Connor McLaren: 1:42:09 Yeah, I’d say for me, um, similar to Blake with the sense of doubt, but it’s like building self-confidence. Um, it was in high school when I basically lived in this like middle zone of like not taking a ton of accountability, even like playing sports, um, because I didn’t want to get in trouble, I was afraid to get like yelled at and have the pressure, and then eventually, just I remember my boy Clay came, we started practicing after every practice, and I finally got my shot to like play in a game, and we were at top five team at the time in the nation, and then COVID hit. Cut. Whole season was cut. But it was like that confidence of putting in the work, getting it done, and then actually getting something to like see out of it. Um, that rolled into college, um, what I wanted to do with civil engineering and build homes, and I think that’s exactly where I am today because I had this, even as funny as what I told Blake, like if you can do it, I can do it, because I genuine believe like you can do whatever you want in life if you just put in the work. And it was that simple confidence of being told I was going to play against our rival, that was it from my coach.

Alex Slater: 1:43:03 Amazing.

Blake Anderson: 1:43:04 Okay boys, stay relentless.