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

This is Million Dollar Brainstormer.

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

Spoiler, Sam is one of those collectors. And lastly, we tell a little fun story about Rupert Murdoch. All right, Million Dollar Brainstorm, enjoy.

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Subscribe.

So subscribe.

So basically, uh, A, tell your friends, be like, yo, this is the best business podcast out there. And B, if you go in iTunes and subscribe, that, that spikes us in the charts. So some people like to unsubscribe and then resubscribe because that creates the, like, the charts say, oh, there's more subscribers today. Yeah, I think that's the Barstool trick.

So subscribe, then unsubscribe, and then resubscribe. Just do that a ton of times because here's the deal: if Sean and I don't get to 100,000 listeners per episode in the next weeks or months, we're gonna start charging for this podcast.

Yeah, or we just get so bored, we're like impatient, we're too impatient.

No, we're gonna make it so you have to pay money to listen. That's gonna happen. So you want to start talking about some ideas?

First of all, I think we should start with this, the Twitter weight loss thing. We should start with that. That's pretty interesting.

Did you sign up for it?

I signed up. I just ate a big old plate of veggies just now because now— because I'm like, oh shit, this is starting. So explain what this is.

Okay, so when you're on camera, you predict— this happens a lot, but you get self-conscious. But also, we are both trying to lose weight. Our friend Justin is doing a thing where we have Venmo— did you Venmo him money?

I Venmo'd— so he tweeted out, "Hey, I gotta experiment for weight loss, 30 days. If you want in, let me know." And you had to Venmo him $800. I did. Nope, just did it right away, just to pot commit myself into it. And then he's gonna send us a blood glucose monitor.

It stays in you for 28 days.

I love it. And he is doing this in a way where he's buying all of our monitors. Yes. Which typically cost, I think, $300.

$400. If we stick to it, by the end of this challenge, we've paid $100, we've lost a bunch of weight, and we got paid back all our money. If you stick to it. If you don't stick to it—

Oh, I didn't even see it, so we're giving him $100?

It's $100 net. Net, if you do it to the letter of the law, you get this $400 device for $100, and you lost your weight.

I love it.

Sick deal. Um, and we should explain who he is. He's the founder of this thing called Kettle and Fire.

He also, I think, is one of the founders of Perfect Keto. Yeah.

So two keto products basically. Yeah.

And I have no idea, but I imagine his businesses collectively are in the $50 or $60 million in revenue range. So like he sees a lot of—

Where did he say that?

On his website.

Oh, good for him. Yeah. Um, I didn't know that, which is pretty crazy for a keto product. Yeah, so it sounds like he's thinking of a new, uh, business. Yeah, go ahead and copy that.

Yeah, so I like it. So what we'll do is, uh, when we get the device, we'll just shout out our blood glucose levels during the show.

I'm doing it. I also use My Body Tutor where I take pictures of everything I eat, right? And I send it to my— so I ate that donut just now. I'm gonna have to send that to them and they're gonna shame me.

How you gonna send it? You ate it.

Well, there's some more out there. I'll take a picture of it.

Okay.

But all I've eaten today is a donut and an orange. I'm good.

All right, cool, cool weight loss idea. I like it. Justin Mayer's good stuff.

Uh, okay.

What's up?

What else you got? Okay, so last episode we had your buddy here and we, he told me about this thing where he had invested in a company that's doing drone window washing. Yes. I thought that was crazy fascinating. And I went and researched it a bunch. There's another competitor that's raised money and drones, I don't think are the right words to describe it. Cuz when I think of drones, I think of like a quadcopter. These are things that like, um, they look like the normal. So when you are pulling up the scaffolding or when you're pulling up like the, the, what do you call it? It's like an elevator. Yeah. An elevator up and the guys are standing on it and wiping. It looks like that, but there's a robot on there that is doing it instead of people.

Right. So it's not flying, you're saying?

It's not flying.

Yeah, why do they call it a drone then?

'Cause technically it is a drone. It's a robot. Drone means unmanned vehicle, I think. Okay. So technically they're right. And so another company called Sky, I forget what it's called, they raised $3 million to do this. And so this morning, what I did, and yesterday morning, is I went to, I Googled, Manhattan skyscraper window cleaners, and I found like the top 3, 4 people and I called them today to talk to them and I got, and I was talking to them and they're gonna call me back with some more details. But my takeaway from this industry is incredibly segmented. So like fragmented, like small, like $10 to $20 million businesses and there's probably 5 or 10 of them in New York. Right. So.

It's like the guy, uh, Brian from 1-800-GOT-JUNK, right? This is how the hauling business was. And it, you know, before he sort of started aggregating all these small fragmented local players. And you've always had this thesis, which is you could do the 1-800-GOT-JUNK model for other businesses.

Yeah. So I would do it for irrigation, for lawn mowing, for painting, which is already happening, and for landscaping. Right.

And it sounds like window washing is in that vein.

Yeah. —so maybe you don't even need these freaking drones to do it, but that's definitely a cool shtick.

So the private equity play is you go, you buy up these businesses, they have a book of business, they do recurring revenue probably with the same buildings, and you say, okay, I'm gonna buy this $5 million a year business for $8 million or $10 million, tell me, $10 million bucks, um, or you do smaller ones, you buy a bunch of $1 million a year businesses, and then you could bring in this technology to increase the efficiency. So they're getting 50% margin, you could get 70%.

And there's two playbooks to look at if you wanted to replicate this. The first is, um, dentists. So PE right now is gobbling up dentists, dentistry, dentists, dentists. We have friends who are doing this. I think we have like 3, like Sieva looked into doing it and then like 2 other guys I think we know. They love it. And so what they do is they find a dentist that does $2 million a year in revenue and they buy the company. And he's like 60. Ready to retire in a few years, and they buy it for— maybe if it's like a $3 million revenue thing, they probably buy it for like a million dollars.

And the goal here is you just— you kind of become a little bit of a— just a marketing company. And so, um, we're—

well, we missed the punchline though. A couple of these roll-ups, I think like in Canada, 70% of dentists— you know, number's wrong, but something like that— a huge percentage of the, of all the dentist offices have been rolled up now in Canada. And a couple of them have been taken public, uh, the roll-ups, for $3 billion. Name them. I don't know the names.

Okay, well, that's— look it up. Yeah, because I'm—

because Henry, if you want to Google dentistry roll-up Canada goes public, um, I would do that.

And then the other model that you can look at for this is old people homes, nursing homes. Uh, like so many pe— I mean, this is like, so my wife's dad owns 3 senior care facilities.

Yeah. And so I was looking into this cuz I was like, wow, this thing is a cash cow. And, um, I think it's soul crushing. That's the problem with it. Cuz he was like, hey, you guys wanna take this over? And we were just like, oh, the money's there. But like, it sucks. I don't want this to be like my life. You know, like I think in general people wanna avoid nursing homes at all costs.

Yeah. Fuck that.

And so getting into it earlier than you need to was painful, but he's making money doing it.

How much does it make a month? Like a million dollars a month?

And so you just put all the bullshit upsells into it. The problem is, is that your upsell is a dementia ward. You know, so it's like, all right, clearly a lot of money can be made. You are definitely providing valuable service to people.

Yeah, you're not scamming people. We're not scamming people. It's— but it is a dirt— it's a saddening business to be in.

Yeah. And so for these— so we're getting off track, but let's go. So my father-in-law owns a moving company in New York, and it's a medium-sized business. And it's done the same amount of, like, let's say, let's just say some number between $10 and $30 million in sales every single year and real profitable. I go, how do you make this bigger? He goes, I'd have to buy everyone out and I don't feel like doing it. I got a good life. And so I would— you could do that for these window things. And if I was one of these drone window companies, I would look into doing that.

That's what you would do. Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't necessarily go the, oh, raise VC and try to build this organically. This is more of you take, you know, you take some capital and you start rolling up these businesses and then you already have technology for efficiency.

Yeah, and I know people who did this. A bunch of my friends from Nashville were just these scam artists and they would do this for the locksmith industry. They would do what? And so, so when you roll up, the reason you roll up a company is because you want to get efficient operations. Another thing you want to do is you want to like centralize marketing. And so basically, if you own 20 different businesses, you wanna be dishing off leads to them so they constantly have new business coming in. Right. Then, and we're actually in trends, um, we're running a report on hotels. Brad, is that gonna go live next week? The hotel thing? Okay. So we're gonna have a thing. This is what Hilton does. So they franchise out the hotels, right? Everyone knows the Hilton brand. You centralize the marketing. Yes. You central— everyone knows Hilton. They buy all the ads everywhere. You go to Hilton.com, book a hotel, then they dish it off to their franchisees. So that's what— what was I talking about? Locksmiths. That's what locksmiths do in Nashville.

What was scammy about it?

That's so funny. When, um, my sister had a baby and we, the baby was at a party and we put the baby to sleep in this room. It was like in this, like the bassinet or whatever. And we closed the door so that it wouldn't be too much noise. Door gets locked, baby's inside, baby wakes up, starts crying. We realize the door's locked. Pretty panicking moment. Did you break the window or call someone? So called locksmith right away. Israeli. I don't know if they're Israeli. It's an Israeli thing. This is San Francisco, so maybe not, maybe not as much, but maybe it was. Person shows up. It's like, this is like, we're indoors. We're not, this is not like your front door, like complicated lock. It's like a bedroom doorknob. And, uh, they're like $400. And we were like, no fucking way. And then they were like, no chance. Well, and they were like, well, it's $400. I can hear a baby crying inside. Don't you wanna get? And we were like, yo, just outta principle, like no. And then we just busted down the door with our shoulder and like got in. Good. Because that was just how it works. Outrageous.

No, it was was, uh, it was a good friend of mine did this. He— and he was from Israel, and he told me, he goes, yeah, for some reason, like, it's a trade back in Israel, and so we'll come here, and then we get all of our friends to come here, and we just dominate the market, right?

It's like Indians in motels. There's— it's not even Indians, there's a specific group of Indians whose last name is all Pakistani. Indian.

And Indians love motels.

I think Indians own 70 or 80% of all motels and Dunkin' Donuts, period. And actually Families with the last name Patel, specifically because they're like, they're sharing. There's a book about this. I know.

Well, you would— all right, so Dennis, Dennis.

So, uh, there's a couple of companies that are big in this, and apparently, uh, only about 2% of the companies, uh, of the dentists in Canada actually roll— get rolled up into these corporations.

So 98% of dentists—

a lot of opportunity. But there's— it started about 4 years ago where this one company called the Dental Corporation of Canada.

I heard about this. Dental Corporation Canada, that's the—

they've got like 160 practices that they rolled up and they— what they— there's a law that makes the dentist— the dentist actually still has to have the practice registered in their name, but then that allows dentists to make even more money. But these corporate players come in and roll up a bunch.

So how big was the roll-up?

Does it say? Well, Dental Corp has 168 dentists. What was the revenue? Doesn't say.

Are they public? No. There definitely was a $3 billion roll-up that I remember looking at. And then also, I believe BlackRock, Blackstone, one of those two, they are— they're heavy in this business now as well.

Maybe tomorrow or Friday. Let's have a roll-up edition because I can list a whole bunch of companies that have done this and I'm crazy.

So you're saying rather than half talking about it and half knowing it, we should—

okay, gotcha. Okay, let's, let's move on and tomorrow we'll know everything about this industry. Okay. Quick break.

And I'm going to tell you a little bit about my Saturday morning routines. So every Saturday I wake up in the morning and, you know, some people watch cartoons, some people read the newspaper, some people check the mail, some people exercise. I go to QuietLightBrokerage.com and I check out what's for sale. So if you don't know, Quiet Light is a platform where you can buy and sell online businesses. So if you don't want to start something from scratch or you don't know if your idea is any good, you can go on here and you can see ideas that are already proven, they're already working to some extent, and you can either sell your business or you can buy a business off here and try to grow it and improve it. And so if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, one of our most popular episodes was with Ramon, Ramon Van Meer, who, you know, sold his soap opera blog even though he never watched soap opera in his life. He built one of the most popular soap opera blogs for $9 million in cash on this website. He has bought multiple businesses off Quiet Light as well. And, um, we had Paul on here. He sold his FBA business for 7 figures on Quiet Light. So it is a fantastic place to sell your business. It's a fantastic place for me to look for businesses. Like, I'm on it right now and I see a kids monthly subscription box. It started in 2018, so it's fairly new. Asking price is $149,000. So you could buy this on an SBA loan. You don't have to put too much money down. And, um, you know, it makes $50K a year in profit.. And there's ones that go all the way up to millions of dollars in profit per year. So whether you're looking for something small or something big, Quiet Light's got a great, great little selection. And it's not just like everything that's for sale. They curate and they qualify. Only certain businesses get in and get on here. And when you're interested in something, they have all the financials in a folder organized. They have interviews with the founders that will tell you, you know, what, how they run their business, how many hours a week they put in, that sort of thing.

Very good business. All right.

So for any listeners for the podcast, they're offering a 25-point checklist to see how sellable is your online business. So if you have a business right now that's making money and you're interested, you would love to sell it someday, check out this thing. Check out what the 25-point checklist is to see how sellable your online business is. To get the free guide, it's at quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Again, that's quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. This zillion beers thing, what happened?

Yeah, what is this? Okay, so Barstool just put a clinic on marketing, on how to do marketing right.

Okay, so tell me the story. I don't know what— I don't get what happened.

Barstool Sports, we'll dumb it down. Barstool Sports, media company like ESPN or Bleacher Report, but personality-driven.

It's like ESPN after 3 beers, basically.

Yeah, it's just like comedy. It's more— it's like SNL. It's more comedy and fiction than it is whatever. It's not journalism. Yeah, yeah, sometimes it is. Some— I mean, every once in a while they'll have something amazing, but yeah, no, it's, it's just a bunch of like— it's for the average man by the average man, their tagline. Okay, um, they have a guy, he's a camera guy, and Henry's a big fan so he knows too. They have a guy, a camera guy named Dana. Dana was getting made fun of one day like 10 days ago for drinking too many beers, and he said a line like— he tweeted out and he said some line like I'm just a guy who drinks a zillion beers. And he starts like talking about zillion beers over the course of a day. And his boss, Dave Portnoy, was like, dude, you're a cameraman. You're not a content guy. Quit the zillion beer stuff. Yeah.

Stop trying to make it a thing.

It's all just happening like a weekend, basically.

Yeah, and everyone was following it in real time. I didn't go out on Valentine's Day because I was just refreshing Twitter and just like reading about all this.

It was amazing. Yeah, that is amazing. I saw it happening. I didn't understand the full backstory.

Yeah, I, I saw it all happening. I, I don't even drink beer and I bought $150 worth of Zillion Beer merch.

Yeah, just out of respect for what was going on. I thought it was great to support the cause. It's like a It's like a rowdy Kickstarter that he did. I love it. Yeah.

And so I think the takeaway here is like, they— Barstool put on a clinic of like how fast you can do stuff. Yeah.

It was about putting it into Dave's face and be like, oh, you doubted him. We're all gonna get behind him. And this guy Dana, the guy behind it, he's like a total bro, but he seems like a really good person. And it was fun watching him like be excited, watching him win. Yeah. And people, he put his Venmo out there and I Venmoed him like $50. People Venmoed him money collectively. He got like $3 grand and he went and, uh, blew it all out a fancy restaurant. And it was funny seeing like a redneck eat at a steak restaurant in Manhattan.

Have you seen this guy, MrBeast? Do you know who that is?

Love MrBeast.

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

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

And they film it and they film it. And this, the reaction, it's kind of like that. Like it has a feel-good element to it because you see people who are like, no way. Like, but it's funny. He'll go to a restaurant and leave a $2,000 tip. On a $10 bill. And they're like, people break down crying. And then sometimes it's funny where he'll be like, he'll take 4 friends, he'll buy a Lambo and be like, put your hand on this Lambo. First person, last person to have their hand on this Lambo keeps the Lambo. And they just, for 2 days straight, they just have their hand on this thing. They're passing out. And they, you know, he may, he turns out YouTube content and he's brilliant because he gets brands to pay for the whole thing. So this one brand, Quip or Quid or Quip, it's not the toothbrush. It's like this like stickers trading cards thing on online. I think it's Quid. Um, Quidd has given this guy, you know, they'll just put up the $50K, he does the challenge, he shouts out Quidd, and they're happy for it because their videos are getting like millions of views. And so it's way better branded content than usual. And so he basically took brand money and parlayed it into being like huge, which is pretty crazy.

Yeah, and he even did a thing where he raised $100 million— $20 million for trees. Trees. Planting trees. And the founder of Shopify gave him $100— or sorry, a million. Elon gave him a million. Yeah. And he raised $20 million in 2 weeks. Or—

Yeah. And I have a friend who talked to him on the phone the other day to do a campaign, and he was like— What friend? Jason. So Jason Hitchcock. Shout out to Jason. So he was like, you know, talking to him. And when he got off the phone, he's like, yeah, I talked to MrBeast. Really cool. I talked to his agent or whatever. And he described— he's like, you know, one weird thing happens, which is didn't plan for this, you know, sort of success. You get the success, but the YouTube game is such that you kind of You don't need to top yourself every time. He's probably getting exhausted. And so he's like, dude, the stress of like, okay, we gave away a Lambo through this like crazy thing. Next week, what do I do? Like, okay, it's just this constant bar raising, which is really tough.

So when we first launched our company, I get a phone call from Elizabeth Murdoch. You know who Elizabeth Murdoch is? Rupert Murdoch's daughter? Yeah. Okay. Just a big shot. And she was like, hey, you guys wanna do these videos? I'm launching this new thing and I need video content. And I was like, no, that's not what we're trying to do, but let's stay friends and shoot the shit. And she goes, okay, well, I'll find someone else. So she finds someone else to do it and they start a YouTube channel and that YouTube channel is now called Yes Theory. Have you heard of Yes Theory? I've heard of it, yeah. They got 5 or 6 million subscribers and I've become friends with them over the years and they have a, I mean, they're like famous. They're like legit famous. I have no idea if it's a good business, but I bet you they make they could each pay themselves $1 million a year. So pretty good for young people, pretty good for anyone. And, uh, each week they're having to do crazier and crazier shit, and they've had to do this for 3 years now. Every video is like, I went to the most remote island in the world by myself, right? And it's 3 guys now, uh, and they're like taking turns over doing crazy shit. Like, it's— the crazy stuff was like, I asked my Uber driver if she wants to go to Paris, and we went straight to Paris and went there. And now they're like doing variations of that.

It's like, oh my God, that shit's exhausting. It's like if Jackass, if Steve-O and the Jackass crew had YouTube and like they would have to do this every week. Like we were just lucky that they were lucky that the cadence was like, you know, seasons of TV or a movie because when it's weekly it's just insane. Which is why Casey Neistat and Logan Paul, Jake Paul, all these guys eventually, you know, they do this daily grind for so long, but they burn out. Like the content burnout is crazy. For sure. It's not gonna happen to us though. Well, it's not gonna happen to us.

We just sit and do nothing. Imagine though, like, having to get on a plane and like— or like Logan Paul, you gotta like yell at someone or like go break up with a girlfriend every week.

You gotta go box someone. Yeah, you gotta— so I got a Rupert Murdoch story because you said Murdoch. Um, I'm so impressed with this dude. So he gets a lot of hate because like his business practices and whatnot. People think he's like a tyrant in a way. Um, he is. And he is, and like the show Succession is basically about their family. Um, good show. So we had this opportunity to pitch Rupert Murdoch. So, uh, Michael, who's my investor, comes to me and says, hey, we got invited to this thing. Um, basically every year during CES, Rupert Murdoch, uh, brings all the CEOs of his companies, um, through News Corp. So they own Wall Street Journal, I think, or New York, uh, New York Post, Fox, and Sky, and then they own Penguin Publishing, right?

They own Realtor.com.

So he is the media mogul, right? Like, that's cool. So basically once a year they all get together. It's during CES. They go to the Wynn and they rent out the entire top floor of Wynn. And so all the rooms there are all the execs, and they have the biggest suite, the penthouse suite of the Wynn. And what they do is they— and I really admire this— they go from 8:00 a.m. to about 7:00 p.m. every single day for 2 days straight, and every hour is just— they just bring in a speaker, um, not like a speaker, it's like a, an industry leader from something. And they just, um, they just grill 'em. So it's like, you, you start by just telling me a little bit about your business and then it's 30 minutes of Q&A from the CEOs of all these companies. Cuz they're trying to figure out, okay, how do we play into this? So when I was there, it was like literally CEO of Google, CEO of Slack, number 3 guy at Facebook, just back to back to back.

The CEO of Google was the one getting grilled. Yeah.

He would go and he would explain, here's what, here's where we're going next year.

I've worked with that guy. Isn't that guy?

Because these are big media partners for them. They, they want to have these media partners working with them. So they'll say, here's where we're going next year, but it's off the record, right? So it's more candid than you're ever going to get these guys. And I— they told me you can just come for your slot, you know, this 45-minute slot. But Rupert's here. But I was like, I'm sitting here the whole day. Like, this is why—

why did you get to sit there?

Yeah, which is funny because if you're the CEO of one of his companies, you're already maybe a billion— and some of them might be billionaire. I mean, you're, you're up there.

I don't know if you've been there, but yeah, you're maybe doing super well. If you sold— like, it'd be like you're— it was like the CEO of Fox Studios, like, oh yeah, we make these movies for this year. And it's like, oh, whatever, you know, Marvel. Like, it's like, these are big individual brands.

You're, you're a big— you're a big swinging dick. Yeah, big guy.

So that was incredible. I just thought that was really cool, and I got to give him props for that. I was very impressed. That's crazy. Trying to think about what else was important. I think another piece that was, that was cool there was setting his company up for success, because the media business— I mean, a lot of his stuff was— he literally started with newspapers, local newspapers. And so you very easily— companies like that can miss all these shifts and become like extinct. I think one of the reasons they haven't is because he probably has this learning culture. And, um, sounds corny, but what he did was pretty badass. It was like, we're here, we're not gonna go tell these guys what, what, what the world is. We're gonna be the listener, we're gonna be the student here. And, um, and so I thought that was pretty badass that he set up— he architected these days, which was just, you know, action-packed with like top top people of the world coming and teaching them about the future. And even us, like, why did he have us? He had 4 startup slots, you know, it was all big companies. They have 4 startup slots. We were one of the startup slots.

You got brought by him?

Yeah, because it was like, okay, you guys are doing something interesting, was when we were doing Blab. And he was like, okay, tell us about the future. You're not big yet, but you're growing, and we think you're interesting. And so tell us what you know that the big companies don't know. And they would ask questions, like very good questions, like, like that. Like, what is the— if we're us, that one of the questions he asked was What is— what are we stupid for not doing? Like, when you look at our business, what do you look at, you just say, you are stupid for not doing this.

This is our enterprise version of Trends, Brad, is having that.

Nice. So anyways, that's what I learned from these guys. I thought it was pretty awesome.

God, that's badass. Who are the other 3 companies?

One was Alfred. The Skimm was there. Oh, you told me. I told you about this because I was sitting there.

Fox is an investor of The Skimm. Yeah.

Um, yeah, it was, yeah, it was cool. And in fact, I heard the guys in the back, cuz I was sitting at the back when that was happening, is like probably not the people who were doing it. Um, I, or they weren't investors at the time and they were just like, like they were like, yeah, this is cool and all, but, and then they were just like ragging on it in the back cuz they were just like, look, it, you know, here's what the numbers are. Here's where, you know, this is not big enough yet for it to matter to us. And, but Rupert at the front was kind of like, What do we not know, like, about this business? He wasn't— it's easy if you're a huge conglomerate to just look at everything and say, you're small, you mean nothing. That's what the guys in the back were doing. But at the front, Rupert was sort of like, email, interesting, tell me more. And like, was going through these, like, you know, you could tell he was searching for what he doesn't know, um, rather than the guys at the back thinking they know everything and not really being open to learning something new from the people who were talking. Crazy. So one other idea that's similar to something we were talking about earlier is this revenge against the spam calls. Have you heard about this?

Yeah, I tried to write about this last year because I bought one of these apps, Robocall— Robocaller. Amazing. I did research on it. Huge business. And one of the reasons I know it's huge is because I did research on them and I try to find everything. And immediately I knew it was going to be big because it was so hard to find information on them.

So Tell me what that business— what— explain what they do first, and then I'll tell you about what this new guy is doing that is interesting.

This one, I think it was based in New Jersey. They have many different apps, one of them being Robovisor, I think it's called. And users like me pay maybe $50 a year. And if someone calls that's clearly a spammer, it goes straight to their voicemail. Or if it is a suspicious one, it just says on my voicemail, suspicious, like Right, but this is a spoof call, right? And so I know to avoid.

And so, so that existed, and this company called Truecaller, that's huge internationally, that does this. Truecaller? Truecaller is like a universal caller ID.

We should do an Android on Truecaller.

It's like, it's like a WhatsApp. It's gonna be like a WhatsApp-sized exit, I think, or like, you know, that's gonna be multiple, multiple billions of dollars on this thing called Truecaller. And it's not that relevant in the US because we don't have the same problems you have internationally with not knowing phones. People switch phone numbers all the time there.

Dude, I get 10 spam calls a day.

So Apple started doing this, but what this guy's doing is interesting. So, so this guy, uh, Joshua, he has this company called Do Not Pay.

I love this. I signed up for it.

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

So it doesn't work as good as you think though. And I'll tell you why. There used to be a company called Fixit. Yep. And I knew people invested in it. I used it. And the way it would work is you would register your license, and anytime your car got a parking ticket, before you even got to your car, the app told you, and it automatically fought, fought the ticket in San Francisco court. And you would pay Fixit half the price, whatever you got back out of your—

yeah, and they would refund.

They would always get it reduced, right? It was awesome. San Francisco outlawed it. Yeah, it was just cramming the system, right?

So these guys did something interesting though. They started off with that, which is you can fight tickets, but it's like, what else can we do? What else is like— they call themselves sort of Robin Hood. They're trying to sort of take money and give it back to the— and the guy's like 20 years old, very young, gets a ton of press with this, very smart. That's how he grows. But they have other use cases. For example, they have a credit card, a virtual credit card that you can use. I use that automatically, cancel your free trials.

Privacy.com offers that. It's a great product, right?

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

I think these are good. I think there's enough people that are— that don't want to be ripped off in these like 5 ways. They have like 5 things they can defend against, and one of those is going to be like a repeatable use case that that's going to work. Okay.

I would say that I am bullish on the industry, bullish on the product ideas. The guy Josh seems like a loose cannon. Yeah. Which really usually goes the bad way, but the great outliers end up being right. Massive.

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

Which type are you? That's a good question.

Or do you have both gears?

I think I have both. What do you think?

I think Adam does a pretty good spreadsheet.

Adam is clearly the second type, right? Adam is clearly the, the pragmatic, diligent, steady hand, not look— not trying to swing for home runs all the time.

I, I would say occasionally I'm fine betting it all. Um, if my business goes away entirely tomorrow because we bet it, I wouldn't be upset. So I would say I am closer to that wild card one, but not entirely, right?

And then with hiring people, it sounds like you hire mostly for— I think naturally you hire mostly for the prudent, steady hand. It's a ratio.

So I think you need a few of these loose, loose, loose cannons, right? Um, and that's where cool stuff comes out of. But most of the stuff that they come up with is really dumb and stupid, right?

And there's also an art to managing a wild card.

Furkan's a wild card.

He's a wild card for sure. Um, and he's steady and he, um, you know what I did with him?

He's not emotional and he'll bet it all.

We hired him and within a few like weeks I was like, A, this guy's amazing. Uh, and B, This guy's a wild card. Like, I can't handle him like I can handle most people in the company. And so I set— I literally separated him. I was like, look, um, you need to work with people who are like you, cuz when you work with these people, they're gonna drive you crazy cuz they're so steady. They're 9 to 5. They're no highs, no lows. You're just getting what you get. And I was like, you will hate that, that style. And so I said, I want you to hire your own team and only you do the interviews. Nobody else is gonna give their input. Like, oh, you make the decision. You don't— there's a CTO, you can hire outside what the CTO wants, which was like pretty controversial at the time. So I was like, you hire your own team. He hired all people who had either dropped out, never went to school, these hacker types that would just be up all night. He— because he knows how to manage the wildcards. And so he hired a team of wildcards, basically.

I love those people.

So if you have them in your team or your company, like, make sure you're not just treating them the way you will, because they will be very frustrated and you won't be getting the value of their, like, potential.

My friend Jack— Jack, my best friend Jack Smith, he's one of them. Sold his company for $800 million. 6 months ago, he got all the money. I was like, what are you gonna do with it? He's like, I think I'm gonna go and put all it like in some major bet. And I was like, what? He was like, yeah, I'm about to go buy that. Like, and he had done that even before he sold that money. He had a fair bit of money, but he— not that much. And that— but he didn't have any income, right? On a consistent basis, he would bet all of it, like, at least once a month. He would literally have like a few thousand dollars to his name. Yeah, and 7 figures on some like short or like a stock. We got to get Jack in consistently. He always did that. I know, I don't think that I take risky investment. No, I don't think my— in our— I don't think I'm that risky. I put like 10 or 20% of my liquid assets into very, very, very high-risk things where it's just probably gonna go to zero. I don't think that's crazy.

Yeah, that's not too crazy, especially given the age and earning potential you have going forward. Yeah, I don't—

I'll do some crazy stuff, but no, I mean, I know people that will literally empty their bank account on things. Do you have any friends like that?

Um, Yeah, I have, I have friends. It's not so much like the empty their bank account on things, but I have friends that once they get to conviction, like Suli is like this, um, and we should, we should have him join us one of these times. But he's the type where when he has conviction in something, the question is not like, um, he breaks all the rules of his like usual investing and he'll go and try to like plow the money in, own as much as he can, create a competitor to it. You know, like he, when he gets his mind into something and he believes there's an opportunity, he goes like into hunting mode. Like, I remember we were investing in Lambda School and like, I brought this deal to the table and I was like, hey, I think it's great for these reasons. And I set up the call and like, but once he got to conviction, you know, the CEO would be like, hey, yeah, you're in. I'm going to send you the docs in a couple of days. And so he would ask me, he's like, where are those docs? Let's get those docs. Let's text him again. Let's call him. And I didn't realize, like, I think part of it is like, as an investor, it's easy to get squeezed out. You never know what's going on. So you're sort of in a state of paranoia. But the other part was like when he knows what he wants, he goes for it at a degree that I wasn't used to. And then once I saw it, I was like, oh, okay, that's how you're supposed to go for these things.

Well, speaking of Munger, he once said, he goes, all I do is find companies that I can invest in that require no diversification. Like the perfect investment is one where you don't, you don't, you don't do any diversifying. You put all of it into that one. And I always am looking for those, which you normally would never find one, but you try to find ones close to it.

Yeah, because they go for value investing, so they go for essentially what they consider a sure bet, where it's already— the value is already baked into what it is. I don't have to bet on the future. Um, I'm getting it at such a mispriced moment that like, yeah, I want to take as much as I can of that asset because I'm, I'm already sure it's worth that today and it's just mispriced by the market.

Good. I think we should do a case study on a couple of these. Some of them are big, like tens of millions of dollars business, and we'll do Truecaller. Truecall. So on Trends, go to trends.co and sign up, and we will have a case study on this in the next week or so.

And I think we should talk about this chess thing real quick, because I think it's a good, it's a good example of a mistake a lot of people make. So in the, in the Facebook group, the My First Million Facebook group, somebody posted this. So somebody, Priyav, they posted, they said, hey, I'm a 20-year-old college nearly dropout here. I run mychesttutor.com. Mychesttutor.com. It's an online chess academy. We currently have about 90 weekly students. It's doing $12.5K MRR. Growth has been slow, and as you can imagine, chess is not really like this, you know, super widespread thing. It's niche. Um, question is like, I really want to learn about, um, a new high-income skill or take on another high-potential project, but I'm not sure where to start. Um, you know, I just feel like I'm capped out here. And this was like such a— you are not capped out. Yeah, this was a mistake I would have made when I was 20. And so immediately I was like, are you joking? Explain the business. So it's mychesttutor.com. It's basically a coaching academy for chess players, young chess players, and it's doing $12,500 a month. How do they pay? What's that? You pay for the training, basically.

Is it like a digital training or do you have a coach?

I don't know if it's— I think it's coach. I think they match you with a coach. So I think, you know, there's some revenue split here. But I would say this. You're 20 years old, you have this chess thing that only on 90 students, which is like— 90 is basically zero. You're doing $12,500 a month, which is like extremely respectable for a 20-year-old person who's been doing this thing. Chess is a niche, yes, but it's way bigger than 90. And in some of the comments here, somebody was like, hey, like, just so you know, like, the US National, you know, Elementary Chess Tournament has 2,500 players. That's the tournament. That's a one tournament. That's elementary school, just US. And so like, you're not capped out by any means.

I mean, do you think that this guy could get 5,000 people to pay for this? Yes, totally. I totally agree. So what's, uh, what's the difference? What's that revenue if he gets 5,000 people?

Uh, I mean, let's just do the math here. So, and we get made fun of because our on-the-spot math sucks.

While you're doing the math, Jason Lumpkin, who's an advisor to me, famous— not famous, but he says it, and he told me, he goes, if you can get to $10 million in revenue, you can get to $100 million in revenue, right?

There's these benchmarks. If he says, I think if you get to $1, you can get— there's a high chance you get to $10. If you get to $10, there's a high chance you get to $100.

It may take a long time, right?

100%. Now the question is rarely like, can this— $1 million a year— can this be big enough? Typically it's, do I raise money or not? In this case, Ray, if you are going to raise money, make sure it's under $1 million. Yeah, because likely don't raise anything. Yeah, don't raise anything. And if you could own this business and pay yourself $5 million a year, Yeah, and also the question is like, how do you get bigger?

Because probably it's what you're doing. The reason you're getting shiny object syndrome and trying to look for a new business idea is because you can't— you don't figure out— you don't know how to make more progress in this one. And so you need to get with somebody who's a little bit smarter than you. Like, I'll help you. Just message me. I was about to say, do a session.

Have you gone to the website? No, I haven't. Is it good-looking? Ask him if he wants to sell it.

Yeah, actually, you're capped out. Fuck it, you should sell this to me for 10 grand. Worthless.

Okay, here's the site. You take a look. This is a shit business. I think he should bail.

These like niche sports small companies are very like—

Like what?

Counseling, like Flex— there's a company in New York called Flex Debate. Flex Debate? Okay. Kids like learn about—

Debate? Like yeah, yeah, like strategies and stuff. This is what I'm gonna do. Money like that could be made. I'm gonna dominate the grade school and high school market with these.

So chess, Debate, spelling bee, spelling bee. Oh my God. This is it.

Yeah, this is it. Yeah. We're gonna call it Extracurricular Inc. And we're gonna dominate this.

It's gonna be called Overbearing Parent Inc.

Overbearing. Well, let's call it, yeah. Helicopter Inc. Tiger Mom Inc. Right. And we are gonna, this is awesome.

Who's this guy? What's his name? Priyav, I think, in the Facebook group. So shout out to Priyav. Good, good, good food for thought. And, uh, don't, Don't quit, man.

Do not quit. This is awesome. If you need help, honestly, there's—

we're actually doing a case study of a company called Knack, K-N-A-C-K, which is a peer-to-peer tutoring marketplace. Yeah. And they raised $2.5 million from these— some venture funds and some nonprofits. They had 900% growth in 2019. They have these big partnerships with big universities. There's tons of money to be made in these types of tutoring environments.

Right. Yeah. I don't know if you could hear Brad, but he just spit some good info. Basically, I would share how big these can be. If he wants to—

wants any money money and wants this to be a cash flow thing, I love this. I, I'm very interested.

Yeah, I would invest if I'm getting like a monthly dividend, um, but not if I didn't.

Great idea.

Another great one from the Facebook group was this restaurant refills thing. I don't know if you saw this. So somebody basically said, um, and I should find their name, but they basically were like, hey, I own 14 kind of venues. I don't know if it's bars, restaurants, something like that. And, um, They were like, dude, you know, I pay Aramark $1,000 per month per location just to refill my toilet paper, my hand, you know, like the bathroom, like the toilet paper, the toilet cover seat thing, like just these like stock goods. How big is it? $1,000 a month per location for him.

How much revenue does he have? I don't know.

He didn't share too much about his thing, but he basically said he's refilling it every 1 to 2 weeks from them. And so Uh, so, so basically one of the ideas here was if you were doing restaurant refills, um, Cisco and Aramark are these giant companies that do this service and they're, they're very, very big. And I wonder if you could go in as a local player and differentiate on one of these, one of the following levels. A, just not shitty service, cuz Aramark and Cisco are so big, they're almost certainly giving shitty service to your average venue by now. Um, the other one is price. And so like, can you create a co-op or a group buying vehicle? So that a bunch of restaurants say, hey, we're tired of paying $1,000 a month for this. Instead, we'll pay $100 a month membership fees, but get all of our goods at cost instead of with the markup. And so you can have a membership model for that, or you do something where you actually provide like a better service, you know, better quality products in some way, like more higher-end stuff than, than these things. But I thought that was a good kind of like— I love these ideas where it just makes you think. I'm not going to go run and do these ideas, but you start to see the world differently where you walk into it. Next time you go into a restaurant bathroom and you see the toilet seat cover, you're going to realize, Yeah, this restaurant paid for this and somebody's restocking this.

Toilet maker? Yeah, I always see them. It's called like American Made. Um, it's a billion-dollar company.

We should look into them.

You want to know another one real quick? Otis Elevators, right? Total monopoly on elevators. Been around for 100 years, family-owned, probably makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit.

YKK zippers. Love—

I told you about YKK zippers, didn't I?

No, I mean, I just, I just noticed in high school all of my zippers say YKK.

Yeah, and then the really good—

what do you know about them?

I don't know anything. So I collect Vintage leather jackets, if it's a YKK, then you can tell what year it's on. A Talon zipper is even higher end, so if it's a Talon zipper, it's really good. And that same category is white cone denim, so if it's from Cone Mill, it's a great denim factory in Raleigh, North Carolina. And so YKK, Talon, and Cone Mill denim, it's like the high-end stuff that is the, it's the accessories to all the high-end stores. They're just factories that have been around for 150 years and will probably exist for another 50 or 100 years.

You said you collect leather jackets?

I collect leather, vintage leather jackets and denim. How many do you have? Probably $10,000 worth of leather jackets and probably $5,000 worth of vintage denim that I don't wear. And I just, I wear them sometimes.

Okay, so we'll do this as the last one. The top thing we had on our list was this, uh, MyHeritage auction. This like auction place, uh, which I assume is collectors, and this is so foreign to me because Indian people don't collect.

Like, I'm not gonna collect shit.

That's an American thing, I think. Like, if I go to my aunt's house, there's no art on the walls.

Okay, let me give you a background on this.

Okay, so in 2008, there was this guy who had a TV show called American Pickers. Have you seen American Pickers? Okay, at the time—

have you heard of it? I've heard of it, but I haven't watched it.

At the time, it was the second most popular show on cable. It was number 2 behind Pawn Stars, which is similar. And the guy's name on the show was named Mike Wolfe, and I was a huge fan of Mike's. And when I lived in Nashville, I saw Mike walking down the street, and I walked up to him. I go, Mike, what's up, man? Let me get a picture. And if you look on my Facebook, you see the picture. I start shooting the shit with them, and I'm like, Mike, let me work with you somehow. And so turns out Mike is opening up a store in Nashville, and he lets me help set him up and work there. And so what American Pickers does is they go to old barns, typically in the South, but barns, people's hoarders' homes. Not hoarders, I mean, it's not junk. We call it junk, but it's not really junk. It's like old motorcycles, old cars, neat stuff that's old. Yeah. And we'll buy it for $100 and sell it for $500. We'll buy an old car for $5,000, sell it for $20,000. And I ran the store where we would keep a lot of the cool stuff. I mean, at this point, he made so much money off the TV show, he just wanted to collect the shit because people loved collecting it. I would get people people that would fly in from Australia just to touch an old gas pump. The collectors were fanatical. I would sell old gas pumps that don't work and are only for decorations, and people would be like, is that gas pump the Model A, or is that one the Model C? Like, they knew.

What's going on? Why are they into this? Why are they into this?

And they would pay $3,000 because it's fucking awesome. I would buy that stuff. I have signs that cost $1,000, a Mobil gas sign. Only just to look at. It's cool because it's part of history. And here's the even best part. If you clean it or repaint it or try to make it nicer, it loses all its value, right? It has to have patina on it. The stuff with the good patina is best. So if you have an old car and what does patina mean? Patina. It's like when you have a pair of jeans. So like basically Levi's changed how they made jeans in the 1950s. So any pair of Levi's jeans prior to before 1950s they used raw denim, and the more you wore them, it would get these cool lines in them. And that— and the lines are called patina. I saw wear and tear, wear and tear. And so a pair of Levi's pre— pre— like before they made that change to their modern process costs $1,500. And if it has cool patina in it, it'll be 2 grand. I see. And so if it has any of this patina in it, it's really valuable. And so me myself, if I find a Schott jacket, which is a brand, a Schott jacket jacket. My favorite era is the 1950s with the red liner, um, or a Buco jacket. I'll drop $1,000 or $2,000 on it all day.

And so where do you buy these things?

Online ever, or so you, you, you can buy them on eBay. So what I used to do is, uh, I used to find jackets in America that were from the 1950s, and I would put them on eBay, and the Koreans and Japanese would buy them because this, uh, a 44 from the 1950s in America is no longer a modern 44. It only fits littler guys, particularly the Japanese and Koreans, and they fucking love that American— that American shit. They love it, right? And so I would— I used to sell all my stuff on eBay, but eBay wasn't the best marketplace for it. So now there's a lot of niche marketplaces, and you're talking about— which one? Scroll up. Which marketplace are you talking about?

Heritage Auctions, ha.com. Heritage Auctions?

I've never heard of that. Up higher.

All the way at the top. So they did $850 million. They said their biggest category is coins. Is it coins? And I was like, oh my God, people spending tens of millions of dollars on like thousands of dollars worth of coins.

I buy some coins. I own hundreds of dollars of coins. Scroll down more.

You own coins? Yeah. Don't you think this is stupid?

You think this is cool? Scroll up. There it is. It's awesome. I love it. So movie posters. Yeah. So I own some movie posters. So I live in San Francisco, so I don't have too much room.. But if I lived in Austin, Texas, where our office is, I would have a warehouse and it would be full of stuff.

Right now, blows my mind.

Right now I'm in the market for a 1995 Corvette, which is— and it's, it's like compared to modern cars, it's not that good, but it's like a cool year. I'll probably pay $20,000, $15,000 to $20,000 for it.

I kind of— I get the cars thing. I actually even kind of get the clothing, jackets, boots.

These are Red Wing boots. I buy them for a very particular type of reason. I own a pair of boots that are like the same brand, but from the 1950s and it costs $800. I don't wear them. They just sit there and I look at them and they feel good. It's like a museum.

And the coins, one, those are the ones where I'm just like, what? What is going on? Dude, movie posters.

I'm like, okay, this is only going to get popular. Here's why I'm so bullish on this. Okay, so you have some money now. What was popular when you were— let's just, let's just imagine that you're 50 now. Yep. Because nostalgia will be more important, I think. But what will you— what would you— let's see, what categories of things— what if I showed you a cassette tape, a VHS tape, unopened, of Home Alone? One of my favorite movies. Great. Okay, how much would you pay for that right now?

$0. I'm not a collector.

To have it right here? No.

Okay, as art. Okay, yeah, I guess I would— I guess I would do that. I guess I see that.

How much would you pay for that VHS? It's unopened. Opened, completely unopened. I mean, I probably wouldn't buy a Blasphemous.

I'm imagining I'm in that mode. $30, $40? Yeah, I'd pay $30, $40 to just have it there as a talking point in the room.

Okay, now let's fast forward 30 years. Would you pay $300 if you could find an unopened VHS tape and you have kids and you're like—

I hope I don't. This is a note to me when I'm 50. Don't do it, bro.

But do you understand my point? It's cool, right? It's cool. Okay, I get it. Let's do another one. What's a car? You don't like cars. Is there anything?

Okay, here's another example that came up. The guy who started Oculus, Palmer Luckey, he's bidding online. He tweeted this out. He's like, who is bidding against me? So he was bidding $260 grand to buy this rare thing, which was a— it was Nintendo made a PlayStation or something like that. It's made by Nintendo, but it is a PlayStation. I don't even know what this is. I don't want to look into it. I don't want to research it.

Awesome.

He's like, who the hell is bidding this up? I'm at $260 grand. Surely there's no other nerd that wants this. This, I bought a pair of Snapchat Spectacles.

I've never even used them. They're sitting in my drawer right over here. Oh, future member, they're just sitting there. Yeah, I'm just holding— I'm holding on to them. I own— that's hilarious. How about the Elon Musk flamethrower?

Okay, that's cool.

Dude, I think this shit's gonna be way more popular with young people. I think that what I would do is, okay, like, what if I have a— like, I'm not poor now. What, what did I— what was I into when I was like 5, 6, 7, 8 years old? Like, I'll see Pogs, whatever. Yeah, Goosebumps. And yeah, like, if I saw like a Slime from Nickelodeon thing, if I saw the entire collection of Goosebumps unopened, I would love to buy that and just have it sit here.

Yeah, that's actually pretty cool. Okay, I would buy that.

You see what I'm saying? This is how it works, right? Or like, imagine you grew up with like—

I feel like you're explaining collecting to me which anyone listens gonna be like, duh, what the fuck? But I really do feel that way. I'm like, what is motivating people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars? I saw one of the posters— movie or someone— the comics that was— that just sold for $70 grand. It's a one-page of a comic. And I'm like, who is this person with too much money that is spending $70 grand on this one page? A lot of people. A lot of people.

And it's not $70 grand. You have to think, if someone's rich enough to spend $70 G's on this thing, it's just like you spending $10 on it, right? Are you buying a $100, $100 Home Alone thing? It's like, it's kind of a lot of money, but like, who cares? It's fun, right?

I also wonder if there's a market for, for first dibs. So like, let's say you're coming out with something, an album or whatever, a movie. Why aren't these companies selling the first? Like, who wants the first copy ever made of this? Who wants the first book? Great. And just auction the first dibs and create a company that Yeah, just on the spot, dude. That's what I do. I'm the fucking magic man. And so you, you, you create this first dibs thing because then you create new inventory that doesn't even exist yet. You sell it today, it comes out in the future, and people would bid like crazy for this.

First dibs. Real quick. So Sean and I are doing this all the time, but I always have to plug this. If you like doing this on your own time, you got to go to trends.co— wait, trends.co— and buy a Trends subscription. And I think what we did was trends.co/million, and you'll see a big discount.

And I'll tell you one thing, the sleep report you guys did, I thought was great. I thought that was pretty interesting because you see these things that get hype, but then you see the actual data. It's like meditation gets all this hype. Watch how sleep is growing, how the sleep interest is growing, and all the different products that go around that, from beds to pillows to anti-snoring to sleep aids to whatever. So I like that article a lot. And the group, I've said this a million times, like all the values in the group, the group is amazing. Um, and I, and I, I really enjoy it.

So, so sign up, but we'll keep doing this anyway. Bye.