My First Million - #131 - The Companies We Would Buy and Fix and A Multi-Million Dollar Rapper Snack Business

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - Shaan finds Internet gold in the Twitter replies from followers of Chamath (1:45) - Sam explains why Casper mattress company should be in the midwest instead of Brooklyn (3:35) - Sam thinks one company that is ripe for innovation is Subway (5:25) - the guys talk about why Western Union should switch to Crypto and modernize (7:10) - Shaan thinks CVS is another candidate ripe for modernization (12:30) - Shaan explains why Tootsie Roll should go viral (15:45) - Sam and Shaan wonder why new candy bars don’t exist (22:15) - Shaan breaks down a blog post called “Nine Charts About Why Bitcoin is Different This Time” and on if there’s substance behind Bitcoin’s recent rise (30:25) - Shaan pitches a “collaborative search engine” idea that he’s calling Figma for Browsers (36:10) - Could “Substack for video” be a thing? (42:00) - the guys find an interesting bootstrapper online named Jakob Greenfeld (44:35) Reference links: - Chamath's tweet https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1329578886556839936 - Shinola https://www.shinola.com/ - Gumspy https://gumspy.com/ - Rap Snacks http://www.rapsnacks.net/ - Rokfin https://rokfin.com/ - Why Bitcoin is different this time https://cointelegraph.com/news/this-time-is-different-10-bitcoin-charts-show-that-this-rally-isn-t-like-2017 Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. We live? What's up, Sam?

What did you say, Sam looks like? Looks like the male Elizabeth Holmes. He's got a very, very nice black turtleneck-looking thing on. No, it's just a collar. I'm just being preppy today. All right. What up, man? What are you going to talk about?

I'm sitting here in my office. You know, Jack Butcher from Visualized Value? Yep. I went to his house in Nashville and him and my wife and his wife all became buddies. And now he just arrived in Austin. He's going to be celebrating Thanksgiving with us. He's right in the other room here. Amazing.

So I'm happy he's here. Love it. Buddies. We became buddies fast. By the way, do you like this new little studio setup? Yeah, it looks very slick. Does it look good? Every day is getting better, yeah.

All right, good. Let's get into it. By the way, I love how much time you spend improving the visual of your podcast studio given that no one can see it. That's, I didn't really think about that. That's fucked up. Does it sound good at least?

It does sound good, yeah. Because I put, like, we put carpet and stuff in here to make it sound good. before it sounded like so echoy. So hopefully it sounds good. Okay, you want to talk about some of this stuff? Can we talk about the first thing being your, the Chammoth, or what's his name, Chimoth? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, Chimoth's tweet.

Yeah, go ahead. So he put out a tweet the other day and Chimoth's probably one of the five to ten people I have Twitter notifications on for us. So I get like a text message basically whenever they tweet, which is pretty annoying. But it's like, you know, you get, you get. get all the good stuff. So for some people who are very putting out high signal and low noise, it's good. So he put out a tweet that said, what's an interesting cash flowing public company that could be supercharged if I could get a hold of it and help revamp its technology and go to

market? Basically, what's a public company that's got good cash flows that I could buy and I could use technology to supercharge the growth? And so good question. And then because he's tomorrow, I think it's a bunch of replies of people doing sort of free free. homework forum. You know, they're his free associates. And so I thought this thread was great. And I spent like, you know, 45 minutes in this one thread, just learning different stuff and looking at these different companies. And, you know, I think somebody could easily spend 12 hours in this thread and learn a whole bunch and publish what you learned and probably get, you know, a job with Schmoth if you wanted to. But what did you think of this? Yeah. So I only saw

the tweet. I didn't read any of the replies. Okay. By the way, on Twitter, do your replies sort by most popular? Yeah, I think so. Mine don't. It's not exactly most popular, but it's some algorithm for sure. I don't have that. So I don't really, I didn't sort through the comments, but how about this? Let's go back and forth and we'll name one, and then I'll name one, you name one,

and we'll go back and forth. And it's okay if yours are stolen. None of mine are stolen, but that also means none of mine are maybe that good. So all of mine are stolen, but what it means is that I didn't do the homework. So I'm going to know pretty much nothing more than just what they said in the tweet. But I'll just read their tweet essentially as my own. Okay, let me tell you one. And this one, mine are either going to be incredibly obvious or just really stupid.

So, sorry. Okay. Casper Mattresses. Okay. Have you seen their market, like, have you seen their market cap? No, what is it? $2 billion, $1 billion? No, dude.

Less than a billion? Yes, keep going. $300 million? How low is it? No, $250 million. Wow. $250 million market cap. with like $500 million in sales a year.

Okay, but why would Schmoth want to buy a trash company like Casper that... It's not a trash company. It just shouldn't be in New York. I would buy it. He should buy it and fire every single person and move them to Utah. Tell me why a mattress company has customer service people who are hipsters out of Brooklyn or in Manhattan. You don't need that. But is the problem they're essentially their office?

G&A expenses or is it that the mattress and shipping a mattress and dealing with returns is really expensive and that's the problem? He could figure it out. Matt, see, like I told you, none of my ideas aren't necessarily going to be that great. Okay, I like it. That I would say, I'm going to say no on that because I don't think that technology, I think they are a technology native company. I went the other way, looking at the dinosaur companies that have strong brands, strong

cash flows, sometimes small, strong real estate, and they just don't have technology DNA. That's where I went with this. But okay, you want to do another one or you want me to go? Yeah, let me do another one. Okay. Okay, this one doesn't necessarily fit because I think it's still privately owned, but it's probably owned by, I think it's owned by a bank. Okay.

So that's like subway. Ah, okay, tell me why. Okay, here's why. Did you know that there are more subways than McDonald's and Starbucks combined? I did know that. So, okay. Well, so it's the largest, I think, I believe by location, it's the largest food chain in America. Great brand.

Everyone knows Subway. You know, you say Subway, everyone knows what it means. They're incredibly cheap to open. The reason why there's so many of them is a little town in Alabama may not have a McDonald's because that requires a proper kitchen. Well, Subway just is two people and like an easy bake oven, like a little like, you know, microwave oven. and it's really easy. Now, the reason why it's interesting is,

is I think that their quality right now is horrendous. The subway, like the logistics, there's something wrong with their logistical, with their chain of, their supply chain, that they can't get quality ingredients to the location. Nothing is fresh anymore. And like, that's their shit.

Yes. And, but it's still a great brand. It's, even though they've been a horrible brand for like 15 years, all of us who are in our 30s and 40s now, grew up thinking that Subway was like the Chipotle back then. Like it's a healthy alternative, which is no longer is. So I think I would be very interested in buying Subway. And I think there's a lot of things that you can do in the back end to make that business incredibly more efficient.

Okay. I don't hate the Subway call. I still don't think, I still think you're thinking in the same vein. Like you're taking a brand that's known for X and saying do X better rather than, okay, I'll give you an example. Okay, fine. Let me give you a good one here. So I found this in the thread. Should I even try to give credit? Should I try to find who said this? Maybe, maybe not. Okay, so the one idea is Western Union. Okay, so the person who tweeted this back is Main Street investor. Their ad handles New Money FC. Good name. I like it. So he said, Western Union, here's why. Growing digital footprint, tepid revenue growth, strong for your cash flow and no other bets. And I think that's the key. There's no like growth bets really in Western Union. And so, you basically showed for for 2020 a billion dollars of free cash flow on five billion of revenue so that's pretty good and then they basically um they talked about some of the assets that they have so they are operating already and they have compliance in 200 countries that would take

you a long time to buy into or grow into so they already have that they have a network of 500,000 agents already in all these different countries for you to do business with. That's really critical. And then, you know, it has a billion in cash and three billion in long-term debt. And so Western Union, here's the play with Western Union. You have Chamath, who at one point owned 5% of all Bitcoin that was out there. And you have Western. Did he really? Yeah. I don't know if he still does. But at one point, he owned 5% of the market cap of Bitcoin. He had accumulated a pretty big position. This is according to him. I don't know if this is an audited statement, but I heard him say it at a talk.

So then you have Western Union, which is all about money transfer on legacy systems. And it's for international remittance of currency, which is actually the one thing that Bitcoin can do really, really well. And so I think you basically take Western Union and then you pair it as the Bitcoin brand. And so you have all these agents in all these different countries where they have weak currencies, you know, you go to Uganda or wherever else. And you have Western Union is a known brand over there, which. which is one of the few Western brands that's known internationally. It's known as a trusted financial partner, which gets over the hump with Bitcoin, which is this new kind of scary thing.

And you basically inject, you basically turn Western Union into a Bitcoin remittance network over time, starting small and then going bigger. And so I think this is a great way to become this sort of international Bitcoin merchant and network using Western Union as your Trojan horse. And let me look up the Western Union market cap. So while you're looking at that up, let's look at what, like, I usually default to like, oh, yeah, why could this work? But let's actually ask ourselves why this can't work. By the way, $8 billion is the market cap.

So Western Union, pretty shit brand. Like, they're known for being like reliable, but like to put crudely, like, this is what you use when you're really poor. Well, that's the market for that's the market that they have is people who need, you know, need money transfers. this. Totally. And it's typically like in bad neighborhoods, it's like poor low income people, right? Like it's opportunity. You're just saying the word opportunity over and over again in my head. That's all I'm hearing. Dude, I'm just hearing opportunity, opportunity, opportunity.

Hey, look, I agree. There's opportunity everywhere. But my point is, is that with that market truly embrace Bitcoin. So the thing is, you can make it where either Bitcoin is getting to that point where people are curious enough. And if you make an easy on-ramp, that's what people always talk about, on-ramps and off-ramps with Bitcoin. How do you make it easy to buy? How do you get it get-it-cash-out, get cash that you want with it? That's what Western Union is. It's a network of on-ramps and off-ramps. So I like that. The other thing you could do is you could sort of mask it. So you could basically make it a more user-friendly product that just uses Bitcoin as the Rails. And so you could be able to skip the step of educating. But I would just go for the

education component of it because I think enough people are interested in Bitcoin. And I also think that the kind of bad neighborhoods thing, that's the U.S. perspective. I'm talking about countries where it's just a bad, the whole country is a bad neighborhood. And so that's where Western Union is on the other side of the, you know, that's the other side of the tunnel when you send money through Western Union is typically to countries with really poor financial infrastructure, poor currency controls, that sort of thing. That's who needs Bitcoin. Another thing about buying a company like Western Union is that you probably, have a ton, like hundreds of people in upper management who have been worked there for probably

20 years. And it's like, can you teach an old dog new tricks or do you just got to fire everyone. Casper mattresses, baby. We're cutting heads over at Western Union. Okay. So if you're going to do this, everyone's like, there's so much opportunity, but you got to think like you're going to have to fire a ton of people. Also, it's going to be a headache. You're going to get lawsuits. The yellow color, we're brightening it up. We're rebranding. We're doing everything here. So heads are going to roll. We're rebranding.

The whole name might change to Western coin soon. And it's going to be about transmitting. I'm just saying these people probably all look like my aunt and uncle. You're going to have a lot of angry Karens in Western Union. Hey, the severance package is on the left over here. You can collect six months of severance and see you later. I'm getting a bunch of crypto nerds in here. And we're taking over.

That's an interesting one. other ideas. It's a pretty good. It's a pretty good idea, I think, now. Not like, I would be on, I wouldn't bet my own money because we're just shooting the shit, but it's, it's quite interesting. Okay, here's another one. Um, CVS. This was the top reply in the threat. No way. And, um, okay, so let me give you the, the person. Dude, CVS is booming. They're, they're great. They they don't need him. Uh, so post, post, post, underscore market is her handle. Uh, she's actually very interesting. She has very good, good tweets. Um, so she said, CVS has 15 billion of cash flow, has touchpoints with 100 million consumers and a storebase of 9,000 stores for distribution for you.

So this is the Whole Foods Amazon Playbook. And so basically it's healthcare is the most attractive vertical with the largest profit pool. They have the tools to win in an Amazon dominated world. So Chimoth is known to be very interested in health care. I think one of his backs just took Clover Health public as well. He invested in like a diabetes company and some others. And so now there's some problems with CVS, which is that like you said, CVS is doing well. So CVS's market cap is like $80 billion. So not a realistic target to take out, take

private, take over. So he actually responded in the thread and said, what about cash tag RAD, which is Rite Aid? What about right aid instead? Right aid's kind of interesting, right? It's, you know, the poor man CVS. And I think right aid is like a 500-ish million market cap company that has many of the same properties just with a smaller footprint overall. And so here's the play. We do, we do, we, we, we, we, We take Sam's original idea with the subway. No, no, no, no. We need, like, a blockbuster. We need someone who's going out of business.

And we're going to take Rite Aid, the brand. And then we're going to pick up real estate footprint of some brand that just died during COVID. And they, like, you know, some dollar store or like, you know, Sears. I don't know. Somebody's going out of business, but it has the same Sears too big. You need somebody with the same footprint as a Rite Aid. We're going to do a roll-up of those two.

And we're going to offer the sort of mobile. ordering delivery DoorDash style service for prescriptions and products from Rite Aid. Give me your thoughts. And passport photos, which is why people go to CVS and Walgreens and stuff as well to take passport photos. We're going to come to your house and take a picture of you. How big is Rite A? Are they public?

Five, six hundred million. Five hundred million dollars? Yeah, that's it. It's fucking steel. Yeah. Cool idea. How many locations, like how much, I feel like their real estate would be worth close to that. They may not own. They may lease, right? So, okay, so it's a $600 million,

net operating cash flow, $2,000, $500 million. Free cash flow, $330 million. I don't understand public companies. How is a company that's got, you know, $300 million of free cash flow and, you know, 500 million of net operating cash flow? Yeah, I don't know anything about that either. I mean, I would wonder how much debt they have. Someone who's smarter than me about how public companies are valued, tell me about all this. But I like the idea. I like the idea of taking something that has going for something that has a wide real estate footprint in a space you care about like health care. And then trying to modernize it by offering some of the things that the digital pharmacies are doing and try to go that route.

That one's a good one. What else was good? One other one I liked. This was actually my idea, but somebody in the thread also was thinking about it, which is a brand that I find hilarious. and that's Tootsie Roll. So Tootsie Roll is a very interesting company. I don't know if I ever tell you about the Tootsie Roll stock tip I got. No, but wait, is that the one that Moise talked about?

I talked about it with him, yeah. Yes, I've heard about this through the grapevine. So several years ago, and by the way, this turned out to just be very lucky timing. There was no actual intelligence behind us. But several years ago, like 20, 17-ish, Tootsey Roll was like, I don't know, $35 a share. And I saw this YouTube video of this guy who was like on CNBC and they were asking about all these like, what do you think about the global economy?

He's like, I don't know about any of that. But I'm tell you one thing. Dead stock, Tutsi Roll. He's like, I'm short and Tutsi Roll big. And I was like, what? This came out of nowhere. And he's like, I'm shorting Tutsi roll. He goes, do you know anyone under the age of 40 who likes Tutsi rolls?

And he's like, yeah, Sam raises Sam. But he's like, he's like, kids don't like Tutsi rolls. Don't even know about Tutsi Rolls. He goes, Tutsi Roll, owned by this woman who is 90 years old or whatever. She's never going to sell the company. She refuses to sell over her dead body. So there's no sale possible. Revenue is going to go down because nobody likes Tutsi Roll.

And as I was listening to this, I was like, yeah, dude, Tutsi Rolls are gross. And so I shorted the stock. This is my first stock I ever shorted. And it crashed. It went down to like, whatever. Not a huge crash, but it went down like $5, six dollars a share. And I made a bunch of money. I immediately sold it and I got out.

And since then, by the way, the stock is up. So it wasn't a long-term thing. But ever since then, I've just always looked at this Titsyroll stock. So Titsy Roll's worth $2 billion. And it is actually a big brand, but it is so outdated in every way. And it doesn't do... Dude, I love Tutsi-Roll, by the way. I wish I had a Tutsi-Role right now.

I feel like they don't do any of the things that like M&Ms and Skittles and others candies do to stay relevant with, like, the younger generation of like, you know, partnering with young pop stars, like coming out with new various. new holiday themes. Like, you know, I feel like Tutsi rule does nothing. And so the idea would be to buy Tutsi rollout and bring it back with like, hire like the best marketing agency of all time and bring it back with the vengeance using TikTok as distribution.

What's their, what's Tutsi Roles market cap? Two billion. It's expensive. It's 500. Sorry, two billion. Yeah, two billion. Not bad. It's expensive.

Wow, but I think, wow. That's an interesting one. All these other brands, right? Hershey is, I think, sold for $20 billion or something like that. There's basically several candy brands. If you follow the trail of candy brands, they all get sold to the same, you know, Mondalese and whoever. Tootty rolls is a good idea. Here's why.

Okay, so they own Tootsy rolls, obviously. They own fruities. I love fruities. Okay, they own dots. You know dots? Dude, I don't even know what fruities is. I don't know what kind of, you know, middle America candies you eat. That is some redneck shit that I eat.

Do they own like redhots as well? I feel like that would be a brand that they would own. No. They own Sugar Daddy. You know Sugar Daddy? No. And Sugar Baby. No.

Do you know Dots? Yes. Dots is like what you get at the movie theater. I love dots. How about Andy's chocolate mints? Don't know. Yeah, the little, they're like in a green. Dude, everything in their portfolio is outdated.

Dude, Andy's is what you get at the restaurant. It's like the green thing that you get at the restaurant. Like a peppermint? It's kind of like that. But they also own. own junior mints they own charleston choo they own charms blow pops i mean i wish people could see the excitement in your face right now like this is like when you meet someone and you have five friends in common i feel like that's what's happening right now with you the tits your old brand

portfolio double bubble they own double bubble dude you're crazy this is a good there's some good stuff here all of these i would i would partner with rappers and make very clever songs i'd get my candy name dropped in every single song double bubble that should be a rap song altogether uh i would sugar daddy. I'll try to bring it back, make it culturally relevant again, and, and bring, bring this candy back to the mainstream. And then by the way, you actually don't need to do any of that stuff. You just need to not be this 90-year-old lady.

And then you need to sell the business. She's just refusing to sell the business. No, no, I don't think she is. Is she? Yeah. Tosyroll CEO dies at 95. We may never know how many like. My info is outdated here.

This is back from three, four years ago. She dead. So who owns it now? Why didn't they sell? Well, it's publicly traded. I mean, I don't know. It's got a CEO. I don't know, man.

I'm looking at this shit on the spot. But on Wikipedia, so she's dead. There's been all this candy movement, these candy roll-ups that are going on. And I'm surprised that Tutsi-Role hasn't gotten in on the action. By the way, the candy companies, I think Hershey's and Mars, I think those are like two, I think they're both in the top 10 of privately held companies in America in terms of size. Interesting. Candy businesses are cool.

Yeah, I mean, Buffett is sort of famous for being in the C's candy business. And yeah, okay, but how about that? You want to talk about no one eating Tutsi roll? Who goes to Seas Candy? Well, does Seas Candy own other brands that are like very popular? Like, do they own Eminem or something like that? Because he's always eating Eminem. He's eating Eminem to drink Coca-Cola.

So I assume they're, he only like consumes his portfolio. So I feel like. No, Seas Candy is owned by or they own, they own those all the. The fancy stuff. Yeah. I mean, it's fine. But like, it's not like, it's not. I'd rather have a Butterfinger than a Seas Candy.

Yeah. Anyway, I'm into the candy space. I think there's opportunity in the candy space. I agree with you. Like, when you, has there been, like, there's lots of, like, D to C healthy ship, but has there been a new, like, I remember when I did my cross-country trip on my motorcycle in 2012, I remember going to, like, rural Alabama or rural Oklahoma where I hadn't seen anyone in hundred miles and then rural Minnesota and then Manhattan and then Miami. I went all these places

that I'm like, they all have the same candy. Like there's a Snickers in Eminems and Hershey in all these places. And then I went to Mexico and then Europe and then all over the place. My sister was in Africa and I was talking to her and I was like, she's like, yeah, M&M's freaking everywhere. Like I'm like how like that's pretty crazy how ubiquitous some of these brands are. Right. It's just phenomenal. Right. That you go like we think that. each region's different. It's not. We all, like, we're kind of similar and we all got the same stuff. And I started thinking about that and the scope of business. And I'm like, that actually seems like, why has there not been that many new entrants into the candy bar space? I mean,

there's been like cliff bars and healthy stuff, but not like. So I was literally thinking about this like an hour ago when I thought of the Tutsu-year-old thing. I was like, dude, why are all these DDC brands trying to be like the vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free candy? It's like, go for the junk food go for addictive um you know delicious indulgent uh have fun uh you know get a little wild candies and i can't remember the last one of those that came out and so i can remember one of them which one rap snacks okay i don't know what that one is i don't know what rap snacks are oh it started 94 i had it when i was a kid and i still eat it it's called rap snacks i know they take rappers like juvenile or

Migos or Cardi B and they call it rap snacks. Yeah, rap snacks are great. I'm looking at this, it's like honey drip, butter popcorn by like Missy Elliott and like notorious BIG Honey Halapeno Pop potato chips.

Or a little boozy, Louisiana heat potato chips. Okay, so this is pretty much the exact idea I was going to pitch you, which is you buy, going back to buying legacy brand. So you go buy Warheads. Do you remember Warheads? Yeah. So you go by warheads and warheads are amazing. I don't know, when I was in like sixth grade,

like warheads were the shit in my school. It was like Pokemon cars and warheads. Those are like the two ways that you could. That's like, you know, that was Gucci and Prada as far as I was concerned in my school. If you were carrying that, you were cool. And so warheads are kind of out of fashion now. But I think you could take that same product, that extreme sour product and rebrand it and go part I would go to clutch sports and I'd be like, hey, LeBron. We need like 15 NBA athletes. You're each going to get your own warhead flavor. LeBron, you're the black warhead.

You're the craziest most sour one. And then we're going to go get, you know, Anthony Davis and Janus and the other guys to be the other flavors. And then I would go to Jake Paul for the next season. I'd be like, hey, Logan, you're the black warhead. Jake Paul, you're the red one. And then we're going to go get the other team 10 guys. And I would just keep basically licensing influential people and make the warhead packaging you know, their head basically.

And those would be the different flavors. They'd all be limited edition. And I would go that route. I'm into it. I think that would be killer. I really like some of these ideas. What else is there in the candy space? Like, there's just not much movement.

Migo, sour cream with a dab of ranch. Was that rap snacks? Yeah, rap snacks. So good. The one with, what's Dr. P? Or what's the fucker's name? Dr. Dre? Master Pete?

No, Master P. What's Master P's son name? He has one. Little Romeo. Little Romeo. He made it popular. There's Little Romeo rap snacks. That's what I used to eat when I was a kid.

That was the cool one. Okay. The other brand that I would do this with is ramen, like cup noodles. There's a picture on the rap snacks website. That's E40s prime rib icon ramen noodles. And it's just a branded. version of the ramen noodle thing. And, you know, the ramen noodle, I think is eaten by a certain demographic of sort of like, kind of like the college student or like low income, like, because

it's like, you know, it's the cheapest way to get a bunch of calories, basically. It doesn't taste, you know, great, but it doesn't taste horrible either. And so I would basically take the, any of these products that are generically branded or they look like, kind of like ramen, it's like this Asian looking brand. It doesn't really, you know, like have much of a, of a standout presence. I would just clone the product and slap, you know, different celebrity faces on, on those products.

I'm into it. I love this idea. I've just, I've always been thinking about, I mean, I've been thinking about this for years. I'm like, why do we not have,

like, when you think about the innovation that has come out of candy, like it's been like Eminem's having peanut butter and crisp and, like, you know how Eminem's has all those different flavors now? Yeah. Or like peanut or, or,

or peanut butter cups having Christmas tree or like there's it's very there's like they don't do a lot of new shit ever. Okay. So did you know the story of rap snacks? No, I did it have something to do at Masterpiece? Yes. Masterpiece. I think he bought it. Right. So basically, they went into the chip industry. So not exactly candy. So so somebody named James Lindsay's part, James Lindsay partnered with Master P to put some of hip hop's biggest stars on bags of chips. And so this article, when's this So this is from 2020. So this may be, you know, put some water to cool down on my idea. I don't think it's that big.

So basically it said they're in 400. Dude, they only sell it like in the Midwest and the South. Like they have it at all the stores where I grew up. Right. So it said, you know, they started this in 94, like you said. I can't believe you even knew this, by the way. You have the most random collection of knowledge I've ever seen. And then in 2011, things slowed down.

And then they were just kind of operating in three or four markets. And then they came back in 2016 and they launched nationwide. basically, not nationwide, but like a much bigger part of the country. So now they're in 4,000 Walmart stores nationwide. And they say it's grown into a $5 million business, which seems really, really low. That's wrong, brother. It is big, bakery and snacks reported. I don't know what that means. No, rap snacks makes at least $100 million a year, dude. Like every store in St. Louis has them. Let's see if we can do a quick, I believe you. It's like it's huge. And they have like T.I. Snacks and they've got like juvenile. They got Migos. I love it. I love RAP.

I just bought them like four weeks ago. 30 million in revenue in 2019. You bought rap snacks recently? Yeah, dude. I love rap snacks. Do they taste good or do you just think they're cool? They're just generic chips. They're just cool.

I was with Sarah and she likes Cardi B. I got her some Cardi B rap snacks, dog. Like, come in. This isn't like hard to understand. I would also be interested in starting a line where I just got the brands that we would all eat for lunch. So like Bosco sticks or like pizza sticks. or hot fries and cheddar fries.

Yeah, what's Dunkeroo's doing nowadays? All right, so let's move on, but I'm into the legacy brand, legacy food brand rebranding as, do you know who did a really good job of buying an old brand and making completely different was Shinola? No, what do they do? Shinola. Do you know what Shinola is? No.

The guy who started Fossil Watch, he's a Greek guy. I mean, he's American Greek, I think. I don't want to pronounce. his name because it's like a very hard Greek name for me to say. Tom something. Fossil Watch went public. He became a billionaire. He then started Shainola and Shinole is a very, or it used to be a famous American brand. And their tag phrase or tagline was, you don't know shit about Shinola. And I don't know why that was the phrase actually, but that was their tagline. And It originally was a shoe polish business, but Shinola, it had the coolest logo.

And so he bought it, the logo and the brand, which I don't know what bought mean. Like, I don't know what there was to buy. And then he turned it into a watch company. And at this point, they make watch it. They put Shinola branding on watches, basketballs, some electronics, like electrical cords, which is weird, notebooks. And it's like a half a billion dollar. company.

Interesting. I like it. Which one do you want to go to? Do you sure you want to talk about Bitcoin? It's kind of nerdy, but I'll just shout it out. Okay, so there is a blog post you should Google called nine charts about why Bitcoin is different this time. And I think it's important because, A, I'm into Bitcoin, but B, it's hard to differentiate

between when something is actually here. there's substance versus just hype. And what this shows is that Bitcoin has re-arrived at the like 18. It's about 18,000 and a half now per Bitcoin. And that's just about the all-time high where it was it hit 20,000 a few years ago. And then it crashed. And so people want to know, is it just going to crash again? Or is it just hype, speculation? What's causing this? And I thought this guy did a good job of looking at some of the fundamentals of Bitcoin. And it's pretty compelling. I'll just shout out two of the proof points and then I just think people should go read this. It's very interesting. So he did analysis and he basically said because Bitcoin's all, all the wallets are public,

right? It's a public ledger. So you can basically see how many wallets have more than $10 in them. And this is a, you know, this is a way to check how much adoption is there, right? Bitcoin, like all money is about a network effect. So the more people that use it, the more valuable it gets. It's like if not everybody uses a currency or doesn't speak a language, it's not useful. back in 2017, so just three years ago, the number of wallets with just over $10 in them was three and a half million wallets, not that, not that much adoption, right? There's, you know, apps that tell you about plants that have more users. And now just three years later, it's 18 million wallets have more than $10 in them. So you could see like the number of, and you could

do this, you could say more than $100, more than $1,000, it's the same curve. It's basically 6x the size. The adoption is six X size as it was. last time the price was at this point. So that's way better, way more adoption, way more fundamentals. The second part is what they call realized market cap. And basically this measures, okay, what's, like right now to get the market cap of Bitcoin, they just say, how many Bitcoin are outstanding and what's the price for Bitcoin? That's the market cap. But that's not really real, right? Because a lot of people got in when Bitcoin was cheap. And so it's not like they're actually buying it at today's prices. Like if one person buys it at $20,000, that doesn't mean that all the

Bitcoin are worth 20,000. So it's a little bit, the market cap generally is misleading. So he looked at something called the realized market cap. And all this basically means is he ignored all the Bitcoin that hasn't moved in many years. So this is like stuff that people have had since 2009 and like hasn't actually, hasn't actually been transferred, hasn't been sold or bought. So it's basically of the Bitcoin that were sold and bought this year, how much have those

been worth? And so what it showed was that on a, it shows. shows you kind of the cost basis. And so in 2017, the market cap, if you use this method, was only 10 billion. And now it's 120 billion. So 12 times the size, which basically means that that even though Bitcoin's price is higher, the number of people who are actually buying and selling at this price is much, much larger this time. So last time, the price ran up because a small number of people were buying at this high price. And most people had been in it at super low prices. So like, you know, if you own Bitcoin when it was $40. And now it's at $20,000. You're not going to

you're a more likely to sell because it's like life-changing money for you to cash out, take some money on the table. And you're almost completely unlikely to go buy a $20,000. Because mentally you're like, dude, I bought this at $50. I'm not going to buy this at $20,000 per Bitcoin now. And so there just weren't as many buyers available at that price point. Now there's way more. So I think those two are really promising signs. And so I would guess that Bitcoin is going to break through to new highs, you know, over the next two, three years. How high? I don't know. People do these like estimates where they say 50,

60,000 of Bitcoin. And what they're assuming is essentially Bitcoin continues to sort of eat into the gold use case of why people buy gold. And so basically if you look at it as a, how big is Bitcoin compared to gold? It's like 2% right now. And people see it getting to about 10%

of gold's market cap within that time. And that would price it at 50,000, per coin. And there's all these other good signs like a bunch of financial institutions from, you know, JP Morgan, Bank of America, whoever I've come out and put in their thing. Like, here's the asset classes we're most excited about looking forward. Like, all their fund managers and stuff like that. You know, Square is now now using Bitcoin. So there's more adoption by institutions and there's more buying by institutions. And institutions can really spike the market because that's a lot of cash that wasn't able to get into Bitcoin before that can now, you know,

use Bitcoin as a small hedge in their portfolio, and that'll be huge. So I think those things will drive it up. There's a guy who is supposed to be chopping off his dick soon, right? Why, he bet something? The guy John McAfee, he said if it does, I think, did he say if it doesn't hit a million dollars by like this January? That's right. Yeah. He's going to chop off his dick and eat it. That's what he said. Set your calendar reminders.

Is that this December? I don't know. I'm ready to check when he promised that. Not to interrupt your wonderful. No, that's it. That's all I wanted to say. Wonderfully intellectual point, which I buy into, but just a reminder,

the founder of McAfee virus software on December 31st is supposed to chop off his dick and eat it. If it's not at what, like 100,000? I think a million. If it's not reached one million. Okay, yeah. Oh, he said he'll do it on national TV too. Perfect.

Okay, so forget the blog post. Just watch this when this goes live on ABC. We'll do one more. Yeah? What's the, let's talk about Figma for browsers. What's that mean? Okay, so I got two ideas that are kind of what I'll call the X for Y ideas, where you just sort of take X and you say,

I'm going to do it in a different category. So Figma for browsers. So there's been this movement of all the shit people used from being, what I'll call single player, like a single player video game, to being multiplayer. So a good example of this is Figma, which is like a new, it's Photoshop, but it's like the new age Photoshop. And Figma's valued over a billion dollars. So they built a billion dollar startup, basically taking Photoshop and saying, oh, this should

actually be on the internet, not just a computer, something on your computer. And like, while I'm doing designs, Sam, you should be able to like collaborate on the same file. And you should be able to- great framework. That is such a great framework. And so then there's Google Docs, right? Google Doc said, oh, there's Microsoft Word.

that's the single player version of writing a document. Google Docs. It's the multiplayer version. Two of us can be writing on the same document, editing things, leaving comments for each other, that sort of thing. It's like collaborative software is the boring way to say it. But I call it multiplayer software. Did you make this up?

I think a bunch of people have come to the same realization. I thought of it myself, but I've seen other people talk about this too. So there's another one that's Front, which is an email inbox. So email is a single player sport. Usually, Front basically said, hey, you know when you have like a help desk, It's kind of like annoying that everybody has to share the same password and you don't know who's going to reply. Like, we're going to make a team, a multiplayer version of an email inbox. And like your whole team that does customer support can see the same inbox and then assign each other's things and leave each other comments about it as you go.

So this trend keeps continuing. So I just look at on my computer screen. I go look at the kind of the desktop apps, all the apps I have. And I just think which ones of these are single player today? That could be multiplayer. And the biggest one is the browser. So Chrome, right, or Safari or whatever you use. So today your browser is a completely single player experience.

You use your browser. You don't share it with anybody else. But you do take links and you share the shit out of links, right? That's how stuff grows on the Internet. People sharing stuff with one another. But the sharing is like a four-step process. You like grab the link and then you go to your email or your messenger, copy, paste it. You send it to them.

Then they click it. Then they open it. And so I actually think that there's room for the figma for browsers, which is basically let's say for this podcast, for example, we could just have a shared Chrome window and we both just open up a bunch of tabs and I can see which tabs you've put in and you can see which tabs I've put in.

I can highlight stuff on it and I could write notes on it. You could see my comment, you can reply to it. And it's like we have this little shared internet window. And I don't know what that would be good for and who would use it. I would use it.

I know with a bunch of friends, but I think it's crazy to me that there's not a multiplayer browser. Whatever the fuck that means, I think somebody should go do it. I think that's such a good. great framework. The multiplayer browser one,

maybe, but like in terms of just that framework, I think it's goal. Like, for example, you know, do you know what pro tools are? No. It's for music.

Okay. Editing music. It's like considered the, I think it's like the default. I'm like, yeah, multiplayer of any type of. So people are saying Figma for like after effects or for I movie,

like basic video editing should be done the same way. It's not today. Today I edit on my timeline and then I can export a file. Then you can import that and then you can't make the changes. It's like really annoying. That should be done in the Figma style. There's a whole bunch of these. Do you know what's crazy antiquated? I cannot believe it exists.

And like I try to tell my lawyers all the time. I'm like, can we just use Google? And they're like, no, we're not using Google. Is when they redline documents. Yep. Like track changes in Microsoft Word. Change tracking. Yeah.

Like it's so weird. So what lawyers do, if no one's had to do this, is they say they're going to, I don't even know the terminology, but they say they're going to be track changes or redlining, which means they cross out the original contract and make something new in order to negotiate. And then they like download it to, they save it and they upload it to Microsoft Word and they email it to you. And you can see the track changes if you have Microsoft Word. It's so freaking weird. It's so weird. I can't believe that that exists that way. Yeah, that's an old habits die hard thing.

I think there are some people who have tried to like modernize this whole thing because the big problem there is there's a bunch of different versions, right? You'll have like contract January 2.3 and then it's like, oh, contract January 2.4. Then somebody just says contract, you know, revised clause. And now it's like a different file. New, yeah, new, new, new, new coffee. New copy, one. I cannot stand it.

I cannot stand it. It bothers me so much. I hate this whole redlining thing. When I called my lawyer, I was like, hey, have you heard of Google Docs? And she's like, yeah, that's like amateur hour. We're not going to use that. And I was just like, okay, I guess, whatever.

But I'm shocked by that. I'm shocked at the redlining how that process works. So there's another X for Y idea that I think is interesting that a bunch of people are trying to do right now. And I don't know who's going to emerge a winner or if there is even a winner. Maybe everybody's chasing a false prize here. But it's Substack for video. So substag got really popular in the kind of like tech community as a really easy way to create a newsletter with a paywall if you want. And so you can get subscribers and you can send them emails and you can charge them for emails.

And a lot of people are trying to do this for video. So to say you can get subscribers for you to do video, either live or recorded. But let's take live. I think that's where more people are innovating right now. So I'm going to be able to go get subscribers for my live streams. some of those streams can be free and some of them can be paid. And a bunch of people are trying to make substack for live video right now. Some people are trying to do a sub-act for recorded videos as well.

What do you think of this idea? You think there's a there. I'm kind of torn on it. Yeah. So let me tell you an example. There's this company that Ben Askran is part of, and I've talked to him a bit about it. It's called Rock Finn. Do you know what Rock Finn is?

I think you've mentioned it once, but explain again. So it's R-O-K-F-I-N. and it's very similar to that. And their tagline is the best way to monetize your content. Now, they've done something weird in that they've built this on the back of Bitcoin, which to me, I'm like, I told them, I was like, you guys, I don't, like, just make, just let me give you money and make the service cool. So I don't understand what this whole, like, Bitcoin shit is and how it works with this.

Honestly, it makes it super weird. But you can go to Rockfin at the very bottom, click, like, subscribers or, dashboard. And you could see how many subscribers they have. So they have about 10,000 people who pay them money. And they've lined up people like Ben Ascgren, people who are like mildly well-known athletes and they create athletic blogs for them. And so Ben Ascran will like leading up to some fight or something, he'll like put out a bunch of episodes. And I think it's cool. I actually paid for it. It was awesome. So they're trying it. I think one problem is is that video is significantly harder than text.

So, like, with Substack, I can just sign up and it would take me 30 minutes to write my first article. Right. Video, it's definitely a lot more intense. But I do think it's quite cool. I mean, you're, you wouldn't do it like Rock Finn. You would definitely do, you would just rip off OnlyFans. Yeah.

OnlyFans is a great, great example of this. They do, they do everything. They do, you know, mostly photos and videos. I think a lot of people are doing this for live video, which I think makes, you know, some sense because you it's not as hard to create live video as it is recorded video ironically right because for recorded you have to like put all this time into editing make it good and all the stuff with live video it's just like hey whatever happens during this hour happens and then you're done with it and so I think and then you have like Instagram live and all these other things where Twitch

where you can stream for free but you can't have like your stuff behind a paywall and and so that's where I think a lot of people trying to do this for live video. I think it's interesting yeah I would just rip off only fans though that's what that would be my thing but for the same market as only fans are for a different market different yeah like a like a PC uh you know a a safer work type of thing right okay one other idea i wanted to talk about is this i this website called gum spy so it's gumspy gumspy i was pronouncing it gumcy have you seen this no i saw it on your sheet i was like gumsie What's gumsy? So gum spy.com?

Yeah. So I'll shout out the guy's making it. This guy Jacob Greenfield's making it. Greenfeld, maybe is how you say it. And I like this dude. He's a kind of like building public type of guy. And those are my people. I like that.

And so he's building a bunch of different random projects. This is one of them. So what he said is, let's see who's got the best selling stuff on gum road. So it's just a list of the best selling stuff on Gumroad. This is good trend stuff for you, by the way. So he has this, you know, website where you can go and you can get a seat, You can see a free sample where it's basically like this air table kind of embedded into the website. You can just see.

So like if you scroll over and you sort by estimated monthly revenue, look what's at the top. It's a trans competitor of yours that's doing 27, $27,000 a month. And then there's, you know, just a whole bunch. There's the agency core. Stock market investing fundamentals that's sold about $9,000 a month on Gumroad. So I thought this is kind of cool. It's a cool way to see kind of what's popular on Gumroad. And I like this guy, Jacob Stahler.

I recommend you follow him and look at the different things he's doing. He's doing what he's calling a bootstrap MBA, which is like, how do I learn business through trying to bootstrap a bunch of projects over this year? And it's going to cost me money. Maybe I'll make some money. Maybe I'll lose some money. But I'm definitely going to learn about business by building a bunch of businesses this year. And I'm going to publish as I go.

And so I like this guy's up to it. And I think this is a cool product. Wow. This guy's Jake, his personal website is even cooler than the real website. Yes. Yes. It's Jacob with a K. So Jacob Greenfeld.

Dot com. Yeah, this kid's a, how old is he? Is he young kid? No, I don't think it's a young kid. I think it's a like guy.

Oh, okay. Well, this man is talented. Yeah. This guy's awesome. Yeah, I like him a lot.

Wow. Yeah, I think this person is going to be great. I like this gum road idea. That's not going to be a big business, obviously, but it's a really neat, small tool.

But I bet you if it looks like, he already has eight of these tools already made. Yeah, he just uses the same landing page, by the way, for all of them. Like, he has another one called Product Explorer. And it's just the same website. It's a great format. What is this made out of? Is this like some like notion thing or something?

I sent it to my guy who by guy Ben, who helps me with all my projects. And I said, great example of a personal website and great example of a landing page. Let's figure out what he's using as his template for these because I really like this format. Yeah, this is really good. I really, really like this. His landing pages are phenomenal. This person seems great. I think this is really, really cool.

Oh, man, I'm like digging through all of his stuff. So how did you find this person? I saw the gumsby tool and I was like, oh, this is cool. And at the bottom right, it's like, this is made by Jacob. And I was like, ah, anytime somebody builds something tight, I stalked the shit out of him. And then I saw, he follows me, he DM me, and I never had replied to him. And I was like, ah, shit. Here we go.

And so now I DMed him being like, hey, your stuff is cool. Yeah, I don't have anything to say about this, except this is cool. I don't think that some of his tools are going to be particularly big, but I bet you many of them can make $5,000 a month. Yeah, I think, you know, this is kind of like

in the learning phase and maybe something, something leads to something is kind of what you bet here. Wow, that's badass. Let me tell you a quick story. I was out in at a bar. Not a bar. I wasn't in a bar. I was outdoors on the past.

patio of this picnic area. And I was talking, I guess kind of loud, but I had a mask on and glasses on. No one can see my face. And this person walks up to me, he goes, are you Sampar? I was like, yes. Hi. He goes, dude, you're in Sean's podcast. I love it. I'm a huge listener. I listen to every episode. And I thought it was kind of cool. So you recognize you by your voice, you're saying. Yeah, they can tell my voice. And that happens every once in a while when people can see my face. But it was very funny. people were able to recognize it just from the voice. That's cool.

Who would have thunk it, man? That's pretty crazy. Has that happened to you yet? No, the closest thing of that is like, I called my cousin and I called my cousin Robbie and he picked up the phone and it sounded like something was like, oh, hey, what's up? And he was like, hold on. And he's like kind of like distracted by something. I was like, oh, if it's a bad time, like I'll go back later. And he's like, no, no.

He's like, I was literally just listening. to the podcast and then you called and it's the same voice but like now it's live he's like he's just like really tripped me out for a second he's like I didn't know if I just push something on my phone and didn't know what the heck just happened uh that's actually a pretty good a little bit um that's a good anything else too we got to we want to go over no we're good great sounds good cool all right man I will see you then all right that's it see you all soon cool