My First Million - #93 - Why Tai Lopez Bought Pier One

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

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. This episode Shaan and Sam talk: on being a wartime CEO, Bonsai Mirai and the relaxation industry, Tai Lopez's new company, and the great Twitter hack.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

All right. I've been in meetings all day. I can I tell you, I am a wartime CEO. I love what things are going bad, so much more when they're going good. Why is that? Because you're good at it or it just gets you fired up? It gets me fired up. I love the adrenaline. Like when Corona hit, and we've done good during Corona.

It's all good. I mean, you know, we got hurt, but like we're fine. I loved it. I was like, oh, my God, this is living. I feel so happy. Yeah, I love it. Okay, so you love being wartime CEO. What's the war? Tell us about it. Well, like, okay, so there's this great book that I'm reading, and I think I've seen this across

multiple books. It's called Ready Fire Aim. I've heard this, yes. And you know, it's funny. It's, it's published by Agora, that scammy company that I've mentioned tons of times. Wait, that's the name of the book or just name of the framework? Book. Okay, got you. Ready Fire AIM. Maybe it's a framework. I don't know. Mike, something Mathinson, this guy created it. It's the army guy, the general, right? No, no, no, no. So I think we're talking about two different. Maybe there's two things named the same thing.

And it just basically said, like, look, from zero to one million, you have to just figure out, like, what it is that people like and make it. And then from like one million to 10 million, it's just about hiring people to, like, help make it possible and like just surviving. And then 10 million to 100 million, where we are, you have to innovate constantly and while maintaining process. And that's really hard to do. I mean, that's like a different challenge.

I've overcome the first one. I've overcome the second one. Now this is a new challenge. And it's a challenge not for me, but for all of our staff. And that's super hard. And so there's constantly drama of like making people happy. Some employees who started are not the ones to lead.

You know, things like that. And I'm dealing with that now. And like part of me is like, oh my God, this is such a headache. And other part of me is like, this all can crumble. And I love the feeling of knowing I can die tomorrow. Okay, so what's your approach? Are you, you know, problem comes to your attention. So the first question is, are you a problem identifier or do you hear about the problems from

somebody and then you're like, oh, that's a problem? Okay, I'm going to act on it. Or are you the one who in your company is like, hey, guys, this is a big problem? Both. Both. But where I am is I'm decisive. Like, I'm not, when things are going well, I'm like, you know, just keep doing the same bit more.

But then when people are, when I hear about problems, I'm like, like someone before this told me of like a problem that haven't. I go, okay, you're going to change. We're going to hire this person and we're going to do it today. And so I send out an email and I go, we put this ad up, Madison, start recruiting people immediately. And so to me, it's like I only can hear something one time. I go, we're going to do this. And so what I like to do is, it's like, I self-identify as like a strong belief loosely held, which is I believe something whole heart with all my heart. And then if I hear a little bit of information that changes, I go, oh, okay, fuck all that we're going the other way right so anyway I love like it's like in a battle I'm like

if there's if we I so wish I could be in like war sometimes I'm like oh the enemy's coming from here we're going to risk our lives and do this this this and this go right so I was thinking about this yesterday because of the presidential debate stuff so right now we're four or five months away whatever it is like November is is when the the election happens right so I think that's four months away and there has many debates yet. And I was like, when the hell are the debates? Are they going to do the debates? I think they're going to do it.

When are they? And because I really want to see what happens with Biden versus Trump. And right now, all the news, I don't know if you've seen is like, oh, Biden is crushing Trump in the polls. It's looking like it's going to be a Biden landslide. And then Biden is kind of like, hey, hey, hey, guys, guys, it's not over. Like make sure, because, you know, he needs to be able to turn out. People need to feel like they're going to lose so they go vote. You know, I don't pay attention.

I don't give a fuck about polls anymore after last election is. So that's what polls are saying right now. And smart people are sort of backing that up as they tend to do, which they also did in 2016. But anyways, it's looking like Biden's going to win in a landslide. And so I was thinking about this and I was like, to me, I don't think that's what's going to happen. I would want that to happen, but I don't think that's what's going to happen.

So why? I was thinking about it. Why do I think this? Is this just like, I'm trying to be contrarian, or I don't trust the polls, or and I realized what it was is I think that we are in war time, not literal war necessarily, although some people, but kind of. But kind of.

Like there's a lot of tension with China. There's the coronavirus, which is like this biological war that we're fighting. There's like the race tensions in America. There's all the stuff. So we are not in peacetime in America. And I think it's because it's wartime, people are going to want a wartime CEO running the country. and I think Trump is going to be seen as the wartime CEO. And that's why I think people are in times of tension,

they're going to go towards the leader they think is the stronger, more decisive, more aggressive leader and they will ignore the many, many flaws that the guy has. So that's my theory on that. What do you think? I completely agree. And let's preface this by saying, we are not saying what we do or do not want. And I always like, I always talk about this shit all the time and be like,

what do you pro-Trump? I was like, well, I'm not telling you if I'm pro-Trump or anti-Trump. but I'm just telling you what I think is going to happen. Right. And not only is this not what I want to happen. I also don't know shit about politics. So yeah, somebody's who'd be like, no, no, trust me, this polling data is statistically significant.

It's kind of blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, sure. I'm just saying, based on what is a total gut instinct on what I know about people. And I know that when people are afraid, they flee towards strong man leaders. And I think that Trump is going to be that more than Biden. That's the theory. I think that they don't, I mean, I think I agree with you.

But I would say, I don't think that it's, just that they go for a certain type of leader, I think that it's more so they don't want change. And so I just Google this while we were talking. I was just curious about the president during World War I and World War II. So Woodrow Wilson was the president from 1913 to 1921. I don't think the war was 14 to 18. So he was between the he was before and after the war. Yeah. So he got reelected during the war basically. Okay. Yeah. So he had eight years. So four, uh, two terms. and then FDR died in 45 in the middle of the war. So that doesn't exactly work out.

But I would be curious about like in times of massive crisis, what does happen? Like Bush won two terms. So yeah, that would be interesting to see like what in times of crisis and I don't know how you define crisis. Like maybe the Great Depression was it the same person over and over again? I don't know. I would love to learn about that. If I had a bet money, which I'm not going to, I would bet on Trump winning.

Right. So, okay, we don't even have to go to the politics, but I do like this framework. And I think if you're out there and you don't know what we're talking about wartime, peacetime, you should go figure that out. I think Ben Horowitz's book talks about it. He also has a great blog post about it. And then there's other kind of wartime, peacetime type of analogies. I think we talked about one on here, which was like pioneers, settlers and town planners. Did we talk about that?

I think. maybe so that's that's like a thing with your company like there's some people who are pioneers they're going to be great at figuring out the new thing then there's settlers who basically can create the initial camp once you find the new land and then there's town planners which are more like the large company you know I can run a division of 100 to 1,000 people and so there's that and then there's another one I was listening to so I like the Naval podcast a lot if you haven't listened to that it's good better than this podcast I would say he's probably you know the sort of best blend of business and philosophy out there, although some people don't like them now because he's getting...

I like Naval. I'm not a Naval Dick writer, though. Yeah, I think is that just because there's so many dick writers that you're like, fuck that. I'm not going to be one of them. Or is it because you actually don't like the content? I think there's a lot of emptiness in rich people saying money doesn't make you happy. Right.

So there's two ways to think about that. So there's two ways to think about that. One is, yeah, that's easy to say when you get a lot of money. All right, fair. Could be true. That could be the truth. And then the other version of it is, what if it, what if there was like this curtain? And everybody wants to go to the other side of the curtain.

And then people who guilt through it to the other side of the curtain, they're like, hey, guys, wait, this is not all that's cracked up to be. Maybe that would be another way of thinking about this, which is that if rich people get to the other side of rich and they're not fulfilled, then they're going to go tell everybody, hey, guys, this isn't the answer. I thought it was the answer too. And so I just don't think it's binary like that. That's my point.

It's like not, it's different strokes for different folks. Not everyone is driven by the same stuff. not everything. Some people are happier rich. Some people are not. Like it's not like a you've, money is not a universal rule. Yeah. It's money is, it's impossible to say money does not make you happy. It's like, some people, it might, many people it will not. Right. By the way, for Naval specifically, he has a pretty good line, which I subscribe to, which is that money solves your money problems. It doesn't solve all your problems, but it solves your money problems. And if you don't have your problem solved, those are big fucking problems in your life. Exactly. He's actually of the type that says,

everybody who tells you if money doesn't make you happy is kind of crazy because money solves a lot of these problems that will make you unhappy. So although it won't make you happy, it gets rid of several of the root causes of unhappiness that people have, but there are others and you should work on those too. So anyways, on this podcast, he was talking about, he was interviewing this guy, and this guy was talking about in every company or really any society, there's three, it's like his thing was about innovation. It's like, why don't people innovate? Why don't companies innovate? why don't societies innovate? Because a lot of people say America doesn't innovate anymore.

Big companies don't innovate anymore. He talks about these three groups. One is chiefs. The other is priests and the third is thieves. So he goes, chiefs, priests, and thieves that steal innovation. So, okay, what are these three groups? So chiefs are the people in charge and they typically like the status quo. There's priests which sort of are all about sort of the religion of the way things are done,

the way they should be done, the rules. and these are usually invisible mythical, mystical rules that it created. And so at big companies, they always talk about, hey, what sacred cows do you need to kill in order for your company to grow and become new? It's like, well, you need to address the priests in the company who are not going to want you to kill those sacred cows. And the last one is the thieves. Did he say to fire them?

Does he say to fire them? I don't know. So he was interviewing him about a book that's not out yet. So I don't if I can know that. But I just thought this was interesting because I started seeing it everywhere when I think about the company I'm in, right? I'm in a company with over, you know, close to 2,000 people. I would say it's not that innovative as a company.

Now, in some ways, it doesn't need to be like the company's just growing like crazy because the market is growing and it's the leader of the market. But if you think about innovation and there's always a need to innovate, if I looked around, I can identify people who might be chiefs, priests, or thieves in the company. The thieves would be people who are sort of in it for their own self-interest. They like to kind of hoard resources. I mean, they're just looking for their own personal gain at the expense of the greater good. And so I like these frameworks because it helps you decode a bunch of messy human behavior

and just be like, oh, that's a way to think about what's going on here. Does this lens help me, if not throw it away? But maybe this lens helps. So that's why I wanted to bring it up. I think that's fantastic. You know, it's funny. Everyone, I some, a listener sent us this like Shopify store of T-shirts he made. And some of them are kind of neat.

And I posted about it. I go, shit. Are these guys, is this cool? Should we sell the shit? And everyone, I got people texting me saying it's cool and I would be like, well, somehow got to like, what do you like about the podcast? And they all said the same shit, which is Sam is blunt and honest. And sometimes, I think some people said mostly right,

Sean is the king of frameworks and makes complicated things easy to understand. Yeah, that's cool. I think that's accurate. I also give you that you're kind of like, McGivory. Like, you're a hustler and a schemer in the best way. meaning like you will figure out where's the action, where's the money, where's the demand. I think you're really good at that. And I think when you bring up things, it's because you've sniffed out something.

And you're like, you know, you've gone and hunted something. You bring it on to the podcast or you bring it into the Facebook groups. And for all the rest of us, it's like, oh, shit, this is interesting. I never knew this company's making all this money. I never knew there was this much demand for X. And it's because I think you're very good at sniffing that out. Well, I didn't want this to be a Sam and Sean jerk off session. but anyway, here we are.

Yeah. But the point is, is that you are very good at this framework stuff. I'm writing down chiefs and priests and thieves, and I'm going to apply this. You've done that a couple times. You did this another time. What was it? I forget when it was, but I was like, oh, my God, yes, he's right. I'm going to do that.

So good job with that. Keep doing that. Speaking of, I got one question for you. Do people in, do people at the hustle listen to this? and is that weird for you that they listen to this? Because I hope my coworkers just don't listen to this. Yeah, it is weird. I don't want to even have that in my head of like, oh,

if I mention something that's gone on at my company or whatever, I don't want to have to deal with the actual people who are doing it later because this is my little private space to share with the listeners. But if the listeners are some of those people, I'm like, oh, shit, it's tricky. Yeah, it is weird. So Steph Smith, one of our... She's a star. Steph's a star.

I love Steph to death. She's listening to this right now, I bet. she told me she listens to every episode. I'm like, really? She goes, yeah, it's so good. And I was like, first I, it's, there's flattery. Second, it's like, I can't believe people like this. That's crazy. Because I mean, I don't do. I don't, I've never listened to one episode because it's hard for me. Well, first of all, I was here during the conversation, right? So like, I don't need to go listen to it. I know what we said. So it's not new information to me. It's just hard. You're like, I don't, you don't want to, I call it the peanut butter and jelly problem, which is like when my mother would make me something to eat, it was wonderful. And then when I did the same thing, I'm like, oh, this is not that hard. Like, this isn't special at all. This is bullshit. What a fraud. Dude, that guy's going to make a Shopify t-shirt. My mom makes the best peanut butter and jelly. Probably will. All right. So you were going to switch topics. What are you going to? Okay. Speaking of sniffing out stuff, I got some stuff that I've sniffed out just this morning. And we didn't prepare too much for this because it all happens. This is interesting. You sent this to me. I loved it.

So let's talk about, well, all right, I'm going to talk about that one. Second. The first one is, wow, more people are sending me the same decks. So many people, okay, well, we could just talk about it if you want. Let's, we can talk about that first. Yeah, let's talk about this other one first. Okay, so I just read about this guy and I just tweeted about it. It's so interesting.

There's this guy. It's called Bons. I don't know how to pronounce this because I don't know where the space is in the word, because I'm just looking at the URL. Okay, here it is. Fuck, I can't pronounce this. B-O-N-S-A-I. So bonsai.

And then Mira, M-I-R-A-I-com. Okay. Are you going to that? I'm on it right now. Okay, so I'm seeing trees. We create trees that connect you. Okay, what's happening here? Okay.

This fucking guy is brilliant. He is the Bob Ross of bonsai trees. And if you go to go to that URL, I said, but add live in the beginning. Okay. Oh, I see it now. Okay. If you go to live. Bonzai Mirai.com slash pricing, you can get to a pricing page at least.

Yeah. $17.99 per month for you can build your bonsai skills on his revolutionary live stream. Yeah. So you pay $20 a month or $30 a month and you get to watch him do bonsai trimming. And people are loving it. And I looked at his traffic and he has peaked in April. And he is getting somewhere between 20 and 50,000 people a month coming to this website. And they want to both watch him trim bonsai trees and buy bonsai trees.

And buy bonsai. I mean, I know nothing about this world. I don't know what. It's just freaking crazy. So he has 230 videos in his library with 360. 60 hours of bonsai education. 50 different tree species worked on and hundreds of different techniques. It is nuts.

This is so cool. I love this. And so his take is this is an alternative to headspace. Ah, okay. So it's like some kind of active meditation, basically. And it is so cool. I'm a big believer in this. Okay.

So this, you just made me realize why I like this whole set of things. meditation is cool. I think everybody wants the benefits of meditation, but I would say the majority of people really struggle to meditate regularly. But what most of people don't realize is that meditating is not just sitting in a room with your legs crossed and breathing

and not thinking any thoughts, right? There's a whole bunch of different forms, including what this guy's doing, which is bonsai tree trimming, but also including that workout thing we talked about, the happy body. It's like this low intensity, slow, breath-based, like weightlifting, that honestly just felt like meditation more than weightlifting.

Exactly. There's other things. Why do people like hiking? Well, it's because there's a whole bunch of things that, okay, I'm really on the Naval train right now, but I got to say another line of his, that's money, which is most people want peace of mind, but really they should want peace from mind. And people just want to get away from their mind. And, you know, your mind living in your head makes you unhappy a lot of times.

and you'll notice this if you're in a social situation but you're in your own head, you will not be enjoying that social situation. If you are trying to give a speech but you're in your own head, editing your thoughts, thinking about what you're going to say, you will not be doing a good job nor enjoying it. And so same thing here. There's a whole bunch of activities that can get you out of your own head.

Meditation is one. Maybe bonsai is another. Exercise is another. And so people are music festivals is another. If you stimulate yourself with enough loud music, drugs, dancing, sweating, alcohol, whatever else, you will stop living in your own head. You'll lose yourself in the moment.

And those feelings are kind of euphoric. And I think people are chasing those. And so if you can develop something like that, which might be as simple as those silly Instagram, like cutting of sand videos or whatever, like there's apps in the app store that are these calming, calming videos on loop. So it's kind of like calm.com.

It's kind of like the calm meditation app. But instead, it's like a TikTok feed of just soothing, soap cutting, sand cutting, cake cutting videos. And people love these for relaxation. So I think there's a whole class of ideas that are like this. And let me give you more classes. And I am just riffing right now where I have not planned this at all. And I'm just, this is all off memory.

Okay. So here's three examples. The first example is there's a TV show that I used to watch as a kid that I see. No one's really done a good job of making it again for digital. it's called How It Works. Do you remember that show? I remember the show, yeah. All they did was they would say, today we're going to do a Ferrari factory, a soap factory, and a factory that makes hoses.

Right. And they still remember what's called Fortune Cookie Factory. I still remember that episode in my head. And they don't really talk much. The guy talking is a man with a deep voice. And he talks a little bit. He goes, first they source the rubber and mix it with black to make the rubber black or whatever they say.

And then you just see like a machine mixing rubber for like three minutes. Then they go after that, the people put it into a mold to make it round. And then you just see that. And then they stretch it out. Like next step is like, boom, there's your hose. And they do that for an hour. And it was wonderful.

I used to watch it as a kid all the time. The second example is AMSR barbers. Me and my friend Neville. A-S-M-R, yeah. But there's barbers. Me and my friend Neville have sat and watched this. There is, for some reason, this is really popular in India where you type in ASMR Barber. There's a barber with 666,000 subscribers on YouTube.

And all you do is watch him shave people's heads. I have watched so many hours of this. Me and Neville will sit down and just watch this. I went to his house one time and I used his computer or Apple TV to go to Google or something. And I saw that like the link was clicked. I go, Neville, do you also watch this guy? an idiot who shaves heads and he goes yeah and we did i go me too and we just watched him shave people's heads with a straight razor no third so is is this the sound thing where you like

because there's a different barber thing i've seen where you put your headphones on and it sounds like a barber shaving right above your right ear only it's kind of like a stereo sound or whatever where you can kind of feel where it's going behind your head in front of your head it's not that that's a different no it's different so this is just watching the guy do it yeah um and so they have so many views and I have sat for hours and watched it. There's just one, okay, it's this Indian guy. I think he's Indian. Yeah, he's in India. Asmr, saloon and massage. This guy has 10 million videos of someone getting their head shaved. That's all it is. He doesn't talk. All he does is shapes his head. And I've watched it so many times. There's another version of this.

It's not ASMR exactly, but this guy, Moneer, have you seen him on Instagram? No. There's this hairstylist in Dubai or something like that. And girls will fly around the world to just go to this guy's salon because they've seen him on Instagram. And he just colors and cuts your hair. And he does an Instagram video. It's kind of like a music video basically of him just, he grabs your hair, he washes it. So you see the wash. You see the foil being wrapped. Then you see, boom, the color's done. And he cuts the hair. And then he does this thing at the end where he just flicks the hair with his hands. And the way he flicks the hair, everybody loves the flick. And this guy, Mooneer has like, I don't know how many followers.

Does he even talk? But I listen to a lot of the, no, he doesn't talk. No, there's nothing. It's just the same song every single time. So it's like hypnotizing. It's always the same song, I believe. And this guy has 6.6 million followers on Instagram. I watch a shit ton of his videos.

And I couldn't care less about like women's hairstyle. But there's something addictive to watching this. I agree. And I think that anyone who has a product or service that you can do this, you just film it for 30 minutes. And there's a few characteristics that people love to watch. The third one is called primitive technology. I filed this guy since the day he launched.

He launched five years ago. He had his original videos. If you go to his YouTube page and do sort by all this, his original videos, it's a 13, 11 minute video, four minute video, four minute video. And then I believe he used to, or maybe he still does, has 30 minute videos. He has a piece of property in the woods.

And he builds stuff. So he's building a hut. He's starting a fire. with sticks. He's building a stone axe. And he has, and he blew up. His very first video that he posted, he accumulated like 2 million subscribers. Now he has 10 million subscribers. He doesn't talk. He doesn't say a word. All you do is you watch him build this hut. And it is mesmerizing. And now he has a book, a survivalist guide to building tools, shelters, and more. But he could, he could do anything he wants. This guy, it's pretty amazing. Literally all of his videos, you can go and look at this.

have at least 5 million views and the highest ones have 30 or 40 million views. The highest one has 74 million views and all he's doing is building a hut. This is fucking amazing. Wild, dude. I didn't know about any of this. That's amazing.

Wow. I'm just looking at his stuff right now. It's cool. Every video has like over 10 million views. And he's not like, he's not like, oh, I'll teach you how to do this. No, he's just doing it. Literally, he doesn't say a word.

He doesn't say one word. What kind of genius was this guy? Like, who has the creative genius to like do this, come up with this and actually make it successful? That's amazing. I mean, he has, let's see, he has. We should just do a silent podcast. Just know, just us breathing. He has close to one billion views on his video.

Wow. Okay. Oh, that's crazy. This is, okay, so relaxation. Yeah. I don't even know what we bucket this as. Takeaways is these small, I guarantee this Bonsai guy makes a wonderful living. And this primitive technology totally does too.

The takeaways for anyone listening is these relaxation things are awesome. They're probably a lot harder to do than we are making, like, oh, all you do is. These are the winners. Yeah. Yeah. So there's definitely more to it, but they work. And the second thing, it's cool to see people make livings off small-ass fun stuff. Yeah, exactly.

Some niche that they're super passionate about. Let's get to the less niche thing. So I will set the context here. So I read about this today. Pier 1, they sell betting stuff. They sell furniture. They sell home goods. Yep.

They went bankrupt. And there was this company called retail e-commerce ventures, really bland name, that acquired the IP, I guess you could say. So what they're going to do, it seemed like was they're going to use. Did they acquire it? It's like done? Yeah. They are sorry.

I think they have the winning bid and the paperwork signs in like a very short amount of time. I see. Okay. And so they're. move is that they're going to turn pier one.com into a viable store and saw all the stuff online. I don't understand how that works with like the brick and mortar stuff. I don't quite get it. But I remembered, I recognized this name. And I realized, oh, I'd read about this when someone bought Dress Barn. Dress Barn is like a middle of America store. I grew up with it where it's like

cheap clothes. You just go and you kind of pick stuff out of a bin. And the same company bought the IP for that. And I did some research. I mean, I just Googled it. It wasn't that hard. And the guy who owns that is Ty Lopez. And for those you who don't know, Ty Lopez is this guy, I'm going to try and reserve judgment, but many accuse him of being a get rich, quick guy. He sells courses on how to start a social media agency or how to find your calling in life. And he was most famous because he was one of the first advertisers on YouTube. And he had this video where he goes, here I am in my garage with my Lamborghinis. And I read a lot of books. And you should read books too. Buy my course. And I can just teach you what I've read in these

books. And so he's spending $30 million to buy Pier 1 along with other stuff. And we got a hold of his deck. I didn't even read it. But I read it. I've talked a lot and I've set the stage. You want to? Yeah. So this is one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while. So it's not just Tai Lopez. It's also this other guy, Alex Mayer. Alex Mayer was the founder and CEO of Zusk. he and Ty Lopez so Zusk sold for $204 million I think it was a dating app that was really popular in the app store It's kind of like a low-level dating app but they they had gamed Facebook at so he had like found an arbitrage of Facebook I believe early on had grown a lot through that maybe some other things I'm not super familiar with their story But successfully built Zusk then him and Ty Lopez built mentor box which

Does pretty well so mentor box I'm gonna just do a little calculation let me just get a little estimate here. Yeah, and on his website, they say how big mentor boxes. They say how big the variety of businesses are that they've acquired. Yeah, how big is mentor box the claim? It says 60,000 subscribers. Yeah, so 60 or 70,000 subscribers. I don't know exactly what their price point is, but I think it's doing over a million dollars a month. So I think it's safe to say about $10 million a year. I actually subscribed to it to see what it is because I was, how much does it cost? looking at this is like this. There's like a $1 trial and then I think it costs like 10 bucks or something like that, maybe 20 bucks. You get a book or summary and you get

access to these videos. I don't know. I don't use it. It's not that good in my opinion. But anyways, this mentor box does over 10 million bucks a year easily. And so Ty Lopez, you're absolutely right. Most people view him as kind of like he's a meme. He's a joke. You've got to kind of respect the hustle in a way like he's not a nobody. So, you know, good on you. But he really sold out hard on the kind of self-help. I'm a rich guy. Let me teach you to be rich type of thing to the point where successful and rich people typically don't look at Tai Lopez as like someone they admire.

He's not Richard Branson. He's Tai Lopez. But this dress barn thing was interesting. They didn't say how well the dress barn acquisition has done since they, so basically they're buying these old retail stores that have a big brand. And then they're relaunching them as e-commerce only stores. they're saying, hey, what if we had the brand recognition of a Pier 1, but none of the brick and mortar headaches that Pier 1 has?

And can we just sell Pier 1 as an e-commerce only store? Pier 1 was doing about $300 million a year in e-commerce revenue, a billion dollars of total revenue. And I'm not exactly sure why it's going bankrupt or why they, if these guys are getting this for $30 million, that's a fucking steal unless there's something else I don't know, which could very well be the case because we don't have their books. but this is an amazing business opportunity, I think, actually.

So, you know, props to those guys because when I saw this, I was like, this is a really smart play. Pier one has, Pier one is actually like more of like a tier one brand. It's like much bigger than dress barn. And taking, if you can get the rights to the name and the inventory to be able to sell this online, I mean, that's a, if the online store, the online business is already doing over $250 million a year, and you're picking up that asset for $20, $30 million, that's a steal. So I'm not sure how. And here's what you get when you buy Pier 1.

You get 30 million customer database, which basically means their email address and their buying history, I think. I don't know what else. Of those 30 million, 8 million of them are activated or active, which I don't know how that's defined. Yep. And most of the database can be retargeted on Facebook. And the guy who bought, who's Ty Lopez's partner.

was a dating app person. And the dating app people are notoriously, and they're in the same category of gamers, which are gaming people, which doesn't mean that they're scammie at all. It just means that they're incredibly savvy marketers, and sometimes that involves like some shady tactics. And, but that's okay.

Dating apps are user acquisition companies that happen to sell dating. And gaming apps are user acquisition companies that happen to sell games. And so both of them, you live and die on how effectively you're able to buy a user and make money off that user very quickly, which sounds like all business. But it is because they're typically low retention businesses, you're kind of churning and burning through users at a pretty high rate. Exactly. So you're probably sophisticated at customer acquisition. And so the theory is if you could take someone who's that sophisticated at that and throw them at a more stickier product that's actually like people love or that's in a better industry. you're going to have success.

So it's interesting. I think that these guys did this before Corona and then that should happen and now all these guys are going bankrupt so we're good on, I mean, they're set to succeed. It's interesting. Yeah, I think this is honestly

this is pretty great. I'm kind of jealous that I didn't do this. Well, you could have done it with brandless, except you'd have to, so brandless was a company that was like a brandless.com, we talked about them on here before all this happened. And they sold like basically the target brand of stuff,

that brandless wanted to redo target brand and make the generic brand. Generic brands that were high, medium quality, but low priced. And they went out of business, but you'd have to assume I think like $30 million in debt or something crazy. Yeah, which I'm guessing is also the reason that this business is so devalued slash going bankrupt, right? The revenues are actually quite high. but there must be some just huge overhang or debt obligation or something that's causing them to

declare bankruptcy rather than find a buyer. But yeah, if they can become kind of like a Wayfair Jr, that's pretty good. Wayfair is like a $7 to $8 billion company. And if they can take Pier 1 into an online only brand, if they can shed some of that, you know, liability in the transaction, like that's a win. And so I'm curious if we're going to see more of this. Are we going to see Dollar General? Are we going to see Crate and Barrel?

Are we going to see... No, you won't see... Dollar General. Dollar General. So do you know about the dollar stores? I've heard that they're thriving during COVID in general. You know why? No, why.

Okay. So in the early 2000s, I think that's when the first one. I'll bring you, you can actually look this up if you look up Dollar General. They're all, but Dollar General and then where is the other three, there's three of them, I think. The Dollar General. Family Dollar, I believe. Family Dollar and maybe there's one more. Dollar Tree.

Those three were acquired by the big private equity firm. So KKR, which is one of the maybe the third biggest private equity firm. The second one, another brand was acquired by Blackstone or Blackstone, which is I think the biggest private equity firm. And these fucking guys turn these damn things around so much. They like said, like, all right, we're going to start selling milk. We're going to start doing this. We're going to start doing that.

And it costs a million dollars to open a store. and they go, we're opening up a store everywhere. And they went on a spree where they opened up these fucking stores everywhere. And they are crushing it. All the private equity firms pounced on this at the same time. And dollar stores are killing it. Yeah, I've heard about that. I know somebody who is like the preferred real estate developer for them.

So I was like, dude, how's COVID? You know, you do retail development. He's like, well, luckily my tenants were Hobby Lobby, Dollar General. And, you know, basically a bunch of stores that actually have continued to thrive, even as retail continues to die. So I found that kind of interesting. Now, what's interesting here is that they're actually buying the IP for Pure One. They're not buying the company.

And so I think they're just basically buying the brand, maybe the rights to sell online. I'm not sure exactly. This deck is a little bit light. So, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting. I think Sharper Image did the same thing. If you want a case study and how this is done.

I'm almost positive that Sharper Image went through an issue where it went out of business and they only sold the website and it ran as its own thing. I would also be interested to see if somebody's going to do this with other struggling brands like a 24-hour fitness. So 24-Hour Fitness is also closing down stores going through bankruptcy, has a huge customer database of members who have active memberships. And if you could say, okay, cool, we're going to buy the 24-hour Fitness IP

and we're going to take it to a digital fitness brand. And you basically rip off either the sweat app or like freelytics or one of these like workout apps. and you like basically white label the app experience, but you combine that with the 24-hour IP and customer database brand name. I think that that is, you know, you could probably create a lot of value there depending on what price you could get in. So I think this is cool.

Yeah, it is cool. And if anyone is caring about this and we'll move on, there's two other companies that I know that I've done this. The first is Iconics brand. Iconics brand owns a ton of stuff, including Rockaware, JZ's thing. So they bought JZ's thing, mud jeans. you remember mud jeans um bro they own um ed hardy joe boxer all these kind of like third fourth tier

brands right they've done it and they're quite large and then the second one that's done it even better and i was i i don't want to give stock advice but uh i i think i was gonna i like this brand uh it's called vf corporation and they own dickies vans which is on a tear jansport um timberlin the north face and a few others. Wow. North Face is pretty big. Okay, cool. What else, what else we want to talk about? There's a bunch of things on this list. Anything stand out to you or anything you wanted to bring up? That was interesting. I'm going to defer to you. All right, let's do a quick one. You saw this Twitter hack yesterday that was about like, you know, taking over Elon and Jeff Bezos's accounts. And a whole bunch of people were like, you want to give the, you want to set the kind of says this.

Yeah, so a bunch of people, so there was a takeover of a whole bunch of blue checkmarked face, verified kind of Twitter verified accounts, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others. And they posted a thing. So what I saw was basically Jeff Bezos posts something along the lines of, you know, guys, I've done so well. I really just want to give back. You know, I want to make sure I give back to the community for, you know, for the next 30 minutes, anybody who sends me one Bitcoin, I'll send two back. You know, 30 minutes only, good luck, have fun, guys. And then Elon's account retweets it and basically is like, oh, me too, brother, I'm in.

Oh, Eli got hacked too? Yeah, I'll do the same, blah, blah, blah. And so they did this. And then the funny thing is that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded on the blockchain and they posted the public address of the wallet, you could see how many people in real time are getting duped by this. And so, like, you know, last I saw it, $100 something thousand dollars had been transferred to these wallets that will never be recovered.

I'm looking online now. It looks like $118,000. $118,000. And then Twitter kind of like blocked all blue check accounts. So they kind of just hit the safety switch and just said, no blue check can do anything on Twitter right now to like stop the activity. They figured out that they posted something that said they think that some like a moderator or an admin had been compromised.

So somebody who had admin rights, which gave you rights to like manage like the blue check mark accounts, they either bribed the person or they were working with them or they took over that person's account or something like that. and that's how the vulnerability worked. That's why they were able to get access to everybody's all at once. And so interesting, just crazy scenario in general. And then two, a whole bunch of people were like, dude, if you had access to Jeff Bezos, Elon, and whoever's Twitter accounts, and the best you could get was $118,000.

Like, you completely lack imagination. And so what will, and then there was a bunch of people saying, what would you do? Like, okay, let's put yourself in the criminal mindset for a second. How would you maximize the value of this? So I'm curious. What would you do? I don't know. I mean, I guess, I mean, look, that's like a, that's a, I mean, like, they got a, I don't know how hard it was, but they got a hundred grand off that. That's not a lot of money, but like, they probably will never get caught. Right. So if you could blackmail them,

you could say, Elon, I know you're cheating or I know you're, you'll probably get caught. Right. Uh, what could you do? So, so those are the, so two of the most, suggested things were blackmail through the DMs or um you're like short the stock so a lot of people were like oh dude if you have Elon's account you just you know post something that you're you know you're sick and taking leave or that you're gonna do some crazy shit because you tend to tweet that stuff anyways and you short Tesla stock and then that's how you'll profit off this thing yeah and i was like dude that'd be the most easy to catch thing that it could be and maybe with Tesla because there's so much short volume that like you would just be lost in the sea but it would be like

so obvious if you did it with like Amazon stock or what would you right so you'd have to say like um like things are not going well from Elon's thing or for or for uh Bezos you'd have to say like as of today I'm officially stepping down right exactly like I'm done you're stepping down and like you're the key man risk of those businesses and so you know the stock market would panic if Elon was stepping down from Tesla or something like that now I or you could do the other way you could be like you should be like we are we are high considering buying Tesla, like if you're Bezos. Right. Yeah, one

way to do it would be to send an, you know, something that looks like it's meant to be a DM, but actually accidentally got tweeted about like buying some penny stock or something like that. You take advantage of the pump. I don't know. There's a whole bunch of random things. I didn't see any ideas that I love, but I did think it was

crazy that this happened. And it's so crazy that there's all these vulnerabilities, I mean, through whether it's email, social media, like the whole world is so fragile, really. Like, people people's lives, the companies are really fragile, and there's all these other, like, you know, risks that are, that are just out there that's very hard to do, like Slack, for example, if Slack gets compromised and your whole company runs on Slack and your entire Slack chat

history gets exposed, like, you know, you could be screwed. And, you know, we just trust Slack and we trust Google Docs and we trust all these things. Should we? So, well, Sean, you do, what email service provider do you guys use at Twitch? Gmail. We're G Suite account. Really? So I think at Facebook, they don't use, I think they use. Amazon runs their own for a lot of these. Amazon doesn't use Google Hangouts. They have Chime, their own shitty version of Zoom, but it's Amazon's own, so they'd have no risk in that sense. But Twitch got acquired, right? So we use Slack, which they don't get to use, which Amazon doesn't get to use.

We use Google Docs. We use all these things because we were, you know, it'd be pretty disruptive to change the whole company's like operating system. Well, I didn't know about this. When I, when someone at Facebook was like, yeah, we use, I think Outlook. I was like, Outlook is fucking stupid. Why? And they go, because we don't want Google spying on us. Right. And I was like, we want Microsoft spying on us instead.

Yeah, I was like, that would never happen. And now I realize, yeah, it can happen. Yeah, somebody tweeted this the other day. They were like, you know, can we all just agree that like God mode type features of any app where basically like, you know, you have some super admin account that can like, see other people's activities. Like there's all these good reasons why you would want to be able to do that to moderate, to fix issues, to somebody says, oh, I need this fixed in my account. You're like, oh, don't worry, I'll take care of it for you or, you know, whatever.

But there's so much harm that can be done with this. And just a word to the wise, if you're using a startup, like, let's say you're using some startup medical app, like, oh, telemedicine, and you got this, you know, you've been a little promiscuous, you came down with this STD, and there's this app that's this new app from Silicon Valley. You read about it at TechCrunch. And all you got to do is take a picture of your junk and this doctor will prescribe you some medicine. You don't have to go to the doctor's office. Just know, at that eight-person startup, there's like six engineers that see every photo that gets uploaded into the app. And there's probably like a Slackbot that's just tweeting about

that. That's just posting every diagnosis. And that's usually for bug fixing and shit like that. But like, your shit is not secure with startups. Yeah. And that's something that's outside of my world. And I've learned about it recently where these companies are building stuff. I'm like, man, you should sell the companies instead of people. And I look at their product roadmap and they had this like SSO feature and I was like, what the fuck is SSO? Like I guess that stands for what's that single sign on? And I was like, well, just use like laugh. I don't understand. And apparently I sound pretty ignorant. Everyone's probably laughing at me who knows about this. I guess it's security around signing on. Everybody who works at a big company is like, oh yeah, you know, when we need to use a

service. Like if I log in to watch our company all hands, like I don't know if you do it all hands through Zoom, but like when we do in all hands, you have to log in with your company, company user ID and password, single sign on in order to access it. So to make sure that outsiders can't access your stuff if they had the link. And you have to like enter in your same thing. All your metrics, all your, uh, you're not really fingerprint. Not your fingerprint. Sorry. Uh, what's that thing called the VP or, um, oh like, yeah, it's like, there's like a USB little thing I have where I have to push into it on my computer and that's my like hardware password that I have to use to log in to go see my health care benefits or whatever.

And by the way, there's companies that just make single sign on as a service. It's a great little startup. They just say, hey, if you want to get your app enterprise ready, you're going to need single sign on. Trust me, it's a pain in the ass. Just like you don't want to build payments software and fraud detection and Stripe just does it for you. We do single sign on for you. And I was like, when I saw that, I was like, oh, that's a great idea. Isn't that with that company, Oktah?

Is it Octa? Octa. Yeah. I think Octa might do this as well. Yeah. Yeah, that's like a $10 billion company I know nothing about. But anyways, so what was I saying? Oh, the same thing goes for any like new email client.

You're like, oh, this new email thing came out superhuman and I'm really pumped about it. It's cool. You could swipe to the left and the right and it's like Tinder for email or whatever. And you give it access to your email. Like giving access to email is like insane. Giving access to a Chrome extension when it says Chrome extension, we'd like to read and write all data on every web page you visit. That's insane. insane to do all the six people do. Everyone's going to know Sean likes midget porn. Yeah, exactly. Like,

that's my business, what I like to do and how small or big they are. Anyways, people are insane. There's lots of security vulnerabilities. Okay, one last topic. Oh, I have one on here. That's not even research, but I just wrote, why the hell do we use signatures? Like, that's crazy. You just did your taxes yesterday, huh? No, I'm doing house sale stuff, but they're like, oh, yeah, can you sign this? And by the way, if you sign this, you know, you're claiming this. And I'm like, dude, this signature I made with like my pinky on my keypad. And it looks different than every other signature ever did.

And in general, signatures are stupid. And also when I go to some place and they're like, you need to sign this waiver. And it's like, nothing's in it for me. It's only just liability productions for them. I literally just write the word Jane Doe in cursive. And they just take it. And I'm like, look, if this ever came back to me and they're like, you sign this. I'm like, what are you talking about, dude?

This says Jane Doe. Are you crazy? I didn't sign that. I don't understand that either. When we were doing our taxes, I had to sign some stuff. And I'm like, and Sarah had to like, she had like wait for me to do it. And like, she called me home. It was like, hey, can you come sign this stuff?

I'm like, no, just you do it. Right. Just write my name. Like, I don't understand. And we've had that. If I'm not authorized to forge your signature, like, we're not friends at this point. Yeah. Well, I was like, and there was another time where I was out of town and one of our account had to like sign a check.

And I'm not going to say the outcome to the story because I don't, I don't even know if it's illegal or not. but I go, can you just like, like I know what the check is. I hear you. I'm telling you I'm on board. Sign my name on it. Or I was like, video me, Edy, and I will watch you sign my name on it. Like a lot of people are like, no, no, no, we can't do that.

I'm like, I don't understand the intent. Like if the intent is there and I approve. Right. Maybe there should be like a on the fly power of attorney where you can grant like a one-time power of attorney to somebody just through a little video face message, some startup like that. Okay, here's a little idea that I was cool. Well, here, but by the way, when I was 19 using fake IDs, I would like find someone who looked like me and give them $100 and they'd give me their ID.

I remember I would sign the debit or the, I would like sign some paperwork or like, no, I don't remember what they would do. They would make me sign a piece of paper at the liquor store. And they're like, this, I got busted a couple times ago. This signature doesn't look like the one on the ID. And that's how I got caught a few times. Yeah, my handwriting is inconsistent. I don't write much.

Yeah, I was like, well, I've changed. Or like, if you had a bar, you're like, I don't know, dude, I'm wasted. Well, dude, mine, I used to, because my name starts to the S as yours does too. I used to do the really fucking lame thing of doing that little chain link S as the start of my autograph. You know, like the three lines, three lines and connect them, make a little chain link. And then like, of course, I got above the age of 18 and I was like, what am I doing? I can't go forward like this. So I changed my signature from there.

Yeah, so it could have changed. And you probably opened a bank account when you're like 14. And now I have to explain why I've changed and then they look at it. They're like, no, I understand, bro. Don't worry. Okay, here's a little idea that's sort of interesting about the health sale process that I thought was cool. So I'm selling my house and I use an agent who's with Compass. And Compass has this feature that is really cool that I wonder if it's extendable to other.

This might already exist, but I think it's a cool little thing to think about might spur some new ideas. So in the house sale process, the agent wants me to invest in my house and like stage it really well, you know, fix up the landscaping, repaint everything. Do all these, like, fix-ups, right? And I'm like, cool. Like, in theory, like, I get it. You know, that's going to help sell the house. But, like, also, I've already, like, moved mentally and physically at this point.

And, like, I don't really- Deal with it. Yeah, I don't want to deal with it. I also don't want to spend $25,000, which is what mine's coming out to, to, like, do these improvements. Even though logically in my head, I'm like, there's probably a good ROI for every dollar I do in fixing this up. I just don't want to pay more money for this asset that I'm selling.

Like, when I'm not, even sure if I'm going to make money or lose money on the sale. And so he's like, don't worry. Compass has this thing where we'll just take it out of the escrow. So you just say yes, like, yes, I'm cool with staging it and painting it and whatever within this budget. But like, don't worry. You don't have to write a check. That's what TurboTex does. It's amazing. Right. And I'm like this. And it's so stupid that that changes my decision making, but it absolutely does. The fact that I don't have to take out my wallet and pay. And I can just say, yeah, take it out of the sale price. When it's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's a

same exact thing. But it's not the same thing. And I instantly was like, okay, cool, yeah, yeah. And then they hit me up. They're like, oh, by the way, we think it would be good if we touch this garage up too. Can we do that? I'm like, yeah, yeah, put it on my tab. You know, it's coming out of the sale price anyways. I don't have to take out a dollar. Yeah, it's way easier to spend money. So I found this to be, it's a no interest. And they're like, no, it's a no interest loan. And they, because they know that, hey, getting you to do this will help the sales. So they're like incentivized to, to offer this as a service. It's a short term, like two to three months loan that they have to, the front. And so I was wondering, A, is, does this exist for any house sale? Because it should. I used it.

I think they use a service called Notable. So it's kind of an interesting company to check out. I think that company might offer this to everybody. But then I wondered, like, how many other things are there like this where, um, get money back? Yeah, you like, it's like take it out of the, take it out of the thing. Like taxes is another good one where it's like, oh, yeah, I don't want to pay for you to do my taxes. Just take it. take it out of my refund or put it out, add it to my bill later, you know. And so where are there other opportunities to reduce the money out of pocket up front? And I would say a firm or afterpay or a great example of this where they're like, hey, you want to buy this thing on, you know,

but like you don't want to pay the full price for it right now. Pay in 12 installments of, you know, $100 and you can get it instead of fronting. That's a great question. So I think these are, these are great businesses to start. If you can find that opportunity where people don't want to pay now. Like maybe it's property taxes or something crazy like that. Maybe there's some, maybe it's, you know, I don't know, like income share agreements. This is the same thing for income share agreements, right? It's like, no, no, no, don't pay for school. We'll take it out of your salary when you're done.

And it's like, it's the same thing. I was going to take a loan and pay it back after I get a job or I just don't take the loan and I pay it back after I get the job. Like as a shadow loan. And so income share agreements work the same way. But psychologically, people view it very differently and they're more willing to do it that way. So anyways, I think that's a cool situation. If you're listening to this, you've know another area where that would apply, I want to hear it. Yeah, I completely agree. I just,

like when I was doing my taxes, it was the same thing. I was like, oh, yeah, just add, add, add out of that. I'm not, it's like, it's free money anyway. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Sean, I looked at your house listing. It's listed for a lot cheaper than you bought it. Are you going to lose a lot of money on this? Or it is the strategy that people are hopefully going to The strategy is just to drive enough foot traffic, drive a lot of foot traffic by making it low priced, and then get at least two bidders and then just bid them up against each other. Also, the listing is wrong. It says my house was originally bought for 2.4, but that's the neighbor unit. So Zillow has it mislabeled.

So I got mine for 2.1, not 2.4. So it looks like it's at this huge discount, which is not true. It's at like a small discount. Do you regret buying it? Yes, I regret buying it. Would you have regretted buying it regardless of Corona or not? Yeah, even if I had sold it for like a slight profit or whatever, I just could have done better things with that money, right?

Like I had to put $500,000 down and it's like, I lived there for three years. Like the rate I could have grown that $500,000 through other investments would have been much higher than the rate of my real estate appreciation or in this case, depreciation that I ended up with. Plus, home ownership is just a pain in the ass. There's just headaches along the way. and renting is way more fun, way more flexible, way less headache.

Will you ever buy a place again? So now my, because I was talking about this, he's buying and I was like, dude, he's buying an expensive house, like, $5,000 more than our house.

And I was like, who is? Crazy, my brother-in-law. And so I was like, why are you doing this? And he was like, he's like, the thing you,

he's like, I always lose money on real estate. He's like, but the thing is, once you get to a certain point where like, I must live in this neighborhood. Like,

I want to live here. This is the place I want to live because sometimes those places just don't rent. Like they only sell. He's like, so the only time to, he's like, my rule now is the only time I buy is when I really want to get to a neighborhood or to a house that I just can't get for rent, then I'll buy. And it's my tax for really wanting that place. But otherwise, if I'm flexible, then renting all day. And so I, I have a fucking money. People got money, dude.

People got money. What does your brother-in-law do for a little bit? God damn. He refuses to come on the podcast because he doesn't want to. draw attention to to his business and what he does and all that and how much money he's got and all that stuff he must be in real estate Sean's dropped hints I think he's in real I don't know yeah he does stuff in real estate yeah it's it's real estate plus other businesses fucking A we got to talk about real estate that seems like I've always said real estate is

has the highest ratio of dumb rich people dumb to rich people like there's a shit ton of dumb rich people right yeah I love that line that that's another a good shirt one. It is. I mean, like, if you think about like, not dumb, but like tech has like a lot of high IQ people, but maybe, maybe not as many rich people. Real estate, you don't have to be that smart to be awesome. Yeah.

If you took, so the idea is if you took all people who have, let's say, over $5 million in net worth and then you said, okay, buy industry, how'd you make your money? And then you've mapped their IQs. And you said, which has the lowest average or median IQ? you. It's either good, number one's going to be inheritance and number two is I think going to be real estate. Yeah, for sure. We got to talk about real estate next time. All right. Well, good episode. Yeah, cool. We're out.