The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Part 1/2 - Riffing on Business Ideas with James Camp⏐Ep. #117

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

I sat down with James Camp (https://x.com/JamesonCamp), an entrepreneur who has built and sold multiple internet-based businesses. In this episode, we focus on unique business ideas and how to spot opportunities in untapped markets. James shares insights on identifying niches, leveraging AI tools to streamline operations, and practical ways to monetize audiences. If you’re trying to figure out your next move, this episode is packed with ideas you can run with.Check out episode #118 for the second part of our discussion with James Camp, where we discuss his unique subsidized rehab business model, the importance of taking action in business and more!Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Introduction and Business Potential00:26 Guest Introduction: James Camp01:08 James Camp's Business Philosophy02:34 Current Projects and AI Integration03:32 Crypto and Ad Tech Innovations05:09 Challenges and Opportunities in Business07:55 Managed Services and AI Implementation13:16 Scaling and Pricing Strategies16:32 Token Pricing and Market Dynamics17:00 Strategies for Small and Medium Businesses17:37 Starting from Zero: Building a Business with AI18:51 Innovative Business Ideas: Never Call Again22:07 AI in Business: Opportunities and Challenges24:08 The Future of AI: AGI and ASI29:58 Digital Detox: A New Business Opportunity

Anyone listening, I'm 100% sure this business at work. If I were a betting man, which I am, I would bet large amounts of money that people would pay for this and you could charge decent money for it. It's easier to sell things to people that have money that makes them money. Saturations essentially admit. I've said the same thing. Nothing is oversaturated. That million, $2 million a year is just a formula. We all have this same keyboard.

You just press the right button. The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive the ticket to the right one is. Welcome to the Kerner office I had my friend James Camp on today. James lives in L.A. and owns a port. portfolio of internet businesses. He's a super interesting guy. He's on the cutting edge of everything happening in AI and he's a marketer at heart, which I love and respect because that's me as well. James is an idea machine, which is why I love him. So we chatted about four to six different ideas, some in AI, some not. I got super hyped by the end of it. You know I'm hyped about an

episode when I end it with a headache. And I did on this episode. James had a couple big exits earlier in his career. For the last little while, he's been content just buying and or building these niche sites that are super profitable. This episode will be split into two parts. So come back in a few days or a week or so and we'll air part two. Enjoy. If you were to take your like business slash investing slash startup philosophy into a quick framework, like what do you look for?

What type of businesses do you love? What do you avoid? Sure. So I think that for me what I love is consumer is super fun. It's just really hard. And like what I would tell whenever we talk to people that are like buying little internet businesses, consumers just like, I'd see. Like, e-com is really, really, really tough.

I think we had a moment in COVID where everyone thought you could just run a Shopify-based brand. And it was going to be so easy. Just, you know, you cut out the middleman, direct-to-consumer. You know, it's just much tougher than people perceive, especially bootstrapping. It's just so many more moving parts. So I think consumers really fun. And I think that probably moving forward for me, I'm going to, unless someone comes to me with an idea and they show me this consumer brand I love, I probably focus more on like B2B. You know, I think, I hate to say it, it's sort of a trope at this point, but it's easier.

to sell things to people that have money that makes them money. I would probably never, I mentored a couple of tech accelerators, and that's like a great way to be have fun and be involved in the startup scene as opposed to selling the startups. Selling the startups and B2B is just a nightmare. It's selling to people that have no money is a nightmare. So I think that probably, I don't know if that answers your question, but hopefully it does a little bit. Yeah, it does. So what are you excited about right now? Like what are you not doing publicly? What are you seeing that you're just, what are you working on right now that really gives you energy? That isn't a portfolio company.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I had an idea the other day. Well, I'll tell you, the active thing I'm working on is much more pipeline for PE shops and family offices, right? So like helping them find businesses to buy, enabling that with AI and packaging that together so that they can get a good deal flow. And then sort of on top without layering where the other investment making style practices that bankers are taking $2 million fees on that really enable AI is really going to enable and really, really change. in some really weird ways. So that's actually something I'm actively working on that fits into what we have with off market, which is finding off market deal flow that will become an upsell for us. You want to buy our database. That's easy for $100 a month. You can have access to our database. You want to have an advisor in your pocket for a couple thousand bucks a month. You can't.

If you would like to have us do all the outreach for you and do all the due diligence, we will, for five, six grand a month, you know, get you six businesses to look at that are fully packaged up. We're ready to buy. And then we take, you know, some, you know, some, two or three percent on the closed transactions, right? That's something what I'm actively working on. I'm not a tech dude at all, but I had like a thought, maybe I was inspired by a tweet.

Nothing's original. We're all inspired by other things. But I thought yesterday the day before, which is like if I could figure out how, because my first little business win was like an ad network, oddly when it was 19, 20, sort of a little CPA network, not for a lot of money,

but if we could figure out how to pixel wallets in crypto, I can't think of a better, like new opportunity for the ads for ad tech, then me serving ads predicated on transactions that your wallet has taken. Because it's on a blockchain. It's not a question for me. It's not a question whether you maybe purchased something

or you may be, it's like I'm 100% sure that this wallet has done these transactions. Yeah, yeah. And I almost before we started recording, I am such, dude, I've been around this business building block my whole life. And I know execution is almost everything.

And ideas are so, worthless. And so normally people like, oh, I have an idea, but I don't want to tell you because it's a secret. I'm like, okay, bro, shut up. You know what I mean? Like, I'll sign your NDA, it's just stupid. This is one of the first things where I've been like, oh, whoa, like, that's, I know that's, yeah, yeah, like, and now we're just going to put it out to world. It's fine. But the way I guess I'll prolet it is if anyone listens or watches this and thinks that they understand tech side how to accomplish that, but has no idea how to like take that to market and know how to get the capital to do so, feel free to reach out to me because I,

from a technical standpoint, do not understand how to do that. But I do think that that's going to be like a major opportunity. And I think that that's going to be sort of, that's what I would love. That's what I think it'd be cool to be working on. I just have not a clue how to do it. Yeah, because it's like as an advertiser, you don't care in this case that it's a 37 year old white male in Dallas, but you know that that guy has this much Bitcoin

and he frequently sends to his coin baseball and he's frequently buying this. And it's almost like it's a pixel inside your credit card account for your bank account. Yeah, 100%. And so I guess it's sort of like, if you think about like social advertising is like, it's like psychographic and demographic based ads, right? So this is much more like this, this is much more like Google, right? Like does someone search, you're actually capturing someone at that moment of purchase, right? That's why like search traffic converts so well, right?

So where to buy blank. Excellent. Here's an ad for blank. It's great to convert. High intent. Super high intent. I think that this is pretty high intent as well. I think that probably right now, the use case under the crypto, it's early.

And again, this is why I think it's a good idea. It's because early enough that it couldn't really, it's not at the place where I think that someone with a trillion dollars is like, let's dedicate real money to this because there's not enough users that are actually using crypto or Bitcoin, whether there's the Liding Network or USDC or wallet, you know, like to actually track this and make it super usable to advertisers. but I think one could build out the infrastructure. And if you believe that I believe that like, I don't know if all of a sudden the dollar disappears, but if you, I'm a pretty long Bitcoin and definitely a lot of crypto stuff.

But my point is that if you believe the future is changing from a monetary perspective and a payment's perspective, which I do. And I think the writing is on the wall very clearly. Then I do think it's thinking four or five years out. I do think it'll be a cool opportunity. But yeah, exactly. You know, Chris bought this yesterday and he bought this six. months ago. I know that for sure, you're right. It's like tracking inside credit card spend and then

tying add dollars to it. Yeah, that's one of those ideas where on one hand, you don't want to share it. On the other hand, you're like, I know whoever launches this is going to have to raise a whole lot of money and bang their head against the wall for a long time. And I'm not about to do that. So whatever. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The only way I would do that is like, I think I realized at this point life, like the next big swing. Like this is the type of thing I would take a really big swing at with the right partner. I'm just so not that person. Like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm only one half or maybe even a quarter or a third. Do the marketer.

Like, yeah, the marketer and I really understand and I definitely know, I know where to get the capital. I think I know the people that would be interested in writing a check and do something like this, but it's such a huge lift to your point that like the person that's going to do this is either really qualified to do this or, you know, they're not going to watch this and it's not going to be someone that has no idea how to do this or they're going to be like, oh, James is a great person. Let me reach out to him.

You know what I mean? We'll try and do this together. You know what I mean? This is not a solo. entrepreneur mission. You know what I mean? No, no. For sure. For sure. Being in the advisor game, you probably see a lot of books, a lot of P&Ls, a lot of opportunities

that you're not jumping on for whatever reason. Are you seeing anything out there that's particularly exciting to you that other people are doing or this niche product or service is just crushing it that you saw? Yeah, I mean, I think if I were building something, I mean, there's a couple brands I'm advising that I have said very clearly to you that I would love to other business. You know what I mean? Like, because it's just so clear to me. And it's not that I'm so smart or that I'm that creative.

I'm actually quite the opposite. Like I'm like, I'm thinking myself as like a B at everything. You know what I mean? It's just like I've been on this ride long enough to see what works and what doesn't in certain regards. And there's a couple of ecom brands I'm looking at right now that I'm advising actually right now that I'm like looking at and be like,

I would love to buy you. And I think that probably might deter them from raising money, maybe try and introduce them to like a credit fund. you know what I mean? Because I don't think that I think the way they need capital probably is better in debt and warrants than it is in giving up large chunks of equity.

But I'm jealous of everyone building all this AI stuff, man. I don't mean actually building AI. I mean, like using AI as managers. Yeah, the rappers. Yeah, like, dude, if I, you know, part of me wants to go and like, I mean, I forgot who said this, but everything's a rapper, right? Someone, I saw someone tweet that like Ventures. Type form.

Was it? Was it? Okay. Someone was like, oh, that's just a rapper. It's like, type form is an HTML wrapper worth a billion dollars like who cares and it's just a rapper and i saw someone go from that and say venture is just a rapper on capital right it really is like like we're all middleman yeah a fund is literally a rapper on money it is someone taking money which is the tool and figuring how to apply it in a

different way right yeah so that's stuff's all interesting to me i think there's a major opportunity and i've tweeted about this a bit i would do it in like i'm just like not good at building this but like if someone really had the flows of like how to build agents, right, and then go to apply those, I think you could build a nice managed services business on that right now on enabling AI inside sort of boring, you know, SMEs. Like I don't think that that's rocket science to do. I think pretty much all the old adage of like cold emailing and cold calling and, you know what I mean, I would create content in the back end and run some ads. But I think in general, like, you could go easily get 50 businesses to pay you some setup fee and some ongoing fee. And I know,

people that are trying to do it and I've looked at doing it. I'm sure people are already doing it. And that's enough. And that's one also where there's like enough meat on the bone for everyone to eat. You know what I mean? Like there's going to be a hundred people doing that, 200 people doing that. It's not going to be like a like the ad tech one that we were talking about earlier. That's a winner takes all or maybe two or three oligarchy kind of world. You know what I mean? Yeah. The managed services of implementation and management of AI is like there'll be a hundred. Yeah, thousands of those. Yeah. Thousands of people doing that, you know. Let's dive in on that because I find that really interesting. I've started playing around with Replet and agents and. And I kind of see like a managed services agent agency as like the next iteration of a Zapier Automation agency, right?

Totally. You're just step in. You're like, I know how to use Zapier. I can connect to this API. The API, it's $29 a month. And you feel like it, you look like a genius to them. But what you're doing is like stuff that you've just been doing for years, right? A hundred percent.

I think actually the difficulty here is not the business. Anyone listening, I'm 100 percent sure this business at work. If I were a betting man, which I am, I would bet large amounts of money that, well, Chris and I are talking about would functionally work as a business. People would pay for this and you could charge a decent money for it. There's my hook. There's the hook. Thank you. Good. You're welcome. You're welcome. I'm not bad at social. I'm not bad at hooks. I was going to say that I think the question the wall I've hit to you could do it through audience. You could do it through cold outreach. It's hot enough. You could do it through paid ads. There's probably enough margin on it

and enough LTV to like run paid for it. The difficulty that I've run into and I've thought through a lot is pricing structures, right? Because how do you price? Do you price per receipt? Do you price per ongoing retainer? What do you, do you see what I'm saying? Is it set up fee? That was my next question to you,

is how do you charge for something like this? I don't know. I mean, the way I thought it's sort of a thought, I mean, we have, I have clients in the IT management space, you know, that you're charging per seat there, essentially SaaS is charging per seat, right? It's like, you know, I think that might be a way to do it. I think one of the difficulties you run into is how much tokens

cost at scale. It really depends the businesses that you're pitching to. Probably the cost tokens come down in the future. I bet you could probably get some grants for tokens as well that would allow you to run this business like crazy high margin. Yeah, I think you charge a set. I mean, what I've thought about doing. There's someone I spoke to recently. I don't want to say had their setting up doing it because I was consulting them, but I'll talk about how I've thought about doing it, which was that like a setup fee and then with a monthly retainer. And then you probably have them pay for upgrades. Right. So like I think this is all living so fast that like probably every year you could pay for basically a new setup fee.

You know, like the retainer is much more management. It's much more like we can make sure that your Zapps are connected. We make sure that you're, you know, $1,000,000 bucks a month instead of paying X amount of employees, like we're just going to watch it and manage like managed WordPress hosting. You know what I mean? If something happens, it gets fixed. And then you probably every 12 to 24 months can do another real like setup fee. Be my guess.

That's that's my gut on it, you know. I'm trying to think of how I would do it. Like, I think I would probably start super niche and say like, I set up email agents for small businesses, right? And here's a relevant example that I just did for myself. You've heard of Lindy AI? Sure. So I just used Lindy for the first time.

I have this lead magnet on tkopod.com where people can get my toolkit, a bunch of growth eggs, business ideas, yada, yada, for whatever reason, this is hosted in Google Drive. The links frequently don't work. They just don't work. I don't know why. And I'm trying to fix it. I'm going to move it to Webflow or whatever. Or for whatever reason, when they subscribe to my Beehive, they don't get the confirmation

email. And so every single day I get emails saying, I didn't get the email. Where's the toolkit? My links don't work. And I have my assistant responding to them the same thing over and over and over. So I went to Lindy. I've never used Lindy in my life. Five minutes, because it's easier than Zapier even, right?

Five minutes. I've got an agent set up that's automatically responding to those in a smart way using AI. And now, granted, you could do this with Zapier a year ago because the Open AI integration has been active on ZAPU for that long. And it's kind of the same thing, but you got to cobble it together and there's more moving parts, more to break. This was a game changer. So maybe you could say, I'm going to go into a dental office and I'm going to look at

your emails. I'm going to spend an hour observing. That's the setup fee that you're charging for. And I'm going to say, okay, you're getting these emails per day. I'm going to charge the setup fee plus like a per email rate or like a, you a monthly rate, like you said. And that's all you're going to do is emails. And that's your foot in the door. That's your way to earn trust. You come back the next month and you say, let's look at your your booking system, right? And I'll integrate your calendar, right? And you can charge another

set up fee for that and increase your monthly fee because now you're managing more stuff that's breaking. What do you think about something like that? I mean, I think that's right. I think the question was really difficult and this is going to sound ridiculous. But you start to ask yourself, and this is actually where I get it, I think that most people should avoid what I'm doing here because I actually get in my own way all the time these days. Because I built a couple of things that have scaled a bit and not like true scale. I mean, baby scale, eight figures of scale, right? I mean, we have multi trillion in our companies today. But often I think how far can this scale out?

So I think that if you asked me like, how don't I want to go make 10 or 20 grand a month, you know, I think that what you said sounds great and is totally possible. I think that a lot of margins change at scale. As you know, OPEX just really does change its scale. and I don't know if that becomes a $50 million business, what you just said. Although I do think it wedges open the door in a niche way. I think that makes a ton of sense.

I would go the way too. I would get super specific with who I approached. I would look at some sort of, you know, maybe, you know, what's some automation I get set up that takes 10 minutes, right? That I could maybe even do on a sales call with them. Like, you know, like what's something I could get them to do there? It was like this free lead magnet, right? Like, you know, obviously you want to have qualified leads come in,

maybe through a quiz or type form, like, making sure that whoever you're doing it for is right, but that you can all of a sudden prove that you're going to save someone an hour or a day with 10 minutes of your time, right? And I think that, yeah, I do think it opens up the door some more and more and more you can do. I do like the idea of per email sending,

which I've never thought about. Again, the question comes at like, how do you price it? And I think that the pricing of tokens is going to change pretty drastically. But yeah, dude, I think a lot of the way I've been thinking these days is thinking very up market and not so up market that it's the old boys club I'll never get into because there is, you know, the McKinsey's Accenture, you know, there's a level of business in which you're half paying

for accountability, right? You're half hiring these firms and paying so much because you want to make sure that like when you go to your boss or your shareholders, they know who you hired and you can say this is right. But I do think that there's a lot, there's an obscene amount of money in the lower market world in the small business local world, but there's also like this lower middle market that I think that a lot of people don't go after these businesses doing like 50 million, 20 million, you know what I mean?

We're like there is, you do have a longer sales cycle to sell to, but you could definitely get in there and you could, you know, you could probably still go knock on a door. You could probably still go find an email and cold email. Still find the decision maker, but they still have a lot of money. Still find the decision makers, you know, and just get them moving and grooving that way. But yeah, I mean, that's one of those businesses if someone said to me, like, which is a common, like Twitter thing, if I just start from zero and make $10,000, right? Like if I wanted to make $10,000 from nothing, I think that right now I would figure out, I would go find.

I've been taking this course actually by this guy, Nat. I saw that. Yeah, great. I mean, it's great. The productivity things. Yeah, like I'm building how to build, learning how to build a productivity tracker and with AI. All right. If you were watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube.

And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check on my podcast while you're at it because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTube's that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform or you can go to tkotopod.com. Also, my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube. Newsletter.

com. You'll see the link and we'll see you there. I would go get really familiar. Go spend like $300, 400 bucks on some AI course that showed you how to create what are agents, which are just, I think, automations through LLMs right now, right? This will change in the future if AGI comes through with Open AI. But and then I would go and find, to your point, go find some, business where I could walk in and be like, give me 30 minutes your time. I'm going to set up

one thing for you that's going to save you an hour a day. And if you find that interesting, I'd love to talk to you about a way that we could work in a long run. I think I would go cold email or go knock on, you know, 50 doors, you know, and you would get on five calls and you'd close one of them, you know, and I think you could go get $10,000, $2,000 set up fees done and, you know, into some management contract at $500, $1,000 a month, you know, and you can go. And you can build a nice little agency that way. I'm very, very, very, very confident in that. What do you think about this idea? So I brought this up on a recent podcast episode, but I want to hear your take on it. So I just bought the domain name, never call again.com. And I'm thinking it's kind

of like the type of name where it's like do not pay.com, which is very clear. Sure. This is what we do. And what it is, it's, I'm just going to use wedding planners or brides as an example. But it could be much broader than that. Let's say you're planning a wedding. your own wedding. You need quotes from caterers. You need quotes from photographers, videographers, all that. You're on the phone a lot. You click this button and we're going to use air.a. AI or Synth flow or any of the many services that have AI like verbal calling agents. And they're going to call 20 photographers, 20 caterers, 20 wedding venues. And this is what the, like the opening prompt is going to be. Hey, I'm actually, you probably don't say this first.

You're going to say, I'm calling on behalf of Mallory Smith. She's getting married on September. September 13th. She's looking for catering orders for 50 people. She'd prefer a steak and two sides. I will say I am an AI agent. You're going to hear some awkward pauses, but please talk to me like you would a human, and I'm going to report all this back to Mallory. If your quote is competitive, she'll give you a call back in person. Do you have any questions for me? So you get it like all out. And they're like, what? I'm talking to a robot. But it's like you're getting ahead of it, right? I'm an agent. Okay, so that box is checked. You don't have to worry about them dropping the call. And then it's like, there are going to be pauses because that's the big downside with these calls

right now. There are pauses. But it's like, I represent a human being. This is her first and last name. She lives in this city name. You've heard of all this. This is real. She wants to spend a lot of money with you.

What's your best price? And they do that 20 times. And you save them thousands of dollars because more quotes equals more savings. And what do you think? I love that. I love that. I love that because all my like ideas are just like hyper, duh, and practical or like so esoteric and large that you would need to raise $300 million over the next decade to accomplish it.

And that is something that feels like someone could just like, you could probably get going for less than 10 grand and put in some work and grind to work. I love it. I think that what becomes interesting to me, though, is that like, then do you start, I'm such a, I'm such a capitalist. And the first business I sold was like, was a CPA network. I started thinking about just broken those leads then, right? I'd start thinking about where is it more value that I can capture, right? Because now it starts to come into me where it's like, excellent. Mallory Smith is calling. What does she want?

She's getting married. Oh, my God. Are there a million people to buy that by that contact info? Which ironically, though, starts to then, I'm just that monster who's like, oh, we should be selling off their data. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, you know, and now I'm the person you hate, you know.

But I do think that opens a bit interesting opportunity. How would you charge for that? I love that. Do you charge, though, you know, do you charge per call? Do you charge, you probably charge a flat rate, right? Probably for, or like, in, engagements, right? Like my wedding planning, right?

Yeah. I feel like you have to buy like a bundle of calls. It's like, you know, I'm going to say 200 bucks for 100 calls. And maybe you want to call 100 wedding venues. Maybe you want to call 10 caterers, 10, you know, it's up to you. So it's like per call with a floor, right? You've got to spend this much. Sure.

Now you made me think about apropos is talking about layering on top. You made me think about something that I think to take this to another industry this works in. Are you familiar with car brokers? Mm-hmm. So, like, I think that you could do this as a car broker when we reach out to every single, I want to buy a Lexus GX 550. I'm looking for a new Lexus GX 550. You could as a car brokers will get people better deals on cars because relationships

they have. And they will basically just call across the whole country to look at inventory, right? You know, basically the same concept with car brokers, right? I'm going to call every single, I'm going to call every single Lexus dealership in the United States today and telling them that we're looking for X and why. Because I guess the part that I'm missing for not that that business is missing, but where the extra opportunity allows to me is it's like when we talk about building a pipeline deal flow for people buying businesses for pre-e shops, right? I can either get a private equity firm 20 calls a month of businesses for sale. They don't want that.

They want five packaged up deals every month that look great to them that have actually been vetted and can look at, right? So my point is for you is with that question says to me, that idea, the next question to me is, okay, I'm Mallory. great. I've got this pricing. That's cool. But now I've got a bunch of pricing with maybe a bunch of people that are going to tell me they're giving me competitive pricing because they want to get me on the phone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which one really is the best. I still know nothing about these businesses except for them competing on price, which I think in certain scenarios is not necessarily the right way to do it. So then do you have a, is there opportunity to have an upsell as like a middleman who does some vetting for you here, right? Now I've spoken to, in my scenario,

I've spoken to 50 car dealerships. I've gotten 18 quotes, right, to get us, from A to B, well, now as the car broker, do I have conversations with those 18 so then I can bring that to my client and get them the best singular deal? Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it does. As opposed to presenting the client 18 different deals to then look at themselves. Same thing that are just price-based. Because in the wedding photography, what package am I getting, right? There's some negotiating that's still going to come into it, right? And maybe there's like, this is where I think we're at with AI. We're either all going to need to get your guns and your sticks to create your fire pretty soon.

I don't pray on the downfall of anyone. If I could, you know, John Connor, so I'll come, you know, Terminator take out Sam Altman as a child. I might, you know, I think that we're looking, I think that we're looking at a scary future. I think that when systems upgrade, things have to break. The old system has to die. I think a lot of people,

and maybe humanity's in a better place in a hundred years, but I think of if the things come true that Sam Allman would like to come true over the next five years, we're in a terrifying, terrifying place. in a lot of ways. It's going to get hairy. It's real scary. Dude, I mean, he says AI in 2025 and then they're going to move all their efforts to go to ASI, super intelligence.

I mean, plug me into the matrix, I guess, bro. Keep me plugged in because, you know, get what you need out of me. But my point there is that, like, I think that it is Sam Olman learned something from Elon Musk, which is really how to oversell. He's one of the greatest marketers of all time. He is the most over-promiser of all the time. The thing about Elon Musk is he's promised, he over promises to the moon. But what he does is he really delivers.

He never reaches. He's never once done what he said he would do in time. He'd do it. Yeah. But he does blow your mind on the way there, right? Yeah. And so I think Sam Olman learned that from Elon years ago. So that's what Sam Olman has been off on timelines?

I think a little bit in terms of some of the AGI stuff. Maybe I'll eat my words this year. I don't know. He said that we're really going to reach. Well, he said, I mean, I just think it's. a major say, I don't know if you saw what he wrote last week, but he did write that in 2025 we'll be presenting AGI the way that we perceive it. I mean, dude, this whole pot, all of our conversations are worthless if that's true. I mean, almost. I mean, like, really, really, really.

And especially if we start going into ASI, you know, this super intelligence, you know, and then it opens a much more existential conversation about what's artificial about this. You know what I mean? Like what makes this artificial versus, you know, genuine. But my point is I think we're going into a much more a place where I see AI being the ultimate leverage tool for human touch on top, right? So like in your scenario, I think that you either go very mass to your point and you charge like, you know, it's 50 bucks and you get to use this tool. And that becomes a chaotic world in which, you know, 10,000 people a month are using this tool to each do 150 phone calls.

And there's just now the 150,000 robo call, whatever. Maybe it's possible. Or it becomes a little bit higher ticket and you have a human in the same way we do it with customer service today. You let everyone know it's AI. If you want to talk to human, they can talk to human, right? But you basically have that outreach with a human negotiator on the end, that car broker that sort of then says to you, hey, Chris, here are the three best options.

We reached out to 150 vendors. We got the pricing. We got those down was most competitive and we did some negotiation. And here are your three best options. here's the one we recommend for what we think you're actually looking for. And I think in something like a wedding market or a car market, there's money like that. And your plumber that you need next immediately, maybe not, you know, but you do something, that's where I go with it.

Yeah, I can see this, like this idea specifically that I brought up is like, let's say you went mass market, which I can see this being. It's $100 a year subscription for a consumer, anyone that's just kind of like an insurance policy. Oh, my AC went out. hey click call 10 HVAC companies and get me the best quote sure and you just keep that on speed dial at all times cool 2025 we see that and then 2026 all the HVAC companies are answering the phone with AI and it's just everyone answers the phone at that point right no one doesn't answer the phone like we see today everyone answers the phone it's all AI they're pulling from a database they know what the prices are

they know what the availability is and just computers are talking to computers and humans are ironically off their phones less than ever. I don't know. That might not be so bad. First of all, I like this. I think you end up in a really interesting conundrum though about with commoditized services just in a race to the bottom

with two AI negotiating against each other, right? Like it's different when we're saying, oh, like I want this kind of flower for my wedding. I'm just making this up, right? My florist, right? But yes, my AC is out. You end up in just a total race to the bottom. I'm calling, you know, AI negotiating against AI.

They all know the margins of their business, right? I think you end up in a world where just the biggest winners win, right? The conglomerates win because they can they can compete on price, right? And you end up not being able to have, does it make sense? Yeah, but is that any different than like an eBay auction where it's I want to buy a holographic Pokemon Charzard? And everyone has a floor price. One of them is 100.

One's 95. And it's just, it's all automated. It's all the same thing. It's all commodity. But they're still winners and losers, right? It's kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're more efficient with. cost. So they just programing the AI like, hey, never quote under $300 for a condenser.

The guy down the street, he's like, I need $450 for a condenser. And so they're still negotiating, but there's also like floor prices and limits. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I guess it starts to just the reason that freaks me out, I think you're right, is you pull that thread and when we start really getting to this place of when I talk about, you know, artificial intelligence, starts to be like when we have ASI and AGI and its computers negotiating, it's computers, what are, what are we here for? And you mean like, what is this? It's like the, the pendulum always swings, right? So like smartphones came out and we were more, quote, connected than ever. We're all connected, but really we're all alone more than ever, right? And

then AI comes along and it's like now we're less connected than ever because all the computers are just talking to each other and we're still alone. Right. Yeah, yeah. Well, dude, I mean, this brings me up to, I've been having this sort of essential crisis about. I wouldn't want to do next in my life, like the big swing I want to take. And part of me thinks that like I'm so addicted to my phone, right? And I bought this thing called Brick the other day. It's literally like an RFID thing. It makes it so my phone doesn't work, right, in a different way.

And I realize I'm pretty passionate about I try to start my mornings for an hour, no phone or at least no social media, right, which becomes tough for someone like you and me whose job gets sort of intertwined with social media. The line gets very blurred. But another like quick little side hustle that has to do with sort of connecting or being disconnected, I think it was really easy money and a huge wave that's going to come with like digital detox for treating. I'm sure it already exists, right? But I'm like, and I've thought about it because I'm kind of passionate about that, right? Like, could you get,

you know, 15 people to pay 10 people, you know, to pay 3,000 bucks for a weekend in which ironically, your margins were great because instead of trying to make their, you know, you, you, it's about detoxing. It's a luxury. It's about this dopamine. I mean, yeah, come sit in the woods. You know what I mean? Like we're going to go canoeing. We're going to walk in nature. We're going to touch grass.

We're going to touch grass. This is called a butterfly. Yeah, you know what I mean? And by the way, I mean, even if I say it out loud, I'm positive. The irony is the way I would advertise it would be through the phone and computer. Right. But like, you know, I think that you could probably, this makes you think of another business idea that I like, I want to bring up quickly.

But I think that you could probably easily, now does it scale to be a $10 million business? No. Do I think that you could go make, you could run quarterly retreats and make 30, you know, 30 grand on each one? For sure, do I think you can run a weekend retreat and every weekend make four or five grand.

Ten people, 500 bucks. It's an overnight. You buy a bunch of tents. You pop them up. You know what I mean? Like, for real, for real, all their phones go in a fair day back or whatever. You mean that someone gets taken away.

You give a rule beforehand hand to them, which is like, we're going to watch your phones overnight. Someone is going to have them in their hands. If X, give us three phone numbers, do you seem saying, or names or whatever, or triggers that if they happen, we will bring your phone to you, right? Like, your mother calls you. Do you mean like your sister, you know, you're, you get a work call from your CEO, whatever it is? That's your sort of like, you know, and obviously you can press a button and escape, right? Like, like in, yeah, and that's that. It's like an escape. It's a digital escape room. A digital escape room, right?

And you would do, and you put everyone in tents and you do some sort of meditation. It's very low cost. You get 10 people a weekend at $750 for two nights. And I think you could easily do half a million dollars a year on that business and margin-wise take home a quarter million. You know what I mean? I think the margins are super high. And it's probably fun and you're doing good for the world.

Because we're early on in that industry. And those things exist today at like a multi-thousand-dollar price point. And I think that happens in any industry. In the nascent stage, it's super niche, it's expensive, it's luxury. It just has to come down market. And I think there's a market for that. All my friends, and I may do it myself, do this thing called Hoffman Institute, which is like, there's one in California, there's one in Canada.

It's like 12 grand for 10 days. They take your phone and you learn, you know, and they're sold out six months ahead. And by the way, go look on Twitter, people looking at a Hoffman Institute. Everyone loves it. Everyone says it changes their lives and made them the best first, the best entrepreneur, you know, like more present. I mean, you and I were talking about conferences prior to being on the, you know, 10K for a conference is nothing to the right audience.

Yeah. It's about finding the right audience. I do think to your point, this is about going a little bit lower markets, a little bit down market and saying like, it's $500. You know, we're going to, all your food is going to be taken care of. You're going to do meditation. You're going to do a hike and you're going to sleep in a tent. You're going to sleep in a cabin. Whatever it is, your margins stay pretty high.

All right. What do you think? Please share it with a friend. And we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.