My First Million: #47 - Robot Lawyers, Pay to Lose Weight & Prudent vs. Wild Card Managers

Hubspot Podcast Network Hubspot Podcast Network 2/20/20 - Episode Page - 1h 5m - PDF Transcript

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 hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a 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.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to 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.

This is Million Dollar Brainstormer.

We talk about an idea where you get revenge against spammers.

A new weight loss challenge business that Sean and I are trying out, as well as looking

at a $12,000 a month chest tutoring company and how we think you can blow it up.

We talk about Charlie Munger throwing a little shade at Elon Musk and people who collect

super strange and niche items, but it's somehow built an $800 million a year company.

Spoiler, Sam is one of those collectors.

And lastly, we tell a little fun story about Rupert Murdoch.

All right.

Million Dollar Brainstormer, enjoy.

So what do we think is the best way to get more review or more downloads, which is our

goal?

Subscribe.

So subscribe.

Basically, A, tell your friends, be like, yo, there's the best business podcast out

there.

And B, if you go in iTunes and subscribe, that spikes us in the chart.

So some people like to unsubscribe and then resubscribe because that creates the, like

the chart say, oh, there's more subscribers today.

Yeah.

I think that's the barstool trick.

So subscribe, then unsubscribe and then resubscribe.

Just do that a ton of times because here's the deal.

If Sean and I don't get to 100,000 listeners per episode in the next weeks or months, we're

going to start charging for this podcast.

Yeah.

Or we just get so bored.

We're like impatient.

We're too impatient to wait.

No.

We're going to make it so you have to pay money to listen.

That's going to happen.

So you want to start talking about some ideas.

First of all, I think we should start with this, the Twitter weight loss thing.

We should start with that.

That's pretty interesting.

Did you sign up for it?

I signed up.

I just ate a big old plate of veggies just now because now, because I'm like, oh shit,

this is starting.

So explain what this is.

Okay.

So with the camera, you predict this happens a lot, but you get self-conscious.

But also, we are both trying to lose weight.

Our friend Justin is doing a thing where we have Venmo, did you do Venmo him money?

So he tweeted out, hey, I got to experiment for weight loss 30 days.

If you want in, let me know.

And you had to Venmo him 800 bucks.

I did.

No, just did it right away.

Just to pot commit myself into it.

And then he's going to send us a blood glucose monitor that stays in you for 28 days, 20

days.

And basically the way it works is he's going to send a nutrition plan and like a eating

plan.

But if you, and if you stick to it, you'll be fine.

But what problem is most people don't stick to it.

So here's how it's going to work.

If your blood glucose levels go out of the range, like the healthy range, the weight

loss range that he's going to prescribe for us.

So first thing to monitor your baseline, then he's going to say, okay, cool, here's

the range I want you to stay in.

If you stay in that range for the day, he Venmo's you back 25 bucks for the day.

And if you don't, he keeps your money.

I love it.

And he is doing this in a way where he's buying all of our monitors, yes, which typically

cost I think $300, 400 bucks.

If we stick to it, by the end of this challenge, we've paid $100.

We've lost a bunch of weight and we got paid back all our money.

If you stick to it, if you don't see it, so we're giving him 100 bucks.

It's 100 bucks.

If you, if you, if you do it to the letter of the law, you get this $400 device for $100

and you lost your weight.

I love it.

Sick deal.

And we should explain who he is.

He's the founder of this thing called Kettle and Fire.

He also, I think is one of the founders of Perfect Keto.

Yeah.

So two Keto products basically.

Yeah.

And I have no idea, but I imagine his businesses collectively earn the 50 or $60 million revenue

range.

So like he sees a lot of, he says he's at 100 million plus run rate for his two products

for Kettle and Fire and Perfect Keto.

Where did he say that?

He found his website.

Oh.

Good for him.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

Which is pretty crazy for a Keto product.

Yeah.

So it sounds like he's thinking of a new business.

Yeah.

Go ahead and copy that.

Yeah.

So I like it.

So what we'll do is when we get the device, we'll just shout out our blood glucose levels

during the show.

I'm doing it.

I also use my body tutor where I take pictures of everything I eat and I send it to my, so

I ate that donut.

Just now I'm going to have to send that to them and they're going to shame me.

I can send it.

You ate it.

Well, there's some more out there.

I'll take a picture of it.

Okay.

But all I've eaten today is a donut and an orange.

I'm good.

All right.

Cool weight loss idea.

I like it.

Justin Meyers, good stuff.

Okay.

What else do you have?

Okay.

So last episode, we had your buddy here and he told me about this thing where he had invested

in the company that's doing drone window washing.

Yes.

I thought that was crazy fascinating and I went and researched it a bunch.

There's another competitor that's raised money and drones, I don't think I have the right

words to describe it because when I think of drones, I think of like a quadcopter.

These are things that like they look like the normal.

So when you're pulling up the scaffolding or when you're pulling up like the, what do

you call it?

It's like an elevator.

Yeah.

An elevator up and the guys are standing on it and wiping.

It looks like that, but there's a robot on there that is doing it instead of people.

Right.

So it's not flying you're saying.

It's not flying.

Yeah.

Why do they call it a drone then?

Because technically it is a robot.

Drone means on our unmanned vehicle, I think.

Okay.

So technically they're right.

And so another company called Sky, I forget what it's called.

They raised three million to do this.

And so this morning, what I did yesterday morning is I went to, I Googled Manhattan skyscraper

window cleaners and I found like the top three, four people and I called them today to talk

to them and I got, and I was talking to them and they're going to call me back.

So it's some more details, but my takeaway from this industry is incredibly segmented.

So like fragmented, like small, like 10 to $20 million businesses and there's probably

five or 10 of them in New York.

So it's like the guy, Brian from 100 Got Junk, right?

This is how the hauling business was.

And you know, before he sort of started aggregating all these small fragmented local players.

And you've always had this thesis, which is you could do the 1-800 Got Junk model for

other businesses.

Yeah.

So I would do it for irrigation, for lawn mowing, for painting, which is already happening,

and for landscaping.

Right.

And it sounds like window washing is in that vein.

Yeah.

So maybe you don't even need these freaking drones to do it, but that's definitely a cool

shtick.

So the private equity play is you go, you buy up these businesses, they have a book of business,

they do recurring revenue probably with the same buildings.

And you say, okay, I'm going to buy this $5 million dollar a year business for 8 million

or 10 million, 10 million bucks.

Or you do smaller ones, you buy a bunch of $1 million a year businesses.

And then you could bring in this technology to increase the efficiency.

So they're getting 50% margin, you could get 70%.

And there's two playbooks to look at if you want to replicate this.

The first is dentuses.

So PE right now is gobbling up dentuses.

Dentistry.

Dentists.

They have friends who are doing this.

I think we have like three, is like C.A.V.A looking to doing it.

And then like two other guys, I think we know.

They love it.

And so what they do is they find a dentist that does 2 million a year in revenue and

they buy the company.

And he's like 60, ready to retire in a few years.

And they buy it for maybe if it's like a $3 million revenue thing, they probably buy

it for like a million dollars.

Yeah.

Basically they'll buy it at like one, I think one to two X EBRA, which is crazy.

Yeah.

So they pay back your money in a year or two.

Yeah.

So they buy it for the dentist's salary.

Right.

Times two.

And they give him, you know, you still keep this little piece and you keep getting your

salary, but you don't have to run this business anymore in the sort of all the administration,

marketing, and they centralize it.

So they'll go buy 10 of these dentistry.

And then they'll put, they'll be like, okay, we'll have one central office that's doing

Facebook ads, driving traffic to all these.

We'll bring all your billing stuff into one central place because why do you need four

people doing billing because health insurance is, you know, all complicated.

And so they centralize, which makes each one more efficient.

And basically the dentist is already playing golf two days or three days a week.

And they're like, look, here's a, you know, accelerated retirement for you.

And the goal here is you just, you kind of become a little bit of a, just a marketing

company.

Right.

And so we're-

We missed the punchline though.

A couple of these rollups, I think like in Canada, 70% of dentists, you know, numbers

wrong, but something like that, a huge percentage of all the dentist's office have been rolled

up now in Canada.

And a couple of them have been taken public the rollups for $3 billion.

Name them.

I don't know the names.

Okay.

Well, that's not-

Look it up.

Yeah.

Cause I'm, cause-

Henry, if you want to Google dentistry, rollup, Canada goes public.

I would do that.

And then the other model that you can look at for this is old people homes, nursing homes,

like so many people.

I mean, this is like-

So my wife's dad owns three senior care facilities.

Yeah.

And so I was looking into this cause I was like, wow, this thing is a cash cow.

And um-

I think it's soul crushing.

That's the problem with it.

Cause he was like, hey, you guys want to take this over?

And we were just like, oh, the money's there.

But like-

It sucks.

I don't want this to be like my life, you know, like, I think in general people want

to avoid nursing homes at all costs.

And so getting into it earlier than you need to was painful, but he's making money doing

it.

Yeah.

Like a million dollars.

It depends on the size.

So basically the model is you go and you, um, you can buy an existing nursing home.

But what he looks for is he says, okay, this is an existing nursing home.

It's got 28 beds, but it's permitted for 42.

And so he'll either just buy it and he'll build out the other beds.

And so, and then the other thing is he'll buy things that are motels today.

So motel, the room or the bed might rent for like, I don't know, $150 a night.

And so that becomes, let's call it four grand, you know, ish a month.

And what he does is for, for senior care, you're charging seven grand, eight grand here in

California for each bed and you can put two beds in a room and then you could do memory

care, especially, you know, dementia ward on the bottom and that's like 12 grand.

And so-

So you just put all the bullshit upsells into it.

The problem is, is that your upsell is a dementia ward, you know?

So it's like, all right, clearly a lot of money can be made.

You are definitely providing valuable service to people.

Yeah.

You're not scamming people.

We're not scamming people.

It's, but it is a, it's a, it's a saddening business to be in.

Yeah.

And so for these, so we're, we're getting off track, but let's go.

So my father-in-law owns a moving company in New York and it's a medium, middle, medium

sized business and it's done the same amount of like, let's say, let's just say some number

between 10 and 30 million in sales every single year and real profitable.

I go, well, how do you make this bigger?

He goes, I'd have to buy everyone out and I don't feel like doing it.

I got a good life.

And so I would, you could do that for these window things.

And if I was one of these drone window companies, I would look into doing that.

That's what you would do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You wouldn't necessarily go the, oh, raise VC and try to build this organically.

This is more of you take, you know, you take some capital and you start rolling up these

businesses and then you already have technology for efficiency.

Yeah.

But I know people who did this, a bunch of my friends from nationals were just these

scam artists and they would do this for the locksmith industry.

They would do what?

And so, so when you roll up, the reason you roll up a company is because you want to get

efficient operations.

Another thing you want to do is you want to like centralize marketing and so basically

if you own 20 different businesses, you want to be dishing off leads to them so they constantly

have new business coming in.

Right.

You know, the trends, we're running a report on hotels, Brad, is that going to go live

next week?

The hotel thing?

Okay.

So we're going to have a thing.

This is what Hilton does.

So they franchise out the hotels.

Right.

Everyone knows the Hilton brand.

Centralize the marketing.

Yes.

You central, everyone knows Hilton.

They buy all the ads everywhere.

You go to Hilton.com, book a hotel.

Then they dish it off to their franchisees.

So that's what, what was I talking about?

Our locksmiths.

That's what locksmiths do in Nashville.

But what was scammy about it?

Or you're just saying these guys in general are scammy.

Scammy about it is because they could rank really easily for Nashville locksmiths and

they don't give you the price.

And then when they get there, they just see how much money they can get out of you.

Gotcha.

And then the locksmith who's like typically where I live, they're all Israelis.

So they all knew each other from Israel and they would come over and they would be like,

they would go to your house.

And you're in a pinch.

Yeah.

Clearly.

And it seems like the top 10, you read reviews.

You're like, the reviews in this one are only okay.

The reviews of this one are kind of good.

It's all the same company.

And they're all the same.

My friend owned it.

And they would all, it was all the same.

And then they wouldn't really tell you how much the price is.

And then you'd get there and they'd be like, all right, I bet you I can get 200 bucks.

And so they would charge the lady, the customer $200 and then they would give the owner just

like 20 or $30.

Right.

And so the owner was just a lead gem machine.

That's so funny.

When my sister had a baby and we, the baby was at a party and we put the baby to sleep

in this room.

It was like in this, like the bassinet or whatever.

And we closed the door so that it wouldn't be too much noise.

Door gets locked, baby's inside, baby wakes up, starts crying.

We realized the door's locked.

Pretty panicking moment.

Did you break the window or call someone?

So called locksmith right away.

In the Israeli?

I don't know if there's really.

It's an Israeli thing.

This is in Francisco.

So maybe not, maybe not as much, but maybe it was.

Person shows up.

It's like, this is like, we're indoors.

We're not, this is not like your front door, like complicated lock.

It's like a bedroom door knob.

And they're like $400.

And we were like, no fucking way.

And then they were like, no chance.

Well, if they were like, well, it's $400, I can hear a baby crying inside, don't you

want to get, and we were like, you know, just out of principle, like no.

And then we just busted down the door with our shoulder and like got in because that

was just outrageous.

No, it was, uh, it was a good friend of mine did this and he was from Israel and he told

me he was, yeah, for some reason, like it's a trade back in Israel.

And so we'll come here and then we get all of our friends to come here and we just dominate

the market.

Right.

It's like Indians and motels.

There's, it's not even Indians.

There's a specific group of Indians who last name is all Patel, Pakistani Indian and Indians

love hot motels.

I think Indians own 70 or 80% of all motels and Dunkin Donuts period.

And actually families with the last name Patel, all because they're like, they're sharing.

There's a book about this.

I know.

What are you?

All right.

So Dennis Dennis.

So there's a couple of companies that are big in this and currently only about 2% of

the companies of the dentist in Canada actually roll, get rolled up into these corporate.

So 98% of dentists.

There's a lot of opportunity, but there was, it started about four years ago where this

one company called the dental corporation of Canada.

I heard about this dental corporation in Canada.

That's, that's the, they've got like 160 practices that they rolled up.

And they, what they, there's a law that makes the dentist, the dentist actually still has

to have the practice registered in their name, but then that allows dentists to make even

more money, but these corporate players come in and roll up.

So dental corp has 168 dentists.

What was their revenue?

Doesn't say.

Are they public?

No.

There definitely was a $3 billion roll up that I remember looking into and then also

I believe BlackRock, Blackstone, one of those two, they were, they're heavy in this business

now as well.

Maybe tomorrow or Friday, let's have a roll up edition because I can list a whole bunch

of companies that have done this and I'm crazy.

So you're saying rather than half talking about it and half knowing it, we should, okay,

gotcha.

Okay.

Let's, let's move on and tomorrow we'll know everything about this industry.

Okay.

Quick break and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my Saturday morning routines.

So every Saturday I wake up in the morning and, you know, some people watch cartoons,

some people read the newspaper, some people check the mail, some people exercise.

I go to quietlightbrokerage.com and I check out what's for sale.

So if you don't know, quietlight is a platform where you can buy and sell online businesses.

So if you don't want to start something from scratch or you don't know if your idea is

any good, you can go on here and you can see ideas that are already proven, they're already

working to some extent and you can either sell your business or you can buy a business

off here and try to grow it and improve it.

And so if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, one of our most popular episodes

was with Ramon, Ramon Van Meer, who, you know, sold his soap opera blog, even though he'd

never watched a soap opera in his life.

He built one of the most popular soap opera blogs for 9 million in cash on this website.

He has bought multiple businesses off quietlight as well.

And we had Paul on here.

He sold his FBA business for seven figures on quietlight.

So it is a fantastic place to sell your business.

It's a fantastic place for me to look for businesses.

Like I'm on it right now and I see a kid's monthly subscription box.

This started in 2018, so it's fairly new, asking price is $149,000.

So you could buy this on a SBA loan.

You don't have to put too much money down.

And you know, it makes 50K a year in profit.

And there's ones that go all the way up to millions of dollars in profit per year.

So whether you're looking for something small or something big, quietlight's got a great

little selection.

And it's not just like everything that's for sale.

They curate and they qualify, only certain businesses get in and get on here.

And when you're interested in something, they have all the financials in a folder organized.

They have interviews with the founders that will tell you how they run their business,

how many hours a week they put in, that sort of thing.

Very good business.

All right.

So for any listeners for the podcast, they're offering a 25-point checklist to see how sellable

is your online business.

So if you have a business right now that's making money and you're interested, you would

love to sell it someday, check out this thing.

Check out what the 25-point checklist is to see how sellable your online business is.

To get the free guide, it's at quietlightbrokeridge.com slash myfirstmillion.

Again, that's quietlightbrokeridge.com slash myfirstmillion.

This zillion beers thing.

What happened?

What is this?

Okay.

So Barstool just put a clinic on how to do marketing right.

Okay.

So tell me the story.

I don't know.

I don't get what happened.

Barstool Sports.

We'll dumb it down.

Barstool Sports, media company, like ESPN or Bleach Report, but personality driven and

more ESPN after three beers.

Yeah.

It's just like comedy.

It's more, it's like SNL.

It's more comedy and fiction than it is whatever.

It's not journalism.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sometimes it is.

I mean, every once in a while they'll have something amazing, but yeah, no, it's, it's

just a bunch of like, it's for the average man, by the average man's with their tagline.

Okay.

They have a guy.

He's a camera guy.

Henry's a big fan.

So he knows you.

They have a guy, a camera guy named Dana.

Dana was getting made fun of one day, like 10 days ago for drinking too many beers.

And he said a line, like he tweeted out and he said some line like, I'm just a guy who

drinks a zillion beers.

And he starts like talking about zillion beers over the course of a day.

And his boss, Dave Portnoy, was like, dude, you're a camera man.

You're not a content guy.

Quit this zillion beer stuff.

Stop trying to make it a thing.

Stop trying to make it a thing.

And Dana goes, Dave, I bet you I can say.

I sell like $30,000 worth of zillion dollar beer merch.

And Dave goes, if you do that, I'll give you 10 grand or something like that.

And they blew past it.

Then after a few days of this going back and forth, it gets to the point of, if you sell

a million dollars worth of merch in the next five days, I'll give you a hundred grand.

Right.

He has, he hit it.

He crossed that.

He got 1.5 million.

And the, how long do you think that lasted?

So he created a brand essentially on the fly.

So he created a brand called zillion beers and in 10 days sold $1.6 million in merch.

And throughout this process, pretty much the way in which they sold merch was pretty much

all Twitter.

And so I was watching, like as a marketing person, I was looking at Dana went from having

a thousand followers on Twitter to whatever he has now, maybe 150,000 followers on Twitter

in 10 days.

And he would get into drought, like drought, like a fights like, so for example, he met

this girl on Twitter and she flew out and they started like talking about how they're

dating now, even though they just met.

And then the ex-boyfriend starts tweeting at him and he's like, all right, me and you,

we're going to get in a fight at rough and rowdy.

I put a hundred grand on the line and so that became a storyline.

There was like a dozen different story lines.

It was all just happening like a weekend basically.

Yeah.

And everyone was following it in real time.

I didn't go out on Valentine's Day because I was just refreshing Twitter and just like

reading about all of this.

It was amazing.

Yeah.

That is amazing.

I saw it happening.

I didn't understand the full backstory.

Yeah.

I saw it all happening.

Yeah.

I don't even drink beer and I bought $150 worth of zillion beer merch.

Yeah.

Just out of respect for what was going on.

I thought it was great.

To support the cause.

It's like a rowdy Kickstarter that he did.

I love it.

Yeah.

And so I think the takeaway here is like they barstool put on a clinic of like how fast

you can do stuff.

Yeah.

And people want to be a part of something.

And so it's one thing to just sell merch.

It's another thing to be a part of something, which is like, oh my God.

Once it gets the momentum of we're going for a million.

Holy shit.

We're going to do it.

My boss bet against me helped me beat the man.

I think it like it just caught this wave of it wasn't about the merch, obviously like

none of it was about the merch.

It was about putting it into Dave's face.

Right.

Oh, you doubted him.

We're all going to get behind him.

And this guy, Dane, the guy behind it, he's like a total bro, but he seems like a really

good person and it was fun watching him like be excited.

Watching him win.

Yeah.

And he put his Venmo out there and I Venmoed him like 50 bucks.

People Venmoed him money.

Collectively, he got like three grand and he went and blew it all out a fancy restaurant.

And it was funny seeing like a redneck eat at a steak restaurant in a minute.

Have you seen this guy, Mr. Beast?

Do you know who that is?

Love, Mr. Beast.

So if you don't know who Mr. Beast is, he's this YouTuber who's grown like crazy in the

last like 18 months, really.

He's new.

He's like a new guy, but he's blown past.

I don't know how many subscribers, but maybe tens of millions of subscribers now.

And his whole thing is he's just like, he just gives away money to people.

Well, like he does challenges, but like he's typically he'll give away cars.

So for example, he goes to a used car dealership and he buys 10 cars, which each car is probably

five or $10,000.

So maybe he's in 40 or 50 grand on this thing and people come to buy the car and he acts

like the salesman and the lady will be like, all right, this car looks good.

And he goes, okay, here, and he gives her the keys.

He goes, no, it's yours.

Right.

And they film it.

And they film it.

And it's the reaction.

It's kind of like that, like it has a feel good element to it because you see people

who are like, no way.

Like he'll go to a restaurant and leave a $2,000 tip on a $10 bill.

And they're like, people break down crying.

And then sometimes it's funny where he'll be like, he'll take four friends, he'll buy

a Lambo and be like, put your hand on this Lambo first person, last person to have their

hand on this Lambo keeps the Lambo.

And they just for two days straight, they just have their hand on this thing.

They're passing out and they, you know, he turns on YouTube content and he's brilliant

because he gets brands to pay for the whole thing.

So this one brand quid or quid or quid, it's not the toothbrush.

It's like this like stickers trading cards thing on online.

I think it's quid.

Quid has given this guy, you know, they'll just put up the 50K.

He does the challenge.

He shouts out quid and they're happy for it because their videos are getting like millions

of views.

And so it's way better branded content than usual.

And so he basically took brand money and parlayed it into being like huge, which is pretty

crazy.

Yeah.

And he even did a thing where he raised a hundred million, $20 million for trees.

Tremplanted trees.

And the founder of Shopify gave him a hundred or sorry, a million.

Elon gave a million.

Yeah.

And he raised $20 million in two weeks.

Yeah.

And I have a friend who talked to him on the phone the other day to do a campaign and

he was like,

What friend?

Jason.

So he was like, you know, talking to him and when he got off the phone, he's like, yeah,

I talked to Mr. Beast, really cool.

I talked to his agent or whatever.

And he described, he's like, you know, one weird thing happens, which is didn't plan

for this, you know, sort of success.

You get the success, but the YouTube game is such that you kind of need to top yourself

every time.

He's probably getting these off.

And so he's like, dude, the stress of like, okay, we gave away a Lambo through this like

crazy thing next week.

What do I do?

Like, okay.

And it's just this constant bar raising, which is really tough.

So when we first launched our company, I get a phone call from Elizabeth Murdoch.

You know who Elizabeth Murdoch is?

Rupert Murdoch's daughter.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's just a big shot.

And she was like, Hey, you guys want to do these videos?

I'm launching this new thing and I need video content.

And I was like, no, that's not what we're trying to do, but let's say friends and shoot the

shit.

And she goes, okay, well, I'll find someone else.

So she finds someone else to do it and they start a YouTube channel and that YouTube channel

is now called Yes Theory.

Have you heard of Yes Theory?

I've heard of it.

Yeah.

They got five or six million subscribers and I've become friends with them over the years

and they have a, I mean, they're like famous, they're like legit famous.

I have no idea if it's a good business, but I bet you they make, they could each pay themselves

a million dollars a year.

So pretty good for young people, pretty good for anyone.

And each week they're having to do crazy and crazy shit and they've had to do this for

three years now.

Every video is like, I went to the most remote island in the world by myself, right?

It's three guys now and they're like taking turns over doing crazy shit.

Like it's the crazy stuff was like, I asked my Uber driver if she wants to go to Paris

and we went straight to Paris and went there.

And now they're like doing variations of that.

It's like, oh my God, that shit's exhausting.

It's like if Jackass, if Steve-O and the Jackass crew had YouTube and like they would have

to do this every week.

Like we were just lucky that they were lucky that the cadence was like, you know, seasons

of TV or a movie because when it's weekly, it's just insane, which is why Casey Neistat

and Logan Paul, Jake Paul, all these guys, eventually they, you know, they do this daily

grind for so long, but they burn out.

Like the content burnout is crazy.

For sure.

It's not going to happen to us though.

Well, it's not going to happen to us.

We just sit and do nothing.

Imagine though like having to get on a plane and like, or like Logan Paul, you got to like

yell at someone.

Like go break up with a girlfriend every week.

You got to go box someone.

Yeah.

You got to like.

So I got a Rupert Murdoch story because he said Murdoch, I'm so impressed with this

dude.

So he gets a lot of hate because like his business practices and whatnot.

People think he's like a tyrant in a way.

He is.

And he is.

And like the show Succession is basically about their family.

Good show.

So we had this opportunity to pitch Rupert Murdoch.

So Michael, who's my investor, comes to me and says, hey, we got invited to this thing.

Basically every year during CES, Rupert Murdoch brings all the CEOs of his companies through

News Corp.

So they own Wall Street Journal, I think, or New York, New York Post, Fox and Sky and

then they own Penguin Publishing.

They own Realtor.com.

So he is the media mogul, right?

Like that's cool.

So basically once a year, they all get together as during CES, they go to the win and they

rent out the entire top floor of win.

And so all the rooms there are all the execs.

And they have the biggest suite, the penthouse suite of the win.

And what they do is, I really admire this, they go from 8 a.m. to about 7 p.m. every

single day for two days straight.

And every hour they just bring in a speaker, not like a speaker, it's like an industry

leader from something and they just grill them.

So it's like, you start by just telling me a little bit about your business and then

just 30 minutes of Q&A from the CEOs of all these companies because they're trying to

figure out, OK, how do we play into this?

So when I was there, it was like, literally CEO of Google, CEO of Slack, number three

guy at Facebook, just back to back to back.

The CEO of Google was the one getting grilled.

Yeah, he would go and he would explain, here's where we're going next year because these

are big media partners for them.

They want to have these media partners working with them.

So they'll say, here's where we're going next year.

But it's off the record, right?

They're more candid than you're ever going to get these guys.

And they told me, you can just come for your slot, this 45-minute slot.

But Rupert's here the whole day.

But I was like, I'm sitting here the whole day with my popcorn because we were going

to present at the end of the day.

And so we had access.

I just sat there at 8 a.m.

I'm there with my seat.

So here's what I noticed.

During the day, a lot of the CEOs, they'd be interested in certain people, but for the

most part, they get hungry, they go to the bathroom, Rupert Murdoch, I don't know how

old he is.

He's like, he looks old and he is old.

And that guy sat right up front with a paper and a pencil, did not get up, did not take

a break.

He was the most.

Didn't take a piss.

Didn't take a piss.

He was the most attentive.

He asked the best questions.

He was like a machine.

And I was like, that's why this guy's Rupert Murdoch.

I was so impressed by this guy.

His just endurance, really.

And also just his level of focus where everybody else was wandering throughout the day because

that's what you normally do.

And that's kind of contagious.

But he asked quite.

How the leader was like on point because it held everybody else like closer to that standard.

Did he ask questions?

He asked good questions.

Yeah.

Which is funny because if you're the CEO of one of his companies, you're already maybe

a billion.

And some of them might be billion.

I mean, you're you're you're up there.

I don't know if you've been ever.

Yeah, you're maybe doing super well.

If you sold.

I could be like your.

It was like the CEO of Fox Studios.

Like, oh, yeah, we make these movies for this year.

And it's like, oh, whatever, you know, Marvel, it's like, these are big individual brands.

You're, you're a big, you're a big swing and dick.

Yeah.

Big guy.

So that was incredible.

I just thought that was really cool.

And I got to give him props for that.

I was very impressed.

That's crazy.

I'm trying to think about what else was important.

I think another piece that was that was cool there was setting his company up for success

because the media business, I mean, a lot of his stuff was that he literally started

with newspapers, local newspapers.

And so you very easily companies like that can miss all these shifts and become like extinct.

I think one of the reasons they haven't is because he probably has this learning culture

and sounds corny.

But what he did was pretty badass was like, we're here.

We're not going to go tell these guys what, what, what the world is.

We're going to be the listener.

We're going to be the student here.

And so I thought that was pretty badass that he set up.

He architected these days, which was just, you know, action packed with like top, top

people of the world coming and teaching them about the future.

And even us.

Why did he have us?

He had four startup slots.

You know, it was all big companies.

They have four startup slots.

We were one of the startup slots.

You got grabbed by him.

Yeah.

Because it was like, okay, you guys are doing something interesting was when we were doing

Blab.

And he was like, okay, tell us about the future.

You're not big yet, but you're growing and we think you're interesting.

And so tell us what you know that the big companies don't know.

And they would ask questions like very good questions like like that.

Like what is the, if we're us, one of the questions he asked was, what is, what are

we stupid for not doing?

Like when you look at our business, what do you look at and you just say, you are stupid

for not doing this?

This is our enterprise version of trends, Brad is having that.

Nice.

So anyways, that's what I learned from the, from these guys.

I thought it was pretty awesome.

God, that's badass.

Who are the other three companies?

One was Alfred.

The skim was there.

Oh, are you told me?

I told you about this because I was sitting there.

Also, Fox is an investor of the skim.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's cool.

In fact, I heard the guys in the back because I was sitting at the back when that was happening

is like probably not the people who were doing it or they weren't investors at the time.

And they were just like, like, they were like, yeah, this is cool and all, but, and then

they were just like ragging on it in the back because they were just like, look, you know,

here's what the numbers are.

Here's where, you know, this is not big enough yet for it to matter to us and, but Rupert

at the front was kind of like, what do we not know like about this business?

He wasn't, it's easy if you're a huge conglomerate to just look at everything and say, you're

small, you mean nothing.

That's what the guys in the back were doing.

But at the front, Rupert was sort of like, email interesting, tell me more.

And like was going through these like, you know, you could tell he was searching for

what he doesn't know, rather than the guys at the back thinking they know everything

and not really being open to learning something new from the people who were talking crazy.

So one other idea that's similar to something we were talking about earlier is this revenge

against the spam calls.

Have you heard about this?

Yeah.

I, um, tried to write about this last year because I bought one of these apps, Robocall.

Robocall are amazing.

I did research on it.

Huge business.

And the one of the reasons I know it's huge is because I did research on them and I try

to find everything.

And immediately I knew it was going to be big because it was so hard to find information

on them.

So tell me what that business, what, what, explain what they do first and then I'll tell

you about what this new guy is doing that is interesting.

This one, I think it was based in New Jersey.

They have many different apps.

One of them being Robovisor, I think it's called.

And users like me pay maybe 50 bucks a year.

And if someone calls, that's clearly a spammer, it goes straight to their voicemail.

Or if it is a suspicious one, it just says on my voicemail, suspicious, like, this is

a spoof call.

Right.

And so I know to avoid.

And so, so that existed, um, and this company called Truecaller, that's huge internationally

that does this.

Truecaller.

Truecaller is like a universal caller ID.

We should do it.

On Android.

On Truecaller.

It's like, it's like a WhatsApp.

It's going to be like a WhatsApp sized exit, I think.

Or like, you know, that's, it's going to be multiple, multiple billions of dollars on

this thing called Truecaller.

And it's not that relevant in the U.S. because we don't have the same problems you have internationally

with not knowing phones.

People switch phone numbers all the time there.

Dude, I get 10 spam calls a day.

So Apple started doing this, but what this guy's doing is interesting.

So, so this guy, uh, Joshua, he has this company called Do Not Pay.

I love this.

I signed up for it.

Do Not Pay for those who don't know is, um, he follows me on Twitter, so we'll make sure

he sees us.

Yeah.

So Do Not Pay is cool.

So basically it's like, you get a bullshit parking ticket.

So you know, like you can actually contest a lot of these because either they filled

out the form wrong and therefore you don't have to pay or technically it was just wrong.

You don't have to pay.

So it doesn't work as good as you think though.

And I'll tell you why.

There used to be a company called Fixit.

Yep.

And I knew people invested in it.

I used it in the way it would work is you would register your license and anytime your

car got a parking ticket before you even got to your car, the app told you and it automatically

fought, fought the ticket in San Francisco court and you would pay Fixit half the price.

Whatever you got back out of your, uh, refund, they would always get it reduced, right?

And it was awesome.

San Francisco outlawed it because it was just cramming the system.

Right.

So these guys did something interesting though.

They started off with that, which is you can fight tickets, but it's like, what else

can we do?

It's like, they called themselves sort of Robin Hood, they're trying to sort of take

money and give it back to the, and the guy's like 20 years old, very young, gets a ton

of press with this.

Very smart.

That's how he grows.

But they have other use cases.

For example, they have a credit card, a virtual credit card that you can use.

I use that automatically cancel your free trials.

So privacy.com offers that it's great product.

Right.

And then they have a couple other ones.

One is, um, where they, um, they contest, what is it they, they have a couple, they have

like four different things that they can test.

The new one that they came out with is we still get spam calls.

And so what they do is twofold.

There's this thing called the do not call list or whatever the do not call registry.

And so they, if you download their app, what they'll do is they'll sign you up for the

do not call registry.

But the problem is spammers don't care about the do not call registry.

They just call you anyways, because they know that you're not going to take the time to

let go and, you know, enforce this, you're not going to go fight or figure it out.

So then they ought to first they put you on the registry, then when you get a spam call,

they give you a little credit card to give to the spammer, uh, and to the scammer.

And when they give, when they use those details, they automatically generate paperwork to sue

them for three grand.

And so there's like, you can sue for three grand every time they commit this mistake.

And so what they're doing is they're automating the like $3,000 lawsuit, uh, for, for this

robo call for the spam call thing.

I just think it's a very smart model of like saving people money through these small hacks.

I like this.

Do not pay.

Because that's a great segment that we should go through more of small hacks that make big

differences.

Um, this guy, what's his name, Joshua, something, I think he's 21.

He raised money from Peter teal, a substantial amount, 10 million, maybe, maybe, um, okay,

bullish or, um, yeah, bullish.

I think these are good.

I think there's enough people that are, that don't want to be ripped off in these like

five ways.

They have like five things they can defend against.

And, uh, one of those is going to be like a repeatable use case, um, that, that's going

to work.

Okay.

I would say that I am bullish on the industry, bullish on the product ideas.

The guy, Josh seems like a loose cannon, which really usually goes the bad way, but

the great outliers end up being right massive.

And he's getting a ton of PR because he is what you're talking about.

He loves to go and champion the cause.

He's great for media.

He's a shithead.

So he gets a bunch of free PR.

He's a huge shithead.

He's doing controversial things.

Yeah.

Okay.

So on that note, I have a note up here that says, what Charlie Munger said about Elon

Musk.

Um, so it's directly related to what you just said.

So somebody was asking Charlie Munger, Hey, uh, you know, what are your thoughts on Tesla?

What are your thoughts on Elon Musk?

Cause it's one of the most like polarizing companies.

He's one of the most polarizing CEOs.

And so here's what he said.

I want to know if you agree with this or not.

So he goes, um, he first said, you know, I wouldn't long or short the stock.

Um, I think it's a great product.

And he said, my most important comment was this, he goes, never underestimate the man

who overestimates himself.

I think Elon Musk is peculiar in that he may overestimate himself, but he's not wrong

all the time.

And when he's right, he seems to be right.

Very big.

And he, and so these, so that was the first thing I liked that quote, never underestimate

the man who overestimates himself.

And the second thing he said was they said, would you hire Elon as one of your CEOs for

a Berkshire Hathaway company?

And he goes, no, never.

He goes, I want the guy who understands his limitations instead of the guy who doesn't.

Um, you know, I've learned this lesson in life that these weird guys who overestimate

themselves, they occasionally knock it out of the park.

But me personally, I don't want to be around a guy around somebody who's in a, who lives

in a state of delusion and who occasionally happens to win big.

I want a prudent person.

So I want to know your opinions on this.

I feel like you're going to have a good take.

I feel like I just said exactly that.

So when I try to hire sometimes, uh, certain people, I'm like, a loose cannon here could

work.

Like I basically, like you hang out with a lot of these guys, like these like hackers

because at Sean's old office, it had an apartment and there he would meet a guy in the internet

and literally five days later, the guy would fly from Germany and basically live in that

apartment and literally would never leave.

Like I could see like, yeah, that German kid live with you.

I bet you he could have been in that apartment for five days and he maybe only brought a

book bag and a t-shirt, right?

And then he overstates his visa and he just, everything is just crazy.

So I like those types of people.

I for sure like them and I like being around them.

I don't trust any of them.

I expect that they will do mostly nothing, but the one or two times that they pull through,

it's going to be massive, massive, massive.

So let me ask you, for you yourself, would you say you're more in the bucket of, you

know, the kind of the delusional type who overestimates themself, but sometimes knocks

it out of the park?

Or are you more the prudent, pragmatic person who takes a realistic view and is sort of

a steady hand at running a company?

Which type are you?

That's a good question.

Or do you have both gears?

I think I have both.

What do you think?

I think Adam does a pretty good spreadsheet.

Adam is clearly the second type, right?

Adam is clearly the, the pragmatic, diligent, steady hand, not look, not trying to swing

for home runs all the time.

I would say occasionally I'm fine betting it all.

If my business goes away entirely tomorrow because we bet it, I wouldn't be upset.

So I would say I am closer to that wild card one, but not entirely.

Right.

And then with hiring people, it sounds like you hire mostly for, I think naturally, you

hire mostly for the prudent, steady hand.

It's a ratio.

So I think you need a few of these loose, loose, loose cannons.

Right.

And that's where cool stuff comes out of, but most of the stuff that they come up with

is really dumb and stupid.

Right.

And there's also an art to managing a wild card.

Furkin is a wild card.

He's a wild card for sure.

And he's steady.

And he...

And you know what I did with him?

He's out of emotional and he'll bet it all.

We hired him and within a few like weeks, I was like, A, this guy's amazing and B, this

guy's a wild card.

Like I can't handle him.

Like I can handle most people in the company.

And so I literally separated him.

I was like, look.

You need to work with people who are like you because when you work with these people,

they're going to drive you crazy because they're so steady.

They're nine to five.

They're no highs, no lows.

You're just getting what you get.

And I was like, you will hate that, that style.

And so I said, I want you to hire your own team and only you do the interviews.

Nobody else is going to give their input.

Like you make the decision, you don't...

There's a CTO.

You can hire outside what the CTO wants, which was like pretty controversial at the time.

So I was like, you hire your own team.

He hired all people who had either dropped out, never went to school, these hacker types

that would just be up all night because he knows how to manage the wildcards.

And so he hired a team of wildcards basically.

I love those folks.

I love those people.

So if you have them in your team or your company, make sure you're not just treating

them the way you will because they will be very frustrated and you won't be getting the

value of their potential.

My friend Jack, my best friend Jack Smith, he's one of them.

Solo's coming for $800 million.

Six months ago, he got all the money.

I was like, what are you going to do with it?

He's like, I think I'm going to go and put all it in some major bet and I was like, what?

He was like, yeah, I'm about to go buy it.

And he had done that.

Even before he sold that money, he had a fair bit of money, but he didn't have that much

and he didn't have any income.

On a consistent basis, he would bet all of it.

At least once a month, he would literally have a few thousand dollars to his name and

seven figures on some short or stock.

We got to get Jack in here consistently.

He always did that.

I don't think that I take risky investment.

No, I don't think my in our, I don't think I'm that risky.

I put like 10 or 20% of my liquid assets into very, very, very high risk things where it's

just probably going to go to zero.

I don't think that's crazy.

Yeah, that's not too crazy, especially given the age and earning potentially have going

forward.

I'll do some crazy stuff, but no, I mean, I know people that will literally empty their

bank account on things.

Do you have any friends like that?

Yeah, I have, I have friends that it's not so much like the empty their bank account

on things, but I have friends that once they get to conviction, like Sully is like this

and we should have him join us one of these times, but he's the type where when he has

conviction in something, the question is not like he breaks all the rules of his usual

investing and he'll go and try to like plow the money in, own as much as he can, create

a competitor to it, you know, like he went when he gets his mind into something and he

believes there's an opportunity, he goes like it to hunting mode, like I remember we were

investing in Lambda school and like I brought this deal to the table and I was like, Hey,

I think it's great for these reasons and I set up the call and like, but once he got

to conviction, you know, the CEO would be like, Hey, yeah, you're in, I'm going to send

you the docs in a couple of days.

And Sully would ask me, he's like, where are those docs?

Let's get those docs.

Let's text him again.

Let's call him.

And I didn't realize like, I think part of it is like as an investor, it's easy to get

squeezed out.

You never know what's going on.

So you're sort of in a state of paranoia.

But the other part was like when he knows what he wants, he goes for it at a degree

that I wasn't used to.

And then once I saw it, I was like, Oh, okay, that's how you're supposed to go for these

things.

But Munger, he once said, he goes, all I do is find companies that I can invest in that

required no diversification.

Like the perfect investment is one where you don't, you don't, you don't do any diversifying.

You put all of it into that one.

And I always am looking for those, which you normally would never find one, but you try

to find ones close to it.

Yeah.

Cause they go for value investing.

So they go for essentially what they consider a sure bet where it's already, the value is

already baked into what it is.

I don't have to bet on the future.

I'm getting it at such a mispriced moment that like, yeah, I want to take as much as

I can of that asset because I'm, I'm already sure it's worth that today.

And it's just mispriced by the market.

Good.

I think we should do a case study on a couple of these.

Some of them are big, like tens of millions of dollars business and we'll do true call

or true call.

So on trends, go to trends.co and sign up and we will have a case study on this the

next week or so.

And I think we should talk about this chess thing real quick because I think it's a good,

it's a good example of a mistake a lot of people make.

So in the, in the Facebook group, the My First Million Facebook group, somebody posted this.

So somebody pre-off, they posted, they said, Hey, I'm a 20 year old college, nearly drop

out here.

I run MyChessTutor.com.

MyChessTutor.com.

It's an online chess academy.

We currently have about 90 weekly students is doing 12 and a half K M or R growth has

been slow and as you can imagine, chess is not really like this, you know, super widespread

thing.

It's niche question.

He's like, I really want to learn about a new high income skill or take on another high

potential project, but I'm not sure where to start.

You know, I just feel like I'm capped out here.

And this was like such a mistake.

You are not capped out.

Yeah.

This was a mistake I would have made when I was 20.

And so immediately I was like, are you joking?

Explain the business.

So it's a, the MyChessTutor.com is basically a coaching academy for chess players, young

chess players.

And it's doing 12 and a half thousand a month.

How do they pay?

What's that?

You pay for the training.

Basically.

Is it like a digital training or do you have a coach?

I don't know if it's, I think it's coach.

I think they match you with a coach.

Got it.

So I think, you know, there's some revenue split here, but I would say this.

You're 20 years old.

You have this chess thing that only on 90 students, which is like 90 is basically zero.

You're doing 12 and a half K a month, which is like extremely respectable for a 20 year

old person who's been doing this thing.

Yes is a niche.

Yes.

But it's way bigger than 90.

And in some of the comments here, somebody was like, Hey, like, just so you know, like

the U S national, you know, elementary chess tournament has 2,500 players.

That's the tournament.

That's a one tournament.

That's elementary school, just U S. And so like, you're not capped out by any means.

I mean, do you think that this guy could get 5,000 people to pay for this?

Yes.

Totally.

I totally agree.

So what's, uh, what's the difference?

What's that revenue?

If he gets 5,000 people.

I mean, let's just do the math here, so and we get made fun of our on the spot math sucks.

While you're doing the math, Jason Lumpkin, who's an advisor to me, uh, won't famous.

Not famous, but he says it and he told me he goes, if you can get to 10 million in revenue,

you can get to 100 million in revenue.

Right.

There's these benchmarks.

He says, I think if you get to one, you can get, there's a high chance you get to 10.

If you get to 10, there's a high chance you get to 100.

It may take a long time.

Right.

It takes a long time.

But you can do it.

And this is basically saying, don't quit early.

So what's it?

Don't get 80.

Okay.

So they're making 140 bucks per kid.

And if you had 5,000 students enrolled in this, you're doing about 700 grand a month,

monthly revenue as, you know, an online chess school.

And I totally believe this is a achievable 100% now.

The question is rarely like, can this million a year, can this be big enough?

Typically it's, do I raise money or not in this case, Ray, if you are going to raise

money, make sure it's under a million dollars because likely don't raise anything.

Yeah.

Don't raise anything.

And if you could own this business and pay yourself $5 million a year.

Yeah.

And also the question is like, how do you get bigger?

Because probably it's what you're doing.

The reason you're getting shiny object syndrome and trying to look for a new business idea

is because you don't figure out, you don't know how to make more progress in this one.

And so you need to get with somebody who's a little bit smarter than you.

Like, I'll help you.

Just message me.

I was about to say.

We'll do a session.

Have you gone to the website?

I can ask them if you want to sell it.

Yeah.

Actually, you're capped out.

You should sell this to me for 10 grand.

This is worthless.

Okay.

Here's the site.

You can take a look.

Who's a shit business?

I think he should bail.

These, like, niche sports, small companies are very, like, like counseling, like, flex

there's a company in New York called Flex Debate.

Flex Debate?

Okay.

Kids, like, learn about.

Debate?

Yeah.

Like strategies and stuff.

This is what I'm going to do.

Yeah.

I'm going to dominate the grade school and the high school market with you.

So chess, debate, spelling bee, spelling bee.

Oh my God.

This is it.

Yeah.

This is it.

Yeah.

We're going to call it extracurricular ink.

And we're going to dominate this.

It's going to be called overbearing parent.

Overbearing.

Yeah.

Helicopter ink.

Tiger mom ink.

Right.

And we are going to.

This is awesome.

Who's this guy?

What's his name?

Priyav, I think, in the Facebook group.

So shout out to Priyav.

He's a good food for thought and don't, don't quit, man.

Do not quit.

This is awesome.

If you need help.

Honestly, there's, we're actually doing a, a case study of a company called NAC, KNACK,

which is a peer to peer tutoring marketplace.

Yeah.

And they raised two and a half million dollars from these, some venture funds and some nonprofits.

They had 900% growth in 2019.

They, they have these big partnerships with big universities.

There's tons of money to be made in these types of tutoring environments.

Right.

I don't know if you could hear Brad, but he just bit some good info basically sharing

how big these can be.

If he wants to, wants any money and wants us to be a cash flow thing, I love this.

I, I'm very interested.

Yeah.

I would invest if I'm getting like a monthly dividend, but not if I didn't.

Great idea.

Another great one from the Facebook group was this restaurant refills thing.

I don't know if you saw this.

So somebody basically said, and I should find their name, but they basically were like,

hey, I own 14 kind of venues.

I don't know if it's bars, restaurants, something like that.

And they were like, dude, you know, I pay Airmark $1,000 per month per location just

to refill my toilet paper, my hand, you know, like the bathroom, like the toilet paper,

the toilet cover seats thing, like just these like stock goods.

How big is it $1,000 a month per location for him?

How much revenue does he have?

I don't know.

He didn't share too much about his thing, but he basically said he's refilling it every

one to two weeks from them.

And so basically one of the ideas here was if you were doing restaurant refills, Cisco

and Airmark are these giant companies that do this service and they're very, very big.

And I wonder if you could go in as a local player and differentiate on one of these,

one of the following levels.

A, just not shitty service because Airmark and Cisco are so big, they're almost certainly

giving shitty service to your average venue by now.

The other one is price and so like, can you create a co-op or a group buying vehicle so

that a bunch of restaurants say, Hey, we're tired of paying $1,000 a month for this.

Instead we'll pay $100 a month membership fees, but get all of our goods at cost instead

of with the markup.

And so you can have a membership model for that.

Or you do something where you actually provide like a better service, you know, better quality

products in some way, like more higher end stuff than, than these things.

But I thought that was a good kind of like, I love these ideas where it just makes you

think, I'm not going to go run and do these ideas, but you start to see the world differently

where you walk into it.

Next time you go into a restaurant bathroom and you see the toilet seat cover, you're

going to realize, yeah, this restaurant paid for this and somebody's restocking this.

Toilet maker.

Yeah.

I always see him.

It's called like American made.

It's a billion dollar company.

Yeah, we should look into them.

You want to know another one real quick?

Otis elevators.

Right.

Total Monopoly on elevators.

Been around for a hundred years, family owned, probably makes hundreds of millions of dollars

a year in profit.

YKK zippers.

I love.

I told you about YKK zippers.

Didn't I?

No.

I mean, I just, I just noticed in high school, all of my zippers say YKK.

Yeah.

And then the really good thing.

What do you know about them?

I don't know anything.

So I collect vintage leather jackets.

If it's a YKK, then you can tell what year it's on.

A Talon zipper is even higher end.

So if it's a Talon zipper, it's really good.

And that same category is a white cone denim.

So if it's from Cone Mill, it's a great denim factory in Raleigh, North Carolina.

And so YKK, Talon, and Cone Mill denim, it's like the high end stuff that is the, it's

the accessories to all the high end stores.

And so they're just factories that have been around for 150 years and will probably exist

for another 50 or 100 years.

You said you collect leather jackets.

I collect leather, vintage leather jackets and denim.

How many do you have?

Probably $10,000 worth of leather jackets and probably $5,000 worth of vintage denim

that I don't wear.

And I just, I wear them sometimes.

Okay.

So we'll do this as the last one.

The top thing we had on our list was this, my heritage auction, the site auction place,

which I assume is for collectors.

And this is so foreign to me because Indian people don't collect.

Like I'm not going to collect shit.

It's an American thing, I think.

Like if I go to my aunt's house, there's no art on the walls.

You want me to give you a background on this?

Yeah, tell me about collecting and how this company is doing $850 million in auctions

this year.

I will tell you.

Okay.

So in 2008, there was this guy who had a TV show called American Pickers.

Have you seen American Pickers?

Okay.

At the time, have you heard of it?

I've heard of it, but I haven't watched it.

Okay.

At the time, it was the second most popular show on cable.

It was number two behind Pond Stars, which is similar.

And the guy's name on the show was named Mike Wolfe.

And I was a huge fan of Mike's.

And when I lived in Nashville, I saw Mike walking down the street and I walked up to

him.

I go, Mike, what's up, man?

Let me get a picture.

And if you look on my Facebook, you can see the picture.

I start shooting the shit with them and I'm like, Mike, let me work with you somehow.

And so it turns out Mike is opening up a store in Nashville and he lets me help set him

up and work there.

And so what American Pickers does is they go to old barns typically in the South, but

barns, people's hoarders, homes, not hoarders.

I mean, it's not junk.

We call it junk, but it's not really junk.

It's like old motorcycles, old cars, neat stuff that's old and we'll buy it for $100

and sell it for $500.

We'll buy an old car for $5,000, sell it for $20.

And I ran the store where we would keep a lot of the cool stuff.

I mean, at this point, he made so much money off the TV show, he just wanted to collect

the shit because people loved collecting it.

I would get people that would fly in from Australia just to touch an old gas pump.

The collectors were fanatical.

I would sell old gas pumps that don't work and are only for decorations.

And people would be like, is that gas pump the Model A or is that one the Model C?

If they knew...

What's going on?

Why are they into this?

Why are they into this?

And they would pay three grand because it's fucking awesome.

I would buy that stuff.

I have signs that cost $1,000, a mobile gas sign, only just to look at.

It's cool because it's part of history.

And here's the even best part.

If you clean it or repaint it or try to make it nicer, it loses all its value.

Right.

It has to have patina on it.

The stuff with the good patina is best.

So if you have an old car and then...

What does patina mean?

Patina, it's like when you have a pair of jeans, basically, Levi's changed how they

made jeans in the 1950s.

So any pair of Levi's jeans prior to before 1950, they used raw denim.

And the more you wore them, it would get these cool lines in them.

And the lines are called patina.

So wear and tear.

Wear and tear.

And so a pair of Levi's, before they made that change to their modern process, cost

$1,500.

And if it has cool patina in it, it'll be two grand.

And so if it has any of this patina in it, it's really valuable.

And so me, myself, if I find a shot jacket, which is a brand, a shot jacket, my favorite

era is the 1950s with a red liner or a buco jacket, I'll drop $1,000 or $2,000 on it all

day.

And so where do you buy these things online, ever?

So you can buy them on eBay.

So what I used to do is I used to find jackets in America that were from the 1950s.

And I would put them on the eBay and the Koreans and Japanese would buy them because a 44 from

the 1950s in America is no longer a modern 44.

It only fits littler guys, particularly the Japanese and Koreans.

And they fucking love that American shit.

They love it.

And so I used to sell all my stuff on eBay.

But eBay wasn't the best marketplace for it.

So now there's a lot of niche marketplaces.

And you're talking about, which one do you scroll up?

Which marketplace are you talking about?

Heritage auctions up there, HA.com.

Heritage auctions.

I've never heard of that.

Up higher.

All the way at the top.

So they did $850 million.

They said their biggest category is coins.

Is it coins?

And I was like, oh my God, people spending tens of millions of dollars on like thousands

of dollars worth of coins.

I buy some coins.

I own hundreds of dollars of coins.

Scroll down more.

You own coins?

Yeah.

Don't you think this is stupid?

You think this is cool?

Scroll up.

There it is.

It's awesome.

I love it.

So movie posters.

Yeah.

So I live in San Francisco, so I don't have too much room.

But if I lived in Austin, Texas, where our office is, I would have a warehouse and it

would be full of stuff.

Right now.

This blows my mind.

Right now, I'm in the market for a 1995 Corvette, which is, and it's, it's like compared to

modern cars, it's not that good, but it's like a cool year.

I'll probably pay $20, $15,000 to $20,000 for it.

I kind of, I get the cars thing.

I actually even kind of gets the clothing jackets boots.

These are Red Wing boots.

I buy them for a very particular type of reason.

I own a pair of boots that are like the same brand, but from the 1950s and it costs $800.

I don't wear them.

They just sit there and I look at them.

And you feel good.

It's like a museum.

And the coins one, those are the ones where I'm just like, what, what is going on?

Dude, movie posters.

I'm like, okay, I get it.

This is only going to get popular.

Here's why.

I'm so bullish on this.

Okay.

So you have some money now.

What was popular when you were, let's just, let's just imagine that you're 50 now.

Yep.

Because nostalgia will be more important, I think.

But what will you, what would you, let's see, what categories of things?

What if I showed you a cassette tape, a VHS tape, unopened of Home Alone?

One of my favorite movies.

Great.

Okay.

How much would you pay for that right now?

$0.

I'm not a collector.

Not just to have, like sit right here.

No.

Okay.

As art.

Okay.

Yeah.

I guess I would, I guess I would do that.

I guess I see that.

How much would you pay for that VHS?

It's unopened.

Completely unopened.

I mean, I probably wouldn't buy.

I'm $40.

Yeah.

I'd pay 30, 40 bucks to just have it there.

It's a talking point in the room.

Okay.

Now let's fast forward 30 years.

Would you pay $300 if you could find an unopened VHS tape and you have kids in your

house?

I hope I don't.

This is a note to me when I'm 50.

Don't do it, bro.

Don't buy it.

But do you understand that point?

It's cool, right?

It's cool.

Okay.

I get it.

Let's do another one.

What's a car?

You don't like cars.

Is there anything?

Okay.

Here's another example that came up.

Jackie, he's bidding online.

He tweeted this out.

He's like, who is bidding against me?

So he was bidding $260,000 to buy this rare thing, which was, it was Nintendo made a

PlayStation or something like that.

It's made by Nintendo, but it is a PlayStation.

I don't even know what this is.

I don't want to look into it.

I don't want to research it.

It's awesome.

He's like, who the hell is bidding this up?

I'm at $260,000.

Surely there's no other nerd that wants this bad.

I bought a pair of Snapchat spectacles.

I've never even used them.

They're sitting in my drawer right over here.

Oh, future memorabilia.

They're just sitting there.

Yeah.

I'm just holding, I'm holding onto them.

I own.

That's hilarious.

How about the Elon Musk flamethrower?

Okay.

That's cool.

Just never open it.

Just don't even open it.

A lot of people just don't even open it.

Just sit there and it's just cool to have.

And then maybe in 30 years, would you pay two or three or four or $5,000 for that?

Maybe.

Yeah.

Maybe.

This is why I'm saying it's awesome.

I think nostalgia is big money.

So maybe there's a company.

So just to turn this into an idea, A, I think this is interesting and there's a whole brainstorm

around how do you tap into either nostalgia or collectors and the fanaticism that they

exhibit.

But a quick idea here is you've seen these, um, these apps like goat and, um, and Stock

X, like these like street wear marketplaces.

So goat is like a mobile only way to buy, you know, sneakers.

It's like, I'm going to buy these Yeezys for two grand.

I'm going to buy these rare Jordans for $1,800.

And so, um, I tweeted this out or retweeted this list of top hundred marketplaces by GM

V. So by gross merchandise volume and, um, and goat was like whatever in the top 20.

And you know, that's how the kids are basically spending that much on these like cool sneakers

and the sneaker heads are spending so much.

And so, um, I wonder if you could do a mobile, like what they did was just make a slick mobile

only, uh, marketplace for these rare items.

I wonder if you could do that and pick your favorite movie posters, coins, whatever.

Clearly there's a lot of demand and it's just about making sort of a modern day marketplace

because if you go to this h.com, it literally looks like what I imagine a coin collector

looks like.

Then I imagine a website.

It looks like that.

Uh, it looks like a 75 year old, uh, you know, website that never leaves this bed.

Dude, I think this shit's going to be way more popular with young people.

I think that what I would do is, okay, like what if I have a like, I'm not poor now.

What what did I, what was I into when I was like five, six, seven, eight years old?

Like I'll see.

Pogs, whatever.

Yeah.

Like if I saw like a slime thing, if I saw the entire collection of goosebumps unopened,

I would love to buy that and just have it sit here.

Yeah.

That's actually pretty cool.

Okay.

I would buy that.

You see what I'm saying?

This is how it works.

Right.

Or like imagine you grew up with like, I feel like you're explaining, collecting to me,

which anyone listens going to be like, uh, what the fuck?

But I really do feel that way.

I'm like, what is motivating people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars?

I saw one of the posters movie or someone in the comics that was, that just sold for

70 grand, it's a one page of a comic.

And I'm like, who is this person with too much money that is spending 70 grand on this

one page?

There's a lot of people.

There's a lot of people like that.

And it's not 70 grand.

You have to think if someone's rich enough to spend 70 Gs on this thing, it's just like

you spending $10 on a thing.

Right.

Are you buying a hundred dollar, a hundred dollar home alone thing?

It's like, it's kind of a lot of money, but like, uh, who cares?

It's fun.

Right.

I also wonder if there's a market for, for first dibs.

So like, let's say you're coming out with something, an album, whatever, um, a movie.

Why aren't these companies selling the first like, who wants the first copy ever made of

this?

Who wants the first book?

Great.

And just auction the first dibs and create a company that, yeah, just on the spot, dude.

That's what I do.

I'm the fucking magic band.

And so you, you, you create this first dibs thing because then you create new inventory

that doesn't even exist yet.

You sell it today.

It comes out in the future and people would bid like crazy for this.

First dibs real quick.

So Sean and I are, are doing this all the time, um, but I always have to plug this.

If you like doing this on your own time, you got to go to trends.co dot, wait, trends.co

and buy a trend subscription.

And I think what we did was trends.co slash million and you'll see a big discount.

And I'll tell you one thing, uh, the sleep report you guys did, I thought I thought that

was pretty interesting because you see these things that get hype, but then you see the

actual data, it's like meditation gets all this hype, watch how sleep is growing and

how the sleep interest is growing and all the different products that go around that

from beds, to pillows, to anti snoring, to sleep aids, to whatever.

So I like that article a lot.

And the group, I've said this a million times, like all the values in the group, the group

is amazing.

Um, and I, and I, I really enjoy it.

So we'll sign up, but we'll keep doing this anyway.

Bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. We've partnered once again with the online business broker Quiet Light Brokerage, they want to give you guys a FREE 25-point checklist to see how sellable your online business is. To receive this free guide, visit quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Topics for today: Paying to lose weight (01:26), Private equity rollups in cleaning, dental & locksmiths (04:22), Buying nursing homes (08:47), Back to private equity talk (10:30), Baby locked in a room story (13:02), Public dental companies (14:26), Barstool's genius marketing with 'Zillion beers' campaign (17:58), Mr Beast & Content burn out (21.44), Rupert Murdoch's elite meeting at CES (This one's good,26:14), Revenge against spam callers & robot lawyers (32:13), Charlie Munger thoughts on Elon Musk and if you'd hire a wildcard or someone prudent (37:02), Risky investing (41:31), Listener's chess tutoring biz and if he should continue (45:00), Restaurant refills & other boring but large businesses (50:05) and lastly the crazy world of auctions and collecting (53:10). 
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