My First Million: Half-Baked TV Show Ideas, Miss Excel Making Millions, The Adventure Challenge, and More

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.

I have just straight fire.

We might need to split it up into multiple segments or multiple episodes because I just

got too much fire for one day myself.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like the days on for the road.

Let's travel never looking back.

We got a bunch of ideas today.

If you like ideas, this is, this is going to be one of the podcasts you liked.

I promise you I didn't bring in any frameworks or life advice.

We just went straight business, cool businesses and ideas you probably never heard of.

The best one was Sean brings up this guy who's got this adventure book, which that doesn't

make a lot of sense to you, but you will understand in like two years, he's done like $85 million

in revenue.

We talked about this lady who's making nearly a million dollars a month selling an Excel

course, which is pretty outrageous.

Talk about the script, which is a really amazing bit of technology that's going to

crush it.

And we think it's kind of under the radar.

What else?

Story worth.

We talked about a bunch of interesting ideas.

Monthly.com.

And then we had a little, at the end, we just brainstormed TV show ideas, ideas that could

be made into TV shows.

So I think you'll like this episode.

It's a classic.

It's a, it's a sandwich on classic brainstorm.

All right.

Enjoy.

Producer Ben gave it an A minus.

So take that for what it's worth.

Enjoy the show.

Welcome everybody to the show.

I hope we have the new intro music by the time this airs, but we may not.

I don't know about you, but I've been jamming out to the new intro song pretty excessively.

And it's been great.

It's good.

It's good.

The guy who made it has a wonderful name.

Yeah.

You say his name?

Young Spielberg.

That's his name.

That's a good name.

I've really liked that.

But young without no.

Why UNG?

All right.

We have to mention the clip contest.

So we're doing this contest.

I think if people want to learn about it, I think they go, so if they go to mfmpod.com,

they'll see it.

If you go to mfmpod.com slash clips, you'll for sure see it.

MFM pod.

And you'll see like a link.

Did you see?

So these kids, it's mostly like younger, like kids that are making videos where basically

the contest, by the way, is you chop up these videos to just go to our YouTube page and

like download the videos and chop it up and put it on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, whatever.

And if you use a certain hashtag, MFM clips, we'll find you and we're going to get five

grand to some of our favorite clips.

Yeah.

There's already some amazing things.

So I saw a few TikToks that were already past, I think a hundred thousand views.

So crazy.

So their TikToks are, their TikTok account is blown up just by taking our content and

just chopping it up.

And then the guy who did the like South Park looking cartoon thing, that was amazing.

Amazing.

This, it's a young guy named Corey who's, I found his account and he's got like hundreds

of thousands of views on a handful of videos and he launched the videos and like within

a day or two, he had all these views.

It's wild.

And then the guy who does the cartoon thing, I think he's launching a business and we are

his first.

Right.

Right.

Because I followed his Twitter account and he had zero.

It was like zero zero.

Yeah.

So that's.

Anyways, five grand.

Go, go take our content, turn it into clips, let it go viral and yeah, everybody wins.

All right.

I've got a few interesting things.

You've got many interesting things.

You should go first.

I have just straight fire.

We might need to split it up into multiple segments or multiple episodes because I just

got too much fire for one day myself.

I know what the first one is and I think we should start with that.

Okay.

So I wanted to bring this up.

We had talked about this in the past, but this is a story about Miss Excel.

So her name, she calls herself Miss Excel and I don't know if you've ever seen her.

I don't think you're a big Tik Tok guy, but I am.

I had seen this person going viral on Tik Tok and basically it's a woman who puts out

like Microsoft Excel tips and tricks like little hacks like, oh, you know how you're

like, things are always like poorly formatted, just put pushed like, you know, command G

when you're hovering over the column and look at auto formats, everything perfectly

or like, do you know what a V lookup is?

You do this, this and this and boom, you can find anything.

So she basically puts out these little clips on Tik Tok, but it's not just the content.

Like the way she does it is like, what works on Tik Tok?

It's like cute, cute girls, dancing, humor, like these are the things that like work on

Tik Tok and so she does that.

She's like, she'll put a song, like that's like a trending song on Tik Tok.

She'll dress up.

She'll be, she'll have the screen, screen share behind her and she's kind of overlaid

on top of it and then she's showing something funny that's like something that's happening.

She's explaining it quickly and in an entertaining way.

So here's her story.

She's a consultant, kind of a boring job.

She was a consultant and she decided, you know, there's a lot of consultants and bankers

that if you watch them use Excel, they won't touch a mouse.

Like they just use a keyboard, like a wizard and like they could just do everything just

by hitting like shortcuts and macros on their, on the keyboard and Excel is actually a lot

of people that could do this.

My friend who, who used to work at BCG basically, they had a mouse with like a wired mouse that

was clearly cut.

The cord was cut and they like, it was like in a frame on the wall and they're like, that's

what you're going to do here.

The mouse is cut.

This needs to look like you don't use the mouse.

Exactly.

And I don't know how any of this works, but I've definitely seen a bunch of friends who

could do this.

They, it's kind of amazing when they're doing it.

So she basically took that idea and started turning it into interesting clips.

So she starts off and she tells a story where she's like, you know, I wanted to like try

making some content and you know, TikTok, I felt embarrassed because like, isn't TikTok

like for kids and like, it's just like the silly thing to do.

I shouldn't, I shouldn't make a TikTok account.

I'm a consultant.

And then her gut was like, you should do a TikTok.

And so she listens to her gut.

She makes a TikTok and pretty quickly, I think like within the first week or so she goes

viral with one or two clips and she gets over like a hundred thousand views.

She's like, holy shit, this is awesome.

And so she does it again and she does it again.

And then she starts in, she's like buys a little ring light and gets a green screen

so that it looks a little bit better.

And she does it again.

She gets a video that gets a million views and it's like, wow, this is amazing.

And so she starts branding herself, amazing branding, by the way, Miss Excel.

Like she is the one, she is the Excel woman.

And so I thought that was great.

And so she starts doing this and she's getting popular, but she's not making any money.

And she reaches or what happened?

Morning Brew reaches out.

They're going to do a feature story on her.

And they're like, oh, we want to feature you.

And at the same time, a business coach reached out to her and was like, hey, I saw you have

this like really great following.

I think your content is super unique, you know?

And she was like, yeah, it's great.

I'm going to be featured on Morning Brew.

They're like, awesome.

Like, what do you have to sell?

And she's like, I don't sell anything.

It's all free content.

And they're like, if you're going to get featured, you should have something to sell.

And she's like, okay, challenge accepted, you're right.

I'm going to make a course.

And so she decides to make a course.

She's never done it before.

And I think she had like something like two weeks or something to like pull this whole

thing off.

And she rushes to do it.

Now let's fast forward to today.

She is making courses and she is making six figures a month off this thing.

So she's making single digit millions a year.

She has a few days of the year where she's made over $100,000 on a day in course sales.

That's kind of like her Black Friday or Black Friday special or whatever, where she sold

her course.

And so she's doing millions of dollars a year and she's working towards million, a million

dollar a month.

That's like her goal.

I want to hit a million dollars a month as Miss Excel.

And she is like, Microsoft loves her there, like pumping her up, you know, she's featured

in business insider.

She's featured in like Buzzfeed.

She's featured in a whole bunch of places because it's this great story.

She's featured on this podcast right now.

And so she is doing amazing.

What I love about this is she quits her job as a consultant.

She now works 15 hours a week unless she's making a course like, but just like a normal

thing is she's doing 50s hours a week.

She has one employee, which is an overseas virtual assistant.

Her cost structure is that overseas virtual assistant, which I'm guessing is making something

like six to $10 an hour.

So you know, probably paying them like $500 a month ballpark plus she pays $97 for Think

ific, which is the course platform, and she pays a video editor to edit the videos for

the course.

So like all in all, her expenses are probably like sub $1500, maybe sub $2,000 at the time.

And she's making six figures a month.

So she's profiting, you know, at least $100,000 a month doing this thing.

And there was a whole bunch of like little nuggets in there that I liked, but that's

the, the overall story quick, quick reaction to that.

Amazing.

I don't think it's going to, maybe it will last.

Maybe that was, that was my initial instinct.

I was like, awesome.

Grab, grab.

But like, you know, who knows if this is here two years from now.

And then I changed my mind when I kind of read her, read a little bit more about her.

Here's what I liked.

Okay.

So we had talked about Excel way back, maybe a year ago when I, when we were talking about

I was going to create a course and we had done a deep dive of what are the best courses.

It's always Excel.

Microsoft Excel is always in the top.

And if you go to Teachable's top courses, Udemy's top courses, learning to master Excel

is always in the top, like 10 earning courses.

And you know, it's hard to be the one, but it's a topic people will pay for.

Anchor from Teachable, he's got a, he's a good Twitter follow.

He tweets out some of the biggest earners.

He won't explicitly say who they are, but he'll say one earner, we just paid their,

you know, we, they just crossed 20 million in revenue or in like earnings.

And then he'll also say like the top course is this Excel thing.

So you can kind of like triangulate in exactly.

And on Udemy, I think I was able to do this as well.

I was able to search and sort for the top best selling courses and Excel was in the

top as well.

That's amazing.

And so I think Excel has real demand.

Then the question is who's going to be the best brand in the Excel space?

And she's the horse I would pick.

So why do I think that first is her content is fundamentally better.

She took the most, she has the best top of funnel.

So what's her top of funnel strategy?

It's highly exciting, quick hitting, snack sized, TikTok videos.

TikTok itself is like the crack cocaine of content, right?

Like 10 seconds video with music overlaid.

That is crack cocaine for content.

And she's using that for Excel when all the other Excel creators are like bloggers and

shit like that.

Stale old thing, then her brand and her personality, miss Excel, good looking woman who understands

how to do content and she, I know she understands the content.

So she's a little bit, when I was researching her, she is really into some of the shit I'm

into that's really like kind of like off the beaten path.

So she was like, yeah, she's like most people when they think of content strategy, like

especially for, for, for this space, B2B type of content, she's like, it's always like strategic

intellectual, trying to figure it out.

She goes, I spend most of my time just getting into a certain state of mind.

I just, she's like, I just get into a, she goes, she goes, this is her exact quote.

She goes, the way I run my structure for my business is through energetics.

Most people don't even know what the fuck that means.

She goes, I get my energy to a place where my presence is truly magnetic.

I get a vision of what's going to go viral.

Then I run to my computer and I create that.

And sure enough, it goes viral.

She goes, cause most content people.

Don't understand content is just energy transmission.

Yeah.

I'm having a great time.

I'm excited about this topic.

And so I'm going to push that through the phone into you.

And sure enough, you're going to learn something, but you're also going to smile while you're

watching my shit.

You're also going to laugh while you're watching my thing and nobody else is doing that.

And I've read that and I go, she gets it.

She gets like one of the most important things about business and life, which is just like

maybe able to manage your own energy.

But the second part is she gets the content strategy in a way that I don't think anybody

else is going to really get in this, in this space.

Did you see other things?

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

She now has scale.

So at first I was like, oh, okay, but she's just like an individual creator on Tik Tok

and like, who knows, maybe Tik Tok algorithm changes.

No.

So here's what she's doing.

She basically is like, I'm going to scale in two ways.

First she's expanding into the whole Microsoft suite.

So it's not just Excel.

She's doing PowerPoint and Word and Outlook and like everything that like, you know, a

billion people on earth have to use professionally.

And so, and Microsoft is helping her and every time they're releasing a new thing, she's

getting first look at it and she gets to come out right away with the content that's going

to highlight this new function or this new feature that you get to be able to use.

So that expansion gives it more legs than just Excel.

The second thing is she now hired a performance marketing agency and she's like, yeah, get

my brand to grow.

And she's like, beautiful thing is I don't sell my course.

I just put my most viral thing and I put ad spend behind it and people love it.

Like they love that content.

And so they like it.

They comment on it.

Facebook's algorithm promotes it and so I was like, oh, that's kind of an unstoppable

like flywheel.

She's going to keep creating this like juicy, like quick life hack type content that's already

inherently viral.

Then she's putting a paid ad spend behind it.

She's growing her following on Instagram now plus Tik Tok plus YouTube plus all these

different places.

And she's like, oh yeah, reels came out.

So then I just like jumped on reels and I became like one of the most viral reels creators

on Instagram.

And so I'm like, okay, now she's diversifying the audience and she's got the course of

behind it and she's going into more, more parts of the suite.

I like that formula.

I was wrong.

She's going to, she's going to crush it.

I think she's going to get to my bold prediction.

She's going to get to a hundred million dollars in sales and that sounds outrageous.

I was going to say a hundred million.

I think she could, I think you could do, I think a hundred million a year or a lifetime

a year.

Yeah.

I actually agree with you.

I think that's bold.

I think likely she'll get to like $25 million a year in revenue and could probably actually

do that for many years.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I loved, I loved her thing.

There was also these other little nuggets.

So she basically, she's working 15 hours a week.

So then she's like, oh, cool.

Quit my job.

I'm going to be a digital nomad.

Something you kind of did this last year.

She's like, every month me and my boyfriend, we just moved to a different state and we

just want to experience it.

So they'll just move to a different state in America and just like hang out there for

the month and then they hop around.

And the other thing that she's, the other nuggets I liked was she does these like webinars

because she understands there's like a top of funnel.

The top of funnel, if you don't know is basically like how you get new customers to even like

get in touch with you, get in, get into your warm place.

But in this case is, it's just going viral on Tik Tok, going viral on Tik Tok or Instagram

or YouTube.

Great.

Then she has the middle of funnel, which is where a lot of people fall out, which is,

okay, you've touched base with me once, you're not ready to buy something just yet, but how

do I actually get you to participate in a deeper way, to invest in a deeper way?

And for her, she runs these webinars and she calls them high energy Excel parties.

So she, she invites people to these and what happens is it's, of course, it's like someone

from BCG and then they go and they're like, Oh, this is amazing.

Then they're like, Hey, we'd like to buy like 1500 seats for our, for your course for our

company.

You know, like our, Hey, I work for target corporate training and yeah, we have 25,000

employees that we think would be benefit from this.

How do, could you create something custom for us?

And it's going to be like, yeah, here's the same thing, but now I say the word target

at the beginning and I charge you, you know, it's $5 million for, I have a buddy who's

doing this, which basically is like his top, he does top of funnel newsletters.

Then he does these like webinars and workshops and podcasts that go deeper.

And at the bottom is somebody from, you know, Procter and Gamble will reach out and just

be like, Hey, cool.

Like, yeah, we got 50,000 global employees.

We would love to have you come speak at our headquarters once a month and like, you know,

we'll pay you basically like $100,000 retainer per month.

How's that?

And he's like, Whoa, okay.

That's like way easier than like, what's he teach?

So he teaches basically, I don't want to give away too much because I can't say the numbers

then, but he teaches like a version of growth, growth mindset.

Are you familiar with that?

So he's like kind of one of the thought leaders in growth mindset.

And so big company, like sports teams, like have them on retainer as well as, you know,

big companies like whoever, you know, Coca-Cola or whatever will, will pay him and they, they're

just like, look, we think your stuff is great and we have 50,000 employees.

How do we just like package this up for all those employees?

And then like, guess what?

We want to do this every year.

And so that turned out to be a very big business for him.

And he's just trying to figure out like, what do you charge a company like this and he'll

just name a number and, you know, sure enough, they'll pay it and he's like, Oh man, maybe

I should have set a higher number.

I thought that was a crazy high number.

But I guess for them, it's like, they didn't even blink.

They just like said yes.

So shit.

Did you see this weekend, the world Excel financial modeling championships happened?

No, but that is amazing.

I love that.

It went viral.

Ben, look this up.

It's like, look up like financial modeling world championship.

Why did I think of that idea?

That's such a me idea to think of.

It went viral and there is like, and you see these guys, it's like, all, you know, no disrespect.

It's all nerds doing it, obviously.

And you see pictures of them and you see memes like, this is what peak male performance looks

like.

And, uh, okay.

What do they actually do?

What is the competition?

So they're all like, you can, it was, they did it like Twitch.

They like were streaming their screens and they were asked to do certain things.

And then they had to like, in real time, like make this model.

And I don't actually know how they judged it.

I didn't pay attention.

I just paid attention to the memes.

I think Seth Smith tweeted something funny.

Like this is a gift from God.

It like, she showed a picture of them on there.

It's amazing.

It was hilarious.

And all my Indian friends were sharing it this weekend and like making Indian jokes.

And it was awesome.

It was so funny, but this is so that is hilarious.

I really think, I think that's so funny.

Who owns that?

Who do you see?

It's probably like, you know, Deloitte, but anyway, so that was amazing board with this.

That's awesome.

I love makes it miss Excel.

When this article in the verge, I think it was went live.

I had so many people DM me and say, you guys got to cover this.

So I was going to do it.

And so I'm happy you did baller.

I think that I've talked to a couple of friends that have course businesses and my friend

Neville, my best friend, Neville, he had a course called copywriting course.

It honestly changed my life.

And he made this one course like 12 years ago, maybe, and it's been paying his bills

every single year since then, and he does other stuff like as well.

He like updates it.

And now he has like a membership thing.

But this one thing that he filmed years ago, it's like, it's that's been his career.

By the way, in terms of transferring energy, Neville is exactly like that.

If you watch in the course, he does, he's like, like most courses are like, here's

an hour long session about X. His is like, it's almost like a blog post and it's like

one minute where he's teaching one concept and he'll like the camera will be on and

then he'll pop out from under the table and be like, yo, and then he'll like say the thing.

And then the next one, he's got a guitar in his hand.

He's like, he's like, if I'm writing an email and I want to get a reply and he's like singing

a song and he's like, he makes it entertaining and you could just, there's something that

makes you smile and it keeps you engaged.

It keeps you involved with it.

And you know, people will forget the content, but they won't forget how they felt taking

your course.

And so they'll still recommend it and refer it and be happy with their purchase.

Can I, I'm going to tell you about one or two really quick things.

And I think we've just been most the episode on your stuff because it's actually pretty

good.

This adventure book thing looks amazing.

One very quick thing, monthly.com, did you know what that is?

Yeah.

You see, they explain it.

So it's just like, I think it's pretty under the radar.

It's pretty much the exact same thing as masterclass, but only for creators.

It's kind of cool.

I just signed up for my first one.

Casey Neistat is launching a YouTube and storytelling class.

Do you see?

It's amazing.

Yeah.

So I signed up for it.

So that's like a cool find.

So it's, how is he not at the fucking top of this screen right now?

He's like, just in the middle of this long list.

What is he doing?

It's monthly.

Founders of monthly.

I think I've talked to them before.

They were, they were cool.

They were like, they were cool and they knew they were cool.

That's right.

I was like, hey, this is awesome.

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

I was like, I'd love to invest.

Yeah.

A lot of people want to invest.

That's all right.

I appreciate that.

So I just, I just signed up for that.

I'm so excited to do it.

Like I bought it full price and everything and pumped.

The second thing, another cool product that I've been fooling around with, well, we'll

do actually three.

The second one is Descript.

Have you seen Descript?

Yeah.

We've talked about it.

So Descript is kind of like editing software for like you, you record something audio or

video and then it like transcribes it automatically.

And then if you, if you delete a piece of text from the transcription, it deletes that part

of the video, which is like magic.

It's amazing.

I've been playing with this for my YouTube stuff.

What do you do with it?

All right.

So you film a video.

Let's say I film a 10 minute video.

It uploads the video and automatically transcribes it.

And so I edit the video by editing the transcription like a Google doc.

And so I could copy and paste and move stuff around and that edits the video.

It's amazing.

It's, it's, it's almost trans transformative because it change when I think about what I'm

going to film, I think about like the, the narrative, like a story is just a long narrative

and it's harder to think in video clips.

It's much easier to think in transcript and text.

It's super cool.

And so I actually think this company, they raised money recently at a $200 million valuation.

I actually think this is a company that's going to be significantly larger than it is

now.

And well, like it's going to be pretty epic.

The guy who started it also started a Groupon.

Yeah.

What's him?

Andrew Mason.

Mason.

He's dope.

Also the best part about Andrew Mason that I respect is he, he starts Groupon.

Groupon goes on this crazy run where it's like, at that point in time, it was like the

lot of startup in the world copied by like every fucking, you know, every Joe Schmoe

was copying Groupon, Groupon like raises all this money, it ends up going public.

Then it kind of like, you know, then the world turns against Groupon.

It's like, this is not, not a good business.

It's not going to work.

People are pulling out.

It's, it's still, I think like a billion dollar company, but like, you know, it lost

its, its shine.

And he was in Chicago, I think.

And then he quits or whatever.

He gets fired.

I think he, he got fired.

I think he wrote something really hilarious, write something really funny on the way out.

He wrote like an email.

He goes, pull that up.

He goes today.

I'm paraphrasing.

He's like, today's my last day.

I've been fired.

You probably know why.

Like it.

Yeah.

You know, the video I made making fun of that CEO who botched the layoffs.

This was the opposite.

This is the CEO who like, who got it, who gets it.

And so he, yeah, he wrote this like letter.

I was fired today.

Then he takes a year off and he creates an album of music, like a rap album of him just

and he's not good, but it's hilarious.

We should pull up one of the, one of the videos of his, his like rap album or whatever.

And he releases that and then he like came back with Descript and it started off as

this like walking tour thing, which was amazing, by the way.

The walking tours were amazing.

I bought a lot of them.

It was really cool, but like not that good of a business because how I mean, I was a

super fan, but like most people, you're never going to do this.

And if you do, you're going to do one in your life, but yeah, exactly.

Like that, by the way, what a great lesson.

The walking tour was like what people should do and like makes them like be, be more active

and like learn things in the world.

And then Descript is like, Hey, it's like products that make you make it easier to be

lazier.

It's like, Hey, you know, editing video is hard.

Let's make it easier for you.

So Descript, I've been playing with it.

I think it's called Descript.

I've been calling it Descript unless it's Descript.

So sorry.

Awesome.

Under the radar.

Cool.

And then the last thing I'm going to tell you about that's kind of interesting.

So story worth.

So Sean or Ben, go to storyworth.com.

This is a crazy, fascinating thing.

Very simple product.

I actually knew the guy, Nick.

He started it.

I shared an office with him and he's still, I believe, the only employee and it's kind

of cool.

It's very simple.

When I logged in or when I used it years ago, all it was is you pay like $100 a year

or $200 a year and it sends emails to family members that you sign up and it asks them

about certain memories and it asks them so much over the course of a year that at the

end of the year, if a lot of your family members have answered some of your prompts, you now

have a book describing their childhood.

So it'll be, I sent it to my aunt Debbie and she was like, a question, I don't remember

all the questions, but it was something like, what's the best memory of your father before

you were 10?

And she was like, you know, on Halloween, we did this thing and, and it's like, oh my

gosh, I'm learning about my family.

And at the end, I printed out this book.

Super fascinating.

And it's super fascinating because it's a one person business.

It's just him and, and it's really simple.

It's very easy.

And I love that ancestry stuff so much.

Like I'm a big fan of that.

Yeah.

That's cool.

That's really cool.

I, I've never used something like this.

So isn't it kind of a lot of work for the other person to like write an answer?

Like, I feel like people don't like to do stuff like that.

Yeah.

But if you get what you get one a week and you spend like 10 minutes journaling, yeah,

it's work.

But I like told my aunt, I was like, Hey, this is important to me.

And she, after a while, she was like, Oh, I kind of like doing this.

I'm remembering a bunch of stuff.

It's a lot of work.

We had done a version of this or there's a version of this that's like, uh, I think

a little easier, which was, I don't know if you remember, I had, when I, I had my mom

over podcast with her and I recorded a podcast with her.

And the podcast was so much easier because really all they had to come into was like

one time, Hey, let's sit down and talk.

And you get this hour long thing with their voice and they don't have to like people will

get pretty intimidated at having to write something.

There's this pressure internally to like do good writing.

I think school like traumatizes the shit out of people.

And this podcast thing worked great.

I did it.

I had an amazing podcast with my mom.

I recommend anybody.

You don't need to be a podcaster, by the way, like this, I don't publish this anywhere,

but it's just a memory I'll always have.

And it was a conversation that I wouldn't have otherwise had more importantly, like

I don't even know if I'll ever go back and listen to this.

Maybe you'll give it to your daughter on that really horrible day.

Yeah.

Like, you know, when she, she passes away, like I'll be happy I have this.

But more importantly, it was like so much of life is so surface level and like we're

just talking.

We're just talking about me and my life all the time, be like, if I'm talking to her,

it's about like what we're doing today or whatever.

I realized I do very, very little about like her and her family and what made her her and

like her upbringing because, you know, I don't know, that was just shit in the past.

And so, and even she forgot a lot of these things.

And in the conversation, it all was coming flooding back to her.

So I recommend everybody do that with their parents, just sit them down and record one

hour thing.

And I can share like the questions I asked or whatever, but it really doesn't matter

to be honest with you.

Have you done ancestry or 23 and me?

I've never done it.

No.

They're awesome.

So 23 and me is awesome.

Ancestories, I think cooler because I've spent hours on it like building up my family

tree.

23 and me, I've thought about getting it for I have it and I've done about buying it

this Christmas for my family members.

The reason I'm not, I may not do it.

Have you heard of this thing called GED match?

No.

What's that?

Have you heard of the golden state killer?

No.

Okay.

So in the 1970s, there was this guy.

That's what they call you.

Yeah.

That was my nickname in high school.

Golden state killer.

And then in the 1960s, 70s, and I think 80s, there was this guy who basically like raped

like 50 women and then he murdered eventually like 20 of them.

Like he was a serial killer and he got away with it for years.

No one knew who it was.

And Patton Oswald's wife, Patton Oswald, the comedian, his wife who recently died right

before she died, published her like master work or life's work.

And it was about the golden state killer and how he's never gotten been caught in a renewed

interest.

And then the FBI got all into it because all the press and they eventually use this website

called GED.

It's public.

It's like anyone can use it.

It's like an open source website.

And it analyzes all of the information from 23 and me, ancestry and like all that stuff,

all the database stuff.

And they found, they put his DNA, the golden state killers DNA, which they had into this

GED match thing, and they realized that the daughter of the killer or like they were like,

well, this is so aligned.

It must be like the daughter or the granddaughter of the killer recently signed up for 23 and

me.

And so they stake out this guy's house.

They dig through his garbage.

They find they go, boom, got him.

And that's how they arrest him.

And they arrested him when he was like 80 and dying.

And if you Google golden state killer, you'll see like these pictures of this old man and

they got him because he got away with it for so long.

But eventually they brought him to justice.

And now they've caught many dozens, maybe even hundreds of killers or rapists this way,

which is good, but it's kind of scary.

And so you can.

So I was going to say, so you're, you're worried about this?

Why is this?

I'm because it's being used for a grandpa in trouble.

It's being used for good now, but like you could see like, do I want to be in this database?

Do I want to be in this database?

And so this is one thing I'm a bit worried about.

So you can go to GED match and you could upload your results and it could tell you all types

of stuff about your results.

You could see a lot of interesting stuff and you could like, if you can somehow get the

DNA from an FBI case, which I believe in some cases you can, you can like upload it.

And there's like thousands of like these internet detectives using this database to solve crimes.

It's kind of fascinating.

It's kind of interesting and it's definitely a little scary.

Wow.

Is there like a subreddit for these, you know, like sort of like public crime solvers?

Yes, there is.

And it's very, very interesting.

And most of the time they're wrong.

So like, if you remember when the Boston, like the Boston marathon bombing, they like

named like these like three guys and they kind of fucked with these guys lives.

They didn't end up doing it, but everyone was certain on that subreddit and they're

uploading pictures and they go, this guy works at this place.

It wasn't them.

They were wrong.

No one guessed it that it was the two actual guys, but this is a little bit different because

it's DNA, but DNA isn't perfect.

So it's like, there's a, it'll say like, there's a, this person is 5% related to this person.

So it's like, all right, let's see what that is.

So that could be like a distant cousin.

And so you like track your way down to that and you build these family trees to figure

out, oh, you know, it's kind of weird that like this matches this person and they're,

they also lived in the same area.

And so it's not perfect, but it's like pretty good.

So anyway, I thought that's why I may not get 23 and me.

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Yeah.

I also know people who have gotten it and realized like their dad is not their real

dad.

And I think that that happened to a family member of mine.

I think that's a, you know, side effect to be aware of sometimes ignorance is bliss.

A family member of mine, a family member of mine found out that their parent had a base,

their parent cheated on the spouse and had a kid.

And so they logged on and they go, Oh man, I've got a second brother or whatever.

You know, like a step brother or half brother and it changes.

Yeah.

I was going to say without getting too personal that, that has like that went, they went public

with it or they just kind of kept that information to themselves.

No, no, no.

They did not go public with it, but it like was very, it was, I don't know.

They haven't talked about it with me too much, but it was, it seems like it was like a somewhat

earth shatter.

Yeah.

There's a, there's a thing that I've heard that goes on, which is people who use sperm

banks.

So like a sperm donor will take the tech or sorry, people who didn't realize that their

parent had used a sperm donor or whatever, they will get the sequencing done or whatever

and they'll find out like, Oh my God, I have 42 like half brothers or sisters out there.

It's like, Oh, yeah, this was a person who, you know, this is a person who donated a bunch.

And then so yeah, you actually do genetically share with all these different people.

Like, wow, that's really crazy.

So there's all kinds of like interesting stuff.

And I think 23 and me, their business model is to sell your data, right?

Like I think that is the core business model is they sell it to pharmaceutical companies

for, you know, like the research or whatever, like, I don't know if it's fucked up or if

it's like, this is for the good of science, but I don't think you really know or often

it's not clear that hey, like,

It's not clear.

Yeah.

It's probably definitely the terms, you know, but nobody's reading the terms.

And so that's the problem.

It's like, it's like a benevolent dictator.

It's like, it's cool when they're making the trains run on time.

It's not cool when they start killing people, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

It's like, it's good when it's good, but it could go bad really easily.

Yeah.

All right.

What else we got?

Do adventure book.

All right.

So this is another, so to me, the miss Excel thing was one.

This other thing I think is really interesting.

So the adventure book, let me tell you about this story.

Have you heard, do you know what this is, this product, the adventure book?

I have no idea what it is.

Ben, have you ever heard of this thing?

I have never heard of it.

No.

Okay.

All right.

So you guys are also not on Tik Tok enough.

This is like the number one ad on Tik Tok that I see.

I don't know if I'm just in their market or they just run a shit ton of ads, but I've

been seeing it for like a year.

So basically it's a, it's kind of, it's a book you buy and it's like a high quality

big book.

And what it is is like, there's a bunch of, imagine like a scratch off, like a lottery.

So there's a bunch of things, a bunch of adventures that you could scratch off.

So you open the book to a random adventure, you scratch it off and it reveals a thing

you're going to go do.

Like it might be, I don't know, I've never bought the book.

So like, you know, bad example, but like, you know, you're going to go into a store

today and you're going to give out 10 compliments to people in the store or you're going to

go streaking around your neighborhood or whatever, like an adventure, a thing you can go do.

And so this idea and, and, and they pair with it like a camera.

So you, you're supposed to take a Polaroid of you doing it.

So it becomes a scrapbook.

So on one side, it triggers you to go do something that you've never done or that's like, you

know, get you out of your comfort zone.

And then it gives you the ability to capture it and paste, you glue the photo in and it

becomes this memory book of all your adventures, like cool kind of novel idea.

So I'd seen this and I was like, Oh, that's a cute idea.

That's novel idea.

What I didn't realize is that this is a hundred million dollar business that was created in

the last like two years.

So how do I know this?

You know, like for the podcast, I don't know if you get these emails, but I definitely

do.

There's a bunch of people that have like booking agents and we get all these emails, which

is like, Hey, Sean, love my first million.

Have you thought about having, you know, Joe, Joe on and you're like, you know, it's like,

yeah, first they're, they're complimenting me, so I like open it and I'm like, Oh, shit.

It's one of their booking agents.

I think, by the way, I think Jonathan was doing this before.

I think that's what his company was.

It's like the Groucho Marx, like I don't want to be a member of any club that will have

me.

You know, so it's like, that's how I feel about the guest thing.

So normally I write all these off, but this one caught my eye, which was, they said, would

you like to have Brian Ellis on?

He is a high school dropout now owns a hundred million dollar business called the adventure

challenge.

And I was like, it's like that, that adventure book thing.

And so I replied, I go, a hundred million dollars.

No way.

That sounds high.

And she goes, yeah, like it's been incredible.

They've grown a lot.

And I said, a hundred.

I just like clarify.

I'm like a hundred million cumulative revenue, annual revenue.

What are you saying here?

And so she goes, yeah, like they'll do eighty five million in revenue this year.

And they have a few big, bigger partnerships, the distribution partnerships that will get

them over a hundred like in the next year.

And you know, so the business is valued over a hundred million dollars with eighty five

million revenue.

And I was like, what the fuck?

And so I go and I start researching this.

And so here's the story.

So this guy, Brian, he's, so I couldn't confirm the high school dropout part.

I don't know if that was just like some post fact shit.

Like like to make this sound better, but like let's assume it's true.

So high school dropout.

I think his job was he had some job, which was like he was a skyscraper inspector.

So he was like, you know, some low man in the totem pole doing a job he didn't love.

And he's like, all right, I'm just doing this for the money.

He wanted to make a business.

Like he just he's like my whole life.

I just always been, I always have ideas and and you know, I wanted to come create a product.

It's like, so I'm doing this job and I had this idea to do this like adventure box.

So his original idea was create a box, like a machine and you push a button and it's

like, like prints out a receipt.

The receipt is like the adventure you're going to go on.

So you get like a random adventure that comes out.

Cool idea.

Right.

And so that was the original idea.

And he's like, ah, just tells a couple of people about it and they're like, ah, that's

cool.

And he's like, great, but he's doing his job and he hasn't really, you know, figured

out exactly how to do it or whatever.

And he's like, he's like, okay, but he's, he's, he everything's like on hold until

he gets fired from his job.

He like, he makes a mistake.

They think he committed fraud.

His boss is like, no, no, no, this is honest mistake.

But either way he gets fired.

He's like, all right, shit.

What do I want to do?

So he's like, I want to go to acting school.

So he's like, I'm going to go to acting school, but I need to pay for life.

So he's like, I need to create a side hustle that's going to make me $2,000 a month.

That's my goal.

And he's like, what about that adventure box challenge thing?

And he's like, the idea over the course of a few months had, had like evolved and he's

like, all right, what if it was actually like a book that you could scratch off the adventure?

Um, and so he tells a couple of people about it and they're like, that's actually a really

cool idea.

You should do it.

And so he goes to Hobby Lobby and he buys some paper, some of the scratch off material

and he's like, buys a kid goes to a different story, buys a camera and he's like, starts

coming up with this idea and he basically spends six to eight months prototyping this

idea because nobody had really done a like kind of like an adventure style scratch off

book before.

So he's like creating an actual physical product.

And so he's like, he has this idea and he, um, he just keeps telling people about it.

And so he, he gets to the point where he's prototyped the idea several times and there's

videos I found online of like, he's creating a vlog while he's doing, he's like, all right,

it's 11pm, April 1st.

I just got this really cool material for the scratch off.

I really liked this one, but I'm having trouble with the bindings, you know, and he's like,

so maybe I'll try this other thing tomorrow.

And then like he has the next video, you know, a week later, he's like, okay, I figured

out the bindings part and now I need to figure out this other thing.

I love seeing the, the start, the early stages of these ideas.

So he creates a Kickstarter.

He's like, I'm going to do a Kickstarter.

It's going to be great.

I want to raise $10,000 for this book and Kickstarter goes live.

He makes $1,300 the first day and he's like, fuck yeah, I'm the man.

He, you know, goes to a coffee shop.

He's strutting in.

He's like, I made $1,300 today.

I don't know about you guys.

I'll take, you know, your best, give me your finest coffee.

And he's like, all right, we're, you know, we're already 13% of the way of the goal.

Let's keep going.

But day two, $400, day three, $0 and like the Kickstarter like runs out of steam.

He's like, shit.

I was kind of just banking on this going viral and now it's not viral.

So what now?

And so he's like, all right, basically he's going to throw in the towel because like for

only $1,700, I can't even get the quality of book made that I want.

So I'll just quit.

So he's like, I need to get a job to pay for life.

You know, like I'm out of money.

And so he's like, he's like, oh, maybe I'll contact my buddy, I don't know for guys name

but Ben, my buddy Ben to, to get a sales job.

He has like this company I can do sales.

So he calls him up.

He gets a sales.

He's like, I want to do a sales job.

I want to do it for one year and I'm just saving up money so I can go back out there

and build a product.

And the guy's like, all right, cool.

That's fine.

Like you're upfront about it.

Like I'm down with that.

Let's do it.

So he gets a sales job there.

He's telling people at work this idea, he can't shut up about the idea.

And the guy there was like, you know, have you tried ads?

He's like, oh dude, nobody clicks ads like ads, like, or ads, like ads are scams basically

like his mentality at the time.

And the guy's like, no, like that's how we grow our business.

Like, you know, you should try.

So he puts a little money into ads.

He's like, I don't know if it worked or not, but like, you know, I got this like 10 X row

as and the guy's like, what, like no way.

And he's like, yeah, like people really like the ad or whatever.

So the guy, he partners with his buddy, the guy who hired him.

And I'm fast forwarding some parts of the story, but basically ends up leaving that guy partners

with him.

That guy's like, look, we're going to grow this thing through ads.

And and they basically run a shit ton of Tik Tok ads, Facebook ads, whatever.

And they've grown this thing to now 85, if this is true, $85 million in sales.

They've sold about 2 million copies of this book.

It's like a $40 book, which is like, you know, something 70 something million dollars in

sales.

If you do the math.

And yeah, what an adventure.

It's like a couple's book.

So you're like 50 fun adventures to go on with your date.

They have a family book.

Here's some things to do with your family, a friend's book and then by yourself book.

And yeah, it's kind of amazing.

They also Sean, just looking at the website right now, they also have a sex book now too.

Oh, of course.

Yeah, here we go.

I am into these notebooks.

I told you I use one of these best self code, right?

Yeah, but that's different.

That doesn't have like a different to go do things in the real world.

It does.

It does.

The one I use.

We use like a marriage one.

And so I'm into this.

This guy's amazing.

How old is he?

It seems very young.

So I don't know how old he is.

It looks like he might be 25, 30 max.

I don't know.

I think these box things are cool.

We talked about one that was doing like a hundred million in revenue and it was.

Remember it was that like catch a criminal box.

You remember that?

Oh, what was that?

What is that one?

That's is it a true?

It was amazing.

It was it was a true crime thing.

It was $30 a month and they send you a box and you sell a crime with your friends.

It was so good.

It was so fun.

And this is in that same world.

I think it's cool to like it feels special to me to order something and to like see a

physical get a physical thing.

And I'm into it.

I think this is badass.

This is so awesome.

True crime one better than this because that's a repeat.

That's like a recurring one where you'll have more repeat purchase than this.

It's so fun.

And I do one.

I buy this thing called Kiwi for my niece, which is like it sends her like kind of like

a science fair project.

Basically, it's like, here's a kit.

You're going to build a like a little like mini tractor.

It's sort of like Legos or whatever, but it's not like one specific thing or sorry, it is

one specific thing.

It's like, here's you learn about electricity through this little like box every month and

it's not great, but it's good enough and like she loves it.

So now if I cancel, I have the guilt of like her not getting the toy she wants.

And so I'm like, I'm going to just keep this $20 subscription forever.

I guess I'm on board with this.

I think this is awesome.

I think who, by the way, whoever's making clips, this should be the clip that you make.

This guy's story is like, I was enthralled.

This is amazing.

Wow.

All right.

What else do you want to do?

I have a...

Keep going.

Okay.

I have a segment.

It's not even a full segment.

It's just the start of a segment.

I think this one might be bad, but let's try it.

I basically pretend I'm drunk and then this will be like, that's pretty good for a drunk

guy.

I have a bunch of half baked TV show ideas.

Do you even drink?

I'll drink.

You know, if the occasion calls for it, I'll drink, but not regularly, no.

But I want to pretend I was drunk when I came up with this list because it's kind of just

like a random ass list of weird ideas.

So these are half baked TV show ideas.

Okay.

This is for the producer who listens to the show, the Netflix guy who listens to the show.

You're welcome in advance.

I want to get your reaction to my concepts.

Okay.

I'm going to pitch you three ideas.

I don't know if you have any TV show ideas, but I'll pitch you three.

Okay.

Okay, go.

The first one is called Frat U. I love...

I don't know if you've seen the football one that's on...

Oh my God.

What's it called?

There's like a football one called something on Netflix.

It's like one of their original shows that basically follows a junior college football

team around and it's like, here's the coach, here's the players and it like picks six players.

And it's like, you kind of get emotionally invested in their story.

There's a formula one show that's just like this.

It's like, here's these six drivers you get invested in their story.

There's a cheerleading version of this that I watched.

I think it's called cheer.

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

But it's like, here's just the best cheer college.

You know that that was like the most popular show and it's not like something you discovered.

I'm a pretty, you know, good curator here.

So I don't know, but a lot of people didn't watch the show because it's like, why would

I watch a show?

Have you heard of this thing called squid games?

So I signed up for the service called Netflix.

It's pretty great.

All right.

So this same model, I think it'll be applied to a whole bunch more topics.

The one I'm surprised at is why is there not a reality show just inside one of the craziest

frats in America?

Because you know that they would basically go all out, sell out to make the show entertaining

because they want the fame.

Well, but I think it's a faux pot.

Have you ever talked to like an 18 year old man?

They're woke.

No, dude.

Are they?

Are they?

That's just like the that's like the 18 year old who's like talking to old people like

us.

Most 18 year olds don't interact with people like us and they're like very normal and

just trying to have a good time in college.

They're not like our frats even our frats popular.

You think I would think they were going down like significantly are super popular because

it's a bubble.

Like when you go to a college, it's like in such a little bubble, it's not really affected

by like the way the world is changing.

You don't have to.

You're not you're not you're not convincing me.

I understand the value, but I didn't even I just thought that like with everything going

on that it was like a faux pas.

No, dude, I bet if you go to Arizona State, are you go to like, you know, wherever, you

know, Georgia?

Do you think they give a shit about like, you know, woke ism and they're disbanding

the frats?

Hell no.

They are.

Have you seen doubling down?

Well, there's there's these there's these girls on tiktok that do this challenge.

I've heard not this challenge, but I forget what it's called.

If you're a tiktok guy, you probably know, but Sarah showed it to me.

It's these girls who are like pledging.

Is that what it's called?

Yeah.

I wasn't part of that where you I don't know what you do is like you it's like a tryout

and they always talk about what they're wearing.

I'm an I'm an old man and I was a dork.

I wasn't part of a frat, but they like talk about the clothes that they're wearing to

their their like pledge ceremony things like that.

And it's gone very viral on video.

You watch is a wearing.

I don't know, but it's just funny.

It's just hilarious because like, don't you know how like in the South and like at Ole

Miss and stuff like that, the the sororities do these like, they all like I went to a

Southern college.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For sure.

Like, like they all like it's all like the boys and girls.

They all like exactly alike and they dress exactly like and that's like the joke is

they like show like what they're wearing at Duke.

You weren't even allowed to throw a party if you weren't a frat or sorority.

Like they literally were like, you better join this shit or you don't get to have a

social life.

Dude, it's it's weird.

It's so weird to me.

That's so weird.

Also, whenever I go to one of these frats, I'm like, this is disgusting.

I don't want to live with like a bunch of dudes or alcoholics and there's like 80 of

them in this crappy house and there's beer shit like tape on the wall about you and

you were like getting drunk all the time.

Even back then.

But even back then, I'm like, this is filthy.

I want to get drunk.

I don't want to clean place.

I just don't want to be around a bunch of like degenerates all the time.

Oh, OK, well, you're alone in that.

I would love to go back and experience college again.

I think it was a great time and living in one of these houses was yes, messy, but fun.

Anyways, point is you go to a party school, you go to Ole Miss, you go to Georgia, you

go to, you know, Santa Barbara or whatever.

And it's frat you and you basically just follow around with a king alpha frat.

You go inside the house and you pick the five characters who are the fun.

You know, they got they're going to have all the elements of a great TV show.

They're going to have relationship drama.

They're going to have in fighting.

They're going to have camaraderie with the boys.

They're going to have a hazing and a pledge process that's going to be controversial and

get them to do all kinds of outrageous stunts.

It's all baked in the show basically, right?

So you got to have like, like one guy questioning his sexuality.

Exactly.

Comes out and he's another guy who he's afraid they're not going to accept him, but they

accept him.

There's the the person who gets canceled for doing something racist or sexist or something

like that.

It's got all the elements and then you could just hop from school to school and the schools

will be excited.

Oh, shit.

Frat you is coming.

We got to represent because, you know, Georgia looked like they had a good time.

So now all of a sudden Clemson is like, oh, you think Georgia was hardcore?

Look how we party.

Look how we do our thing.

I think this is a no brainer franchise that somebody needs to create and you could put

me down as executive producer.

All right.

I'm going to do a separate episode of this, but I recently met somebody who was completely

like middle class or a little lower middle class.

I didn't have any money.

All their, all their tastes were that of a basic person, right?

They, they didn't shop at Whole Foods.

They shopped at Kroger, right?

They didn't eat like fancy stuff.

They, you know, like McDonald's and stuff like that.

They didn't drive a fancy car.

They drove like a Camry and like, okay.

So that was their like taste buds.

So I thought, what if you had a show where you just give a really basic person, fuck

you money and they get to go ball out and you get to see their reaction because already

shows where people ball out, like, like, you know, whether it's kind of like a million

dollar listing or it's like a selling sunset or it's like Kardashians, it's like, it's

nice to see the lifestyles of the rich and famous people like that.

But those people also, there's that genre of lifestyles of the rich and famous from

people who are already rich and famous and sort of like, you know, snobby and materialistic.

Okay.

That already exists.

What about some, what if you transformed somebody?

You gave them the Cinderella treatment.

They went from the, you know, the bottom to the top suddenly and they're now just discovering

all these things for the first time.

Hilarity ensues.

Okay.

That's my second.

Let me make a, let me put a twist on it.

Please.

I actually think that you could do this or someone listening could actually do this immediately

via a YouTube series.

So in 2005, there was a documentary called reversal of fortune.

It was on showtime.

It was amazing.

And the question was, what would a homeless person do if they were given a hundred thousand

dollars?

And so they found this homeless guy, they gave him a hundred thousand dollars and they show

him going to like a hotel for the first time and sleeping in a bed for the first time.

And he's like, I don't like this.

And he's sleeping on the floor of the hotel because he's like, it's not comfortable sleeping

on this bed.

And they give him a hundred thousand dollars and it ends not good.

So he spends all of his money on women.

He buys a $35,000 truck and this is like 35,000 of the hundred grand and basically blows

through all the money and he does get a job, but he like, all the money is gone on basically

partying.

And at the end of the movie, he's only got five grand left and he's sleeping at his sister's

house.

But I actually think what you do sounds like great TV to me.

It was great TV.

I was watching it the whole time.

So I think what could be what you should do is just get a hundred thousand dollars and

do a YouTube series on this.

I think you can make your money back in ad revenue.

That's how I think.

I think if you did it with a homeless person, you might get some blowback now.

So you know,

Yeah, now it's a homeless person.

But like, you know, like what would happen if like, you know, a someone who's in need

or doesn't have much is given a month, give it a lot.

And I think it kind of needs to be temporary.

Like, you know, so, you know, with like Pimp My Ride, you know, exhibit shows up at the

door and then like your life just sort of changes overnight or like, you know, wife swap or

whatever where it's a very short period of it's like a month or something like that.

I think you need to let them ball out and then let them return back to reality.

And you see that that sort of the yo-yo of emotions between them.

Okay.

So that's my second one.

Okay.

Third one.

Very easy show.

I just need to show that's background noise.

Are you a background noise kind of guy?

Do you just have something on because it just feels better to have something on?

In our, when we had a physical office, we had a, we had white noise machines throughout

the office and I enjoyed babies to sleep.

It was, so you could have like hard, like if you wanted to have a conversation in a conference

room and for it not to bleed through the walls, right?

And it was for like newsletter conversations.

Yes.

Or like when you have like an open office plan, you put it in like pods of desks.

So then like the people eat and lunch, don't bother you.

Now I keep the fan on.

Well, you, you're also like a music video guy, right?

I remember we were at your house.

You were just throwing up like on Apple TV, like a bunch of music videos.

I have music videos playing throughout the day.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's the behavior I'm talking about.

I think that Netflix does not.

Does anyone else do that?

You don't do that.

You don't have a music video.

But my wife, she'll always put like friends on.

I'm like, dude, you're watching friends and she's like, no, I'm not like, I'm not watching.

I'm like, why do you have it on?

I kind of turned off.

No, no, no.

I like, I like having it on.

And it's like, yeah, she doesn't like if there's like kind of like an empty home feeling

and also it's this comfort safety blanket where it's like, I already seen all the episodes

and this is why the office and friends are such valuable catalogs because people just

put them on and they can only pay 10% or 20% attention to it and 80% could be on the thing

they're trying to do.

And they can just glance up and, you know, see certain parts, but then they just don't.

It's a low maintenance show.

And when you go on Netflix today, so much of it is high maintenance attention.

It's like, oh, here's this intense story about this bank heist and that's great when you

want like a Friday night intense drama.

But I think they're under serving the background noise.

And I also learned this at Twitch because when I was at Twitch, we looked at some of

the data about the usage data and somebody was pointing out like, oh, yeah, like X percent.

I can't say the exact percent, but like a significant percent of the viewing time is

when it's not the tab that's in the forefront on people's computer.

And I was like, oh, so we should just like throw that out, right?

Like they're not even watching.

They just like accidentally left it open.

And I was like, why is it such a high percentage?

Do we have some bug that like it stays open in the background in some weird way?

They're like, no, this is actually the usage.

Like all the developers are going to talk about the developers who actually like use

Twitch all the time.

They're like, this is how I use Twitch all the time.

Like I'm coding.

I just have it on in the back.

I'm just listening to it.

Like you're listening to somebody play video games.

Like if there's one thing weirder than watching somebody play video games, it's listening

to somebody play video games.

Like, no, I just like it as like an ongoing background stream.

It's kind of my favorite streamer.

And I don't really need to pay attention to it, but I'll hop in if I hear something

cool happening.

I was like, holy shit.

So there's this big genre of background entertainment that I think you, if you specifically tried

to make in, make background entertainment, you could create some really successful franchises.

So can I, can I, can I tell you something that validates us?

So you know, chive, chive.com.

I think it's just like a news website or something.

I don't really know much about it.

A little bit.

It's like basically Barstool, but a slightly different demographic, but mostly the same.

And they created this thing called Chive TV.

And so what they did was they would, they're based in Austin.

They basically gave a little Amazon fire stick to a bunch of bars in Austin.

And they said, you can have this stick for free.

And on this stick is basically, we're going to put loads and loads of different clips

of basically like America's funniest home videos, basically guys getting hit the balls

and like funny bar stuff that you don't actually need any sound to understand or to get like

pleasure from.

And so it was like silly stunts, guys jumping off skyscrapers and like skydiving and stuff.

And they eventually spun this off and they created this business called Atmosphere.

And this was making tens of millions of dollars in revenue pre pandemic, I believe.

They raised tens of millions of dollars at like a $200 million valuation.

And they would give these, these, these fire sticks to like loads of different people.

And then eventually you could just download this app and they would fulfill the put content

in the pipe and then put ads on it.

And that's how they made all the money and they go, look advertisers, you're reaching

all these bars.

Right.

Bars is a great one.

Right.

That's like perfect background, background entertainment.

All right.

So those are my three TV show pitch ideas, half baked ideas.

Do you have any ideas?

Is there a show that you think could exist or what exists or should exist?

I know I'm putting you on the spot here.

No, but level.

So one that has caught my eye, YouTube on YouTube, CNBC is doing something that I think

is actually amazing.

It's called millennial money, stupid name and the branding is really dumb.

But what they do is they convince these, no, they got the idea is cool though.

My friend Steve was on it the other day.

They convinced these people and they say like, and the titles are like, here's how we live

on a million dollars a year in Silicon Valley.

Here's how we live on $40,000.

Here's how we live on $150,000.

And I've also seen Kevin O'Leary reacts to them.

Have you seen this?

That's what they, and that's also awesome.

I think it's a great series.

I think they're missing the mark though.

But even though they're missing the mark, it's still quite good.

And so I've always thought that for different stuff, I was like, what you, what you should

do is get, you could do it in one of two ways.

I've always thought what you could do is you could maybe have a podcast or get actors

and they like, I bet you if I send out a survey and I've done this before, we did this at

the hustle.

We sent out a survey, we posted it on hacker news and we got like 3000 people to tell us

how much money they have in their checking account, how much they have in investable assets,

how much they spend each month and then just like a comment box and they like leave comments.

And if you search like the hustle founder bank account, it'll like, we did an article

on it and people would give us all their information and it was all anonymous though and it was

pretty great.

And I always thought it would be interesting to where we can do a podcast where I just

ask these people questions and then I'll hire a voice actor just to read them.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

I like that.

I also really liked that survey kind of idea because if people, people are very willing

to share because there's no cost to them.

It's anonymized.

You know, it's not being publicly shared that it's their, their information, but people

really benefit from seeing what the aggregate is doing.

So we talked about this with salaries, with levels.fi as well as somebody heard the thing

for levels and then they made it for, do you know about the story?

Someone heard our podcast about levels.

They made it for doctors and then it got acquired by levels and so they, you know, work out.

Oh, it got acquired.

They got acquired.

They got aqua hired.

Maybe it's a better way to phrase it.

Like those guys now are like, you know, like doing their thing at levels.

He's like, dude, thanks for like that idea.

It led me to like, it got me off the path I was on.

I built something cool.

I got to learn from that.

And then I got a sweet opportunity at levels through that.

So, but, but there's another one that's going viral right now that's like, I think 175,000

tech workers have put their stuff into this spreadsheet.

Yeah.

I've seen that.

What's that called?

It's literally just a Google sheet.

It's like, it's broken because it has too many rows now, like nobody can like use it.

They like, they're like asking for Excel experts to like help them, you know, like format this

so that they, they don't lose the data, but like people can still put their stuff in.

I saw that they're basically doing it because they want to end like maybe if you're a minority

or something at Facebook, you're like, I don't know if I'm getting fucked here.

Can everyone please enter their salary anonymously so I know like, is this fair or not fair?

And that's how it got started.

And so people were like rallying behind it and it went viral.

I saw that.

That was pretty cool.

Yeah.

All right.

That's a couple other ideas, but I'm going to save them.

All right.

I think that was a good one.

Benjamin, what do you, what do you think of this one?

Give it a grade.

This was an A. This was an A minus.

I take it back with an A minus.

Walk me through that.

It was an A and then it became an A minus.

It was an A because it was good top to bottom, like all of it was good.

And then I decided to add the minus at the end because it was missing like a hose water

Sam moment.

Like I didn't have anything that I was like rolling on the floor laughing or anything

like that.

So I docked it.

Dude, it's because my freaking camera's screwing up.

It knocks me off my flow so much.

I can't stand it.

Apparently.

So I did.

So I, some people say we're funny, which shocks me.

And like the other day, Noah was like, you have to take notes about reading a book.

And I'm like, dude, I just read a book about like the Navy SEALs.

Like what you, am I supposed to take notes about how like bin Laden was shot in the head?

And like apparently people wrote in the comments, they like when we say dumb stuff like that.

And that shocks me.

When people say they listen, I'm like, I'm like, really?

So I don't know if you're just doing that thing where it's like fake, fake humble, like,

oh, gosh, shucks.

I didn't know that guy, like, no, I think it's funny.

Like, I think it's funny.

I think you're funny.

I think you're funny as a group, I would say we're like mildly funny, but I wouldn't

say funny is an attribute that I would like give this show.

And I think you're way funnier also.

I even texted you this because you would, you would sent me something that was so funny.

And I was like, dude, you're funny.

No, you said a left-handed compliment.

You're like, I don't think a lot of people understand this, but you're pretty funny.

Like I made a joke the other day.

Someone posted a picture with them with their arm or it was just like a headshot of them

with Apollo Antonono, the ice skater.

And I was like, I don't know who that is.

It's I was like, that's Apollo Antonono.

I'm like, ah, sorry, I didn't recognize them without a skates on.

Yeah.

There's like a little kind of it's like that.

And no one laughed at it.

And I was like, guys, that's hilarious.

That was funny.

I was funny.

I should have given you a laugh because that was, that was a good one.

And yeah.

So I think we're funny.

You have a, you're blunt, which is that's funny in itself, right?

You just, you just say something and you don't hedge, which is like makes it even funnier

because everybody fucking hedges nowadays.

So you don't hedge or apologize, which is hilarious.

And then you have some good like kind of phrases or one-liners that hit.

Well, I'll take it.

So Ben A minus, but we'll try to get some hose water stuff.

Yeah.

People are still calm.

People tweet at me and call me hose water.

I love it.

All right.

We're out of here.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.