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

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

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

This is Million Dollar Brainstorm. We talk about an idea where you get revenge against spammers. A new weight loss challenge business that Sean and I are trying out, as well as looking at a $12,000 a month chess tutoring company and how we think you can blow it up. We talk about Charlie Munger throwing a little shade at Elon Musk. And people who collect super strange and niche items, but it's somehow built an $800 million year company.

Spoiler, Sam is one of those collectors. And lastly, we tell a little fun story about Rupert Murdoch. All right, million dollar brainstorm. Joy. So what do we think is the best way to get more reviews or more downloads, which is our goal? Subscribe. So subscribe. So basically, A, tell your friends, be like, yo, there's a best business podcast out there.

And B, if you go in iTunes and subscribe, that spikes us in the chart. So some people like to unsubscribe and then resubscribe because that creates the, like the charts say, oh, there's more subscribers today. Yeah. So I think that's the barstool trick. So subscribe, then unsubscribe, and then resubscribe. Just do that a ton of times because here's the deal. If Sean and I don't get to 100,000 listeners per episode in the next weeks or months,

we're going to start charging for this pocket. Yeah, or we just get so bored. We're like impatient. We're too impatient to wait. No, we're going to make it so you have to pay money to listen. That's going to happen. So you want to start talking about some ideas. First of all, I think we should start with this, the Twitter weight loss thing.

We should start with that. That's pretty interesting. Did you sign up for it? I signed up. I just ate a big old plate of veggies just now. because now because I'm like, oh shit, this is starting. So explain what this is. Okay.

So when you're on camera, you predict this happens a lot, but you get self-conscious. But also, we are both trying to lose weight. Our friend Justin is doing a thing where we have Venmo. Did you do Venmo him money? So he tweeted out, hey, I got to experiment for weight loss, 30 days. If you want in, let me know. And you had to Venmo him 800 bucks. I did.

Just did it right away. just to pot commit myself into it. And then he's going to send us a blood glucose monitor. It stays in you for 28 days. 28 days. And basically the way it works is he's going to send a nutrition plan and like an eating plan. But if you stick to it, you'll be fine. But what problem is most people don't stick to it.

So here's how it's going to work. If your blood glucose levels go out of the range, like the healthy range, the weight loss range that he's going to prescribe for us. So first he's going to monitor your baseline. Then he's going to say, okay, cool. here's the range I want you to stay in. If you stay in that range for the day, he vennmows you back $25 for the day. And if you don't, he keeps your money.

I love it. And he is doing this in a way where he's buying all of our monitors. Yes. Which typically costs, I think, $300. $400. If we stick to it, by the end of this challenge, we paid $100. We've lost a bunch of weight,

and we got paid back all our money. If you stick to it, if you don't stick to it. So we're giving them $100? It's $100. bucks net. Net, if you, if you do it to the letter of the law, you get this $400 device for $100, and you lost your weight. I love it.

Sick deal. And we should explain who he is. He's the founder of this thing called Kettle and Fire. He also, I think, is one of the founders of Perfect Keto. Yeah. So two Keto products, basically. Yeah, and I have no idea, but I imagine his businesses collectively are in the $50 or $60 million in revenue range.

So, like, he sees a lot of... He says he's at $100 million plus run rate for his two products, for Kettle and Fire and Perfect Keto. Where did he say that? On his website. Oh, good for him. Yeah. I didn't know that.

Which is pretty crazy for a keto product. Yeah. So it sounds like he's thinking of a new business. Yeah. Go ahead and copy that. Yeah, so I like it. So what we'll do is when we get the device, we'll just shout out our blood glucose levels during the show. I'm doing it.

I also use my body tutor where I take pictures of everything I eat. Right. And I send it to my, so I ate that donut. Just now I'm going to have to send that to them and they're going to shame me. How are you going to send it? You ate it. Well, there's some more out there. I'll take a picture of it.

Okay. But all I've eaten today is a donut and an orange. I'm good. All right. Cool, weight loss idea. I like it. Justin Mayer's good stuff.

Okay, what's up? What else are you got? Okay, so last episode, we had your buddy here. And he told me about this thing where he had invested in the company that's doing drone window washing. Yes. I thought that was crazy fascinating. And I went and researched it up.

There's another competitor that's raised money. And drones, I don't think are the right words to describe it. Because when I think of drones, I think of like a quadcopter. These are things that like they look like the normal. So when you're pulling up the scaffolding or when you're pulling up like the, what do you call it? It's like an elevator. An elevator up and the guys are standing on it and wiping. It looks like that.

But there's a robot on there that is doing it instead of people. Right. So it's not flying, you're saying. It's not flying. Yeah, why do they call it a drone then? Because technically it is a robot. A drone means unmanned vehicle, I think. Okay.

So technically they're right. And so another company called Sky, I forget what's called. They raised $3 million to do this. And so this morning, what I did in yesterday morning is I went to, I Googled Manhattan skyscraper window cleaners. And I found like the top three, four people. And I called them today to talk to them. And I was talking to them. And they're going to call me back.

some more details. But my takeaway from this industry is incredibly segmented. So like fragmented. Like small like $10 to $20 million businesses. And there's probably five or ten of them in New York. Right. So it's like the guy, Brian from 100 got junk, right? This is how the hauling business was.

And, you know, before he sort of started aggregating all these small, fragmented local players. And you've always had this thesis, which is, you could do the 1-800 got junk model for other businesses. Yeah, so I would do it for irrigation, for lawn mowing, for painting, which is already happening, and for landscaping. Right. And it sounds like window washing is in that vein. Yeah. So maybe you don't even need these freaking drones to do it, but that's definitely a cool schick.

So the private equity play is you go, you buy up these businesses. They have a book of business. They do recurring revenue probably with the same buildings. And you say, okay, I'm going to buy this $5 million-dollar-year business for $8.000. million or 10 million, tell me 10 million bucks, or you do smaller ones, you buy a bunch of $1 million a year businesses. And then you could bring in this technology to increase the efficiency. So they're getting 50% margin.

You could get 70%. And there's two playbooks to look at if you want to replicate this. The first is dentists. So PE right now is gobbling up dentists. Dentistry. Dentists. We have friends who are doing this. I think we have like three.

is like Siva looked into doing it and then like two other guys I think we know they love it and so what they do is they find a dentist that does 2 million a year in revenue and they buy the company and he's like 60 ready to retire in a few years and they buy it for

maybe if it's like a $3 million revenue thing they probably buy it for like a million dollars yeah basically they'll buy it at like one I think one to two X EBTA which is crazy yeah so basically the pay back your money in a year or two yeah so they buy it for the dentists

salary. Right. Times two. And they give him, you know, you still keep this little piece and you keep getting your salary, but you don't have to run this business anymore in the sort of all the administration, marketing, and they centralize it. So they'll go by 10 of these dentistry's, and then they'll put, they'll be like, okay, we'll have one central office that's doing Facebook ads, driving traffic to all these. We'll bring all your billing stuff into one central place, because why do you need four people doing billing? Because health insurance is, you know, all complicated. And so they centralized, which makes each one more efficient. And basically the dentist is already playing golf two days or three days a week.

And they're like, look, here's an, you know, accelerated retirement for you. And the goal here is you just kind of become a little bit of a just a marketing company. And so we're. Well, we miss the punchline, though. A couple of these rollups, I think like in Canada, 70% of dentists, you know, numbers wrong, but something like that. A huge percentage of the, of all the dentist's office have been rolled up now in Canada. And a couple of them have been taken public, the roll-up. for $3 billion.

Name them. I don't know the names. Okay, well, that sucks. I'll have to look it up. Yeah, because I'm, because. Henry, if you want to Google, dentistry, roll up Canada goes public. I would do that. And then the other model that you can look at for this is old people homes, nursing homes.

Like so many P. I mean, this is like. So my wife's dad owns three senior care facilities. Yeah. And so I was looking into this because I was like, wow, this thing is a cash cow. And I think it's soul crushing. that's the problem with it because he was like hey you guys want to take this over and we were just like oh the money's there but like it sucks i don't want this to be like my life you know like i think in

general people want to avoid nursing homes at all cost and so getting into it earlier than you need to it was painful but he's making money doing how much does it make a month it depends on the size so so basically the model is you go and you um you can buy an existing nursing home but what he looks for is he says okay this is this exists nursing home, it's got 28 beds, but it's permitted for 42. And so he'll either just buy it, he'll build out the other beds. And so, and then the other thing is he'll buy things that are motels today. So motel, the room or the bed might rent for like, I don't know, $150 a night. And so that becomes, let's call it, four grand, you know, is a month. And what he does is for

senior care, you're charging seven grand, eight grand here in California for each bed. And you can put two beds in a room. And then you could do memory care, special, you know, dementia ward on the bottom. And that's like 12 grand. And so you just put all the bullshit upsells into it. The problem is is that your upsell is a dementia award. You know? So it's like, all right, clearly a lot of money can be made.

You are definitely providing valuable service to people. Yeah, you're not scamming people. You're not scamming people. But it is a, it's a, it's a saddening business to be in. Yeah. And so for these. So we're getting off track, but let's go. So my father-in-law owns a moving company in New York.

And it's a medium-sized business. And it's done the same amount of, like, let's say, let's just say some number between 10 and 30 million in sales every single year. And real profitable. I go, well, how do you make this bigger? He goes, I'd have to buy everyone out. And I don't feel like doing it. I got a good life.

And so I would, you could do that for these window things. And if I was one of these drone window companies. I would look into doing that. That's what you would do. Yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't necessarily go the, oh, raise VC and try to build this organically. This is more of you take, you know, you take some capital and you start rolling up these businesses and then you already have technology for efficiency. Yeah. And I know people who did this, a bunch of my friends from Nashville's, which is just these scam artists. And they would do this for the locksmith industry. They would do what? And so, so when you roll up, the reason you roll up a company is because you want to get efficient operations. Another thing you want to do is you want to like centralize marketing. And so basically if you own 20 different businesses, you want to be dishing off leads to them. So they constantly have new business coming in. Right. And we're actually in trends.

We're running a report on hotels. Brad, is that going to go live next week, the hotel thing? Okay. So we're going to have a thing. This is what Hilton does. So they franchise out the hotels. Right. Everyone knows the Hilton brand.

Centralize the marketing. Yes. Everyone knows Hilton. They buy all the ads everywhere. You go to Hilton.com, book a hotel. then they dish it off to their franchisees. So that's what... What was I talking about?

Or locksmiths. That's what locksmiths do in Nashville. But what was scammie about it? Or you're just saying these guys in general are scammy. They're scammy about it is because they could rank really easily for Nashville locksmith. And they don't give you the price. And then when they get there, they just see how much money they can get out of you. Gotcha.

And then the locksmith, who's like typically where I live, they're all Israelis. And so they all would knew each other from Israel. And they would come over and they would be like, they would go to your house. And you're in a pinch, clearly. And it seems like the top 10, you read reviews. You're like, the reviews and this one are only okay. The reviews this one are kind of good. It's all the same company.

And they're all the same. My friend owned it. Right. And it was all the same. And then they wouldn't really tell you how much the price is. And then you'd get there. And they'd be like, all right, I bet you I can get $200. And so they would charge the lady, the customer, $200.

And then they would give the owner just like $20 or $30. Right. And so the owner was just a lead. machine. That's so funny. When my sister had a baby and we, the baby was at a party and we put the baby to sleep in this room. It was like in the like the bassinet or whatever. And we close the door so that it wouldn't be too much noise. Door gets locked. Baby's inside. Baby wake stuff starts crying. We realized the door is locked. Pretty panicking moment. Did you break the window or call someone? So called locksmith right away. Israeli? I don't know if there's really. It's an Israeli thing.

This is San Francisco. So maybe not, maybe not as much, but maybe it was. Person shows up. It's like, this is like, we're indoors. We're not, this is not like your front door, like, complicated lock. It's like a bedroom doorknob. And they're like, $400. And we were like, no fucking way. And then they were like, well, it's $400. I can hear a baby crying inside.

Don't you want to get? And we were like, you know, just out of principle, like, no. And then we just busted down the door with our shoulder and like got in. Because that was just outrageous. No, it was a good friend of mine did this. And he was from Israel. He told me, he was, yeah. Yeah, for some reason, like, it's a tradeback in Israel.

And so we'll come here. And then we get all of our friends to come here, and we just dominate the market. Right. It's like Indians and motels. There's not even Indians. There's a specific group of Indians who's last name was all Patel. Are you Indian or Pakistani? Indian.

And Indians love motels. I think Indians own 70 or 80% of all motels. And Dunkin Donuts. And actually, families with the last name Patel. All the motels. They're like, they're sharing. There's a book about this. I know.

All right. So Dennis. Dennis. Yes. So there's a couple of companies that are big in this. And apparently only about 2% of the companies of the dentists in Canada actually will get rolled up into these corporate. So 98% of dentists. There's a lot of opportunity. But it started about four years ago where this one company called the Dental Corporation of Canada. I heard about this dental corporation Canada. That's the that's the they've got like 160 practices that they rolled up. And they what they there's a law that makes the dentist. The dentist actually still has to have the practice registered in their name. But then that allows the dentist to make even more money, but these corporate players come in and roll up a bunch of money. So how big was the roll-up? Does it say?

Well, Dental Corp has 168 dentists. What was their revenue? It doesn't say. Are they public? No. There definitely was a $3 billion roll-up that I remember looking into. And then also, I believe Black Rock, Blackstone, one of those two, they were heavy in this business now as well. So maybe tomorrow or Friday, let's have a roll-up edition because I can list a whole bunch of companies that have done this.

And I'm crazy fascinated with us. So you're saying rather than half talking about it and half knowing it, we should. Okay, gotcha. Okay, let's move on. And tomorrow we'll know everything about this industry. Okay, quick break. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about my Saturday morning routines. So every Saturday, I wake up in the morning.

And, you know, some people watch cartoons. Some people read the newspaper. Some people check the mail. some people exercise. I go to quietlightbrokridge.com and I check out what's for sale. So if you don't know, Quietlight is a platform

where you can buy and sell online businesses. So if you don't want to start something from scratch or you don't know if your idea is any good, you can go on here and you can see ideas that are already proven, they're already working to some extent, and you can either sell your business or you can buy a business off here

and try to grow it and improve it. And so if you've been listening to the podcast, one of our most popular episodes was with Ramon. Ramon Van Mier, who sold his soap opera blog, even though he'd never watched a soap opera in his life. He built one of the most popular soap opera blogs for $9 million in cash on this website. He has bought multiple businesses off Quiet Light as well. And we had Paul on here.

He sold his FBA business for seven figures on Quiet Light. So it is a fantastic place to sell your business. It's a fantastic place for me to look for businesses. Like I'm on it right now, and I see a kid's monthly subscription box. It's started in 2018, so it's fairly new. Asking price is $149,000. So you could buy this on an SBA loan. You don't have to put too much money down.

And, you know, it makes $50K a year in profit. And there's ones that go all the way up to millions of dollars in profit per year. So whether you're looking for something small or something big, Quiet Light's got a great little selection. And it's not just like everything that's for sale. They curate and they qualify only certain businesses get in and get on here. And when you're interested in something, they have all the financials in a folder,

organized. They have interviews with the founders that will tell you, you know, how they run their business, how many hours a week they put in, that sort of thing. Very good business. All right. So for any listeners for the podcast, they're offering a 25 point checklist to see how sellable is your online business. So if you have a business right now that's making money and you're interested, you would love to sell it someday. Check out this thing. Check out what the 25 point checklist is to see how sellable your online business is. To get the free guide, it's at quietlightbrokerage.com slash my first million. Again, that's quietlightbrokerage.com slash my first million. This zillion beers thing. What happened? Yeah. What is this? Okay, so Barstool just put a

clinic on marketing, on how to do marketing right. Okay, so tell me the story. I don't know what, I don't get what happened. Barstool sports, we'll, we'll dumb it down. Barstool sports, media company like ESPN or Bleacher report, but personality driven. It's like ESPN after three beers, basically. Yeah, it's just like comment. It's more, it's like S&L. It's more comedy and fiction than it is, whatever. It's not journalism, yeah. Yeah, sometimes it is. I mean, every once in a while, though, I have something amazing, but yeah, no, it's just a bunch of, like, it's for the average man by the average man's their tagline. Okay.

They have a guy, he's a camera guy, and Henry's a big fan, so he knows too. They have a guy, a camera guy named Dana. Dana was getting made fun of one day, like 10 days ago for drinking too many beers. and he said a line, like he tweeted out and he said some line like, I'm just a guy who drinks a zillion beers. And he starts like talking about zillion beers over the course of a day. And his boss, Dave Portnoy, was like, dude, you're a cameraman. You're not a content guy.

Quit this zillion beer stuff. Yeah, stop trying to make it a thing. Stop trying to make a thing. And Dana goes, Dave, I bet you I can sell like $30,000, where the zillion dollar beer merch. And Dave goes, if you do that, I'll give you $10,000 or something like that. And they blew past it. Then after a few days of this going back and forth, it gets to the point of if you sell a million dollars with the merch in the next five days, I'll give you a hundred grand. Right.

He has, he hit it. He crossed that. He got $1.5 million. And how long do you think that lasted? So he created a brand essentially on the fly, zillion beers. So he created a brand called zillion beers and in 10 days sold $1.6 million in merch. And throughout this process, pretty much the way in which they sold merch was. pretty much all Twitter. And so I was watching, like, as a marketing person, I was looking at,

Dana went from having a thousand followers on Twitters to whatever he has now, maybe 150,000 followers on Twitter in 10 days. And he would get into, like, draw, like a fight. So, for example, he met this girl on Twitter and she flew out and they started like talking about how they're dating now, even though they just met. And then the ex-boyfriend starts tweeting at him. And he's like, all right, me and you, we're going to get in a fight at Rough and Rowdy. I put 100 grand in line. And so that became a storyline. There was like a dozen different storylines. all just happened in like a weekend basically. Yeah, and everyone was following it in real time.

I didn't go out on Valentine's Day because I was just refreshing Twitter and just like reading about all of this. It was amazing. Yeah, that is amazing. I saw it happening. I didn't understand the full backstory. Yeah, I saw it all happening. I don't even drink beer and I bought $150 worth of zillion beer merch.

Yeah, just out of respect for what was going on. I thought it was great to support the cause. It's like a, it's like a rowdy Kickstarter that he did. love it. Yeah. And so I think the takeaway here is like they, Barstool put on a clinic of like how fast you can do stuff. Yeah. And people want to be a part of something. And so it's one thing to just sell merch. It's another thing to be a part of something, which is like, oh my God, once it gets the momentum of we're going for a million. Holy shit, we're going to do it. My boss bet against me, helped me beat the man. I think it like, it just caught this wave of, it wasn't about the merch,

obviously. Like none of it was about the merch. It was about putting it into Dave's face. Right. Oh, you doubted him. We're all going to get behind him. And this guy, Dana, the guy behind it, he's like a total bro, but he seems like a really good person. And it was fun watching him, like, be excited.

Watching him win. Yeah. And he put his Venmo out there and I venmoed him like 50 bucks. People Venmoed him money. Collectively, he got like three grand. And he went and blew it all out of fancy restaurant. And it was funny seeing like a redneck eat at a steak restaurant in Manette. Have you seen this guy, Mr. Beast?

Do you know who that is? Love Mr. Beast. So if you don't know. who Mr. Beast is. He's this YouTuber who's grown like crazy in the last like 18 months really. He's new. He's like a new guy, but he's blown past. I don't know how many subscribers, but maybe tens of millions of subscribers now. And his whole thing is he's just like, he just gives away money to people.

Well, like, he does challenges, but like he. Specifically, he'll give away cars. So, for example, he goes to a used car dealership and he buys 10 cars, which each car is probably $5,000 or $10,000. Right. maybe he's in 40 or 50 grand on this thing and people come to buy the car and he acts like the salesman and the lady will be like all right this car looks good and he goes okay here and he gives her the keys he goes no it's yours right and they film it and they film it and this the reaction it's

kind of like that like it has a feel good element to it because you see people who are like no way like but it's funny he'll go to a restaurant and leave a two thousand dollar tip on a ten dollar bill and they're like people break down crying and then sometimes it's funny where he'll be like he'll take four friends he'll buy a lambo and be like put your hands and you're hand on this Lambo, first person, last person to have their hand on this lambo keeps the lambo. And they just, for two days straight, they just have their hand on this thing. They're passing out and they, you know, he turns out into YouTube content. And he's brilliant because he gets brands to pay for the whole thing. So this one brand, quid, or quid or quip? It's not

the toothbrush. It's like this like stickers, trading cards thing online. I think it's quid. Quid has given this guy, you know, they'll just put up the 50K. He does the challenge. He shouts out quid. And they're happy for it because their videos are getting like millions of views. And so it's way better branded content than usual. And so he basically took brand money and parlayed it into being like huge, which is pretty crazy. Yeah.

And he even did a thing where he raised $100 million, $20 million for trees. Treas, planting trees. And the founder of Shopify gave him 100 or sorry, a million. Elon gave a million. Yeah. And he raised $20 million in two weeks. Yeah. And I have a friend who talked to him on the phone the other day to do a campaign.

And he was like. What friend? Jason. So Jason Hitchcock. Shout out to Jason. So he was like, you know, talking to him. And when he got off the phone, he's like, yeah, I talked to Mr. Beast. Really cool.

Like, talked to his agent or whatever. And he described, he's like, you know, one weird thing happens, which is didn't plan for this, you know, sort of success. You get the success. But the YouTube game is such that you kind of need to top yourself every time. He's probably getting exhausted. And so he's like, dude, the stress of like, okay, we gave away a Lambo through this, like, crazy thing.

next week, what do I do? Like, okay, it's just this constant bar raising, which is really tough. So when we first launched our company, I get a phone call from Elizabeth Murdoch. You know who Elizabeth Murdoch is? Rupert Murdoch's daughter? Yeah, which is a big shot. And she was like, hey, you guys want to do these videos? I'm launching this new thing and I need video content.

And I was like, no, that's not what we're trying to do. But let's stay friends and shoot the shit. And she goes, okay, well, I'll find someone else. So she finds someone else to do it. and they started a YouTube channel and that YouTube channel is now called Yes Theory. Have you heard of yes theory? I've heard of it. Yeah. They got five or six million subscribers

and I've become friends with them over the years and they have a I mean they're like famous. They're like legit famous. I have no idea if it's a good business but I bet you they make they could each pay themselves a million dollars a year so pretty good for young people. Pretty good for anyone. And each week they're having to do crazier and crazy shit and they've had to do this for three years now.

every video is like, I went to the most remote island in the world by myself. And it's three guys now. And they're like taking turns over doing crazy shit. Like, it's the crazy stuff was like, I asked my Uber driver if she wants to go to Paris and we went straight to Paris and went there. And now they're like doing variations of that. It's like, oh my God, that shit's exhausting. It's like if Jackass, if Stevo and the Jackass crew had YouTube and like they would have to do this every week. Like we were just lucky that they were lucky that.

the cadence was like, you know, seasons of TV or a movie, because when it's weekly, it's just insane, which is why Casey Nistat and Logan Paul, Jake Paul, all these guys, eventually they, you know, they do this daily grind for so long, but they burn out. Like, the content burnout is crazy. For sure. It's not going to happen to us, though. Well, it's not going to happen to us. We just sit and do nothing. I imagine though, like, having to get on a plane and, like, or like, Logan Paul, you got to, like, yell at someone or like go break up with a girlfriend every week. Yeah, you got to go box someone. Yeah, you got to like, So I got a Rupert Murdoch story because he said Murdoch.

I'm so impressed with this dude. So he gets a lot of hate because, like, his business practices and whatnot. People think he's like a tyrant in a way. He is. And he is. And like the show Succession is basically about their family. Good show. So we had this opportunity to pitch Rupert Murdoch.

So Michael, who's my investor, comes to me and says, hey, we got invited to this thing. Basically, every year during CES, Rupert Murdoch, brings all the CEOs of his companies through News Corp. So they own Wall Street Journal, I think, or New York Post, and Fox and Sky. And then they own Penguin Publishing.

Right. They own Realtor.com. So he is the media mogul, right? Like, that's cool. So basically, once a year, they all get together. It's during CES. They go to the Wynn,

and they rent out the entire top floor of Wynn. And so all the rooms there are all the execs. And they have the big. biggest suite, the penthouse suite of the win. And what they do is they, and I really admire this, they go from 8 a.m. to about 7 p.m. every single day for two days straight. And every hour is just, they just bring in a speaker. Not like a speaker, it's like an industry leader from something. And they just, um, they just grill them. So it's like, you start by just telling me a little bit about your business. And then it's 30 minutes of Q&A from the CEOs of all these companies.

Because they're trying to figure out, okay, how do we play into this? So when I was there, It was like literally CEO of Google, CEO of Slack, number three guy at Facebook, just back to back to back. The CEO of Google was the one getting grilled? Yeah, he would go and he would explain, here's what, here's where we're going next year. Because these are big media partners for them. They want to have these media partners working with them. So they'll say, here's where we're going next year. But it's off the record, right?

So it's more candid than you're ever going to get these guys. And they told me you can just come for your slot, you know, this 45 minute slot. But Rupert's here the whole thing. But I was like, I'm sitting here. the whole day. Like this is like with my popcorn. Why did you get to sit there? Because we were going to present at the end of the day.

And so we had access. So I just sat there at 8 a.m. I'm there with my seat. So here's what I noticed. During the day, a lot of the CEOs, you know, they'd be interested in certain people,

but for the most part, you know, they get hungry, they go to the bathroom. Rupert Murdoch, I don't know how old he is. He's like 80s. Like he looks old and he is old.

And that guy sat right up front with a paper and a pencil, did not get up, did not take a break. He was the most, didn't take a piss. he was the most attentive. He asked the best questions.

He was like a machine. And I was like, that's why this guy's Rupert Murdoch. I was so impressed by this guy. His just endurance, really. And also just his level of focus where everybody else was wandering throughout the day because that's what you normally do. And that's kind of contagious. But I loved how the leader was like on point because it held everybody else like closer

to that standard. Did he ask questions? He asked good questions. Yeah. Which is funny because if you're the CEO of one of his companies, you're already maybe a billion, and some of them might be billion. I mean, you're up there. I don't know if you're better now, but yeah, you're doing super well.

If you sold it. It was like the CEO of Fox Studios. Like, oh, yeah, we make these movies for this year. And it's like, oh, whatever, you know, Marvel. It's like, these are big individual brands. You're a big, you're a big, you're a big guy. So that was incredible. I just thought that was really cool.

And I got to give him props for that. I was very impressed. That's crazy. I'm trying to think about what else was important. I think another piece that was, that was cool there was setting his company up for success. Because the media business, I mean,

a lot of his stuff was he literally started with newspapers, local newspapers. And so you very easily, companies like that can miss all these shifts and become like extinct. I think one of the reasons they haven't is because it probably has this learning culture. And sounds corny, but what he did was pretty badass. It was like,

we're here. We're not going to go tell these guys what the world is. We're going to be the listener. We're going to be the student here. And so I thought that was pretty badass that he set up. He architected these days, which was just, you know, action-packed with, like, top, top people of the world coming and teaching them about the future. And even us, like, why did he have us?

He had four startup slots. You know, it was all big companies. They had four startup slots. We were one of the startups. You got grew up by him? Yeah, because it was like, okay, you guys are doing something interesting, was when we were doing blab. And he was like, okay, tell us about the future.

You're not big yet, but you're growing, and we think you're interesting. And so tell us what you know that the big companies don't know. and they would ask questions like very good questions like like that like what is the um if we're us that one of the questions he asked was what is uh what are we stupid for not doing like when you look at our business uh what do you look at and you just say you are stupid for not doing this this is our enterprise version of trends brad is having that nice uh so anyways that's what i learned from these guys i thought was pretty awesome god that's badass who are the other three companies? One was

Alfred. The skim was there. Oh, you told me. I told you about this because I was sitting there. Also, Fox is an investor of the skim. Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. In fact, I heard the guys in the back, because I was sitting at the back when that was happening is like, probably not the people who were doing it. Or they weren't investors at the time and they were just like,

they were like, yeah, this is cool and all, but, and then they were just like ragging on it in the back because they were just like, look, you know, here's what the numbers are. Here's where, you know, this is not big enough yet for it to matter to us. And, but Rupert at the front was kind of like, what do we not know, like, about this business? He wasn't, it's easy if you're a huge conglomerate to just look at everything and say, you're small, you mean nothing. That's what the guys in the back were doing. But at the front, Rupert was sort of like email, interesting, tell me more. And like, was going through these, like, you know, you could tell he was searching for what he doesn't know,

rather than the guys at the back thinking they know everything and not really being open to learning something new from the people who were talking. Crazy. So one other idea that's similar to something we were talking about earlier is this revenge against the spam calls. Have you heard about this? Yeah, I tried to write about this last year

because I bought one of these apps, RoboCall. Robo caller. Amazing. I did research on it. Huge business. And one of the reasons I know it's huge is because I did research on them and I tried to find everything.

And immediately I knew it. was going to be big because it was so hard to find information on them. So tell me what that business, explain what they do first. And then I'll tell you about what this new guy's doing. That is interesting. This one, I think it was based in New Jersey. They have many different apps. One of them being RoboVisor, I think it's called.

And users like me pay maybe 50 bucks a year. And if someone calls, that's clearly a spammer, it goes straight to their voicemail. Or if it is a suspicious one, it just says a, voicemail, suspicious, like, this is a spoof call. Right. And so I know to avoid. And so that existed, and this company called True Caller, that's huge internationally that does this.

True caller? True caller is like a universal caller ID. We should do an Android. On True caller. It's like a WhatsApp. It's going to be like a WhatsApp sized exit, I think, or like, you know, that's, it's going to be multiple billions of dollars on this thing called True Caller. And it's not that relevant in the U.S.

Because we don't have the same problems you have internationally with not knowing phones. People switch phone numbers all the time there. Dude, I get 10 spam calls a day. So Apple started doing this. But what this guy's doing is interesting. So this guy, Joshua, he has this company called Do Not Pay. I love this company.

I signed up for it. So do not pay. For those don't know, is... He follows me on Twitter, so we'll make sure he sees this. Yeah, so Do Not Pay is cool. So basically it's like you get a bullshit parking ticket. So you know, like, you can actually contest a lot of these because either they filled out the form wrong and therefore you don't have to pay. Or technically, it was just wrong.

You don't have to pay. So it doesn't work as good as you think, though. And I'll tell you why. used to be a company called Fix It. Yep. And I knew people invested in it. I used it. And the way it would work is you would register your license.

And anytime your car got a parking ticket, before you even got to your car, the app told you, and it automatically fought the ticket in San Francisco court. And you would pay fix it half the price. Whatever you got back out of your refund. They would always get it reduced. Right. And it was awesome. San Francisco outlawed it.

Yeah. It was just cramming the system. Right. So these guys did something interesting, though. They started off with that, which is you can fight tickets. But it's like, what else can we do? What else is like they called themselves sort of Robin Hood? They're trying to sort of take money and give it back to the...

And the guy's like 20 years old. He's very young. Gets a ton of press with it. It's very smart. That's how he grows. But they have other use cases, for example. They have a virtual credit card that you can use. That will automatically cancel your free trials.

So how much... Privacy.com offers that. It's a great product. Right. And then they have a couple other ones. One is where they contest. What is it? They have a couple.

They have like four different things that they contest. The new one that they came out with is we still get spam calls. And so what they do is twofold. There's this thing called the do not call list or whatever. They do not call registry. And so if you download their app, what they'll do is they'll sign you up for the do not call registry. But the problem is, spammers don't care about the do not call registry. They just call you anyways because they know that you're not going to take the time to like go and enforce this.

You're not going to go figure it out. So first they put you on the registry. Then when you get a spam call, they give you a little credit card to give the spammer and the scammer. And when they give, when they use those details, they automatically generate paperwork to sue them for three grand. And so there's like you can sue for three grand every time they commit this mistake. And so what they're doing is they're automating the like $3,000 lawsuit for this robocall for the spam call thing. And I just think it's a very smart model of like saving people money through these small hacks. I like this.

Do not pay. So this guy has, that's a great segment that we should go through more of small hacks that make big differences. This guy, what's his name? Joshua or something. I think he's 21. He raised money from Peter Thiel, a substantial amount, 10 million maybe. Maybe. Okay, bullish or?

Yeah, bullish. I think these are good. I think there's enough people that are, that don't want to be ripped off in these five ways. They have like five things they can defend against. And one of those is going to be like a repeatable use. case that that's going to work okay i would say that i am bullish on the industry bullish on the product ideas the guy josh seems like a loose cannon yeah which really usually goes the bad way but the great outliers end up being right massive and he's getting a ton of PR because he is what you're talking

about he loves to go and champion the cause he's great for media he's a shithead so he gets a bunch of free PR he's a huge shit head and i love it yeah Okay, so on that note, I have a note up here that says what Charlie Munger said about Elon Musk. So it's directly related to what you just said. So somebody was asking Charlie Munger, hey, you know, what are your thoughts on Tesla? What are your thoughts on Elon Musk? Because it's one of the most like polarizing companies. He's one of the most polarizing CEOs.

And so here's what he said. I want to know if you agree with this or not. So he goes, he first said, you know, I wouldn't long or short the stock. I think it's a great product. And he said, my most important comment was this. He goes, never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. I think Elon Musk is peculiar in that he may overestimate himself, but he's not wrong all the time. And when he's right, he seems to be right very big.

And so that was the first thing I like that quote, never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. And the second thing he said was, they said, would you hire Elon as one of your CEOs for a Berkshire Hathaway company? And he goes, no, never. He goes, I want the guy who understands his limitations instead of the guy who doesn't. You know, I've learned this lesson in life that these weird guys who overestimate the substance, they occasionally knock it out of the park. But me personally, I don't want to be around a guy, around somebody who lives in a state

of delusion and who occasionally happens to win big. I want a prudent person. So I want to know your opinions on this. I feel like you're going to have a good take. I feel like I just said exactly that. Yeah. So when I try to hire sometimes certain people, I'm like, a loose cannon here could work. like I basically like you hang out with a lot of these guys.

I love the wild cards. These like hackers because at Sean's old office, it had an apartment and there he would meet a guy in the internet and literally five days later the guy would fly from Germany and basically live in that apartment and literally would never leave. I could see like you had that German kid with you. I bet you he could have been in that apartment for five days and he maybe only brought a book bag and a t-shirt. Right.

and then he overstays his visa and everything is just crazy. So I like those types of people. I for sure like them and I like being around them. I don't trust any of them. I expect that they will do mostly nothing but the one or two times that they pull through it's going to be massive, massive, massive.

So let me ask you. For you yourself, would you say you're more in the bucket of you know, kind of the delusional type who overestimates themselves but sometimes knocks it out of the park or are you more the prudent, pragmatic person who takes a realistic view and is sort of a steady hand of running a company. Which type are you?

That's a good question. Or do you have both gears? I think I have both. What do you think? I think Adam does a pretty good spreadsheet. He's pretty predictable. Adam is clearly the second type, right? Adam is clearly the pragmatic, diligent, steady hand, not trying to swing for home runs

all the time. I would say occasionally I'm fine betting at all. If my business goes away entirely tomorrow, because we, bet it, I wouldn't be upset. So I would say I am closer to that wildcard one, but not entirely. Right. And with hiring people, it sounds like you hire

mostly for, I think naturally, you hire mostly for the prudent, steady hand. It's a ratio. So I think you need a few of these loose loose cannons. Right. And that's where cool stuff comes out of, but most of the stuff that they come up with is really dumb and stupid. Right. And there's also an art to managing a wild card.

Firkand's a wild card. He's a wild card for sure. and he's steady and he um you know what i did with him he's out emotional and he'll bet it all we hired him and within a few like weeks i was like a a guy's amazing uh and b this guy's a wildcard like i can't handle him like i can handle most people in the company and so i said i literally separated him i was like look um you need to work with people who are like you because when you work with these people they're going to drive you crazy they're nine to five they're no highs no lows you're just getting what you get and I was like you will hate that that style and so I said I want you to hire your own team and only you do the interviews nobody else is going to give their input like you make

the decision you don't there's a CTO you can hire outside what the CTO wants which was like pretty controversial at the time so I was like you hire your own team he hired all people who had either dropped out never went to school these hacker types that would just be up all night he because he knows how to manage the wild cards and so he hired a team of wild cards basically I love those people so if you have them in your team or your company like make sure you you're not just treating them the way you will because they will be very frustrated and you won't be getting the value of their like potential my friend jack jack my best friend jack smiths he's one of them so he's coming for 800 million dollars uh six months ago he got all the money i was like what can

do with it he's like i think i'm going to go and put all it like in some major bet and i was like he was like yeah i'm about to go buy that like and he had done that even before he sold that money he had a fair bit of money but he not that much and that but he didn't have any income on a consistent basis. He would bet all of it. At least once a month, he would literally have like a few thousand dollars to his name. Yeah. And seven figures on some like short or like a stock. Dude, we got to get jack in here. Consistently. He always did that. What about you, Sam? How do you spread your or coming around investing? Um, I, I, I don't think that I take risky, uh, investment. No, I don't think my in our, I don't think I'm that risky.

But you spread it around the lot, right? I put like 10 or 20% of my liquid assets into very, very, very high risk things where it's just probably going to go to zero. I don't think that's crazy. Yeah, that's not too crazy. Especially given the age and earning potential you have going forward. Yeah, I don't. I'll do some crazy stuff, but no, I mean, I know people that will literally empty their bank account on things. Do you have any friends like that?

Yeah, I have friends. it's not so much like the empty their bank account on things, but I have friends that once they get to conviction, like Suli is like this. And we should, we should have him join us one of these times. But he's the type where when he has conviction in something, the question is not like,

um, he breaks all the rules of his like usual investing and he'll go and try to like, plow the money in, own as much as he can, create a competitor to it. You know, like he, when he gets his mind into something and he believes there's an opportunity,

he goes like to hunting. mode. I remember we were investing in Lambda school and like I brought this deal to the table and I was like, hey, I think it's great for these reasons. And I set up the call and like, but once he got to conviction, you know, the CEO would be like, hey, yeah, you're in. I'm going to send you the docs in a couple days. And so he would ask me, he's like, where are those docks? Let's get those docs. Let's text him again. Let's call them. And I didn't realize like, I think part of it is like as an investor, it's easy to get squeezed out. You never know what's going on. So you're sort of in a state of paranoia. but the other part was like when he knows what he wants he goes for it at a degree that I wasn't

used to and then once I saw it I was like oh okay that's how you're supposed to go for these things well speaking of munger he once said he goes all I do is find in companies that I can invest in that require no diversification like the perfect investment is one where you don't you don't you don't do any diversifying you put all of it into that one and I always am looking for those which you normally will never find one, but you try to find ones close to it. Yeah, because they go for value investing. So they go for essentially what they consider a sure bet, where it's already, the value is already baked into what it is.

I don't have to bet on the future. I'm getting it at such a mispriced moment that, like, yeah, I want to take as much as I can of that asset because I'm already sure it's worth that today. And it's just mispriced by the market. Good. I think we should do a case study on a couple of these. Some of them are big, like tens of millions of dollars. business and we'll do true caller true call so on trends uh you go to trends that co and sign up and we

will have a case study on this the next week or so and um i think we should talk about this chest thing real quick because i think it's um a good it's a good example of a mistake a lot of people make so in the in the facebook group um that my first million facebook group um somebody posted this so somebody pre-ov they posted is that hey i'm a 20 year old college uh nearly drop out here i run mychest tutor.com. My chess tutor.com. It's an online chess academy. We currently have about 90 weekly students.

It's doing 12.5K MRR. Growth has been slow. And as you can imagine, chess is not really like this super wide. It's our thing. It's niche. Question. He's like,

I really want to learn about a new high income skill or take on another high potential project, but I'm not sure where to start. I just feel like I'm capped out here. And this was like such a mistake. You are not capped out. Yeah. This was a mistake I would have made

when I was 20. And so immediately I was like, are you joking? Explain the business? So it's a my chess tutor.com. It's basically a coaching academy for chess players, young chess players. And it's doing 12,000 a month. How do they pay?

What's that? You pay for the training, basically. Is it like a digital training or do you have a coach? I don't know if it's, I think it's coach. I think they match you with a coach. So I think, you know, there's some revenue split here. But I would say this, you're 20 years old. You have this chess thing that only on 90 students, which is like 90 is basically zero.

you're doing 12.5K a month, which is extremely respectable for a 20-year-old person who's been doing this thing. Chess is a niche, yes, but it's way bigger than 90. And in some of the comments here, somebody was like, hey,

just so you know, like the U.S. national, elementary chess tournament has 2,500 players. That's a tournament. That's one tournament, that's elementary school, just U.S.

And so, like, you're not capped out by any means. I mean, do you think that this guy could get 5,000 people to pay for this? Yes. Totally. I totally agree.

So what's the difference? What's that revenue if he gets 5,000 people? I mean, let's just do the math here. And we get made fun of because our on the spot, math sucks. While you're doing the math, Jason Lumpkin, who's an advisor to me, famous, not if it's not famous, but he says it, and he told me, he goes, if you can get to 10 million in revenue, you can get to 100 million in revenue. Right.

There's these benchmarks. He says, I think, if you get to one, you can get, there's a high chance you get to 10. If you get to 10, there's a high chance you get to 100. It may take a long time. It takes a long time. You can do it. And his thing is like, don't sell early. And this is basically saying don't quit early.

So what's it? Don't get ADD. Okay. So they're making 140 bucks per kid. And if you had 5,000 students enrolled in this, you're doing about 700 grand a month, a monthly revenue as, you know, an online chess school. And I totally believe this is achievable. 100%.

Now, the question is rarely like, can this be big enough? Can this be big enough? Typically, it's do I raise money or not? In this case, Ray, if you are going to raise money, make sure it's under a million dollars. Yeah, because likely don't raise anything. Yeah, don't raise anything. And if you could own this business and pay yourself $5 million a year. Yeah, and also the question is like, how do you get bigger?

Because probably it's what you're doing. The reason you're getting shiny object syndrome and trying to look for a new business idea is because you don't figure out, you don't know how to make more progress than this one. and so you need to get with somebody who's a little bit smarter than you like I'll help you just message me we'll do a session Have you gone to the website?

No, I haven't Is it good looking? Ask someone if he wants to sell it Yeah, actually You're capped out You should sell this to me for 10 grand Worthless Okay here's the site

This is a shit business I think he should bail These like niche sports small companies Are very like counseling Like there's a company in New York about flex debate. Flex debate. They help kids like learn about

debate. Debate. Yeah. Yeah. Like strategies and stuff. This is what I'm going to do. Money like that kid you made. I'm going to dominate the great school and high school market with these.

So chess, debate. Spelling B. Spelling B. Oh my God. This is it. Yeah. This is it. Yeah.

We're going to call it extracurricular ink. And we're going to dominate this. It's going to be called overbearing parent. Overbear. Well, that's called. Yeah. Helicctor Inc. Tiger Mom, Inc.

Right. And we are going to, this is. awesome. Who's this guy? What's his name? Priyov, I think, in the Facebook group. So shout out to Pre-Ov. Good food for thought. Don't quit, man. Do not quit. This is awesome. If you need help- Honestly, we're actually doing a case study of a company called NAC, KNACK, which is a peer-to-peer tutoring marketplace. Yeah. And they raised two and a half million dollars from

some venture funds and some nonprofits. They had 900% growth in 2019. They have these big partnerships with big universities. There's tons of money to be made in these types of tutoring environments. Right. Yeah. I don't know if you could hear Brad, but he just bit some good info. Basically, sharing how big these can be. If he wants to any money and wants it to be a cash flow thing, I love

this. I'm very interested. Yeah, I would invest if I'm getting like a monthly dividend, but not if I didn't. Great idea. Another great one from the Facebook group was this restaurant refills thing. I don't know if you saw this. So somebody basically said and I should find their name, but They basically were like, hey, I own 14 kind of venues.

I don't know if it's bars, restaurants, something like that. And they were like, dude, you know, I pay Aramark $1,000 per month per location just to refill my toilet paper, my hand, you know, like the bathroom, like the toilet paper, the toilet cover seat thing. Like just these like stock goods. How big is it? $1,000 a month per location for him. How much revenue does he have? I don't know. He didn't share too much about his thing, but he basically said he's refilling it every one to two weeks from them.

And so basically one of the ideas here was if you were doing restaurant refills, Cisco and Air Market of these giant companies that do this service and they're very, very big. And I wonder if you could go in as a local player and differentiate on one of the following levels. A, just not shitty service because Air Market and Cisco are so big. They're almost certainly giving shitty service to your average venue by now. the other one is price. And so, like, can you create a co-op or a group buying vehicle so that a bunch of restaurants say, hey, we're tired of paying $1,000 a month for this? Instead, we'll pay $100 a month membership fees, but get all of our goods at cost instead

of with the markup. And so you can have a membership model for that. Or you do something where you actually provide, like, a better service, you know, better quality products in some way, like more higher-end stuff than these things. But I thought that was a good kind of like, I love these ideas where it just makes you think. I'm not going to go run and do these ideas, but you start to see the world differently where you walk into it. Next time you go into a restaurant bathroom and you see the toilet seat cover, you're going to realize, yeah, this restaurant paid for this. And someone's restocking this.

Toilet maker. Yeah, I always see them. It's called like American Made. It's a billion-made. It's a billion company. Yeah, we should look into them. You want to know another one real quick? Otis Elevators. Right. Total monopoly on elevators. Been around for 100 years. Family owned probably makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit. YKK zippers. Love, I told you about YKK zippers, didn't I? No, I mean, I just noticed in high school, all of my zippers say YKK. Yeah, and then the really good stuff. What do you know about them? I don't know anything.

So I collect vintage leather jackets. If it's a YKK, then you can tell what year it's on. A talon zipper is even higher end. So if it's a talon zipper, it's really good. Right. And that same category is a white cone denim. So if it's from cone mill, it's a great denim factory in Raleigh, North Carolina. And so YKK, Tallon and Cone Mill denim.

it's like the high-end stuff that is the it's the accessories to all the high-end stores right and so they're just factories that have been around for 150 years and will probably exist for another 50 or 100 years you said you collect leather jackets i collect leather jackets vintage leather jackets and denim how many do you have probably 10,000 dollars worth of leather of leather jackets and probably five grand worth of vintage denim that I don't wear, and I just, I wear them sometimes. Okay, so we'll do this as the last one. The top thing we had on our list was this My Heritage Auction, this like auction place, which I assume is for collectors. And this is so foreign to me because Indian people don't collect.

Like, I'm not going to collect shit. It's an American thing, I think. Like, if I go to my aunt's house, there's no art on the walls. Okay, you want me to give you a background on this? Yeah, tell me about collecting and how this company is doing $850 million in auctions this year. I will tell you. Okay. So in 2008, there was this guy who had a TV show called American Pickers.

Have you seen American Pickers? Okay, at the time, have you heard of it? I've heard of it, but I haven't watched it. At the time, it was the second most popular show on cable. It was number two behind pawn stars, which is similar. And the guy's name on the show was named Mike Wolf. And I was a huge fan of mics. And when I lived in Nashville, I saw Mike walking down the street.

And I walked up to him, I go, Mike, what's up, man? Let me get a picture. And if you look on my Facebook, you see the picture. I start shooting the shit with them. and I'm like Mike, let me work with you somehow. And so it turns out Mike is opening up a store in Nashville and he lets me help set them up and work there. And so what American Pickers does is they go to old barns, typically in the south, but

barns, people's hoarders homes, not hoarders. I mean, it's not junk. We call it junk, but it's not really junk. It's like old motorcycles, old cars, neat stuff. That's old. And we'll buy it for $100 and sell it for $500. We'll buy an old car for $5,000, sell it for $20. And I ran the store where we would.

keep a lot of the cool stuff. I mean, at this point, he made so much money off the TV show. He just wanted to collect the shit because people love collecting it. I would get people that would fly in from Australia just to touch an old gas pump. The collectors were fanatical. I would sell old gas pumps that don't work and are only for decorations and people would be like, is that gas pump the model A or is that one the Model C? Like they knew they're, they're, they were fanatical about it. And they would pay three grand because it's fucking awesome. I would buy that stuff. I have signs that cost $1,000 a mobile gas sign only just to look at.

It's cool because it's part of history. And here's the even best part. If you clean it or repaint it or try to make it nicer, it loses all its value. It has to have patina on it. The stuff with the good patina is best. So if you have an old car and what does patina mean? Patina. It's like when you have a pair of jeans.

So like basically Levi's changed how they made jeans in the 1950s. So any pair of Levi's jeans prior to before 1950s. they used raw denim and the more you wore them, it would get these cool lines in them. And the lines are called patina. I see. So wear and tear. And so a pair of Levi's, like before they made that change to their modern process, costs $1,500. And if it has cool patina in it, it'll be two grand.

I see. And so if it has any of this patina in it, it's really valuable. And so me and myself, if I find a shot jacket, which is a brand, a shot jacket, my favorite era is the 1950s with the red liner or a Bucco jacket, I'll drop 1,000 or 2,000 on it all day. So where do you buy these things online ever or totally in person? So you can buy them on eBay. So what I used to do is I used to find jackets in America that were from the 1950s. And I would put them on the eBay and the Koreans and Japanese would buy them because a 44 from the 1950s in America is no longer a modern 44.

It only fits littler guys, particularly the Japanese and Koreans. and they fucking love that American, that American shit. They love it. Right. And so I would, I used to sell all my stuff on eBay, but eBay wasn't the best marketplace for it. So now there's a lot of niche marketplaces. And you're talking about, which one, scroll up.

Which marketplace are you talking about? Heritage auctions, something, H.A.com. Heritage auctions, I've never heard of that. Up higher. All the way at the top. So they did $850 million. They said their biggest category is coins. Is it coins?

And I was like, oh, my God, people spending tens of millions of dollars on, like thousands of dollars worth of coins. I buy some coins. I own hundreds of dollars of coins. Scroll down more. You own coins? Yeah. Don't you think this is stupid? You think this is cool? Scroll up. There it is. Um, it's awesome. I love it. So movie posters. Yeah. So I own some movie posters. So I live in San Francisco. So I don't have too much room. But if I lived in Austin, Texas, where offices, I would have a warehouse and it would be full of stuff. Right now. This blows my mind. Right now I'm in the market for a 1995 Corvette, which is, and it's like, compared of modern cars, it's not that good, but it's like a cool year. I'll probably pay

15 to 20 grand for it. I get the cars thing. I actually even kind of gets the clothing jackets, boots. These are Red Wing boots. I buy them for a very particular type of reason. I own a pair of boots that are like the same brand, but from the 1950s and it costs $800. I don't wear them. They just sit there and I look at them. And you feel good. It's like a museum. And the coins one, those are the ones where I'm just like, what? What is going to move posters? I'm like, okay, I get it. This is only going to get popular. Here's why. I'm so bullish on this. Okay, so you have some money now.

What was popular when you were... Let's just imagine that you're 50 now. Yep. Because nostalgia will be more important, I think. But what would you... Let's see. What categories of things? What if I showed you a cassette tape, a VHS tape, unopened, of Home Alone?

One of my favorite movies. Great. Okay. How much would you pay for that right now? Zero dollars. Really? Not just to have... Like, sit right here.

No, okay. As art, okay, yeah, I guess I would, I guess I would do that. I guess I see that. How much would you pay for that VH? It's unopened, completely unopened. I mean, I probably wouldn't buy, but listen, I'm imagining. I'm in that mode. $30 or $40?

Yeah, I'd pay $30.40 to just have it there as a talking point in the room. Okay. Now let's fast forward 30 years. Would you pay $300 if you could find an unopened VHS tape and you have kids in your house? I hope I don't. This is a note to me when I'm 50. Don't do it, bro. Don't buy it.

point it's cool right it's cool okay let's do another one uh what's a car uh you don't like cars is there anything okay here's another example that came up uh the guy who started oculus palmer lucky he's bidding online he tweeted this out he's like who is bidding against me so he was bidding 260 grand to buy this uh rare thing which was it was nintendo made a playstation or something like that it's made by nintendo but it is a playstation i don't even know what this is i don't want to look into it i don't want to research it's awesome and he's like who the hell is bidding this up. I'm at 260 grand. Surely there's no other nerd that wants this this bad. I bought a pair of Snapchat spectacles. I've never even used them. They're sitting in my drawer right over here.

Oh, Future Memor really. They're just sitting there. Yeah, I'm just holding on to him. I own, that's hilarious. How about the Elon Musk's Flamethrower? Okay, that's cool. Just never open, just don't even open it. A lot of people just don't even know, just sit there. And it's just cool to have. And then maybe in 30 years, would you pay two or three or four or $5,000 for that? Maybe. Yeah, maybe. This is why I'm saying it's awesome. I think this, nostalgia is big money. So maybe there's a company. So just to turn this into an idea,

A, I think this is interesting, and there's a whole brainstorm around, how do you tap into either nostalgia or collectors and the fanaticism that they exhibit? But a quick idea here is you've seen these apps, like Goat and StockX, like these like streetware marketplaces. So Goat is like a mobile-only way to buy, you know,

sneakers. It's like, I'm going to buy these Yeezys for two grand. I'm going to buy these rare Jordans for $1,800. And so I tweeted this out or retweeted this list of top hunter marketplaces by GMV, so by gross merchandise volume. And Goat was like whatever in the top 20. And, you know, kids are basically spending that much on these, like, cool sneakers. And the sneaker heads are spending so much.

And so I wonder if you could do a mobile, like what they did was just make a slick, mobile-only marketplace for these rare items. I wonder if you could do that in pick your favorite movie posters, coins, whatever. Clearly there's a lot of demand and it's just about making sort of a modern day marketplace. Because if you go to this H.A.com, it literally looks like what I imagine a coin collector looks like, then I imagine a website. It looks like that. It looks like a 75-year-old, you know, website that never leaves us better.

Dude, I think this shit's going to be way more popular with young people. I think that what I would do is, okay, like, what if I have a little, like, I'm, I'm not poor now. What, what did I, what was I into when I was like five, six, seven, eight years old? Like, I'll see. Pogs, whatever. Yeah. Like, if I saw like, slime from Nickelodeon. If I saw the entire collection of goosebumps unopened, I would love to buy that and just have it sit here. Yeah, that's actually pretty cool. Okay, I would buy that. You see what I'm saying? This is how it works. Right. Or like, imagine you grew up with like, I feel like you're explaining collecting to me, which anyone listens is going to be like, duh, what the fuck? But I really do feel that way. I'm like,

what is motivating people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars i saw one of the posters movie or so one of the comics that was that just sold for 70 grand it's one page of a comic and i'm like who is this person with too much money that is spending 70 grand on this one page there's a lot of people there's a lot of people and it's not 70 grand you have to think if someone's rich enough to spend 70 gs on this thing it's just like you spending 10 or you buying a hundred dollar a hundred dollar home alone thing it's like it's kind of a lot of money but like uh who cares it's fun right i also wonder if there's a market for first dibs.

So like, let's say you're coming out with something, an album, whatever, a movie. Why aren't these companies selling the first? Like, who wants the first copy ever made of this? Who wants the first book? Great. And just auction the first dibs and create a company that- Yeah, just on the spot, dude. That's what I do.

I'm the fucking magic man. And so you create this first dibs thing because then you create new inventory that doesn't even exist yet. You sell it today. It comes out in the future. and people would bid like crazy for this. First dibs. Real quick.

So Sean and I are doing this all the time. But I always have to plug this. If you like doing this on your own time, you got to go to trends.co. Wait, trends.com and buy a trend subscription. And I think what we did was trends. com slash million and you'll see a big discount. And I'll tell you one thing.

The sleep report you guys did. I thought that was pretty interesting because you see these things that get hype, but then you see the actual day. It's like meditation gets all this hype. Watch how sleep is growing, how the sleep interest is growing. And all the different products they go around that from beds to pillows to anti-snoring to sleep aides to whatever. So I like that article a lot.

And the group, I've said this a million times, like all the values in the group. The group is amazing. And I really enjoy it. So sign up, but we'll keep doing this anyway. Bye.