#147 - How Sam Hacked Amazon's Book Rankings, A $600m Exit, And Crypto with Brother Aaaron

on this episode of my first million me and sam we talked about the idea of romance and romantic fiction books i feel like we talk about that a lot but we did it again because what had sold for six hundred million dollars so we got into watt pad the idea of romantic fiction and how you would build a business around that and a an experiment that sam ran in that space and how he made a best bestselling book in the romantic fiction category on amazon kindle we talked about an idea around the covid smell test and and at the end the last fifteen minutes we invited brother aaron back on to talk about his latest from the rabbit hole and so that's at the very end the last fifteen minutes alright enjoy this episode u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back so today's episode i thought we could dedicate because it's the inauguration day i just wanted to talk all about politics for the next two hours are you okay with that yeah people love that so i'd read a couple articles i think i know what i'm talking about i figured today strictly politics if you read a couple articles then i mean we have an expert so that's we're good then well i read the headlines of a bunch so i read the comments in reddit it i think i know what i'm doing so if it's okay with a brave you if it's okay with you we're gonna dedicate the entire episode to politics particularly our opinion and why that should be the rule the land i tweeted out a thing just a bunch of memes based celebrating trump's last day in office with like a bunch of funny trump moments over the last four years and i got three dms just now saying bro i i didn't follow you for politics you're like hey you said you tweet about business this is this is not business i was like well but it's also funny yeah i was like this is a joke this is not politics yeah like we'll see if they like that received you know we actually get a lot of compliments that we stay away from politics i wouldn't say i'm not a political person i wouldn't say i'm not not i don't know i'm pretty well i'm mildly interested i think you are too but we don't talk about it here because it's not really important and if we do do it i think it's from a relatively objective standpoint i know if i agree with any of that i personally don't think i tried not to spend any energy on it in my own personal life therefore i'm pretty badly uneducated on it therefore whenever i speak on it i'm kinda speaking out of turn but you know i think most opinions are quite uninformed also so i would say i'm just i'm right in there with everybody else of mostly uninformed bias i wanna bring one thing up last episode that i didn't make it it was you and sore you guys i heard talked a lot about religion right we had a segment on yeah creating any religion you just admittedly are a political guy but and i don't give a shit if you listeners think this is fake or real it's interesting to me and it's interesting to you i wanna sell like an idiot i'm like you know what big bitcoin are you familiar with like q on yeah like i don't spend a lot of time figuring out what the q on conspiracies are of the moment but i'm i'm aware of it yeah but do you know the origin no tell me about it so this is just someone who has listened to a sixty minute podcast and don't care if it's real fake whatever you believe whatever but basically it started i think in ford chan this right when trump got elected this guy just a an an anonymous guy no one knows who this person is he says that he has the highest level of clearance at the white house called q i guess it's q clearance so they come q and he starts writing these vague messages on four chan and he sends updates every couple weeks a couple months about what's gonna happen they're all relatively vague and they're kinda like puzzles and the people believe it so a lot of the people who storm the capital i believe they were cute folks but i just think that like just let's just be objective let's just who cares what he's saying or she's saying how crazy is it hold this cute and supposed to be a person i thought it's a group or like an idea person and these people are all followers and they they'll say like queues a patriot we love q you know q not gonna let us down it's probably fake right it's definitely fake it's definitely like a a young person they've made some predictions that are mildly true like for example like finance and hollywood is controlled by pe but you're saying it's a person i'm googling right now everything on googling says k is the umbrella term for a set of conspiracy theories and a kind of a a set of believers who believe you know for example there's the satanic war you know pe file sex ring keep reading it comes from one guy named q okay yeah q is the is the is the clearance patriot october twenty seventeen yeah he writes all these things and they believe that trump is like there i think like the savior or who's gonna like write a lot of the wrongs that q saying exist and so they like i guess technically like maybe he was right because q said that there like pe files is controlled or were powerful or something like that and like jeffrey epstein and so the fact that bill clinton wrote on jeff have epstein jet like you'd would be like oh wow he predicted it whatever yada yada but it's just crazy that a guy behind his computer is making this up i mean you guys i'm sorry if you believe this like this you you have to imagine you have to believe this is probably made up it's amazing that this person is convincing all these people do that i find that to be amazing it's crazy i hopefully this queue is selling his own t shirts if not who is i think that these guys are you know totally crazy but it it it would be interesting to know who is behind this and i bet there's you know elements of truth to their story like i bet i would believe you if you told me there is somebody with a high level of clearance or maybe it's like the it person or whatever like somebody who has some kind of access in government who whether for fun or out of their own kind of mental illness decides to propagate these conspiracy theories on four chan and i also believe that just like jeffrey epstein and his island of like young girls that clinton and whoever else we're going to look when there's powerful people powerful people do some pretty disgusting stuff and whether whether it's a satanic worshiping you know sex i don't know but i would bet that this person does have clearance that there is somebody who's clearance who is posting this stuff and that there are elements of truth to some of the things that they do now people are gonna be like you're crazy i can't believe you're validating this stuff i'm not saying it's all true but i wouldn't be surprised if if there was such a person doing such a thing maybe but the reason why this interests me is it's the same reason why like does it interest you to who created bitcoin oh yeah for sure it's really funded i should say it interests me but i also i'm glad it's an anonymous person and i wouldn't if i knew their identity i would mount them type of but just from like i wanna watch a documentary that speculate like it's fun no yeah because this is like movie shit you know what i mean it's like oh this mysterious creator creates this digital gold becomes a billionaire it's like you know that's cool that's like a sci book and it's real life and then same thing with this qa on thing it's like there's underground forum of internet trolls and hackers they actually crack conspiracy but nobody takes them seriously and everybody discredit them but you know blah you know i just think that that's like movie shit and therefore i can't look away i'm lu rubber you know looking at it even though i know i should probably just ignore so i've been fascinated by this and it's cool to me just like the same thing with like the ross right who all was behind silk road that stuff's quite interesting to me this whole queue thing you know i got into it since the the storming of the capital i got curious about it fascinating very interesting how to do with what you guys were talking about religion and then let me tell you one more tangent before we get it and i've got a couple ideas i wanna run by you got i sound i kinda am embarrassed to say this what am i about to say you know how we are talking about collectible yes and we are talking about different categories that are interesting mh so i'm a big true crime fan right i like date line i like q i mean that's all like i like silk road stuff i love like these mysteries are just fun it's just like a man version of a soap opera i watched the night stalker on netflix about serial killer about that serial killer richer ramirez horrible guy rape kids killed people i think he hurt thirty people he's the guy who held up his hand and you see like the of the pent you know talking about that picture no i've no idea what you're talking about alright type in night crawl i bet you know this photo it's like a very famous picture of him in court sorry night stalker night stalker okay night stalker okay i see the guy yep and i see the hand thing yes i've seen this before yeah it's like real famous whatever and i started thinking like i'm a huge fan of american history this night stalker thing was a big thing of history you know what what else was was ted bundy everyone knows that name named ted bundy yep everyone names knows the named jeffrey dah charles manson i kind of was curious i'm like well these guys are in prison can you buy stuff from them like can you buy like a charles manson like piece of art or can you buy like if you trying to wear like a a uni obama hoodie no i don't want like i don't want like memorabilia i want like artifacts like historical artifacts for example you could buy the confession letter or like when bernie made off went to jail you could purchase like his metz baseball hat you could buy even his underwear like have i was old enough i would totally would've have bought something like that i've been so fast because like we love crime in america right obviously true crime is the top podcast stuff like i'm incredibly fascinated and i went and found a couple auctions that do sell this stuff it's so weird and so fascinating it's kinda neat is that kinda of creepy that i'm saying i might collect that yeah and actually so our our friend ramon had this idea not too long ago that's totally tangent related but you said true crime and it reminded me which was to do true romance which are basically like a blend between the true crime genre and romantic kind of fiction like you know whether it's fifty shades of gray or or recently like the number one shell in netflix bridge ten it's kind of just like this like you know romance thing that like everyone in my life is like oh my god i love bridget and i love this dude on bridget the duke of hastings things and so he had this idea of taking you know creating these fictional stories whether it's audio or in text format and making a subscription service but have the content be like true crime where it's like you take these crimes but then you like you take these famous names but then you like do the romance version of what's going on behind the scenes or you just make it up altogether it's like the clinton and le story and you just use their names you use like either their names or names like theirs to to do this splitting and c you know that's how it fifty shades gray started right like u it's a fan fiction off of twilight so there's the twilight series which was kind of like romance slash vampire stuff and then fifty shades array was just somebody in a fan fiction forum on the internet was like i wrote this thing and they used the names you know from twilight which was is like bella and i forgot what the dude's names are but it's like whatever our team team john and team harry or whatever their names are and basically they just use that and they wrote kind of like a ra version of it and that was fifty shades of gray but then by the time the book came out they changed the names they couldn't use that ips they changed the names just something else altogether i'm like ninety five percent sure that's the story behind fifty cents gray which is the most best bestselling book in like last decade or something let's move on from my creepy my creepy serial killer shit yeah yeah and let's actually talk about that because that's actually something i brought up so our friend ramon i had this idea for a little while and he actually raised money for it and then he gave the money back to investors because he actually started working on something else that took off and it was called the well doesn't matter what it was called but yeah could explain the app another time but it was in the space of true romance and i actually ran tests with him and we collected hundreds of dollars of subscription revenue in a matter of three days doing this test i help him set it up and what you would get is you a first story of a romance thousand words of a romance story that was also audio and we paid someone one fifty bucks to do it we said for part two sign up and that got me interested in watt pad do you know watt pad mh so i've been filing this company watt pad and we brought it up a bunch of times i think so did you see that they were acquired today for six hundred million dollars no i i i think found i was i was just on the founder twitter they replied to my tweet or something recently so i was just checking them out they sold a neighbor wow six hundred million dollars amazing yeah so watt pad was based and i think toronto they had roots in hollywood and silicon valley they had a hundred and sixty million users they raised a ton of money so i don't know if the exit is considered a home run they raised a hundred and seventeen million dollars and the whole idea was that there's this group of women who love romance novels and there's a lot of amateur writers out there and they created a place where they can meet and share stories are free and they did not make a lot of money i think at the time of sale only twenty five million dollars in revenue they were only making money through advertising i believe which i think for them was really dumb but eventually in two thousand sixteen they established watt pads studios which was striking licensing deals with the most popular stories and authors and they would help turn them into movies and then they would buy the ip from them and turn it into stuff but the biggest challenge for their business was that the company didn't own the underlying ip the writers did and so to lock in some of that value w had to persuade some of these people to partner with them and turned it into movies yada yada very very very very fascinating and so my question to you oh and one more thing the company raised a little bit of money from china literature i brought that company up a while ago china there's a company in china that is doing this exact same thing it's just called china literature obviously the translation is a little funky it's only in china they do close to one billion dollars in sales on a platform that allows readers a writers to share stories with their readers it's wild it's a conglomerate it's owned by a checkout so in this article about the sale they say w which is like fourteen years old so sells to neighbor which is a south korean like kinda like media conglomerate they also have like a messaging app that's really really popular and they said they plan to incorporate it with web tune have you seen web tunes dot com no so web tunes dot com is watt pad but for just creating comic strips so anybody can go publish a comic strip and other people come read them and then you could look and like this the top one on there right today so it's wednesday true beauty is the top one on there it has thirty one million likes it's on episode number a hundred and twenty nine if you click it you just sort of start scrolling and it's like i mean i wish this is not a podcast i wish you could to see this i'm literally gonna share my screen so you can see and react to this but look at the shit so let me explain what i'm saying it's like a clearly like a is this a an asian company yes south korean okay so they've american these asian women and they make them look like hot like big boobs big butt so it's like clearly there's some like sex appeal thing going on here what this say so this says so this guy sees the girl he's says what on earth there's a celebrity here she turns around while holding her starbucks coffee and it says hey what diet are you on you've gotten super hot i saw your instagram you've become even prettier and it's just people like complimenting this pretty girl and she's on the breakup diet and it's like i don't know what this is but look at is like and like how like this is just like mobile optimized for web so i feel like something like this can exist it looks great yeah exactly like i know how if this is an amateur publishing this i can see why this has thirty one million views and like pages and pages comes four thousand comments on today's episode is crazy that's pretty cool i really like this this is like you don't really hear too much about this in the west but honestly like somebody could do this for the us could do this for india somebody could do this for the philippines like you could build a business that does exactly this in different regions and like the way that's one way to start it would be to like just honestly kinda rip the content off one of these sites translate it or have it modified but just take the core stories and seed your platform using this type of content i've actually brought this up before website say again i think there's another website there's a bunch of these there's one called i think it's called lit rad like literature rad is it called lit rad or is it called it's it's called something like the lit erotic lit erotic do you have similar web on that i think it gets like fifty million monthly unique fifty million monthly visits and look at the time spent on the website sixteen minutes that's like an eternity for times average visit duration are you kidding me like that's insane and it's like a geo city look website right like there's nothing look at this it looks like i mean just literally a black and white website with text and blue links blue like urls to different different things this was the mvp of how we were telling at least i was telling ramon to do his his site was just like hey make page like this that's what ours was you wanna see it yeah let's let's pull it up he was like let me put in my email and just get the next story in my inbox every day or text it to me or something like that so i you know you can hook him but it's really simple it's like people just wanna read there's a lot of people both that just wanna read stories and i think fan fiction works so that's a lot of what was on watt pad i think kind of this like romance slash like literature erotic that works i know somebody who's doing this for audio erotic basically and so it's like it's like a podcast version of this it's kinda like two characters reading you know like kinda like doing the dialogue of the scene and it's you know it's supposed to get you all hot and bothered and i bet you that shit's gonna work like i don't think these are big vc back things click your zoom thing what is this so this is short but romantic dot com this was your your landing page i built us so people could check this out so short but romantic dot com daily short romantic stories exactly the header is perfect guy next door and is this girl who's literally taking her shirt off you can't see anything yet but she's got her hands at the right places and this guy who's like super into her i see audio and then i see the story yeah click it you don't see the story i do see the story yeah oh click audio or click that button do the audio is hilarious already who's reading this we paid a guy that's so good and then did you like the story hey there i'm carly carly is a fake person yeah yeah k i'm carly carly the fake person i'm the managing editor in of short romantic we put out one new story day do you want part two of the story great it's ready click the button below so this is a great example of what a mvp looks like for an idea because most people don't know where to start it they're like i to make like an app oh shit okay let me go find a guy who knows how to make apps and like pay them oh man they want twenty thousand dollars like in this case this is a perfect mvp for this and just for the record this was all ramon idea i just we were sitting at my office one day brainstorming it and i go we go i go watch this i'm just gonna make it right now we made it in thirty minutes and got sales at night yeah i think probably like literally i think fifty people who listen to this are gonna go do this thing because every time we talk about this two more people go start this business a few people have have had success with businesses like these they've came back and told us and i bet you more people will do it after this so let me ask you this sean i've got two questions for you and you have experience because twitch has been acquired so my question is this i think they are the leaders in this space after they get acquired do you think that that means there's more opportunity for ups starts and second watt pad was terribly horribly under monetized they had something like a hundred and fifty monthly users and they made twenty five million dollars they could be saying like well we're building up the audience if we're gonna monetize i guess that's an okay stick because they actually did have the audience but how would you have actually have made this more money because china literature has eight hundred million dollars in revenue there's a way to do it yeah there's a way to do it i actually don't even think that's the more interesting question because you'd kinda need to look at their assets and figure it out but the first part of what you asked i am a hundred percent agreement with it so i have this theory in general that it that's eight or nine years into a company's life is the perfect time to go disrupt that company and why because that's usually when either they get acquired they're trying to go public the focus on profitability they've you know scaled up their employees and now like innovation has kinda slowed down and it's about managing what you have and really just like you like handling all the different problems that you now have you know i don't know how much time at what pad is probably spent on fraud or spam or like inappropriate content like as a startup up you just don't need to think about and so in general i've seen that eight or nine years into a company's life is when the ups starts see openings it's also where technology just changes enough enough stuff in the world changes that there's more opportunity so in this case what i would try to do is un bundle what pad so i'd go what pad and i would look at what are the most popular types of content is it true crime is it romance is it fan fiction and it's actually just harry potter spin offs that people just you know harry potter fans just wanna keep reading about ron and hermione like going and making babies or whatever like you know what is the content that's actually most popular here and then i would un bundle that and so like i think what you guys did is a perfect example of an un unsettling which is to say cool romantic fiction content is super popular we're gonna be the romantic fiction shop we're gonna brand ourselves accordingly we're gonna run ads to get users here also maybe change the model so they did a good job of basically being a marketplace where or like a user generated content platform where you know millions of people are writing stuff most of its crap and then a few things rise to the top i think what you guys did here which was guaranteed quality content behind a subscription is a really cool way to attack the problem from a different angle and i would just be brainstorming different models that work that go all in on one of the genres that you un bundle from what pen maybe true crime i'll give if you're thinking about doing this i'll give you a little bit more feedback because i actually research this quite a bit i think romance novels next to business is the hottest has the most movement on amazon kindle and there's subcategories and like i'm just gonna say this but i'm not saying like it's cool or whatever but like there's some really weird and subcategories for example women who wanna have sex with wear tell the story you guys published a blog about how you created a i don't know what the idea was like let me see if we can game the best seller charts or something right tell the story what you did yeah so we wanted to become a best bestselling author because i knew a guy who was writing books on how to sleep at women and he was not a ladies man but he was just pla patronizing people and i did it because i actually thought that what he was doing was highly unethical and stupid and not right but amazon knew about it and they were gonna like let it fly so like okay we're gonna do something funny just to like prove our point and so we wrote a best selling book in the romance novel category we gave it a fake woman's name a fake name called captivating claire and what was the book called it's taken down you can't find it okay captivating oh that was a name of the book okay yeah captivating clear and we got fake reviews all fiber and we got to number one in the category for a few hours and it worked out well it way someone's asked me is that it captivating bidding looks like it yeah that's it it's down it's still there but looks like it is there yeah it is still there you can buy that i don't know what they did we we did our part because like the publisher we told the owner of this what we are doing and they went along with it and afterwards we did our part to take it down i don't know how it's still up there what did you learn from this tesla that it's easy to game amazon kit i mean this was how long do i do i did those three years ago so the rules how you become number one i missed that part well what did you do to become number one it's about velocity of buys and you can get a bunch of friends there's like rings of these kindle writers there's like a whole rings where they go alright my books out everyone go buy it and then you just do that with all one another and then you can get fake reviews on amazon how about how many buyers do you think it takes or did it take at that time what are we talking i don't remember ten thousand no it was about five hundred for us gotcha it it was about five hundred and you gotta game the category so there's was like a whole way to game i mean like if you just look at like amazon rick yeah this for sure is not ours because ours had reviews and this says there's no customer reviews i don't know what's going on here did these names carter v he's damaged sophie wood she's a virgin my my friend he's best friend my best friend was a josh wood so but so here's my point though there's all these categories of like women who wanna hook up with billionaires women who wanna lost with wear because there's category of women who wanna have sex with wear women who want to hook up with military men with people have different ethnicities there's people who want it rough i mean there's all types of categories that you could do this for amazing i think this is amazing and the reason i say amazing is because it just shows like there's just quote that i love that i always repeat to people which is i forgot who what's the guy's name who wrote the bar on letters gary hal was that his he said this thing in a talk once that stood out to me he goes never has more money been lost than trying to market what people should do instead of what they want to do it's such a big lesson especially for silicon valley and engineers and stuff like that like there's a lot of really idealistic people who wanna be successful they want their product to be used and they want more customers they wonder why they're not growing and it's because they built something that they think people should do rather than what they want to do and what this is is the thought experiment played out of what do people really want it's like people wanna read trash romantic fiction about a a woman who is you know being pursued by this hot muscular billionaire out i wouldn't even say it that way do we think that porn is good i mean i think that like some porn could be healthy and it teaches you with yada it just seems that maybe this is like the women's version of porn this has helped people get off so i wouldn't even call trash i would just say it is what it is and it had there's a place in it i'm this something to you it it feels like yeah this is what it is and there's a place for this and people want this and who's it to judge most people the reality is most people if we were to go talk about this in you know the middle of you know some conference we're were gonna talk on stage some people would be offended some people would be horrified some people would be like that's trash that's a waste of time that's blah blah blah most people talk about is not what most people think about most people are not really aware and and i think most people don't really talk about the fact that the products that work the products that spread are tapping into things that people want tinder works because oh man i could just see a bunch of pictures of nearby girls swipe right with a flick of the thumb i might be able to like you know hook up tonight with somebody if i wanted to that's my tinder works and like we'd like to think that no dating should involve all these cool variables that are really matching you based on your personality and your values and it's like that's not what works simplicity spreads and like the fastest path to the seven deadly since is what spreads the fastest that's a good rule i would just say if it makes you like more powerful more money look better naked or have better sex like it's probably gonna work well yeah exactly alright what else do you got what else should we talk about we we did politics and porn so i think you know that's that's off to a good start well you had nit circus i don't wanna talk i was gonna do research on that one i i you might actually know much more about it than i i just knew i know a little bit but i thought like i i was gonna it piggyback off your stuff also have i talked about pickle ball on here no we haven't go ahead okay a lot of people in the south where i'm living now and where i'm from but a lot of people are gonna be like oh pickle ball like that's so old of course you guys are acting actually like you're talking about some brand new thing i get it it's been around for a bit i found out about it like nine months ago and when somebody guy was like yeah i just sold my company for ten million dollars selling you know pickle ball equipment and i was like what what all equipment and he's like yeah pickle i was like what the fuck is that and he's like and i actually still don't even to know how you play but i'll tell you what i do know is that this sport is like exploding and popularity see some exploding it is exploding sorry if you guys laugh yeah it's already it's new to me because it wasn't popular in california until it's probably isn't out but in austin they have pickle ball courts now throughout the city and they are always full dude what is it it's like full body ping pong what is this it's like tennis wait look first question have you played while i have the equipment we got a pickle ball like membership like there's like a bar nearby that has a bunch of courts and you pay money to rent and they're building up this billionaire guys building out a pickle ball league here when you pay like a country it's like a country club only for pickle this is how popular it is it's like tennis but the court is half the length so it's much shorter the ball is like a wolf ball if you're not american and a wolf ball is like a really light plastic ball and you just kinda hit it back and forth there's some rules that like there's some like basic rules like you gotta stand here when you serve and for the first two hits you gotta stand this other place but then after that it's just tennis so is it okay so is it basically tennis but you don't have to run around so much and be as athletic is that what the thing is is like easier it's tennis but you don't have to be a skilled great okay i love it it's not hard to hit it over the that it's not hard to have a rally anyone can have a rally it's easy to have a rally so it's more fun okay so i'm really interested in this and i'm really interested in just generally new sports so let me tell you three things that i think are interesting first that story of a guy who was selling the equipment that also means that you know anytime there's like an emerging sport you just take all the shit that exists for the existing sports and you say cool there's gonna be a leader in this category so blogs about information rules leagues equipment that stuff those are a bunch of opportunities the other side of it is like who's gonna take advantage of this so for example if you're bar stool sports what if bar stool like look we can own pickle no one's looking here it's still early a bunch of our readers like pickle ball it's definitely kinda like a bro right it's a bro thing seems like you could play with a beer in your hand okay so let's say if i'm bars stool i'm looking at pickle and i'm saying ten percent of our audience thinks pickle was the shit and ninety percent has never played and never heard of it so here's what we're gonna do we are gonna go by the league right now and we're gonna own the lead we're gonna basically own the nfl pickle you know we're also gonna like sort of be the lead sponsor and we're just gonna go all in pickle it's gonna be like half joke and half like real content and real money behind this thing i think there's even big companies that could do well with this if you're twitch or youtube you know why not go pick up the rights to to pick a bowl for example the last thing is there's other sports that are like this are you familiar with twenty twenty cricket no what is that alright so this is a crazy story you're gonna you're gonna love this and i don't even know the full story so re i'll just give you those the surface you know cricket matches like a normal cricket game and crickets like obviously super popular in india and like pakistan and the uk they like cricket australia likes cricket a normal ticket match can last like five days so it's like it's you know this worked back in the day when like you would kinda play the sport and then like the sun would set there was no lights there's no like you know if i can know no outdoor electricity so people would just like go home for the day and they would come back and resume the game the next day and these would be like five day matches so obviously this didn't like keep up with the way the world change and the way people's attention spans were shrinking and like tv providers were like you know how the hell do we show this like this thing you know takes hours every day and then like spills over into the next day and the next day and the next day so these people got together they formed something called twenty twenty cricket and it's basically a shortened version of cricket that only lasts i think like two hours or three hours or something like that i'm gonna get a bunch of the details around but the high level idea is they took cricket three to five day match and they shrunk it down into like an accelerated two to three hour actual sport who did this ec is that like a company oh there's like a board i don't understand how this was is like a board yeah i don't know exactly who invented it a but you can check that you can look it up but basically like it is owned by an end tea it's always kinda confusing to figure out how it's square group i think it's like a business i think you group people basically like made this thing and created this lease so the guy the people who own it it's called england and wales cricket board and they have a chairman they have a ceo i don't know if it's it's weird i don't know how the entity is structured and so this this got really popular so twenty twenty cricket i think is probably more popular than normal cricket except for maybe some of the like once every few years big matches between countries sort of like the olympics and then a bunch of the star players were like shit we get paid more if we go play twenty twenty and so they started going to play twenty and so it's like what so you you look at baseball today right in america and you wonder like is somebody gonna do this for baseball baseball like this the most fucking boring sport golf right like you have like these kind of spin off variants like skins matches and golf or pro tournaments and golf that like get a lot of attention in boxing now there's the youtuber boxing celebrity boxing is like a new variation baseball maybe somebody's gonna do like the short and form of baseball that's like more home run it's like you know sort like bigger boobs and bigger butts like hey how do you do more home runs less time spent and and whatever it's like what's that movie you that movie i'm thinking about basketball baseball yeah it's i was thinking about this when i thinking about spike i'm like how do we basketball all this somebody's gonna do a basketball or i think that would be really fun if somebody tried to basketball all this yeah i was thinking a lot about that and i was like man that is pretty interesting there's a great book that i've read i don't know if it's up here so this person that i admire because they're just like funny looking is bernie a have i told you about him yes so formula one was kinda rag tag in the seventies and he organized it and he formed this company he formed a a a governing body and he was the chairman of the governing body and then b he formed a sub company that was responsible for getting all the sponsorship for the governing body which would then distribute it to even teams he was like yeah and that sub company gets fifty percent of the money by the way right and he what but he was that sub so he kinda like pull the fast one and and now he's worth four billion dollars and and so worked out really well we just gotta do this for pickle ball now well okay so so there's other ones too like these like little french sport so a brain just put this in the chat have you ever heard of the sport u alright so this is indian sport and it's like the most fucking indian sport there is because it's a sport played with zero ball zero scale zero equipment the only thing so here's how it works imagine a volleyball game so you have two teams on two sides of the net but there's like i don't like ten people on each side or something there's like a lot of people it's a bunch of indian news with the shirts off what happens is it's kinda like red rover where one guy from one side has to cross under the met and go to the other side and he's trying to like he's trying to tag as many people as he can and then he's gotta get back to his side and they're trying to like stop him here's the catch and here's why the game is called company which is the whole time he has to keep continuously saying the word company so he's he goes over and he goes company company company company company company company company company he has to keep saying it in one without like taking a pause or a breath and as soon as he runs out of air he's out if he's on the other side so they're trying to hold him onto this side he's trying to tag as many again and get back to his side of the thing that's a joke no one would wanna care about that and that's the thing that popular sport that's that that's the thing that pickle ball would have to overcome which is like is this just gonna be darts shuffle board and bowling or wrestling papers scissors is around yeah or is this gonna be like tennis because right now in my mind it's still a little bit like darts it's like a drinking game i think it can be darts i think it should embrace being darts in the same way that like you know they took the spelling bee and the spelling bee i mean literally couldn't be a do thing in the world you know they put it on espn they gave it production value they tell the back stories of these kids and watching the spelling bee is a great three days like that i've watched many years of the national script spelling bee i don't know if you have but that shit is amazing you're genetically predisposed to like that i think so yeah i think that there's a bunch of french sports i think you could just embrace being the french sport and just put it like go direct to consumer you know behind a pay wall basically with the french sport yeah it's gonna be interesting to see what happens with pickle ball to see if it keeps up with the pandemic demand but it is pretty cool it's not new to anyone who's lived here for a while but since i've been in austin it's news to me i no idea what it was and it's just weird but let me tell you one more interesting thing at the top of the hour at three o'clock from me i got asked to go and interview this woman who's making a hundred grand a month from only fans nice is that wild apparently she's like a marketing wiz and has done a really good job and you know it's even listen to how crazy this is by the way shout out to a listener from the pod for making only fans metrics dot com go to only fans dot com and you could just type in a name of any only fans creator and you could see how much they're earning that's cool didn't know about that do you follow world star on instagram of course world star the s i follow all have you noticed that a lot of the sponsored world star ads are only fan pages like the individuals themselves yes these women with these only fan pages are buying drops on world star it's so nuts it's so brilliant i mean it's not brilliant because like this is exactly what they should be doing but it's just need to see that this industry and these young entrepreneurs like these women who like you wouldn't expect i don't know we're gonna stereotype like i didn't think they'd be asked if sophisticated case they are they totally are yeah i think it's amazing i did expect it because i think that they are smart and they're kinda like baller in their own way and it they just needed the tools like the traditional kinda like industry for this stuff really had them at a disadvantage and as soon as those the power structure changed and their power was in their hands they became like super entrepreneurial very smart marketers and have done really well by the way i just saw on the world startup hip up this thing that i've just been seeing advertised everywhere i bet this company is spending like five million dollars a month right now i see them on tiktok i see them on what's it called it's called dose of roses dose dash roses dot com you might have seen it they have this giant rose teddy bear like it's like a huge stuffed animal made of roses that you can get for valentine's day and it costs sixty dollars and they've been selling this thing like on every channel you could see like leading up valentine's day they just show these really hot girls happy with their like kinda like average looking boyfriend handing them this like amazing wait i these real roses i'm looking at their website now i don't know i haven't haven't got one but and i think it kinda like breaks apart or something like that so it's basically just a bunch of different variations of roses and they have yeah know three hundred thousand followers on instagram and i just feel like they are really clever with their marketing so i've seen them they they market basically through memes memes on instagram memes on twitter memes on on tiktok i mean and yeah i bet this company is doing really well and they're spending a ton of money right now so what are gonna ask your only fence fair what are you gonna what what's gonna be be your hard hitting interview questions i don't know what should i ask her i would try to figure out the marketing tactics like how are you growing this you know basically i was just trying to figure out like is this awesome for you like are you like dude this is amazing i used to do x you know i used to make x and put in y and now i make ten x and i put in one tenth of y and that's what i wanna hear and so i'd love to just hear kinda like what were you doing before how hard was that what were the downsides of that how much were you making and then now how much more are you making and how much easier is it what you're doing or how much more enjoyable she has a bio and she has like a website like a safer work website that just explains everything she does it's called i'll i'll see his called anyway she's oh here knowing less dot com so the word knowing and then l e s s dot com and if i you click her about page she says that she got started because she has the number one post of all time on reddit subreddit gone wild and that is how she started her career that's funny by the way this website is not when i expected it to be when you yeah it's like a proper blog yeah it looks like she's talking about like history or we're like you know medieval france or something like that like this is this weird looking website to me yeah and she has a survey section where she asked her people serve it her folks surveys in order to learn about our customers yeah is wild okay so that's cool what else let me do one quick idea and then we're gonna bring on my brother law brother aaron to give us his latest internet rabbit hole backed by popular demand people liked his making fun of tim ferris and silicon valley people and how kind of obnoxious we could be and they liked his kinda tax rabbit hole last time so we'll see what he's got maybe he was a one hit wonder i don't know what we'll find out but i have one quick idea my friend is a doctor i think there's a business opportunity here but i don't have time to do it he's like there are a lot of people out there right now who have had covid and they're fine but they lost their kinda sense of smell he's like you know to get it back takes quite a long time it could take months to recover your sense of smell so you have like you know i think four hundred thousand people have died of covid i think you know how many tens of millions of people have had it in to some level of severity whether they tested ford it or not i don't know but let's say you now have a new market of millions of people who have lost one of their i don't how many senses we have what five or six one of their five or six senses that we have can you help them get it back and he's basically like there's this kinda like medical procedure like this there's like a series of like exercises you could do to accelerate the return of your sense of smell oh my god he's like but it's done in such a medical way he's like someone should just make this as a kit and he's like if anybody wants to do this like i can tell you like the right process basically a step by step kit like what you should do kind of each day he's like but there's just like you just need some essential oils and like you need a a certain structure of how you're gonna do in a certain dilution for it i think somebody should make this and i was like dude that as a great idea it would be so easy to market and it wouldn't be a long lasting business but like you can make half a million to a million and a half dollars of profit i believe in the next twelve months if you just did this one thing so i thought that was a cool idea we have friends that own essential oil companies why haven't they done anything think like this i think they're just busy i sent it to one of them i think this is like small for them they're big now but i think that you know for somebody who's got nothing but time on their hands i think this is a cool idea i'm just fooling around on this tool i had to look up how many people search covid lost smell or anything like that not too much i know it's popular because on tiktok one of the most viral tiktok nowadays is this one where you like take an orange with peel on and you put it on your stove and you burn the orange on the bottom if you've lost us a smell do this to get it back and then you like do that and then you like i don't know sniff it like a bunch of times or throughout the day and it helps accelerate the return of your census smell like all the comments are like oh my god i thought this was a joke but this actually works and there's like millions and millions of views on this thing which means it's getting shared that's a great idea think this is like a hundred million dollar idea but it could be a a good way to get your foot in the door and makes up in the neat yeah exactly i think you know this could make i think it can make half a million to a million dollars of profit if done well easily make tens of thousands of dollars a profit i dig it we gotta come up with a cute name for it and then we're gonna advertise wherever these roses company bear roses over rid of the hell that things called throw roses alright cool sam you gotta jump yeah i gotta jump aaron's coming on now i will talk to you all in a week okay so back by populated demand brother aaron how did it feel to get so many tweets and all the feedback man it was great and one day i went from four followers to five followers on twitter so i was said twenty five percent in one day if my bidding one much would be great anything is possible kg tell people tell me about your bitcoin thing i think this is funny by the way so you out a bunch of bitcoin but you jumped in kinda like head first a little bit reckless so explain your bitcoin thing and then we're gonna go down whatever rabbit hole you got for us this time okay so this was like maybe the second week of first week of december we talked and you said something about oh dude get bitcoin and i was like what's bitcoin right like i know what it is like the word right and so i looked at it and i was like oh man like that's a lot of money in i was like well well what was the price back then i think it was like eighteen eighteen point two eighteen point three and so got one and went down a miniature bitcoin rabbit hole and started being very dis distressed of he currencies and started to understand what it was about and then a few weeks later like i'm gonna say how much of course but i was like bro this bitcoin is messing me up man and so i just sort of like stopped and then there was a a week or two towards late december where it just exploded and i couldn't believe it and so then i called you it was like bro man to put that bitcoin right you doubled your money so far so there's a lot of people in bitcoin who some people like it because it's like this is like a good store or value it's like a digital version of gold some people fit love the technology they're like this is great to do a a trust system a decentralized financial system and then some people are like oh my god the government is printing money like crazy i don't trust fiat currency and you know i i feel like for you you're a man who loves a conspiracy so you know you this is like introducing a fish to water here what was it that hooked to you i think it was like the whole don't trust the government and no get me wrong i love america i love the military shout out to the troops but the government and the military and the government in the country are two different things and so when you started to sort of dig into the budget deficit being twenty five trillion twenty six trillion and twenty seven trillion and just kind of us living and understanding about inflation and so you'll go oh okay well you know things go up two or three percent a year and it's really that your money's being the base and so when i looked into that that conspiracy was all about okay get out of fiat and get into bitcoin as you know i got into gold silver so i'm also a stack and a h in one so it's two for one and so anything that's not a dollar if you give me a million dollars i might just slap it out your hand man you know i went real estate gold silver bitcoin pizza but i don't want your paper man what ra hole have you been going down lately because you told me you said alright i got a new one i'm ready i've been down a rabbit hole i'm just coming out for air what rabbit have you been down i don't if i'm gonna like this one what will you you tell me what it is dude like for all the listeners when i went to this rabbit hole i didn't have any facial hair and now i looked straight mu over here man so i went down the second residency second passport rabbit hole because people like you sam soul like the sort of the tech people that i know have left san francisco so they'll go to you know to austin and sam case we're in your case they'll go outside of the city and they're doing that to to live better be it oh i can actually afford a house so it actually not based aid income tax i can have all this space and so i took it a step further because i used to live in texas and you still have federal income tax in texas so you still have to pay whatever that rate is and if you're a big ball and you're paying thirty forty percent of your income i took a step back and i went down this rabbit hole of well what if i didn't live here right and so when i was looking into what a second residency and second passport means it's a way to take your lifestyle to in indonesia to a mexico to panama as the latin athena say and then being able to if you are a tech entrepreneur like you like sam and all these guys you can make that same amount and actually not pay any property taxes or any federal income taxes and your life can be better to explosive better from your time in indonesia indonesia from my time in indonesia you know that's a fact is it better because stuff is cheaper there so you can live like a king like when i lived in i lived in china i finished high school in china and we had a a private driver we had a live in maid who would clean everything who would cook everything every single day in indonesia same thing we had a driver we had a live in maid when you lived in indonesia you had a live in made can you share what you paid for somebody who and they were happy this was not like this is not slavery this was somebody who wanted this job to work in the city and they wanted to to basically work with a family like yours they would clean and on the weekends that would go home or or send send money back to the family where in the countryside can you say what you were paying at that time yeah yeah man and i actually this is something that me and sister talk about i think that we only paid we paid what the rate was and it was like a hundred and twenty hundred and thirty dollars we should have paid triple that explain per one oh per month per month not yeah number day not per day not per week and it's more that at that time this was ten years ago we really didn't understand it's not that we were trying to be cheap or trying to take advantage but we would just ask other x expat yeah we're we're were paying the same rate or ten percent more than what the going rate was it's just that the going rate is ridiculously low unbelievably low dude it was incredibly low at the time of course as you know no kids so it's not like she did much work because we would be at work all day come back and you know she makes some dinner and it was great but those are things that if you have a second residency or a second passport and it's not very difficult to get one of those that what you could do is live like a celebrity there for what you're making here and it's not as easy as just oh i'm just gonna get a claim taking can go there there's some work do you have to do why do you need a passport why not just go on vacation a lot of people go to bali right now and they work from bali why do need a passport to panama or anywhere else so a passport or a residency visa would give someone say who's listening to this program the chance to work in those countries so if you wanted to work that's a way to get income there's also access to health insurance there so these are the two things that americans think about oh man i'm gonna lose mail health insurance oh man i'm lose my job yeah but you have a password for a residency what you can do is avoid those okay so that's the big difference between visa when just going through all this covid thing thanks sean and seeing what's happening with you know think capital with the riots and the protests you know that have happened in the last you know ten months covid has happened america's he is kinda dicey man like for the inauguration i think the listeners know they had twenty thousand troops and tanks for president biden this isn't like the dominican republic man right and so i'm just sort of thinking about this stuff never happened when i was younger and now it's very politically juice here right like you can't post this thing or your friends will be fringe you you can't say this when you'll get fired and it used to not be like that so there's kind of this little shift in america which is all good you've said one thing before about entitlement because you live in san francisco right now i personally believe the reason you're is to a second passport does not even for the tax savings it's not even for the greater lifestyle i think you're sick of the entitlement of san francisco tell the people what you believe about the entitlement of san francisco dude here's my hot take and i hope you are ready for this san francisco and i've been all around the world all around america the most beautiful city in america with the worst people and that's because everyone here is entitled to everything you have rich people that are entitled you have four people inside this you have homeless people entitled this you have hispanics black everyone is this is my space get out here your kids are too loud stop making noise and it's for someone like me who's from text this or someone like sam from saint louis people are not liked that there and so if you offend anyone they can call the cops they can do this they because that now this stuff hasn't happened to me but i see it it's just that everyone here i'm all about equality but they're just like look my kids like should also have everything so you gotta give it to me that's all good because it's it's my choice to be here or not but the second residency or the second passport can help you avoid san franciscan right there's a great talk by apologies on youtube or might be a a blog post but i think he gave it as a talk as well called exit voice and basically what he's saying is like you know and people think oh it's a democracy so you know you have a voice you have a vote you have a voice and that's what makes america great and what gives you the you know the chance for change is that you have a voice here his point is you know this is the really dumb down simplification of it but his his point is hey you know what's better than a voice of the ability to exit meaning if you can leave if you can vote with your feet that is a much more powerful factor for change and competition and driving like you know different governments to treat you well then you having a voice where they can either listen to you they can ignore you you can kind of keep waving your your fist in the air but do nothing right now for example we see people leaving for austin for miami for places they either have you know in the meantime san francisco is talking about hey california you're talking about like we're gonna increase the wealth tax and then you have like companies walking out the door you have investors walking out the door have entrepreneurs is leaving because san francisco and california is actively making things worse while these other places are making it better and the thing i think is really smart is have you been following this mayor of miami francis watt as you know it bro so he is doing what i think you know he's like mister steal your girl out there so he is basically saying as california every time california does something dumb he personally rights a letter to an influential person saying come out to miami i would love to have you yesterday he was talking you know elon musk has been trying to do his boring company where he's drilling tunnels onto the ground and in california you he runs into bottlenecks and bureaucracy bureaucracy and all this stuff the mayor tweets out of them and goes come do this in miami we're ready for you and like we'll we we'll lay out the red carpet cup we would love for to have you here we would love for you to be doing this this project here and and elon responded he goes if the governor and then the mayor are both on board things can go real quick and the governor responded also let's talk and so this guy is recruiting coach k at the mcdonald's all american camp these guys recruiting entrepreneurs out of california out of san francisco because now they have an option to exit and go somewhere else because you're not tied to the kind of silicon valley network because hey everybody's kind of gone remote everybody's moved and that has opened up the door it's something that in all of the research i did on youtube bear us one guy named andrew henderson no matt capitalist shout out to this guy he would say don't go where you're treated better go where you're treated did best and so what texas is doing what florida is doing is they're saying hey look we want you here we're gonna give you tax credits we're gonna roll out the red carpet and that's why oracle hp tesla all these big companies are taking those jobs to texas and for texas that's great but for us california is a lot like that great athlete in high school who has it all i mean six foot seven two thirty jumps out the gym but he doesn't practice man right and eventually pissing it away yeah eventually that athletic is less and less of a factor because people have real skill like this guy saying hey elon come here also is saying it looked we're already like the tech capital here and so people are moving in places like california what this means for san franciscan and all california's is taxes taxes must go up because california unlike the government cannot print fiat up currency and so that's gonna happen for a fact because all these jobs that are leading me and her sister to run a small business those employment taxes bro man they'll kill a lot of companies and so the taxes on the existing employees and people that lived here a hundred percent will have to go up unfortunately so that's why the second passport in second residency they said that there's like a five hundred million dollar shortfall already just from people who have left and companies who left and this has been like just a few months so sean and that's just in san francisco not in la and all the other big cities there's gonna be a day of reckoning but it's for us and unfortunately leadership did it themselves i mean it wasn't like the rest of the country didn't have to deal with covid you've been going down this kind of like sovereign man rabbit hole right now what do you think it is the next rabbit hole where where are you where are you looking next so all of my rabbit holes have to deal with taxes because taxes in the road of business taxes is the thing that you can control right and so now that we know about by borrow die now we know about why we invest real estate and and write down those expenses now that we have a second residency and a second passport i think the next one is gonna be more the gold silver slash bitcoin rabbit holes because if we printed trillions of dollars in this last year the currency is gonna go down so where can't we go other than a recommendation from you just to by bitcoin i need to like really dig in and see okay what is ether about okay i have this gold and silver i'm like a lannister right now in twenty twenty one aaron always pays his debts as the new slogan and so i'm a hoping that i can get a little bit more educated about those things so i don't know as much as y'all do for sure okay well i appreciate it i appreciate you covered on and brother there and giving us the giving us the latest from the rad hole so go back down there and we will see you again in a month or so when you when you come up for air roger that take care alright see you have bye bye