#207 - How to Make Millions by Unbundling Etsy

that's exactly how it works is people think oh if i practice stoic is i'll become that person who is calm mind and able to just operate and doesn't have these sort of like massive swings and it's like no it's the other way around when once you learn to tame the mind once you learn to master the mind you'll naturally become a stoic person yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a go let's travel never looking back what up alright what's going on i'm in nashville i wait it's is it eight or seven where you are seven oh it's seven wow it's so i woke up a little bit late and i texted you and i just record something right now and you said yeah i'm thankful you said yes yeah let's give it a shot you're at a podcasting conference which sounds like not a ton of fun is it a ton of fun though so it's educational and i'm happy and i'm learning but it's just like nerdy stuff and you know there's not i don't wanna i can't absorb it for that long but i'm happy that i i i would yeah it's worth it it's cool people people like know us and that's crazy like it's crazy just to walk around it's a it's at a hotel and like so everyone's staying and it's kinda funny to be walking around and just people come up to you and say that they like listen so that's kinda neat because it's all podcast nerds yeah okay i like that you learn anything cool hacks any he any growth hacks for us or what i think youtube it's just the way to go so and that's what we'll be doing with this show you're like going hard podcasting is for nerds we're going to youtube no i mean well that's the way to go some of these people spend so for the listeners sean and i spent what's on our money anymore but when we were doing this like we were like so cheap and i actually think too cheap about starting this podcast i mean i think it was right how we did it with like really bad at first and then it got a little bit better and a little bit better but people spend so much money on recording their stuff and i actually don't think that's important when you have something like we have which is like you kinda hit this lick it's important to invest and i think we've under invested which is crazy yeah maybe i don't know i was renting a studio the first ten at ten twenty episodes hundred dollars an hour so that was a that was like professional setup up i went i i thought i was going i thought i was over vest at that time because that had zero listeners so whenever i recorded those yeah no but that's my point is that our my perspective has changed when i'm seeing like some of the budgets that people have but for this episode i like i called you because i saw like three amazing things that i wanted to bring up to you and you have one two three four five interesting things and i just wanted to talk to you about them alright let's do what do what you wanna start can you me give me your first one okay the first one that i we didn't get you last time but i wanted to fill you in about it and it's about the oh i'm just writing to notes it's about the elevator business so i told you a little bit about this so i like there's this was one of these moments and i've had them with you a ton where you explained something and you're like i didn't even know that this was a problem i didn't even know this was an industry but now i'm totally bought in and i think it's amazing and this particular come and but in this particular company i'm not sure i don't it's not because i think that they're bad i just don't know them well enough to actually believe that they're gonna win but like it it was pretty amazing so let me set the stage so i believe there's something like i'm i might be off by a little bit but i believe there's something like two million elevators in america and only four companies basically control the whole elevator business have have you ever been on an elevator and looked at your feet where the doors open and seen the names yeah you there's this little like plaque there but i don't remember any of their names i don't i don't i i can't recall i went through my key in the crack and had to call one of the companies to be like hey how do how do i get under your elevator wow so it's otis you probably recognize it that's the big one yeah otis sc cohn and is that it's yeah miss yeah miss mitsubishi are the big ones i know of otis because i've already i've looked into them a bunch they're not technically these four aren't technically a monopoly because there's more than one but basically they control just about everything and what that means is when you buy an elevator i'm not actually sure how how much an elevator cost but something like like target might have six or seven thousand elevators and when you buy an elevator from them it's a like ten year or twenty year contract it's a really long contract and it's almost like buying a car so when you buy a car you get a fifty thousand mile warranty and except imagine buying five thousand cars and right it's incredibly challenging to know when each car needs to be serviced what type of service the the car company is actually gonna pay for and what they're not gonna pay for what falls under it it it is it's kind of a pain in the butt and so what happens is oftentimes a company like target they employ a whole team to manage their elevators and escalators and they don't know like you know what they have to do and instead of fighting with otis and deciding they just go out fuck we're just gonna call service people and we're gonna we're gonna get figured figure out on our own and there's two new companies one is called audit mate that's who i talked to but there's one in britain called we maintain that's raised forty million dollars and basically what they do is they manage your elevator and escalator like it's like fleet management you know what i mean right i did they determine what and i thought that this was so fascinating and very interesting and when i heard about this company i was like well i don't necessarily want i'm not sure if ever wanna like invest anything like this but i would love to own it and so the way it works is they charge fifty to sixty dollars a month per elevator and the name of the game is you just go out and find all the elevators and you say look we're gonna be your your agent which means we sign on to speak on your behalf and we're gonna negotiate with otis and we're gonna make sure that your shit's maintained it doesn't break down and we're gonna handle all of it and i thought that that was amazing and it's one of these business models where it's kinda like the way that they charge right now or a lot of these companies charges a subscription fee which is fine but this is one of those business models that we've talked about like turbo tax where they take a percentage of all savings so this is like the easiest shit ever to sell right and so anyway they're basically saying hey you have no no risk no loss because we're gonna save you money know you you sign up to pay you sign up with us you're we're gonna save you money and we'll take we'll take out of it in the same way that you know like main street does this with tax savings basically for for you they'll be like alright we'll take a percentage of whatever we save you it's like oh okay sounds like i have no downside and even if that percentage is large it's like found money so they feel good about it i thought and i thought this was cool i've never have you ever even heard of anything like this no dude and so you so i'm looking at some of your notes otis twelve and a half billion in revenue sc eleven point six billion cone basically the same ten billion in revenue huge those are huge revenues for for these companies now i don't know how profitable they'll that are businesses but well they're like family own oh otis is like a family owned business i'm almost positive otis has been around since the eighteen hundreds i mean these are like huge huge family owned businesses so they definitely are i believe they they have to be profitable here otis oh at otis says twelve the otis is publicly traded so what do you think their market cap is for twelve billion in revenue okay i'm gonna guess they r a twenty two billion dollar company might be less i think it could be less you think less i think less it's about forty forty okay so twenty two i was off so okay pretty crazy right like who would have thought and so this is just software that lets you how negotiate twitter twitter is like fifty so fifty five or something like that so is it really otis the elevator company yeah twitter had been hovering below that and then now it's says fifty five sixty or something like that because the stock went out recently but basically otis the elevator companies worth almost as much as twitter but just didn't insane and not only that i believe let's see it's been around since eighteen fifty three yeah amazing so it's and the funny thing is this is named after like a guy's first name it sounds like it's not like it just it was it was the the company was invented in y new york in eighteen fifty three and they've been around since then fucking elevators and so this fa me when i like learned about this because you know i like old shit when i think about you and and and but friend are what is junk his junk at place you is somebody born in y because that's amazing i wanna say i'm from junk now yeah it's in it's in i believe it's in the bronx in new york it's like it's like i don't know in new from y in the bronx alright well so so this company but you're what you're saying is that this company is a saas company on top of those right yeah it's a saas company at lays the top of and here's why this fa me i love old shit things that lasts a long time and we were talking about like the creator economy subs stack i don't remember what we were talking about something like involving like one of these newsletter like one off creators and like yeah i think you can make a lot of money but can you do that for twenty or thirty years it's really really challenging i think right basically sam's type on companies did you start in the eighteen hundreds in some way did you did do you have a physical product that you could feel that you could touch and feel were did were you started in the midwest or some some part of america you know are you named after a family like rockefeller or sc or otis or or something like that let's see what else what else is it you know are you absurd profitable what those are your those are your type essentially yeah look i think it's cool that's something to build something that can last a really long time yeah that interests me because that that that like you you optimized for excitement i think or interest i optimized for what's the least amount of work i can do in order to like have freedom and but you're is more like durability and i and i i i feel like durability is like number one it's like yeah you just if you have this you win and i'm like if you have this you might win for an hour and then you might lose the next hour like i'm cool with that so both work but they're both work they're just different what what what do what do you have what do what do you me give you one alright so what i wanna do let's do let's do this do okay let's do this un unsettling at etsy one so i'm really interested in the second tier or like what i call b class marketplaces i don't mean that as an answer i mean it more like if you're in real estate you're like oh do i buy an a you know a a class property which is like it's a modern building fully leased up blah blah or do you go for like an older thing that has upside right do you go for something that has some hair on the deal that you might be able to do and so you you go you know this is not new york right that like that marketplace might be amazon etsy or posh mark are these like second tier marketplaces but i see a lot of opportunity in them we talked about i think we talked about this about building saas tools for sellers on those marketplaces so you you you you brought that up and i and i thought that was a pretty revolutionary that that was a big idea and so i these exist but they're not great and there's not a lot of competition and so like i think we talked about jungle scout which sold for some large amount of money that you knew jungle scout is a tool for sellers on amazon and i was thinking okay who's building stuff like this on the second tier marketplaces like etsy or posh mark so that was the first idea then i start thinking okay wait that can are you gonna elaborate on that because that's pretty amazing well think didn't we talk about it maybe we talked about i thought we talked about it no if not no that's i think i don't know if you phrase it that way i think the your the storytelling here that you just said is actually wonderful so i think that's actually brilliant we had so at hustle con we had posh mark thread up and one more of these companies speak and yep i think there were some of the biggest mer car is a big one yeah they're huge secondhand sales the real real you know there's all these like other marketplaces basically there's all these other other places so ben's wife tiffany she is a posh mark like super seller or something like that and so she like she's sold so much that like when the ipo they invited her and like whatever the top other thousand sellers to be like do you wanna buy the ipo you can buy the reserve price basically we're reserving some shares for you because you've helped build this thing for which company for posh mark and like airbnb did the same i think i think for they they offered super host ability to buy some share some some some small amount of shares and so airbnb b by the way another another marketplace where could you be able to jungle scott type of tool on top of air there is that i'm a subscriber for too it's called air dna it's amazing and what does that do tell you like what the price it at or yeah so it's called air dna and when i was so i rent out my house and i'm not there and i buy property to rent out and i use it as a research tool and i guess it just crawls airbnb and it determines what the average occupancy rate is what you should charge what the earning potential is it just it's tons of signals for buying properties to make intuitive airbnb b and there might be other things like reporting you know tax you know some tax savings you can get or whatever if you if you're an every b host to plugs into your airbnb and it generates your your report so anyways i was thinking okay you could build a jungle scout type of tool and for those who don't know what jungle scout is basically you go on amazon if you have jungle scout installed it's a chrome extension and basically when you are looking for products you can just click jungle scout and it'll tell you hey here's how much search volume this has how much monthly revenue this product makes it's it's an estimate but it's pretty good here's how fast it's growing and here's how strong the competition is and so what you wanna find is something that there's a lot of search and low competition and if you find some if you find a combination like that you're like oh nobody's searching for you know wooden spoons that are like wooden oversized spoons you don't wanna build that because nobody's searching for but if you have like you know what in oversized baby spoons is high search low low competition you could go go to china get that product made and and become like the top result on amazon which is basically free traffic for you so that's the idea i think you could do that for posh mark i think you did for etsy one thing that i was thinking about for etsy is i think you could spin off a whole new marketplace just un bundling etsy etsy is now big enough it's a public company been around for a decade plus and has all these different categories right so it's like you can go and you can go to home you can go to you know custom gifts you can go to all these different categories on etsy and you could ask yourself could i make an of marketplace of or or or a service that just does this one thing better than etsy doing marketed it as that and actually like un bundle a piece of etsy in the same way that people have got a lot of success un bundling reddit un unsettling craigslist if you haven't seen this google google un craigslist and look at the diagram it's like it takes every part of craigslist and then it just shows how oh look this housing part of craigslist became airbnb and this became etsy and this became this other thing and so the same thing i think can be done here so here's that's the that's the core idea is un unboxing one of the verticals of etsy what i would do i was looking at the the categories i would do custom gifts so custom gifts is one of the top categories on etsy and people go there because they wanna set a thoughtful kinda like what looks like a homemade handmade gift to somebody or they're getting it made for like their wedding and they want all their wedding coasters to have their names on them or their bachelor party and they want everybody to have matching shirts that say the bat the the bachelorette name on it or whatever and so i think custom gifts could be spun out into a marketplace that's like fiber where you basically just here's a bunch of custom gifts push a button and you get these for you know ten bucks or some some flat rate basically so i think you could do a fiber or or even like a cameo style thing for custom gifts and that's the that's the category i would go after but i think generally i think you could study their marketplace and find it find a we'll find one that works because you can also see the shop sales you can go into any shop on etsy and you could see how many sales at tad which is like you can do that and you can do that right yeah this is part of it's like you know here this shop has had six thousand orders and you can look at the price at price at the store it'd be like oh at you know the average thinks thirty five dollars it'd be like six thousand times thirty five that's how much revenue this stop the shop is made in two years those are both two big ideas so you're talking about building like the the the software that analyzes the sales and then the the marketplace that sells the stuff both actually pretty amazing i go to etsy sometimes and i do so if you scroll all the way to the bottom you'll see how many sales they have ebay does it too but not as good but that's actually a great idea i and and by the way i looked up air dna so the thing about these software companies you're you're you're you're talking about two different things we'll call one software one marketplace the software companies so if i told you or if if you told me about jungle scout a few years ago i would say like oh that's a nice little that's a nice business yeah yeah well it it it probably does like eighty or i mean if it's worth a billion i wouldn't be surprised but it's definitely worth nine figures i know that for a fact because it's sold part of their company so told you just about air dna i thought that which is a small thing how big do you think air dna is by the way jungle scout raised over a hundred and ten million dollars which is that gives you a sense of how big it is if if it was a was say i think it was some of it was private equity i don't know how big the valuation was but it's definitely huge right okay air d and i don't even know what it does i've never been to website so i'm just gonna take i'm just gonna say a random number at out of the air i'm gonna say thirty five million what is pay worth well so they air d and so they charge i think i pay a hundred dollars a month for it in two thousand eighteen they did four point nine million in revenue in two thousand nineteen they did eight point four million dollars in revenue they said they were going a hundred percent so you could probably assume that i would i would actually bet that in two twenty they probably did sixteen and then twenty one i i wouldn't be surprised because there there's a lot going on with investing in airbnb i would be surprised if they're in the thirty million recurring revenue annual recurring revenue range and they raised eight million dollars in order to build up they they bootstrap to nine million in revenue and then raised eight million dollars so these are like these things that you would think are small insignificant stuff that could actually be quite big so that's a that's a fifty million dollars to a hundred million dollar your value business at the at that roughly the those numbers you just told me yeah it's a huge thing and who would've have thought i never would have thought that if you just told me you're gonna build this thing that that analyzes airbnb i'd like noticed side hustle are cool yeah yeah you should be able to bring in the four five k a month you know with your little air airbnb dna tracker or whatever the hell you're talking about and and i would say i i i would have if you had to guess what's bigger etsy sellers or airbnb i would think there'd be more etsy sellers than airbnb hosts well the thing with etsy sellers is that so airbnb is very much it's it's a lot more set and forget it and there's less levers to pull and there's less like there's less like categories and things like that whereas like etsy has like multiple different categories each one has its own little nuances and then if as there's like such a wide variety of sellers where yes there's many people have houses but it's all they're all doing the same they're offering the same service etsy offering like a million different services to people and so i think that's why it's has probably a little more opportunity what would you divide would you call it cameo well i was just thinking custom gifts if custom gifts is this big of a market i would just start with that i'd say custom gifts maybe the end product wouldn't be a physical gift like etsy maybe it would be something like a cameo where it's a video or just making a jingle for somebody or it it could be with celebrities or non celebrities but basically some way to send a custom gift to somebody if that's such a big such a big part of etsy maybe you could rank for it in search or run google ads and hijack some of that traffic of people looking for custom you know handmade whatever custom name blah blah blah and be like yeah we do that we we'll put your name on a shirt yeah it's not as nice as at etsy it's you know we just took the generic etsy look and we just mass produce it basically that that that'd be one way i'm i'm on forward with that you wanna move on to another one yeah yeah let's alright so i'm gonna weave two one one of mine in one of yours i i'm a big fan or are you so dc c daniel cor he is he's retired now but he's a he's a big fighter and he he posted this thing and i seen ads for it but he posted that he's now gonna endorse this thing called fit to warrior and i went and looked at it so fit to warrior it's incredibly interesting and so what they do is you spend twenty two hundred dollars and in six months they take you is it six months maybe three months i think six months they take you from being a complete n so you're just a guy off the street is they to warrior oh sorry i spelled the yeah it's went my bad that fit warrior wouldn't make sense it's called went to warrior went to warrior they take just you off the street you give them twenty two hundred dollars and i think you get like a hundred classes or fifty classes what are the right fifth so so it's a twenty week program how many months is twenty weeks five so five months in okay so you if you have five months and what they do is you sign up and you have a fight you have a fight scheduled five months from the day you sign up and it's like and it's like cohort based you pay like twenty five hundred dollars of covid there of course yeah yeah it's a cohort based thing and they say in the next five months we're gonna take a guy off the street and you're gonna have an mma fight now it doesn't take a rocket scientist understand that the goal of this is not necessarily to get you fit or to like get in a fight the goal of this is to have like a pivotal change in your life to be more confident to say like look i've i said i'm gonna lose weight forever now i like i have a fight in five months if i don't get my act together like i'm really it's not a a good it's not gonna be good so this is like pivotal life changing thing and i love this business they just raised eight million dollars from a bunch of pe people it was launched in australia and basically what they're doing is they came up with this name went to warrior they come up with this program and they work with loads of different mma and i guess boxing gyms and they license out their program and now they are paying kind of a mcgregor coach junk kavanaugh on board dc all these coaches to like promote it and they give them a type of fee i thought this was amazing and i think this is amazing for a couple of reasons one it's a business that i actually think with this would change your life if if i told you you had to if i told you you had a fight in five months would that be the one thing that finally like said i gonna take this am i wrong that you think basically this should be mandatory part of the education system well you everybody to do this here's what here's here's why this has always fascinated me so women have this because they have like a biological like you are now officially a woman but men we've lost like a rite of passage we've never had this like alright now i'm officially a man like i guess if you're jewish of a bar mit spot maybe that's like the like the crossing of the cats of like alright you're no longer a boy now you're are a man and like we had this like i i i love the sparks the spartan because they do this thing where they like you'd go they say alright you're fourteen or whatever now you gotta go on the wild for five days and you gotta survive and just come back when you're done right men american we don't really have this like this this modern day yeah yeah and so i love these type of transformational like alright it is official you have it there's a start beginning and then like an end type of thing so i love that and you here you wanna talk about mental fitness i've also done like yoga or not yoga meditation i love head space i love calm i i i try to i do buy in into mental fitness this up but it's a little bit tough because it's not like intense and so i love these intense programs and i think that they can be great businesses and incredibly fun and fulfilling to run yeah so i think there's a couple things first i i seen this i thought mcgregor coach john kavanaugh i thought he invented this because he was the first one always talk about all we're doing went to warrior it's so good we have two hundred people doing it this season and he just kept doing it and it was like they take average joe's you come in and you basically say cool i'm gonna turn into a fighter i'm gonna train like a fighter for x amount of weeks and then it ended the it kind of the graduation the culmination the right of passage at the end is you do the likes the the the the amateur exhibition fighter or whatever with somebody else from the program i so it's not like you're not in a ton of danger i think it's really cool i didn't realize that there was like a business underneath this and so just to do the math so basically what they're doing is they're licensing this out to gyms and they're saying hey this is a great customer recruitment like mechanism right so you you run a warrior your program we'll give you the branding we'll give you the business in a box kit and what what you got and and we'll send you the customers and we'll send you customers because we have star athletes and coaches promoting this because it's a feel good thing for them too and and so we'll we'll send you a bunch of interest people they'll a him to warrior program near them and you be my operator so it's asset light you do all the work we will just do the marketing and create the brand on top of this i think this is actually really really smart i would invest in this company even though it seems like so crazy fringe i i think that know actually there's this a very nice model it's better than tough mud or better than sport race better than all those because they had they take on a ton of operational overhead they're traveling circus and so i i like this model a lot better so okay i think web warriors cool i think that your right of passive right of passage thing is interesting and especially we talked early on about boy scouts and like the downfall of boy scouts program and what you would do if you were gonna buy it or reinvented or make a new boy scout and and i think we were on to something with this and we should keep looking for the opportunities that are here i'm i'll i'll tie this into the mental fitness thing we we did a segment on some simone bile in a podcast two two episodes ago or one episode ago yeah and we ended up cutting it so it's on the it's it's in the lost archive lost files along with me and sam spa footage from when i went to his house in austin and the reason we cut it is because i had a strong take i was pretty like so but we didn't we had i didn't have i didn't have all the details of the story i didn't realize that there i thought this was when she said i had like a mental breakdown i was like oh that's like crazy that like that's nuts but then yeah yeah and then there's like these like the twist these things i'm like alright well that's like that that's like an injury that's like a your legs broken type of thing so my opinion changed and i was like oh i didn't actually have all the facts when i was when i was kinda explaining my opinion yeah yeah that's that's true and so we we basically were like we sent it to sam's wife and we're were like hey what do you think too much it seems was like yeah a little too much and so we kinda but i i i thought there was one part of it that was interesting right like so yeah yet nobody really cares about sean and sam's opinion on some on even though kind of the that's whatever it can be interesting the more the more crazy your reaction the more interesting it gets i thought the more interest i thought the real part and it was there's gonna be a trend of calling it now over the next five to seven years people are gonna start to really give a shit about mental fitness and it's a very different thing than mental health just like for your physical body you have health like do you have a disease or you ill like no i i'm not i'm not sick but you can be not sick but you can be not fit at the same time and right so so you could be healthy but not fit and in the same way you could have mental health meaning you don't you're you're not suffering from you know depression severe anxiety bipolar or anything like that but you can also not be mentally fit and you know so what's a fit person right sam really fit person you know really physically fit if you work out sam you go for a run with sam he'll be like goddamn this guy can run he's you know he can go long distances he's he's fit and so similarly there's mental fitness which is basically just like a physical fitness it's about overcoming some adversity so a mentally fit person is somebody who can overcome a high degree of in variety of of of adversity and intensity of diverse of adversity and so you know shit not going your way getting in sticky situations being out of your comfort zone these are all areas where mental fitness matters relationships the different different challenges that come your way is what mental fitness matters and i think right now this is something that is very poorly understood it's rarely talked about it's almost never taught but i would say mental fitness is in my opinion the most important skill one can have right the most important thing is the little voice in your head that's talking all day nonstop this chatter box we have in our head and what is it telling yourself is it telling yourself that you suck that you can't do it is it telling yourself that you should give up this is too hard is it telling yourself that you know don't do it things might go wrong or is it saying the opposite is it saying you know what you could figure this out hey even if it doesn't work out no problem you know you'll still everything will still be okay hey even though this this person just cut you off on the road look at the look around the sky is blue the the air is crisp your your family is happy and healthy you have a lot to be grateful for right like the voice in your head dictates the quality of your life and the voice in your head is your mental fitness it is it is the the the manifestation of your mental fitness and so i think we're gonna be seeing a lot around this i think we're gonna be seeing growth and services content thought leaders whatever around mental fitness what do you think am i over blowing this or is that or are your a believer i'm a believer i think that what you're doing with the title of mental fitness is i think you're just rebranding something that's been around for a long time you know this is like a tony robbins book so i i i i totally buy in to what you're saying and i and i one hundred percent agree with it i think there's a few opportunities here the first is so i'm reading this amazing book called human nature i've been reading it for a long time for like six months and it's it's very dense but i've i'll read it and read it over and over and over again and i take notes and i'm trying to like master it because to me it's like a handbook on how to like handle my emotions and how to handle other people now the what i would do with this is what i would wanna do is almost have like a whip to warrior type of program where i can spend a fair bit of money and have a very intense program and i think that a mental fitness type thing i think that's a lifetime of learning and a lot that's like a lifetime journey but i do think that there is like transformational moments and series of your life that could actually level you up significantly and i think that there's an opportunity to build something like that in this weird kinda of fucked up way i've always been a little bit jealous of people who went to the military or at least people who went to military school because like there's this like classic like i was un i was fat i was unhealthy i wouldn't wake up early now i make my bed i know how to like show respect to each other to people i have self confidence i know i a a a new level of discipline and i'm like my god i know what i made up i went through hell week and i made it so i i have been to my breaking point beyond my breaking point where there was just no way and and i did it and you know they don't brag about it but you could tell there's a certain level of confidence that people have by discovering your bottom right what is your actual rock bottom not not not in terms of your money but in terms of like your mental your mental game where you break you break physically sure but when you break mentally it's over and and so they've been there because you know that's what the military does to challenge you in that way and i've always been jealous of that i'm like man i wish that well like i make a i i like i sent in a joke and but i'm not actually joking when with my wife i'm like i i wish i would have went went to military school because like there's some like disciplined stuff that i don't have that i wish i would i would have had and it's almost like i've searched for like what type of programs gonna go to words like it's like basically like the like the the the soft version of that it's like a like a fat camp version of that where i can just like spend money and they just like insult me for a week but anyway i think that's like i think there's something there with that and i also think that there's something there with mastering some of these books and some of these things and doing this mental fitness type of type of stuff and so i'm a board with this i i actually think this is quite amazing yeah i and i think the the the word is amazing in this concept this concept of look you're healthy you're not like ruin but you're not fit i think that's amazing i love you know who could like crush us if they wanted to but i don't think they they do have you bit paid attention to what ryan holiday has done with his stoic brand no like i i'm i'm from a before but i don't i don't know anything specific i've seen his books but tell me what's interesting so ryan hall is an author his first book was called how to get famous or what was it called how to he's like news jacking or whatever and yeah i forget what it was called he's pretty obstacle is the way ego is the enemy or something like that he's got a bunch yeah so he's got obstacles way you go and the this whole idea is based on stoic which is this i i what are they greek i don't know marcus aurelius to these philosophies of basically like you're gonna face hardship in your life and it's not about avoiding them but it's about embracing them and finding meaning in them and it's great and these and and it's probably predominantly male young males who listen to his stuff i i'm one of them and he's built this brand called the daily stoic so i believe it's called daily s dot com and he sells twenty five dollar stoic is coins which i own one he sells like a nineteen dollar email course where every fourteen days he teaches you like a new stoic like thing on how to read more like and it's it's pretty amazing and like if i don't think he would ever wanna do this because he'd he seemed like he's got a good life and he doesn't wanna work much harder but i i would imagine that if ryan holiday had like a s s boot camp for like a month any charge like ten grand and like it was around this mental fitness idea i think loads of the loads of people including me would would pay to go yeah by the way i heard something that i thought was great they go a lot of people get it backwards i forgot who said this they were talking about stoic and i was like yeah you know stoic i've you know i get it you're supposed to be and then that that brings you sort of this calm and this piece and this like sort of like really stable mental mental game and you goes no it's the other way around when you calm the mind you become stoic you don't become stoic to calm the mind and i thought oh that's so true which is that you that's exactly how it works is people think oh if i practice stoic is i'll become that person who is calm mind and able to just operate and doesn't have these sort of like massive swings and it's like no it's the other way around when once you learn to tame the mind once you learn to master the mind you'll naturally become a stoic person you have to get the get the order back get the order right and so that was like a big breakthrough for me because i've know i know a lot of people that have i've tried to get into they they have this anxiety they have this like sort of mental like lack of clarity and calm they get into stoic i'm thinking it's the answer and they get sort of disillusioned very quickly they're like yeah it wasn't for me and it's like well that's true because stoic is is almost a state you get to after you learn how to come in the mind it's not the method you use you know so i've read a lot of doses and books and and i like it from just a history perspective and i like it from a practical life philosophies perspective i think it's one of the very few like philosophical things that you could apply your daily life you know whose book change my it kinda changed my life on it and it was shocking was naval that naval alma what's it called right the naval alma it's so good it's so good so the the first half is all about making money and the second half is all about being happy and the first half is like that's just normal whatever who cares the second half i felt was was pretty game changing and he talks about about stoic and a lot about mental fitness and i and he was basically like the the the summary is basically happiness is a choice that i made and here's some of the strategies that i use and it's very s it it it is stoic ism and i thought it was very useful alright let's let's jump to a different topic real quick can i wait let me quick tell you really quick about one of the greatest hacks that i've seen so a financial hack so woman starting a company so the first one that i always tell people and this is something that's new to me that a lot of people it wasn't new to me a lot of people don't know about it's called q sbs so it's probably the greatest american tax ad basically when you sell your company if you have qs sbs which basically is like let's the it basically means qualified small business tax so if you sell business and you've owned the business stock for five years and it's a c corp if you sell your company the first ten million dollars in sales are in in in profit that you make like your company you don't you don't pay taxes on so it's amazing but i think i found something that's even better moving to canada so i talked to this company the other day and they and they were building this like amazing thing and i was like how how many people worked there you're like a really new company and they're like well we have about eighteen people who work here and we only spend about a million dollars a year in total cost and that's kinda so basically when you're starting a company i started my company in san francisco if you're starting your company i i would imagine that you would when i started it it was ten thousand dollars ahead but i and i was hiring like young people would didn't pay much but i imagine you'd wanna you'd wanna bake in fifteen thousand dollars ahead right easily how it's engine engineers yeah so maybe more so but let's just say fifteen thousand so fifteen thousand times twelve is let's see say fifteen thousand times twelve is so that's a hundred and eighty grand ahead oh i think it's even more than it's probably it's one so so that number you're talking about is basically seven years ago and non engineers and now you fast forward seven years double it and then engineers basically double it again and so you know what what was maybe let's say ten grand is actually you should be buck you should be budgeting almost thirty grand thirty grand per per head is probably probably closer to reality now thirty grand you think okay so if you're grand engineers yeah so thirty grand times twelve is three sixty so three hundred sixty thousand dollars an employee so three sixty times fifteen if you have fifteen employees that's gonna be around five million dollars you year by the so that's not that's not the just a salary so let's say their salary is two hundred to something k then you have to pay all the like you know kinda additional overhead on salaries which is about twenty percent that's your fico that's your social security all that good stuff you have your rent you have your free catered lunches you have your your snacks in the office you have all the other bullshit that you gotta do if you're gonna hire in this like extremely competitive hiring environment signing bonuses recruiter fees it all rolls up so if that number sounds high if that number sounds high you'd be surprised if that number sounds low you're probably right and so let's just say like three to five million dollars is a huge range to have a team of fifteen engineer heavy highly competitive startup up to to get going it's a lot of money i talked to this guy the other day and he had fifteen people and i was and he told me he was spending a million dollars a year and i was like wait what he goes yeah so here's how it works in canada we have these things called the research and development credits and basically what that means is if you were an engineer is is how what's it called they're called them shred credits even though it's it's sr e d but they i think they just when people talk about it they call them shred yeah i i heard people mentioned mention it but i didn't actually look the mechanics of it and and i'm not an expert it but he was reading it to me and i was a amazed and basically what happens is he pays their full salary so he pays some engineer a hundred and fifty grand a year and at the end of the year i think he literally gets like deposited money back fifty percent of the cost that he's allocated he's paid them he gets that money back at the end of the year so a hundred and sixty thousand dollar salary is actually only eighty k to him and also in order to manage cash flow there's these loans there's loans that you can so he has to pay the hundred and sixty thousand dollars so a hundred and sixty thousand bi weekly so he pays that out so you have to have cash up upfront but he was able to get a loan against that and so he gets a loan up upfront and then at the end of the year after paying taxes and things like that he gets the salary money back this was amazing and he was telling me about it and this guy was based in toronto and i've never been to toronto but it's it sounds like an amazing place there's a company that you should check out for this that's kinda cool so so most companies aren't gonna make the drastic move to go move to canada so there's a company it's it's it's part of atomic if you've ever seen it and and while you're talking pulling that up i think i think the best arbitrage to do this in or one of the easiest is service based businesses so okay so but i think you can't do it unless they're engineering i i feel like it's only engineering roles it it it's i believe it's for anything that's research and development right which usually i think is no no no because the at the hustle we got a we got a tax credit for some type of research and development stuff and i had go through each employee and like kinda guess what percentage of the time is on like research and development and and you can do this for agencies you can get a fair bit of money back so agencies that do a certain type of thing and i was at my friend's office who has a new york agency and their office was like lavish because and and and they spent they i think they sent half a million dollars in decorating it and i was i was like well why you guys do and he's like well this is just what we gotta do to like keep up with everyone i was like fuck i don't wanna play this game i'd rather keep up with other people in other places and i think that we have a friend who has an agency and he sells the silicon valley in new york companies but he does this arbitrage thing and he makes way more profit than most huge agencies the the company was talking terminal terminal die dot i io o i think they're basic what their their their startup up is is a smart idea they basically were like hey we will spin up a a canadian engineering office for you so you want these credits you want these cheaper engineers but you don't wanna relocate yourself in your whole business and figure out shred credits and figure out where to go find engineers and figure out you know the best coffee shop in toronto cool we will do the engineering office for you and you just pay our bill and like basically they're kind of like a a recruiting slash spin up agency for for talent in in this region which think it's pretty smart a smart arbitrage that they're doing it in kind of a fancy way i think anybody could really do this i think it's a smart idea yeah and so anyway this guy like made this it like i had this whole conversation and then you like of you like made this off here to comment and i'm like wait wait wait wait what and that like it totally was like it there was a big shift there and i was like sorry i know we're not just like this isn't like the main point in this conversation but can you tell me everything about this right and that was pretty that was pretty amazing you wanna do one more yeah let's do one quick one alright what's fun did you see that reese where there's had sold her production company for nine hundred million dollars yeah and a lot of people caused the fuss about that and i don't entirely understand the business but i don't think i think people caused the fuss because they don't understand what the buyers were getting but i don't i'm what their getting but why is this worth nine hundred million dollars like get three tv shows and her her team well so this is like kinda of bro sign so i wanna preface like i haven't done like entirely a bunch of research on this but reese witherspoon has had this production company i think since like the early ish two thousand so for a long time what that means is i believe that she owns the rights you know do do realize that reese witherspoon is like like she's growth like over a billion dollars i mean she's like insane one of those people that she's like the killers like the killers is a band that like maybe not everyone says that there it's their favorite brand but like everyone knows like mister bride side and they like you know they they they're quietly the background just always the best in the most popular but even though they're no one's favorite that's kinda what reese witherspoon our is is like everyone that at least kinda likes her and we'll will go to our movies and so with with the deal i believe what they're buying is like a lot of ip from years and years of production work so okay so so i'm looking looking up right now so it says that she started hello sunshine the company that got bought in two thousand sixteen before that she had another one just called pacific standard twenty twelve and that's a subsidiary of it so she kinda rolled that in so twenty twelve so that's only a decade i guess in two thousand she had another production company called type a films and they made i don't know some oscar boot gone girl they made you know not nothing too big big little lies was their hit recently and then they had the morning show which is on apple tv but this is wild this is like so she has a book club and the book club has over five hundred thousand followers on instagram leather well that's pretty amazing she also owns to good for her she's a filmmaking lab that teaches twenty year old twenty girls that are thirteen to eighteen they art to filmmaking like this is great did be be like she also has a she also has a clothing brand i think it's called draper james and they have brick and mortar stores all over the country what what a powerhouse reese is kinda like an oprah thing where she's just gotten kinda got a web of like a variety of different things she's she's a baller she's also a kind a baller because a few years ago her husband her and her husband ran at a party and they drove home and her husband was got pulled over and i think he got the dui and she got out out of the car and like confronted the cop and and she's like i'm going with him so and she got arrested with her husband so she she she she's kind of a she's kind of a boss no it it's amazing i think if i remember correctly i believe her company was bought by kevin maher who recently was the ceo of tic tiktok america but got fired because of all the stuff and before that with disney ceo he was his ceo disney or it wasn't the ceo disney but he was president and he he like was the president i think of disney plus like when they launched or whatever yeah sure he's a big dick and he yeah and he basically they bought this company to build a conglomerate of like some type of media company i i don't entirely understand the structure the these deals to me always seem me very complicated and they seem very like deal make e like an understand the numbers right because like i'm looking at the the so i'm looking at the assets so they have gone girl which which aids three hundred sixty million gross in the box office then the next highest one was fifty billion so they have four films of which you know nothing nothing huge and then they have on tv they got big little lives the morning show little fires everywhere those are the three shows you know and then there's six that have been bought sold to either apple tv plus amazon abc netflix whoever i just don't get how you get to that number because i feel like to do that you you basically need to like like the office was getting a hundred million dollars a year of like streaming royalties that's like you know the top of friends you know those were getting a hundred million a year i feel like there's a pretty deep drop off after that so i think this is like this is like a beats by dr acquisition is kind of what i see it as which is basically somebody being like cool we get reese we get recent and then some stuff great i think that's basically like when apple bought beats and they're like great we get you know we get doctor dr and we get whatever his name is jimmy iv or or whatever plus we get some headphones alright three billion yeah well we'll we'll pay three billion for for but i think it's like the most expensive hire the company that bought it was blacks stone they're the funding and they they i i i would imagine they don't they're pretty savvy i don't know if they over pay for a lot of stuff blacks stone is funding that guy kevin mayer kevin mayer company is the one who bought this so i think it's more like kevin i think it's more like a qui thing where kevin mayer in this case qui was started by with the named jeffrey katz katz katz you know the dream work the guy who started dream works he was able to go raise two billion dollars because he's like jeffrey katz and i started dream works and then he used it to go buy a bunch of content and and all evaporated into zero dollars i think that's that's you know more like what this is like versus something some like real asset that you can analyze and say yeah it's worth that dude congratulations to reese for getting that bag we i would that she is actually amazing reese for this spins pretty amazing have you seen have you seen what you you you know she's like i i think she's in her mid fifties isn't she i don't know but she's killing it and i i she looks exactly the same well that's looks exactly same they get like you know shot up all over over their face and you know they they they they looked the same or or or it goes the other way and they just look super weird and they're like yeah it's just gone wrong you know what i know this one one last thing you know the new covid strain is called like whatever delta the delta variants delta plus is the new one i was thinking about this this morning first delta how shitty for delta airlines just for for the new covid trying to get named after you god that's a that's a tough that's a tough loss to just wake up to it's like you know which scientist just decided to name this delta like that's not cool and then i was it's was a scary name it's a scary name i was thinking what would that be worth to them if you were delta delta hey if you were delta what would you pay some lobby some some bribery to some scientists how much money would you shove in the briefcase for this to not be called the delta variant it's like yoke we called this united variant call us the the the southwest variant don't call this the delta variant so i'm staying at this hotel it's called the i don't know what's it's called gay lord op land i don't know what it's called but i i think it's called gay lord i mean gay lord op land that wasn't like a joke that's what it's called and i'm in this like wing of the hotel called the delta wing and it i it it has like a bright red sign that says delta wing and i'm just like oh i'm seeing this i'm like man this is just like not good like hospital wing but yeah i don't did you associate delta airlines with the variant i didn't i didn't i didn't it's gonna happen a corona with like beer with the coronavirus like you know that can't have been good for them i didn't associate beer too much with that did you i mean yeah people did us like that it became the word of the year and it's associated with like the deadliest virus in a hundred years is the coronavirus and who owns you know thinks you know nothing could comes from that except for you know the like college bro who's i bro i've had i've had the coronavirus for you know five years been loving corona say you know whatever ever since like that joke that's the only upside you get everything else is downside and so i don't know i feel like delta should pay you know they're worth i think like twenty five thirty billion dollar or something like that where do you pay i you can't you can't pay what a it i'm saying what would they pay if they could push a button and make this go away i feel like this is worth a billion dollars to delta like easily this is worth one twenty fifth of their of their market cap this is worth a four percent swing in like brand value perception you know who's gonna wanna fly on delta with the delta variant going on i just feel like that's a there's there's some association here on delta that's my understand in the delta wings so i think you're selma the delta wing you're just helping health in delta alright yeah anyway i i feel like if i could if i could secretly present the ceo with a button that said pay a billion dollars and this goes away this doesn't this isn't called delta i think he pushes that button yeah i would agree alright i think that i think we had an action packed episode we'll see you what people think i think we gave like eight good things good alright and alright early morning episode in the books enjoy the podcast conference alright i'll see you see you yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back on