#189 - Second-hand E-commerce, Door-to-door Sales, and Live Show Recaps

this is why in all my landing pages i always ask for email first yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a days off on a less travel never looking back what's up we're back from miami and we got a new nickname i am sean fury he is the vanilla gorilla and we are back we had to wing it this episode because we had a guest cancel last minute i think it turned out pretty good so sam what do we talk about yeah so this episode actually turned up i think to be one of my favorite in a long time we probably discussed maybe twenty or thirty ideas the ideas start about halfway through but we have a bunch of interesting ideas that are scattered throughout so a few things that we've discussed so businesses that we've both invested in recently including an event business we've talked about slingshot ideas so slingshot ideas that are ideas that have been kind of under the radar because of covid but now that there's a lot of pent up demand for events for interaction things like that these are gonna be slingshot is that the right word slingshot shooting back into popularity we talked about litigation finance basically there's a whole bunch of people that will finance lawsuits and then take a cut the winning winning settlement kind of interesting we talked about secondhand hand stores shockingly that's actually it seems like a huge idea and then finally we wrapped up with one of the best sean stories i've ever heard but we talked about door to door sales trust me it's gonna be fired up it's in the last fifteen minutes it's awesome we were supposed to have bill smith from hello landing on i got an email from his p team literally sixty seconds before we're supposed to hit record saying he's not gonna make it i don't know what what we're gonna do today i'm so angry about that oh my gosh i'm frustrated i gotta give you credit you you replied back to the email to the p r purse the p r person sixty seconds before the podcast supposed to record right we're in like the sound room in a green room getting sound check and it's like hey folks sorry you're not gonna be able to make it today looking forward to res scheduling and just because are you kidding one minute before the podcast no context it is and i thought they are you kidding was very balls i would have just i would have just ate it just took the slap and i think you rightfully you rightfully like what i mean okay so i'm reading this book call non nonviolent communication i'm reading it for i'm reading it for two reasons the first reason is i've gotten repeated feedback from you and ap bra and my coworkers that i have a temper i don't think i have a temper so i'm trying to get that and my wife sarah on the second this feedback is pissing me off i i i yeah i i think i could be a little hot and they you gotta say i was with you the whole week we went to austin miami and you were like an angel you were totally patient you were group just being grateful the whole time it was amazing and then you i think you didn't even notice at the end i was gonna tell you and then you go i've been really kind this whole trip i'm feeling really kind i'm grateful so i guess we can we can talk about that but yeah yeah so bill smith sorry brother like i have a feeling i have a feeling it wasn't bill's fault that that's what i would bet i bet he's got people and i bet eddie he screwed that they screwed it up not him but i never bought you know what happens like sometimes you you don't sort of don't really think about the other side you're just going about your day one thing is rolling over this other thing comes up and you're just like we gotta move that call thing we're we gotta move that podcast thing and and so you know i've i've been on that side where you know i don't sort of fully you know appreciate that the other side of it has you know there's a lot of prep that goes into a podcast it's like multiple people on board and timing and then you need to record because you have to release and then you're preparing for him you're researching him you're not researching other topics so then you gotta go live without a but i show on look we're not big shots yet i would love to be a big shot we're not big shots yet but i would say we are big enough shots that like somewhat like it would be wise to take this at seriously and give like a little bit of a heads up i'm not saying that we're like big deals but like you're saying it's a good and it's a good of the platform she wouldn't have reschedule tim ferris a minute before the pot is that what you're saying oh definitely enough look i'm not saying that we're big deals but i am and we are alright no let's whatever so i hope you come back so i don't know what we're were to talk about but you wanna do a recap of this weekend yeah let's do it so we had a fun week we went to i went to austin with your hometown state at your house not my hometown my where are your current town yeah and we did a live show i don't know about a hundred people were able to fit into the venue we did it at the apps office with noah ka that was fun then we hopped on a plane next morning five am and got to miami where the bitcoin conference was happening so there was like ten to twenty thousand people in town for you know the big bitcoin thing and we were there for our miami show and i think i don't know a few hundred people i don't know how many ended up being maybe i don't know what anything think dan two hundred fifty three hundred people something like that well three hundred people rs but i no sorry three two hundred show up yeah something like that yeah so two hundred people showed up or so did the live show there met a bunch of cool people people who flew in from paraguay and you know all different types of places to to attend and yeah then we hung out and way we flew home so that was a that's what happened but there were some interesting things that were going on give me your kind of like what do you think would be the most interesting one or two things to talk about from the trip i have a so i have a bunch and and bank bill smith so i'm just rattling this off the top of the dome there's no research here but the airports and hotel situation in both miami and in austin bananas absolutely crazy we went to the airport i think we got there at about six am we left my house at five thirty i think and it was like an hour long wait including tsa pre check to get past security and it was booming i went to miami the reason i came home early is because my hotels i went to book on hotel tonight and they all got canceled for some reason and i couldn't find a single hotel in between the ranges of two hundred dollars and two thousand dollars in miami i had to go say the family family's house travel is crushing it right now i'm i'm just shocked at how booming everything is yeah and also i came from california and in california there's just like covid you know precaution everywhere and as soon as we got to austin you're were like yeah this is my favorite like you know coffee shop slash bar i don't even know what the place was a lazarus or whatever it is whatever it's called and we walk in and i was like it's like stepping into a time machine i was like whoa everybody's just chilling everybody's hanging out at a restaurant indoors no masks the ever some people had the mask on that's cool that's their choice and other people didn't but it just it was like wow life has really gone on and people are back to normal and because in florida and texas i think they're probably two of the most like kind of forward states as far as like returning to the norm and then you know california i come back and it's sort of the same thing you know you if your nose peaks out of your mask you get three dirty looks and i'm i'm over the mask mask time i'm like i'm vaccinated let's let's roll here yeah so that was a takeaway with some covid stuff my my thing where do you think that the do you see any opportunities right now so like you had heard about pent up demand and how the economy is gonna bounce back after seeing miami after seeing austin airport i've seen a little bit of new york it's just it's booming where do you think the opportunities are do you have anything i'll top of your head that you're looking at i'm glad i bought airbnb stock when it was down because i think is gonna do very well because i do think people are pretty roaring to get back out there and doing things traveling traveling especially i know a lot of people that haven't seen their family and like you know a year and a half type of thing so i think that people are gonna be be coming back out that's not that like you know insightful of an answer it's just sort of obvious and i think that a lot of things that we we did as a necessary evil are gonna go away people are gonna ditch those with quick the same way i was ready to just ditch my math as soon as those it was okay to do it i think you know all the remote learning stuff is gonna go away pretty quickly because people if it wasn't a better experience it's like go into the graveyard as soon as you don't have to do it and i think remote school is one where every parent and every kid ever talked to the had to do remote like you know zoom school they are not like oh you know i really i really enjoy you know school from home like there's people who enjoy work from home i don't know anybody to enjoy school from home so i think that's that's is like gonna take a big hit did you see this company so i'm gonna talk about a startup up real quick that i just invested and i bet you looked at it as well it was called mary have you heard of mary is b mary dot com no tell me about so on so basically i'm friends with this guy named mon who's a successful entrepreneur and he invest in stuff and he just sends me interesting stuff i thought you are on that list because you maybe i just missed it or i think i have a feeling you missed it and so there's this so basically i'm on the lookout for companies that are gonna be take taking advantage we have to come up with a cute name to this like pent up demand because it's like what are people gonna care about right now so jason tele had a good phrase where he goes slingshot startups they had a setback they were pulled back during covid but it like it's like a slingshot when you when you when you pull it back is yes it's gone back backwards whereas but it's building up this momentum to slingshot forward i thought i like that was good little slingshot startup so i'm looking at like a event a event related stuff i think sex related stuff is gonna be quite interesting what are some other blush what does the two examples i invested in one company called fitness ai and this was like a app you use when you go to the gym so it's like a trainer when you're at the gym it would be like hey cool like it knows your progression so it basically say it tracks all your reps so it knows what weight you need to do next to get the next get the maximum gains over like a few months period of time now when covid hit jim's close his whole app became like useless overnight and so he had to re architect the whole app to do at in home fitness but the reason i would say is it's not that this startup necessarily benefited from it but you got to see what different startups are made of when you saw the entrepreneurs you know pivot the plane mid flight and find a new path and actually start growing at a time where they should have been having a setback another example is there's these guys who keep emailing me grew hotel they were a yc startup and they were you know software for hotels to increase their bookings and focused in lot latin america and of course you know covid hits nobody's booking hotels their business should really struggle and like they just made all these tweaks and all these adjustments so that they first stayed flat and then actually started to grow at a time when their business should have crater in many less less determined entrepreneurs less adaptable entrepreneurs would have would have gone under and so i think it it was a great the great filter it weed out the entrepreneurs and you got to see the entrepreneurs who actually succeeded despite the circumstances and those are the ones i think worth betting off what's guru hotel about i don't know exactly what they do they basically i think what it is is it's like shopify for a hotel so most hotel websites suck so what they did was they just make they make your hotel website higher converting and higher up upsell and so you're gonna get an incremental ten percent to fifteen percent in revenue because instead of paying some you know your nephew to build a wordpress website for your your your hotel and it hasn't changed in eight years and you you know you don't even touch it because you don't know how to code it they basically take over the front end website for your hotel and in doing so they generate more revenue for you and then they take a cut or they take accessory that sounds pretty great to me have you heard of mind body you don't mind body yeah so mind body they're publicly traded they were started in two thousand so they've been around for a minute and basically they kinda started out doing that a little bit just helping a a a yoga instructor i think it's mostly like it's health stuff studios yeah so it's basically like yoga studios pilates studios stuff like that and they became the website and the bookings system and payment system for all those physical like locations yeah crazy good company kinda quietly i think they're based out of san luis obi so they're not silicon valley and so they've probably been quietly crushing it and what's this called hotel guru goo guru hotel yeah well i should call the other yeah they should they should switching it should be hotel guru they should switch it's like so obvious when you said it i haven't even done that yeah they they they didn't change that guru hotel no never mind res all by compliments they well like i think there's a mind body component here of like you just create the first thing and then next next and next x next so i are you gonna invest in that company maybe i and like they keep sending me updates and it all sounds good but i just have this inherent thing that the best startups don't reach out randomly to non super famous investors like me so unfortunately and this is like the this is kind of a screwed up thing what if a startup is reaching out to me to try to make room i already discount twenty that doesn't mean i don't do but i discount twenty percent how good it is even when it looks good so yeah i know time in anybody else i'm the same way i'm like oh you you're willing to like it's like that's what i felt like when i was dating like oh you like me something something's bad yeah right this is easy so there's there's this company called mary i just invested like i said we send it to you and i'm not sure if this is gonna be the biggest thing but i think could that definitely be a very profitable investment it's called mary m e r r o i did you go to it it it looks like a very b mary dot com i'll tell you why i'm interested but i'll tell you first what it does so what it does is you need to organize as an event they've uploaded i don't know how maybe there's a huge database out there but they've uploaded massive amounts of rendering or like floor plants of event space and then they make it really easy to drag and drop different tables and chairs and whatever you need for a wedding or a conference and you get outline what the event is going to look like and you do it in three d because somehow the four blue one it looks like it looks like the sims so it's like you take it you have the venue and then it lets you upload like circle table chairs banquet chairs you know like speaker like podium or whatever right it looks like the sam you make a little three d rendering exactly and the reason i invested in this was because of something that andrew wilkinson said on this podcast he called something an airport business i think he called what's that thing he owns dr yeah she owns this thing called dr and what dr is is or i think he was referring to dr when he was we're talking about airport business but basically with with with an airport you arrive at the airport and you're there you have to be there for three to four hours you're gonna buy whatever they have you're gonna if you're there it's very easy for that airport to sell you can be a magazine you're a captive audience yes you're a captive audience and what mary did is they made it where they uploaded all of these venues and so people who are executing weddings can go on there and pay a fee to use their software to drag and drop and like organize stuff and then what they've done is so the vendor can come on and put their the stuff that they wanna sell so like certain type of chairs whether it's for rent or to buy it could be on there and then as the event planner is on there doing their thing that they can sell just the event planner loads and loads and loads at stuff so they can make money through affiliate they can make money through subscription fees they can make money through a lot of different stuff that they're on there and the reason why i invested in this is i think that this is a boring boring thing that could work quite well and there's gonna be a massive pent up demand for event and so we put a little bit of money into it we'll see if it works but i love the business of house do you know how h o u z z i've i've heard it and i think you used that or something like that for your your house right no i use something like that yeah so i use what houses is you probably don't know houses is probably the audience is probably majority women it's a you basically can design your kitchen or your bedroom on house and they make like a billion dollars a year through affiliate fees it's quite amazing and it's a it's a multi billion dollar company but it's kinda been quiet in the background it's kind of amazing what i used was what the fuck did i use the i use a service where you take a picture of your house mods thank calling mo i take a picture the thing where you take a picture of your house and then they you pay three hundred dollars per room i think i paid like twelve hundred bucks a designer designs it and then if i choose to i can purchase all these stuff that they're telling you to buy or i just go buy stuff on my own that kinda looks like it right but by the way i like these models where i don't know about you but for me whenever it's like hey you get the free consultation and ideas and then it's up to you if you buy them and at the beginning i'm was like sweet let me get the free expert advice and like i'm not gonna buy the things that's how i go in and then as soon as i see it i'm like oh that looks really good like i guess i could just push this button and just order these items right like i could just buy these things and so it ends up being where they i go in knowing eyes wide open on the model like it's like nerd wallets it's like cool i go in i read the blog post about the credit cards i'm not gonna like just pick one of these credit cards right off here and necessarily like because i kinda know you know there's like affiliate thing but but then i do because it's so convenient and there's something to that when i was selling my house it was the same thing with staging they're like cool like we're gonna we're gonna do all this work to give you these three free options on which one you wanna do and then as soon as you see it you're like okay i'll give you the give me the expensive one do it it looks so much better and so you know it it sort of breaks you over time like a like the puppy close where they give you the puppy they'll let you keep it for the weekend and you're like great i'll just play with this puppy for the weekend and then by by sunday night you're like this puppy is never leaving my house i didn't know that was a thing you never heard that and say no copy close basically you give them the thing and then instead of having them opt in you have them if okay you can opt out if you want and nobody ever opt out do you what what are some other slingshot start ups that you're seeing or or or slingshot opportunities so the slingshot so it has to be something that was set during covid so what was setback during covid i think physical i think physical retail schools travel hospitality like we just said there's other things that are like you know like a concerts and stuff like that i think those are i think those sports games concerts i think those are all gonna come back so i i'll give you one which is sports games so the nba playoffs is going on right now and i always wondered would people have kind of like ptsd from covid where they don't wanna be in even when it's safe they just don't wanna be close to other people without you know and and and confined areas but these arenas are sold out you know as many people as they'll let in it's packed people are going nuts they're having a good time and you know if it just feels good to be back in a high energy place again with a whole bunch of other screaming you know luna and so but i think what happened is i think the it's sort of like the the nba franchise or the the league had to get pretty had to get like double resilient because all of a sudden this thing it just took for granted which is all this ticket revenue win away for like a year and so now they open their mind up to well what other revenue streams should we have should we allow sports betting should we like should we do that should we sponsor things that we weren't sponsored before should we do n t's oh okay cool you know nba a top shot we'll do n t's as a source of revenue so i think it's pretty interesting that i think all these like pro sports are gonna bounce back because they were already a premium in person experience and now they were kind of lazy before at innovating they didn't have to innovate and covid made them innovate the fan experience and the like business model and i think you know we should see some some good things come from that last night so could you watch the logan paul floyd bay weather fight i watched a little bit it yeah a little bit really it was in a warehouse where we didn't have streaming internet very strong and so i you know it was choppy but i got to see the last two rounds only so it was i was it was exciting so basically if you're go i was gonna go but then i realized i didn't and two things happen one someone gave me tickets and then right before i about go get the tickets they were like also like you're gonna mention us in the hustle and i was like no not a chance i thought this was a gift thank you but no thank you i i know there strings attached i'm out so i gave up the tickets and also i didn't like miami so i came home early right it wasn't for me and not for me at all i i i can see why some people like it it ain't for me so last night basically logan paul is the six foot two probably he weighed in at one ninety probably fought at two zero ten two ten to zero five huge guy and he fought floyd may weather who's forty four backs best boxer of all time but forty four and a hundred and sixty pounds at his heaviest right and i thought for sure floyd was gonna win and ended up being basically a draw because i don't declare a winner because it's an exhibition but floyd did not do well and logan did as good as he possibly could have which is he didn't get knocked out well and from what i understand floyd did the floyd thing where he just didn't do anything he just played defense he just let the clock run out he didn't was it that he was unsuccessful on offense or he just didn't try any office because he didn't need to because he got paid either way i think he's old well i think that he i think age it was a factor here and i think that he sides the factor here mh i think that the reason why everyone says floyd loss because a loss or floyd is not winning and not knocking him out everyone including me though for sure logan's gonna get knocked out he didn't he did great he's a winner the guy like went from vin to fighting floyd in a stadium total winner but what he did before the show was logan is known for like collecting pokemon cards and there's this whole trend if you don't know about this on of un cards and so i actually love watching un nba cards i don't even i like the nba but the title will be like i yeah unboxing a michael jordan card i think it's awesome i love doing it earl love washing this logan has this whole thing where does it and he in his he traded a necklace that was basically the most expensive or most rare pokemon card of all time and he like put it in some type of like safety thing and he wore around his neck as he was walking out and what i think is gonna happen it was when i would looked like what he's setting up is that he is gonna sell that and i think that what his brother did jake paul was they during the knockout when he when his brother fought a few weeks ago they had an n nxt right after the fight right and i think that them selling the member of memorabilia right away after the fight is a brilliant idea and that started a little bit with n t's and but i think that that idea is here to stay alright that's interesting yeah so so just for the context so he basically had like the way that most fighters come out they come out with their gold chain they're you know they come out with diamonds on and he basically had a a sort of diamond chain but the pendant was a charizard a one million dollar charizard card that was laminate as a holographic charizard i'd rare blah blah blah and he's like i'm wearing a million dollars on my chest right now and it just helps because he's already invested in pokemon so him giving it that sign and giving it that credibility using the platform made his own collection worth more and made that individual one worth more because it now has the story of this is the one that you saw on tv not just the fact that it's a rare charizard on court so smart smart move all around these guys know how to make money floyd had his mask sponsored he had he had like everything's sponsored on his mask was sponsored by ethereum something dot org like did you see that is i know what it was it was it was crazy so his hat is his mask everything was sponsored as he walked out because these guy this was a an all time money grab was great so i wanna tell you cool n thing most n t things by the way not that cool you you you you you have to explain what we're we're adding so many listeners sean that you have to actually say what f is so i think like a lot of people don't understand i got i got an aunt and and a mother model listening and gotta explain what the is alright n is a piece of art that is digital that's that's the way that most people are using it today it stands for this thing from crypto so you've heard a bitcoin might have heard of ethereum ethereum lets you create this thing called an n nxt and n just means it's a unique a a unique thing so for example if i have a hundred dollar bill sam has a hundred dollar bill we could swap it and we would just know they're all the same one hundred dollar bill is the same as the other but if i have a piece of art on my wall santa's has a piece of art his wall we can't just swap it because my art is unique and his art is unique and they're not gonna be worth the same amount even if we had you know sort of the same pair of of of jordans you know they they might be in different condition or different years whatever it is so an n is more like a pair of of of fancy you know basketball shoes it's what something that collectors will will own it can be used in many other ways but the majority is that people are using to collect sort of to create and collect digital art they got popular because a whole bunch of people who are what i call crypto rich right they made their money on bitcoin they made their money on ethereum they got tons of money from that and when n emts came out they were using they were using their their winning to buy n t's and so they were buying n t's for literally millions and millions of dollars so you and it blew people's minds it's like wait that's just a image on a computer screen why are you buying it for millions of dollars and they would say you know what's the mona lisa but some you know but some paint on a on a on a piece of paper right it it art has art has its value is in the meaning that people give it so anyways n entities got popular they've had sort of a crash since since the hype cycle because every everybody everybody poured in thought there was a chance to make money and then you know it's down at the n nfc markets down like eighty plus percent right now from where it was just a few months ago so it's been very up and down but i'll tell you something cool that the people who were not there's a group there's with any technology there's a hype cycle where people jump in just to try to make a buck and then there's like the people who just believed it it all time and when the crash happens they stay they don't go away and so i'll tell you a cool n example so do you know who lame mellow ball is a basketball player from the ball family and they're kinda like a little obnoxious so like the kardashians of like nba so go to lame ball dot i o so i'm met this guy or you know actually i haven't met me at ben madam him because we thought this project sounded really awesome so he partnered up with lame ball and lame ball created his own feet now here's how it works the website looks so awesome yeah yeah exactly very very good website so there's there's like four different types it's like he turned lame essentially into a pokemon card okay so he you can collect these different available types of of cards now what do they do well the the twist here the reason i think it's kinda cool is that this is called a dynamic n feet meaning it most n entities is when you make it it is what it is the image or the video is what it is it stays that way for till the end of time a dynamic one will update or upgrade based on things that happen so what this is is it's sort of like a bet on the player so you can buy one of these you could buy the mvp card and today it's worth not so much because he's never won an mvp but if in his career he ever wins in in an mvp the card will like like evolve like a poke pokemon card it'll upgrade because it has been unlocked because the thing actually happened in the in real life so it's like today you're betting these cheap options will will ball ever win the n it will he ever win mvp will he ever win rookie of the year will he win a championship and if he does your asset that you bought will dynamically upgrade because it takes in the data from from the real world that hey this event has happened and it is now worth more and it could do more and specifically just to like kind of round it out but the price isn't it's not worth more necessarily right well and you know it's like most things right like if i buy michael jordan rookie card and then michael jordan becomes a greatest player of all time that rookie cards worth more than it was when he was a rookie and nobody knew how good he would be how do they literally so what i'm looking at here is basically this three d rotating image of like trophy almost how are they make i mean this looks awesome like the resolutions maze everything about like the way it looks is cool how are they making that i think there's just the three d animators on the internet they're right they get them to make some custom stuff for them and by the way there those that's a group of people who who've had a renaissance right now because there's a whole bunch of famous people that want their own n nxt and you you to do that you need a digital artist to make you your cool thing so it's one cool thing about this by the way you buy the thing and it comes with access so like let me just read off the perks if you bought like the the most expensive one so so the gold the gold lame one is the rookie of the year one and is guaranteed to evolve if he wins rookie which by the way he will this year it comes with a it comes with a physical card it comes with seventy five seven hundred fifty dollars in guaranteed endorsement deal rewards so basically his endorse have to give you free stuff which is kinda cool it comes with some official merchandise from him you can you have a chance to win nba a game tickets valued up to five thousand dollars you have fifty percent chance to receive autograph memorabilia and you're gonna get exclusive access to video calls that he's gonna do with holders of his his collectible so it's kinda cool right what if a basketball card came with access to the player right like you know you buy a little lebron card and lebron for all the the holders of the of the platinum card he's gonna do a skype call with them or a video why hell did i say skype a zoom call with them you know once a year or something like that or you get you know a pair of ga game worn shoes you have a ten percent chance of getting those or something like that this is great i think this is so cool what i wanna ask well i'll ask on in a second but this is awesome i think like i'm not that's way sir the guy who made i think he's like twenty twenty one years old he's like steve bartlett type of i i'm seeing shades of of steve bartlett again in this guy who who's a hustle who made this happen so that's actually what i wanna ask about i i wasn't gonna skip ahead but i i do we'll come back to us so what i'm seeing on this website is that this is basically this la lame mellow thing is basically a creation of a company called ether cards is that right yeah maybe that's the name of his company yeah yeah because company called ether cards i'm looking at the traffic if you go to similar web and look at like traffic basically nothing nothing nothing and then in one month three million visitors all the traffic is direct meaning someone very likely is there's just three million people in the very first month of this thing being launched in march typing in ether dot cards those numbers if you don't know anything about these numbers that's a really the that's phenomenal right what i wanna know is how are people discovering these types of fit fit so beautiful question i should have said this at the beginning the change here is not oh we went from a a a basketball card that's a piece of cardboard that you buy from target to now a digital thing that you have on on your on your phone or a computer it's not just that lame mellow owns his own ip he is releasing his own card set so otherwise the nba signs an agreement with pin they're the guys who make the the all the the basketball cards or tops right these these brands that make cards and the players don't get directly ascent from their their own cards popularity so right now like luca he has the most popular pine cards and they're going up they're being sold on the secondary market for thousands and thousands of dollars you know like a lebron card will sell for for two hundred thousand dollars but lebron doesn't get a cut of that transaction because he didn't issue it he you know he as a collective group they signed the rights you know when they become an nba a player they'd nba cuts a deal and so they're gonna sure they get some like shared royalty stream of like know whatever the licensing agreement was nba but individual player doesn't get anything and therefore also has no incentive to promote this thing whereas with this lame has mint his own card he owns whatever percent he negotiated with ether cards and lame is gonna be putting this in his instagram story all the time and he guess what he's got millions of followers on instagram who love lame ball and so he's gonna get more value out of this and he would ever get out of a traditional basketball basketball card walk me through how this young guy made ether cards and and in this business so basically eat the cards he just you you know he made the website it's it's very slick very cool how is the the tracking of of of all these cards possible the the the back end technology of like tracking the payment and all that do they actually make it make that are they building on top of something else i don't know i think they're probably building on tops something else it's one of the best parts of crypto is that because crypto is open source crypto is about building protocols you can use those protocols to do anything so we had fur on here i don't know did he talk about pac protocol i don't know if remember he's building fe building something called the pac protocol out of his thing yeah and basically it it's just a protocol where or can go on there and say hey you know just like you said you love to watch people doing pack breaks nba cards we could make our own m packs just like jack butcher i think did with visualize value we could say great we want we wanna we're gonna offer these ten possible cards right inside one of them gives you like an hour of business coaching another gives you a shout on the podcast another gives you a free shirt another gives you just a a twitter follow whatever we come up with our our rewards we just type them in and it basically says assign the probability to each it's like oh you know the follow is high probability and a hour of business coaching is only one percent of people should get this when they open a pack we set the price and it'll basically spin up like shopify for n fees it'll spin up a website where we can sell our packs and fans can come they could buy them and they can open them up and they can have a chance of winning inside we didn't have to do any coding to make that happen because they have built the pack protocol and to to make this happen and it's all saved on the ethereum blockchain like it's all the ownership is there and so and they just take a cut of every buy in in exchange for having built this technology for us so back and but back to the ether cards so so so the these kids like bill just a front end and use someone else's protocol and then they holler it they somehow got in touch with lame mellow i mean like hey agree and by the way they sorry just to catch you off one second they i don't know how we got tesla i've been gonna ask him but after launching this project so this thing did hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first day when it dropped so you know just the lame mellow thing or just a thing did did i don't don't know if i say the exact number but north of three hundred thousand dollars in during the drop and then other players just by the way it's so funny say like north of three hundred like yeah it did over three hundred four hundred thirty three thousand dollars like i said like you know i gotta give people the information without giving people hey it rides with heaven hundred thousand dollars like that like we just say yeah basically so other nba players including one of the most popular nba players on the planet hit him up and was like hey saw the lame thing let's like talk to my people let's do it let's do my own and did this kid have a following already on twitter or what platform are using so he i'm gonna chat with him this week but ben talked to him while we were in miami and and what he said was that he got big he his his claim to fame before this was helping artist go viral on tiktok so he partnered with a bunch of musicians because y you know a bunch of the viral things you've seen on tiktok i kinda architect those behind the scenes i don't know what that means but i'm like oh you got hustle dripping off you like this is good and did you how did ben your so ben if you're listening is sean's coworker basically they scheme together how did ben find this bet we saw the announcement on the espn announced lame ball is doing his own n feet we saw an article i go i read the dynamic part how it updates based on the players actual achievements in the real world and i go i just best ben and i go this is fucking genius find the genius who made this and he went and found the guy who made it scheduled a call i couldn't make that call ben ben did the call and ben gave me the low on like who this guy is he's like he's awesome you should talk to him and ben met him on social yeah just dm them ben has my i i don't know if you use his twitter or he has access to my twitter where he could just dm anybody from my account and because my account has more followers i get a higher rate of reply so let's do the there's so many takeaways here for a listen i wanna actually wanna go and take it with the first is like i'm actually amazed at this the way that you found this was not special quick maybe if ben used so ben doesn't have a big following right he's just no it looks normal bm levy ben ben levy or ben m levy fine i don't know twitter something like that ben m levy so yours looks special you have a hundred forty four thousand people most people would ant reply to someone they have a hundred and forty four thousand people but ben is it all i did was d does can't even know to see know who you are like to see know sean is like a a popular podcast or anything no idea okay great so that's the takeaway here is that like you've found an opportunity by seeing it on es espn yeah had ben but you didn't have to happen no i i i've done this my that's how i found ben by the way same thing just this out that that's a huge takeaway here the other takeaway is just that the setup t thing is cool yeah yeah yeah exactly and i think you're gonna see more of this you're gonna see famous people launching their own limited edition n t's that come with access to the person and they own the whole thing so they're not using they don't have to sign with a label or sign with or like rely on tops to go make their card for them they're gonna release their own cards and they're gonna own their own upside which is obviously a much better thing for the talent yeah this is amazing i love this i with all other topics if wanna do go go go go okay let's do let's do two things how do you how do so normally when we when we research we have a document what what are you using remind just on my notes on my comp my my it's for my phone's notes because i was typing it while we were like it would be out we've meet somebody like for example at the event where we did the podcast some guy came up he's like hey i'm a lawyer i i've been a lawyer in dallas for a long time i drove down for the event from dallas to austin and you know i just love you guys always get the wheels turning in fact i can't just like be a normal lawyer anymore i really wanna do more and he has this idea for litigation finance because you know what that means did you talk to this guy no but can i guess what that means yeah please basically i think this is what peter till did so is it wins okay so basically peter t is this billionaire guy who had a vendetta against ga because ga out him as being gay so peter feels like a a powerful vc he's gay he didn't wanna anyone know he's gay docker wrote an article saying he's gay and so he plotted for ten fifteen years probably ten years he goes whenever i see these guys slipped tom po so ten years later or after this article hulk hogan has a sex tip issue and peter t has two guys on staff just sniffing out and in fraction they go hey this hulk hogan thing that's it so the story is hogan was hit either hawk hogan so hulk hogan was having sex with someone they some third party filmed it without his consent ga published the video peter two goes boom that's it hey hawk i got the best lawyers i'm gonna fund you and if the case wins just give me a little cut of it peter t probably didn't even take it kind of it right that's how it could've worked how hotel it could work exactly and he did he they did the lawsuit they bankrupt they basically put ga out of business ga no longer is is is in business the guy who built that site over the years you know it all came falling down because he pushed it too far he pissed off the wrong the wrong billionaire so and by the way some people think this is bad whatever okay so what not not that you don't care that if it is or it's not bad it's interesting regarding irrelevant to what we're talking about is whether billionaire should fund lawsuits and take down media not okay whatever so yeah so litigation finances is exactly this so basically what he does is they he the lawyer he analyzes cases that could be pursued so oh you might have a lawsuit here that you should be pursuing you for whatever reason maybe you don't know if you could wait you don't realize it's a it's a you could potentially sue for for being wrong you don't have the money the you know the corporation can can throw all their lawyers at this and you you don't wanna go broke trying to trying to just sue so you kinda sit on it so i think it was like seventy percent plus of potential suits go un file because of you know one of many reasons and so the idea here would be if you see you can submit to them hey would you back my my case and they basically under write the risk of it they look at it they say oh i think you have a really strong case or no i think have a weak case if you have a strong case they'll say great we will fund the lawsuit you get a piece of it if it works if it doesn't work you lose nothing and and so that basically the guy it had rate has now raised or is raising millions of millions of dollars from family offices and and other folks to fund these cases and so that's what they're doing now as a thing hey anyways i thought it was cool listener idea i don't know what you think of that how much have they raised how much does he range i think they raised something like six million dollars so far to to fund this and he's trying to get you know basically it's a proof of concept if they could show that yes we are successfully able to under write these cases meaning we can correctly select the winners and offer a payback great if once we know that we're we're able to pay back twenty five thirty percent on your you know annually on your on your on your financing here then we can go raise fifty or a hundred or two hundred million to do more okay i i i've i've heard of this i didn't realize this was such a thing i'm am so in so there's a company called bur capital it's founded in entails a nine located in england did you see it that's he told me about it he goes this is big an england there's a multi billion dollar company bur blah blah blah i just googled this while you're talking i googled finance legal stuff the first web the first website went to p capital the website has like like a like a monday night football looking guy wearing a white dude wearing a ill fitting suit right there i'm like opportunity okay like anytime there's like these like shitty wick websites with like basic looking at white dudes i'm like that's interesting second the second thing that came up was bur capital i just googled it has a market cap of one point eight billion dollars sir in two thousand and nine that's pretty good right that's per this is pretty amazing yeah exactly so he was like you know send you the information and i told her if i said look this sounds great i don't know anything to about this so i'm probably not gonna fund it just because i have two options i can either invest in things i really understand or i invest in things i don't understand i used to do both but now that this podcast has got is so popular and now the number of opportunities that i do understand are so large they they exceed my invest capital now i don't have to do shit i don't understand anymore this is a really interesting business this is but was so when i you i you're further along and i would actually say you're probably a better investment than i am when i look at these sets of companies i think like what's the idea that's important right i i think of i don't have enough time to go and verify if this is like a solid market so i look at who else is investing right that's probably a lot of people say oh that's boring you know you are you ever gonna take a chance well probably not to be honest like i i like to look at that but then the third thing is i look at the person are they a competent person right like so did this person seem like they're gonna build a huge company office you know he seemed like a competent person he seemed like a lawyer who you know it is i don't think you need to be the visionary or like the shark executor i don't think you need to do anything for that i think you literally just need to be somebody who's gonna do the the blocking and tackling to make this happen i don't think it requires genius which is great that that's actually a a positive thing for the for this business you don't want to invest businesses that require genius yes but you more likely than not need some type of charisma in order to be i mean like you either do need to be a genius so you do need to be like a peter t type of guy you do need to be maybe like what are you like you or me type of person which we don't really know how to do that much but we're charismatic enough to convince other people to come work in our companies and convince them to do the work yeah like and then you have like a few like industry knowledge what maybe this guy has because you need something yeah you need attributes as conor mcgregor with the if you're gonna be you gonna have some yeah if you're gonna beat me you need some attributes yeah so like look if you're gonna like succeed need you need some attributes but one of the attributes gonna be like something like when you're building a finer or building a sports team or building like an nba player on video games and you can like put like do i make this person like as fast as possible do make them as calls as possible we're doing make the strongest as possible you need something there i think that's the next shirt you need attributes to meet me yeah so what i'm like what attributes is this guy have so that's what i'm curious about yeah i think his domain knowledge i think that's the the biggest one do agree with me by the way you need some attributes you do and what i guess like the only point i trying make is that some require more attributes and other there are some where you have to be the smartest and the fiercest assist and the fastest and you know the like that's there's some businesses that require that and there's some where you can be the tortoise not the hair right and i think this is one where you could be the tortoise you just have to keep going forward and sleep by the way termination and just i'm more to do all the time exactly and you know having the steady hand and being be good at actually selecting the cases right because that's gonna just prove the track record out over time so i think the domain knowledge matters alright i wanna do some of topics so i have like three but i don't know which one i wanna do okay i'll give you i'll give you some options this is amazing by the way this is turning out to be quite good totally unplanned so and by the way i wrote these down just while we were talking at the beginning when the guy canceled alright so bitcoin miami i have a few comments on what was going on at bitcoin miami i don't know if i know it's horrible so i we could talk about that we could talk about i have a a a thing on second hand e commerce if you wanna hear that also door to door sales i have a story there and the last one is a framework about the next apple the next google the next facebook so so tell me all agree do give me which one you wanna do the second one and then the fourth one okay the second one i think was the the second handy commerce thing yeah alright so let's do that so so as you know i've been dabbling an commerce and and you know building have built a brand and then have gotten built a community club lt tv that has like i don't know a hundred store owners each doing somewhere between one million a year and a hundred million a year in sales and so in that i've started to learn some of the the pain points of e commerce one of the interesting things that i didn't know about that you might know about right because you've used posh mark i think when i was at your house to told me guess what me and sarah did this weekend we sold like ninety seven dollars worth of old clothes on posh mark yep and i was like dude you're we well what's happening this is your hobby and you're like yeah i love this shit i didn't realize how big the second hand market for for e commerce is dude posh you're crazy so let me tell you posh mark going public multi billion dollar evaluation valuation what's a public party yeah win public what what is it i don't know we'll we'll look up but yeah it's a public okay there's threat up spoken hu raised two hundred fifty million dollars either going public or went public already there's grail i discovered grail in two thousand eleven i didn't have any money it was launched for benchmarks three point six billion great there's grail i i dm this guy because or i messaged him on reddit it years ago because i was on the day he launched it i was going to the website i didn't invest in it i think it it still could be great it's basically posh mark for hit dudes what else is there there's like eight others yeah they're like substantial so let me tell you what i think is interesting here we for for our store for our our our d brand we have a large amount of people who buy new and they they're willing to spend more buying new because they know there's this has secondary value they know they could sell it three months from now six months from now either new or used and recoup a good amount of the money so a certain certain categories you could do that better than others so anyways the but the but managing this thing is is really awful so the way that people do it today is sometimes they list on posh mark or the real real or like i forgot the other one mc macquarie b is huge they go they go list on those exchanges but a big part of it is they have facebook groups for every brand so every brand will have any brand with a with a cult following will have a secondary market facebook group called buy sell train bs and we'll s bs so you can look up any brand name on facebook go type in the brand name and like i don't know your favorite boots or leather jackets you liked or whatever just type in that bs so what you'll see is that there are these these private groups on facebook communities for buying selling and trading what you already have what you do is you take a photo of your your closet or your your item you lay it down on the floor you take a photo of it and you just write you know like there's all these acronyms like if you go in there it's another language it's like m t that means new with tag okay great or like you know iso in search of this product and so they have their own little lingo it's insider community and the postal the item you just say here's what i have here's what it's for i have no pets in the house no smokers and then somebody in the comments will just say they'll just type in a number it's like an a little option those should be like forty dollars and then you just say done send me your what's your email i'll send you the paypal invoice so there's just like it's like this is kinda like stitched together experience where then you have to send them the paypal invoice they have to pay it then you have to like find a they get their mailing address you have to ship it and then do just google bs t i just found what pay bs t twenty k members right and and that's what they'll have they'll have tens of thousands members often and and they're very active and for the brand for the brand themselves this becomes kind of a headache if it's it's good but it's bad why is it bad so the first thing is a bunch of people will buy your product just to flip it right so they'll go and they'll sell it for more so we have a product we we have one one of our products it sells for sixty five dollars and then it immediately so it it sells out the first minute we'd we release it and then it immediately starts selling for ten times more so five hundred or six hundred dollars on mer or the second hand websites what's the what what's that mer one at m e r c a r i probably seen their billboards before they're very big that's cool so so anyways so so some one one part pain point is is these flipper but that's okay the other part is like you don't benefit from the second hand market directly like you don't get any cut of those sales that are happening but you do sometimes have customer service problems because people complain oh you know i bought this thing from the official buy sell trade group and they scammed me or they didn't send it or they sent the wrong item and you're like dude is not my problem like this is that's not even us that's like craigslist so like so you can't complain to us about what's going on on craigslist so this company we found has a very interesting take on this so i'm trying to invest in this this it's called tread how did you find this how do you find all this crap guess who i can can i how do i share him you you need a you wanna give a love letter to ben i think you fell in love ben on this trip i did tread is tread dot com so sean has a guy who he pays a great salary too and his name's is ben and i hung out with ben for the first time and what ben i admire him so much ben is and i say this would love pretty nerdy a nerdy guy and not like in terms of like looks or acts but like just like his interest like he just loves like gadgets he loves new stuff and i started talking about him and he just brought or talking to him and he just told me he just browse the web to find the latest and greatest stuff and he'll use it and then he'll dm or email or message the person who starts the and just say this is neat ear tips that i would do to make it better or here's been my experiences and your thing and that's all he says and in doing that he sees everything and knows everyone and i think it's so fascinating right he's just he's just helpful okay not just it's not trick treat is the name of it treat dot com i'll send it you t r e e t dot c okay so so check that out so what they do is they have this idea of circular commerce meaning you make an item you sell it and then that person instead of it just going to waste they can resell it to the next person and they can resell it to the next person sort of a circular commerce model so what they do sandy to url again t r e e t treat dot gov so what they do is they give your shopify store a page or a tab that just creates the second hand market right there in your store so somebody who wants to buy a used item can just go buy it secondhand hand from within your store you don't have to do the whole paypal invoicing facebook group you know questionable integrity type of thing anymore customers can just list their stuff here it can be bought from from your store which has more trust than just a random group and the transaction is processed you know online using normal credit card processing and stuff on this and the brand gets a percent cut you could set your percent cut of what you'll take out for hosting the secondhand hand market so it's an additional new revenue stream for our d brand i think this is really really smart this does two things it a it legit this the sort of secondary circular nature it and a lot of people like that it's not being that's like a less wasteful version of consumerism the second thing is that it takes resale and it makes it a part of your business model as the brand so for consumers it helps because it's higher trust you know the technology technology's is all built you don't have to do this manually through facebook groups and for the brand here's an extra x percent of revenue that you're gonna make every month because now you participate in the resale market that that's crazy i i don't know if this is a good idea how would you feel as a business i mean you you do i'm gonna use this because i've i want this for our business do you think a lot of people feel the same way i don't know we'll see you you don't my guts super early make more shit like why are you selling out don't sell out like is you selling out that sounds like a u problem not a you need a plug in problem well it's not just not just for selling out right some people just can't afford the full priced item like i don't know you bought those dumbbells in your in your garage second hand off facebook marketplace or whatever right like if you can get the good the item in good condition for half the price for that opens up your buyer pool into a different segment that can't maybe always afford the full price item and you don't have to do heavy discounting as a brand okay so i'm just googling as you're talking because we didn't have them to research but so pat ceo has this great saying where he goes i actually don't want you to buy more stuff buy one thing from us and if if you if it rips if it rips we'll fix it and it should just last so like only buy one thing so i just googled pat pre owned they they have a url that's dedicated to it called one ware dot pat dot com and i'm pretty sure they have their entire yeah they have an entire way to buy and sell their own their own gear kinda cool actually it is actually cool you know who would buy use pat stuff you me me i buy and use clothing all the time whenever i buy a red wing boots i always buy them used i actually changed my opinion very quickly i think this is cool alright i i'm glad pat go got your first line okay i have another topic for you do you wanna do another one or we're keep going wrap it up no keep going this is good okay let's do one more no no you you had four things four this one you wanna do so your rating options put the door door to door okay so this is a little bit longer pat pre owned website by the way it's fucking sick ninety dollar jeans for thirty eight bucks all bore in but could treat me a big business as a shopify plugin am my being a hate just because it's a simple shopify pipeline plugin well i don't even it's not i don't even think it is a shopify plugin but i know what you mean yeah i think it's i think it's the wrong way to think about it because if you look at how big the centralized marketplaces are mer macquarie posh mark those are three or four billion this is that same thing but just decentralized instead of one website where you go to find all the brands every brand has your little marketplace embedded into it so i think it's a smart strategy where you you give the brand the marketplace instead of trying to get the customer to come to your app this is fucking awesome yes yeah here's some more so door our sales so this thing has been happening recently and i know you love the mormons so i think you'll you'll dig this love the mormons you love the mormons so i have met in the last or i've heard these stories in the last few days i'll give you two of door door sales i have never done door door sales but i'm almost jealous that i have now so i'll give you two two examples do you know who brian johnson is janine might not be might be hard to place did yeah so i know two different brian johnson's one sells books online and the other started brain tree brain trees is the guy i'm talking about okay so good that's that's pretty good you know you get you get two hundred points for for your house there alright so so brian johnson i was listening to his interview he went on le friedman men's podcast i was listening to it does this still work yeah so so here his story insane so he basically creates brain tree which is like a payments it it's basically online payments company stripe before stripe it was stripe before stripe it didn't become stripe but it's sold for about eight hundred eight hundred million dollars i believe to paypal and he owned most all of it yeah exactly he owned a a huge chunk of it he also i think they bought v moe along the way so so he had the strategy early on which was like we go to the merchants we get the merchants to use us because we're so easy to use online and then we'll build a consumer like side of we'll buy the the most hits consumer app there was that was v and that will be a valuable company and anyway so he builds his company for eight hundred million dollars he sells it and he decides what he wanted was he wanted to have a huge nest egg to just reinvest into a world changing idea so he's like how do i get as much financial capital as possible in the next few years so that i can self fund and work on one of the most like gnarly you know like few life world changing problems so the thing he's working on and by the way he thought that brain tree wasn't gonna be i mean that's like pretty and alex even brings this up he's like you know online payments actually does help the world he's like yeah that's true i knew that if i didn't do online payment somebody else would i wanted to work on something that if i didn't do it i don't know if anyone else would and so the thing he's working on is that same thing that that elon is working on ne link so this is called kernel kernel it's a it's a brain interface so so what that means is you put this like helmet on it looks like a bicycle helmet and it's basically reading your brain waves while you're sitting there and so you know what does that mean first it can analyze your brain while you're just doing things so that's interesting you can get more insight about yourself and there what here's what his company is trying to do is basically spit the data out so that all he's trying to do is be able to read brain data then any developer can take that those that data and those learnings and actually build any application to improve your life off of it so that's what they're trying to build with kernel so and by the way he took i think sixty million dollars after he sold brain tree and he funded the first sixty million into kernel himself because yeah reading about that right now he put so they've raised fifty three from outside fifty four from his own money yeah fifty four fifty weren't for a million of his own money exactly and so i think know most investor didn't wanna touch it because it's like dude this is just gonna be a money pit you know it's the hardest technology requires the most expensive engineers we're not there yet he's gonna take ten years and he's like yeah don't worry that's why i that's why i have this nest egg to to fund this thing myself how much did he make when he sold brain you think i don't know i don't know the exact number but anyways this doesn't even matter this is just set up no that's the guy cool guy yeah i would have featured him maybe as billy of the week and maybe we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive hey hey dan let's get this guy on the podcast this guy is cool yeah we'll get brian on the part i thought was pretty remarkable is his door to door sales part okay so what happened so before he starts brain tree he i think he had done a startup and it was fail it either had failed or it was failing and what he did was i hope don't put you this story i'm just trying to remember this off top of my head we didn't have time to prep today so what he did was he needed some money so he he's like okay how do get money fast i my starbucks was failing or it already failed he's like okay need like a sales job so he goes and he gets a sales job with a some kind of like financial product company i think it was like either like a credit cards or something like that for for for businesses and so he's like he he's a basically a sales rep and he's like okay how do i how do i become like the best sales rep for this and so it became a door door sales challenge and so he was going door to door to each merchant and he was selling them on the benefits of this product and and he would then get a commission off of like kind of a whatever the value of that customer was over the the next period of time and and so i oh my i'm gonna butcher this because i can't remember the hack he used but he had a he had a very clever technique he was using when he was going door to door that that enabled him to become the top salesman in north america and so i'm i'm gonna go brian yeah so he became the number one salesperson person he basically goes door to door and he figures out how to sell this product and what he said was like door door sales is like just this like really formative formative experience for anybody because you you have to have like incredible amount of determination you're gonna get rejected all the time and you need to learn how to like get your foot in the door how to get somebody's attention how to get them interested in how to close them in order to sell any product door door and then i so so i heard the story from brian johnson and he talked about how important that experience was to him next day i go meet my uncle i have an uncle who i've talked about on the pub before because i considered him to be the happiest man on earth he's real estate uncle a real estate uncle is his name's uncle vin vin literally people just coined his name smiley the so they just stop calling vin people just call him smiley because he's just so smiley like his company they got him a trophy because he's the number one salesperson and on the trophy they didn't put his name they just wrote smiley and that became kinda like the nickname that's stuck and they didn't even ask his permission they just knew this is the right name for this guy so he's incredibly happy but he's also been incredibly successful and i would say i don't think he's in all of my you my aunts my uncles in terms of iq just raw intelligence i don't know he's probably either fifty percentile maybe even less maybe maybe half let happen sorry vin no and i i've been this with love because whatever the point of making is good thing they didn't come dope smiling a lot better he he's he's the most successful of anyone in our family but it's not because he had more raw horsepower in the brain that's not the reason that he was able to do it and so i was telling my trainer about him and he goes i'd love to meet him and i go what he go he goes yeah does he where does he live i go he lives in dan actually he lives you know not far away from here you know thirty minute drive he goes could we just go meet him i was like yeah so i texted my uncle i said hey i was telling my my trainer about you and he just he wants to meet you and he was i he was like star come on by no problem but yes like can't wait to see you and i was like i was like who doesn't and i was like i noted to myself he didn't even ask why what's the context do you want something for me he's just like yes you wanna you meet me yes and i also thought to myself what what a goal by the way to be the type of person that people wanna make a pilgrimage out you know to go drive an hour to go see just just because of a description of the way you are i know that's kind of amazing because he doesn't want anything from him he's not trying to get a business deal or get a customer out of him he just heard how his personality is and i was like i gotta meet this guy so we go we drive out there and we sit down and you know he's already on level ten excitement and he we're having a great time and i started asking him i said you know when did you become you when did you become this way you weren't born this way so how'd did you become this way and he just telling me the long story and he talked about this door door sales job he goes i came from india and i'm a student at university he goes george washington university i think he goes i needed a summer job i needed he's like i came here i only had enough tuition the government paid for my tuition for the first year i had no idea how i was gonna pay for the second year but like i have one summer to bridge that gap like how the heck am i gonna make next fall tuition so he looked for a job and his roommate was like hey i worked with this company that called southwestern i don't know if you ever heard this company you're gonna love it but basically this company called southwestern and then what they do is they sell books so they sell books door to door they have this fleet of college students that will go out and they'll sell these books like encyclopedia dictionaries bibles you know any textbooks of any kind and southwestern northwestern advantage is what it's called and so and they've they've since grown like crazy they acquired all now it's like twenty something companies and it's like a multi billion dollar company crazy story about the founder i'm gonna have him as the ability of the week as a special profile but i'm wanna tell this daughter door sales story so he goes okay great so what do i do he's like you i can barely speak english because i'm just here from india but okay i gotta go do door sales how do i do that he's like they gave this this training where you they gave us seven books like you know how to win friends and influence people you know you know like these seven kinda classic self help books tony robbins and whatever he's like read these seven books and then come to this training seminar he goes i go to this thing it's auditor and it's me and like you know the fifty other college students and there's this stage and there's there's a door frame on the stage and you you'd have to get up and you'd have to knock on the door and then they would have an act you know like the person from the the company on the other side an actor who is like i'm missus johnson and you you open the door missus johnson and she would simulate like slamming the door on your face and being like like stop bothering us right or somebody who's like lukewarm or somebody who's interested and they would teach you how to sell door to door and he talked he talked me he's like i used to they used to my job basically every day of the summer and i'm in the you know the the heat of summer i would my roommate would drive me to some neighborhood any neighborhood i would just pick a different one every day and at nine am he would drop me off i didn't know a car so i needed him to pick me up at the end of the so he's like nine am he dropped me off in a neighborhood at nine pm he'd come pick me up at the end of the day he's like i would go door to door and i knocked and they would teach you these skills of just selling door door so do you know i don't know if you have you ever heard this i was fascinated by how you act what is the actual method of selling when your door to door have you ever heard this no what all so you typically say hey i was just talking to a bunch of your neighbors and they thought this was interesting and so here i am talking to you that that that's definitely part it but he broke it down step he's like there's a scientist that they taught us at this training he goes first you ring the doorbell you're not on door and you don't look into the door because when you look at the door it's a little bit intimidating and they see your face they recognize that they don't know you he's like you wanna look slightly you know off forty five degree angle away so that they're gonna like when they look through the people be like okay i don't know who this guy is but it doesn't look too threatening what are you trying to get you to do like the step your foot into the door eventually basically so you you they open the door and you you explained the pitch that you just said which is you know hi my name is like you know my name is vin and i'm a student here at george washington nearby and i actually have been you know i've been talking to your neighbors we what we do is we sell you know we sell tech or whatever it is he's basically saying i was talking to your neighbors and i wanted to stop by your place i'm a student nearby right so you you become a a local you're not a stranger you're a friend right so you you you imagine you wanna put like a time like i'm is it only gonna be i'm i'm i i have to go in a second yeah exactly don't have a a bunch of time but i would love to just you know chat with you whatever right and he goes he goes a lot of people what they would try to do is the door sample meaning they would tell them i'm here to sell you a textbook check out this book is this something you're interested in and then you know the the learning is nobody ever buys a book at the door and i thought that's actually like very applicable thing for almost every kind of sale is you're because you're afraid of getting rejected you rush you rush to try to just sample it you know give them give them the value so you don't annoy them but the reality is that that's not how a product like this would ever be bought nobody's ever gonna buy this at the door itself so because you wanna get into the home the whole objective of the door is to get into the home and it reminded me of your writing style or you go was about to say this this is why i always say longer is better i want them to fall down my slippery slope but and and explain the slippery slope it's like the first line the goal of the first look there's only one goal of a headline of a sales page and that's to get you to read the sub headline the only goal the sub headline is to get you read the first sentence and the only goal of the first sentence is to get you read the second sentence i'm gonna keep on doing that until you fall down the slippery slope and i don't want a lot of people say i wanna make this very easy to read so do i i wanna make it easy to read as well but i'm gonna tell you a story and i'm not gonna rush it and i want you to fall slowly fall on this slippery slope and i wanna make it kind of hard for you because the more pot committed you are the more likely you are about exactly exactly so this is the same exact thing so what he wanted to get into the home so he goes you asked to come in and and you you don't you don't look at them in the face you sort of lead with your arm and your face you sort of like point where you're trying to go like into the living room right behind them so you said you would you mind if i come in for a moment and you you sort of point your way into the door and if your once are in the door now your close rate has gone from like point o one percent to like thirty forty percent just because you're there you're sitting and you're you're sitting down so you're not like standing anymore now this is why in all my landing pages i always ask for email first because once you give me your email you're just a little bit more bought in you're in the door exactly and you know they might offer you water or a drink you say yes you don't say no now you're both sitting there you have your water and you start to explain to them and now you need to put it in the context of their problem so you look around the house oh i see you have children how old are they oh i gotta boy and grow myself yeah the you know blah this this age is the craziest blah blah blah what are your kids doing for what do you do for kind of after school education for your children and that's how you're leading into the encyclopedia sale that's how you're leading into the textbook sale is you need to frame your your product as a solution to their problem right so this is all like you know this is common sense but i just love to hear that common dog i think that like a lot of people don't know this i think you want you so i learned it so i read how to win friends influence people and by the way all those old like fuzzy books like how to win friends in in people influence people both thinking real rich it sounds silly i endorse all of them fully that shit totally helped you tony robbins totally helped too i'm i'm i'm entirely on board but that right a founder of panda express makes all of his employees go through tony robbins and how to in front influence people seminar totally on board with it it's that i learned how to did this when i was selling hot dogs and then you anyone else did like every other eighteen year old i will i use it to me right and it totally worked in i mastered at well i wasn't like that good but like for i i stepped up my game from significantly when i learned how to do all this right right exactly and so he told me a couple things out of that he goes he's like here i am i'm a hindu selling rivals to to bear i mean indian hindu selling like bibles to americans and he's like that experience that whole summer he's like you know i it changed me he's like first i'm working hard i'm there at nine am i'm walking around carrying loads and loads of books and i'm walking door to door and i'm getting mostly rejected but then you know if i got even an inch she's like i used to schedule a same day follow ups he's like so oh now's is not a good time you know would it be better this evening when your husband's home like maybe five pm great i'll be back because he's like i'm i'm just walking around this neighborhood anyways i'll walk right back to this he's like i was scheduling same day follow ups to keep the keep the he's like by the second time they met me now i'm not a stranger he's like nothing has changed they don't know anything more about me but it's just the second time they've seen me and and so there was all these little things i thought were really applicable to sales but also i started thinking about these formative experiences the really hard experiences like what's a hard business experience and i think this is actually pretty underrated so he said learn a work hard i learned how to sell i learned how to build rapport and talk to people and he's like i wasn't doing it to manipulate anybody he's like i just genuinely it life was a lot more fun if i got to know the person rather than you know having a standoff relationship and then them being angry that i'm bothering them that day and it got to the point where one woman would be like are you walking around tearing all these books he's like well yeah you know i have to and she's was like here's the keys to my car here's my van drive my van around their the neighborhood instead so she gave him a car to actually do the sales so it went from most people slammed the door on a door to salesman and she gave him as her car to make it easier for him to go do what he was doing he still keeps in touch with her thirty six years later or something like that forty years later he's like yeah you know she just sent me this cake and like missus whatever her name was he's like we're still good friends actually because and we met because i sold her you know a a bible back in the day and so i thought this was interesting so i think there's something to this in from two levels what are the opportunities here i thought hey who's doing door sales now are there still companies that primarily sell door i'm gonna research them and find some else know i mean like really that the probably the most famous is one is cut coat you know cut c no what is that wow you've never heard of cut up so they make knives in kitchen wear their knives are actually pretty good but their whole business model is door to door and like i've got friends that i've done it it it it's reputable in the sense that it's a good product right some people think it's scam but because they're like direct sales and multi level marketing but it's legit right and so i'm i'm interested in these direct sales companies i'm also interested in hiring people who are successful door to door salespeople in fact there was a guy on the podcast early on who did this for solar he's like my first job was door to door sales i was selling solar like hey you know have you ever thought about doing solar it lowers your bill and blah blah we could help you out it's good for the environment and he's like dude it hard to shit i got good at it i became the top salesperson and i kinda feel like i can i will never go wrong if i hired the top salesperson from any door to door sales company it's like works hard knows how to sell like what else do you need when you're were when you're trying to hire somebody well you wanna hear something funny you know who jordan be is yeah the wolf of wall street oh we talked about at this week and i think you haven't read his book you show so jordan be was wolf wall street he made hundreds of millions of dollars selling penny stocks service rich people in the and it was a great sales he created the thing called straight line persuasion he started by selling fish and sticks door to door that's how it was his entire things covered was door to door yeah it's a great book but it was all was all door to door sales yeah so i don't really have i don't really know what the point of this is it's more like i loved hearing these stories i i'm sort of jealous i never had this experience because i think i would be better at what i do if i did and i wanna go further i wanna research these companies and i wanna start hiring people out of this pool of talent i think it is an underrated pool of talent just like we talked about you know sort of mormons who go on the mission and they have to sell sort of the hardest thing sell a religion to somebody who never asked you to come sell it to and they have to do that for two years that does create a certain sales ethic and work ethic in a person and we've seen that take place that's why almost all the direct sales companies all the the successful direct sales companies are all based out of utah because that's where the talent is that knows how to do this sort of thing i think for i would say for not preparing this episode should not to be pretty amazing and i would say even amongst all episode this has been one of my favorite dan do agree that this has been fire this has been great guys door our sales was awesome what about the other stuff the other stuff was good too what you guys just finished with a big bang yeah i think this ended up being a winner so that's the episode i think right we're gonna wrap up there let's wrap tomorrow or wednesday i wanna talk about c working spaces i think we have to tab on my first million c working business yeah you have a that idea i do that was another ben idea and i think it's wonderful so i tweeted out who i could talk to i got a bunch of interesting stuff we're gonna talk about that next week for wednesday that's it yeah i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back