My First Million - Crumbl Cookie Making $1B/ Year, AI In Sports, and Underutilized Assets Create Businesses

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Episode 419: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about how Crumbl Cookie is making a billion a year in profit, will AI take over sports, looking at underutilized assets to create businesses and much more. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. ----- Links: * Flying Magazine * 1,000 True Fans * Parcast * Crumbl Cookies * Amjad Masad Twitter * Replit * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (07:50) - What is a university? (09:05) - Craig Fuller & FlyingMag (24:20) - Finding the real metric that matters (30:40) - Parcast (34:10) - Crumbl Cookies (42:20) - Super Bowl and AI (54:55) - Underutilized Assets Businesses ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

And again, remember, percentage of their readers are ultra wealthy people who are like, yeah, great, I want to have a home on the East Coast that I can park my private plane in and that'll be one of my hubs. And I'm pretty sure, okay, I don't know the exact numbers on this, but I can triangulate a little bit. I think they've done at least 25 million in pre-sales on this thing. That is crazy. And it could be, it could easily be double that. But that is a really awesome and impressive, like way to take this niche hobby, find a, find a, find a kind of media publication that works and go content to commerce. I have some stuff for today.

You have something that I know about that I've kind of mentioned, but I mentioned it without saying their name, Craig Fuller. Now we can mention it. Let's talk about it. Did you get permission about this? Yeah, I think so. So we got some of this is public,

but let's talk a little bit about this. Okay, so there's this business called Flying Magazine or Flying Mag. And so when you look at it, you're like, okay, well, what is this? And so basically the story is there's a guy who bought this magazine called Flying Mag. And Flying Mag produces this beautiful magazine, amazing photos. And if you're a flying or aviation enthusiast, you will love this magazine. He bought it for like, I think like not quite 10 million, but a little under that. So maybe somewhere between let's call it $5 to $10 million.

My guess is a fraction of that. I think it was closer to one. Do you have any evidence? Yeah, we've got a little source here saying high seven figures. So let's assume the source is correct. Okay. So but then I was like, well, where did this person get high seven figures to go drop on a magazine? That seems like a pretty indulgent purchase for somebody, unless they have a lot of money.

So he started a company before that called Freight Waves, which basically is like a data company for the freight shipping industry. So they're like a price reporting company. So they provide data that shippers and freight companies use to inform themselves on what's going on in the market. They also have a SaaS tool. So they kind of have like a media side, which is that, you know, contents that they're producing that's pricing information. And then they have a SaaS business called Sonar that's in it. And they've released a public press release so you can kind of see some of their numbers. I saw they did that.

That's very weird that they did that. Yeah, they're not a public company, but they sort of like did a public report. And I'm not sure what the agenda was. like I think I'm just sort of naive here. I don't know. Normally this is we want somebody to buy us or we want to raise money or we're prepping to go public. But it's, I don't think it's either any of those three because of what they said.

So they basically reported 13 million in revenue for a quarter. So let's call it. Let's just extrapolate that out in a straight line. So roughly 50 million a year in revenue. It wasn't a lot in profit. So it was like, you know, one or two million in EBITA in the quarter or something like that. So let's say that this business is making. I don't know, four to eight million of profit a year.

But it's growing 70% a year. It's growing quickly, almost double. And it's been around, I think, for a little while. So, you know, it's done well. They had 28 million in cash just like on the books, on the balance sheet. So, you know, the business was in a healthy spot. So I think Craig starts freight waves. He then separately buys Flying Mag.

One of the interesting things about Flying Mag is that if you think about who are the readers of a niche magazine like this, you have, two categories. Uber nerds and Uber nerds who are rich. Because you know, you got to be kind of nerdy about this hobby if you're going to be like reading about this. Like we had a guy once who we hired as an engineer

that used to had an app on his phone where he would listen to the, what's called air traffic control. He would just tune into the frequency of air traffic control and listen to it at lunch. And like, I got to tell you, never had a worst lunch with anybody in my life. Dude.

Me, him and his phone on with air traffic control was our lunch. And I was like, you know, hey, man, I'm going to go back for seconds and then I'm going to go kill myself. So, you know, see you later. This has been horrible. Thanks. I do that with the, I do that with the police scanner. You ever do that with the police scanner?

At least police. Look, there's a show called cops. There's no show called Safe Landings. Because that's all the air traffic control is. There's no, there's a show called which way is the wind blowing. But there is a video game called that. There is a video game where all you are is an air traffic controller. Yeah, fair enough.

Okay. So anyways. Back to my flying mag story. So a big percentage of the readers are like rich people with private planes or like, you see this a lot in tech for some reason. Like my buddy Furkan did this. So sold this company immediately starts signs up for flying lessons, wants to get his pilot licensed to like go fly this like,

you know, five seat or six seat or two seat or plane. They love that hobby. And it's a really expensive hobby. So one thing that they did recently that I think is really smart is, have you heard about this, this community that's building in Atlanta? So he told me, I'm not going to steal your thunder,

but he told me what he was going to do, and he goes, I'm flying from New York to go see this property I'm looking at, and I'm flying my private plane. Do you want to come with me? And I ended up not going because I had to go up to Teterboro,

so in New Jersey, and then fly back down to Atlanta to see the spot with him, but he asked me to go with him, and I almost did it. And so I've known about this for about a year and a half now. Yeah, that's great.

And so the interesting thing is they're basically building a community in Atlanta. And I think the reason people build these communities is like there's like a, what's it called? Like a landing strip like in the middle of the neighborhood. So you can park your plane. And if you want to take off, you could just like go take off. Like the driveway of the community is like a landing strip. And correct me from all of them. It's a, it's a, so it's a country club with golf with homes around the golf course.

But instead of a golf course, it's a landing strip. That's exactly what it is. So it's a country club for flying. And so you purchase, I forget how much a plot of land costs. And then they build you a home. And now you are part of this aviation community. Right. And so they pre-sold the plots of land,

the plots for the homes in this community. So they find this kind of bare ground or whatever. They start pre-selling the plots. And again, remember, percentage of their readers are ultra wealthy people who are like, yeah, great. I want to have a home on the East Coast. I can park my private plane in and that'll be one of my hubs.

And I'm pretty sure, okay, I don't know the exact numbers on this, but I can triangulate a little bit. I think they've done at least 25 million in pre-sales on this thing. That is crazy. And it could be, it could easily be double that. But, um, but that is a really awesome and impressive, like way to take this niche hobby, find a kind of media publication that, that works and go content to commerce, right? This is the, what's the churning group?

Churning Group believes in this, that content to commerce. So they did bar to. Which is what Haudinky did. Haudinky did this for watches, right? Watch blog for super high-end watches. Well, guess what? As soon as you start selling watches, that business, I think Kevin Rose came on this podcast and said it went from one or two million a year in revenue

to a hundred million when they flipped that switch and started actually selling the watches that they had been talking about for 15, 20 years. And so content to commerce is this kind of like really interesting. play. And I think that this is a great example of it being done well. Yeah, look, you have BuzzFeed doing it with stuck animals, which is pretty lame. You know, they did it with houses.

They did it with houses. And this is baller. Craig told me about this, about a year and a half ago. And I was like, this is very bold. And he was explaining it to me. And he was very confident. And it was like, no big deal. And I was thinking about this. And I was like, I don't know.

This kind of seems like a really big deal with me. Here's what we should do. Well, I was like, I don't think you're going to be able to pull this off. Well, I didn't say that, but in my head, I was like, this is ridiculous. He totally did. They totally pulled it off. We did this way back in the day. I think you had said something. You were like, ads are lame. This is before HubSpot bought the podcast. So it was basically like ads are lame. We're selling ads for the podcast, but like what would be a better business for my first million to do? And I think at the time, people were like, you should create like a

we work, like a branded version of WeWork or like a white label like co-working space or something like that. Which sounded crazy. But I actually think that there was. was a version of that that that's true like basically if we just bought like a eight unit or 16 unit apartment building um in san francisco but it was only you could only go rent there if you were part of our community or you could buy units there if you're part of our community something like that could work uh because people would rather live in a community of like-minded people than a community of absolute strangers i think there's a huge number of people that would do that and so then you get into the real estate game these units in san francisco go for you know

million and a half, two million dollars on average. So you could do these things where you, you know, in theory, a brand like ours could also do that and say, yeah, if you want to be around other entrepreneurs, other business people who are, you know, share this kind of like, this ethos that we have, then, you know, you could do that. But there's a problem, which is you and I, I don't know about you, me. I wasn't even bold enough to like consider that. I thought that was stupid. Now I've got a little bit more experience and I kind of understand like our poll a little bit. Now I actually think that that could work. But at the time, I was like, that's ridiculous. There's no way that would work.

Dude, my brain is like a metal detector that's just looking for something that's going to scare me to do. I'm just like, where can I get the maximum thrill, the business thrill? Like, we're going to get the maximum reward. Plus, I'm down with the risk. And saying, like, if I said out loud that I was doing this, that I think would get other people's attention, but it would also make me a little scared because I don't know exactly how to do it. Like, I am very attracted to these ideas. And that's not always a good thing. I think that's a bad thing in many cases.

But I'm, I hear that and I want to run into that fire a little bit, whereas I think you hear that, you're like, there's a fire. Why would I run? No, no, no, no. Now I'm more comfortable because I've seen some, I've seen like, well, if you do this, this and this, the odds of some type of return is positive. But like before I was still kind of understanding and like that mechanics of business and like investing and things like that.

Now I actually do see it. We're like the opposites. We're like the opposite. I get excited by that weird kind of like kind of half figured out thing. And you're like, well, I don't know. I want to figure it out first. But then once you do figure it out, you're like, you're like, go. And you just execute and you're like locked in and you just, you just freaking go on that opportunity.

Whereas I'm like, oh, this is cool. And it's kind of figured out. All right, cool. Like I'll kind of go there. But ooh, there's this other interesting thing over here that's like, you know, half figured out. And I'm not as good at the last. lock in as you are. You get bored after you figured out the puzzle. Exactly. Yeah, but for me, I have to figure out a little bit more. And like, I want like a higher certainty that the puzzle

pieces are even going to be able to fit fit together. You know what I'm saying? Right. Right. Exactly. And then once the puzzle's done, you're like, my puzzle. I love this puzzle. Dude. And you know, I'll tell you an example. So, uh, Sean and I are going to Vancouver Wednesday, I think. And we're doing this little, uh, meet up with us and Andrew Wilkinson. And this wasn't even that well organized. Like, they've done a good job of it. But, like, there's no, they're not, maybe it well organized isn't the right word because that sounds insulting.

It was just kind of low key. Like, we just have, like, a type form that you have to sign up for, and that's it. And then you pay 50 bucks to show up. And I think you get a refund if you show up. I think they're doing it to, like, guarantee seats. Like, the people listening to the pod, if they say, how do I sign up? I don't even know where to, I don't know where to go. We're doing a meet up, but it's in stealth mode for no reason.

I don't know what the organizer is doing, but it just doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't make any sense to me. You know, what's the venue and date and time? Oh, man, it's all coming together. We're working on it. It's like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Is this fire festival?

What's happening here? And then they refunded the money. And I'm like, well, I couldn't use that money on like my flights and hotel. I wish, I wish, you know, like I'm paying money to go and do this. It would have been cool because like that thing, it made like 50 or 100 grand. I'm like, you know, give me like $3,000 to pay for my stuff. But when I kind of like realized that we were able to pull off some of this stuff, I'm like, oh, hey, we can get people.

The thing with media is if you can get people to buy shit or leave your home, so like if you say, I'm going to be at this location at this time, if you were able to get people to do that, that means you have pull. And every once in a while, when we pull that off, then I'm like, oh, we could have pulled this off, something like this. Or we still could. We still can. Then I start to believe it.

Yeah, that's interesting. Actually, that's a good metric because I've been trying to think about on the content side. I'm like, you know, I want to set a goal because I think I work better when I have a goal or target to work off of. You have to give context. The context is Sean is now he's considering or planning or doing to go harder on creating content. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Sounds lame.

So I don't even say those words. Content creator sounds like lame. I'm going to come up with my own words. But like, yeah, the idea is, hey, I like doing this thing where I get to just like learn about stuff, talk about it. And people seem to like it. Podcast is one version of that. The newsletter is another version, et cetera. And anyways, the point is I was like, what's a good goal for this?

And I was like, oh, million, 10 million subscribers, fans. No, what do I want here? And I was like, and I was like intuitively, there's something more like that Kevin Kelly thing, the true fans, thousand true fans where it's like, he wrote this blog post. That's amazing. That's called a thousand true fans. Basically says, if you can have, if you can have a thousand true fans, a true fan being somebody who would pay $100 across the course of a year to, they'll buy your shirt.

they'll show up, you know, for your event. They'll buy your tickets. They'll do whatever because they really like your stuff. And like, you know, for an artist, if you're somebody who's just creating a thousand people who are willing to pay 100 bucks, sounds kind of achievable. It doesn't, that's not like I'm going to be the next, you know, Justin Bieber or whatever. And it's 100 grand. And like you could make a living doing what you love if you get to that point.

That was like one of the original things that I think inspired a lot of content creators online. And I was like, oh, maybe something like true fans, but how do you measure a true fan? I guess it's this $100 spend thing. but I think this thing you're saying is actually true, which is, it's like a test. It's like if I just tweeted, hey, I'm hanging out at this coffee shop right now in San Francisco, how many people would show up? And like, I think three years ago, that answer was zero to zero to two. You know, like maybe just my actual friends who I had caught up with a while.

You know, now I don't know what that number would be, but probably, what do you think? If I did that, I have no idea. Thousands would be crazy. But if I was like, I'm hanging out here all day. So it's not like a window. If you gave it a two week window or a two week notice, two to four week notice, I think you can get hot. I'm saying same day. I'm going to be here all day.

Swing by if you're around. 50 to 100, I bet. 50 to 100. Yeah, exactly. And I think that there's a, that's probably, that's great. That's amazing. There's some point where it's like, the coffee shop's like, what the fuck is happening? There's like, there's too many people here, guys.

What is this? There's some point where you break the coffee shop. And I'm like, okay, there's some way of testing that because I think what most people go is for reach. And they get really tricked by these platforms that are like, yeah, your video got 95,000 views. And it's like, cool. How many of them actually watch this versus just swiped by it? Or if they watch, like, how many of those 95,000 people know your name? How many of them know anything about you?

How many of them care about you, right? And so I think what most people do is they just take. what they're fed. And they're fed basically the most large vanity useless number. And I think for any business, you want to find not the vanity metric, but the true metric that actually shows like the level of engagement you have, the level of love that your product has. And so, and different businesses, different companies have like different ways of looking at this.

Like Facebook back in the day, one of their metrics that mattered was they were like, yeah, of all of our signups, 50% of them use this every day. And that became this thing that was like, okay, it's not that they have the most signups, like MySpace has way more. But man, this Facebook thing,

like half of the total signups are using it every single day. That's got to mean something. And the people that were able to identify that inside the company and as investors got mega, mega rich. Whereas other people were just chasing like a total user count number, but they didn't really like have the good way to measure it. So I think there's something to like finding the real metric that matters. At the hustle,

what did you guys use? because you could have just said subscribers, right? But that wasn't like quite the, that wasn't just the thing. Like, do you have any examples of finding the real metric that matters? Dude, we would just do replies. And so every once in a while, I would purposely either write about something that was a bit controversial or I would purposely have typos. And I would just see how many people reply and say that they saw a typo.

Right. Or at the very bottom of the email, and I told you to do this. And I think you did do it. I would say, what city are you in? right now. Send me a, or I would say, I'm working from this brand new desk. It's called this. I love it. Take a picture of your workspace. Let me see it. And it would be just how many people are going to take a picture and reply back to the email. And there was a time where at the very bottom of the email, we said, we're going to send out stickers to everyone that replies. And we got like 10,000 replies.

So we had to like mail at 10,000 stickers. And so we would do little things like that where, and we got like 10,000 replies on like 100,000 subscribers. And so I remember like anytime we get a reply from an email, that's a, that's a really good sign. Right. And like I see this all the time with newsletters now because substack has this feature where if you subscribe to one newsletter, like, I read something. I'm like, yeah, I like this.

I subscribe. It pops up this full screen thing, which is just like, Sean recommends these five newsletters. And there's only one button and you're just like, uh, okay, next. And you hit that and now you're subscribed to five newsletters. And you can see people on substack. they're like, wow, my new, my growth is crazy. I'm hitting 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 subscribers. No, but it's bullshit.

Dude, it's all bullshit. And substacks like, this is awesome. When they're showing this, I'm sure, in their investor presentations, look at this. Now, we drive the majority of subscriber growth for our newsletters. There's a network effect here. It's like, no, it's not a network effect. It's a giant screen where people click next. Like, I used to do this with our mobile apps.

It's like, oh, if I want to, if I want this app to grow, let me just pop up a screen where it's your entire contact list, everybody pre-checked. There's one big. button that says next and there's a tiny black X that's like hidden in the top left corner if you could see that you're going to skip it. And like everybody wants to skip it, but two out of, two out of every 10 people are just going fast and they're just going to hit the button. And they just spammed all of their contacts. I guess what? My app goes viral. Is it really viral? Are they sharing it because they like this product? No, they're sharing it because I tricked them into spamming, basically. And subsect does the same thing. They basically trick people into subscribing to these

newsletters. This is my opinion. I'm sure they would disagree and say, no, no, no, people just really want to be referred five news newsletters every time they subscribe to one. I don't believe that for a second. This happens with podcast. There's a very popular business podcast. I like the guy, but I think his numbers are BS. It's, uh, you know, should I say the name. I don't know if I should say the name, but like, do it.

Uh, let's just say, it's not 30 minute VC. It's a little less than that. Leave it to your imagination. No, he's a, he's a great guy and he's done a great job building his podcast up. but he'll tweet out these things where he'll be like, two million people listen to the last week's episode with this person. And I'm just like, dude, there's just no way in hell. That's Joe Rogan numbers.

That's just, there is not two million people. I know we, we have a podcast. I can see where we are in the ranks. I can see where he is in the ranks. I know other people that are at the top of the charts. You can look at the reviews.

You can just see the cult following of certain things. Like if you said, you know, the all in podcast is getting a million views per episode. I think that's true. I think that they have really tapped into something. You could see the YouTube numbers. You could think about where the podcast charges.

I think it's doing at least a million, probably closer to two per episode. They do once a week. It's super high quality. It's got a broad appeal. The data matches up to that signal. But when you're like, oh, dude, yeah, I get two million per episode for my super, you know, my talk with a third least well-known partner at this fund.

I'm just like there's no chance. And I think I even asked him once I was like, Dude, how are you getting these numbers? That sounds like off the charts for what like a business or tech podcast of this, you know, size could do. And he's like, oh, yeah, we have a big audience in Asia or wherever. And I'm just like, oh, okay, well, I've been in the internet game long enough to know like, like, dude, I bought my first 5,000 Twitter followers, right?

Like I know that you can get a, you can get any number by doing anything on the internet. And it doesn't mean anything, especially for something like podcasts, which is like news that are subscribers. It's like the hardest thing ever to have. click once and now you're a consumer of everything else. Nobody could even measure on podcasting if anybody's actually listening to these things. And so, yeah, I can go get a bunch of people to click subscribe one time and it will auto download my feed every time I release in the episode.

Like there was a guy, Nathan Lacka that was doing this too. He was like, we get this many downloads per month. And I was like, oh, wow, a couple million downloads a month. That's pretty good. Huge, yeah. What do you do? And basically he was like, and I, when I talk about it. him. I was like, he's like, hey, welcome to the show, Sean, he's going like hyper speed.

Five minutes. The podcast was over. And I was like, this is a five minute episode. He's like, yeah, sorry, I got to hop to the next one. I was like, how many of these you record in a day? He's like, I record eight of these a day. And then we release like, whatever, he was on some crazy schedule. And then I did the math and I was like, oh, he has like 7,000 subscribers, but he just releases huge volume of random episodes of these five minute episodes. And so his total monthly number because podcast is just like, you know, if you just do downloads, it just adds. It's up. All your episodes times your number of subscribers. You can have a small number of subscribers and do a huge number of episodes and get a big download number. And so people, I think, use these vanity metrics all the time and they're BS. So I'll bring this up because we're discussing it, but I didn't research it fully. But have you heard of a parcast? It's like my name, but cast. So parcast. Have you ever heard of that? Are you spinning off your own solo? Did the brand break up, band break up? You're doing your own podcast now?

I wish I invented this. So it's a guy named Max Cutler. I think he's our age. I think he's like 31, 32, 33. So this guy named Max Cutler created this thing called Parcast. And the whole idea of it is it's a podcast network. But they only have like true crime. True crime.

And I'm a weirdo. You want to know what I listen to every night? There's two podcasts I listen to every night. The first one is just called serial killers. So it's a. It's just a bunch of podcasts about serial killers. I can tell you all. I got my fantasy league of serial killers, you know, with Ted Buddy as the quarterback.

And then there's another one called, you know, this one's fitting for going to sleep. It's called Deathbed Confessions. So it's people who confess about a crime they did when they're dying. So it's just nice. It's the best. So this guy started this, and it's all scripted. So it has like voice actors and it's all scripted stuff. He bootstrapped this podcast.

company, which is unheard of, and he sold it to Spotify for $200 million after only maybe five years. And him and his dad owned the whole company. His dad was in radio. And so his dad was like a radio announcer, something like that. And they are producing something like 30 or 40 podcasts a day, like episodes. And they're all highly produced stuff. And it's amazing. Have you not heard of this business?

I've heard of this brand once before. I didn't realize that they, I didn't know the business. I didn't know that they had bootstrapped it and sold it to Spotify, but I really, I like true crime. I don't know where to start. There's just so many true crimes and a bad one is like such a waste of time. But yeah, I've seen some of their shows because I go sometimes look in the browse section for like a good true crime. Dude, true crime, if you go and look at, so what's a good one of theirs? If you look at, I like serial killers. Zero killers, dude, deathbed confessions is awesome.

I'll send you a good deathbed confession one. They're so awesome. And true crime, it's, if you go to the. podcast app and you look at like one of the top episodes or shows it's always like 30 or 40% true crime and which is it's mostly women who listen to it and it's always and so like a dateline I told you about this date line from NBC which is a show that's been around for 20 or 30 years at this point it's still usually a top podcast every single week and so these true crime folks they kill it and this guy bootstrap this company to a I think it was a hundred million

cash and then another 100 million earn out, all off of these true crime podcasts. He killed it. It's a really interesting story. I'm going to have to, I'll dive deep and do some better research on it, but I was reading about it this weekend. It's a pretty amazing outcome this guy had. So I just read an article. This might be maybe wrong or maybe you're wrong. I don't know. Spotify confirms it paid 56 million for podcast, or a podcast, sorry. Then maybe I got my numbers wrong. I think it was 56 and then another like 75 outcome. It was a nine figure out. There was a retention. According to the podcast Wikipedia, which reads as if Max Cutler, the founder, wrote it. It's very congratulatory. It says there's like a huge earnout. Yeah. I don't know if I trust anyone that does true crap, by the way. These guys are natural storytellers and like liars.

Dude, all right. I've got an interesting thing to bring up. This is something that we talked about a while ago. I think you brought this up in 2020 or 21. I forget. When we. we were recording in the original hustle office. So do you remember that company Crumble that you brought up? Yeah. Well, first of all, I love a good I told you so. So I'm already, I'm already glowing. Yeah, I remember crumbled cookies. Crumble cookies.

So when you originally told me about it, the story was something like these two brothers or two cousins launched this thing. And for some reason in my head, I'm thinking like a family like making cookies in their like kitchen and they start this like pandemic thing and it gets popular. and basically once a week, they tweet out a new menu and may have a drop, you know, things that like typically Supreme does or like these, but they're doing it with like outrageous flavored cookies.

Well, that's not entirely true. What is true is they do do these drops, but it's a massive business. And some sources are saying it's close to like 800 million a year in revenue. And the reason I saw it was someone shared this on Twitter, but basically over the last like couple months, it's been growing and growing and growing. And so the other day, it was like the number fourth most downloaded app in the week. And so they have an app. And so their app now has 2.3 million ratings or reviews with like with a 4.9 average.

And right now they're opening brick and mortar and they're opening a new store every five days. They have something like 730 stores at the moment. And it's one of the fastest growing chains in America. And so these guys, listen to these numbers. They have 800,000 followers on Twitter, 3.4 on Instagram. 6.5 on TikTok, 1.2 on YouTube. And they create these commercials every single week for a new cookie drop. And it is crushing it.

These guys are killing it. It's so fascinating. I never in a million years thought this was going to work as big as it has. But basically every Sunday at 6 p.m., they do like a new drop. And their app just spikes and goes way up the charts. And they're up there with like Uber Eats and all this stuff like that. They're killing it. And so I remember you brought this up.

And in my head, I was like, oh, this is like a little like mom and pop. It sounds cute. Like, oh, that's cute. Bakey. Yeah, like, oh, your aunt made cookies. That's nice. Yeah, no, they're sharks. They're killing it. And so you called that pretty early on. And now it's a franchise. So here's some stats. In 2012, the highest revenue store did something like 3.6 million. Other stores did, the average was like 1.6 million. The store with the highest net profit was 600,000, with the lowest being 33,000, with the average profit of being around 350,000. And a quarter of the quarter of the cost. According to the founders Twitter, they did over a billion dollars in revenue. And you have to come up with $150,000 and then you can open up a franchise and they send you all of this traffic via their, you know, their Instagram and their app. Super fascinating business. Yeah, this, I think of the franchise world, this is like the hottest franchise right now is

Crumble Cookie because they're just exploding and they're just super popular right now. I do feel like this is not like the most sustainable franchise. Like at one point in time wasn't like, I think I feel like Froyo franchises were like growing like crazy like this. I don't know if it's Pinkberry or whoever else. Like, you know, there's these waves where this becomes the treat. But like I don't know how many people are going to like anything that's drop based. There's a natural fatigue that sets in for the buyer.

And there's like a vicious cycle. Like drops when everybody's into the drop, get even more fun because it's like the hunt and you've either got it or you didn't get it and you feel special. But as soon as that starts to, as soon as the drop fatigue starts to kick in and now, oh, notifications there. But if I don't get it today, I can go get it tomorrow. Like as soon as the scarcity's gone, the drop like plummets in value. And so I think that that's a challenge for for something like this. But I agree. But look, here's the deal. I have a, you and I have a friend who buys broadband companies. So broadband companies are basically internet service providers. And a lot of people who are

listening in the city, we'll have no idea what I'm talking about. But where I have my country house, I have like this ranch way out in the country. And if you live out in the country, it's not like you're getting like Spectrum or Google or Warner or whatever the big service providers are in New York City. You're getting like a small internet provider that you pay 100 bucks a month for. And that company probably does 10 million in revenue and like five million in profit. And you and I have a friend who goes out and buys these companies. And everyone says to him, well, what about Starlink? Yada, yada, yada. And he was like, yeah, they'll come eventually. But Like until then, I'm making $5 million a year in profit.

So with this cookie thing, yeah, maybe they'll plateau, but a billy a year is a nice plateau. I don't mind sitting on that plateau for a while. And that's kind of, that's like how I feel whenever I hear some of these stories. Like, it's not going to grow. I'm like, yeah, that's cool. Sorry, I couldn't hear you. The money counter was burring a little too loud in my ears. Yeah.

If anybody asked me why I sold for $200 million, you get in a slap. Like, you know, just don't ask, don't ask the stupid. questions. Dude, and the founder, one of the cousins or one of the brothers, he previously worked in tech and he had a Facebook app that got to like 120 million followers. So these guys are like viral guys. They know how to do this. But interesting story. Yeah, it looks like he was director of product at Ancestry, which is like one of the like, just one of the gems of internet companies that's like really big, but nobody knows anybody who's like works there. Nobody claims to use it even though it's like really, really popular site and did a bunch of

cool, like viral things and like basically did a bunch of smart product stuff along the way to like make that business work. Dude, ancestry is funny too because they're a Utah based company and they're founded by Mormons. By the way, this guy's first business, first business, BYU.com. You hear about this? No. What is it on his LinkedIn?

BYU.com was a social network for Brigham Young University students. We grew the network to include half the campus in a very short amount of time but was ultimately crushed by Facebook. So he did this in 2005. I think Facebook launched 2004. And so basically he was doing the like, you know, the Harvard social network. He was doing that just on BYU's campus. But like the Facebook wave, you know, swallowed it.

But that's, you know, you're putting on the green. You're landing on the putting green right there. If you're creating a social network back in 2005 for college campuses, like, goddamn, you were close to being on to something, you know, like I'm not surprised that this guy ended up being really successful. No, it's a really fascinating story. But anyway, where do you want to go? You want to drive? Can I tell my story really quick?

Ben has a story. So obviously, you mentioned their Utah company. So of course I know. Well, so the story is. This guy adds me from Utah State University. Looks like he's just graduating. You're about to graduate. I have a bunch of mutual friends with him on LinkedIn.

So I was like, okay, I'll do this kid of favor. I don't know what he wants. So I click ad. And he immediately starts posting cringe. Like, I'm starting. this company. It's going to be huge. And then he keeps posting stuff that's like, I don't know how to describe it. It's very like Adam Grant or Dumber, like business. Like, did you know that you can increase your productivity by 20% by having a team offsite? So we're having a hashtag team offsite this

weekend. And I was just like, who is this kid? He says he's starting a cookie company. Honestly, when they opened their first location, I was like, I'm amazed. I didn't think this kid would ever actually get even a location open. And it was Sawyer, the founder, the CEOO of Crumble. And this kid who just posted cringe to my LinkedIn timeline is now going to be billionaire. That just totally like breaks my frame. I just always assumed that if you're that mega cringe, you won't win. And now I have to consider the possibility that every hashtag user could actually be a winner. Because I just had a blanket rule. If you're a Mormon guy and you're telling me you're going to start a cute cookie franchise i'm in i mean come on of course this guy's going to crush it

Mormon does trump cringe so like if you're Mormon i have to i you know the checkbook's already out i'm just waiting to hear you know how many zeros i need to put my my number here but that's based on the idea so yeah you're right that that actually overwhelms the cringe part because it's like this guy's gonna sell he's gonna sell he's gonna sell it's gonna sell yeah well that sucks ben out on that one. Yeah, I know. I should have just hit him up and like, oh, this looks really cool. But, you know, live and learn.

I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. Sean, I have a couple things. What do you want to do?

Okay, I have a quick little idea. So I was watching the Super Bowl. and did you watch, by the way? I watched the halftime show. Yeah, I watched it. I watched, no, I watched like quarter three. How long did it take you to figure out Rihanna was pregnant during the halftime show? Are you quick on the uptake or no?

You know, it was one of those things where my wife loves her and like, you know, you don't want to be rude when you see a lady with a lump and you want to like, you know. I'm not going first. I'm not talking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had her go first, then I asked. But she was doing some pretty raunchy stuff as a pregnant lady, right? I mean, that was like... No, I thought that was tame for Rihanna.

That's like, that was PG to Rihanna. Dude, I'm a Rihanna fan. She's in my, like, top five, like, most beautiful women on Earth. I'm on team Rihanna. But when I saw that she was pregnant, I, it was, that was surprising. I think she just had a kid, too. Yeah. That's, yeah, she just had a kid like nine months ago.

I don't know. The math doesn't even make sense to me in my head. Whatever. Whatever. I'm watching the football game. And one thing you notice if you're watching the game is that when the chiefs were scoring, they were scoring with these like incredible plays where the guy was just going untouched into the end zone.

Like three, what was that thing where they like, will they get a huddle and they do like ring around the Rosie and then they like run to the line? That was crazy. Is that like? It didn't work. What is that? But amazing that they tried it.

Right. Like that is, that was an awesome play. So I was thinking about it and I was like, but it did stand. out they had the two or three touchdowns where it was just like brilliant play design right call and like totally worked and then you know i've gone you know i love sports and i've watched tons of sports documentaries and shows like last chance you can just see the life of a coach and a coach is like a really specific character in my head like a football coach at a high school college or even pro level is like it's the same type of dude in most cases and their life is football

they live and breathe this shit they're preparing all week for you you know, the Sunday game, and then they start again the next week, and they're just like, they just live in this playbook and the XS and O's. They all have the same value system about toughness and grit and whatever. And I was like, oh, this is another job that AI is going to replace. Because I was like, this is an AI problem, the problem of an offensive coordinator in the NFL, which is basically what play should I call here to maximize, you know, my expected return? And I think somebody's going to build AI that basically,

ingest a bunch of data that says in this situation third down in seven you know maybe even take into account the teams and the talent you know equation this is the best play to run with the highest expected value it's basically like what Madden does when Madden

suggests like yeah run this play but like yeah yeah that's exactly the really good version of Madden now that we have like you know computers are geniuses and so so I'm pretty sure that there's somebody's going to build a basically like a play caller AI play caller will help because these guys are you just look they're literally looking on a cheat sheet like you know like

like it like it's a open book exam or whatever when it's like you can bring in one eight by 11 piece of paper and everyone's writing in like size two font to squeeze as many things as they can on it that's what these guys use when they're calling plays and it's like they have you know 10 seconds to pick the play this is just a job that computers are going to be better at and um it just reminds me of like how crazy AI is going to be that like even these like total non-tech situations not even big markets but it's just going to be like when now when humans play against a computer at chess or or even you know, go or poker or whatever where the computer is just so much better than the human. That's what's going to happen in this play calling situation.

It just kind of reminded me about man, AI is going to be going to be nuts because it's going to take over all these things that you wouldn't really have expected or in the line of fire for AI. Is football as like, you know, there's obviously. obviously the famous moneyball thing where he's like, I don't care what, who's a superstar, who's not, I'm just going to look at the math and we're just going to pick people off spreadsheets. And then famously, although I think this is highly exaggerated, Chimoth was like, oh, I'm going to buy the Warriors and we're going to do that same thing with basketball. So we're only going to shoot threes or whatever, I don't pay attention, but whatever their stick is. Sorry, I'm ruining this.

But yeah. And the reason I have a feeling it's not true is I have a feeling. None of that is true. And also like, I think he said that though, right? I don't think so. But, well, I'm making it up then. But other people did it in basketball. Darry, famously, was, like, the big, you know, proponent of this.

The reason why I don't believe that is I have a feeling like teams were always doing this. Like, maybe it's one of those things where, like, like, for example, my favorite copywriter, he was like, I wrote these famous ads for the cat, what's it called the Cassio watch? And he's like, we talked about how we use space grade aluminum and crystal quartz to make this watch. And he was like, little do they know. every watch does that. That's just like table sticks, like every single watch, but I'm going to explain it

because I know that the audience doesn't know. And so, like, you have a guy saying, like, look, we use state-of-the-art technology. It's like an Excel sheet that like everyone else uses.

It's like, yeah, I guess it's state-of-the-art. But anyway, we have a premium licensed to Microsoft Excel. Unlimited seats. Unlimited seats. We do not use the trial.

But is football the same way where you could just follow the math? So there's actually, This is actually a great question. There's a, Darryor Mory went on that guy, I forgot his name, but invest like the best guy,

Patrick. Patrick, Seanese. Yeah, he went on his spot. Actually, it was a really, really great podcast.

If he liked sports and you like kind of business stuff, it was kind of an amazing one. He talks about like baseball is basically the, almost like the perfect game for modeling. Like you could basically, because it's like stationary. It's like one pit, one batter versus one pitcher.

And, and then, you know, like, it's a like, it's a contained problem. Is it like, whereas in,

basketball, you got five guys on each team on the courts. You got 10 guys all moving around free form at any given time. The ball is moving like crazy. It's much harder to model, but you can still model the impacts of like one player in these certain situations. And so it's like the data thing has had a pretty big impact in basketball, but less than it did in baseball. Baseball was like a math, became a math equation. Basketball became more of a math equation than it was before, but still it's never going to be perfect. It's too complex and high skill.

There's too many variables. to be perfectly modeled out or whatever. But still, it was improved, which is why you see, like, they'll post like 20 years ago, here's what the shot chart looked like. And it's just dots all over the courts, like, as you kind of expect,

like people shoot from everywhere. And it's like, here's what it is in 2023. It's like people only shoot layups or threes. Because optimally, like, basically a three is worth, you know, whatever, 150% more than a two. But there's percentage difference of shooting it is only like, you know, five, this 7% worse than a two-pointer or whatever.

So you get way higher expected value for shooting a three. So that's why all these teams shoot three is now or layups. They tell their players don't shoot this in-between shot because it's the wrong combo, right? So things like that. And then he's like, football is going to be the hardest one to game because you have 11 players on each side. And on any given play, everybody's moving in different directions and you can't really figure out like the net effects of this guy running in this lane.

What did that cause this other guy to do? it's much harder to do. But I think that's true at a like, because the reason these general manners care is because they're trying to, they're trying to like basically, it's like a stock picker. It's like they're trying to find undervalued assets. So the way you do that is you say, this player is not like, yes, his traditional stats look like this,

but his game impact is different because of whatever. And so you're trying to figure out the value of one player. But is the game impact because of locker room stuff and leadership? No, no. They're looking at just the online. the court movement like, you know, in basketball, for example, there's an assist. If I pass you the ball, you score, that's an assist. But if I pass you the ball, I've made the whole defense shift to me. You pass to the next guy. You get the assist. The stat sheet doesn't show that I actually was the one who created this whole play, this opportunity by caving in the defense. So the stat sheets, like the traditional stat sheets limited. So what these guys have done is figure out like advanced stats that like better, better show an individual player's impact, not including locker room stuff. And he's saying football is even harder, more players, more movement, more whatever, less plays, total. So you have a smaller sample size.

But I think that this play calling thing is bigger in football because in basketball, you don't call many plays. But in football, every play is called in by the coach. And so if you can make the coach 20% more intelligent by suggesting a better play, that's going to, like, that's going to shift the, you know, the balance of power towards that team because they're just going to get that many more first downs and touchdown. So I think this is like, I don't know, it's kind of. It's kind of like really, really niche here. But I think this is an example of how AI is going to touch a bunch of areas and kill a bunch of jobs you don't expect. Barshap, you got something. Yeah.

Okay. So last night the game was dictated on that terrible call that, you know, the Eagles defender, you know, got called on like a pass interference that basically made, ruin the game. Chiefs win. That should have been decided by AI ref. Like, why are they not AI refs? why is any call up for debate, you know? I agree. Well, there are in some sports.

Like in tennis, they put a chip in the ball. So, like, when the ball lands out, you see they always like instantly cut to this like silhouette of the ball. And it was out or it was in. And everybody's just like, it's unarguable.

And why is that? Because they have a chip in the ball and a bunch of cameras that triangulated it. So they can tell you exactly whatever. Dude, but that makes it so boring. Well, that's the problem.

Because in baseball, you would have been like, oh, great. Like, the umpire call strikes by squatting behind the catcher and trying to like eyeball this. Like that's insane for this billion dollar sport. Like why are they doing this?

And it turns out if you just used computer to pick that to like perfectly call pitches, I guess the reasoning must be. I don't know Ben Ben, Ben Levy might know better. But there must be something where people preferred that their human had the like final say here versus because like the technology is there for a computer to call balls and strikes. There's really no need for that umpire anymore. I'm not romantic to the.

early part of the game. I'm romantic to fist fights. That's what I want. And that's the best part about baseball is when like they get mad at each other. I mean, that's what I watch. I don't watch any of that other crap. I want to see the fight. There's a demo.

I sent this to Ben. I'll show it to you. There's a demo of because there's actually a bigger problem in fighting. Like, dude, how many fights? I don't know. In the UFC fight this fight this weekend. Did you think the right guy won? I thought he, I thought the right guy won.

But people were. Me too. But a lot of people did not. People did not. And there's a big problem with like, it's these three judges that are going to decide who won the fight. And it's like, how do you call it? Oh, how do you judge? You know, if this guy made the wrong facial expressions, like, did he get hurt? How am I assessing damage here? Whereas there's an AI demo of basically the like, like the striking tracker where it's like this guy did the left

hook and it landed with this like with this level of impact or this like clean like it was deflected partially there or it was a clean shot. And they're like, we should have basically like perfect tracking of the fight game. but for you as a fan, would you want that? Would you want the computer to basically say who won the fight? Or do you want these three old judges to scribble a scorecard? I want the three old judges because a lot of fight. I can't believe it.

But here's why. First of all, when you watch WWF and fake wrestling, WWE is called now, the best part is when they like hit the ref or they like distract them. Like sometimes they'll have like a hot girl come and distract him and he turns around and then like something bad happens. And that's like the best part of the show is like when there's drama. But also in, you know,

UFC, they have a new thing where they measure aggression. You know, like, who's pushing the plot? And I think they do that so it's more exciting. And I don't know if you can entirely measure, like, aggression with AI. But that's why I don't like it. But, no, I'm okay with having humans do it. I think it makes it more exciting. More exciting.

We're talking about it. They're only ever in the conversation when they do it wrong, right? Like, it's never more exciting because, man, they really, the refs really added to the, to the fight there by, by scoring it. They don't add anything. They only subtract when they screw it up. I'm surprised you don't want like the actual accurate score. The only thing that I want, I want them to tell me the scores of a fight in between rounds

and have that be the official thing because I want, I want the person to know when they're going into round three or round five that I'm down. And if I don't knock this guy out, the fight's over. And so that would be the only change that I would want. I want them to know the real score as it's going. I got one more random topic. Let's do one more, even though we're a little over time. Well, if you're going to do one more, are you going to do this guy, this Ahmad?

That seems meaty. All right, go for it. Yeah, it is kind of meaty. But let's do like a fast version of it. So this guy, Amjad, who's the founder of Replit, which is an awesome company, is, he tweeted this out. He goes, you know, some of the biggest companies that were built, Airbnb, Umb, Uber, et cetera, were built because they took an underutilized asset and we're able to get more

utilization. So, for example, Uber or Airbnb said, well, there's an extra bedroom in your house or extra rooms. You have extra space. Today, it's not doing anything, but you could rent that out and we could actually have more rooms to stay in and more options for a customer. And that became Airbnb, this multi-billion dollar company. And Uber is the same way. He goes, what are some other underutilized assets?

I think this is a great, you know, framework for trying to figure out, you know, where a marketplace could be or where a, and I think people were doing this maybe five years ago, seven years ago a lot more. There was like a people realize this and started jumping on it. And that's why you got Wag the Dog Walker app, you know, becomes worth a billion dollars in Airbnb and a bunch of others. And I have some examples here, but what do you think about this framework and what examples stand out to you? I think it's brilliant. I see on here you have stay at home moms. One of my favorite companies that have been I in is called Squared Away. And their whole niche is virtual assistants.

And the virtual assistant is a military wife. And that's like for some reason in my head, I think they're going to act a certain way, which who knows if it's true. But I think that's one of the best ways of like a quote in underutilized asset. I love that. But the problem is a lot of people like, I knew a guy who started a thing where you could do. It was like self-storage, but in other people's garages. Right. And I'm like, dude, this is a stupid.

but it should I've ever heard of. And it was, in fact, really stupid and it completely didn't work. And so I think that a lot of people approach us poorly. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things you can think of, like, I know another one that people have tried a bunch who's like, chef. So it's like, oh, why do you only order from restaurants? Like, what if there's a lady who lives three doors down that makes an amazing, you know, Thai red curry?

You could just order for her. And she would get revenue for her cooking skill. And then she could deliver it to you and it's closer. and, you know, wouldn't just be limited to restaurants, but it's like, A, operationally, these businesses are usually absolutely brutal. B, there's like a whole bunch of like safety and quality concerns and like uniformity of the quality concerns that come up. So I think that's another problem.

And then the economics, like people do, you know, is there enough dollar value for there to be, you know, for the customer to pay, the provider to get paid and the middleman to get paid and the delivery person to get paid? like you need enough value in the chain, which is why Airbnb works. It's like a high ticket thing. There's one for, versus others.

And there's one for pools that I hear is killing it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Share, like rent a swimming pool by the hour, right? Because I have a pool. We're not using it 95% of the time. So if somebody could rent it from us, and we make a few hundred bucks. Yeah, yeah, that's great.

I want to give you some of the best answers that came from the thread. So the first, the number one is cars. So cars, I think, are parked like 93 or 95 five percent of the time. And so once we have self-driving cars, that car shouldn't just stay parked. It should go be a taxi for somebody and earn you money. So I think that's like one of the big unlocked that people, you know, people who know about this,

they're like, oh, yeah, that's obvious and that's going to be a big deal. But I would say the majority of the population doesn't realize that your car is going to turn into a worker for you. And people are going to just, you're going to be earning revenue when your car is idle instead of it just sitting in your driver. your garage. Dude, get around, which I used to use all the time in San Francisco, I think they raised almost a billion dollars in funding, and they went public recently-ish. Their market cap, as of right now, $59 million. So no one quite has figured it out yet, it looks like.

Well, at least they haven't. That's a little different. That's still rental cars. This is going to be just like, no, get around to other people. Well, yeah, you're right. You're right. Right. So, so, this is what Tesla is basically betting on. This is what Elon's betting on. He basically like your car is going to go from a depreciating asset to a revenue generating asset for you, which will make the car worth five times more than it is today once it's able to just run all day for you and just go do rides. Okay. That's bold, but that'd be cool if it works out.

Clean structured data. So basically, there's a bunch of data in a bunch of different companies just sitting around. And if you could kind of organize it and clean it up, that data is actually an asset that can be used. And like we talked about earlier, the freight wave. company that's doing pricing data, you know, how many companies have pricing data about like what they bought recently, how much it costs, how much it costs, how would, with volume and from what provider, if that was available in a structured way and you could sell that to a middle, like a network, like a data aggregator, you know, that that becomes a valuable asset that today is worth

zero to the company that has the data, but it's not doing anything with it. And it's not their main business to be able to do something. So I thought that was kind of an interesting one. Dude, someone wrote The Sun. Yeah, the Sun. So they were like, the sun is basically providing all this energy. But until we have solar and batteries to capture it, it's massively underutilized. Like, we're getting free energy from this giant, you know, nuclear fusion reactor that's in the sky or whatever. But you have to be able to capture it and store it.

And it's underutilized for that reason. Another one I thought is kind of interesting. So a fun one, nightclubs. Nightclubs are really like only useful, like, you know, for like 5% of time. at night on Thursday, Friday, Saturday or whatever. What can be done? And they're usually in kind of prime real estate in cities. And I've always thought it was cool when I lived overseas in Indonesia.

They used to take nightclubs and during the day turned them into like fitness day bars. So you'd go in, the dance floor and the mirrors would turn into basically like a cardio session. And then the bar would turn into a smoothie bar. And I was like, oh, this is so smart. They're getting like double utility out of their nightclub. I don't know why I've never seen that in the, the United States for some reason. So I think nightclubs is a fun one.

And then another one that was on here was a specialist talent. So like, what's that mean? Like, think about somebody who's like a really great 3D animator or something like that. So like if a company hires you, that's great. But I would actually say like you doing the thing your world class at, you're probably only doing like 10 to 15 percent of your time when you're in a big company. A lot of your time gets spent sort of like waiting for approvals or feedback or doing meetings or doing whatever other stuff that's around it there's probably a case to be made that

like people with really specialist talent you know financial modeling or design or whatever they would be better off being freelance to companies but it would need to the market needs to be more liquid and fast pace than it is today like um you you would need like like navall has talked about this he says the future of work is basically like oceans 11 it's small teams of people that are within each team there's like highly specialized you know that's like highly specialized you know that guy's the guy who's a pick pocket and this guy is the guy who can break codes and this guy's the guy who can do acrobatics or whatever like the ocean's 11 that that's what they do there's like highly talented specialists they gang up together to go on this mission for a heist they then they split the

money they go on their way they rest until they get the next call and he's like that's what and he's like that's what work is going to be it's going to be pods of people that work well together highly specialized they're going to get a beep they're going to wake up in the morning they're not going to have a job they're going to wake up in the morning and check their phone for possible missions they could go on. They could choose to do none of them and just chill that day or take one because they're like, oh, that's a juicy bounty. They could go do that mission. When they're done, the employer rates them, like an Uber ride, like five stars. You rate the employer five stars. The money gets paid out to everybody's cell phone and you go on your way and you wait until the next job.

And I just thought those are a really sexy view of the future. It hasn't happened quite yet, but like you could see like, I guess Uber kind of works like that. And I guess there's like, you know, TaskRabbit and these other things that kind of work like that. And I guess freelancing is becoming more popular. Maybe this is, maybe we are moving in that direction. I hate when people make these claims. Like this is the future of blank. Like if you say that like the future is electric car, yeah, I buy that.

But if you say the future of work is like Ocean's 11, my reply to that is like, no, maybe the future of criminals is Ocean 11. But like that's not like, it's like the future of people getting money is to rob banks. No, maybe like a group of people will do that. But I just don't think that like... But why? Okay, take the Ocean's 11 analogy out, right? Like, yeah, that's leading you to bankruptcy.

But what's wrong with the actual premise? Because I think most people... Now, it's like saying, well, most people are just going to freelance. No, maybe 30% of America will. But I think that 60 to 70% of America, they want to go to work at 9, they want to get off at 4 or 5, and they want to play softball.

That's what they want to do. They don't want to, like, go on a heist where they are having some exciting mission, they just want to clock in and clock out and do the same thing every day. Maybe we think that's cool. Maybe our listeners thinks it's cool. But I think when Naval says something like that,

I think that he is in this small bubble. And although he's smart and gets a lot of things right, I think it's too grandiose to say, this is the future of work. And I think it's really dumb. Like when people say, the future of media are the creators, like doing X, Y, Z.

I'm like, oh my God, dude. Like, maybe that's like a new band that you're assembling. but that's not like the that's not like how everyone's going to operate i think you're just you like to smell your own farts so i like i i think you're just you're out of your you're out of your depth here that's that's what i think when i hear stuff like that yeah but i think uh nobody means 100% of people are going to do this when they say the future is x i think they mean like a lot of certainly sounds that way yeah but no 100% of people don't do anything today 100% people don't do 9 to 5s either so you know not even 80% of people do 9 to 5 so i think that's kind of i think it's a

given, right? That's like a, it's a given to be like, not everybody's going to do this. You can't say anything is the future if you say everybody's going to do it. There's still people who use AOL to get on the internet. Like, yeah. My mom. You know, like, of course you can't say that everybody's going to do it. It's not a, that's not a realistic thing. But I think it is real to say, uh, shit's going to change.

Trends are going to shift. And, you know, huge chunks of the economy or the workforce is going to look different that it did today because this whole idea of go to a go to an office for a nine to five that's also kind of new and that was also a shift from what was before so i don't think that's like just ingrained in human that's not like biological that's not physics that's you know society and economics and a society and economics tends to change it's not sexy enough to say the future of work is this group of people that's a nice small enough niche that you can go and capture marketing share while also being big enough to support a multi-billion dollar company that can return

capital at a 55% annual return. I get it. That's not as catchy. Yeah, it was a short end in the future. Yeah. But yeah, that's cool. I have some more topics that I'll say for later. Yeah. But this was a good one. All right. That's the pod.