My First Million: #193 - How a $25 Million a Year Sweepstakes Business Works and Shaan Predicts the Future

And you're like, dude, I believe in you.

If you were just going to start a new startup,

I'm in for 25K, like no questions asked.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it,

like no days off on a road.

Let's travel never looking back.

All right, everyone, we have a new episode.

This one was pretty good.

So we talked about a couple of things.

The first thing we talked about was Oasis,

which is this interesting new product that kind of,

it's like a deep fake, but for Zoom,

that's not the best description, but check it out.

Sean says it's one of the biggest ideas

that he's ever heard of.

Second, we break down the sweepstake business.

If you want to make a company that makes like

half a million dollars a month in profit,

and you want to have it start and launch inside the next,

probably two years, like, or sorry, two months,

and then grow in the next one, two, three years

to half a million dollars a month in profit,

I think this is an interesting idea.

We break it down.

And then we talk about Sean's prediction.

So he predicts what's gonna be the next Apple,

Facebook, Amazon, 7-Eleven, Netflix,

Pornhub, Dominoes, those are all separate predictions.

Not one company can do all of them, but that would be cool.

And it's a great episode.

Give it a listen.

And by the way, have you clicked subscribe yet on YouTube?

And have you clicked subscribe on iTunes?

A lot of people say like,

hey, you guys are awesome.

Thank you for doing all that work.

Then pay me back.

I don't want money though.

All I want is for you to hit subscribe on iTunes,

hit follow on Spotify, hit subscribe on our YouTube page.

That's all I want.

And we're gonna keep doing it for free.

All right, quick break to tell you about another podcast

that we're interested in right now.

HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast

called Another Bite.

Every week, the host relived the latest

and greatest pitches from Shark Tank,

from Squatty Potty to the Manchana Bench to Ring Doorbell.

And they break down why these pitches were winners

or losers, and each company's go-to-market strategy,

branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

It's basically all the things you wanna know

about how to survive the tank

and scale your company on your own.

If you wanna give it a listen,

you can find another bite on whatever podcast app

you listen to, like Apple or Spotify,

or whatever you're using right now.

All right, back to the show.

All right, let's get to the episode.

What's going on?

I am, look at me now, I'm in a chick palace here.

What's a chick palace?

I mean, I went from a manly industrial look

to everything is glitter and gold now.

Yeah, that doesn't look like your style.

That doesn't even look like it's your wife's style.

Yeah, I don't know whose style this is,

but that's the style we got today.

Have you ever thought about creating

a brick-and-mortar business, by the way?

Oh, wait, actually first, two things.

Two things before we get into anything.

Everybody, like and subscribe, and tell a friend.

Tell five friends.

Yes, but Wednesday, do we have a guest on Wednesday?

I don't think so.

Okay.

Yes, we do.

Oh, okay, damn it.

Okay, not this Wednesday.

On Monday after that, let's do the investor episode.

We have another guest.

We have a guest on Monday too?

Yeah, Dan held this coming out on Monday.

All right, so we got two guests.

Okay, never did it, fine, didn't forget that.

Second thing, I have this episode coming out.

You know how I've been doing these Monday things?

Yeah.

So what I'm doing is I'm splicing together clips.

I'm gonna splice together like five to 10,

and I'm gonna talk in between each one.

And each clip is gonna be from a YouTube video

or from a podcast.

And the topic is, I'm obsessed with time right now

because I'm quite impatient and I'm trying to work on it.

And the topic is on actually patience

and how like great things that I admire

actually took much longer than I thought.

Right.

And so what is, okay, so if I listen to this episode,

what am I gonna get?

I'm gonna get Sam talking about time.

Yeah, and you gotta turn your mic down a little bit.

No, so what you're gonna get is you're gonna get me.

So you, all right, so Travis Kalanick,

before he started Uber, he had this thing called Red Swoosh.

You know what that was?

I don't even know what it did, but I've heard the story.

I don't even know what it did either, to be honest.

It was a peer to peer.

It was like, it's not relevant anymore because-

It was like Napster, but better.

It was like Napster, but different.

And he sold it for like $20 million,

but it took like eight years or something like that,

like crazy.

And I found that I have this amazing YouTube video

of him giving a talk, like a 40 minute talk,

but like the first like three minutes is about Red Swoosh.

And it's like, he explains how hard it was.

I'm like, oh my God, that took forever.

And I've got like eight or nine of those clips

that I've saved of people I admire saying

they're gonna take a long, it's taken a long time.

And I'm putting them together.

So it's a however long the podcast is gonna be

with like two to three minute clips with me,

like giving you the background of each story.

Right, okay, I like it.

So we'll see if it's interesting.

So have you ever seen the Joe Rogan thing

where it's like Joe Rogan watches the internet

or something like that?

Have you ever seen these YouTube videos?

No, but is it good?

Yeah, they're funny.

It's like, it's a compilation of basically Joe

watching YouTube videos and just reacting to them.

But all the videos are really interesting,

kind of like random ass stuff from the internet.

And then his reaction is like, good.

He's not trying to be like super over the top.

It's like his genuine reaction to it.

So I kind of see this as like the business version of that

where you're taking one theme

and then you see what a bunch of different

interesting people have said about that theme.

And it's sort of like Sam surfs the internet

where you're gonna like kind of go into and out

of each of those clips and just be talking.

We'll see if it's any good.

So in over the next couple of days,

if you have an example of a talk that you've listened to

or a story that amazed you, send it to me.

Okay, sounds good.

By the way, you said something about Travis Kalanick.

Have you ever read this blog post he did

called like, how to do South by Southwest on a budget

or something like that?

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, so he had this old blog.

Or CES maybe.

Which I don't even think you could find a blog anymore.

And he basically wrote like, you know,

if you show up at this time, you can get free this.

You can get a discounted a cab if you do X, Y and Z.

Yeah, like he was like being pretty scrappy

and like saving like pitching pennies, right?

Yeah, exactly.

It was, I think it was like CES or South by Southwest.

And he was basically like, yo, if you're going

to these things, here's how to do it.

Like here's how to ball out on a budget.

And then he had all those little like tips and tricks

of like, you don't need to get VIP pass to go here

just wear like an orange vest.

And then you could walk through, you know,

that type of thing.

Yeah, he was like scrappy.

Yeah.

So I was just listening to this podcast, Theo Vaughn,

the Theo Vaughn podcast.

I don't even know what it's called.

And he had the founder of Raising Canes on there.

Do you know what Raising Canes is?

Yeah, dude, I've met the founder of Raising Canes

at a random, I was at a table.

I was eating lunch one day

and the founder was right next to me.

And you just said, what's up?

Or I mean, yeah, I was like, hey, you know,

this is kind of like this old, it was a restaurant conference.

So it wasn't like super random,

but there's just kind of this nice,

you know, like slightly older Southern guy.

I think he was the owner of the CEO.

Well, there's two guys who started it.

One of them is about 50, but he looks quite young.

Maybe it was the other guy.

And I was listening to this podcast with him.

He's Southern, lives in Louisiana.

And they have hundreds of restaurants at this point

and north of a billion dollars in sales.

And the way that he makes it sound,

he's like, I just loved running the fryer.

I love being at the place.

It sounds so much, and the grass is always greener.

It sounds so much more fun than sitting behind a computer.

Have you ever thought about doing it in a brick and mortar way?

Well, how is that more fun sitting?

Have you ever been at a restaurant back, you know,

like the back kitchen of a restaurant next to the fire?

Yeah, I mean, I was like, I was a bus boy.

I was a bus boy and I was never old enough to be a waiter.

But yeah, I worked in the service industry.

It is fun, just like being in the action.

It just sounded cool.

Would you ever do a brick and mortar or like a...

I did and I regret it every second.

You know, the part that is fun actually is the camaraderie,

because the kitchen crew, the bond is different

than like just your normal friends or like your co-workers.

Like if you go to your office today

and you have a co-worker who sits, you know, three desks down

and both you have your headphones on and you're typing on your Mac,

you know, and you go to get your free lunch together at the cafeteria.

Like this is the tech industry, right?

It's like a totally different vibe than you're in the restaurant.

It's Friday night, the restaurant's rocking,

you're banging out orders as fast as you can.

And you, you know, it's 1 a.m. when you're finally done cleaning up

and it's like, all right, now let's go eat.

And then, you know, you go to some restaurant and the restaurant's closed,

but they let you in because you're from the restaurant industry

and you get to go eat with them.

Like that's just a different level of camaraderie.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's exciting.

It's fun. You're in the thick of it. I love it.

Yeah, but I would never want to do it again.

It's like, it's like, you know, when people are like, yeah,

going to the army was one of my most, you know, formidable times.

It's like, would you ever want to go back again

through that boot camp through Hell Week again?

Just so you know, I read this book called Tribe and it's all up

because I was curious about what type of neighborhood would be best to live in

and like what makes you happy when finding a place to live.

And it's, you know, I don't know this, I've never been in the military,

but so I know it from like an academic story point of view

that when you're in the military, a lot of guys, a huge amount of guys,

when they get out, they miss it like crazy because they're like, all right,

it was hard. I was risking my life. Yeah, that's true.

But I felt like I had a crew of guys.

We were always doing something.

I had a mission and life is so lame and boring without it.

Yeah, I could see that.

But also there's a lot of people when you talk to them, it's like, man,

that was the best and hardest time of my life.

Would I go back and do it again?

No, I don't want to do it again.

But it was an amazing time at that time.

And, you know, it's sort of like when astronauts come back from space

is what you're describing.

It's like, they're kind of like, well, now what?

I, you know, I frickin went to the moon was my life mission.

And now every day seems quite boring and like, you know, uneventful

and not not really having a purpose as I did before.

But anyways, I guess like brick and mortar.

So what, you know, what would you want to do if you were doing brick and mortar?

I think I could crush a.

I think I could I could I could operate a hotel or restaurant really well.

Hospitality. Yeah, I think I could crush that.

And I and maybe I will want to do that one day, but I think I can kill it.

I'm looking at buying another house and turning it into a rental

because I already did it with this one.

And I'm seeing one later today, but I think I could crush it.

And what? OK, OK, so I was going to say, what was Theo Vaughn talking about?

So Theo Vaughn was just interviewed the guy. OK, gotcha.

All right. Yeah, I wouldn't I'm more like, even with e-commerce,

I'm like, this business is great, except for all the physical products.

Like, you know, right now there's a situation going on

on where I think I forgot what the exact tweet is, but it is sort of like the

the there's boats or, you know, everyone saw that one boat got stuck in the canal.

Yeah, it's like feeling you're like feeling the the pain now.

Well, it's not really that there's just like another situation

where the biggest port in China is backed up and they're just like

there was a COVID outbreak and so for a week, they were operating at 30 percent capacity.

And this is like the biggest throughput, like logistics place in in the world.

And so the knock on effects of that are going to like last, I don't know, like months, basically.

And so based on what you're seeing now is that boats couldn't get out on time.

They were just idling in the water and Ryan Peterson, who we're going to have on the pod,

because he tweeted this out, he goes, you know, it's crazy.

The average, you know, wait time now or the average number of boats

that's waiting is blah, blah, blah. And I asked him, I go, I tweeted back.

I said, what's the cost per day of that boat just sitting idle, right?

With all this cargo on top and just sitting in the water, not being unloaded.

And he did the math, he's like, it's about a million dollars a day

that the shipping company is losing just by being stuck.

And then for all the downstream people, like, you know, if I have my goods on a ship,

on a boat that's not here, well, now I'm delayed.

Now I'm out of inventory and because I'm out of inventory, I'm out of sales.

And there's just one after another is sort of like knock on effects of this.

And so for me, even e-commerce, which is pretty, pretty like

internet-y is like, you know, the only bad part about it is all these physical goods.

Like, oh, you had a product, but then the wheels are broken or the zippers.

Our customers understanding of that at all, like, like when I like, I'm so now I do Amazon,

you know, two day delivery, one day delivery, whatever it is.

But if something comes like in seven or 10 days, I think I'm mostly cool with it.

Right?

Um, maybe during COVID, people were understanding because it was like, dude, it's COVID.

Like everything is backed up.

And if this is not like a mission critical thing, then, you know, then I understand.

But like people's kind of COVID patients wore off, I think.

And, and also if not everything is backed up, it's just your stuff.

Then you look really bad.

And, you know, even if it's not, even if they understand like you lose sales and losing like

two weeks of sales is like pretty devastating for your month revenue, which is like, you

know, pretty bad for your annual revenue when you're operating on like 10, 15% EBITDA.

And so, so yeah, by the way, the tweet was five and a half percent of the world's container

fleet is waiting outside of a port.

And then he said, I asked, what is the cost per day to be waiting idle?

He goes one trip round trip from Asia on one of these shipping boats is 50 million a profit.

So every, every day that they're sitting out, you know, sitting out, sitting idle and it's

a 30 day trip.

And so, you know, so that's about a million dollars per day per ship.

That's idle.

And then I was like, holy shit, these ships make 50 million in profit for a single round

trip from Asia.

And, and then, you know, people are replying people who know about the shipping industry.

They're like, yeah, it's crazy.

Like the top, the top 10 shipping companies will make like 100 billion in profit this year.

But like in the last 10 years, they've lost 100 billion in profit.

Like it's a very volatile, volatile, volatile space based on, you know, volumes and costs

and all this stuff.

Like right now, a shipping container is twice as much as it was last year, just because

supply demand is so out of whack.

That's crazy.

I'm excited to have them on.

And learn about that.

So you want to talk about some ideas.

We have a bunch here.

Where do you want to start?

So some of the, some of the ideas that I wrote down, so I wrote down two, I think I said,

I have, or I have three.

One is Oasis, which I think is one of the biggest startup ideas, most, most interesting startup

ideas out there.

Nugs, which isn't the fake chicken nugget market, and I have some thoughts around that.

And then I have a prediction section where I'm going to predict what the next Facebook,

Amazon, Google and Netflix will look like.

And so those are my, actually I have another one, but maybe we'll save that one for the

next pod.

So those are my three we could do today.

Let's do Oasis, give away business nugs and predictions.

All right, sounds good.

So Oasis, so you know what this is, but I think most, almost everybody, 99% of people

listening to this have no idea what this is.

So let me explain the concept.

I, or I'll tell the story of how I bumped into this guy.

I was on Twitter and I saw this guy, Matt, and he was teasing kind of like, you know,

people do this on Twitter where they have like, my stealth thing is kind of coming or

post a screenshot or like a GIF.

It's kind of ambiguous, but it looks interesting.

It looks provocative.

Or they're just retweeting people.

I think this is what I saw.

He retweeted a mutual friend, Siki, who was like, dude, just got an Oasis demo.

Mind blown.

This is the future.

And so he retweeted that.

And I'm like, okay, hook, line and sinker, like, tell me about, like, how do I get that

demo?

I also would like my mind blown.

And he's like, all right, yeah, hop in the zoom.

So hop into a zoom and he showed me something that was honestly pretty mind blowing.

And what it was was he was like, okay, so I'm talking to you on zoom right now.

Here's my face.

And but you know, the problem with zoom is that you always got to look good.

And people get, you know, people get nervous about that.

And so, you know, over 60% of people don't actually turn their camera on in North America

because they're self conscious of how they look.

And that kind of sucks.

And now we're video calling without the video, right?

And he's like, so what if instead you could have a representation of you?

That wasn't like cartoony.

It's not like an emoji or an an emoji or whatever the Apple thing is.

It literally looks like you and we'll show a screenshot of this on the screen.

If you're watching on our YouTube channel, which is just youtube.com slash hustle con,

you'll see the video of this.

It's kind of amazing.

So the video, the gift that I want to show is it says, never worry about how you look

on camera again.

And it's a video of the founder Matt, he's in the shower holding up his phone.

And on the left side is what he actually looks like.

It's a dude in the shower.

And on the right side is like the digital representation of it.

It's him, but he doesn't look like he's in the shower.

It looks like him, like in front of a perfect backdrop, just talking and it's tracking his

mouth perfectly.

And so I thought, oh, this is kind of amazing.

Like if I could be on video without actually having to be on video, if I could kind of

like a filter, but if I could just automatically have the best looking version of myself on

camera, God, that would save me a lot of time and energy and thought around how I look.

And he's like, it gets even better.

So not only does it let you do that, you could also show up as a different person.

So say you're, you know, a minority, you don't want to be discriminated against.

You could, you could show yourself as a, you know, a tall white male and nobody would

ever know what you actually look like.

So this empowers like working synonymously, which is something we've talked about.

The last thing is, is like, here's the best bit.

This works on like the worst connections, worst connection phones in the world.

I said, well, how do you do that?

This seems like pretty high-powered.

He goes, there's no video being transferred.

I said, what?

He goes, yeah, it's like a video game.

The screen on my side is tracking my face, every pixel of my face, how my lips are moving,

my nose, my eyes, et cetera.

And then instead of setting my video across the internet, it just sends how those pixels

are moving like a video game.

And so then on the other side, it recreates the video just using those pixel coordinates.

And so the idea here is that even on really shitty internet, low bandwidth scenarios,

you could have awesome looking video.

And without you having to like, you could be rolling out of bed and you look like a million

bucks.

So what do you think of this idea?

I think it's pretty big.

I was pitched this as well.

And I passed.

Did you pass or no?

I didn't even really get to, I have a call scheduled with the guy.

I just saw the demo.

This was months and months ago.

It wasn't like in an investable spot at that moment, or like they weren't raising or something

like that.

But I'm looking at it now, you know, it does have a high evaluation and you know, it's

pretty.

It's got a very high evaluation.

I don't know.

Let's not say, let's not say.

It's got a high evaluation and it's like six guys working on this.

It's pretty wild.

And I, so here's what, here's what I think about this.

But I think the way, the way that it's set up now is not the way that it could be a huge

thing.

Okay.

Tell me what you mean.

So a lot of times when I either invest in stuff or I want to get involved in a project,

whether I'm starting it or not, I'm very comfortable taking the leap of faith of saying, this is

just how I'm going to start.

And I'm very comfortable in saying one of two things.

I know how it's going to end or rather like I want to create a massive media company that

covers this, this and this.

I'm going to start with an email.

I don't know the middle ground, but I'm, I'm pretty confident I'm going to figure it out.

Or I'm also okay with not even having an ending point of like, I created something cool.

It feels powerful and strong.

I think I could figure it out where to go.

And this business, I think was that second one.

So I saw the technology.

I played with it.

I got the demo and he basically was talking to me and I got it as like, Oh, okay.

So like, to me, this is like pretty like unlimited, unlimited on what the options are.

And so the bet I'm having to make is, is this founder great?

And can they figure out exactly how to deploy this technology?

And I wasn't sure if I wasn't sure if it was worth trying to figure it out if they could

get it.

Yeah.

Well, also the price matters, right?

So like,

That's why I'm saying you don't want to pay a, I figured it out price when they haven't

figured it out yet.

All right.

You want to pay the, Oh, this is cool and promising price, which should be like 10 times lower.

But I get why this has a high valuation because to me, you see something like zoom, zoom is

a hundred billion dollar company.

Zoom is letting you call, you know, do video calls with people all around the internet for

business purposes.

I think that the future zoom, like the leapfrog of zoom is not zoom with slightly better features

or the recording is better, the audio quality is a little better.

It's this is a video call where I don't actually have to be on video, but it looks like I'm

on video.

Everybody looks great.

Everybody's presenting their professional self, regardless of how they actually look

at home.

And secondly, this works on extremely low bandwidth, shitty internet, uh, circumstances

because it's not even transferring video.

It's just transferring pixel coordinates.

That to me is like a leapfrog.

And that means what does, if zoom is a hundred billion today and somebody built what I believe

if you did this, it would be a better zoom.

Um, obviously it doesn't have the network effects, doesn't have the brand, doesn't have

many things that you need to do to get it big, but it has the magic trick.

And I think when you have a magic trick, you can get a lot of users pretty quickly.

And the magic trick here is pretty impressive.

We were both pretty impressed with the magic, but it sounds like we're saying the same thing.

But I guess my difference would be, I think I know what the endpoint looks like.

The endpoint looks like this is how business calls are done.

You have your, dude, that's not that big.

Is that that big of a market?

I don't, I disagree with you.

I don't know, man.

If I was this, I'd be using this for movies or for, you know, I actually don't even know

what I would use it for, but I can't imagine business calls would be the number one thing.

Dude, zoom is massive.

Zoom is like humongous, right?

A hundred billion dollar company.

How much bigger do you want?

Right?

One trillion.

Okay.

You can get to a trillion, but this, you're not making zoom.

This is a plugin for zoom.

I think you could make the new zoom using this, right?

Why would I use zoom when instead I could use this where I always look like a million

bucks and already it's better than zoom.

And the second thing is it works better on any internet conditions because it's not

transferring heavy video across the wire.

Regardless, I'm into this.

I'm into this.

I just was unwilling to bet my own money at that high of a valuation.

Yeah.

I think that's totally fair.

The reason this stuck out to me was I was like, I had this doc I've talked about before,

which is called the biggest idea in my head right now, which is basically if I was totally

free, I could drop everything I was doing and I was going to work on the biggest startup

idea in my head at any given month.

What is it?

And I just keep track month by month.

And sometimes it's the same for two months straight, three months straight.

And sometimes it changes.

This became the biggest startup idea in my head because I think it's basically taking

novel technology going after a really big market and it's doing it in a way that is

like complete, like the incumbents would have to sort of re architect their whole shit to

be able to do this.

I think I don't think you could just make a plugin to do this.

And so, so anyways, I thought this was like one of the bigger ideas.

I just wanted to bring it up.

I don't have any more besides that.

All right.

Let's move on then.

We want to talk about something that's way less of a big idea, but a surefire way to

make a lot of money.

Yes.

Okay.

Let's talk about the giveaway business, also known as the sweepstake business.

And I'm interested in this business because, well, because I've used it a lot as it seems

easy and awesome and you've done it.

You've dabbled.

Yeah.

So with the hustle, one way that we grew, we grew in a bunch of ways, but we did two

things that are related to this.

The first, we would pay companies, I'll start with this one.

The first, we would give stuff away.

We would give a Tesla away.

We would give a 3D printer away, which we're giving now.

And if you share an email or you get other people to join, like in the user unique URL,

you get more entries.

And if a car costs us $30,000 and we acquire 30,000 emails, that's a dollar to acquire

an email.

That's a really good deal for us because we make, let's say $10 off every email.

No brainer.

The second thing that we did is we paid some of these companies and I want to explain how

they work.

So do me a favor and go to bold.org.

Can you do that right now?

Okay.

I'm on it.

What's it say?

It's a fighting student debt.

That's it.

Yeah.

And how does it say it does it?

Let's see.

So scholarships, philanthropy, I don't know, it just looks like donations or something,

right?

So what you do and because they may click on scholarships for nursing or something.

Okay.

Scholarship for nursing students.

I'm there.

Okay.

Five great scholarships for future nurses.

Great.

All right.

So bold.org, what they do is they go and they either create scholarships or they find

people who have scholarships and they aggregate it into one area, into one platform.

Not that hard to do in itself.

Then what they do is they go get loads of people to sign up for the scholarships.

So they advertise to nurses and nursing Facebook groups on Google and they get people to sign

up and enter all this information.

And here's how they make money.

When you are a nurse, or let's say you're applying to get your MBA, if you have tens

of thousands of people apply to get an MBA scholarship, that's a pretty high qualified

lead list, right?

Same with nurses, same with, I mean, pretty much any of these niches.

And what they do is as you sign up for this thing at the end, they go, also, do you want

to opt in for this, this, or this, or this?

Like companies like the Hustle, I would pay them money.

I think at one point we were paying them maybe 50 to 100 grand a month.

And that's how many leads that they were getting us.

That's amazing.

So basically they go, they pay for, so they go and they spend money to get people to apply

for a scholarship and people are like, oh, fantastic.

Thank you so much.

And then when they're applying, they're basically like, hey, would you like to opt in and why

does the person want to opt in or is it like, hey, do this and you get some increased odds

of the scholarship or how does it work?

I believe both.

Yeah.

And they just like show offers that are interesting.

And also, I believe it just like you're automatically in unless you opt out in the flow and you

get more likelihood if you opt into stuff.

Dude, how did you even find this?

How did you think, oh, you know what, I'm going to go, like when you were trying to

make the connection between sweepstakes and giveaways and you were like, go to bull.org.

This like nonprofit looking, you know, scholarships for nurses in Africa.

I was like, what does this have to do with, how did you even figure out this is how you

grow an email list?

There's a bunch of ways that I know how to do this.

The first, there's this guy named Dennis Gross, who we're going to have to get on this podcast.

So Dennis started Wise Geek, which you and I are both probably too young to have used

it, but it was like a web 1.0 thing.

It made a lot of money.

And then he started loads of other things, including investing into lots of different

startups like Thumbtack.

But then he started bestreviews.com.

Do you remember that?

Or do you know what bestreviews.com is?

It sold for $160 million a Tribune, like three or four years ago.

So this guy named Dennis, he's very, very wealthy and he's started loads of companies

and he stays way below the radar.

And he created this thing called Mechanism, which is like an idea lab, except he's like

an SEO guru and like a lead gen guru.

So he's launched all these companies and the co-founder of Mechanism is Brendan, who's

the founder of Toptail and I'm friends with both of those guys.

And I saw what they're getting into and he pitched me and sold me on using bold.org and

it was pretty good.

So that's first, I can't find this guy, Dennis Gross.

Is that his name?

Go to bold.org slash about.

He spells his name D-I-N-I-S space G-R-O-S-Z.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So he's, oh, he actually did bold.

Okay.

So that's how you found out.

So here's where, here's, here's what I'm getting at here.

So this got me interested into giveaways.

Actually, you have to call them sweepstakes.

There's a lot of legality around this.

And so what, what I learned was you, and we, when we did sweepstakes, we would have to

call it sweepstakes.

You have to have rules that are approved by your lawyer.

And I got kind of it.

It's like, you could buy entries or if you just mail us this form, we have to let you

apply.

We have to give you the equivalent entry, right?

So it's like,

There's all types of technicalities.

Yeah.

You can't make it pay to play.

Otherwise it's like a lottery.

And you can't.

Yeah.

It can't be a lottery.

You can't.

Now I don't, this is just an example.

I don't know if this is actually the rule.

You can't use the word like free or you can't do, like there's a bunch of like technicality

stuff that you have to follow.

But I got very interested in giveaways.

And so I did some research on a bunch of them.

So there's loads of giveaway businesses.

There's three ways that I've seen it work.

The first, you buy entries.

So I've seen, like buy this house.com, I believe it's called, or buy, buy San Francisco home.com

where a company buys a San Francisco house, then they put ads all over the subway.

They put ads all over the billboard and they sell entries for $100 and it's a raffle.

The second way that this business works is you do it bull did, which is the audience

is the product and you sell their information.

You know, those cars that are at malls.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what happens at those businesses is they pay the mall, a marketing part company pays

them all a rental fee to use that real estate space.

Right.

Yeah.

Then loads of people enter their information to join and buy that car.

They look at the, all the leads and names now that they have the birth date, things

like that and they categorize them and then they sell them to different companies and

those companies call, call those people to sell them X, Y and Z.

Right.

Okay.

So the third way that you make money off of this is you can sell merch and when you

sell merch, you get X more entries into the giveaway.

And I found this one company that's doing car giveaways and I got a hold of these financials

and if you're listening to this, actually there's a, the takeaway here is that this

about this business, but the second takeaway is sign up for brokerage website that, that

sell.

Amazing way to learn.

Yeah.

An amazing way to learn.

You go to quiet light brokerage.

You go to, what's the name of this one?

Yeah.

You go to Flippa Empire Flippers, you quiet light brokerage.

You can go to like one of many, you know, FE international or whatever.

There's a whole bunch of places where you can go and you can basically look at internet

businesses.

The beauty of it is if you want to, if you're on the outside, you're like, dude, I've never

actually been inside of a successful business, never run one, never owned one, never sold

one.

And you, it's a great way to get business ideas because you're just going to see a bunch

of business you never thought about like, Oh, these guys sell, you know, you know, it's

a D to C diabetes brand.

They sell, you know, products for diabetic, diabetic patients and they're doing eight

million a year of revenue, four million of profit.

And here's their top three SKUs and here's how they grow.

And here's their P and L because they're trying to sell their business.

So they had to package everything up and make it a book that you can go look at as a buyer.

The beauty of the online ones is they don't know if you're a serious buyer or if you're

a 21 year old kid just trying to learn about business.

And so I've looked through probably hundreds of these at this point, just to learn, right?

So that's like how I feed my business brain is, is one of these, one of the tactics is

to go look at businesses that are for sale and read their books.

So I was interested in sweepstakes and it just so happened, I saw one for sale and I went

and found this one.

So here's a sweepstakes and what they do, if you Google car sweepstakes, I'm not going

to say the name of the company, very likely they come up on the top 10 of Google on the

front page.

So I am just off that.

I imagine they're one of the big dogs.

Did you Google Google?

I'm doing it right now.

Yep.

I see them.

Okay.

And the last 12 months revenue was $26,700,000.

Last 12 months of net profit was $5.8 million.

And in this document that I have, there's like a Q&A where someone's just asking them

questions and they explain how it works.

And what it works is they have a warehouse and they have like 30 employees, all warehouse

workers mostly, and you, they run ads on, let's just say, we'll say this is for a car

one.

They run ads and sponsored videos on YouTube car channels and before the guy shows off

his car, he goes, by the way, this one is sponsored by Blank company.

They're giving away a car.

If you want the car, click the link below, you go to that link and it says, great, you're

going to be entered at win this car.

By the way, if you buy this sweatshirt for $40, you're going to get 10 more entries.

If you buy this hat, you're going to get X amount more entries.

And so they make a profit off of, it's just an e-commerce store, basically.

And it's amazing.

I mean, I don't, I don't think it's actually sketchy.

I think that it's a, you're kind of preying on vulnerable people a bit.

And they said that in this document that the person one time, or first of all, the repeat

customer rate is 50%.

So 50% of people who sign up for one eventually do another.

And they have guys that will spend $8,000 on merch in order to get more entries into

these cars.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's, it's, this is definitely one of those where it's pretty polarizing.

You know, some people will say, this is, this is shady, this is messed up.

I find it fascinating that a business like this even exists, 25 million a year in revenue,

5 million a year in profit.

And very, very simple business, you know what I mean?

And if this is what I call like, you got to know how internet plumbing works.

They're like, okay, I can plug a pipe into YouTube and that gives me a lead.

And then with the lead, I plugged that into an e-commerce store and that gives me this

and then I'll plug into this like sweepstakes law that will allow me to do this legally.

And I've seen the same thing, by the way, in the gun space.

So people do this for guns, give away, give away for guns.

There's a lot of people who are like really passionate about guns and ammunition and things

like that.

There's also ones that are, so cars, probably the biggest one.

There's houses.

When I was going to sell my house, it was right when COVID hit and it was like the worst

time to sell a house.

And so I looked into, could I raffle my house off and actually could I get a better price

raffling my house?

And then there's all these rules against it.

Like you got to like, basically like churches can do it and not a lot of other people are

allowed to do this.

So yeah, so basically there's, there's a lot of these that you wouldn't otherwise expect.

And yeah, I've seen, I've seen somebody doing this with cars at a pretty big scale.

And I'm looking at this company now and just I should say, by the way, I have a friend

or a friend of a friend who's doing this with cars and like, there was three months where

they were just like, Oh my God, this is printing money.

This is the best business in the world.

And then we checked back in six months later and they're like, this is such a hard business,

dude.

It's like, you know, and so I think that it's not, it's like many things where it's not

as easy as it sounds.

And there's also like a thin line of like at some point you, you can fatigue out your

customers.

Right.

They're not the buyers or they who get disillusioned that they're not going to win.

Or you, the ad costs go up and then the business all of a sudden went from working beautifully

to kind of upside down.

Yeah.

Okay.

So this business they're doing five, sorry, six million nearly in profit and they're only

selling the asking price was $24 million.

So they're asking five times profit, one times revenue.

And there's a reason for that five times profit to me is actually quite good for this kind

of business.

I think they would want to get way less and it looks like the only true asset they have

is the website, which anyone could copy probably with 10 grand, maybe 40 grand.

Then they have a 300,000 person email list and then they have 300,000 SMS subscribers.

Which is baller.

So is that good?

Yeah.

That's huge.

And I bet that works extremely well for this.

Cause if it's like, basically, Hey, look at this amazing car.

Do you want it?

And you're just sitting there on the bus.

It's like, well, I'm not doing anything else right now.

Click and you go enter the, enter the giveaway each time.

I could see how that hook would work because SMS, you know, SMS gets like an 80% open rate

and email gets like an 8% open rate.

So it's like, it's, you know, 10 times better.

So I, it's similar to your thing.

I don't really have any ideas for this cause I think they're kind of limitless, but I thought

it was interesting and I wanted to bring it up because I think this is like a little bit

on like the dark side of the internet that not a lot of people know about.

And I thought it was crazy fascinating.

I don't think it has to be like bold.org, incredibly ethical, uh, straight forward.

There's no tricks.

I know the guys who run it.

It's, I'm a customer of theirs.

It's, it's, how was the like, kind of, okay.

So somebody's there for bold, they're trying to get a scholarship, right?

They're not thinking about the hustle.

Maybe hustles like auto-checked in something, which is like share, share your information

with our marketing partners who make this possible, you know, and you're like, great.

Now you got their email on a list.

Did you see that they performed?

Yeah.

They were okay.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So let's do the math here.

So let's just say that, and all these numbers are, uh, I'm making up, let's just say that

I acquire a user from Facebook for $2 and they have a 50% open rate.

That means I'm spending $4 for a 50% open rate or sorry, for a, for a reader.

For a reader.

And, and let's just say that like the way that we use the track it is that we knew right

away if they read the first five, the likelihood that they're going to say for 18 months or

whatever it is was very high.

Yeah.

So it's like $4 for that 50% person.

We'll call it a, we call it, we have a gold silver bronze.

That's like we, we internally, so a gold user just costs us $4.

Right.

Okay.

Now let's just say that on bold.org, I've got to get 10 people, but I get those 10 people

for a dollar and one of them becomes a gold reader.

So I just paid $1 for a gold reader.

So you get a lot of volume, but you make up for it because it's cheap.

Right.

And, and you basically just set your rate with them or they, they just have a rate and

you have to figure it out.

Like, do you say I'll pay this much per lead or how does it work?

A lot of these companies, the smart guys, they don't have a set rate.

They give you a ballpark and then they, but they first want to hear what's it worth to

you.

Yeah, of course.

And then they try to sell you.

They're like, Oh, okay, these are worth this to you.

Okay.

We're going to set it at this budget.

And then what you do is you go out and do it for a month and then you renegotiate.

Yeah.

I think this is a fascinating business.

I also think that giveaways and sweepstakes are just a useful marketing tool.

So even if this is not your business, Oh, by the way, I just went, I just went through

it.

I just went through the funnel while we were talking.

Yeah.

So by getting halfway through the scholarship flow, I earned 50 bold points.

And then you can get five more bold points for signing up for this.

You can get 10 more bold points for doing this.

And how big is this bold thing?

Bold.org.

Like the, like how big is this business?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, they never told me the revenue.

Well, I think a pretty baller business.

I imagine it's very, very, very proud.

If you told me it made half a million to a million a month in profit, I wouldn't be surprised.

This is like somebody who has a black belt in the internet.

They're like, ah, here's what that's this guy, Dennis, man.

This guy, feel good, feel good story on the front end, dope, lucrative business model

in the back end.

Right.

I love, I love this.

This is clear.

This is the internet black belt.

Yeah.

It's, it's amazing.

This is an, it's an amazing thing.

And I wanted to, I just had to bring this up because this is one thing like this doesn't

sound sexy.

Right.

This doesn't sound like, like, oh, I want to do this when I get older, but it just makes

loads and loads of money.

Another one is omaze.

Oh, M-A-Z-E.

Have you heard of that?

Yeah.

That's like a, it's like a platform to do raffles and whatnot.

Right.

Yes.

But they act like it's a charity thing.

So it's like, like Snoop Dogg's going to give away a car and all the money or like some

of the money goes to charity or something like that.

In reality, omaze gets their cut in the same way that I've just outlined the three business

models.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

I feel like we could do an even deeper dive on this because I feel like you just touched

on like 10 interesting things that, uh, that we should probably like, I feel like we should

do a separate episode.

All like kind of like the deep dive into this sweepstakes giveaway thing.

I bet that would go pretty viral, honestly.

And I'm going through the, the, the bold flow.

They ask so many questions.

Like what's your estimated current annual income?

What's your dream?

Like what job do you want to have?

How much money do you want to make?

Uh, how many, how, I mean, they ask so many questions.

I asked you for money right now.

Would you say yes?

Yes.

Okay.

Great.

So like basically what they're doing is they're getting like crazy amounts of quality.

It's all about enriched, enriched lists basically.

Yes.

And this is crazy.

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All right.

All right.

I got another one.

Have you seen this company, Nugs?

Yeah.

They changed their name, though.

Yeah.

Well, I think they have like a parent company and then the product is called Nugs.

So the product, the parent company is called Simulate, I think.

And that's because they're basically simulating real meat.

And so Nugs is one of, it fits into this category of like alt meats or fake meats.

So you have Beyond Meat.

You have the Impossible Burger.

What Nugs is doing is Nugs is chicken nuggets.

Oh, by the way, they changed the product's name is different.

What's it called now?

Oh, really?

It's not called Nugs.

I just Googled Nugs.

I can't even find it.

I think it's so-called that.

It's Nugs with two G's.

No, dude.

So if you go to Simulate.com, you'll see the product and basically it says the Tesla of

chicken.

Oh my God.

And so you can see that the, like if you go to their, go to Simulate.com slash Nugs.

That says the original Nugs, $45 for a box and this 50, for two boxes and this 50 pieces

per box.

So basically 45 bucks for a hundred nuggets and they have two flavors.

There's original and spicy and their landing page is like kind of like cheeky.

Like the, instead of saying it's good for you, it says kills you slower, higher in protein

and lower in fat than animal based nuggets.

You know, you can get this fast.

Here you go.

So they started as a kind of like a D to C brand type of thing.

But I think either during COVID or before COVID, they switched to basically just selling

to retail.

And so I saw them because they raised $50 million recently, like a month ago or something

like that.

And the guy who's behind this is this guy.

He's a young guy, Ben Pasternak.

And this guy is pretty clever.

So he's, he was really young.

He, I think when he was 18 or 19, he had built this app called monkey.

I don't know if you ever saw it.

Like it was kind of chat roulette, but for your iPhone, so you'd get on there and you'd

randomly match you in a video chat with somebody else and then you could like skip to somebody

else.

And I saw this because I was like, Oh, that's kind of clever.

Like, I don't think it's going to work, but like, I like the branding.

I like that this guy was able to like kind of game the app store charts or he was climbing

the charts, but you could tell this wasn't a sticky product.

So I've, you know, reached out to him, had a chat, seemed super smart guy.

How long ago was this maybe five, six years ago?

So he might be 20, I don't know, he might be 21, 22 now.

He was like 17 at the time, something like that.

I don't know.

Somewhere around that range.

He was like 17 or 18.

And I remember just thinking, wow, this kid's like a superstar or the future superstar.

I gave him the highest compliment I could give him, which is I didn't even recruit him.

I was like, you know what, you're better than me.

You're ready to just do this on your own.

Like don't, don't even waste the time coming and working inside my thing.

Like if we work together, we build one company.

If we're apart, you're going to build two companies.

But I really liked the guy and it reminded me of this question.

So I actually don't even really want to talk about the fake chicken nuggets thing, although

good market to be in, I would say.

The part that I think was interesting is like, I meet a lot of people like this who are like

clearly special, going to do big things.

It's probably not their first app.

Like it's probably not monkey, but it's probably nugs.

It's probably their second or third attempt that's going to hit.

And it got me thinking like, could you basically as a founder, like buying option, could you

buy options?

Could you buy future contracts on founders?

And what does this mean?

So most people, when they think of this, they think ISAs, oh, it's income share agreement.

I'm not even saying that.

I'm saying there's, it's, it's that juicy of a market of founders like this that you

could actually just sell the right to invest in my next thing because, because otherwise

it's hard to even just keep tabs on people.

You don't know when they're pivoting.

You don't know when they have a new idea.

You don't know when they're launching.

And you're like, dude, I believe in you.

If you were just going to start a new startup, I'm in for 25K.

Like no questions asked.

Just put me in the pre-seed round.

So it's like the lower valuation of the, of the others.

So I think I would have paid 10 grand just for the option to invest in this guy's next

company over the next five years, right?

So I think, you know, 10 grand, 25 grand, I think you could sell to investors.

I think you could sell to investors just the right of first refusal basically to invest

in my future company.

It's not equity.

It's not an income share agreement.

I don't even have to start another company.

But I think, I think real investors would basically have a budget of maybe single digit

millions of dollars where there's just placing options, there's just buying option contracts

on like high performers they see in the tech industry to say, Hey, next time you start

your thing, I get the first dibs at investing.

So this is something I'm looking this up.

So I, I think it was, it was either Jerry Seinfeld or Joe Brogan was talking about the

90s and TV and I believe they were telling a story about Roseanne and how basically they're

like, it was the golden age of TV because even though the content nowadays is probably

better, but basically if you wrote like an okay script or just a pilot or a screenplay,

a company would pay you a quarter of a million dollars a year.

And the only thing that you had to do was not do it like they bought the option and

they'd be like, yeah, sometimes we would, they would just buy the option and we would

never even do it.

So I was just getting like a quarter of a million dollar a year salary for three years

and the roles will just don't do anything.

Right.

It's like a retainer or like kind of like a, it's like a, it's almost like an advance

on a book deal in a way.

And I don't actually know, I know nothing about Hollywood and I don't know if that

still exists.

Of course it does, but I think it was more common then when cable company or when cable

is crushing, but I think this is actually a fantastic idea.

And basically it would be like, I have the option, let's see, how would it work anytime

you raise money or anytime you own more than 50% of a entity, I get, I get the, I get first

driver refusal.

I think it's a really, really great idea.

Yeah.

Like I don't know how the math works exactly, but I can sort of see like it turns entrepreneurship

into a job and it gives you a floor.

So let's say like, I think if I did this, I think if I went and I said, Hey, you know,

Hey, I left my job at Twitch, by the way, I, as of today, officially and no longer and

no longer employed.

I'm a free, free man.

Congratulations.

I wasn't sure when we were going to bring that up.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if I was basically like, Hey, I don't know when I'm going to start my next company,

but you know, if anybody's interested, here's a place where you could go, here's a website

you can go to and you can basically buy a future option on being in the pre seed round.

So let's say I'm selling slots for, I don't know, 15 K a pop.

So 15 K for your right to invest in my next round.

And I basically sent that to every VC or every seed fund I know.

I think I could probably get 10 people to opt into that.

They'd say, cool, I'll give you 10 K right now, I'll give you 15 K right now.

And in the next 18 months, I'm going to be thinking about a business.

And then when I'm ready, you get the first steps and you know, the round might be like

a $3 million round and you get to invest in this.

And so I get 150 K floor to go do my search for my next business.

And they get, they get, they get the guaranteed locked in deal flow.

And I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I'm underpricing it.

Maybe it could be more, or maybe it's an annual thing.

I'm not sure, but like, I'm pretty sure out of a fund, you know, they would allocate

a few hundred thousand dollars to placing bets on 25 founders that they're like, yeah,

I'll, I'll be in your next round.

Can you also do this?

So, uh, did you pay attention to what happened with the NCAA today?

No, what happened?

So I, I wish that you would have, because I don't actually know the full details.

Uh, but I, yeah, me neither, uh, uh, the, the Supreme court basically, well, I know

what happened.

So the Supreme court, here's the headline, the Supreme court unanimously sides with former

college players and dispute with NCAA about compensation.

So basically, uh, I, I don't know if there was any firm rules, but basically, um, the

doors now open for how NCAA athletes can make money.

And when I think of options, I mean, I definitely think, uh, athletes are the best.

Yes, definitely.

So, yeah.

So, so basically the thing here's, here's what I'm reading here.

It says the unanimously ruled that the current cap on education related benefits such as

scholarships, graduate school, musical instruments, tutoring violates federal antitrust laws

and must be lifted.

So that means that this is just for, uh, there was limits on how much you can be compensated

for, you know, tuition, room and board, stuff like that.

Um, so that's lifted, but it's not yet salaries for athletes, but that's coming because they've

also passed the, there's also been a rule passed around the athlete themselves being

able to monetize their name and likeness.

You know, like, I'm in a, I'm in a college town in North Carolina.

Well, the local car dealership can like use my name and face on their ads and I can make

money from it.

Um, you know, things like that, that's, that's what's coming.

So I think there's definitely a big opportunity there, uh, just in general.

Yeah.

So here we are.

Future contracts.

Yeah.

I'm on board.

I think it's great.

Okay.

Cool.

I don't have anything else to say except great.

Last topic.

I want to give you some predictions.

Um, so I've been thinking about this and I think you're bold for doing this, by the

way, you're making it very easy to look stupid.

Well, that's the beauty of predictions.

It's like, uh, uh, you know, the best predictions, I think most predictions, even when you're

wrong, people forget unless you just got Galloway, uh, you know, when you're small, when you're

small, you should make predictions because, uh, the cost of being wrong is very low,

but the cost of being right.

All of a sudden you're the guy who called it, um, you know, like, uh, it's like my clubhouse

thread.

Like as that gets proven rights, then it'll be like, oh, he called it.

But if I was already big, then if I was wrong, it would be like, kind of like everybody would

be waiting to rub it in my face.

Um, okay.

So let me get, let me run you through what I think the next, um,

when did you come up with these, is this like some Twitter thread you're going to do?

Yeah, I'm going to do it as a thread, but I was just one day, so I could see the timestamp

on this, 1127 PM.

So this is the type of shit I think about at midnight.

Um, and I started typing on my phone and I said, I said, okay, what's Apple becoming?

Cause I see Apple, Apple shifting into like health in a pretty big way with these like

wearable devices.

And so let's just say Apple, which today the core benefit is they give you this ultra

personal device.

You're a little personal supercomputer that's going to help you with life.

So I don't think the next Apple is a phone company.

I think the next Apple, the next Apple, which is going to be a trillion dollar company that

has, uh, that's gives you kind of like a consumer device.

I think it's going to be a healthcare monitor.

I think it's going to be something that is going to be measuring what's going on inside

your body and feeding that data back to you.

And so that's my, that's my prediction.

The next, what the next Apple looks like, not a phone company healthcare monitoring device.

Next Facebook.

Okay.

I think Facebook is an app.

It's a social network.

It's where you go right on a news feed or you post photos.

I think Facebook, the core of Facebook, the guts of Facebook is basically cameras.

It's content sharing.

So it's basically photo taking or video taking and sharing with people who you care, who

you want to share that stuff with.

And that's why Instagram is something they own WhatsApp, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I think the next Facebook is not going to be an app.

It's not going to be another social network.

It's going to be some kind of hands-free always on camera.

So it's going to be something you wear, either glasses or a lapel or something, a fucking

drone that's floating above you at all times.

I don't know what it is.

Probably glasses cause it's at your eye level.

And it's going to be basically like a super memory.

So it's going to let you capture photos and videos of whatever you're looking at, hands

free and instantaneously.

And then once you've captured it, be able to share that or save that as like a super

memory for yourself or with any friends.

And so I think anybody who's trying to create the next Facebook, you're not creating an

app where you add friends.

You should be creating a hands-free camera that makes it way easier to capture content

and you'll bypass Facebook altogether because that cap, that place where you capture content

will just be for sharing similar to a Snapchat attack Facebook.

Snapchat made an app that when you open it, the camera's on right away and you take the

photo first and then you just share that photo with somebody.

So they skipped the whole Facebook process.

So I think that's what the next Facebook as a hands-free always on camera.

Next, Amazon.

This one's stolen from Mark Laurie.

Next, Amazon.

So Amazon, a place to shop.

It's not going to be a website where you type in a word and then you get 5,000 images

as a result and then you got to sort through them.

The next Amazon is conversational shopping in your house.

It's just saying what you need and having something go get it for you.

So basically it's just saying, hey, we need more P-pads for the dog and it says, you want

the same ones as last time?

I say, yes.

And then it's boom, it's ordered.

Right?

I didn't have to type anything in.

I didn't have to enter a credit card.

It's all on file and it's just a hands-free voice assistant that helps me shop for things.

And when I don't know what it is, I could say, hey, I need the best camera for my webcam

and it could say something like, do you want the ones that most of the YouTubers use?

Do you want the ones your friends bought the most?

Or do you want the one that's the best value or the highest price?

And I'm like, ah, what do my friends have?

Sam has this one.

Would you like to ask him how it is?

Yes.

And then Sam and then Sam says, it's amazing.

And then I buy the thing.

Right?

Conversational commerce, something like that.

That's the future.

That's the next Amazon.

Next Netflix.

Okay.

Netflix.

Wait, you skipped over 7-Eleven.

Oh, I'm going to do 7-Eleven too.

Okay.

7-Eleven.

The next 7-Eleven.

What is 7-Eleven?

It's a corner store that has like, it's a little local convenience store.

This one's easy.

This one is, it's a cloud corner store, so you don't need a real location.

It's just going to be 500 square feet.

That's within one mile of you.

It might be in this back alley place.

It doesn't need a good location and it's going to deliver to you with small lightweight

drones.

So small little carrier drone going to bring you something within 15 minutes of ordering.

No human being involved.

And the whole 500 square foot place doesn't need good real estate and is going to be automated

so that, you know, when I push the button to order it, there's no human being in the

place.

It just pops out like a vending machine.

The drone takes it straight to me and it lands on a little landing pad that I have in

my front lawn for drone deliveries.

And as soon as it's there, I go outside, I pick it up.

Okay.

And then keep going.

I'm just listening.

I think this is fascinating.

I'm going to, I'm taking notes.

I'm going to tweet this just like as you're talking.

So I'm going to steal your cloud.

You're stealing my thread.

Okay.

Great.

All right.

The next Netflix, next Netflix, I think is going to be one of two things.

One is it's either in VR and it's more like, it's a hybrid.

It feels like a game.

So you put the headset on, you enter the world and then you walk around and you sort of experience

a movie.

Um, so it's either VR or, or cause I think I'm not sure about that one, um, or it's machine

generated movies, which is basically something personalized to you.

So right now a movie is like a really specific story that gets filmed, edited, produced,

has actors, blah, blah, blah.

I think you might be able to just sit down and be like, I want something that's like

breaking bad, but with casinos.

And then it just generates, it just machine generates a, a movie for you, uh, based off

of basically it's like a mashup.

And you've seen this with music.

So Google released this thing called composer or whatever.

It's like this AI that basically writes classical music.

That sounds like it's made by Bach and Mozart.

And, um, and it's basically just, it's just taking all the stuff that exists out there.

It studies it.

And then it creates remixes and mashups of all those things in a way that's maybe it

could be one time.

It's like, I get this thing and it's like a one time movie for me.

Um, that can be kind of crazy.

Remember that band, remember that band girl talk?

Yeah.

Mashups.

Exactly.

I used to love those things, man.

I still work out to that.

That's my go-to for work.

Same.

I love that too.

It was like feed the animal or something like that.

Yeah.

That's a great track.

Yeah.

I love that shit.

I'm on board.

So similarly, uh, the next porn hub is not a website you go to and you see a bunch of

like pre-made porn movies.

I think it's all deep fakes.

So I think you just go in there and you just have a fantasy.

So you put on your VR device and you just think of something you want to see.

You think, oh, uh, Mila Kunis, um, she's my waitress go.

And like it basically deep fakes a porno for you with Mila Kunis's face on it.

If you don't know what a deep fake is, it's a, um, it's a computer generated movie where

the, like the actor on the screen was never there.

Like it'll make Obama look like Obama's, you can make Obama go to a baseball game and

pee in the crowd, right?

Because, uh, it could just take any video that put Obama's head on it and it looks real.

That's why it's scary.

Yeah.

Deep fakes are scary, uh, for many reasons.

You're not going to be able to trust video anymore because I agree.

Video can be faked just like any photo can be photoshopped.

Any video can be video shopped now.

Um, all right.

Last one, uh, the next dominoes.

So the next pizza company is going to be a fleet of self-driving cars that are just going

around that have an oven baked in the, in the trunk.

So, um, your food is going to be baked fresh.

It's going to arrive to you with a driverless car and you're going to hop out, uh, you're

going to come out to the front.

You're going to meet the car, uh, and the, it's going to pop up at the trunk and there's

going to be a pizza that was baked during the drive time for you.

Basically like a, like a, like a mobile food truck type or like a food truck that, which

by the way, when our friend, our friend Gagan launched this company called sprig.

I think it was only in San Francisco or maybe San Francisco in Chicago and he raised $60

million, all this money.

He launched it early though, 2014.

And that was what he goes.

I want to have ovens in the car.

That's the future.

And I actually think he was right.

I just think that it was a little early.

Totally true.

Uh, this guy, David Langer, he started Zesty.

It was like a food catering company that was like super fast growing at a time.

And I asked him, I go, oh yeah, what do you think of, what do you think of food delivery?

It seems hot.

He goes, he just jumped straight to the end.

He goes, yeah, the, the, and then the end answer is cars with ovens in the trunk.

Um, it's really the only solution that's going to work.

Like at mass, that will replace like kind of like the whole, uh, infrastructure that exists

today is when you can get the food to be baked in the car and kept hot in the car and ready

hot coming out of the car.

And when you do that, there's, it also reduces the delivery time because you're not going

to a brick and mortar place, loading the food into the car and then driving to a place.

You're just constantly circling around an area.

And as you get an order, you pop the thing into bake and then when it's ready, you're

at the door.

So there was zero lag time.

So deliveries get faster and fresher.

So this is my segment of basically Sean time travels to the future because if you think

about it, right, I'm born in 1988, not that long ago, 88 to like 96 or 97, like I remember

that time.

Michael Jordan was like winning championships during that time.

There was for the average person, there was no internet or we were just doing, just getting

like AOL chat rooms and shit like that.

Right.

I was putting AOL CDs into the computer that was in my computer room because the computer

house had one computer.

Right.

Yeah.

We all had computer rooms.

Remember that computer rooms exactly.

And so then like that sort of changed over time.

It's like, oh, computer rooms become laptops, laptops become phones.

Phones have frigging like HD video streaming live, you know, basketball games from the

internet now to my phone and I'm watching that while I'm in my car.

Like that seemed absurd.

I remember actually even the first time I saw someone reading on their phone and I used

to have like a Nokia, you know, like the old phone that had snake on it and I was just

like, what, reading on your phone, who would want to do that?

Like the text is so small and so shitty.

Like who would ever watch a video on their phone or who could type who could like when

they just had nine or ten, ten, ten buttons and you had to like click three times, you

know, their letter.

Yeah.

What was that thing called or you had to like, it's like smarter text or some shit like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it would auto fill.

Yeah.

I was like, but that seems so far fetched.

And that was in that was not that long ago.

Like I was like, that was like 20 years ago.

And so in 20 years, I kind of some amazing things have happened.

And so if I fast forward 20 years, these things that today sound far fetched, it's like, that's

going to happen because it's the consumer benefit is there.

You know, if the delivery is faster and fresher, people are going to do that, right?

If shopping gets easier and I don't have to search and read and be at a computer, I just

say what I want when I want it and I get it.

Like, you know, I get it in less than an hour.

That was the part I forgot to say it was that prime two day delivery is going to seem like

incredibly slow.

Like ordering everything from Amazon is going to be just as fast today as today.

Ordering DoorDash is going to be it'll be here in 45 minutes.

Oh, you need an HDMI cable here pushes button.

It's here at 40 minutes delivered via drone.

And so yeah, I think that's what the future looks like.

So that's my time traveler section.

What do you think?

Which one did you think I was most on or off about your?

I think you're most on about Apple.

I think you're most off on.

So I gave you Facebook, the hands free camera.

I'm looking at it now.

Yeah, I have all the notes.

I think you're on about Apple.

I think Amazon, you're not totally right.

Facebook was what was Facebook?

The hands free always on camera instant capture of anything that's going on your world.

You don't need.

Yeah, I think you're wrong actually about that.

I think there's a world where we go in reverse and we get less tech driven and people want

less contact with people.

I think I think it could go the other way.

So I think you're wrong about that.

I think you're totally right about Apple 7 11.

I think you're right.

Netflix.

I actually think you're right.

Pornhub.

I think you're right.

Domino's.

I think you're right.

I think I'm right on all of them, bro.

I think I got them all right.

It's just a question.

The great quote is don't confuse a clear view for a short distance.

I love that quote.

That's like one of my, what's that mean?

Like imagine you see something on the, you're driving.

You see something on the horizon.

It's like, oh, there it is.

Just because you see it doesn't mean you're near it, right?

Objects in the front view are maybe further than they, than they appear.

And that's what often happens with the future is you can kind of see what the world's going

to do and what it's going to look like, but you overestimate how soon it's going to come

and then you get sort of disillusioned and then eventually show up, you know?

I think, I think it'll be capable of that.

I think the thing is, is what I've learned reading history is that typically repeats

itself or like what's, what's old becomes new and what's new becomes old and it goes

back and forth.

Like when we were, now that, you know, people our age and young, a little bit younger are

always connected, I think it's going to go the opposite that they're going to be one,

they're going to want a less connection.

You know, that's why motels, like motels in America are booming right now because it's

like nostalgia and it's interesting again.

And so I, I do think that the pendulum does swing, but I don't know, I think both happen

at the same time.

I think that the world on demand and more digital and then people create physical experiences

and both exist at the same time.

It's sort of like the clear view, short distancing, a great example of this is like Webvan, you

know, year 2000, it's like, oh, grocery delivery online.

What if you could buy your groceries online instead of through a store and then it like

gets all this hype and then it crashes and then for like 20 years, nobody, nobody really

touches this.

Nobody really tries this again.

And then, and then here we are with Instacart is a multi-billion dollar company taking

that same idea, but putting it in a fresh way with new tech tools and technology like

mobile phones.

Yeah, I, I, I'm on board with a lot of that.

All right.

We should call it here.

And yeah.

All right.

That's the end of the episode.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.