#159 - Update on Michael Jordan's House, a Nine Figure Sex Toy Company & the Man with a Million Acres

i i don't think i would wanna do something that high profile because if you screw up it would be a big deal oh look at you you're afraid to fail now all you you make it big you sell your company and now and now you're like i i gotta wanna watch my step what's going on who not afraid to where's the guy with the pirate ship tattooed on his thigh what would that guy do yeah i feel like got rude world no studio are you in a garage is that what that i am in my garage we we upgraded we improvise so we did this crazy thing where we had talked about on the podcast we're were like shit we need to like upgrade our setup i think mostly it was you just tell me to get a haircut which is fair and wear a shirt where i shirt and i took that as i need a whole new studio so so basically these guys who are from chicago they're like twenty three year old guys who love the podcast they were like they heard that and this is like their forte they do like camera audio they have their own podcast and their own youtube channels they're basically what i realized was i went and watch their youtube channel and this youtube channel has like this guy henry his youtube channel has like i don't know five hundred and seventy subscribers so it's not like some big youtube channel but if you watch it it's the same level of quality of like video audio and editing as like casey neistat stats channel and i showed this to our friends su and i go i go check these guys out like look at look at their channel these are the guys coming in this weekend to to make my studio and he goes he goes i remember when i was kinda like twenty one twenty two we were coming up and what the kind of thirty and forty year olds used to say was oh man you guys have this huge advantage because you're like you're cup your like digital natives is what they were calling us like we grew up with a computer and the internet like i think we we got the internet and computers when we were like in sixth grand i don't know about you it's was probably around the same fifty sixth grade something like that and so you know first for our parents they were getting a computer when they were thirty five or forty so it's just like you know you didn't have that you didn't have it to grow up on and so he goes these guys this is the next the next wave they're video native basically they grew up with a camera in their hand and they just like constantly shoot videos they know how to edit it they're not afraid to be on camera and like it's such a superpower and i think it was so true what what he was saying you said one that line that i think is the real super superpower which is being on camera so for you and i we're kinda like media people so we're maybe a little bit more used to it in the average joe but even i am still very uncomfortable just talking to a camera and like looking at it young people are not i when i was at the airport i saw twelve year old kids with like the phone on the ground with a pop socket right and they were like filling and i could see that they were doing tiktok dances and it was like that's like unheard of for me because i'm like oh my you're gonna do that at the airport with people watching right right yeah i think the upside is they're all look cool they know how to dance and they know how to edit videos the downside is like you know they're like riddled with anxiety and stuff like that so you know it's not all it's not all good but i but and they're not i'm having sex which is a topic we're gonna talk about gonna talk about that but the other thing i gonna say is let me ask you this when you get you're on snapchat right you have snapchat i have no i have an account alright so alright brady you are you you gotta chime in here i but you how how old are you twenty seven alright so you're more like us than i like the people i'm talking about that are kind of like i'm not gonna say gen yeah john i think those i think those couple he is alright he's a lot hip he's a lot hip than we are alright he's a little bit more do it okay so so basically you when you have snapchat right so someone sends you a snap right they send you a picture of something they're doing something looking at and you need to reply tell me do you just type the reply like in the text version or do you send back a photo that's so weird yes see that's crazy to me that is wild to me i'm like you say something i comment like it's fucking like it's facebook right i just write like oh looks fun cool that's great you know like i'm like a ninety year old but you're talking about young people another interesting thing to do is when you ask a young person or did you show me this when he ask a a younger person what it what do you do when someone calls if they put their hand for the people listening i have my hand like i'm waving high like high five and they put their hand like a high five to the ear versus they put their picky and thumb out like this well or or or if you say hey do like it a gesture to to take a picture so if i said to you hey sam take a picture yeah you're gonna do this that's hell us camera yeah it's not a camera right so so so what they do is they they hold up their their hand like this with their thumb like you're holding an iphone right we're like out here with a a a polaroid trying to trying to demonstrate what a picture is anyway so i don't even know why i'm talking about that but basically these guys are know i i say younger people are video native and i think that's gonna be a huge huge win for them because people like us are like self conscious and like just don't know how to use the tools right i wanna bring up a topic that's both related to this and something else so at sean's old office at monkey inferno the guy who owns at michael birch awesome it would looked like it was out of a magazine but he had one or two things that really stuck out and one of them was this macintosh computer it was a max mac mac two is that was all too apple too so i'm gonna look that up i so the reason i'm bringing this up is i am building my studio to look good like yours and i was looking thinking of like designs and interesting stuff to put in the back and i also this all n has got me interested in r and like you know just like google's yeah just like valuable or not valuable beautiful interesting cool stuff i've always liked stuff just like junk right that's what i used to like but now i'm gonna try to get some my shit anyway i was looking around how much do you think so is an apple to is it apple to the same as a mac as a macintosh to i don't know well wow how much you think in apple to that still works cost i don't know a couple thousand i'd say maybe somewhere between two and five it would be my guess two and five thousand you can get one that's in pretty good condition for like five hundred dollars wow you can get one you can get a mac macintosh two which i don't know the difference between the apple two and the mac macintosh too you can get a macintosh too that is still in the box for like a grand and do you remember the commercials when we were younger we were in our teens we were probably an eighth grade or ninth grade where it was like a colored mac so it was like a blue it was called the imac i think right yep you can get those for like three hundred dollars now strictly speaking like from like a collectible like just it's interesting it's it's cool to look at that's incredibly cheap for a machine not tell you what every single person who came to our office was like oh this is awesome i now granted as tech nerds come into the office but they were like wow by this thing and there was like expensive art all up on the walls nobody cared about any of that people saw this old thing and then we would boot it up and they would turn on and they were like amazed by it so it definitely every single person no commented on it i think these types of like old computers these vintage computers i think these are gonna get really popular and the reason i think that is i was looking up how much so for a gift i thought about buying people an ipod that wasn't connected to the internet does say this no so i was gonna buy people like our investors i was gonna buy them like a small thing i was maybe if i spent two dollars ahead let's if i can go and buy a bunch of if i can buy like twenty ipod that aren't connected to the internet and my plan was ruined because i'm like wait you have to have itunes itunes and that doesn't even exist so like this is pretty much meaningless but these old ipod by the way itunes exist i don't know but i mean like you who no one buys can can you even buy m p threes anymore from it i don't think so yeah you have to like have your own music yeah like that no one does that anymore you we all stream and like these things didn't even have internet i i wanted it to so you could like download it and then it would only work if your attached wi but anyway old ipod like old old ones first generation ones are expensive like five six hundred dollars and so anyway i think that both would be cool to have this stuff on your dude if an old ipod is five to six hundred dollars and apple two in the box are mac two in the in the box is also five hundred dollars yeah i i i definitely know which one i think has more more like long term fair value here those those those things are collectible i think you're you're spot on i i would scoop up five to ten of those right now and just hold them yeah i'm okay so like here's a vintage working in in good condition macintosh two for two hundred and fifty dollars i'm looking at it on ebay right now here's a macintosh in the box for four hundred bucks it's pretty interesting right i think that this might become pretty popular these old computers and i think that it's kind of a cool idea yeah i like that a lot those are good and i i actually will go after this on ebay and try to scoop up at least at least two of those just to hold and see what happens alright you wanna get into you have two updates and then we have an idea two ideas yeah okay so one update is on the michael jordan so last episode we talked about michael jordan's house has been on sale for ten years it was a it's a fifty six thousand square foot house and it was originally listed for thirty million dollars now it's been price cut price cut price cut all the way down to thirteen million and it's still not selling and this is after the last dance it's after this giant boom and like trading card collectible like the michael jordan rookie card is going for almost two million dollars and his fifty six thousand square foot house can't sell for thirteen like something seems off like a little tiny three inch piece of cardboard can sell but not this so and he's paying for property taxes i think some somebody said he's paid a bit about a million dollars of property tax just while it's sad on the market and so we threw this out there the last time we said hey look why don't we either collectors me new or we crowd fund why don't we buy j's house and like what could we do with it and we got a bunch of good feedback so i would say like there's a bunch of smart people who immediately pointed out that one of our ideas which was to turn it into some kind of museum the museum of mike you know the basketball museum would it work because you know the h hoa the neighbors would never permit you to let like tens of thousands of people come into their neighborhood and and go to this museum every year right so that's what thought about i mean i was thinking about i just figured there yeah that'd be a way around something yeah exactly exactly you you when you start an idea you don't think about all the different like small reasons why it might immediately fail you think you know what if this works and then you find try to find a way to make it work but the more interesting one on my opinion was always the simpler one which was you don't have to turn it into a museum you don't have to get permitting you don't have to have guests coming in and operations folks you just treat it differently you don't treat it like a house you treat it like it's a monument it's a piece of art and there are paintings that sell for eight hundred you know eighty five million dollars and so if a painting itself for eighty five million dollars i think michael jordan's house this relic of the greatest basketball player of all time is gonna be worth something and so the idea would be you crowd fund it you get i don't know five thousand people to each pitch in to grand you buy the thing out for ten million bucks and you hold it as a piece of art and then you know i there was a couple of good suggestions i thought came in through twitter so some of the good suggestions were you could list this on rally road where people go to buy like you know vintage cars or rare first edition lord of the rings book sets for thirty five thousand dollars that you you know five hundred people each buy it a fractional share of it so that was one idea people liked and the rally road guys said hey we're interested let's talk so i'm talking about they they they held at you they did they've replied to the tweet and then rob the i think he's the ceo i don't know it's c cofounder he emailed me yesterday and so we're gonna we're gonna do chat see this why does everyone cool reach out to you bro they know they know damn and i didn't get anyone holler at me well are your dms open on twitter my dms are open yes oh i've also talked to him before through dms because i was just like rallies is fucking awesome so i had reached out to him actually that's saying hey reilly riley is awesome can i invest in this thing so he knew i was a fan boyle already but anyway so that was one interesting thing some people in the crypto world were like dude let's turn this into an n nxt bro and so i talked to the the founder of of nifty gateway which is just exploding this this marketplace that's just exploding for n t's right now so i asked him hey would you like to dabble and then the last thing was that some people were like hey and what did they say he was like hey this is cool but he was like you know we're just crushing so hard on the digital stuff i don't know if we wanna get into this physical thing because there were some cool ideas from from twitter some people were like you know let's say you came in and you bought a fifty thousand dollar chunk so you instead of the two thousand dollar entry you go for fifty k that should get you like if you present your your certificate of ownership if you show your app and you show that you're you own a piece of this thing you should be able to have like a three night stay once a year with you and all your friends we're gonna share mj house exactly so so you're not fully doing an airbnb you're treating it like it's art but if you own a big enough share if you're you know a super minority owner of this thing then you can actually stay one weekend a year and i thought that was pretty dope so anyways there's some cool ideas but then at the same time i ain't got time to do this and either to you so what's gonna happen from here you're asking me i don't know i feel like you're kind of the leader on this one nothing if i had understand nothing i hear and here's why when i did my deal every smart person i talked to what do you know what they said i bet you can guess what they said no no what they say do nothing for six months right so don't invest it on your hands yeah yeah don't invest and so many times i've been i i've wanted to change and do something and everyone has said the same thing and i'm gonna try my hardest to stick to it so that's one of the reasons why although that's probably a bullshit excuse the reality is it's kind of an i i don't think i would wanna do something that high profile because if you screw up it would be a big deal oh look at you you're afraid to fail not at all you you you make it vague you sell your company now and now you're like i i gotta i watch my step what's going on who not afraid to where's the guy with the pirate ship tattooed on his thigh what would that guy do dude my first time buying like a real estate asset and doing something like this would be like i mean that would be national i mean i guess yeah i'm i'm i'm not i'm not saying you buy it i'm saying clearly the way to go here is to crowd fund this thing because it's just more fun that way and you don't have to put out ten million dollars of risk capital how many emails did you get so somebody yeah that was the other thing so somebody created a website jonathan created a website i think it's like by by jordan's house dot com or something like that and i think you said you know pretty early on after the tweet he said he had two hundred people dropping their email and i think about the same on twitter said i'm in including a bunch of higher profile people there's a bunch of people who are a bunch of really wealthy people founders of companies owners of owners of businesses that were like i'm in for five k i'm in ten k type of thing now are they just talking is this real i don't i don't know we'll see but i think that was cool i mean the the little video that we had reached a hundred thousand people i think across a a couple of different platforms it so it was cool and what we decided the takeaway from this is we gotta do viral clips all the time we gotta we gotta be like obama the wow this the best place to find lever exactly well it's not even a conversation this is now just a collection eclipse yeah the clip and the clip the clip had sixty thousand views too your twitter clip you talking about it really yeah well well the shitty part is that it's you talking about it and me looking at just like it kept showing my face and you're talking all whole time and i'm just dude that's the way the world goes you put the white man's face up there and the brown guys just in the back coming up with ideas and handing them over that's why they get our voices confused because say i look like a pro but i talk like a nerd and you look like a nerve but talk like a broke dude that was the most spot on i wasn't even i was like i'm not mad at all that is so accurate and you know i mixed now i understand why people keep saying this thing that they get as confused and makes sense now let's talk about sex so you have something on here and you before we get into it i wanna tell you a fun fact so you we have this list where sean in i list ideas he has one thing and it says why are aren't young people having sex and what are the opportunities here and apparently thirty one percent of men h and twenty four were sexually inactive before covid yes inactive and the tweet was from a guy named matt allison right who does a bunch of cool stuff the tweets aren't there anymore for some reason or at least i can't see it yeah canceled probably can't say apparently you you can't say man anymore so this guy nat is really interesting his name's matt ellis google he's not like a cool website he owns this agency business did you know that this guy so he's interested in this because he owns this thing called like i'll have look up what's called but it's a ke app do you know what a ke is i do know what k is anything they're like exercise you do with your private parts yeah so basically it it makes it so you don't premature ejaculate and i think women do it too you know i don't like i think women to it because it it like it can increase like the pleasure but also i think it's just healthy for you to do like it's just like a it's just like a movement that's good for you i guess i don't know and this guy his name is elias not elias he has an app called the i i'll i'll look it up what it's called but should be called squeeze because to do it to do a k you're basically trying to like you know for a guy you're basically trying to like flex your balls that's the best way i could describe it and and fe i'm sure there's you know the the equivalent but i don't know what his all calls me scam stamina stamina now i don't know what the play on words is anyway it walks you through how to do these ke exercises and it makes like a hundred k a year he just made it one time and it just ranks what it's a crazy interesting thing ke exercise i never i never knew that was a thing go ahead okay so so we've talked about this before and before when we said i think you actually were the were the original person that has kinda rant about this you were like dude kids aren't having sex you're like i went to this you know people make funny for the hotdog dog stan thing they're like we get it you used don't own a hotdog stand the other story that i've i've heard you tell number of times because it's very entertaining and i think it gets you hyped up is you went to some camp and they had a bunch had like a gen z like you went to some summit and i had a gen z analyst there and the gen z analyst was like hey all the kids are depressed and not having sex and you're were like dude what's going on and you talked about replica which was this app messaging app where you message like a virtual girlfriend and i tried it out you've tried it out after you told me about i i went downloaded it and it was okay it was interesting there's definitely a bunch of people who are really into this it's like this ai virtual girlfriend but i have a different sla to it i wanna bring up here so and by the way this whole sex thing this has been a problem in general pan i think for years right right yeah let's like you know the sex list generation or something they they call it like okay so i wanna actually talk about a company that's based in austin right where you're right where right where you are you might be able to see it if you look at the window it's called interactive life forms llc you you know these guys yeah i i know where their building is i've seen their building do you know what they make no if interactive do they make sex cells interactive life forms this is the maker of the flashlight so i wanted to tell you about this so i did a little research i got a message from a founder of a tech company i won't say his name because he said no he said don't say his name but he messaged me and he goes dude idea modern flashlight lights i was like what he goes flashlight lights and he breaks he broke it down for me he goes the the sex toy market is bigger than you think he goes female sex toys like a ad d or a vi are on the rise and there's this big like kind of like anti stick like people trying to remove the stigma around it i don't know if you've seen any of this but it's like kind of the feminist movement they call it they call it sex positivity which basically like hey doesn't need to be taboo it doesn't need to be stigma it's okay to have sex that doesn't make you like you know a bad person or something like that and so there's this sex positivity movement and with that has been this big boom in sales of sex toys primarily female sex toys so i started looking at the most popular male sex toy which is the flashlight and so here's some information about the flashlight it was started by this guy steve shu and this guy super interesting he basically he's a he's one of thirteen kids he go he plays college football then he goes into the army then he comes back and he's a police officer with the swat team in l la and then he like retire from swat when he's like thirty something because he's like i love being in the police force but it doesn't pay well so i'm gonna start a business and his wife is a pro tennis player so this is he's got this hot tennis player wife and he's like i'm gonna start a business he doesn't know what he's gonna start and by the way do you know who that hot wife and steve sc son is no who aubrey marcus the founder of on it oh no way i didn't know yeah and he c found joe rogan yes because flashlight was joe rogan first sponsor that aubrey secured that's amazing okay so i'll get that that's i actually you're part of this so so so years go by does nothing then they're in their forties steve's wife gets pregnant and the doctor tells him hey you're in your forties so this is kinda like an at risk pregnancy so you can't you can't be having sex and he's like okay doc like you know what do you want me to do i'm a six three red blooded at american what what am i supposed to do and so he starts thinking about it and he goes why isn't there a why isn't there a a a sex toy for men and so he's he originally plans to make a mannequin and in fact in nineteen ninety he gets a patent for a mannequin with sexual applications so it's basically like a dull that he wants to make so he's trying to make this doll and he puts in fifty k and he starts working on this doll and he's he's trying to blend all these different polymers how do you get this skin feel of this doll how do you get the flesh to feel like flesh how do get it to look like a doll feel like a doll i feel like a human and and he makes it a family business so he brings his sons into the to the table they get a whiteboard out and they start brainstorming together as a family which i find hilarious because you know in my family this is not a this not a business we can start together so he he keeps going two years ago by he's putting in a quarter million dollars now he sold zero zero zero product so far and he keeps trying to make this full body doll and he meets a guy one day a friend of his and his friends like hey i think what you're doing is great there's this weird taboo around this but why not more pleasure in the world what's the problem so he says will you give me one i'll buy one off you and he says cool what's your address i'll send you the doll he's like no dude no way i can't bring that doll into my house he's like just take out the part that's like the vagina of the doll and send me that like put in a little box and my my wife won't see it and just send me that and so he's like dude if my friend who wants this won't like can't buy this doll this doll it's dead so that's why he pivoted from the doll to just the just the like you know just the the organ part of it just a single piece one component and so he's like okay how how do we brand this so him and his sons are brainstorming and they're like what do guys like guys like tools okay this thing's kinda like a flashlight okay we'll call this the flashlight so that's how it gets its name during that process and so he been this was like a father son project father son project the multiple year dad and so now years have gone by they've put in over two million dollars and this guy believes so much in this thing he ramps up production he's pumping out twelve hundred units a day before they've sold anything because he's like the world is gonna love this they are gonna buy this thing and so he goes all in on this to to meet this you know future demand and turns out they actually did it so the flashlight lite now these guys do i believe about a hundred million dollars in revenue it's definitely above fifty it's they don't report it but it to me i did some s thing and i think it's a hundred million dollar a your company over a hundred employees they basically dominate the market for for for male sex toys now and you know this guy who went all in on this thing it ended up being a successful family business which i think is you know just a heartwarming story what a crazy story and and i had heard a little bit about it but i didn't realize i didn't know all those details but by the way this this a this is the best part of the whole story so he he opens up a facility in austin so he's manufactured near you then he has a one in spain and he has one somewhere else in asia i think and he has so much like like manufacturing capacity so what do they do with the excess capacity when they when they have a little extra guess what they make they make prosthetics for elephants who have had their legs blown off in the you know for from where there's mines in in in southeast asia so they're they are the top maker of elephant prosthetics in in southeast asia that's their backup that's their side business what got you interested in this well when this guy said it i was like you know the founder who messaged me he yeah this is we're may have to bleed this but he goes dude every guy jacks off there's gotta be a market what if you he's like what if this she's like i don't know this product you don't own this product he goes but what if this thing made it ten times better isn't that crazy that there's still a taboo around this that's gonna change dude the sex positivity thing for women it's gonna affect men i bet you you can make a modern day d version of the flashlight and so i started thinking about it sorry i'm looking up okay how big is this how big is this industry and it is a pretty big industry like they do like the sex toy industry itself is about twenty billion dollars a year one the percentages to to men so women so this is kind of i i was trying to figure out the sales difference so it's most it's dominated by female sales so the flashlight is the biggest of males but the the female industry is much bigger about sixty five percent of women say that they have used one there was a stat that's said fifty percent of male men said that they've used one which i don't believe i don't i know a lot of dudes i haven't heard one ever talk about this so maybe it's just happening on the download sex toy yeah like the never i've never had one conversation with a friend not a single yeah so yeah so i don't know if i believe that stat but basically the european market is bigger than the american market like places like italy it's like super common apparently they're you know free love places the fastest growing markets right now are india and china where it's the most taboo but what's happened is because it's all gone to commerce and the commerce companies are using very discrete packaging like they send it to you and it looks like one thing but inside is another and so that's the like that's where this thing is growing and so there's a bunch of startups in this space as well that are doing like fifteen million a year like love honey i like just just check out this traffic so the top the top website for this the top sort of amazon for this thing is called adam and eve yeah you know it's was just i was looking at adam and eve because they have stores all over san francisco they they have about eight million visitors a month to their e commerce store which is a huge e commerce store love honey is about four million to their store and what's interesting is there's all these problems all this friction in trying to build one of these companies because stripe won't let you take payments but they why wouldn't stripe it let you take payments for a deal they say they say we don't we do not do any sexual products so that's so so you can use shopify but shopify uses stripe and so you can't do shopify basically because stripe won't allow so adam and eve love honey these these companies they can't they can't process on stripe and so there's an opportunity i think for for you know building stripe for vice products because cannabis can't use stripe and neither can any any any sex products porn can't you stripe and so if you know just those three industries alone that's like multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of of of turnover and so who's building stripe for vice i don't i wanna go i wanna go look into that another one of these like opportunities is it is is that you can build a a brand that's figured out a new form of marketing because you can't advertise on facebook or instagram or any like kind of display network that's mainstream for these products and so i was looking into how do they get around this and i was curious how would you get around this if you were trying to market one of these products it's it's interesting sort of like job interview question i would ask somebody wants i would write articles on like you write articles that are yep yeah so you have to write let me alright so if we're talking about like a vi you write an article about like sexual health i guess or i don't whatever a i mean i would have to i don't would have to do research what what a woman who is about to buy this what is she what type of content interests or brand and i would write that article and i would display it on brain or i would just display it on i don't know where would i display it it's hard so i looked into how these guys are doing it and i think there's there's three interesting porn hub you gotta go you can do a porn so so they use the adult ad networks like traffic junkie and xo clicks so they advertise on porn space yeah that's that's a good that's an easy one pretty straightforward the other thing that they do is they they do heavy like content so so even though you can't advertise on on facebook and you can you're kinda limited on google you can do it for certain keywords and for just stuff that people searching for so if people are searching for what is the best one i should buy what you reviews and so you remember how the cat the the mattress company cast was buying up the mattress review websites and then like promoting casper so that's what these guys will do as well they'll buy up the review sites and then they'll just put their products as the best reviewed product on there and they'll say this is you know i'm an affiliate for this for this company so that's one way and then the i thought the most innovative one and that they also do like kind of direct so like you were saying flashlight was one of the first sponsors on joe rogan they'll do that they'll go direct to podcasts or newsletters that are willing to take them as a sponsor and they'll they'll go for it there but the last one i thought was interesting was what flesh i did this is a little bit this whole segment is a little bit x extra i you know you know apologies if you're listening to this with kids in the car you know i hope you've skipped forward at this point but basically what flashlight did was they wanted celebrity sponsors so what they did was you know nike goes to lebron james and says okay we want you to sponsor our stuff so are they gonna get women to be the they got they went to famous models and porn stars and they created molds yes of them and so it's like you can buy the i i forgot the i looked up this chart of who was the top selling sku of that and so there's woman kayla or sheila or something like that i don't remember her name of us but she's some model she some points are i don't know who she is but she's famous and they they they bring them in they do a cast a cast mold of her body and then they turned that into a product and then she can sell that product to her fans and so i was thinking if you were gonna do this now you have only fans where where you know i think a billion billion plus dollars is being paid out to their creators i would go to only fence creators and i would do this the i would do that model for them i think that would be probably the strongest distribution tactic you could get dude what a fascinating thing i would you have i would invest in this but i wouldn't i would never work on this i would never work on this a zero interest in this from from you know like to actually like pursue it but i do think it's one of those things that nobody talks about and so because nobody talks about it it's both interesting and it's surprising when you look into it how this whole system actually works so i like you know just like i love the silk road but i would never go on the silk road and buy drugs but i like to learn about it and see how it worked and how big it was and who was behind it and how how they kept it stealthy like that's fascinating to me just like i like watching prison shows but i'm not trying to go murder anybody everybody i like watching you know bank heist but i'm not planning to rob anybody that's how i am with this these types of products so at the adam and eve store or what was it called yeah adam and eve stores i saw the the we had so many locations in san francisco we probably had three or four or five different locations it's a pretty huge business hundreds of millions of dollars on revenue currently owned by i believe a private equity company that is also another fascinating business did you research that no i didn't research that one but i i found one other two other like interesting things about how they how they market these things that thought was pretty clever it just shows you know entrepreneurial creativity here alright so there's one company that's doing these like you know like the the sort of ml model which which is you get one person who's kind of a seller for you and they have a party so this is like the old tu wear parties they called them passion parties for this and so they have women invite their friends over they're called passion parties where they show the different toys and what what they could do or whatever i don't know how this this sounds like the most awkward party to me but apparently it's working the second one that i thought was super interesting was they basic there was a company show called diamond products and they make they make some brand of something i i no idea and they couldn't advertise in any traditional channel so they went and they bought sir richard's condoms company so they said oh condoms are allowed to be advertised on tv and in on on on different websites it's more loose to to to like trojan right we've all seen trojan ads on tv for example so if the restrictions are loose there they went and bought that company and then on their website they just they up upsell other products basically and so he he went and bought this company because he goes they're sold in whole foods he's like this makes it so easy for me to advertise because now i own this little thing he's like it's my trojan horse like you know this is how i advertise my my sex products company and so i thought that was pretty interesting and you know i think if you did this with instagram models and old fans you could basically just copy the it's us that watch brand mv t you could copy the the the movement movement watches brand model and and try to you know they they went to a hundred million in sales and watches i bet you could do the same using their influencer strategy dude how interesting like i i love learn from these types of people i i don't even like i'm i don't even like going to this i went to the flashlight website i don't even like going to that i think it's close the tab yeah i think it's weird i'm bought my work computer just so anyone at hubspot list legit this is apologize my my my wife's dad listens to the podcast i'm just gonna tell him hey don't listen to this one i apologize if if he loves it was a fairly academic discussion about something well the worst part is now my now i'm getting retargeting like crazy because i was doing research on this for the pod and now all my ads are completely messed up well do you wanna talk about another interesting person yes or do you wanna talk about an idea person make this up appeal okay we're gonna do an interesting person okay there's this guy who we're gonna do billy the week here with this guy and by the way i think we're gonna do this we've discussed doing this every friday maybe we will but google by the way guy we need like a jingle for the billy of the week it needs to be like you know the ability of the week somebody make us a little jingle for that that would be pretty cool we do need that google brad kelly and make sure you spell it like b r a d so brad space k e l l e y okay if you're on your phone do it brad kelly now you're gonna see a picture of a guy with a red beard you see the red beard i see okay and then two over you're gonna see a picture of an old guy with a longer like a he looks like a like mark twain yep see black white so that that's the same guy the photos are just he just older now so this guy he's so interesting to me for a couple of different reasons so this guy's name is brad kelly he at this point he's probably in his sixties and he's known as the man with a million acres that was a headline that was written in the new york times about him and they wrote it about him because he is one of the largest landowners owners in america at one point he was number three or number four and he's kinda known for being incredibly rec so he doesn't do any interviews he do anything like that but he's bad to the bone he's a really interesting guy and i've read a little bit about them and i've kinda got a feel for this guy and he's so intriguing to me so he was born you know he's sixty five years older ish he was born in kentucky went to college in kentucky but at age nineteen dropped out because he started buying warehouses and he started making enough money buying and leasing out warehouses that he goes alright i'm gonna do this i don't need school anymore and eventually he started renting them out to people who were building stuff so creating little miniature factories he would fix them up and lease them to people and eventually he saw that people were using them to store tobacco and one of his tenants moved out and he got whole he he they left a machine that turned tobacco and like pumped them into cigarettes or you know like a like a rolling machine or something like that and he was like well i got this machine let's try it and so he started making cheap cigarettes and eventually he rolled he made it a proper company and he called it commonwealth brands and if you google commonwealth brands i don't smoke cigarettes but i recognize recognized some of the brands they're like i think basically like fifteen or so cigarette brands yeah it's like i think parliament limits that's like when i was a kid that would like we would joke like if someone smokes parliament that i mean they were like a broke kid but he made cheap cigarettes and after ten years he sold the cigarette company for a billion dollars and i hate smoking and i don't think it's cool to smoke and he dead doesn't either it and he it but he didn't hide it he goes i've never defended smoking and i hope that it will be phased out of society but i did it because you know it made i made a living doing you know it it made a living for me and using almost all when billionaires say they they're just trying to make a living it's like no you made you made like a billion living that's a lot made a lot of living and with all this money he did a couple interesting things the first thing that he did well he did do it first but the first interesting thing is he bought lonely plan you what lonely plan is i've heard that what is is that a dating site that's a date i bet you if you look at your your book collection you might have a lonely planet book it's a travel website and book company oh okay and it was a big it was a really big deal for many years and then when digital came along they got crushed and he bought lonely plan for seventy million dollars and he had us and they probably had three hundred employees and he had a a kid that he liked somehow met this young guy who was twenty four and he put him as ceo and they never signed a contract they just shook hands and they go alright you're ceo now you know talk to me if you need me such a kentucky thing to do to shake and this kid ran it and it didn't do so hot i mean it on like it would've have been cool if there's a better ending to that part of the story right it either to a combination of the twenty four old year old sucking and covid they sold it for like fifty million so he didn't make money on it but what he did with the rest of his money is he bought ranches and leased them back to the owners and they make a little bit of profit but not a significant amount of profit and at this point he owns over a million acres in america which is a huge huge huge amount making him in two thousand twelve the fourth largest lando owner in america the guy never does interviews he you can't find him if you want to he's really hard to find the only reason people really truly know bottom is at one point he sold one of his arrangements for four hundred million dollars really interesting guy i like him because he's i think that like i get caught in this world on twitter of like oh build build in public you know what's your mr i gotta go to executive coaching and it's so nice to hear from a guy this guy actually seems like a pretty thoughtful guy but he definitely gives off the redneck vibe obviously he's highly intelligent but they say that like he goes through his ranches and he likes to drink bourbon bourbon and wear killed so he's like it's kind of a wild guy he's into some weird shit alright yeah but pretty interesting guy and i wanted to bring this guy up because i bet most people would never heard of him but so interesting he also owns do you know what kentucky downs is the horse horse truck yeah he owns that oh wow and so he just owns all types of real estate and that's when he put all of his money into very interesting person yeah this is this is cool so why were you saying the part about people who have like executive coaches and well what was the contrast there so to explain that one like i see people who've got like small ass companies who like are not even they're they're like barely just started and they're like tweeting out like leadership quotes or they're talking about like how they need to be more inclusive at their company or this and that and i just get sick of this hype thing and i see all people like oh build in public and and i'm guilty of all this as well but like all the and we're part of the hype cycle right we're media but it's cool to see someone who you've never heard of who just is anonymous and chest the fucks up and just works and does cool stuff and has a cool life and it's entirely like you know everyone's like i got in a fight on twitter about people which about buying domain names you think this guy knows how knows how to buy domain name in one of the interviews he said he he's he doesn't know how to use email right yeah this guy's not vegan yeah that guy no this guy eats vegans right this guy is made of leather yeah okay so you just like that these like kind of like a tough guy rough guy business guy doesn't give a fuck and everybody else you know makes such a big deal of little things it's kind of weird i just think it's cool to see to hear different perspective and i'm sure that he does a lot of bad stuff mean he owned a cigarette company right like that's kind of pretty shitty but it was just cool it's cool to have a different perspective and this guy if you google i'm pretty sure there's only three pictures that i've i've researched just got a lot i i've only found three pictures of them and he's worth three or four billion dollars oh i it alright he is indeed billy of the week i wonder i wonder who i wonder how people will will react to this guy because i some people are like so anti cigarettes that they're like you are you know that you you're saying that you you you kinda idol analyzing this guy who is a you know who did bad things like you know like a warlord almost and so i don't know you're you were the one who also said you would not invest in j right was that you yeah look i'm not i'm not defending this person's actions i think but i think that no matter how evil or horrible someone is there's you can always find something interesting maybe saying admirable is a bit of a stretch but you can always find something interesting no matter how bad someone is and i don't think this guy's is necessarily a bad guy but yeah he i mean he fucking he's so poison yeah it's pretty right i think of it i think i don't know maybe i'm a little disconnected from reality but for me i'm like i don't like movies where everybody is a good guy i would not play a game a video game where you just walk around as a good samaritan like those aren't fun to me and i think that the real world has all kinds of people shapes colors beliefs all all kinds of different things and i'm interested in the variety of ways that people live their life and i'm glad that people live their life doing all these different things even though a lot of them are like villains or a lot them hey i'm not saying this guy's a but like i think that's just the way the world is and i think it's crazy to believe that the world shouldn't be that way it won't be that way where people are gonna live their life doing different things maybe this guy likes to drink bourbon and wear it killed on a farm that y owns it's i'm like alright great i'm glad that character exists and i'm glad that that that you know i'm glad these characters exist i think that most people will not feel that way most people will say well it's this person's a bad guy you know he shouldn't exist and i don't know i i find that to be this is not the way i think about it i believe every great man or every great woman is also a bad man so what mean by that is if you are at all if you're considered great at anything or one of the best inevitably you have m many enemies because you can't make everyone happy right now by the way can you tweet that out so i'm doing this thing i'm getting behind me what one of the things that's gonna go behind me is i'm i'm getting these laser etched signs that are tweets basically it's called laser tweets dot com and so you could basically get at any tweet turned into a wooden laser etched sign and i'm gonna put i'm hang a couple of my favorite quotes and tweets behind me and one of them one of my favorites is every great man is also a bad man and so i need you to tweet that out so that i can do it but what you can't do is you can't or you could do person if you if you wanna not make it a gender specific here but i need you to tweet that out so i can i can get that one made yeah you're gonna get you're gonna get on my wall i don't think i may i think i made up that phrasing but i i read it in a book and i don't remember exactly how they phrase it but that's how i phrase it but i believe it to be true and dude i did so much research on this guy that i went and i went to land forums so really interesting research tactic that you should do is you type in whatever you're searching for like flashlight and then you type in forum them right and then you are brought to user generated content of message boards and what people are saying or you could do the same thing but you just type in the word reddit it's pretty sick and i went to land forums where this guy bought people's land and they go yeah you know i someone almost like hey this guy named brad kelly offered to buy my land who sold to him and people were like yeah we sold to him he's fine enough done but done bother us and offered us a fair deal and so they're like well and we all and people said well and we read about him doing cigarettes and that kinda sucks but he's never causes us a problem so anyway every great man is also a bad man i like it did you wanna do any any of these other ones or are we saving them i think this one should they should be saved okay i one quick one because i don't really have much to say but we talk could the d one like i'm gonna do a one quick plug for these guys that took an idea we talked about and they made it so we talked about levels dot fyi which is a salary comparison to website we had a whole episode about like open salaries and should you or should you not transparent data how that helps blah blah blah blah and we said hey levels does this for the tech industry where you can go see alright if i'm a facebook pro product manager level five what will i make if i live seattle what will i make if i live san francisco what's the benchmark what are the what what is some data so i know if i'm getting if i'm getting hose if they gave me a fair job offer or not fair job offer and so we said dude something should do this for other industries because this is awesome why isn't this happening another so these guys made med levels dot fyi and it's basically doctor pay and so they if you go to it you can see they don't have a ton of data yet but they're getting some they're getting doctors to to put in how much they're getting paid based on where they live and what type of doctor they are i think it's great super simple it's just basically an air table displayed on a website so really easy to build and shout with google forms i think yeah i'd say like in in theory right it's such a simple simple product to do so med levels dot fyi a good job by those guys and if your a doctor listening think go put your shit in there yeah it's pretty cool i was looking at this alright we'll wrap it up by talking about one more thing and maybe we should put this in the beginning but let me ask you how has your angel investing gone so far i'll tell you in ten years that's the problem with angel investing but how many deals have you invested in i think a little under twenty maybe like eighteen something like that eighteen companies we've invested in deployed about i don't know million and a half two million dollars or something like that and do you feel confident that you have some winners yeah definitely there's some winners now we'll see i think any anything anything can happen but i would say i'd be surprised if out of these eighteen if we don't have you know two companies that are worth a billion dollars or more i'd be surprised so wow that's pretty sick so we a few weeks ago i tweeted out something that andrew chen said basically i asked andrew chen who's a partner at teresa in h what his advice to me for angel investing was and he told me his opinion and i tweeted that out people shit on me even though i was like i'm not saying this i'm just or i'm just like i'm the messenger yeah like i'm just like reporting on someone interesting opinion but i did tend to agree of on a couple of the things and one of them was that there's this narrative that you there's this narrative of people who hate vc and they're like i would rather gross slower and it's like okay that's cool do that but in order and and they also say profits matter you know like and they they'd love to mock silicon valley companies are like dude these got you know they don't know anything about profits so sorry i'm just over here running a profitable business just growing steady every year and so they they like to get on that kind of high horse which is crazy because like both can exist and be wonderful right but there was this guy who i really like and i don't mean to show on him at all his it was called nd vc and it was it was kinda weird i don't know why it was a venture capital firm him because its whole s was basically we invest in bootstrap businesses that wanna grow slowly they didn't exactly say slowly but it was for bootstrap companies which is again a little bit of an oxy mo and why is a bootstrap company gonna be taking best capital right but a lot of people really liked it and the guy who ran it i forget forgot his name i met with him awesome guy and they went out a business this week and i think it's his name bryce i like bryce bryce is a good guy but the model didn't work and i wanted to bring this up because something that andrew said was he said two things he was said invest in quantity so just kind of throw money at a bunch of stuff so like anything that seems promising just kinda mindless invest in it and second make sure it's growing three x a year if it's not then it's not good and a lot of people didn't like when i said that and they didn't like it i think because it kind of hurt their feelings of like well you're saying i'm not worthy of venture capital and the answer is is yeah you're not right you're you're not and but that's okay that doesn't like you shouldn't be offended right you don't have to shut down your business that just means this type of asset this type of venture you know venture capital is chasing a certain profile a company and you may not fit that profile and by the way i think that most people i bet you i mean this sounds so douche i bet you i've made significantly more money than a lot of people who have raised absolutely and absolutely i was selling somebody this day of other day i was like i was like you know media companies we're talking about media and you know you guys just sold your you guys are media company and it wasn't the biggest exit ever it's not like you know some insane thing but i was like dude he don't how much did you raise total like a million and a half dollars two million dollars or something like that a million a million dollars right so it took so little money and then not so i give the give the profile it was a million dollars and it took you how many years from start to i finish finish but but when we liquidity start as him we raised money to finish less than five years and right i made eight eight figures right exactly and so and you owned you know majority of the business or whatever so like because you didn't have to raise all this money and dilute dilute yourself over and over and over again from round after round after round and it's like there are if you look at companies that are selling for a billion dollars where the founder owns four percent or two percent or seven percent and you know they're not like and they and they sweat it for ten years and the every hair on their head is gray because because of that path so it doesn't the size of the exit is not not linked really to the to the outcome for the for the founder themselves i agree which proves that we're not or i i know for sticking myself and i i think you you're not shitting on this this idea of anti vc whatever but this company went out of business and it goes against this narrative of like if you're gonna give money to venture capital or companies that fit the profile of vc you want them to be what many would think or describe as reckless right and that one one thing i didn't get why did they go out of business so so basically they couldn't raise more money was the idea yeah right that's how a vc fund goes out of business and he said in his thing he's was like we invested in ten companies or or whatever he gave some so so tell me that he goes they were all bootstrap and profitable and they're all still going and they're forty you know he said something like we've invested these they're all still going they're all still profitable but we couldn't raise anymore about i said what what he i don't understand what what is his reason why did they go out of business he he kinda sounded like he was crying a little bit like he was kinda whining because he's like our lps didn't like our model so they pulled the plug because you know whatever did i didn't read the thing very carefully so you tell me you into this oh i mean yeah why is he saying they failed i don't think he was whining i think he was just saying the fact that like most people don't like this idea and weren't willing to stick it out and i don't blame them because if you go to indy dot vc the website it's a video of a unicorn head on fire as if like their anti unicorn and i mine his returns are good if his returns are good every people would still be looking to back the fund because people who invest in if the returns aren't as good as other stuff like you so that's what he needs to say it's not that people don't like this he needs to say i was wrong my returns weren't as good as i thought they would be and they were not good enough to get more money because people invest i invest in vc funds i also would invest in real estate which has a different profile i'll invest in crypto which has a different return risk return profile i invest in many things and so that's why i thought it was kinda whining because i didn't it didn't just say the honest truth i had this idea that this would be a great way to invest and my but my returns were actually shitty and therefore i couldn't raise more money and either that's true or his returns were actually good and he sucked at going and getting new investors i didn't there's only two ways to go about it right like i didn't understand i didn't i stopped reading because i didn't he didn't he wasn't saying the truth in my opinion no i mean he said the truth he said that like our strategy a lot of lp lps bailed it cost us eighty percent of our lp base so didn't wanna come back and it was yeah the strategy didn't didn't work in the sense of investors did he post his returns no okay that's the thing he needed to say right he's saying they didn't like our strategy it was so he was he's just kinda just like patti himself on the bag i felt he's like they didn't like that we were going against the grand going against the vc thing and they had to pull out because of that it's like well is it that they didn't like what you were doing or is it that it wasn't working and the returns weren't very good and they didn't believe the returns were gonna be very good i don't know i i'm bay harsh i don't know the guy but no he's cool and i'm not bringing this up to show them i think it's cool took a shot it was a bad shot though and that's that's great right you take swings sometimes to this for sure but i think though it's important it's important that we look at what this what's what does this mean here and i think that someone like andrew chen who's this from the outside do you think of him as like an elitist like went to i don't know he just like give this vibe that he's like an elitist step guy but and and so and he kinda represents a lot of the people like him right these like vcs are like oh like fuck these tech pros and the reality is though that that strategy of like doing stuff that appears to be reckless from the outside it is the right strategy it just feels really uncomfortable from a lot of people dude if you if you it's it's a classic don't hate the player hate the game it's not that the it's not that vc decided oh you know what i'll do i'm gonna invest in a bunch of companies and one or two will return the fund and everything else would go to zero it's not that they want that right that's actually extremely stressful for them that hey if i get into this company that becomes a ten billion dollar plus company i'm a hero and i'm the best and if i just missed them and i invest in a bunch of other good companies i didn't quite get there i suck and i can't raise my next fund and i'm out of a job and and so so so it's crazy to me that like they're not picking this that just is the nature of the game and they have to play it if they want to succeed at it it's like in any game theory and the game won't the players in the game will eventually find the meta game the strategy that is the optimal strategy and if you just because of your like you know your opinion and your personality and your morals don't wanna play it cool that's fine but you're just not gonna get you're not gonna be playing the optimal strategy you're gonna eventually lose the game and so i i think it's crazy that people hate the vcs when it's just that's the way that innovation works the innovations that break through become humongous and the innovations that don't become zeros and or close to zeros and the the winners are so big that that's they dominate all the returns but then there's this other ground where it's like f vc which me personally i'm on that boat where i wanna be a vc but i don't wanna take vc money and and that that's this other group of people and it's like dude they all can exist like right and that's why that quote is so insightful right don't hate the player hate the game cool you can hate the game that's a allowed that's in the quote you're allowed to hate the game say i'm gonna play a different game no problem you can play games where you bootstrap or you don't raise vc ac money where you you don't do business at you go be employee somewhere no problem that's always an option well i guess we just did her a little ramp but i wanted to bring that up we'll see if this episode turned out to be anything interesting i'll brand you how we do b plus i want the graphics guys like slam a big b plus all over the screen alright why b plus you gotta give give the people that your explanation why why why are you saying what you're saying i mean i'd it was good research but it's wasn't as juicy as it could be it was good i've never seen sean were animated than when he talked about flashlight by the way yeah i was super into that to be honest i i got ruined when i went to the website it's pretty freaking disgusting but do you go to the website no i did all my research i didn't go to their website it's not great it's pretty gross but no i think it's interesting i think what we'll have to do is i think like if we did an entire episode on flashlight or entire episode on the skype brad kelly i think it would be crazy fascinating more i thought you i thought bracing saying i went too much into it no that the flash was the best part i'm just saying you're very animated about it yeah like i would do here and i i have i have space but it's cold so i have to talk in an animated way to like not food you're you're passionate about flashlight it's okay so i've been listening i listen to a true crime podcast every night which weird that i'm in bed like with my wife i'm about to go sleep hearing about like how this guy like murdered and raped these people but it's this one lately called generation y it's really popular and all it is is two guys discussing crimes and mysteries ranging from nine eleven to serial murders to the be bermuda triangle all that all that type of thing and all they're doing is talking and re telling a story we should definitely just do that with one interesting person yeah i think that's great although if it's not true crime i don't know how interesting people how interested people would be in it if you told a sixty to seventy to ninety minute story in the same way that you told that flashlight story people would love it i could tell because i i could i was ent by it what's the first story we could tell how could we try it well one time we talked about this the french bill gates that that guy was so intriguing to me if you do sixty minutes that's like you can really only tell like your own story or like some something you really go or like a you know the american king penn story you can like retail it retail the book basically as a as podcast podcasts well that's what you're doing at at the end of the day which is you're just reading fifteen articles and you're telling the long story about it and what you could do is one of us is the more more researched and the other one listens and asked questions okay alright i'm down to try it if you have an idea am i wrong are you i mean it could work i'm just i don't know how you can make it that exciting like true crime there's suspense there's mystery you know what's gonna happen i don't i guess business maybe like big business scandals you could do that with no dude you do it exactly like you did the flesh origin stories yeah i think origin stores are right that's what i tried to do with the flesh like guy i was like basically you tell how this thing came to be so i think you could do it that way it works i i but i agree i don't know how you get sixty to ninety minutes out of it i think you basically forget the experiment that doesn't matter it could be twenty minutes isn't no no issue but it's like just a well told story a well researched and therefore a well told story about something that happened i honestly know like for me i started listening this youtube channel that basically is like it's like book summaries but actually done good i i actually like it and what's it called it's called productivity game as a youtube it's a youtube channel with about half a million i think subscribers or something like that i my could be wrong has a lot of subscribers but i've listened to probably ten of their book summaries of i've just books i've had i bought i just haven't got to i'm like i really wanna go read like made to stick or can i just like watch this seven minute video and like oh those are the four principles have made to stick cool i still might read the book but now i know if it's like interesting or not and so similarly i'm reading like you know whether it's like for example i read this book paypal whatever the paypal origin story or whatever if we just re hold that it's like a you know just take the book and then turn it into a twenty minute re telling of the story i think that's pretty that could be pretty i know that would work thinking that would be great there's this awesome podcast called we study billionaires which sounds lame but it honestly it's like you guys know it's they're huge and it's really good and they'll read a book on someone or just a blown article and just tell the story right it's really good i love this podcast it's called the investors podcast we never heard of this that's and pitch yeah either man i know they're thumbnail they're red thumbnail they're huge yeah forty million downloads they have so that would work lots the fan boys i guess we're we should publish us talking right now but speaking of you know what i'm doing is this isn't the what i'm doing with just gonna read one book this year but i'm gonna study the fuck out of it and i'm sick of reading like two books a month and not remembering anything yeah i'm just for me like youtube is just so much better like i'm just going deep on like you know like charlie mu peter lynch youtube stuff and i'm just like watching watching so many of their videos are listening to their videos and there's just a lot of wisdom in there and charlie mu said this thing he's like he's like i don't wanna read the news because goes i wanna read something that it made sense thirty years ago it makes sense today it's gonna make sense thirty years from now and i'd rather just read that ten times than read like whatever the latest thing is and that's kinda what you're saying yeah i i agree alright well looks bounce i'm gonna get my shit set up of by the next podcast better i feel like i could rule to whatever i know i could be what i want to from at all in like the days on the travel never looking back