#116 with Kelly Erb - Tax Expert Breaks Down Trump Taxes and Big Businesses Ran by Few People

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a road travel never looking back okay sweet so here with tax i'm here with kelly herb who has a great handle and domain and i gotta give you credit you've branded the hell out of yourself so you have at tax girl on twitter and you have text girl dot com so already you're my kind of person for having this kinda pretty interesting self branding plus just being you know most people who understand taxes don't understand social media and content and you seem to do so so am i am i right in in that assessment i hope so thank you for by the way trying words yeah no i actually started out i think pretty early on in the kind of the tax writing business i was an attorney that just started writing about tax and at the time i think a lot of people were writing really technical pieces and i didn't think that made sense so i was trying to be more accessible so that's kind of how that evolved and when i'm on your twitter right now it's showing me at tax mama and at tax tweet as people i may like are these your rivals are you is it tax grover versus tax mama no well say first of all tax is awesome that's much she's amazing no actually what's really cool about text twitter which is our our little sub twitter is that they're really great people so we're not we're not so much rivals as we are colleagues great okay i love it and you had this forbes article go viral recently that was i'll read the title it was the ordinary taxpayers guide to the extraordinary story of trump's tax returns and i was looking at forbes and basically i would say like you've been a contributor and and i would say your your normal post will get you know thousands of of reads of views i guess it shows it on the site and this one has over two hundred thousand views so this one definitely you know hit nerve which i'm guessing you kinda had an inkling it would or did this exceed your expectations so the thing about tax coverage that's really tricky is that when you talk about views if you were to look at my articles in march you know it's not unusual for when to get a a million or two views right that's this time of year right you don't talk about tax in september just a general rule like you know people are over by now so that the coverage doesn't usually start up again until like december when people are thinking year end so yeah to have a lot of views on something that doesn't directly impact you as a tax story is is pretty unusual i'd say i did expect some coverage of it i think the thing that i got a lot of impact on social media because actually i think it's probably been shared more than it's been read is that people were interested in the fact that my that particular article is more about the mechanics and not about the politics and so i think that that was something that kind of caught a lot of people's eye because i think right now a lot of people feel like the information that they're getting is just so filtered that they sometimes just wanna know the you know they just wanna know the stuff they don't wanna know all the extra and they don't i read this perspective this wasn't trump is evil or trump is the best this was hey here's how you should think about this information that was released and what you can and can't draw from it which i thought was a good kind of like just the information part that you're talking about okay so yeah this got a bunch of views it's like you know selling a christmas tree in may you sold a lot of christmas trees in may randomly so i so i think that's the that's what's interesting about doing this article not during tax season so i think there's two things that i wanted to talk to you about number one was you know you say in this post you're like you know i'm not gonna kinda comment on you know this is not an opinion piece on like you know to give you my take on trump's tax returns because i haven't seen them and you should go read the article so so i do wanna get your opinion on it so even though in this thing you said you don't wanna talk about it i am curious like what was your was your personal reaction when you when you read the news the are the new york times article cool so one of the things that's really interesting is like if you've been following the the trump tech story at all and i've actually written about it as far back as two thousand like fifteen you know the a lot of this information is not new to us i think the thing that's so extraordinary about what the times did is they have packaged it all at once right so i think a lot of the information we've been hearing bits of this for you know years just a page or two leaks out and somebody talks about on on rachel mad or people of you know michael cohen talks about in his book i mean a lot of this information that we're hearing isn't new i think but again i think what's extraordinary and what the times did is they took other information and that's what i think sometimes we lack right i just just readers you don't know if somebody if i were to give you my ten forty and you would just look at it in a vacuum just for this year you wouldn't really know a lot about me you might could tell how many kids i have where i live like there are things you can glean from a text return but you might look at my business what if my business last year was phenomenal on this year it's not you're not gonna know that from that one tax returns so i think that what the times did and looking at so many years and then also looking at additional information and comparing it to f receive filings and sec filings it was a lot of information that they digested for the reader which i think is really something that we haven't seen before and you know to to the point about a lot of people have said well why do we need to see it now you know i don't know that that's a personal decision on your part that i i will say that usually when you are evaluating presidential candidates you'd like to know what the economics and what the the finances are not just in terms of are they successful or are they not but you know where are their business interests what kinds of money do they owe you know who do they owe that money to and we've seen that from other candidates and we haven't seen it from this president so i think that's what's really you know both interesting and extraordinary about what the times did and were you surprised okay you know the kind of the catchy headline was trump paid seven hundred fifty bucks of federal income taxes or federal yeah federal for federal taxes in that year for year it was twenty sixteen maybe twenty seventeen and something like that was that a surprise to you or you're were like no that's not shocking no actually the only i will say the only thing that i read that actually truly triggered and again this is probably from a tax geek standpoint but truly triggered a from me right because you know we've known i mean the the business loss is nothing new right we've known this goodyear years bad years we've known this we've known there's a lot of bad years you know no matter what has been portrayed we knew there were a lot of bad years but i think what was really interesting to me is when you look at the refund piece which is kind of what everybody's talking about right now there was one year in particular where the president was able to take advantage of obama era bailout provisions to extend what's called carry backs which is where you can recover if you have like a really good year when you're and that you've had a couple of bad years you can balance those out so that you can either lower your taxable going forward or you can get a refund based on your previous the fact that he did that isn't the part that i found interesting what i found interesting was he was entitled to a large refund which you gotten in twenty ten according to the times right the seventy two million dollar one yeah yeah and so that's based on several years from he got a refund based on some losses to recover from years that he had done well on the apprentice mh so he had paid some taxes in o five zero six zero seven zero eight and then he has a bad year he can he can kind of apply that ad year backwards and and get a refund so and and that part didn't didn't surprise me either but the part that i found really extraordinary in the when i was reading is that he that went to a joint committee for review because the number so big that's actually by statute one refunds hit over two million dollars they go to a committee so people are like let's look at this and make sure it's legit right so that's what happened and that was that was kind of the crux of the audit that the president kept talking about every year when he says he couldn't release his returns because they were on audit now we know that that's what triggered the audit was that that year because that's separate from the piece about you know president's get audited every year because he wasn't a president and this is unrelated but when you when you get audited you know sometimes that can go on for a while but it's extraordinary for it to go on this long and according to the times that's because they were unable to reach a deal and the president kept consenting to extend the time to assess which is like a a a move that you know you can do for all kinds of reasons the thing that's interesting to me is they say that in twenty fourteen at least the time says but in twenty fourteen they were close to a settlement and that's what i find extraordinary because as a business person and i run my share as well you know you don't typically like to have that kind of uncertainty especially on the on the financial side go on for that long right so it's it that was the piece i have to say out of the entire report and the follow up it wasn't the losses of the depreciation or any of that it's the the idea that as a business person you would be close to a settlement in twenty fourteen and then six years later still be hash that out and you know we don't know why it fell apart we don't know the details i'm not gonna speculate but i we'll just say again as someone who runs my show if i knew that i might have to pay back a hundred million dollars i think i would i think i'd want that resolve sooner rather than labor i see okay alright so that's sort of the trump tax side of things and the other piece of this is just we have a lot of people that listen to this that have their own businesses that you know taxes tends to be your biggest expense the more successful you get because it scales up with success in many ways and i know for myself i've spent the last six months trying to figure out how do i reduce my own tax burden because you know it's it's large and i want to be smart about it and i started from a place of completely zero education around it and now i'm like oh can i go buy a building put solar around the roof to get some credits depreciate the bill you know i'm trying i'm trying to think through what are all my options here you know should i be living in the caribbean type of thing and and so i just wanted to get from you kinda like i don't know is there a one zero one is there a dumb down version of it that you could sort of walk people through of things that they should be thinking about or looking at if you are a business owner and you're trying to to think about what trying to think about tax strategies that you think work work well so well first there's two things so the first thing is that i i kind of just to tie back to the trump piece as well you know as you mentioned taxes are a big part of being a business owner it's rare that you're gonna have a seven hundred fifty dollar tax bill i mean no matter what you do over and over and over so i think that one thing people need to think about is not to compare their tax liability to other business owners because your circumstances are very different right even if you have two website owners there it's still gonna be very very different what you do how successful you are how you send your money so the first thing i would say is just be careful about comparisons but then on one of the other things that you said which i thought was really interesting like you mentioned solar credits i'm like yeah like as you're talking like absolutely there's the things you can do yeah because there are definitely things that you can do depending on the kind of business that you have that will reduce your tax liability but you shouldn't as a business owner be too quick to focus on lowering your taxes because as a business owner you wanna maximize your profits right not necessarily just focus on taxes and a lot of times to lower taxes you have to spend money so you want it like their solar panels right so you need to figure out is that gonna be a return on investment that makes sense am i gonna earn enough tax credits to make up for the outline outlay of the funds in the beginning and i think that that sometimes where people get stuck because they start thinking to themselves i'm gonna buy a car for my business because somebody told me if i get a car i can write it off i'm gonna buy a new printer and a third monitor and they start adding all these things because they're deductions expenses yeah yeah and if you could see me i'm doing like little quotes i'm like elections but those are also spending money so you shouldn't get so lost in the idea that you want to lower your tax bill that you go down the road is spending money what you should do and this is i think where you are going is that you should think of things that will make your business better that are also tax beneficial and that's where i think people get sometimes confused you know does a third monitor make your life easier if it does then that's a really smart expense because it helps you be a better business owner and it's a deductible so that's i think my my big takeaway would be to think of areas where where if you spend the money to get the deduction or the credit you're also getting a benefit to the business it shouldn't always be focused on just lowering that tax number this week's episode is brought to you by our crowd do you wish you were early in some of the best performing ipo of twenty nineteen and twenty twenty with our crowd at credit investors have access to invest directly easily and most importantly early cloud investors have benefited from cloud companies ipo like beyond meat or being bought by companies like intel nike microsoft and oracle what makes crowd different is that they have in due diligence which includes meeting with management teams and doing comprehensive vetting of the deals that they decide to make part of the portfolio and if they've selected a deal then a accredited investors get an opportunity to invest alongside them at the same terms if you're in a accredited investor you could join our crowd for free at o u r c r o w d dot com slash the hustle as you can review the deals no payment is involved until you decide to participate so today you can join our crowds investment in mimic mimic explains that their tiny robots allow surgeons to be less invasive and safely perform g surgery so women heal faster and have less scarring mimic is a much needed innovation in the rapidly growing multi billion dollar robotic surgery market you can get an early on mimic and other opportunities at crowd dot com slash the hustle if you're interested investing you need to join our crowd little the our crowd account is free just go to o u r c r o w d dot com slash the hustle great and by the way welcome sam sam just joined and so sam we're talking to kelly about the all things taxes she is at tax girl on twitter and i think you have a podcast right tax girl podcast is that right yes mh okay so if you like this you can get more there so so i'm a big fan of this rule called the eighty twenty rule and the eighty twenty rule for those who don't know is basically you know how do i get eighty percent of the results with twenty percent of the effort and if you look at any project you do it tends to be that eighty percent of the outcomes come from about twenty percent of the inputs it's this common pattern you'll see you if you if you invest in your of venture capitalist you're invest in portfolio companies it will tend to be that eighty percent of your returns will come from twenty percent of the companies so i'm curious kelly is there a eighty twenty if you were if you're talking about you know if you're if you're somebody who's looking for what is the eighty twenty what are the twenty percent of efforts i would take or you know what are the first few things that come to mind when you when you're talking to somebody about their tax strategy that if you you can't learn the whole tax code book but if you really just looked at these if you focus on this these handful of inputs you can kinda get a reliably large chunk of results from it in terms of you know being smarter about your taxes what comes to mind if you're talking to a business owner what where do you point them to first what's kind of one two and three so i think first is business expenses which is something that that people are talking more and more about right now and they can be you know office supplies they can be new cars they can be lots of things but i think that one of the things it's funny because when we when we talk about taxes a lot of people assume that you know people over deduct this is i think a myth in especially amongst business centers i find that business centers are so worried about being audited that they actually under deduct so and to qualify though for business owner you're referring to llc or can that include c corp as well so i hear all of them i think i think llc i think but i i think especially on the llc and the sole practitioners so somebody who is filing like a schedule c on their tax returns yep because i think when you have a corporation and i have i have an actual corporation as well one's an s but still we have a corporation i think that you you think about things a different way in terms of how you separate home in business when you are a smaller entrepreneur maybe you have an llc or you're filing on a schedule c i think you the fear at least amongst my clients the fear is a lot greater because there's more it feels like there's more at risk right you can you could lose your house if something goes wrong as opposed to just the asset inside the c corp so i typically talk about llc and pastors throughs and and schedule fees because those are the most common probably and if you throw escort in there about eighty percent like not a lot of people anymore do c courts just because of the the they're actually tax disadvantages and more tax training required if that makes sense yep so but yeah like a business person i'm thinking somebody who owns they're in company again usually as an llc like they use it as pass through pass through because that's an easy way to do your taxes and you talk about expenses that's another example something if you're a a single member llc for example just by ticking a box you can actually eliminate an entire tax return which saves you money because you don't need another you know step along the way so you can eliminate an extra return so we i think a lot of times us business owners again especially smaller businesses worry a lot more about because they're looking at the numbers a lot i think that people who are more involved in the day to day they're looking at the numbers more and so they're worried they're they're they're the ones who are wondering whether or not that printer because they also use it to print out their kids time work really wasn't as deductions so they don't claim it so in terms of what i would say yes two i would say look at the ways you spend money and see if they could be re characterize as business expenses because i do think that more people under deduct than over deduct i would i would imagine and sean what do you think that most of the people listening are c corp people or it'll be a mix right so anybody who's kind of venture backed will be c corp but i think for libby be because of the the issues with transfer right but i think for the majority of listeners i mean of course there are venture backed founders listening to this but i think the most most people are i own a roofing company i'm a consultant i have a agency i you know whatever like i i have e commerce store and those will not be worse typically yeah so can you kinda quickly say what the a you kinda gave a good eighty twenty i mean basically you said that mostly people under deduct what about for c c folks one thing that's the the difference is and again this is a some of its semantics i understand because it's really sort of all the same part of money although my corporate lawyer husband would argue with that characterization but when you have a c corp it the the difference in separation is a lot more right you typically don't use your personal credit card for your c corporation you're gonna have the c corporation credit part even if it's in your name so even if it says kelly herb and then it says text scroll on the bottom it's still probably registered through the corporation it's a lot more tricky when it's an llc that you run yourself maybe you're paid as a consultant to a freelancer or gig economy and the money comes to you directly i i think that that's where kind of the difference where you see the difference because it's a lot if you have an american express card that only use for your c corporation you know they're and you buy things in the name of the corporation the separation is a lot more apparent so when you go to put things on your tax return you see here's the credit card now i advise my other business clients who are in llc or schedule c's solar practitioners all of these folks partnerships to also keep things separate but i do think it becomes a lot more tricky especially now in a covid world right because a lot of us are working from home so all of the sudden you know i have a a microphone set up in my office because that's the work that i do my husband however hasn't been able to go into his office on a regular basis so now he has one too even though that wasn't his his deal so that's where i think it gets tricky i think it's where when things kind of overlap between home and business you know how do you how do you draw those lines and i think that that's where when i say that i think c corporations probably deduct more reliably than other kinds of businesses i i think that's sort of where where i'm going is that i i i i think it's that when there's not as clear a separation it can sometimes be really easy to say oh i i don't know i i ride i i drive my car for home and business i'm just gonna say it's personal rather than deduct those miles but if the if the company was a company car of course you're deduct it so i think that that's where you see kind of the the shades of gray and so kelly let's say here's my ex here's my experience so i have i've had people who just kinda like do the company books have an accountant who you know helps me with my taxes every year i've done turbo tax on my own in in prior years what i really want is i want somebody who i could say hey i'm paying a million dollars in taxes in twenty nineteen how do i not pay a million dollars in taxes in twenty nineteen and i want you know who's trump's guy i want trump's guy to come to me and basically be like oh here's what you need to do you need to you know lovable blah blah establish some dom aisle somewhere else you need to buy this piece of heavy machinery and you'll get paid for it every month plus you're gonna be able to write it all off for this this year and next year we'll do something else where do i i find that person is that a tax strategist is that a pipe dream and do i have to be ten times richer than i am today what should i do so it could be your accountant it could be a tax planner it could be a tax attorney like me i i think that where people especially in when you're getting started in this this kind of fall down on that is that you don't wanna spend a lot of money right so you do the turbo tax you do the accountant and what you do is you see that accountant one time a year you see that accountant in march or april and then you never see that a person again that's kinda like going to the doctor when you're sick but they're never going for anything else like you've had a you know you're you've had a cough but you didn't really wanna look it because it's not a full blown cough yet and you're thinking you'll get it looked at eventually that someday isn't a good thing to do it's the same kind of thing with business you know the the person who knows who sees your books probably has a really good idea of areas that you could possibly get a better deduction you could re characterize into a credit you might qualify a deferral they might have all kinds of suggestions for you but if you're only seeing them when you're handing of your data and signing your return you're not really getting the benefit of that you should add a minimum be meeting with your tax person once a quarter and that let them look at your books and say you know what turns out that because of covid and the cares act you may qualify for ppp money which is the pay paycheck pay paycheck protection program which also not only for people that had employees but also for self employed persons was applicable that money was a loan but it was a forget loan so it's tax ratio so its income tax rate you could have gotten paid to keep running your company during covid and not have to pay that back you might not have known that or whether you can qualify for it without talking to your tax person because you're not gonna get that tax and so i think that when you say like who's trump's it's not that he has a person that he has a team he has accountants he has a an accounting firm i think it's m he also has tax attorneys they i happen to know one of them is william nelson because i always remember that his tax attorney was willie nelson so there's there's lots of you know he has people and i think that that sometimes where business center or skim because they don't wanna pay for people but just like any other thing like you talk about efficiencies and and how you can spend money to to get a benefit those the people that team could maybe help you figure out strategies think about actually to sam's question earlier should i be a c or should i be an llc does it make sense to you know again generally a c corporation is less tax advantage advantageous just but the reason people do it is because they're like you mentioned venture they're gonna sell or they have for an investors like there's reasons why that might happen but if that's not you if you're listening and you are the roofing company that you mentioned maybe you want the llc and sean you have somebody give you that information sean do you know what q sbs is i do but i'd love for kelly to say it better than i will yeah i would love that as well kelly and here's how i i mean this is how we've been it's this magic pill you take you don't have to pay ten million dollars in taxes yeah i mean basically you have as long as you own small business stock for four years as your five five five years you you don't have to pay federal capital gains tax up to ten million dollars ten million of the gain correct well i mean sort of yeah i mean there's a lot of roles and it's actually a relatively it's funny it's in the in the tax world is actually a relatively new rule because it's only been around since the nineties so but that actually makes it a bit of of a new rule but yeah so it basically allows you to re characterize stock that you have so that you can get a tax benefit for it and it only applies to small businesses the the q bs part of it obviously is qualified small business stock so but you have to be a c corp for that which is i i guess we are going with that so there is ways to it is a way to reduce your tax liability if you wanna go you know down the c corporation route yep i have friends who have done this and it's amazing and you you just look up the rules of if you qualify or not you don't have to do anything in advance i think you do it sort of at the end when you do have that that those gains the other thing i thought that was interesting there's the last thing i wanted to ask you about i had heard the story that there's this guy peter t he was the first investor in facebook he was the former founder of paypal and that his investment and he put five hundred k into facebook and he put it in through like an ira or something like that like he's been investing out of a retirement account so that his gains in facebook were tax free essentially do you know about this and tax deferred yeah so i've had people do that with our company through ira yeah so i think it was probably i'm guessing a self directed ira is my is my guess and yeah so and there's actually it's interesting because i i haven't done it as much right now because they those kinds of plants have been under attack from the ira because a lot of them i'm sorry irs because a lot of them were perhaps being used in ways that they weren't intended to be used but i actually used to represent a lot of folks who did that with artwork they did and real estate that was also self directed ira were being used it was art and and being funded by in real estate but what you're talking about is when you have a retirement plan and the reason i i jumped in and said tax deferred not tax free is because when you have a retirement plan the growth inside the plan isn't taxable to you until you pull it out and so you can absolutely put certain kinds of assets inside the plan that might be appreciating quickly and it doesn't even have to be your company it could be something like amazon you know if you bought amazon back in the day and it was in your retirement account it doesn't get taxed to you as it grows it only gets text to you when you take it out so it is a really good way to invest long term that where it gets tricky is like when you mentioned if you're gonna be there are there are rules and this is where the irs irs is looking you know there are rules about the kinds of assets that can be contributed whether or not there are other people in your company what kinds of contributions they're also making and then you have to be careful about exchanges like whether or not you're exchanging one asset inside the plan for another so there are a lot of rules that govern them but yeah there absolutely people are also doing this with to they're doing it with gold there's a lot of you don't have to have a vanguard account to to have a retirement account there's absolutely ways that you can fund them on their own and again the the particular thing i think you're referring to is it's called a self directed ira gotcha okay well kelly this has been great i appreciate you coming on and dropping some tax wisdom on us as you can see we are pretty novice you know what's what's before a white belt like we're we're just signing up for the free seminar right now we don't we don't even have our white belts yet but i appreciate you coming on and i love i love i love that you took expertise in one place and then bill's an online presence around it like if i was able learn one thing from this it actually wouldn't be anything about tax it would be about wow look at this a tax attorney created a online brand around tax girl and i've seen doctors doing this too and they're making youtube channels breaking down sports injuries and getting millions of views by being a doctor who creates content and i think that there will be more content creators who are you know specialists and professionalism and other like verticals that that do this and you're a great example of one thank you i appreciate that and if i could leave one piece of wisdom now just would be absolutely kind of going back to the thing that you mentioned before is just if you have tax questions whether it is a website or whether you go to youtube it pays to get good information and no matter how you consume it because i do think that using those kinds of strategies is what can make you successful because again you don't wanna focus on paying the least amount of taxes you wanna maximize your profits right yeah and free tax advice is expensive yeah absolutely okay so sounds good alright kelly thank you so much thank you sean okay i've got something i wanna ask you about yeah okay so i was thinking about this course thing we're putting together there are a significant amount of companies that look like they are one thing on the outside but behind it it's just a bunch of people doing all the work mh and i wanted to give you three examples cool the first is i found a website online that you pay a hundred and fifty dollars and you get a a cartoon dog canvas and so what you do is it's like and i made a website to test it all it is is you upload a photo of your dog they send it out to like five dot com they get the the cartoon made for five box and then you can get it put on canvas for like twenty five dollars may sell for a hundred and fifty the second one is you know pitch book dot com pitch book yep okay they do like a hundred and fifty million a year in sales a lot of their data they get because they hire these guys in india to like just go out and cold call people and ask for like that's all it is i mean at this point i think it's a it's far more sophisticated than i'm dumb it down to too but that's like i i believe how they made a significant amount of money and the second one or the third one is summarizing books so we well this is a two part were talking about this company called card punch the way it started was this guy would he built this really simple app where we would take a picture of a business card and then on the back end there was human beings that would transcribe that business card and upload it to your contacts same with summarizing books so like okay q started this way where they just outsourced it and they just had someone summarizing all these books for like so cheap like fifty bucks did that what do you mean or sorry the guy who start okay cupid had another company called spark notes okay gotcha yes spark notes sorry yeah anyway what else have you heard of that was like that where it's well we have a friend who did this in the textbook summary space yeah so he did the same thing one of the one of the i will ask him afterwards if we can run any of this i'll cut it out otherwise but one thing that you know you go buy a textbook you it's a math calculus book for your your college class and then there's like at the end of every your chapter there's just like problems with and they typically the textbook has like a solution at the back right you go look up the answer in the back see if you got it right but the answers is like one line it's like you know the answer was c but you don't know why it was you don't know how they arrived at sea and so he got a bunch of smart people in india to like go through and actually hand solve all the all the chapter one two three four five all the questions in there with the actual show your work and people would buy these like course note solutions based out court the textbook solutions that were actually like fully written out which they could either use to just like fill in their homework without doing their homework or to learn and be like oh that's how you actually solve that problem cool this is like a tutor but way cheaper and so that was i thought a a really good hustle solution to to that problem what i think someone can do and i think i personally i don't wanna do this i think i could do this in a matter of thirty days is build a company by going to five dot com finding one of two things one the most impressive five dollar bit of work right something that like i would see this and i'm like are you kidding me this is only five dollars right then i would make my own website and make it look amazing and sell it at a massive up tick and then just manage the contractors to get it done yeah the second thing that i would do is find talents on five fiber for those listen it's a a marketplace for jobs that cost five dollars of course now they do like more than five dollars but no nothing cost five dollars everything's twenty dollars right so it's it it but it's like like someone's like oh i'll narrow your thirty second commercial right all comcast intro yeah which is i think the how this one was done or at first maybe but i would find a fiber job that was positioned poorly and i would reposition it and market it just like that so for example i found this guy who would do cartoons i would say oh i'm just gonna make it strictly dog cartoons send me a picture of your dog like you know what i mean or i will na this thing for you i'm gonna turn it into like custom voicemail mails by the guy who sounds like blank right or like donald trump impression voicemail mails right yeah you take impression guy who does a good dumb trump impression you're like okay cool this is donald trump wishing you happy birthday for thirty five dollars as a service exactly and so you just fix the positioning right i'm looking through fiber right now and looking at the popular categories so a lot of them are on like like basically in some kind of either it's it's a lot of like creative arts so design music video things that people typically don't have the skill set to do themselves so it could be like packet like coming up with your brand packaging fixing up your what personal website your portfolio creating a logo for your brand right that's like one of the most common fiber jobs ever and so there's a bunch that are like that there's like hand illustrated portraits to view there's voice overs there's impressions there's i think there's a lot of these somebody called this i think product ties services basically it's something that's traditionally done as a service but you product ties it so it seems like oh i clicked this button and i received this product back i haven't receive this end output and underneath the hood you you're farming it out to fiber and upwork and you're just connecting the dots for people that don't know that that's where they should go look they don't wanna take the time to go find the right person and write a brief and all that stuff and you sort of automate that workflow yeah and it's not like a scam thing i i i kinda presented it as a get rich quick kinda lazy way to do it but of course there will be work like you have to vet the people you have to make sure it gets done in a timely manner if there's revisions you rather handle it basically but the vetting the part vetting the person i remember martin brian bi was the first person who i heard talking about this i forgot what he called it but he had a great example he had an example of some business doing like millions of dollars a year that was literally just what you're talking about i like i didn't i oh i i definitely overs simplified pitch book but i was like reading about it i'm pretty sure they just have a team of like literally three hundred guys in india who are just scraping massive amounts of data right scraping it by cold emailing and encode cold calling people and then like writing things down and also probably just like aggregating scraping yeah which is a technical skill but yeah yeah i actually i think scraping would be a great one for this which is like oh i need a list of this number of led leads about this and it's just like cool just describe what you need and if you pay me two hundred dollars i get you a list of a hundred fifty people that are like that or if you want a thousand people that fit that criteria great and it's just basically saying i can go scrape this for you you don't know you don't know how to do web scraping but i do so you only have a few minutes you said right yeah so i was i i did something the other day i asked people how they would describe the podcast on twitter i said how i hate the name of my first million and how it's stupid and how i hate explaining to anyone who i don't know about what i do and like how i c host this yeah but for the rare person who like is like you and i it's like an addict thing which is what we hear consistently yeah and i said so how would you explain the podcast and i got maybe two hundred responses in a short amount of time and one bit of feedback you and i got and i rarely given to this shit but they are totally right which is we have had almost all dudes on this podcast guest we definitely need to get different types of people have you noticed that so yes i've noticed that that was feedback we got pretty early on we made an effort to try to balance that out as best as we could but also we count rid of guest i mean literally on this episode we had a female guest from a totally different background right tax tax attorney very different so i don't know i think yes the feedback is valid but also yes we're aware of it and have tried to make strides on it and yes we probably also have a long way to go and yes i also i'm kind of exhausted by it don't even like having guests on anyways so i don't know how i feel about it overall i like having guests if they're like huge interesting people like the ty has thing like we got so much can i read your conversation from this morning out of slack this is this is the sam experience okay so sam goes where is it this is what it's like to work with sam so bray says good news we're about to sell out of ads for the rest of the year and into next year san francisco goes well how much money also we need bang guests once a week like the founder of shopify google famous people and then brady says how much and then says who's who's buying it out sam that's fucking bullshit that's way too low period no no solution offered are you well oh okay also for forget we have the founder of lambda school and the coo of shopify coming on next week those those are getting interesting but have a bigger like fucking hillary clinton a phrase like i don't know dude talk to sales i think we're rate we're getting is pretty good and we just need to move and then he says by the way today we have a tax lady on who's gonna talk about trump's returns oh i just thought it was so funny i was like man working with sam like it's like working with the weather it's like seven days it's sunny and bright and you're like i love the weather and then some days it's it's like a thunderstorm and you but you don't blame the weather the weather's is just the weather you don't get angry at the weather it's like as not the thing about me though is like i'm not actually like i'm like one of those guys who i'll yell and then it's like good yeah what's going on do you know what i mean yeah for sure you're not actually angry at anybody i just thought it's really funny the way that you reacted actually let's bring a brand you in a brand what was that like to be out the receiving end of that of that response this known intervention for sam i'm surprised you brought it up because like i just thought that was like normal sam like if he had responded a different if he had responded a different way i would have been surprised but that concerned no i'm like yeah this the reaction you get i don't yes this this is the normal sam but is this the normal of what you used to or do you like it do you just dislike because some people might be like i'm fired up i like that just straight talk and tell it like it is and don't you know don't don't sugar code it so with where do you for do you stand how does it feel to be rochelle yeah feel it feels normal because i think i get sam's personality so like when he says that i'm like yeah it's normal and i know how he would say it i know how you'd react to it so it's it's not like i'm not like oh sam yelling like i'm like yeah we were recording this course yesterday and like midway through i'm like i don't i don't fucking have it today this is horrible and so we just had to end it so yeah i would say i'm i'm i've up and down ups and downs but with it's very transparent apparent how same feels like i don't like people who like kind of hide or like their personality changes it's like right you hate to guess how somebody's feeling about about something about your work about you about whatever and i i'd say sam doesn't make you guess do you wanna i don't wanna make this about me but this is for anyone who's like crazy so and i know you gotta go so me it quick i'm hiring what i call is a coo in reality this person's gonna be my ceo of the company yeah why don't you just call them ceo but no i told them i go i'm gonna call you coo at first so i can fire you really easily if you suck and then after a while we'll transition you to ceo frankly it's gonna be a ceo and the job description says like don't take this if you and i like have like it's a the job the the job description is literally just sort reasons why you should not take this job and people have liked it and one of the things that it it says is you just got to be like straight woman or straight man to like me being nuts and this the whole interview i'm just like telling these people i'm like so i'm like kinda crazy and you're gonna have to like just figure out how to handle that a little and i was like i'm not like actually like a an ass or i'm not actually nuts but like i'm very creative and whatever and so it's been very creative i don't know what do you wanna call it it's just like i'm just like high energy and very humble awesome super good looking and i but you missed the best part of that slack exchange which is the picture that you posted on twitter like right before you started reading the picture that they posted on twitter oh i thought he's gonna get roasted i didn't even see this oh what is this who is this what am i looking at it's a photo from a conference so i had to fly somewhere to speak at a conference and i was like i it was it was in a different country and i was exhausted in the morning and they're like alright come take your picture and i was like i don't wanna do this and so they took a picture of me and i looked like a grown up bart simpson okay okay so yeah there's a had a shot of there's like like a professionally done photo of of sa and then brady says you look like a boot leg carl lengths and you're about to drop the worst gospel album of all time and then this one what like this i missed this whole exchange and then sam post a top list picture of karl where he's just absolutely ripped he's like you're you're right super similar oh little slack that people should pay to just be in the slack i think that's ultimately the way slack i've decided is a cancer to my business i hate slack i hope i hope they're not sponsoring it whatever sorry that's how the bag i think slack is the worst it has ruined my work life do you like slack i love slack it's doing oh my god i don't want anyone talking to me i have people who messaged me on facebook messenger it twitter dms text message slack email what else is there that's it it's the worst it is the worst it is horrible i hate all these message and then slack six right well to the future ceo of the hustle good luck dude we're interviewing a bunch of baller we're interviewing all these people and i'm like why is this guy talking to me that's great okay one last thing about ceo ship you saw this coinbase letter memo that went out what was your reaction to it totally board okay so so i'll explain it for those who didn't see so just go look up coinbase memo or something like that you'll find it the ceo of coinbase basically emailed out like kind of a confusing little email but like what would he was basically saying was it was definitely poorly written it's poorly written but he was like hey at work like coinbase is not gonna like take political stands around causes and also like when you're at work just be at work we i don't wanna be debating politics and social issues like this kind of a distraction from our mission and if we do put resources and donations and we do care about causes it's causes related to our mission which is let's say i don't like an open financial currency system or something of a financial system which is like you know the crypto world like we're all about growing the crypto economy that's what we're gonna focus on that's what we're gonna do at work that's where we're gonna talk about at work those are the causes we're gonna support and everything else doesn't have a place here if that's not a place you wanna work at like there's a meeting with your manager where you can go and get another job and so that's kinda of what he said and people were really split on this totally polarized so i would say like there was like paul graham and who's you know founder of like a comb who was anyone who's libertarian like probably me definitely me probably you i don't i don't know what what you consider yourself was like oh yeah this guy's awesome and then anyone who's liberal or i'm general was like you know how dare you not so port x y and z right but there was like a you know a bunch of you know prolific people chi in and i was just interesting to see how split the opinions were you know dick cost the formal former ceo of twitter was like this is not good leadership this is like this is basically saying you know shut up and dr to your employees and there was other people that were like like yeah dude i want work to be about work and i don't want it to be about all these other things and i don't think that we should be taking these stands and i also just i don't want that and it's already in my world everywhere else i don't wanna in infiltrate work and i worked performance shut up in dr analogy he's actually stupid because he didn't say he doesn't want his employees to mention anything he just said the company like company is gonna not stand for anything but you can do it whatever you want and don't say don't talk about it at work yeah and so i don't think that's the same as shut up and dr because it's just says while you're on my time shut up and dr while you're on your own time i support you as a human you can do whatever you want right i think that my thinking is if you have shareholders other than one person you should try to your only jobs to make that share your shareholders wealthier and all you should care about is business an you only care about business you'll likely have happy employees because they'll feel like they're succeeding and things like that if you own the whole company i think you could you should make it as political as you want you know like this could be your vehicle this could be the sean vehicle to do to do anything he wants and so the the other argument is no we live in a society and like companies should basically be helping society and if there's societal issues like we should have the courage we should have the backbone to stand up and say when something's wrong kinda like that old quote i i don't know the quote exactly but it's sort of like you know the they came for the jews but i you know but i'm not jewish so i didn't say anything they came for the for the bankers but i'm not a banker so i didn't say anything and it's like they came for me and there was nobody left to say anything sort of like that where if if there are wrongs happening and a companies you know if people and companies people of power which is in some ways organizations don't say anything don't do anything don't don't use their their platform and their influence then that's a shame and don't wanna work a place like that that's that's another take that people have and i think it's gonna get split i think you're gonna get two types of companies you're gonna get companies that lean into the activism and people work there because they're like yeah that aligns with my values and then you're gonna get other people who are like i don't want my work life to be so political or like to to take a a social stance on everything i want work to be about business and i want you know i want it to be about that the actual mission of the business and i think it's gonna get split and then people will self select where they wanna work which and by the way i think that last argument you made is actually a really good argument because in my head i'm like well we would hopefully know like what's actually serious on what you should like say no to and then maybe a lot of people will be like well this is serious like why what you and i'm like i i have to actually walk through that exercise on how to figure that out right and the other interesting thing was i mean the sort of rumor mill was basically because it was like why did you get why'd you post this like really weird thing it was it was sort of weird because it was like this is something he was saying to his company but he published it and was like i want other leaders to learn from how what we did and everyone else was like you know so split that it wasn't like this great example of anything and then some some somebody on twitter and her name is erica joy she's a black woman on twitter and she was basically saying by the way the inside scoop of this is that he was like you know his hand was being forced the engineers walked out because he wasn't saying x y and z he wasn't saying black lives matter he wasn't the company did nothing when all the other companies were standing up and saying something and so he was being pushed and then this was his like tantrum back about like okay you forced me three weeks ago because the the weird thing is like three or four weeks ago he posted on twitter i want to un unequivocally say back black lives matter and here's you know here's why that's here's here's what's wrong in the world and how we should work to fix it and so she was basically saying like he didn't wanna say anything he was being pushed to say it engineers walked out so then he put that statement up but this is like the retaliation weeks later of like look that's not gonna happen again like that's not how our company's is gonna run if that is true and i'm going on glass door right now and go click in most recent if that's true then that's awesome i think that's baller i think that like what of him yeah of him if like someone threatens you like you know if you don't do this i'm out in most cases you should say alright bye right like just for that just like that i would say that's that's kind of the point i agree with you the most which i think we both believe you should run your company the way you want and then you should deal with the consequences of running your company that way rather than this general idea of everybody needs to run every company the same way which is the right way as dictated by the mob of twitter and the mob of you know x group and and then people doing shit that they don't actually even believe to be the right way to do things it's not even actually what they want to do but feeling like they're gonna get canceled or fired or whatever if they don't so i think the the the better world is people do what they actually think they should do and then let the chips fall where they may and then people will self select around around joining companies that that are the way they want to you know the type of company they wanna join and by the way i don't entirely buy that story simply because i'm on glass doors is like the one of the best place to get information on and learn all about a company typically the reviews are too good or too bad but you could so you gotta like to divide by half to get the middle and anyway i looked at the reviews i don't see a thing on that that is this is the the type of thing that that employee would quit or get fired over and that's the first thing they would complain about and i don't see one thing since march that relates to that topic well i think some of it's definitely i think there definitely was a walk out the question is did he do this because he learned oh the company feels this way and dis it made it made some decisions or is it truly like a kind of a a retaliation of response to to that don't know that part but i think they're the walk out part was sort of confirmed by lots of people who work there now i also would say you love glass i never use glass door i don't know anybody who rides on glass door i'm sure obviously people do but i don't know how on the pulse glass door as let's say i'm not sure it's like in the same way that i don't think yelp is i don't agree with yelp most of the time and i know what it's like in our company and i i know if i would agree with the glass door reviews of it either it's a signal it's not the answer it's a signal right but what you're saying is if nothing's there then it's a lack of signal yeah yeah i mean like it it it's a signal like for example if something on yelp has ten thousand reviews and they're all positive and something has only three reviews or rather ten thousand reviews and it's only okay versus ten reviews and they're all like perfect you're like what's going on here like this ten thousand thing actually might be pretty good if it's so popular you know what i mean like yeah it you you you don't look at the number you look at the a variety of factors and that's how i use glass door and i think that it's like a fantastic way to do figure it out very cool alright i gotta a run but interesting episode it's gonna be a different a very different episode got the tax thing and then we got just kind of random shoot the shit at the end so i think i think we kinda crushed it in the last episode although i didn't get a ton of feedback it just went out today okay we're gonna get i haven't gotten any w blow over which is what i was expecting yeah we're in the tweets okay i gotta go see you