Reading this article, the story sounds pretty wild. But I spent a weird amount of time with Martin Shkreli, and I’m not surprised the journalist fell in love w him

A few years back my team built an app called Blab. It was like clubhouse before clubhouse.

Elon Clubhouse summary for those who are locked out:

Q: When are we going to get to Mars?

@elonmusk (says some smart space stuff)... I figure... idk.. ~5.5 years.

Q: What will it take to go to Mars?

@elonmusk You need a fully & rapidly re-usable rocket. Rapid is imp.. can't take months between flights. Needs to be like airplanes where the biggest cost is fuel.

And be able to send 2nd rocket to re-fuel

And be able to make fuel on mars

Q: Why does being able to have humans on other planets matter to you?

@elonmusk - I was trying to figure out what the meaning of life is. Why are we here. Got kinda depressed.

What broke me out was reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Inspired to explore the galaxy

(I'll keep tweeting the convo in this thread)..

@elonmusk - all civilizations fall. Romans, Mayans, Babalyonians etc..

Most likely we will too.

So I think for the first time in 4.5B history of earth. It's now possible to make life multi-planetary. Let's take advantage

Hot take: Everyone is wrong about the Metaverse.

here's my 3 part theory..

Part I - Everyone is wrong

Most people think "the metaverse" is a virtual place.

Like in the movie Ready Player One.

A virtual world, like Minecraft, Roblox, or like Zuck showed in the facebook demo yesterday.

But what if it's not a place?

Part II - It's Not a Place, It's a Time

A time? wtf?

Yes, a moment in time.

You know in artificial intelligence, there's an idea of "the singularity"?

It's a moment in time where AI becomes smarter than humans. The moment when artificial intelligence > human intelligence

Part III - What it is

The metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our phsyical life.

This is not an overnight change. Or an invention by some steve jobs type.

It's a gradual change that's been happening for 20 yrs

Every important part of life is going digital.

Work --> from factories to laptops. boardrooms to zooms.

Friends --> from neighbors to followers. Where do you find like minded people? Twitter. Reddit. etc.

Games --> more kids play fortnite than basketball & football combined.

The ancient struggle was not having enough.

The modern struggle is having too much.

Too much news, too much sugar, too much of everything at your fingertips..There's only 1 way out.

Let's lay it out:

On one side, you have "Team Dopamine":
* 24/7 news cycle, full of clickbait headlines
* Social Media, friend's pics that disappear in 24 hours
* Endless varieties of sugar & porn

going up against your tiny, 3 pound brain running 20,000 yr old software

Even if you are a smart person who tries their best to stay healthy & happy... you are going up against Fox News, TikTok, PornHub, Robinhood, Instagram

These are weapons of mental destruction.

Thousands of our smartest engineers & data scientists work at these companies.

They run constant experiments. Fighting against each other for every moment of your attention. So you open THEIR app.

It's skinner's box, rats pushing buttons for rewards. But you're the lab rat.

So what do we do?

We have everything. More than any species, at any time period in history. It's wonderful...but also deadly.

Food injected with syrup sugar
Painkillers you can't live without
Video games where you can fly and kill
Porn better than any date you'll ever have

If you're out of the loop - this is the (hilarious) story of a subreddit (wall street bets) taking down a multi-billion dollar hedge fund... get your popcorn ready 🍿

the hero of our story: a user named DeepFuckingValue bought $50k of call options in Gamestop ($GME) that has turned into a $13M+ win in ~3 months.

he's a part of the subreddit r/WallStreetBets, a group of degenerate gamblers that I love.

So here's the situation.

Gamestop (GME) = a dying biz. circling the drain. Who goes to a store to buy games? It's basically a pokemon card dealership at this point. Plus with covid, malls are dead.

So some Hedge Funds are shorting the stock, betting it would go down.

One fund in particular, Melvin Capital Managment - a multi-billion dollar hedge fund...had been accruing a big short position in gamestop. Usually you don't have to disclose your shorts - but these were 'listed put options' so some clever redditors discovered the position

Melvin had a $55M+ short against GME.. If you're not familiar with shorting - read this simple explanation using apes and snakes and bananas from the subreddit.

Teachers, take note:

Hmm... something interesting I learned from my buddy @RomeenSheth about McKinsey.

I thought they are just a stale boring consulting co

But he told me they've acquired a ton of software co's & now have a $100M ARR tech portfolio now (!)

I'll let him explain - guest thread!

If you don’t know, McKinsey is a gigantic consulting company:

- $10B+ in revenue
- 80%+ of the F500 as clients
- Hard to get a job there. (<1% of applicants get hired)

Their bread and butter (70% of revenue) used to be “pure strategy” work. That’s now down to just 10% - why?

Clients are demanding “value based” billing. Meaning less "guys in suits talking" and more "show me something tangible"

For example -lets say a client hires McKinsey because they think they are spending too much money on procurement.

So McKinsey acquired Orpheus - a software co that does analytics for procurement.

Instead of advice, they give them a tool (a real solution)

Now Orpheus has been around for 15 years. McKinsey can buy it at a fair price, knowing that it can inject steroids into the business.

Why?

THREAD: Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. It’s 6pm on a Friday evening, everyone is sat around a table at a nice restaurant in London. The head of Marketing from some big company is sitting down with his agency who invited him down to talk things over.

They insist on paying the bill, it’s a casual thing they say. Just a chat about ideas.

Wine starts flowing and jokes too. Everyone has a good time.

Especially the agency, they just signed a new client retainer for £5,000 a month.

Easy pickings.

Too often we see Marketers signing agency contracts because of a few casual chats, usually following some conference waffle sales pitch about how everything in Marketing is dead now and only they have the solutions in this “new world”.

The point here is that turkeys won’t vote for Christmas.

They won’t sell you the best option, they’ll sell what’s best for them.

But the problem isn’t the agencies, its Marketers.

Agencies will try to sell you what they sell, of course they would. Marketers of all people should be aware of this. It doesn’t really matter if you get on really well and they paid for your meal and they are young, millennial, white and middle class and do digital.

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Recently Mike Filsaime, the Co-Founder of GrooveDigital and GrooveFunnels, released a new video about the GrooveSell, GrooveFunnels JV, and Affiliate Program.

In your business, how do you handle the sales and price and T&C parts of the sales?

Specifically, when clients try to haggle, or try to make you play by their rules - what do you do?

It’s very common to then start to appease the buyer - and it's a grave mistake.

[Thread]

When you start to reduce your price, or you agree tot terms you’re not happy with, you’re setting up for an experience that will disappoint your buyer and you as well.

In fact, the more you let go of your own rules, the lower level of customer satisfaction, no matter how good of a job you do.

Saw this tweet the other day:

“Just said goodbye to a potential client because they wanted me to go against everything I've learned and start work without a deposit payment.

"But we're BIG and you're small. You can be flexible."

"No. It's because I'm small that I can't be."

Now this is a correct and true response - but it’s also the wrong one.

Because how big a client is doesn’t have to affect your terms and conditions, and shouldn’t.

Because with that reply, the client heard ‘you’re right, you’re bigger and therefore dominant.