Confronting Our Worst Fears | Yes Theory

what's up everybody my name is mark and deal and i am one of the creators of yes theory and today we are on the 39th ever episode of the iced coffee hour and so far the show has made over 36 thousand dollars so that was amazing that was thank you guys for having me thank you this is a trip like there are very few people that i meet that like i can't believe you're here that you exist because i've been watching yes theory pre-a million like i remember when you guys did your million subscriber video like this big celebration and i was so pumped for you back then like before i was even making youtube videos so it's crazy to go from that and like be sitting here with you man why don't you talk about this stuff it's crazy likewise we've been a fan of your stuff for you know for uh for a long time now and after weeks now before no well once again this disclaimer i am like it's uh there was a joke made before i came because i was telling matt that i was coming on your show and it's uh for like the guy who cares the least about finance and about money on the team to be the one actually sitting here with you is quite it's quite the joke for me we gotta talk about that yeah you were warning me you were like yeah now it's time like i'm gonna get my finances yeah we're gonna do this 2021 is the return around i mean it is it is truly one of my biggest discomforts and i think it's uh today i was analyzing whether it's you know if it's just a matter of not liking money or not being finance oriented because i feel i have the luxury of being in a team where it's very much up matt's alley he likes managing our money making investments and like doing all that so i felt i feel like i can just kind of not worry about it and focus on the parts that i'm good at but but this year i just realized that i feel behind on my own financial literacy and understanding how things work like every day just talking to you know cliff tells me more about ways to optimize my financial situation being a startup founder and being someone who lives in america you know an immigrant so there is definitely a lot that are missing and i i'm starting to believe that it's no longer just the excuse of being like oh i don't care about finance i'm actually probably scared of finances that's why i haven't yeah pursued any kind of like seeking awareness seeking knowledge in it this is not such a scary thing yes you know a little bit it's not such a scary thing this is an intervention that's what this is that's what this really is we very much knew you have your parents in the back oh man we're gonna have to sit down and talk about this let's just go all the way back uh well first of all we should say i i owe this all to jack that's true jack ran into you in venice he did i was playing i was mid uh uh paddle tennis uh game on the beach and and jack walked by i was like mitt serving and then and then he said something he's like oh like ground bro it was not the most comfortable experience for me right like i saw someone i recognized from like youtube and i was like should i say hello should i say something and i called graham before i went up to you and i was like graham like i see a marvel that was early wow you're up i was like i was like should i say something to him like what's going on he's like he's like yeah man you gotta ask him he's trying to like hype him up he's trying to hide me up and i'm thinking to myself like like oh their whole channel is about like seeking discomfort like i feel like i should i should just go for it and so i decided i was like all right i'm gonna ask him i know what to do i was like totally like called out graham's name i was like graham you know personal finance videos i think he talks to thomas or something yeah yes theory and thomas had told me so that's that's when i connected yeah so then and then you're like oh yeah tell them to dm me and then i guess we're here now so interestingly enough yeah we just ran into each other serendipity yeah we are yeah so so explain this yes theory from the very be i know you've said this a bajillion times now but for anybody who doesn't know you or hasn't heard the backstory how did you get started doing this and by the way your channel is inspired i think millions of people that seek discomfort i like the documentaries that you've made that thank you iceman thing it's so cool like anyway thank you so much so i'll take you back to 2015 uh when i was a sophomore in at university in canada um i well i guess maybe let's take it 10 years back let's take it to 2010. and that i was 15 at the time uh made the decision that i was going to pursue my education abroad because i got an opportunity a scholarship to go to a boarding school in south africa and the purpose of the school was to bring together the next generation of african leaders people who wanted to solve different problems uh in on the continent and my personal interest was more in tech social media and so that was 2010 i left egypt when i was 15 in 2011 a few months in the egyptian revolution happens the arab spring which is actually right now uh it's january 25th to february 11th was was when it took place so we're like we're in the anniversary the 10th anniversary of that happening so 10 years ago this took place and that was a transformational moment for me where i realized that i want to work and create in this intersection of technology and storytelling because i saw how much it impacted the narrative in egypt and how young people were able to use you know the tools that are available today facebook and twitter back at the time uh to actually mobilize people and to bring people out on the street and i and i just the power of the tools that we have in the power of the internet like manifested in the most powerful way i'd ever experienced and that was really impactful for me so i decided that after high school i want to take a gap year because i wanted to see if maybe there's a path where i don't go to university and go back to egypt right away start working in tech build something and contribute my part into like the revolution this new wave of for the country but you know very quickly in 2013 which is when i did my gap year after graduating high school i this is that was the time egypt kind of crashed politically and uh i decided to do a gap here and then after the gap here i decided to go to university in canada the gap here was in san francisco lived there for a year and then did two years in canada at university where i studied cyber politics cyber politics and cyber sociology and i was the my school didn't have majors they had questions and my question at school was who controls cyberspace which actually is very relevant to what's happening today of course which i i'm very excited to talk to you about yeah um but back to back to the yes exactly exactly back to the s3 narrative uh i'm giving you the background because it brings me to montreal in the summer of 2015 sophomore in university had this idea for a tech startup that i was building uh went to montreal to raise venture capital uh 19 years old just not knowing what the hell i'm doing and mid that journey i end up sneaking into a party at a rooftop and where like the students live in montreal which is uh they have mcgill and concordia they're big to universities and i just showed up on this rooftop started talking to people and the more i talk to people the more people pointed at thomas being like you should talk to this guy you guys sound very similar and um 20 minutes later into being at the party i ran into thomas we talked there's this instant like chemistry there was this click that was just right there and we started it just felt like we've known each other for a very long time and the following day we met for coffee just started talking more he was tipsy at the time so you know it was just like in the but the following day was actually when we started talking about our aspirations what we wanted to build he was graduating university i was still in my second year so um there was a lot of synergies there and he told me that he had been making comedy skits on youtube but he it wasn't really his calling but he felt like his calling is still in creation on youtube but he really wanted to figure out what what the thing was and he told me about his idea to do uh 30 things he'd never done before in 30 days and tell a story about it every single day project 30 and at the time he had just met this other guy matt who also went to the same university they worked on a marketing uh project together and he ended up bringing me uh in to meet matt and that was just like that was it i met matt and it felt like the three of us were just like unstoppable when we were in the same room just right off the right off the bat the first conversation the level of like vision and dreaming and and this desire to truly live a different take a different path than what the conventional one that was set for us and the one that society just tells us to go down finish university go work for the big company you know have a secure job yada yada um and at that point we just had this moment where for the next month we're gonna quit everything we're doing and we're gonna fully commit to this and so we did and after a month we looked at each other we saw that this was the deepest connection the three of us have ever developed and that was like the closest each of us have ever gone to anyone and we start to realize that there is such an immense power to discomfort and to the idea of consistently getting out of your comfort zone together and being able to do that in the context of community and actually the fact that by doing that you're able to create community and have the strongest bond that you can possibly have amongst you which is again this memory or accomplishment of doing something that you did not think that was possible and for us at that moment is just like we're all in our early 20s not knowing you know what life is holding for us but at that moment our like our moment was we're gonna be together for this month we're gonna put everything aside and we're gonna fully focus on that so as i said like after the month we just uh it didn't take a lot of thinking for us to decide that we need to double down further on this into this and and really just see how we can take it to the next level so from that point onwards we all of us put everything we were doing on the side i didn't go back to school put my startup on hold same with thomas same with matt and within four months we just fully committed all our resources all our time and uh in november of 2015 so we started summer of 2015 in november we got this very obscure email uh being hey do you very informal hey do you want to move to venice beach make videos together have a house together you're like what what is that i thought it was someone trolling us yeah got into it checked and it was a real company it was snapchat out here in venice beach california being like hey guys do you want to be the face of this new channel that we're doing and at the time we have 8 000 subscribers so there's it's not like this shouldn't be an opportunity that the channel 8 000 subscribers gets but uh their thinking was the ethos of what we were doing and the meaning behind the why was so strong that they just trusted that you know we will adapt and and by having by by them giving us the exposure that snapchat would give us at the time uh they kind of like believed in yes theory and believed that that could really take things to the next level and it did as we you know as we start posting on on snapchat in our first year after we moved to la uh that had like pretty good conversion to youtube and gave us a good launch pad for for the channel and then after a year of doing that with snapchat we just decided to fully take the risk leave the money and the security that they provided and and just do yesterday full time let me ask you about the snapchat so when they this the snapchat when they reached out to you how were they funding you were you trying to split the channel did they say we're going to give you a house in venice and just we retain ownership of something or how how did this come up see these are the kind of questions that people don't really people want to ask the actual nitty gritty is over yeah i don't know and then i have a story don't forget me to tell you the story okay snapchat yeah but first do you know what keeps me up at night graham your lack of tinder matches nope it's not that your inability to get a girlfriend jeez dude can you just please no it's it's not that either it's that tons of different businesses and entities actually have my private credit card information i mean every single time we make any transaction we are literally giving away our credit card number luckily privacy.com solves this problem so that i will never have to deal with this again let me break this down for you 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thank you so much privacy for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast so the way it worked is um they actually invested in yes theory so there was an a a stake into they they just thought that the synergy that was gonna be created by them giving us the opportunity to be on snapchat and the the quality of content that we were gonna make for them they thought it made sense that they also allow us to post this stuff on our youtube channel and reap the benefits because it would only be on on snapchat for 48 hours 24 to 48 hours and that's it it would never see the light of day again so you know we were able and again this whole deal came genuinely because they believed in yes theory before they thought like oh this thing will make us money they just like so we were aligned throughout that um you know we were able to create synergies and like making it a win-win for both of us for us to be here and not not just lose on the value of creating all this content for them but also be able to repurpose it in person on our youtube but for them to get and also for them to get a stake in yes theory at the time which you know it was it was just an idea it was nothing but we end up yeah go on but that story ends up that story ends in 2019 when we buy back our shares wow okay so now can we go a little bit further and like how much do they invest because this is something i've wanted to do for quite some time before even making youtube videos i wanted to invest in a youtube channel i wanted to pick a creator at like you know 30 40 50 000 subscribe and be like you know what i'm going to pay for you to be able to quit your job focus on this full-time but i want like 50 ownership it's got to be like a 50 no no so it was it was 20 ownership okay and it was about i have no idea if i'm allowed to say any of this but i'm going to say it anyways it was a 50 000 in cash and throughout the year between four hundred to five hundred thousand dollars in production value wow so this is wait how many subs did you have at this time we had like 10 000 subs yeah okay so back then for you i mean looking back now i'm sure it's a drop in the bucket but back then they were taking a big gamble yeah wow yeah so back then that was a generous offer anybody would jump at that and they funded all of your adventures and was like they were like the springboard to like all the success yeah so do you think there's a chance you wouldn't be here today if it were not for that offer no no i think the biggest the reason i say no is the immigration piece that because that's the one piece that no matter how hard we worked or how much how many hours we committed that's the part that we were not gonna get past but actually not according to cliff um we uh we ended up uh snatching end up facilitating the process of getting bringing in you know two out of the three of us were immigrants and for me you know thomas is french swedish so right things a little easier but for me as an egyptian moving here having dropped out of college so it's not like there's a case for the government to be like this guys he has a youtube channel yeah yeah so they were definitely instrumental to just you know really i think the other thing that that they did for us is there was no financial restriction on our creativity right off the bat any idea that we that we that we dreamed we were able to make happen uh and that really like made a lot of made a big difference at the beginning um and and i feel like that's one of the main reasons that yesterday has been able to build such good momentum with our ideas and how advanced like where we think about and flesh out each concept before we create the story uh i think it definitely came from just having to do that wow at such a deep level because we were working with budget working with traveling abroad and being not being here in america filming for most of the part when we were yeah back then so everyone can understand what exactly like happened was that like yes or uh that snapchat gave you funding so you could post on snapchat stories when they were trying to like push their stories correct so again i want to i want to correct because it was a production wing that was with snapchat it was like we were in dealing with snap it was vertical networks which was a joint venture between snapchat and uh elizabeth murdock big media investor and they were operating out of venice and they were building one of they built one of the first studios for snapchat to be able to make original content so that's what the deal was with and uh uh again one of it wasn't ju like the mentorship element and and the advising element it was so big i mean we're just a bunch of dudes just finishing college from canada coming to la this big town where you know so many opportunities so many people want to talk to us so many agencies want to sign us we just uh it made a big difference at the beginning to just have someone looking out for us wow and so yeah we there's definitely there's a massive like divine element to our story that i truly believe in like i feel like at so many points we're protected in ways that were so unusual uh even in having like you know our mentor through this investment come through and and and be with us along the journey throughout to give us the advice from how to handle the whole thing wow here's my snapchat story this is back when i was uh i must have been 21 or 22 so this was back in like 2010 2011 2012 like between 2010 2013 uh i was doing a lot of leasing back then so people would come to me as like graham i want to they would find me from craigslist and they would say i want to rent a house can you show me houses in this price point and i probably get like 10 or 15 emails a day from different people wanting to see leases and i got an email from a group of like three or four roommates saying that like hey we want a house in venice or beverly hills we're not quite sure yet uh we're all living together but can you just show us all of these houses and and usually i think like roommates don't want to deal with roommates because usually what ends up having you waste a whole bunch of time one of them doesn't like it and then they all like we're like well this guy doesn't so we're all going to start looking over here and then what ends up happening like a month later they're like oh we just each got our separate spot so roommates rarely ever work out so i asked another agent to just show them around and uh and i did that and i just honestly i didn't follow up but they would email me and say like hey we saw this place come up and venice can you show it to us hey we saw this place and i just gave him to another agent didn't think anything of it and then i run into that agent like a few weeks later and he's like graham those are really great clients you sent me they're so cool and i'm like what do you mean they're they're roommates he's like or i didn't say that but because i didn't but i'm like oh yeah they are and it's like yeah i know i i didn't realize that they were they're the starting snapchat or they or they're they're setting up their business of snapchat and venice and it turned out then i looked back i was like wait a second so i looked back at them and it turned out it was like four guys like one of the original i don't know i don't think it was evan but i think it was this other guy in like three others that they were living together in venice looking to rent a house because they had set up that spot on like ocean avenue like right right yeah exactly but it was that when they were first starting up now all of them are billionaires and then i saw like a few years later they're all buying these like five and six million dollar spots in venice from that but i just didn't take it seriously in the beginning so that was my snapchat story awesome so yeah you know what next time you think it's it's roommates maybe it's co-founders yeah that's a new yeah it's a big upside here you never know but uh that's incredible that snapchat invested in you so early on yeah and then how did you start just growing the channel from there like what are some of the ideas that you used in the beginning be like this is going to go viral did you ever try to do that or was it all just organic also were they giving you the advice on what you guys should do or was it all just you guys and then you just asked for funding for each event and then they're like yeah sure basically we would give them all ideas of the things that we wanted and then they were like we like that let's do that so they just picked from our roster of ideas uh what they thought would fit the platform fit the demographic fit the people that they want to talk to um so yeah uh so that was if they advised us or not and your question was um how did you start how do you start growing the channel i think the number one thing was to fully commit full time to not you know we were creating for snapchat that was taking a lot of time and obviously you know still making taking these cuts and doing it for youtube but still mentally our main focus was with our contract with our the commitment that is paying for the paying the bills so i feel like yeah the biggest shift happened when we decided that this is the only thing we're go we're doing and this is the year that we're gonna hit a million subscribers and we did and we did like it was truly just that um because there wasn't like a shift in the kind of ideas that we're coming up with or i mean obviously we're always seeking refinement and seeking like evolution or ideas and never to get stagnant with formats or just get stuck in a little youtube you know algorithm dark hole of of of these trends that people would just like do and never stop doing um so yeah it was just a matter of uh giving it our full time and attention and early on you know algorithm rewards consistency and big volume of upload and at some point we're able to reach posting three times a week um wow yeah i didn't i thought it was once a week no we at some point we're doing uh sundays thursdays and tuesdays so like week sunday was the main video thursday was uh like a smaller adventure and then tuesday was the house show which is kind of like more vloggy yeah what's happening around the house but you know part of us always thought that yesterday the main youtube channel should not be diluted with like vlogging or showing things that are like subpar from the regular yes theory concepts that people are used to like every story that you come to has to be life-changing and that we kept that as the as the like the standard for what we what we create isn't the problem how do you keep one-upping yourself because i imagine you've i it's you've done some crazy stuff but first do you like free stuff that's because audible's giving away a free credit that can be used on any book in their premium selection that comes with their free trial with audible you can download content and listen to it offline so when i'm hiking in the desert with no service i can still listen to matthew mcconaughey's biography and it's almost like he's taking a walk with me if i'm having trouble sleeping from editing the podcast all night long i can just turn on some of audible's soothing sounds and fall asleep right away if i'm getting ready for a date i'll just turn on kevin hart and learn some new jokes to tell you can listen to audible when you're on the go or when you're just doing chores i like to listen when i'm cooking cleaning or pretty much doing anything that doesn't require my full attention audible helps me maximize my time learn new skills and gain a better understanding of the things that i care about audible has over 300 years of audio content so there's something for everyone no matter if you're trying to learn new jokes for your next date or wanting to learn how to build a million dollar business audible has something for you so if you want to check that out visit audible.com iced coffee or text iced coffee to 500-500 and as always if you're looking for more information check out the description thank you so much audible for sponsoring this podcast and back to the show how do you decide like i'm gonna one-up this there's got to be a point eventually where you're just like i'm out of just i've conquered every fear amount oh man i mean we started this by talking like i think one of my biggest unconquered fears is you know my own relationship with money and finance so maybe yeah maybe on a on the outside it seems like well at this point he's you know jumped off all these things and did all these stunts like what else is what what other discomfort he's gonna see but the reality is you know the more the more you seek discomfort the more the more you discover like the depths inside of you that you need to really you know fill and and and oh my time to shine let's take some discomfort here start spending money that's almost uncomfortable yeah that's uncomfortable for me is spending money if you talk oh my god can we do an episode with you i would love to spend your money graham would spend money physically and spend my money i don't even spend it though i was about to say like if you told me like graham you have to spend ten thousand dollars on rodeo drive i would be like in a panic i mean like it's a waste of money wow no well that's yeah i'm gonna brainstorm i'm gonna bring some something to yeah i feel like i've been looking at uh at this ford gt and i i've been looking like every day on ebay and like autotrader and just all these sides of just like a 4g the anxiety that i get just looking at the price and just it's not worth it but you know this isn't about me this is about you today why do you feel like you have so much discomfort around money was it it was it from your family it was your family very much just doesn't talk about money it's is it i think because i left when i was 15 and i realized that it was a big financial um commitment for my parents even though i i was on a pretty much a full scholarship to go but my dad had to pay some somewhere between like three and four thousand dollars a year um which to put things in context that was how much my my my education along with my siblings for an entire year in egypt including all material would cost wow so all of a sudden like one kid was just costing as much as as much as all of them were costing together so um i lit i was very much i didn't have any money in high school and uh that was very stressful because like i felt like i couldn't do so much of of like exploring and being out and actually taking advantage of living in a different country i was very much on campus all the time and and then when i like moved to san francisco i lived i lived with host families that were very wealthy so it also felt like i you know i was very much taken care of i never had to worry about money in that regard so it went kind of from one extreme to the other um but still very much removed from needing to worry about money and then i end up going to university on a full ride and they like i would get monthly stipends so it kept almost the decision to to care about money or to deem it as like an important thing to me kept getting delayed circumstantially and then obviously started yesterday with matt and thomas and i was definitely not going to be the one managing the money for the team you know matt was taking care of that um and i just stayed in my lane creating just coming up with coming up with ideas for videos directing and um so it continues yeah and now i think i convinced myself that it's the story that i don't really care about money but when in reality i know that all my dreams probably are dependent on me being in a good financial standing to to drive because i have such big dreams and you know i'm definitely definitely gonna need money to make that happen that's gonna cost money yeah i was trying to count like in the last two years how many last three years how many podcasts i've done outside of our podcast yeah and maybe there's two it's constantly one of them wow you know what quite a few people have come to us be like we never do podcasts but this is the one and i'm like what's crazy that's why it's like uh people always expect like oh i do but it's i gotta get we get a lot of we get a lot of requests but i just i for some reason i don't feel compelled so i i'm honored to be on here so cool thank you yeah i'm happy to be having the conversation thank you why do you think you have this like inner drive to to do all these like crazy things and to be adventurous do you think that's just like an eight thing like it's it's just within you i i believe that like our true power comes from our own recognition to the free child inside of each of us and what that free child truly desired and dr and dreamt and wanted in in the world because it's very much like the the uncorrupted version of yourself before society kind of puts it on you um and i just always i see the what you describe as the crazy things like when i feel like the the most like a free child like when i do the sky like the extreme sports stuff whether it's skydiving club jumping or any of like the high energy things that i do it just like that puts me in a state where i i feel connected to that and i think this is where like to me it's not i'm not like an adrenaline junkie it's almost to me that brings a meditative state where i feel more connected to myself than ever so i i feel like yeah you need to explain what you're doing tomorrow through friday because i was asking like hey you want to do the podcast on tuesday you're like no i i do oh what am i doing yeah yeah so i am it's actually a big deal so i've been skydiving for two and a half years and one of the main one of them i have two big goals in skydiving one is to do uh a halo jump which i'm gonna get to in a sec second is uh to skydive over the pyramids in egypt uh in the next five years that sounds expensive yeah how much for permits to do that oh well that's you see that's not at all what i'm thinking about well you can do it without permits but then just don't get arrested yeah yeah but i'm talking about the money part of like i'm not thinking about you you could do it without permits and put yes siri uncensored just on your stomach do a vitality get down you get arrested but it's you're gonna call it all the pr yeah so back to the halo yeah halo it stands for high altitude low opening so for the military to avoid getting in the radar zone when you're going vertically that fast you kind of you can really go undercover past the radar like water where a radar is detecting so you're you're flying at night like really high you're getting out of the way i'm not gonna do it at night oh wow usually halos are done at night um and then so you open that like you jump at 25 to 30 thousand feet which is really high up in the room yeah that's like planes yeah exactly and then you deploy at 3 000 thousand so you've got like twenty two thousand where do you normally deploy like ten thousand five five five is like safe three and a half is usually one so but so we're talking a difference of what like five seconds every every thousand feet of dropping is seven seconds wow is it normal skydiving like enough for you no like why i feel like you're with that all your it's essentially the same thing it's just like the free fall state right closer to the ground going at the same speed it's like i think it's just the a matter of increasing the my time no no my free fall time imagine like i would be doubling my free fall so instead of falling for 50 seconds i'll be going for like a minute 40 or a minute 50. have you ever done one of those like dome things where you can get inside and they shoot air up at you and like is that like the same thing so it's actually one of the most effective ways to train for skydiving because you can you can practice different body positions and flipping mid-air and it's it's the same thing and you know in this case you can go in the tunnel for 10 minutes and that simulates 10 minutes of free fall which is 10 jumps so in 10 minutes you can get training that you you would need 10 jumps to do that's where like it gets really efficient now here's the million dollar question is insurance insurance who insures you for this like any insurance company would be like you know what we don't want to cover that that's why i don't go to them my insurance is my insurance is just and me running safety properly and really and understanding that my gear is yeah i have health insurance that covers extreme sports but i mean to ensure they know you're doing this no [Laughter] kaiser uh what got me onto the insurance thing was david blaine was talking about the insane insurance like loops that he has to jump through just to get insured and they're on site a lot of these times like with proper protocols but he's doing these like big extreme like just crazy stuff like what was the one in a balloon that he was doing so he did a halo jump in a balloon so he went up with the balloon to 25 and that was it and he let go but so actually you know this is um we had to face that with the stunt with will smith in 2018 yeah we we challenged will smith to helly to to bungee jump out of a helicopter and he ended up yeah and then he ended up accepting the challenge you want to do on his 50th birthday became this huge youtube event is like the the live event of the year on youtube and that was the first time where we realized that our youtube world and what we you know and what we do with our production and how just like very much guerrilla style run and gun is so different from how this town runs and like all these layers of permits and insurance and this and that that in my mind i'm like well i mean it makes sense because will smith they have to he has to get like that kind of insurance but overall like for someone like david blaine i also bet he would be more than happy to do that insurance but it's because that he's a part of a bigger production that has a legal team and has youtube's name on it like the more you and the more you yeah you leave the realm of it being like creating as an independently the more you will start needing to abide to the rules of the game that's very true so for me like i'm doing this at my own risk i'm doing it with the best coach in the world um with the best gear so for me i'm like i'm not trying to like have someone pay all this money in case i die you know like i don't care about that because it adds such a big layer of complication the way we prep for these things that i'm not i'd rather do with that that is true that's the nice part about making youtube videos is that you could just walk down the street and film and when they're filming like something like selling sunset they have to give notices to every single storefront for like a week or two prior and then if you don't agree with the notice you could dispute it and then it could go through like this this weird so where it's like it's just with the city and then back and forth and it could delay it months it's it's crazy and that's just for like filming a scene indoors but if you're going to be using the parking lot or like anything you got to notify everybody versus like danny duncan can just go to hollywood boulevard and just flip on a camera and just it's it's wild it is but i mean i wonder where where is gonna be the the breaking point for like youtubers not being able to allow to like to just go down on the boardwalk and film i don't think there is gonna be a breaking point because when do you draw the line between someone just like hey i'm videotaping my mom at her first time at the pier versus no you have four million subscribers so you got to pay a permit yeah they're never gonna put some arbitrary like over a million subs permit under a million subs no permit i don't think they're ever gonna get like that so but it's once you get like a production crew behind it then there becomes this big like conglomerate that you could sue yeah like somebody trips on a wire and then they they stub their toe and that's like 20 million bucks to cbs for doing that but really quick we have a word from our sponsor skillshare skillshare is the best platform to use if you are a creative or curious person looking to learn a new skill they have thousands of inspiring classes for all kinds of people on topics ranging from illustration and design to photography editing and more so i'm actually in the middle of a course from ali abdull called video editing with final cut pro 10 from beginner to youtuber and i actually love this course i've been finding it really valuable all of the editing tips and tricks that ali can provide and of course i recognize that not all of you are editors skillshare is made for everyone there are loads of other classes to take that cover a very wide range of topics skillshare is also incredibly affordable especially when compared to pricey in-person classes an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month even if you don't have anything specific in mind i think it's always a great thing to be continuously learning and trying out new things and there isn't a better place to be doing all of that than skillshare so i strongly encourage you to check it out explore your creativity at skillshare.com iced coffee where our listeners will get a free trial of premium membership i strongly encourage you guys to go check it out at least go try out the free trial trust me you're gonna love it that's skillshare.com iced coffee thank you so much skillshare and back to the podcast but just listening to you i would say i i think just from what i've gathered so far you're very much a creative type and that i think leads the way not so much financially but i think just this the aspirations outweigh almost anything else i don't think it's a bad thing uh most of my family i think is the same way it's very much just creative and when it comes to finances that's just this this abstract thing that they've never really thought about before so it makes sense i don't think it's a bad thing at all i i could probably use more creativity in my life besides the thumbnails well that's where yeah all right are you going to rob my back of yours yeah it's like you just love spending money but yeah you spend money or help you save money or heights that's another thing heights i couldn't do couldn't do okay i get so anxious over that have you been skydiving before no i've never worked all right ladies and gentlemen we are doing this live on the podcast and every ram is going to be joining me skydiving next week since we'll start with just a regular jump so uh next week yeah make sure you you comment and and uh if this video gets how many how many how many views did you get if this is 25 if this video gets 10 000 likes uh graham is definitely doing this with me next week no not ten thousand like maybe a hundred thousand likes a hundred that ten thousand likes guys what's the highest what's the most likes you've gotten on a podcast probably like twenty 20. okay if this video gets 30 000 likes grandma's going to be joining me and he's going to be jumping i don't know 13 000 females no yeah yeah absolutely yes i heard it yeah i'm coming i don't even go on podcasts and i'm on your podcast no i wouldn't do it wow i wouldn't do it just why don't you do it i don't want to do it what are you trying to do no no i also i want the guy who doesn't want to do it more jack really doesn't want to do it we'll give this a try at the end i think we could try it at the end i'm not gonna i would say if if i got paid uh a million dollars for me because no way yeah that much yeah i just wouldn't do it oh my god okay well 30 000 likes right now please and then and then and then if it gets 30 000 likes i'm gonna show up to this house i like it i like life too much like why do something that would just put me at risk a little bit more of something happening just a little bit more let's say there's a one in a thousand chance you see one in a thousand that is an amazing segue to my next point because we started talking about uh skydiving and there's like this funny saying yeah that we always say for people who are scared is that you're more likely to die in a car accident than you're likely to die skydiving and it's a statistic but that's not because people just don't skype so few people want to do it it's still true that's the point it's still true and i end up the when i so i had a previous attempt where i was training for the stunt and i was gonna do it in september of 2020 and on august 28th on my way back i end up getting in a deadly car accident almost almost looked at me right the car flipped yeah didn't it yeah so that's uh that's why i'm like you know you just don't know when you say like why do something that increases that risk you actually don't know if that moment of skydiving will you know significantly impact your perspective about life and your appreciation for where you live or you know in comparison for whatever perceived risk that you're thinking will at your gosh graham is not falling for it i feel like he's the exact opposite of you like crazy lives in comfort his whole life is like what is the most comfortable thing he can do that is that is very true we're working on i don't leave the house rarely it's the extent of me leaving the house is like let's go pick up sushi from sushi ipo because they have a good deal because yeah it's cheap that's good yeah mine is just seek comfort that's that's graham's motto you could just get a shirt that says that that's me you got a heated seat i'm gonna spend your money and i'll take you skydiving that's horrible i i like that being like the takeaway of today i'll spend grams money i like him i love that i i gotta say like like since you do so many uncomfortable things that's like your thing do things still make you uncomfortable or is everything just like easy for you now um as i said it's like the more you seek discomfort the more you realize your own capacity for uh like self-improvement right like it's you're never gonna reach a point where i'm like you know what i'm very happy with where i'm with where i'm at i don't want to improve anymore and the process of improving is the process of seeking discomfort so it's like to say that i've gotten so good at seeking discomfort means that i never approach seeking discomfort in the right way in the first place because it's it's it's never supposed to run out right there's always some something there's always something in there yeah but then again i'm sure that you're getting better at being comfortable like like certain things for example like last time i was at the grocery store i forgot to get charcoal from my grill and i was already in line and i was like checking i was like can i go grab something really quickly to the guy like at the you know cash register it was uncomfortable for me like i i didn't like saying that because there are people behind me waiting in line and i'm like i gotta go get my thing now that was really uncomfortable like stuff like that you know it's like the way i see it so definitely i'm more more comfortable like i'm very comfortable now expressing myself saying going up to anyone on the street telling them whatever it is that i want to tell them so the next level of discomfort here is to be able to use this comfort to maybe step in situations where someone else might might need it you know someone stuck in a situation where it's you know they i'm seeing that they can't really express themselves or or get what they what they want so maybe that's the moment where i use this extra comfort that i have with situations like this to step in and be uncomfortable yeah and be uncomfortable in a situation that it doesn't that is not mine so i always like this is the leveling up that i see in in this conference like well if i'm so good at something then i should probably use it to benefit someone else um and in this like if you follow that like philosophy you'll never it will never get to a point where you're like oh yeah i'm good i shouldn't seek any more discomfort you're gonna write a book one day yeah i do math is writing the book really yeah math is writing the book so end of 2021 that's when the first yes theory book is gonna be out and he's definitely the better writer is it gonna have pictures in it i think so is it gonna be a picture it's gonna be a cartoon yeah it's gonna be a comic strip oh man we have i have like a thousand polaroids from our past five years i'm like big on polaroids i'm big on like keeping i didn't photos yeah i didn't realize what it takes to be a new york times best seller is just ten thousand yeah yeah so like dude anybody yeah anybody well not anybody could be a new tech but i feel like if that's achievable just to sell ten thousand comments if you just put the price super super low yes everybody buys it like a dollar yeah five dollars an e download whatever so there is it's a little tricky because you have to go to be like the way they submit the list yeah it has to be physical yeah there's like a few very yeah sell it seven bucks that's break even yeah hardcover's got to be like 12. sure you could do but yeah there's uh uh there's people who like back engine like reverse engineer the process of like being top of a category on amazon and they can tell you exactly how much money it will require how many copies like they give you the full breakdown of how much you need to pay to get to like the number one and how much and what the return will be i wonder if there's a way to game this where i could be like guys i'm coming out with my book it's one page long and just it's gonna be like five bucks i'll lose money on it but then i could call myself a new york times bestseller maybe you open the book and it's just like smash like button or just like some some one little word that's the end of the book you know something this is like a very yes theory idea but you know writing a book in 24 hours and making it a new york bestseller if it's gonna be a page like oh wow come up with like what is you know the 20 pages of that you can write in a day okay that would be terrible because it's i i feel like the pressure it would be an essay if you want to have to get done in 24 hours that would be a lot of fun have you thought about doing that so i mean it's we're brainstorming now what ideas can help with the launch of the book when when matt is ready um i mean he's going to take nine months to write it so it's definitely not going to be 24 hours but a week i feel like a week a week yeah a week sounds good a week does sound like this way it can actually be a book rather than an essay you should you should really think about it that would be interesting that's something i would do in comfort though at home yeah i would totally do i think that would be amazing to be able to do that one week to be a new york times bestseller and i'm sure i'm sure people would love to have just like your knowledge synthesized and booked for that would be cool yeah i might do that go i'll go ahead okay i'll do that i'll be in new york times vessel okay fine i'll do it i just i find it amazing because like a lot of our guests i feel like sometimes it could be a little uncomfortable coming on to like somebody's podcast especially if it's about finance where we like grill them about their finances but like look at you man you're like sitting back oh yeah you're the most laid so comfortable right i want to hold the mic in my hair legs are like crisscross applesauce just yeah it's awesome okay so now let's let's make you uncomfortable here let's talk about the finances of yes theory can you talk about that or how much how much can we talk about or we just talk about you i'm just curious you see i i would have i don't know i don't know of the finances of yes theory because we're in this like transitional moment for us as a company so i don't know how much i uh but i mean like we can talk like let's talk about you yeah so i'm guessing what what happens is yes theory is a company that's owned by all of you and then you pull a salary from that i'm guessing right that's correct okay can we talk about what what what salary you've decided to take in there and also how much did you buy back your portion from snapchat oh we're getting there we're getting there man we're getting there so i can't disclose that but we got a hell of a good deal like like why did they go out on such a limb for you yeah like we we really as i said that's what when i say like there's this divinity in our story like okay to even see that investors you know give giving us back our shares knowing that they could definitely get more but out of just like the good in them and not wanting to drain yesterday out of cash they truly just honored that that was that was incredible yeah and uh and again it's like a testimony for creating with purpose and when you know your purpose is at the center of what you do even in situations where that's nev what that should never happen like there's a finance guy there in that room that is not supposed to left a penny on the table you know un unutilized but for us like there's this like they just fully understood that you know we shouldn't these guys are just starting their career and they have big plans for what they want to do with the company so let's not drain them out of the cash that's good yeah so good on snapchat good guy snapchat yeah shout out to vertical networks yeah and then how how easy they made that um for yeah there we do have we do take salaries uh man i i have no we've never ever talked about numbers so i don't even like inter for the team i don't even want like know what their expectation for like what are we what we're supposed to share like we've never talked about this because i don't want to put you on the spot whatever you don't want to make you uncomfortable here yeah well i i'm i'm okay with it honestly whatever you're comfortable talking about and it serves a problem i mean we're gonna we're gonna go from that but then we're gonna deviate into like exactly where it breaks down and and how to improve that yeah if you want to share numbers i'd say yeah i i i'll keep it as like undisclosed okay yeah so the way it works is we take a salary uh not nothing too crazy can we keeping that low and then at the end of the year since we're shareholders in the business we get distributions and again we very much keep most of it in the business because we want to reinvest uh but we make sure that i mean for the first three years we were not paying ourselves so the whole thing it's like a thing off the past two years is when we actually start building uh like having liquid in our bank before that it was just like we were living off the business and you know business covering travel expenses transportation house all all these things and we were just like happy putting all the money back in that makes sense too i i would agree with that and i would imagine i see i don't know if the the overhead has to be high because i've seen that crazy nice plate don't you have two places we have we have we have our apartments like which is where we live yeah uh and then we have the yes house yes house yes that looks so cool with you you got the aquarium in there you got the multi levels i saw that place i'm like i think you got to come visit perfect i want to i want it i want to go visit it come on yeah i would love to um but yeah i mean if so for that because we didn't get like an office office this is a live work for like artists and living uh it's not as crazy expensive as you think for you know a full company where you've got seven employees so we pay 7 200 a month for that and it's on it's nice it's a nice spot abbott kenny prime location very very very much prime location and um you know compared to other commercial spaces that i was touring before we made the decision on that which was like i think the minimum was 12 yeah in venice at the time so we're a lot lower and we're able and that you know gave us leeway to be able to i was i fully designed the place and customized it worked with artists and architect best friend on on setting it up so it definitely gave us leeway to be able to spend more on making it feel like our space commercial real estate is so behind on this there's so many people now that are renting houses instead of renting an office because a house is nicer and it's way less money you get the same thing for half the cost it's incredible yeah especially in the current landscape of of how people are running their companies being like that mix of like remote and on-site yeah a lot of like we i was just visiting a friend yesterday who gave up his 40 000 uh dollars a month lease on lincoln to get uh for a commercial space to get this amazing house in in mar vista that has great pool a hot probably like 18. wow really holy all right spot off the real estate agent yeah man i know i know how much there's more vista places no because i figure it's a new construction i know they all did they're just cookie cutter plate but yeah they all rent for 18. wow spot on um so yeah we uh that that helped a lot with just like being able to make the decision on on optimizing for space early on okay so where's the money going yeah your own personal expenses yes because i'm sure a lot of your sp like expenditures are just like business expenses because you said like right food when you're working and stuff like that like what is my biggest expense clothes i i don't i don't get yeah food maybe like but i'm also not like i don't go to fancy restaurants i'm just when i if i'm gonna like i i just it's like the basics i don't really spend on anything i mean my biggest my biggest cost so far is i'm investing in uh a foreign country's economy to get their passport to be able that's interesting yeah what countries same kits 250 120. 120. wow what's the advantage doing that the advantage of doing that is compared to my egyptian passport that gives that gets me into 54 country visa freeze and it's the 54 countries that you've never heard of that you'll know that you probably wouldn't want to visit so my passport is pretty useless for travel everywhere i go i need to apply for a visa i need to show up in person i need to show them that i financially capable or won't break my visa and like run away to their country so it's it's just the most annoying process and it has prevented me from participating in fifty percent of travel videos for yester wow yeah so there's like a big part of yesterday that i'm missing thomas is in the process of he's going to chernobyl in ukraine he's going to mauritania to do like this crazy train ride like all these and the most amazing adventures and the only reason i'm not participating is because it's really complicated with my egyptian passport um and you know i just thought at some point it made sense i did the math and and admits like that investment made sense for my career and my own personal just well-being and uh being able to enjoy the opportunities that i that i get so the the senkids passport will allow me to get into 154 countries visa-free including the uk uh schengen area so europe all of europe uh russia like all these countries that you know before it would be a nightmare or you could just get married so marriage was always something that you know my immigration lawyer was bringing up but it's not as straightforward as people think it is and it's not as clean as as just like oh yeah let me just pay this person and get me and i also just didn't want this to be how i get a status in okay you know i get that yeah like i want i just wanted it to be i like i know that i can do work that that makes me deserve to be here okay and i wanted to be through that uh through that process and right now the visa that i currently hold in the us will transfer to a green card in the next round and then after that three years after that i'll be able to get a passport to the u.s but because my egyptian passport expires sooner than that timeline i needed to figure out uh a way to to go to get around it so saint kitts uh the the solution all right so where is your money now going let's get back to this where we're skirt where's my question here and what yeah what what do you want to work on did you invest in the industry i just like i was in an uber ride in austin going to a friend's house and then i was seeing all the fuzz on on social media i was like ah put 150. it's my first i like i downloaded robinhood in the uber right now yeah yeah so i just like put 150 and i finished dinner and i looked at my account i was like there's five hundred dollars in it wow so with that right before the elon musk tweet it must have yeah beginner's luck right there that's beginners every year yeah every beginner gets one win i did not i i sold to britta to put to get back the money that at the 150 and i left the rest yeah yeah so now it's just like the money is all done yeah so where else are you investing or how do you want to oh actually yeah i'll i'll tell you that i mean my biggest investment in 2020 was uh speechify which is cliff's company so i'm more focused on uh investing my money into projects that i can engage with and and and uh you know so far i've done four investments uh tanzoti uh which is a matcha company uh our friends started a few years ago okay liquid iv which just exited with the unilever they sent us some some stuff did they nice yes yeah great uh wait so you exited that position no no the company exited after we invested so without that like it was a buyout it was yeah they got acquired which you were able to pull out your money yeah i mean the money made its return so that's like yeah that was our first successor that was our first success can you just tell us the roi on that it was like a 10x or 50x it was like we invested in the last round and it was three three four x okay yeah last round yeah early rounds would be early rounds would be yeah that's what you want man wow that's all my investments speechifies for it's for all those exes okay and you're yes and that's like you know i was actually telling thomas like it i hate the idea that and i know you're gonna you're gonna really agree with me on that but like putting on in all these like retirement funds and all these like i hate the idea of putting money to just sit like that i don't care how much it's making i don't i don't care about the compound and all that i just feel like i'm a lot happier to just be putting this money in a young entrepreneur that is just like doing actually something because at the end of the day i i don't think my wealth is going to come from whatever i put on the side for my you know for my separate ira or anything with that attitude i know i know i know that's why i'm here i think i think you're doing enough and you're living frugally enough where putting fifty thousand dollars a year into the stock market and a boring retirement fund is not going to change your life it's not gonna do it it's you're not gonna notice any different you could still do all the other investments you want you could live exactly the same except you could put 50 000 a year like 5 000 a month into the s p 500 that's it and here's the benefit here's how i could spin this around for you think of it this way you will grow your money consistently so that when you find a really good deal and you find a startup and an investor that like you really believe in you have all this money sitting on the sidelines so you could be like all right i'm going to use that money and i'm going to invest in this really good opportunity or you just leave it there so you think of it that way yeah yeah are you just like sitting on a bunch of cash in your bank account yeah no don't tell me it's in it it better not be is it a high interest it's in a checking account no can i is it is it over six figures in a checking account yes oh wait six figures is over a hundred thousand yeah no come on no no yeah um okay yeah okay well first of all i'm going to tell you immediately what you should do tonight is sign up for ally bank okay so it's an online bank totally free ally bank ally bank now i could pitch depends on what you want to do i could pitch uh yada bank which is the company that i invested in that was that was my first startup investment ever was yada bank it's a savings account that rewards you for every 25 dollars you save you get one entry to be able to win a prize anywhere from like 10. yeah 10 cents up to like 10 million bucks some guy won 40 grand some guy i i forget is it mark or something like that i can't believe it uh that that's been the top prize ever paid out by yatta bank so far wow so if you want to do that the the interest rate on that right now works out to be about one point eight to two percent but that's spread across a year for all prizes uh or ally bank is just a guaranteed i think it's point five or point six percent they're a great online bank if you wanna use them for like checking and stuff like that that's what i would recommend yata bank is just a savings so if you knew like next month or two you're not going to use that money you want the best return yada bank if you want like a bank account you think hey maybe next week i'm going to use the money i want all of it and a customer service line i could call them up then do allie bank okay well that's that's really great so yeah so that's what i would do and then at the very least you're gonna get half a percent in interest which is not much at all but it's better than getting nothing yeah you know what actually would make this worse if you said the bank was wells fargo no it's chase okay okay good i have chase yeah chase is decent but yeah you got to get the money out of there okay because your money is think of it if you've kept that money let's just say you've kept a hundred thousand in a checking account over the last year really what you're missing out on you've just sacrificed twenty thousand dollars in profit by just keeping your money out of the market for the last year twenty percent 20 years losing money wow and you're losing well well you could say that for the 20 return on the market too is subject to inflation but i would just say just cancel that out 20 grand is how much you've just left on the table by not making a decision on that just keeping it cash now we're all guilty of it we all have uninvested money and there's a chance the market could have gone down in which case you know good on you for keeping the money in cash but overall you're gonna have more gainers than losers yeah and overall i think it'd be pretty safe to say you're leaving about seven to nine thousand dollars a table on the table every year for every hundred thousand dollars you're just leaving in there well time to change that yeah evidently yeah and 20 grand think of it this way too like this would because i think as long as we could we could relate this back to what you want to do which is investing in entrepreneurs that's an extra 10 grand right there that you could be investing back for every 100 000 so just think of it i'm investing my money so that i have more left over that i can invest in these other things i'm really passionate about but in the meantime i may as well be doing this boring stuff because it just it pays the bills have you have you thought of starting a like a fund no never want to do that really no because youtube is is where i think my strength is and i don't want to deviate my time because i know like in order for me to do something well and for a startup that's got to be 24 7. yeah and i can't do youtube and that i feel like youtube is is like the machine and i want to be involved in startups that i would be able to work on just as an ideas person and then create content around that like yada bank was something that i yana never asked for a video by the way at all but i purposely invested in yada bank because i love them but also because i knew that like i'd be able to make such a fun video with this and like is my first angel investment i could explain why i invested in them i could talk about the company and then i was thinking well you know i'll make some of my money back just even if the investment flops the video itself is going to be really good and it's like another idea to get a video out there i see so like i want to do more like that and if i was your first investment as a first angel investor okay not a first ever investor yeah first ever angel investment have you invested in startups before yeah before this okay never before that was the first one and then i had two others right after that that we'll just see how they do oh man um maybe maybe i'll i'll get you excited about investing in entrepreneurs investing and you can you can you can get me excited about saving my money yeah well what i've really wanted to do and this is going to happen at the las vegas place but what i want to do is basically do a shark tank sort of deal where i could get like me and the buddies together and we'll just invite people on the show just to pitch their ideas and we'll just see if we want to invest in them or invest in their idea yeah and i would but it's tough because i don't want to just copy shark tank so we've been like developing something in that direction really and yeah so maybe there's an opportunity there to i would love to be a shark on that yeah yeah something like that yeah but yeah that's what i wanted to do and we've come up with a few ideas just on the back end of like i want to bring 10 entrepreneurs to the house and have them like duel it out over like who gets an investment just stuff like that i wanted to start going in that direction i think would be a lot of fun i i'm uh i'm down i'm definitely into it all right i want to make it happen oh yeah i'd be i'd be good with that i'll tell you one of my ideas after after filming but i was telling jack this but uh yeah if you would want to travel to vegas for this we'd probably do it in like a few months but i think it'd be a really fun concept you could be one of the judges i think would be really cool we'll definitely yeah let's make it happen and just the over like the investment space as i said matt has been very much focused on how we can like allocate our money to go towards investment because you know with the s theory it's not just like it's not just the money that comes it's actually the main thing that comes is the distribution power and the access the community and we feel like there's just an opportunity for like a creator's fund and being able to like pull together a bunch of creators that very much aligned and and can together make some really great decisions on things to invest in that would have like really a high return so would love to you know bring into that conversation and see if there's yeah yeah go off synergy that's what i'm realizing too i think the the big thing with youtube is that uh i think initially you see that like oh i could sell merch or i could i could get ad revenue or i could come out with a program but really like when you get down to it it's marketing yeah like big brands for for what you would make a video on a brand might pay like 500 dollars just to get to the eyeballs that you were able to do organically for free and that's what i'm starting to realize it's like you're able to drive so much traffic and attention to places where ordinarily they would never have that reach your cpm for the main youtube channel must be yeah wow like what is it at uh 25 30 something yeah at the peak i think was almost 40 it was like 38 that was december this last december was like 38 bucks wow that's like compared to four to five for us you get 45 cpm yeah that sounds like you're hardly pm is like two to two and a half it's too low yeah i don't get it see that that's what doesn't make sense maybe put like an ad or two per video like we yeah there's pre-roll uh pre-roll in uh post-roll but yeah we do uh we do mid-roll for longer videos yeah you got to do mid-roll on every video yeah really okay because what i've noticed too is that mid rolls um help the algorithm i think the algorithm just knows that this video is performing well it's making more money for youtube advertisers are happy that they get uh they get more exposure and because of that and this isn't proven i just think the videos do better and my experience has always been that videos that are heavily monetized heavily monetized lots of ads heavily monetized tend to do better for the algorithm so anytime people are upset i mean for throwing in mid rolls it's just like if you want to grow and you want to help youtube out you want to help me out just understand it's a part of the process you throw mid wheels out in the video it does better in the algorithm youtube pushes it to a brand new audience who could get the same message i think it's a win-win for everybody and it's better than watching tv commercial people have gotten so spoiled now over like oh i have to watch five seconds a day do you remember when you used to watch like spongebob and like at the peak the peak moment three minutes you would have enough time to go and like microwave uh like a hot pocket yeah and come back and like you're still going through commercials that's what it used to be like we have it so easy right now we really do for free information but anyway but yeah i'm i'm open to that idea um but that that's my advice to you is 50k a year i think that's doable you'd be able to do it 50k put that aside and everything else could be your fun money but i think as long as you have just that foundation of 50k consistently you'd be set because no matter what happens you're always going to have that to fall back on and you could be set for life you just got to do that for like 10 15 years 50 50 50 50 keep keep it going you'll never have to work after that if you didn't want to just don't do it in robin hood do it in like a different brokerage okay yeah okay yeah i mean i will accuse that i i don't i mean i know i'm gonna get haver i don't i don't mind robin hood i i don't mind maybe maybe i know there's gonna be a cancel leave it in there yeah um i think they're the easiest brokerage just to point at like a finger rat and be like you're bad a lot of brokerages had issues robin hood i think is is the poster child of issues because they've grown the fastest they're the newest most disruptive brokerage out there and i think there's a lot of growing pains they didn't do everything right but you know but if you're doing buy and hold where you're not even checking the app every day you're checking it like i wouldn't do it where you're contributing like 50 dollars one time and yeah then just yeah mike personal belief is that anything over like 200 grand it's probably best to go with a big brokerage like fidelity or charles schwab most likely a vanguard they're all great we're with vanguard vanguard's fin it's fantastic yeah so any company that you could physically just pick up the phone and call someone for me over like 200 grand that that's the amount under like you know under then then it's like if you play it doesn't matter i was going to be like oh well i actually put 56 000 in the separate ira this year but it wasn't my idea and i would have never done it if i wasn't like if thomas and matt were like you just do it just don't i'm so glad you did that yeah yes i'm so glad you need to be doing that every year and they're like listen it's just don't even think about it it's going to save you money just trust us and i was like well what if i just i literally said that i was like i don't want to say i just want to use this money i'm going to take it i'm invested in five startups i don't want to i don't want to put this and they were like well do both yeah just like dumb about it so you're you're making enough where you could do both and it's not like your day-to-day lifestyle does not sound expensive it's not like you're bawling at clubs and stuff like that so you have so much money left over i don't drink alcohol huge if you want a pepper i've never been drunk in my life really yeah wow it's like the biggest money saver see i stopped i stopped drinking for the most part i will have the occasional drink and i limit it to one and it's usually not more than like once a month and it's rare like that's a celebratory thing or it's just like one drink if that i cause it's just i hate the way it makes you feel the next day yeah that's that too yeah um but yeah that's uh so yeah i mean give that your main advice is to put 50 aside i guess thank you thank you matt thank you thomas yeah appreciate the they're honest yeah i would agree what else what what other financial questions you have for us oh wow getting a free consulting session free consulting um what has been your smartest financial decision that you've made in your life we're asking questions like that now huh game stop smartest financial decision youtube channel no no i would say the smartest financial decision was probably investing in real estate and and living no i would say is living below my means living so extreme for so long i would say it really was not until about a year it was a year ago when i started like spending money a year ago and even then it's it's not been like frivolous stuff but a year ago i wasn't even in here i was in an 800 square foot duplex it was a one bedroom one bathroom um worked from the garage and i had kept that up i mean i was i was doing even over a million dollars a year still living in that same 800 square foot duplex in mid-city like this i don't want to say it was like a bad area but like when you think of the income you you don't think of like mid-city l.a um and uh yeah and i just didn't spend any money and that was the best financial decision ever this this house was the first time i had ever done something for myself was this house and i could justify that it that it made itself back because i was able to do so much better work yeah from this house in the backyard and just being in a better environment i got more creative did you buy this house yeah okay and and then the las vegas place was it was i think a fantastic decision just when you look just at all the benefits of living in las vegas and no traffic and just all the connections and all the friends there and everything else it just made sense but uh but yeah until it was a year ago that's when everything kind of not everything kind of switched but that's when i started loosening up the pocketbooks a little bit yeah but prior to then i lived on basically like 1500 a month what about you smartest financial decision i've ever made law you shouldn't ask jack that the obvious dogecoin yeah what's the least amount of money that you've lost in an investment i don't i mean the smartest financial decision i've ever made yeah what's the biggest return you've ever made the biggest return yeah that's a good question i mean i make dogecoin return i guess probably the biggest return would probably just be um apple okay he's made twenty dollars an apple no i i i don't even know what i did i like actually it would be dogecoin it would actually be dogecoin yeah because i got like 1700 percent in dogecoin wow yeah which is pretty amazing it was a hundred dollars into 1700 yeah my yeah if we're talking about roi like that my best investment was actually gamestop for yeah and i was i was upset that i i almost hit a 2 000 return but i didn't it was like the peak was like 1935 percent and well i guess we could talk about it because we're posting this in the future but i bought into gamestop around like 18 bucks and sold half of it at 350 360 something yeah uh and that was this i debated on that one i'm like i wanted to hold it but then i was looking to jack i'm like how i shouldn't get greedy on this and i'm like i could see that the the attention on it was was it was like waning down and uh and i knew i was going to be posting videos about it and i didn't like i never wanted to be seen as trying to like like drive up the cost i'm like you know what let me i'll get rid of half uh so now i'm left with 50 shares and i'm just i'm holding those 50 shares so whatever happens happens but that's my that's my tribute to wall street bed i'm just going to keep that i got one share as a tribute as well there we go two days ago nice after it was already at like three hundred bucks i was like not first you're on the game you got your skin in the game not for financial gain but it's for more first statement yeah yeah cool so after some thinking i i would also agree with graham my smartest financial decision is uh living below my means as well yeah graham knows i'm frugal as well jack needs to keep that i'm worried with jack now that we'll be i'm telling you funny enough i'm telling jack to like get a roll he's telling me to buy a roll but jack wants a tesla tesla wait how how are i guess a rolex is not a depreciating no it's not at all he's gonna get a wholesale cost submariner ask him how good of a deal that it's like he's getting this watch 20 under market and i guarantee to him that i would buy the watch back i'm locking any point instantly whenever he needs the money i'm locking up like a lot of assets that's the way that i don't like to you know what i mean because it's going up in value that watch is going up it's like you make it into as soon as i put a down payment on a house i'm done like my my finances are toast i have nothing after i didn't sell the wine so and i'll buy it okay all right fine you got me fine yeah but i would say yes beneath my means but also i've been wanting to ask this question this whole podcast what is the most uncomfortable thing you have ever done wow i'm sure you've gotten that one let me guess a million times oh yeah definitely yeah like the go-to i just i did the craziest thing you've done no that was craziest but the most like what were you you were like oh this is like odd or uncomfortable i would say the two days that i spent on the streets of l.a with nothing wow yeah so that was i don't want to say it was like became homeless in l.a because i don't i don't think there's anything i can do that can simulate homelessness can you see me the feeling of not knowing when or where i can go back to safety and comfort but so i approached it through the stoic philosophy of um they have a specific practice called negative visualization which is you living for a day or two of your year assuming that the worst happened uh and kind of like just going about your day assuming that and living life as if you're responding to the worst so for me that was you know losing all my privileges including being able to be presentable being able to go up to people and express myself and ask for what i want so i couldn't even like be begging or asking someone for for help i fully took the 48 hours i only had the face of my cellular apple watch just in case anything goes wrong i can make a call from it but other than that i had nothing i ate from the trash that day it's two days eight from the trash i walked from beverly hills all the way to santa monica and then to play vista and then to the airport to sleep on the second night because it was the only like public place where i wasn't gonna get you know hassled for for steven because everywhere el like there's just so much i realized about my life in la that i took for granted and then for city that by the day you see homelessness increase uh it just it was such a wake-up call why couldn't you beg because i felt like i felt like i i'm very comfortable with that like i've done yeah i've done episodes where i would go to a foreign country and you know be on the street for 24 hours and have the best experience just by asking people so i feel like i i have that skill and and and the whole point was to lose all kinds of privilege so that was again to to be living in a city where homelessness is so prominent and it's something that you i deal with every day i'm so happy that i went through the experience because it just was such a prospective giver what did you do all day was there ever a point where it's like you i don't know like also wouldn't you have gotten recognized so i would i that's why i was like sort of invisible i'm i wasn't even trying to be in people's like in people's face i was just like walking resting during the day because that night it was too cold and it was really hard to sleep so the whole time you're just focused on survival and also the other thing the reason this was really hard is because you know i'm so social i like very connected i'm on my phone i you know social media all that and then all of a sudden you literally have nothing you the only thing you're left with is your mind there's no there's nothing to escape to so i went from like the extreme contrast of having the best support system the best friends and like an amazing place to live and all these things to nothing and and that i think that contrast was uh was a really significant one in my just yesterday career what did you eat i ate one meal out of the whole foods trash it was the leftover of a drumstick and a bunch of potatoes with hummus on them that's it it didn't taste very good i mean it was it tasted it tasted decent you're probably pretty hungry yeah i it was and it was my only meal for the 48 hours what did you dress like i just wore i wore black pants a t-shirt and a jacket and a backpack that had my point and shoot and that's it would you do that i would consider it yeah i do i probably do that before i would ever do uh skydive wow right that makes me even more committed to be like i mean no i mean rather no no i'm terrified of doing that no no graham's terrified of staying at home all day and lying in his bed i can't do that well that's so scary you brought a friend here yeah i did cliff weisman my my greatest investment ever as just in terms of like my time with do you want to oh you know what how are you doing let's put them do you want to just go right here can we yeah because i think we screwed over a little bit down yeah if you scoot right here yeah this has been my my greatest investment both in terms of time just the time that i've invested spending with this man and in terms of uh money it's my biggest investment that i've ever made and it's in his startup because i've i literally and again this is not at all like i'm not trying to do this like oh i'm bringing him to promote what he's building it's truly one of the people that inspired me the most and i'm i'm grateful to be introducing to you because yeah we saved this all for the podcast i don't want to hear about it until we're filming yeah so so we got evidence but what you know cliff you were saying that ammar is leaving something out oh yeah what did i leave you have a major expense category that you're forgetting which is amar spends a unusually high amount of personal his personal income on gifts did he bring a gift today i'm the gift today but the first time one of the first time we hung out we were playing paddle tennis so i would have been the partner that was waiting um and there was a lady who was like oh my god i love your sweatshirt seek discomfort that's so beautiful and she didn't know who ammar was yeah and she's waiting for the court and at the end he takes off a sweater he folds it and he just gifts it to her wow and i've seen this happen over and over and over again and he just has this ability to figure out what a per would make a person really delighted and he just will go and get it thank you man i it is true i i do spend a lot of well i like i like gifts you're welcome back yeah i'm looking at this like i i would i would look like such a boss if i wore something like could you like imagine me walking around with this because i you you see this and you're like that's money that's cool i like it all right it's it's got to be like a small or like an extra small for me done all right but it's less material so it's it should be easier to make so this is your investment here yeah do you want to store your story of how we met i'll tell the story okay so in october of 2019 i got a text one random night being like hey there's someone that from a friend of mine entrepreneur female entrepreneur here in l.a she was like you know what there's someone that i think you should really really meet he reminds me a lot of you and then within five minutes i got another text from another friend also a female entrepreneur being like you have to meet this guy turns out that the ladies man turns out turns out that cliff was having dinner with both of them one of them goes to the bathroom and then he sat with the other one she goes you should really meet amar then the other one comes back from the bathroom and goes demi you know who he should meet he should be lamar so both had the same thought uh like separately and then you know when both when both of them texted me that i was like okay well we gotta meet we gotta meet this cliff guy and honestly i don't think i ever told you this i honestly thought he was too unbelievable the first time i met him that i'm like ah is this another like ellie guy who's just saying a bunch of a bunch of things because he was so unbelievable i was like there's no way all these things he's built like all these products in college and he's done all the things that he's saying that he does like he was just like yeah usually i hear that it's red flags yeah like every time someone goes off about that i'm like i did big time yeah big time so for me i was like i was like well i guess and then and then i don't know what ended up happening i think i i what made you decide that it was not i think i think i started i started hearing about you from other people and then having a lot of these things be confirmed and i also start following the trajectory of of speechify like all these things that that you're saying that were that seemed so like out of the out of your league at the time i was just like holy bib by bit month by month i'm seeing him like get to these things that he said that he wanted to get to and you know we end up reconnected reconnecting when he came back to la we just like ever since we became very very close and uh uh very invested in what each other doing i think out of all the people that i've ever met in my life there's no one that has like shown such a deep understanding of what is it that we're trying to do with the s theory more than cliff and i think in the same way with what he's building as you know as someone who's needed the tool that he's building more than anyone growing up having learning disability and and having a really hard time just dealing with academics and reading in college uh to me it was like i i was also very invested in what he's building so maybe you invested in clips i did invest yeah yeah i did all right it was big my biggest investment and you know proudest one yeah yeah i was just like over 100k no i wish he could i wish you'd you know what yeah i swear i would do it if you let me right i was like you didn't want that because that's fine there's a few people that have gotten very mad at me for not letting them invest um well i want to win best no let's hear the pitch i'll give you the background um speechify do i speak to you or do i speak to you or which direction do you want me to wherever you are no i agree um so my story is pretty straightforward i grew up in israel and i moved to us when i was 13. and i'm super dyslexic and i have a dd so it's very hard for me to learn to read like first second third fourth grade like i sucked at school and i have four younger siblings who are brilliant so i was just like twiddling my thumbs not able to spell my name and my brother is like building websites and making iphone apps and my sister like speaks seven languages and i'm just like eh but like i like i had an idea of the person that i wanted to be and that person one of the things they should be able to do is read so i would practice reading and i would always fall asleep in the book so then my dad started reading books to me and the first book he read to me was harry potter and i loved it so much he recorded himself in a cassette tape and walk around the house listening and then we moved to la when i was 13. and i found an audiobook instead of harry potter in english and i listened to that 22 times in a row to this day i have the first chapter memorized sadly i lost a british accent but it made me fall in love with audiobooks so i listen to two books a week every week for the last like 16 years when i got to college i went to brown i studied renewable energy engineering i ended up building this app that let me take pictures of physical books and it would read them and i could upload a pdf it would read i could open a website it would read and i build everything from like 3d printed skateboard breaks to payments companies and apps and websites um and at the end i like really want to do my own thing i didn't want to take a job i had like one internship and i hated it so i convinced two of my professors to let me stay as a visiting scholar or brown basically i didn't pay tuition didn't do homework lived on campus eighth on meal plan and i just built stuff and like guest talk classes um and my philosophy is you want to be the person that you needed most when you were young when i was young the thing i needed was someone to read my books to me and around that time there's a subcategory of algorithms called deep learning and they're really good at optical character recognition and text-to-speech and translation and parsing and i tied them all into this hack that i built for myself and it got really popular at brown and then it built this cult following of people like me who had dyslexia and add and low vision and concussions and autism and second language learners um and then it got really popular with normal people so now most of the users are professionals or people in school who use it because they can listen and understand better when they listen compared to when they read or they can listen faster than they can read or they do other things at the same time and so then we built the iphone app for it and then we built the chrome work how does it work so for the chrome extension you can open a website and a little play button appears um so for example if you're reading about robin hood and gamestop you're like damn this is like a long sec document play and it just starts to play and i like i read all every like contract i read and i listen at 700 words per minute which is three and a half times faster it's nuts when you walk into into a room can i hear 700 words a minute oh my god because i listen to all my youtube videos two times speed and for me sometimes that's like not fast enough why did that one hold on is it two times speed i do audio books at 2.75 oh wow yeah i'm super user here yeah that's that's crazy need to get you on the train no i i mean i was telling you like i would walk into i would walk into a room where he's listening to something and i have no idea what he's listening and then i'm like there's no way you just understood what was just said and he would be like oh yeah this is what happened and he would be listening to our uh like a news article and then he would tell me what happened in news i'm like you can understand that but the trick is just like you're training yourself you're training you're increasing your capacity bit by bit to like listen faster and faster and that was all right let's let's hear it so i listened to the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together is that like three x like what what because i just i only know in like youtube three x three x 3x what is the normal uh reading speed for like a normal so the normal person when they read um on a digital screen will read at 180 words per minute and if you read in a physical book it'll be 200 words per minute and most people who use speechify off the bat are listening at about 240 words per minute because most people like listen a little bit faster than they read and if you practice you can start listening really fast like you do 2.7 5x and audible so when i learned english like i didn't speak english when i was 13. so i would listen to harry potter at 0.75 x speed and then little by little i increased the speed um and the key is that i was using i started using it for everything and speechify has an automatic speed ramping algorithm inside of it so every thousand words it'll boost you by a little bit um and actually we're now adding the ability to increase youtube videos beyond 2x and you can increase them by like .05 x increments with a keyboard shortcut so you can train it and so when i listen it most of the time right i went in fine um i i used to do you get texts do they just read off like that no and not yet honey we're building honey dinner is ready please come home it's 9 p.m let's pack your curfew please come thank you love mom um but um what used to happen is i used to sneak into conferences for kids with dyslexia and when the keynote speaker was finished speaking i jump on the stage and i'd plug in my computer i had a demo and then like principals would offer to fly me out to the school to teach the kids how to use speechify and i'd come in and kids would listen to 2 40 and i'd come in a couple of months later and the kids are now listening at like 350 400. and i come a couple months later and they're now listening to 600 700. and the principles would go yeah um this is crazy because like this kid was getting d's and f's and what we realized is the speed of the listening needs to match the speed at which their mind is working and that helps them because if you were to be forced to watch a youtube video at 0.5 speed even though you like the channel you leave because it's so boring and for most people their reading speed is is not at the same pace as their brain works like most 19 year olds today they grew up on youtube and instagram and tick tock and they move really fast in their brain but the information intake is too slow and so so i listen i'll listen at 700 which is three and a half times faster and i'm number like there's a leaderboard a number like 2500 um in the list like a lot of people listen way faster than i how do you prove that do you actually understand how do you know i could just listen at four times speed and then call myself a second ago yeah yeah um it was talking about the literature in england and how uh even the writer of moby dick would not be interested to read some of that material um yeah but you memorize yeah i'm sure you've listened to any article you want graham yeah i've literally yeah yeah like i've tested that okay and i mean right you listen to 2.7 yeah i couldn't understand that no no but you listen to audio oh yeah 2.7 x speed um most people when you give them those audio books won't be able to listen to them and you practice over time right yeah so what did you listen when you start started listening to audible probably 2x 2x and you built up to 2.7 over time and you watched youtube videos off everything 2x yeah by default yep um if you so here's the crazy part my dad used to hate it when i would listen fast amar hates it when i used to hate it but it was fast too um and um he couldn't stand it if i would watch a video at 2x speed and now he watches all his videos at 2x speed he's 60 years old and he uses speechify for everything now okay and it's just a matter of practice so you know roger bannister ran the four minute mile and then everybody ran a four minute mile that year it's just the type of thing where like you start at first grade and and you're supposed to take like 10 years to become a fast reader with high comprehension and we've been reading for thousands of years but we've been listening for millions of years but to answer your previous question the way that it works is on chrome you just click play and it starts to read you no matter what it is on ios you take a picture of a book or you send an article from chrome um or you upload a pdf and it reads now my thinking is on websites sometimes there's so much just noise that's on there you don't want to read necessarily like who the article is buying you got ads how does it differentiate the actual content create a question smart question so um when i first built it right it was optimized for pdfs and for books where i could take a picture with my phone it would read the book and i tried seven iterations of the chrome extension before i succeeded in building a parser that was good enough to automatically skip over most of the ads and so if you click play it'll just it it knows just from training and for like we just like went to all the most popular websites and adjusted it and wrote macros for it to skip the stuff that's irrelevant um and then you can also like pick the section that you want highlighted and playing so for example 30 of the uses in chrome are inside of google docs and gmail and we just build like a play button into gmail if you click play it plays and one of the cool things is we were talking about like how i met mmr all of our team are people who i met either they found like stuff that i wrote on medium or wherever or people introduced us so we're like 25 people um and they're they're all folks who ended up using it in the same way um from from all over the world who work in it with us and they just like keep coming up with ideas of how to make the product better how do you come up with the voices how do you keep improving those to make it sound realistic so today i had a meeting with uh morgan friedman's agent to try and get morgan's voice how much to zach didn't he do he did a lot he did a gps a long time ago i don't think it was waze he did one of the old ones back in like this this must have been 2006 or seven back when gps is first started being like i used to garmin remember those the garmin gps's there was like a morgan freeman how much is that like it's got to be like 10 million bucks 20. no not 10 million no no it's expensive but it's not that expensive really he's actually you know he's had he has already other celebrities on like a celebrity voices as a part of speechify trevor noah did they just read the entire dictionary so here's what we do yeah i i've seen how they do this it's so interesting you explain it uh i was actually in gwyneth paltrow's house um last week and i just recorded her reading a bunch of stuff for the app so we can make her voice um it used to be the text-to-speech was what was it was made with the thing called concatenative text-to-speech they'd copy and paste speech utterances together and i am a computer like i talk to you then deep learning came around um i don't know if you ever saw like right the computer that beat the best world player and go etc and so it builds the sound wave from the ground up and so then you have like this corpus this engine that's really really good at reading but it's like kind of unisex engine and then let's say you want trevor noah's voice so you pepper in the south african accent and all i need is like a couple hours of audio at this point we've gotten it down to i need 40 minutes and boom it sounds like the native speaker david adam barrow do you guys know yeah it's just voices discovery yeah okay oh yeah yeah yeah yeah it sounds good this is the exactly yeah and it's crazy when you actually listen to it because i think his intonations lend themselves to to work well in like a computer-generated voice yeah it's so good like you actually it actually feels like david adam boris is reading your book i want gilbert godfreed that's who i want all right you know what i like the request what's really i got the dictionary you yeah yeah what's really cool is is that you know in speechify you can you know at some point you'll be able to just record if your mom's voice is one that you like is really soothing to you that then you can that's crazy i would love that just a voice of a loved one imagine that as a christmas gift like you just talk for 40 minutes and then whatever you want is in that person's voice so two things that we're doing that would live on forever is um we're going to release probably later this year um you'll be able to upload anyone's voice um and if i send amara text message and he clicks play it'll play in my voice or my mom text messages and so every contact in your address book has a speechify voice associated with it but the other cool thing is exactly what you're saying memorialized voices so if you have loved ones that are going to pass you better make sure that you upload their voice to speechify because they might pass but their voice can stay forever i think everyone would do just based on that like everybody like you hit the age of i don't know 70 and you just automatically will do this how do you prevent copycats because it sounds like once you get the the template and the framework anybody would be able to go and just kind of make something similar it's v so okay this is a question i'm gonna bounce back to you the trick with building companies that are like fast growth startups um is it's all about the company the team um and so we build at such a fast rate um that it's very very difficult to keep up so that's number one that's the most important part and then the second i want to ask amar why he decided to invest in speechify and why really all yes theory has ended up investing with us uh because i'm sure that's the reason the second reason is the ux is really good it's just like very very easy to use and you end up with the data mode because once you upload right all the articles have you ever used pocket no so the problem with pocket is a lot of people love using pocket but you never actually read the material with speechify let's say you have 25 tabs open it goes oh 18 of your tabs are long form content would you like to collapse them into a folder on your iphone and if you go around a walk or drive you can just click play and listen where you stop and you're like yeah that'll be great so then all the material you want to listen it's like it's already there it's like this expensive switching costs uh so a lot of the voice stuff is proprietary for example if you get the agreement with morgan freedman that's it like there's an exclusive agreement with margaret friedman you can't have his voice elsewhere how is that so but doesn't he already have his voice out out there like with ringtones and yeah voicemails the exclusive is like you can't lend your voice to another text-to-speech application that reads pdf and use so yeah you can pretty specific yeah and it's like it's dynamically generated so the cool part is right um anything you want to read about finance anything you read and you're like masters in medicine anything you're reading for your for your job my emails uh it dynamically generates everything i mentioned my voice like people could pay like 10 bucks just reread a book in my voice that's not hard to do i would love that we're doing a partnership with a couple of youtubers right now um where we're making their voice thomas's voice is going to be yeah and then uh and then and then yeah you can promote your your your speech link and if someone buys feature from your channel they can hear what's gonna happen people could easily just create like a fake web page where i say something i didn't say and then play it back be like hidden audio grim admits to something you know what you do here's the trick is you have a high frequency tone that's inside that you can't remove so you can always prove that it wasn't you oh that's good how many users do you have um many many many millions so speechify has been like the number one app in the magazine newspapers category on apple for the last like 10 months above the new york times and wall street journal um so it started with like very few and then it just grew a lot and why the investment with this guy yeah just in general because i i love him and i want him to succeed as we continue to grow and he also is one of the best product thinkers i know do you know what can you say like what the valuation is right now or like you can't say that okay have you gotten buyout offers a lot yeah exceeding like 50 60 a lot like most companies that you can think of so like right among our investors um the founder of robinhood vlad yeah um charles schwab uh gary cohen um the founders of of grammarly of audible um of um who else brex plaid like most really fast growing startups um and for the most part what we've done is like we try to dodge like the bigger vcs and take it money from like founders who've built stuff uh because they're other people who are actually super useful because they can like give you the advice that's valuable and i i don't know even if if you're going to be saying that it's it's not it's not a cheap cert like product it's it's 140 bucks and you pay it right 140 and you pay it right away like after a week of using it so for him to have millions of users that actually made the financial decision to pay 140 bucks that means something wow so it's free to download free to use for a week and then it's a hundred and forty dollars to try to description service the subscription service you pay after the 12 months so just to be clear there's many millions who are free users oh i see and then there's yeah a lot a lot who are also paying users um and and the differences in the quality of the voices so you can have voices that are lower quality and then you can have really nice voices um um do you put your voice on there no you got a pretty nice voice thank you very much uh later if you have an audience that likes your voice um all i need is like an hour of your audio and then i can put your voice on speechify and then if anybody comes from your links and buy a speechify then you get a kind of thing people say of an annoying voice [Music] i get caught i hate your voice graham your voice is heard but some people like your voice a few people do weirdos psychos like mine so so amar to answer graham's more important question why did you end up investing in speechify the money no i mean because i it was truly the product that i would have wanted to use the most it was the product that i wanted to build the most that in 2015 i found a piece of paper that i actually sent them a photo of when i was doing brainstorming on my tech startup building at the time and it was like one random night where i just wrote on the side of like basically like the idea for not speechify but something something very very similar like i want something to achieve the same functionality because i couldn't think of a product that i would use more given that i'm also dyslexic very adhd always had a hard time just like focusing and and reading and consuming knowledge in that way and it's prevented me from i mean now like i use audible to listen to books but you know anything that doesn't have a real human listening to that's kind of it rules it out from the things that i would read or not but now just being able to literally like if i'm given a piece of paper and i can just take a photo of it and have it be read to me that's that's pretty life-changing for you know someone someone like me and and and again for someone else who speaks speaks english as a second language i see how this can be like a game changer for people to like learn languages and you know what opened up the whole world to me is the fact that i spoke english it's literally it comes down to the fact that i just was able to speak english because you know it's like otherwise i'm my knowledge is just limited to what is in arabic and what's in arabic can just be you know a specific perspective that might not necessarily be the perspective that i want of the world so it to me it was like more of like a like an emotional decision i was like i i want to see every person using this and i want to use my platform to be able to bring it to every person that could potentially benefit from from that product yeah do you do other languages it works in all languages it also does auto translation between like okay is there a feature to help kids learn how to read great question so there's a feature called automatic speed ramping that helps you improve your listening speed over time there's a feature that we're going to release later called the language learning algorithm and so it works in two ways the first one is when i learned english i didn't i didn't speak english but i knew what like harry potter was and hogwarts and homora so i could like understand the context of harry potter um and so you start where the 500 most commonly used words are spoken to you dynamically in the language that you want to learn and then as you improve more and more of the words happen in the other language so let's say i want to read portuguese and if i get to a certain level i can just take things that are in portuguese and listen to them but the really difficult vocab words are dynamically read in english and as i improve it just increases the difficulty rate and it's across everything you want to consume you know what would make a ton of money man um is something where you could take a picture and it translates it to your language like it was already yeah really that's okay that's what i would love to translate do that with pictures really but but they don't know anyway like you could take a picture of a sign it'll read the sign right with speechify you could just like i could i've done this in the past i'll take a book in japanese i'll scan the first chapter and then i'll say translate to english and then just read the book in english and the thing about the way speechify converts text to speech is that at some point this deep learning this the machine learning is gonna be able to take an article that's maybe written for college uh college-level reading and it can give it back to you in like 10th grade because that's cool it's literally it has synthesized everything and it understands exactly what the article is trying to say that it can give it to you and then i that's also like i see that being such a game changer for lang for people who are learning how to for learning new languages just the overarching computer science behind it is like people think about ai as like take over the world like that's not what's going to happen in the next like 10 years um the way that ai is really interesting is ai is just computer that teaches itself and it's a system for learning and what's really interesting today is narrow ai the application in ai in narrow fields for example the optical character recognition of taking a picture of this can and have it turn into digital text the um data building of the sound wave so it can speak the ability to dynamically do natural language processing to summarize something in a way where i can rewrite the sentences from scratch so it's a 100-page article turns into a five-page document that's like accurately summarized and that's a lot of the stuff that we do what's your end goal with it are you going to sell it off good no um we've had so many snacks at this point okay um so the great thing about speechify is number one like when i graduated college i could have gone and like just chilled on a beach somewhere because i had like the kind of news companies um but the goal was if i was a billionaire right now what would i want to do with my life and my answer was i want to solve dyslexia and i got very very lucky that schwab saw a video of speechify early and sent me a message and we ended up meeting and he ended up being one of the first investors um and if i was a billionaire what i would want to do is go work on that so it doesn't matter who you are where you are i want to make sure that reading is never a barrier for learning to anyone and the thing that really strikes me is odd so for example india is our fourth fastest growing country right now and africa as a continent also grows really really fast so i just had a call with a woman from zambia and she's doing grad school in nursing and um she like reads decent but like not fast enough to be able to have an easy time doing a masters in nursing so she uses speechify for everything and so it started off as an accessibility tool then it turned into a productivity tool and now it's becoming a literacy tool and so my goal is i should be able to go into any office any school and say hi my name is cliff i have dyslexia and um anyone here has this here too cool anyone heard about speechify sweet who uses speechify and all the handshakes stay up but the long term vision is not just having this like utility that's a great consumer subscription it's you get to the point where people are consuming trillions of words per week on your platform and you're able to start building an audio profile to recommend to people based on their completion rate not the clicking of the title um the things that are most relevant to them um because there's just the world was desked up first and then move to mobile first so like so you would create like a youtube algorithm where it's like oh you like reading investing articles well let me suggest these other investing articles that's right you know we make a lot of money i just think about everything that would make money get this really quick yeah throw in an ad right in the middle of it like right at the peak interest and then it's like by the way go go and use weeble where you can get four free stocks down below in the description click the link and like a link comes up on the app and you click the link you get four free stocks down below in the description when you deposit a hundred dollars on the platform um yeah um the biggest thing is that you know how do you consume yeah the world it's either through your browser yeah youtube and reddit exactly listening at this point and watching uh listen listen youtube uh reddit reading yep yeah but like in terms of your access to the internet you're accessing that either through apps that are trying to get you to stay on youtube yeah on the side of your device on your device for as long as possible so that you can continue consuming the world through them yeah or your browser uh because it's how you you go on to any website imagine the point where you're able to consume just just the whole the whole internet by listening and for that pipe that that controls that being speechify all of a sudden you have you know exactly what people are reading up to what point they're reading it you know exactly who are the most prominent writers uh on the rise because people are having more completion rates for their articles past anyone else like all of a sudden you're just able to identify so much about what people are genuinely interested in because reading is such a specific meticulous task it's not just like you can't just passively you can't passively read but it's different than passively watching something or like scrolling right through it but oddly enough for reading and stuff like that i i guess for me it's more so spotify or i'll listen to a podcast yeah and that'll be like my version of reading and just listen to it so yours is basically just doing that but taking the text that's already up there yeah so for me um i love books hate reading but love books because they're really dense sources of information um but there's books that i just i can't they don't have an audio book right or a wikipedia article or a long reddit thread um and there's like so much good text that exists on the internet like i want to read i remember when i was young i wanted to know how planes fly and i would go to the wikipedia article and read the first sentence i get a little bit bored second sentence i'd quit but now like i just like i walk around and i listen to it yeah um and so if you are an auditory learner and you use audible or you use podcasts or you use youtube and you assign a textbook for school it makes it just easy to consume same thing for any other source of medium so it's not to replace them but it's to allow you to add text do you worry about let's say i write this really amazing article and it's mine but then i'm pissed that like wait a second everyone's consuming it through your app and you're making money from my thing and people aren't going to my website on that you ever concerned about that so the trick there is you do attribution for those creators and you make sure that um it links back to their article b if you run ads like they get credit for it in the same way that youtube does how would how would that work because then wouldn't everyone have to sign up for ads like let's say i write a medium article for free throw it up there and then you're running ads but i don't know that you're making money on that yes so right now we don't run ads on speeches we don't intend to for a very long time because the subscription covers everything and there's also like mostly users use the free version um it's only the power users that subscribe and for them like it saves you like five hours per week so it's a no-brainer um one thing that we're doing now is if you are a creator let's say you had a blog and you wrote your blog somewhere you can include a speech the link to speechify and if someone clicks on your link and and listens then you you get paid by speech about you wouldn't need to register in the same way that you would need to register for for youtube um but yeah like the way or protecting content is really important so right now within speechify there is no way for you to discover content inside of the app anything that you read you need to find somewhere else right so you take that book and you scan it you go to your website and you click read on inside your browser 50 of the time people have the phone open when they're listening so they look and listen at the same time which increases retention and comprehension um but you can then also take a walk if you want later we'll need to cross the bridge that you're describing cool cool i like it thanks thanks for the pitch i appreciate it shark thank you i'm gonna use it i like it i'll throw in 10 grand today but 5 million valuation today cash cash there you go you making money did your valuation go up i'll i'll i'll evaluation i'll flip it on i'll pay you 10k and and and you uh promote speech refine will give you a cut of the number of people who download it could that be a welcome our video sponsor today thank you guys so much i really appreciate this this has been probably it's so much fun just being able to chat it's just a tr first it's a trip meeting like i keep looking over and like i can't believe it seriously because i remember watching you guys like now six years ago uh yeah so it's just it's wild thank you so much what an honor thank you crazy i definitely thank you for the advice and i hope to stay in contact and just like continue consulting with you on yeah you know how how i can live a financially healthier life and and i think it's i was just talking to matt about this it's very much within you know our interest to have the topic of like discomfort and finance be one that we you know discuss more in 2021 so i hope that we find nice to collaborate whatever you need like you could just shoot me a text perfect i don't care any time perfect whatever i can help with amazing cliff amazing good pitch thank you appreciate it cool so with that said you guys thank you so much for watching really appreciate it we'll link to all the information down below in the description oh you got to say to like the video you have to speak like guys please destroy the like button like button alright guys please destroy the like button so that the algorithm can recommend this video uh make sure you leave a comment let us know what really stuck out to you in this episode and we'll see you for the 40th episode not me but these guys yeah right after you get your four free stocks four free stocks for the 40th episode down below in the description it's only free it's like basically free money so if you want free money you may as well just go and do that so thanks guys until next time cheers okay just say um just let's just say uh welcome back to the 38th ever episode of the iced coffee hour okay my name is ammar and so far we have made and then just say the amount of money which i'll pull up right here that we have made so far okay on the podcast 36 454. okay cool got it so what's up everybody i'm ma i am ammar from yes theory and we are on the 39th episode ever off of the iced coffee hour what is it iced coffee iced coffee yeah okay yeah you just wing it so far the podcast is made thirty six four five four yeah and then say that yeah yeah yeah cool uh into which one probably this uh that big one right there that's just onions that's your angle