#223 - Sam & Shaan Bet $500, Ozy Media Scam, Why Google is Dying, and More

i'm gonna do this but a ira santa i'm gonna find a foot traffic area and i'm gonna make like ten grand in a day no there's no way you're gonna be able to pull this off i bet you five hundred dollars yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back i think it should be doing a light we right now we just roll into the conversation should we be doing a thing where it's like this is the my familiar podcast where we do x y z because like if you're a new person coming on the podcast starts with you being like we good okay so i'm gonna tell you a story i bought a car and car has a transmission you know what transmission is to check this out and then like you go to the thing so should we be educating people on what this is or you think that's chew try hard and just fucking no i think we should we we did the intros at the end for a while where like we recorded them and put them in front but how do you i don't even know how to describe this podcast when i meet someone and they asked me what i do for a living i say oh i do this thing i also host this podcast called my first mailing i'm always embarrassed to say the name but then what do you explain the podcast is yeah i would say like you know for people who are they're kinda like business nerds or the their idea junkie keys so they're always you know scheming or wondering you know what's the business behind this how much money does this make how much money does this person have those types of questions that you're not allowed to say out loud this is the place where we talk about those things out loud that's kind of my my off top my head description and so we brainstorm if you wanna you know if you wanna sit here while we brainstorm business ideas and break down the economics behind businesses that you've heard over never heard of this is the podcast for you great well there's true another way another way i'd put it is every other podcast you can listen to if you go into itunes is gonna be about the past or about the future and we tell you something about the present right now so past is all interviews about shit you've done the future is you know guessing about you know what the world's gonna look like in twenty years and what we do is we talk about business opportunities that exist today that that you should be looking either building investing in or just knowing but it's not just business for example i got messages sometimes we talk about health related stuff or we just talk about like things we're doing with our life and i got messages saying people love it for example right now i'm staying at my friend's house in hawaii and i posted a video on my twitter did you see that video looks sick so okay it looks sick but there's something interesting about this house and what my friend does that i think is amazing so he only has one it's a really big living room he's got a huge living room he's at a very small couch the rest he's got pads like pillows on the floor and it's people it's floor sitting like it's like a floor sitting scheme or like a layout and i love it have you ever sat like they do a house for people like sit on the floor so my sister did this unintentionally so my sister i i think i think i've mentioned i should probably talk about her businesses is a pretty cool yeah but she basically does something called in home i like in home daycare care or preschool so she she does both and so like she took she took over my apartment so my parents were like hey my parents had a house and attached to the house was a two bedroom condo and i was living in that right when i moved san francisco i i lived in that that place like for like a year and then i got notice i was getting evicted by my parents i was like what what's going on like oh yeah your sister needs the the the space she's starting a business in here so like you know you gotta get the fuck out and like she's gonna take over this space so where we had the living room she basically ran a preschool out of that space and and you told me the numbers it was a really good business oh it's still a great business so she has three of these now they're they're all different so she's got it an outdoor so the even better right so so the first genius move was instead of going and renting a commercial space she's like oh just use like an in i'll i'll do in home and okay why is that good well you're already paying the mortgage and what happens is from you know eight am to four pm during the day a part of your home will be used for your preschool your day care and now if you're astute so you would think okay yeah that seems pretty small like you got what ten kids in there no no big deal well every kid pays three thousand dollars so that's thirty grand a month of income coming in now you have teachers so you got maybe three teachers there it ends up being about forty forty percent i wanna say profit i might be wrong off the head but it's about forty percent profit there's another kinda hidden benefit which is you can write off pretty much everything about your house and your in home life because your business runs out of your home so you basically pay no taxes or sorry your all your life expenses are also business expenses in a way because that couch that you bought or that matt that play mat you bought that's all for the school right all the toys you bought that your kids also get to play with they're for the school you're and she also sent her kids to the school so her own what she would normally be paying for day care now she was getting you know for free because she had her own school and so and then she started she created an even better one which was an outdoor only program so what's better than using your in home for for for your space no space at all use the public parks and this was great because a whole bunch of parents didn't want their kids indoors all day and like sitting you know kinda like sitting inside while you're gonna do that at home anyways don't you get out there like a good kid and go play go go play with nature and so she created nature kids such as this program san francisco and it's actually awesome has like the highest reviews and there's i went to the class and basically all the other parents were there and i was just kinda talking to the parents it's like oh yeah this guy he started k this guy is ex paypal this guy is the it's like all these like billionaires of san francisco basically sending their kids to this outdoor program wait see a three of them now so she yeah she has three total programs so this could be like a like a seven figure a year business yeah it is yeah so it it is it is that and and so and so she has like teachers who who who you know run the day she's on walkie talkie with them like doing like throughout the day and she has like can't nest cameras in the place so she can be like like hey you know like you know what she can keep an eye on it but she's not day to day involved anymore which is great at the beginning it was her and my mom was like making the food for the kids like making tacos and shit and like now it's all like you know all done done much and and they're home they're they're they're floor sitter so okay yeah so back to the floor anything sorry so because of that whenever i go to my sister's place her living room there was no furniture there was just tv there was no nothing like a normal living room up she had done like what you did with your home gym she had just turned the whole floor into play mats and even better than just the floor sitting because it's just play mats and then like all the walls had like kinda like kids games and d and stuff like that but then she had these like little swings for kids like you know you know like a rope swing like the tarzan just like hanging from the middle of the room so like things that would occupy the kids but then when i would go hanging out there i'm floor sitting i'm just like stretching while we're hanging out with they're bad that's exactly what i'm doing so so i was getting so fucking limbo just like hanging out with my sister because what why wouldn't i just be stretching and rolling and just getting done know my body a little bit and then there's a swing there so now i'm kinda like practicing rope climbs like a fire man and shit and i was like dude this is like i don't know what like it's like ergonomic lifestyle like you know there's this whole my lifestyle just changed into this like mobile tarzan you know one with nature and one with my body that's exactly every time i'm here so he's got this like hammock swing coming down from the ceiling and so you have to like sit in a particular way where you're stretching and then he's got like these cushions that are only like eight inches above the ground yeah and you just sit there and it takes a minute to get used to it it is so much better than sitting on a couch it's so much better it's the best i watched this youtube video recently and this guy had this whole like theory so it's kinda like a ted talk this i got this video and it's all about how like sitting is like crushing us and basically his whole thing is basically that you should stand most of the time and you should stand in a very particular way where you like squeeze your butt and so it's like your hips are directly underneath you and he's got this whole talk and he like looks at these people who don't sit in normal ninety degree chairs and he shows like what their butt looks like if it's like the whatever it's like the the the whole point is he like has all these visuals anyway i've been floor sitting and it is awesome i'm one hundred percent gonna stick with this or at least i'm gonna try to yeah it's a total hack i should do that like i do love me some couch time but i definitely wanna have a room that's just pure mats and then when i hang out there work there just roll around there it's just like a different vibe and with kids it's perfect because that's what they naturally want anyways and so i'm just gonna do that with my giant like play room do you wanna talk about aussie this is amazing a bunch of topics so i'm gonna save half them for next time but we'll do half today oz this is an amazing amazing story well the story came out about aussie media and if you missed it i'm gonna give you the rundown and then i want sam i want you to react i know all about it okay so here's what i know and you fill in the gaps okay so i heard about this because the story breaks in the new york times and they basically say and they talk about aussie media a companies that i never really heard it most have no idea what it is red flag number one so they go they were they they it's a company that's raised a hundred fifty million dollars and they were on this call with goldman sachs and goldman sachs is ready to invest forty million dollars of the company and they're just sort of doing their final kinda like diligent slash get you calls and they're one of the selling points that oz was telling goldman sachs about like how it's def def and how we're like this next gen media company was they were like our youtube videos which you see you know some of our youtube videos get millions of views which is good for news and media company it's you know youtube loves us the data shows that you know youtube sees that you know gen z or millennials like love our content so they're they're big fans of our of our content we're gonna be doing much more with youtube so you know your investment now you're investing in this like next gen video company as well and so they they get on a call they're like why don't we do a call with us the founders of oz goldman and the executive over at youtube who runs youtube originals and so they get on the call and they're on a conference call and they're waiting for the the the youtube guy emails and says hey i'm running a few minutes late sorry and so they're on this video call and then the youtube guy says hey guys i'm you know i'm sorry i'm still stuck in traffic can't do video can we just switch to a a phone call conference call sorry for the inconvenience and everyone's like no problem we switch over to the phone call and he calls in and he says hey i'm so so let's call them jeff i don't know what his name looks i'm jeff from youtube yeah oz is amazing our data shows that it just crush other media companies they're really innovative we we plan to feature them and do a whole lot more it's so great and the goldman guys they're like wow that sounds good but you know they sort of noticed like it is voice sounded a little funny almost like he was like a like a voice changer and they're like it's probably nothing but you know like just a case let's go ahead and this like double check in our diligence let's just let's just email the guy from youtube and just just make sure you know it's all all good and they were like oh you know he had emailed us from a gmail which is kinda weird you know like the official jeff at gmail mail dot com like let's just email but let's just go to youtube themselves and just email him correct and so they email and that guy of course is like what the hell i've never heard of aussie media no i was not on a phone call what are you talking about and so goldman i what the fuck is going on and so this basically was and then they they they they go back to the company and the company like oh my god yes i we're so sorry about a lapse in judgment we had that was my founder on the call you know like we're embarrassed sorry that was just a bad bad decision i don't know i don't even know how they could with a straight face back out of that but they you know they back out of it and goldman says okay look we're invest because obviously shady as fuck but you know we're not gonna make a big deal out of it so you know what so they back out and this this company if you look into aussie they had made some pretty big claims so host are some other big claims so fifty million monthly unique they said their email newsletter had twenty million monthly subscribers which is like you know as somebody who has like the the biggest thing ever yeah do you wanna like it'd be unheard of i think public numbers morning b said they had three million i think you guys are right around that same number so to to do you know ten times more than that would be like wow that's pretty substantial like that's interesting and oh you have fifty million unique like on your website when i go there looks like you have less than a million according to this but fifty million monthly unique is also like a top hundred or top two hundred website i mean it's it's right huge so people start looking into it and they start looking into all their claims so they claim they're like we are amazon prime first talk show and then you go look it it's like they used it wasn't like amazon prime commissioned and paid them for a talk show they use something called like direct upload which just lets anybody upload their thing into the library and and then they claimed that they were the first and then they were using amazon's name and all their like kind of like billboards and ads saying it was amazon's first and amazon sent them a cease desist was like take our name off your shit and and he's like i stand by our claims but you know of course will take your name off this and and then they claimed that they are the fastest growing talk show on youtube and then the journalist was like so how do you know that because you know we talked to social blade they measure this kind of thing they said you're pretty like average he's like well you know we're the fastest growing premium talk show that's youtube centric like their own category they made up and we looked and we couldn't find a faster growing one and it's like oh so you looked and you couldn't find one and so you said you are the the vessel and then the they look if you look at their youtube videos they'll have like a million views like less than a hundred comments so you know little fishy a little fishy you know what's going on here and so and by the way they had like pretty legit investors so axel spring mark las who owns the milwaukee bucks like steve jobs his wife david drum who's just like you know long time google exec they had some pretty like legit investors still have pretty legit investors and the funny thing is after goldman sachs walked away and all this happened still raised money still always still raised another round and so what's your what what did i miss and what's your reaction yeah so the takeaway here is twofold the first is we actually talked about this a few weeks a a week or two ago we said that you can raise a fair amount of money and pretty much lie and most people were not check on you right yeah we said we said the following i'm surprised more people ain't lying because it would be so easy and quite lucrative to do so yeah when it comes thing and we said most people us included don't do a ton of diligence and even if you do it's very easy to get away with the basic diligence we're nobody's right we're where we're and then you take these larger funds larger names and they still don't do it they all got dupe too you know what i mean so let's like so there is a systemic problem in a way it's a feature and a and a problem other the feature is this industry runs on trust and the reason you you and i can do deals on a handshake is because we trust each other and we and there's a lot of founders out there who are but the majority of people are not try are not du ubiquitous or or lying or committing fraud and so that's why silicon valley can move at a fast pace because we don't have to take three to six months to diligence every single deal we do that's why we can move at a fast pace but the flip side of that is it does create an opportunity for fraud to to july and which doesn't happen often but so basically i believe the founder name is carlos watson and carlos watson is a very charismatic guy i think he was a host or had tv show or something like that on both pbs and cnn if i remember correctly they started about a year or two before us and i remember i recruited people from there or and i had one moment who worked there who worked for us and and i would ask them about a i ask her about them and basically they caught my eye because i would use similar web and i would notice that they had very little traffic and if you go to on their website now the hustle probably actually gets more traffic than they do and we don't even compare you guys have about ten percent more traffic according to that than them yeah we don't even try to get traffic like we don't like that's not our business is not web traffic but their business is web traffic oz additionally their website is horrible like it's one of these sites that looks pretty but you go to it and you're like how the hell you work this thing and like it's like impossible to figure out what they're like as a marketer and entrepreneur i can go to a website today and i can look at i'm oh the goal is to drive me to this thing when i see their thing i'm like what are they trying to get me to do and so i've always had a red flag about this company because they claimed these huge valuations they claimed these this huge reach and i don't know anyone who consumed it i when i was in new york i used to see buses with their logos on it and they're buying all these ads and media companies don't buy ads media companies sell ads and you're not buying a bus ad of above all ads and so i used to see this and i knew that something weird was happening because they didn't make sense how they made money and they constantly had to raise money and so this was always full the shit to me i'm a little surprised axel spring or invested in it because they're pretty legit but i'm not surprised that steve jobs wife invested and do it because she invest in a lot of profit making stuff so i'm like well she just gives money to anyone but yeah this company i think is nonsense they also claim that they have these huge festivals and i've never heard of anyone that went to the one of their festivals so i have always thought that this company was full of it and now there's some proof yeah yeah funny i mean it's crazy how this stuff goes down and then you see people who are so there's one i think mark las on the board and i think he was i think they released a statement like oh you know we you know a lapse and judgment we we we stand by this kind of temporary moment momentarily kinda like lapse in judgment you know they're making the right steps to correct this i don't even think the code founders like got fired i think he i think he's still there that i am correct dude it's a weird company and they also claim that they're you know where they they say they're base out of is palo alto and like you and i have lived here for ten fifteen never heard of never single employee yeah never met anybody who reads them or shared an article from them also not where you would start a media company is palo alto so you know just strange all around yeah so that's weird do you want can i tell you about a can i can i do one real quick okay so have have ever told you about newspapers dot com you told me about this and i remember going to it and be like oh i've been like that sounds like a very common word and i remember going to it you said it was something cool but but say it again for for me because i don't remember and another so i believe it was owned by ancestry dot com and so ancestry dot com it's a website where you can do two things so you can enter in your dna or you can enter in your last name like you give them your dna and they you don't do twenty three me shit and they tell you who you're related to or you just do you enter your your name and you could track like you know if you came into ellis island and like who your great grandparents were based off of civil war records and all this weird stuff and they own they bought this archive called newspapers dot com and it scans every newspaper they could possibly get a hold of it and you could search it and i use it for research all the time and if you scroll down on our doc sean i actually give you an example so dan gilbert started this company called quicken loans he owns the cleveland cavalier is that what he owns yeah and he's like a big shot detroit whatever and he he's seems like a nice guy and i was curious about his background and so i use newspapers dot com to learn about his company so quicken and loans originally was called rock financial and i sent you three examples of why newspapers dot com is incredibly fascinating the first you can read profiles about people so quicken loans went public i think in nineteen ninety seven i found an article from nineteen ninety six i think and you could read that article and it's a profile on dan and he'll explain bill say dan gilbert off office is really funny he's got toys everywhere and he'll say well my you know what i'm trying to do is build this fun work workplace you know whatever and so you see like firsthand knowledge as they are building about how their philosophy on business and that's incredibly fascinating and he'll also say like yeah you know we started the business with five thousand dollars of savings and then we scaled this much revenue and so you could actually see in real time how they're describing the business and where they came from the second thing that you can do and i do this all the time is i find their ads in classified newspapers where they list jobs so i actually listed to one of their their job ads so how would you do this so let's say you you're wanting to find this can you search like everywhere rock financials mentioned or you had to literally go just let me check this sunday and check the job section and see if they're no so what i did was i typed in rock financial i typed in show me all the newspapers within a radius of detroit because i knew that's for their base out of and then i said make it between nineteen ninety five and nineteen ninety six and then pay for newspaper paper dot on the service ten dollars a month right and when i and then i i could see it says when you're searching it says which newspapers it's from in which section of the newspaper and who the author is so i can very quickly see if this is a profile hey this is like just dan gil gilbert giving a quote on the economy or if this is a job ad and i read the job ads job ads are actually amazing so if you ever wanna see what a company is launching even today you go to their website and you click jobs and if you see like oh wow youtube is hiring or i don't know i'm making this up apple is hiring people who have experience cars amazing they're clearly like going into like so that's like a no brainer but it's cool to see and and also on a lot of job boards or websites they'll say you know we're oz media we reached twenty million people a month we we cover this stuff and so you see like it'll actually tell you a lot of stats about the company they have to they have to they have to sell themselves right if you're recruiting people and by the way super super sneaky move go interview at a competitor's company to find out their their data because you during the interview process you'll find out a lot about the company's strategy about their numbers things like that and that's one way to get competitive intel that i've i've heard some people do or you can recruit the people who are if they're knowing that you're not gonna hire them that's another one well that one is a little bit harder because you recruit somebody and you put them in a position some people get really some people are like oh yeah like happy to share nothing nothing that was confidential but just you know here's my point of view and what i think they care about and what they're roughly the size of their this of this part of their business but then some people are like i can't believe you're asking me to d information about my previous yeah you have to be respectful you gotta go about it in a certain way so anyway newspapers dot com i use it to look at job ads and i could see like how they describe their company back then and like what they recruiting for sometimes you could see salary and so actually adds a lot of context around it and then finally i look at ads that they use to get customers and so you could see like how they describe themselves how they got customers things like that you could see if you look at job ads you could see how they're structuring their business it's actually an amazing tool and so the difference is is that when you read biographies they'll tell you like a third person point of view on like and analyzing it when i do this when i do it this way i'm like well here's exactly how they describe themselves and like yeah it's different because this moment in time versus a hindsight right biography is always hindsight now that we've seen it all play out we could connect the dots in this way but when you just go back to the source material at that time when it went to print this is how it was seen in the moment which is which is really useful because like i've done this with tech companies you can go read when twitter launched on tech crunch it's a small blurb yeah it's like this goofy thing called twitter launch is kinda buzz at this party but it kinda has no point keeping an eye on it and blah it's like oh pretty inc launch for something like as that became as influential twitter you go see this for you can go see their original landing pages and their original launch launch press and how they position themselves you can go read original like launch announcements on hacker news for dropbox and other things you can go see the the five minute video that drew house and put up demoing dropbox and the comments of people being like dude no one needs this and you know here we are you know twenty billion dollars and for the modern stuff like a dropbox and twitter there's two ways you do that the first is when you search on google you there's right underneath this the text bar you go all the way to the right and you click search tools and you could change the date so you change the date so you make it so if let's say twitter launch at two thousand nine you type in twitter and you pick up the e because that's how you remember that you spell it and you do like year two thousand five to two thousand ten i forget when they first launched and then you actually see it or you go to web archive dot com and or way back machine dot com i forget just google one of those and then you could actually see the early landing pages so anyway that's a cool hack that i wanted to show you about it's pretty amazing by the way this print add i just wanna i just put it in my swipe file but like this ad for them they go it says everybody's talking mortgage first and then there's a quote from a customer said we found out that the bank's pre approval is just a piece of paper with mortgage first we got a firm commitment and locked in a low rate there's no easier way to shop her right that's like the print add headline and it's just cool to see the copywriting of these like these types of products you know it's not it's not the sexiest type of product to send to to sell as you know a mortgage and that's exactly my point time so here's the point when you're starting something you say to yourself i wanna be like quicken loans or i wanna be like let's say you have a clothing company i wanna be like louis vuitton i wanna be like gucci and you have to i wanna be like steve jobs and apple and you have to remember that it's always on nine out of ten times it's not glamorous early on and so you can go and look at early apple products and you're like oh wow they're they were shit just like i am like they were still trying to figure out they weren't that great and what they said then like i can't connect like it's hard to imagine that this thing became this end thing right that this early ad or this early profile like i never would have guessed that therefore it kinda go to if you go to rocket mortgage dot com now and it's like you know this diverse crew of like white black asian people sitting on beautiful couches and it says rocket mortgage is the home loan experience design for you you're one of a kind your mortgage should be too start an application to see what's possible right like a very different type of ad and so if you wanted to be the next them don't copy what they say now now that they have had a brand x and that they have a salesforce and all these other things go copy what they did at the beginning when they had zero brand awareness and they had to like explain what they do quickly to people in a more literal sense rather than these like kinda like fancy marketing brochures exactly that's exactly my point and so i think this is incredibly helpful tool both intellectually because you can get ideas but also emotionally and you could see that like oh wow they weren't always like tick ass they sucked to like me or you know they were only okay or i never would have printed it to that they ended where they start based off where they started right okay i got i got one for you can we switch yeah you which one you gonna do you got a lot of really good ones i'm gonna give you my blue collar side hustle okay so this is this is the blue collar side hustle segment for for this week which is basically a way you can make money not a ton but like thousands or tens of thousands of dollars maybe a hundred thousand dollars with just a little bit of sweat and creativity that's the blue collar side hustle okay so what is it so it's we're we're we're about to start october and this last quarter of the year is holiday season it's the biggest shopping season the year people are ready to spend and coming into the holidays there's one little side hustle that i always thought was interesting and i started looking into it and it's this business of mall santos so have you ever like have you ever done this you you don't have like a little kids so you may not have ever done this but like last two years since my my daughter was born you know come christmas season sonia always wants to like go to the go to see the santa and have us take a family photo with the santa for like the memories with our like babysit sits in santa lap take a photo dude what and what which is and when you think about it fucking weird that is it's so weird like why does like this young couple who like if you're an immigrant or you're like in your case you're idiot india like just believe that you gotta get this picture with this fat old white dude who by the way barely looks like santa right so the one i'm going to and also kid cries one hundred percent of the time right because you put them in a stranger a stranger who looks like a monster laugh surrounding like dwarves surrounded by dwarves and other strangers looking at you yeah and so you're like give me a smile and they're like no i'm crying here so okay so this little business so so what is this so i'm me gonna tell you how the current system works and then what what you can do so a mall santa out will make between ten and twenty five thousand dollars in about a five week sprint here and all they do is they go they they buy the outfit for about three hundred dollars and then they get hired by these like photo companies like this one company called iconic that does this iconic what they do is they pay they hire all these malls santa's and they have three hundred malls in america that they're partnered with and then like a hundred like babies r us no and then hey i need them i need a santa and charleston you're gonna make you know you're gonna make twenty thousand dollars over the next five to six model agency for fat white guys exactly so then they send you the dispatch you just go sit there on a chair for like six hours straight and kid gets in your lap you say oh what do you want for christmas take picture see you later and you just do that it takes zero what do they use them for the rest of the years like a diabetes commercial like what do you gonna do with these guys so they do so i'll let tell you so okay so that's the first part so then so they have a six thousand santa that they hire just themselves they showed the they get into the malls and get prime real estate because they showed the malls that having a santa there will drive about a million in incremental revenue because you get increased foot traffic into the mall because families like us come to the mall to get the photo done with santa and you're paying like fifty bucks per photo and you're doing a photo you know every i don't know minute and so like you can just add up the cost per hour that are sort the revenue per hour that iconic or the the person hosting this is doing so i thought this is kinda cool then i was like where do these people come from and basically there's been a spin off cottage industry of santa training and santa out costume like businesses so there's like santa costume business is a little e commerce pop ups like you know halloween pop ups or it's just selling certain part of the year and it's the boots and the glasses and the beards and the hats and the robes and all that good stuff so you'll end up spending hundreds of dollars just to to have one of these outfits i i own one of these outfits because we wanted our at home photos to also have me in the santa outfits so you know brown santa sitting next to the street i have a bunch of photos like that from last year dude your wife is is amazing the she's instagram she's like an instagram mom basically without the followers so we all of the work of big instagram mob without any of the influencer money that we get we should be getting out of it so so so so so she does is that she really cares about photos and so like she wants her memories and she wants cute photos so i have to do all this bullshit so okay so then what happens so there's these schools that will charge you up to a thousand dollars for santa training and what does that mean it's like tells you what to say it tells you how to groom your beard and your hair to look like nick and then helps you get a job as a as a santa somewhere so that's like a whole little cottage interesting now what do i think you could do with this so i think this can be done in a whole bunch of different ways so i think you could kinda independently do this in your neighborhood so we've talked about like how do you do door to door in neighborhood i think you could go door to door in any neighborhood and say hey tomorrow santa's gonna be here if you want a christmas photo just come to the front of the neighborhood by that tree you're like me staying up a front this is like a pe dream like santa meets ice cream man this is weird the this is weird kid that goes the parents go with you to the thing is incredibly safe safer than a lemonade stand my friend so this is the lemonade stand we do in the winter which is you do a pop up santa auto other thing and if you were going door door you could go door to dressed as the elves saying that santa's coming alright so that's that's one way of of doing this the other is you could partner with really any place that has foot traffic so whether it's a mall or it's kinda like an outdoor eating area it's a farmers market it's you know if you just need to find foot traffic and if you pop yourself down my estimate is that you're gonna be able to make fifty dollars per minute doing this thing that might be a little high let's just say thirty dollars per minute because people don't always what's opt for the big photo pack so thirty dollars a minute at an hourly rate bro okay so hourly that's eighteen hundred dollars an hour and you're gonna be there for let's say six hours that's ten grand a day you can print doing this thing and all all your costs are you know pat santa for you know hopefully that's somebody that's you or somebody you know that you can get to do it buy the out for four hundred dollars another thousand dollars of of props and decorations and the chair and all that stuff the photographer might cost you let's call it a thousand dollars for the day and and and so that's your because that's sort of your cost structure going into this i think the rest of it is pretty much free because who's gonna really kick out santa who who's iconic iconic is the company that does like like photo experiences and stuff like that are they big i think they're big because i this isn't their main business so i think this is like you know part of their business if someone okay so i agree with you that someone can pull this off i would be i'm missing you wanna make twenty grand for the holiday season that's nice a lot of people want twenty grand i would be amazed if someone is well you gotta have so much courage in order to pull something like that off that scares me this scares me why what scares you about this so it's kinda like whenever i think a business idea i'm like anything that involves eating something i'm like oh that's all that's all you got like it's like a big burden right it's like a big burden if you're like if your product is gonna be eaten you mean selling something other people gonna eat yes i'm like well you can't bullshit that right you gotta like you gotta nail that right away and then like a tear down i'm like well anything involving children i'm like my god like you gotta nail that too you can't add anything weird we're going on there's no risk here it's literally a santa with the parents steady right there next to you you sit on their knee for one second to take a photo is so real low risk because not like a day or something like that day cares is up there too i mean this is i i would be i'd be very curious if anyone's gonna to pull this off this isn't like you're just going to the street and like break dancing like you're going in the street and like having a kid sit on your knee i just think that i'm gonna i'm gonna do this for the for my for you know we're talking about for our youtube channel doing some some little business stunt i'm gonna do this as one of them this holiday season i'm gonna do this but a ira santa i'm gonna find a foot traffic area and i'm gonna make like ten grand in day no way there's no way you're gonna be able to pull this off i bet you five hundred dollars there five hundred dollars okay what part are you are you dad it okay maybe the ten grand a day is the ambitious part no maybe it's five okay i'll be very curious to see if you could pull this off this would be amazing what do you think it's gonna happen what do you think all the risk is there's no risk i don't think there's that much risk i just think there's a huge amount of fear that i have about doing this about anything involving risk is so gets lazy it doesn't decides not to do it that's the only risk that's the only thing preventing me from successfully doing this well let's see i do if i was you if i was white i would even i would be saving myself the the thousand dollars i'm gonna have to pay some santa here to do this there's nobody i i i nobody wants me to be the santa so you know i'm already working from a dispute there ever black santa that is kind of interesting we got it we got like what there are there ever i've never seen a non white santa at a mall i'm sure i'm sure there is but yeah maybe that's the underserved market that i need to go for i think people want the classics i think with holidays people throw all the quality out the window and they want the classic but do you celebrate what religion are you are you anything i'm not religious but i do celebrate fun days like christmas no yeah i didn't but you you're know i know you're not religious like in terms of like a god but like a culture like you know i'm catholic like i was raised kathleen but do you do do anything no i celebrate all the fun holidays if you're you know oh deal d mu sounds great i'm i'm you know i'm hispanic for the day well let's do that like i'm any any any culture has a fun holiday i'll i'll play why not i'm looking more days to celebrate yeah we gotta yeah once i start like meeting my jewish friends i started celebrating so we could pick pixel more hot great do i love yeah you give me some worship yeah it's really good what do you wanna do this royalty free music one i think this is amazing yeah okay so here's the idea so i saw this on product hunt kinda forgot the name but there was basically a product that launched yesterday or today and it's a ai generated royalty free music okay so for anybody who's ever had to make a commercial or like create a video or you're an agency or a freelancer the you music makes your video like ten times better but it sucks to have all the music you know is copyright protected so you'll put it up on youtube it'll get muted or taken down or dmc notice and if you wanna use it to sell products or promote your company you really can't do it illegal if you use copyright music because you don't have the permissions and so there's this whole like genre of royalty free music out there and there's all these big websites like po five that exist that will give you royalty free you know either stock footage stock photos or stock music and this whole like stock industry is pretty big and so what i thought was cool here is take a business like pond five so i know if you ever used po five no po five or no do some so many times in my life it's great it's like the best place to go if you want like stock music for for a thing is it free and how's does it work no you pay you end up buying the the the the music you like like while you're listening to the sample it'll be like the really good music and it'll be like pond five in the background like just as a watermark like every two seconds so that you can't steal the thing you have to buy so here's how i know this company crush they raised one round of funding in two thousand fourteen it was a sixty million dollar round which means they already had a bunch of traction before then since twenty fourteen they haven't reported any other raising of money and i know they're still going super strong so that's like you can sniff that and be like what's the opposite of aussie media it's this it's a company that raises one meg round doesn't raise again for the next seven years probably means it's super profitable just spitting my cash and they probably sold when who they raised sixty one million dollars and they probably like it was probably they just sold so bunch of the shares yeah it's was probably to get some liquidity because i think they started in two thousand five or two thousand eight or something like that so it was like many years into the business that they did around nerd wall at same thing right they started ended up raising a hundred million dollars never touched the hundred million dollars like their bank counts never been less than a hundred million dollars since then it's like these are companies that are lean mean and just super profitable we should nerd wall i do have intel and nerd wallet i you probably have more your buddies with the guy so i don't have much but we should have him on i i i was talking to his his partner and he was saying that he was saying yeah you should have him on and i thought well he i heard they were considering going public or something like that and so he couldn't talk too much but if i don't know if that's the case anymore or not but we you know when you're about to go public you can't say too much and so it's hard to get they're not good interviews well i get a one anecdote i heard which is just on how they kind of got started how they made it work so early on with nerd wall nerd what nerd roll it does is it's a blog for like kinda like personal finance so just kinda to gives you information you need to know about about managing your own finances and their money maker is that they rank really high or credit card suggestion so if you say what credit card should i get nerd it's like at the top of the list and then they'll break down in a pretty objective way here's you know the best credit cards depending on your goals depending on how who you are pick this one it's basically nerd wallet dot com slash best dash credit dash card that page i think that page likely makes like eighty percent of the revenue and the entire company exists to make sure that page shows up number one on google when you search best credit card right exactly and i think when we say eighty percent of the revenue i don't know the revenue if i was guessing i would guess that the revenue is a hundred million dollars or more plus or minus fifty percent yeah yeah definitely online is fifty percent okay so maybe plus fifty percent so that's pretty impressive right because when when somebody clicks that link to go buy it they hit they get an affiliate kickback and so they'll get i don't know what it is like two thousand dollars it's like very lucrative to refer a credit card twenty five dollars something like that for a credit card referral so they make a lot per customer that that hits that page so early on all the so because that incentive is so big every website in the early web days was just like who's gonna give me the highest kickback fantastic you are my my recommended my recommended card and so it was kind of like there was an objective right they were just they they were in the pocket of the credit card companies and they were just printing you know shitty content to try to get you to click that link figure to go through it which is red ventures started red ventures is a company that makes north of a billion dollars a year they basically started doing that with both credit cards and dish tv right right yeah satellite tv and so so with these a high high margin high subscription products you know they'll pay a lot for affiliate so what nerd was doing was they were just two dudes sitting in their room and they would just write blogs like high quality blogs they're like we're gonna write higher quality stuff because these other ones are just kinda content farms trying to generate clicks and year after year they were just like writing these things and it really wasn't going very far and it was like not that impressive now you tell me if i'm wrong on any of this it wasn't really it it wasn't taking off it took it took but they just two basically in the first two years they there was i don't think there was a month where they got more than a thousand people visiting their website and if you google nerd hustle con you'll see a talk where he shows their traffic like it was like you know it was a shitty in his horse that multiple years of staying the course even when the evidence all said this doesn't work because they trusted their gut and their belief system that if we put the highest content out highest quality content out there eventually we will get the traffic and if we build it they will come and it actually worked right so like you know there is a counter point to every every piece of advice i would if there was if they were a start up doing this right now i'd be like guys thanks well two years no traffic less than ten grand a month you're making you how long have you been in this apartment and when's the last time you left this building guys like look at this company they're just shi out shitty content and getting way more traffic and paying for it and just trying to arbitrage like do that that's gonna work that's working so like do that so my advice would have been horrible here because this was a tortoise in the hair start up story that actually worked and so finally there's a google update google updates a search engine and it punishes the low quality blogs that were out there and nerd role it jumps in the rankings and so all of a sudden they they go from making you know zero dollars a day to like seven grand a day of revenue and that's from the the traffic that's coming here and then a few months later there's another update and it goes to like seventy grand a day and and they sort of never look back they've always been kind of like near the top or at the top for this type of thing since then so that that is thought pretty remarkable and you know i i could've have had that same idea i would have never stuck to it the way that those guys did and they deserve every dollar they make off this yeah it's a it's a pretty monster company what but what about pod five okay so back to pond five so pod five my research tells me this quite a big company they at one point they reported sixty million a year in revenue that was like ten years ago so wait really sure that yeah so i'm pretty sure that they're doing a hundred million dollars or north of a hundred million dollars off this most stock websites will do you know a hundred million dollar plus but they get consolidated so like you know i stock photo and all those things they all get owned by the same so anyways what's the idea here well pawn five they they have their value because they have a big library so that when you're searching for up upbeat energetic music for my commercial that's sixty seconds long that doesn't sound cheesy i gotta find that that that thing on your website and so how do they get this library well they don't make it themselves they let any creator just like a stock photo site you upload your content and then if someone buys your thing you get a rev you get fifty percent rev share well here's the cool thing about what's that like there's been a change where ai has got a lot better and you can auto generate music now and so what this product was doing was you put your video in and it knows okay your video is of one minute and twenty three seconds long so that's how much music you need and it can even look at in you know in the future you can even look at you can mark maybe key markers on your video you say this is where the the the climax happens or where my product reveal happens like i need a beat to like i need i need an uptick here right and then it will auto generate an infinite number of music amount of music for that that's custom fitted to your video track and you can just say i want it to be playful i want it to be energetic i want it to be serious i want it to be fore voting i want it to be mysterious and and then you just hit generate it'll give you one you say next next next just like tinder you can swipe through and they're gonna keep one hundred percent of the revenue so whatever whoever does is i think they're gonna have the biggest library pretty much from day ten because their neural net will have generated such a vast amount of stock footage or stock stock music or stock photos so i think they're gonna crush the existing stock stock sites because they're gonna give have a hundred times more content and then they're gonna crush it in terms of economics because they're not gonna have to share any of it with any content creator and they're gonna keep one hundred percent of it so i would love to invest in one of these companies that's doing this that's got the right marketing mojo to get this out there because the fundamentals tell me that however big i stock photo in those guys are the ai version of it is gonna be you know maybe four or five times bigger and those today are like most billion dollar i would imagine though the key to this business is not the ai generated music part i would imagine the difficult part here is getting customers because the stock photos and stock video and stock music in terms of search traffic it's impossibly challenging like it's it's like out i bet you it's almost as hard as credit cards like best credit cards right so that would be the hard part is how to get customers you know a business is basically like three things so it's like convincing people to work or i guess it's four things convincing people to work there convincing someone to give you money or figuring out how to get capital to do it making the product and then getting the sale this one falls into that fourth bucket where that's the hard part i imagine is getting people to go to your website consistently for at least cheaper it i would simplify it i think i think business is get customers charge them enough where you get to keep some some profit and keep customers right you gotta do those three things and get customers is usually the hardest one and it's the hardest one in this case so so that that's why i said the founders that have the right marketing mojo that was the key part of what i said because you have to have a a way that you're gonna like get traffic for this and over time i think they will out compete their the old school alternatives because they're outdated now so here's my my other kids that that fifty percent that goes to creators so you could maybe spend on acquiring customers exactly and and you can give away a lot of the content for free initially right because of that so here's my hack for for this this is also a hustle this is maybe my big c side hustle this is your pm at google or your product manager at duck dot go and you're a search engine well the search engines have one way that they cheat which is when you search for something they can just give you their result as the top result always right that's like google with their one box thing if you just say hey what's the best holiday they they surface the best result in a box so you don't even need to click and go to a website or if you go to google images and you search for icon of this or stock photo or royalty free or whatever they can just serve you the google results for this and they have all the ai talent in the world to do this and this could become a a product line that generates you know nine figures a year for these companies so if you wanna you know if you're inside one of these big companies that's another pitch you can make to your boss that says hey boss how does this sound we use our ai talent on something that we're already getting millions of searches for a year and it will generate you know hundred million dollars plus in revenue within three years can i work on that project and then the answer will be yes and why i haven't promoted you already dude i went if i got two stores i went to a conference and i met this woman who was she was part of the crew that managed this so basically google makes a ninety five percent of the revenue from one thing but they're constantly trying to launch all this other stuff so they've probably done stuff that you don't even know exists but and they'll like buy stuff and try to run it and make it bigger like and it one example is zag guy you remember zag got yeah the restaurant reviews is that right yeah google owned it a lot of people didn't don't even know that but google owned it and i talked to this woman whose job it was to help manage the ceos of projects and decide what's interesting and what's not and she told me that they have some products that would scale to a hundred million in revenue in only a couple years and they would kill it and i was like why did you kill it and they go well two reasons one the people who we get to run them they're oftentimes paid so much money that they don't give a shit like if you're just like running your own startup you're like this has to work because this is worth ninety five percent of my network worth is like i would be screwed whereas the people who work at google they're like dude i make so much money each year i don't really want this to six sixty succeed that much i have to work more and still get paid some and so she told me that and second they're like google is so big that even though a product makes a hundred million plus in revenue over the course of a few years which can be worth a couple billion dollars it's just not worth it to us we just have so much better ways to to spend our time and i was fl acid and i knew this other woman who ran this one thing that was doing over a hundred million in revenue and may killed it because they're like this just isn't bigger interesting enough and it's just it's pretty wild to think about that yeah it's insane actually i did this when we got acquired by twitch i had in one of the meetings ahead with emmett i was who's the ceo's talking about like oh yeah if we talk like this could actually make this much and i noticed he didn't like reacted it anyway like when i say something that i think you're gonna get excited about you don't get excited i'm like hey i thought you would i thought that would like register for you it looks like it didn't tell me why that didn't and he was just like he's basically like look we make this much revenue over here so to move the needle on revenue you have to be like the size of the price has to be x and like trying to make revenue brings in all this like legal complexity business ops complexity and like potentially stands in the way of user growth and so like we either want something that hits this threshold on revenue or make it free and just optimize for you user growth i was like oh okay so like not interested in like you know this kinda like eight figures plus you know of of revenue a year it's like no i was good to don't and i i didn't take it as i was thank you for teaching me that because that makes sense my startup up brain was wired where that's a big number but now that i'm at a big company i'd need to like re rewire it as a small number dude when we sold a hubspot we went we sold in i forget like mid to late january and so we went into the year two thousand twenty one with many many millions of dollars of advertising revenue booked and contracts signed and everything and this year we you know we would have made many eight figures in revenue and when they sold when we sold they go look we make this much money i think what's up make a year like one point two billion a year in revenue and it's growing quick they're like your little twenty million dollars it doesn't really matter to us we'd rather you'd not focus on that so right we gave all the money back like we yeah we had to across call them and we had to be like hey this company i know that you booked like five hundred thousand dollars in advertising sorry we can't do it anymore and right we gave it back and it i was heartbroken i was like oh you're killing me ed they just didn't and in they're right i mean it's smart but it was crazy to think about that dude okay i want you to just don't type hands up hands in the air guess google's revenue last quarter i would imagine that they do i don't know thirty forty billion dollars a year okay thirty four billion dollars a year so let's divide by four let's just say round number ten ten billion dollars a quarter good guess that's actually what i would guessed it is sixty one billion dollars last quarter so four times that is what a twenty four two hundred forty we don't do public math yes dude what that i unless looking at something that's wrong but i'm looking on statistics right now it's it came up in my in the first google search i was like no that right that's annual not quarterly and then i looked at another place and it says it's second quarter revenue of twenty twenty one was sixty one billion dollars okay now how long have you felt like google's juggernaut like an absolute juggernaut that's already like peaked entirety like at the peak of its powers since it how many years ago yeah how many years ago did you feel that like let's just say like at what point in time if i was like hey google's revenue was already like you know just absolutely monstrous not too much upside left like five years ago would you have said that yeah so like in two thousand fifteen which was six years ago now if you told me just to like invest all my money into google i'd be like why would you why would you what why would you ever want something that's already so big it's not gonna to grow that much yeah so since that date to that that same quarter in twenty twenty fifteen this quarter was three and a half times revenue times more revenue so it went from seventeen billion to sixty one billion in that five year span when i think of that so there's like i used to be all about facebook i actually think that if you told me this could be like crazy wrong in ten years if facebook and google are not like i i think they'll exist but if they're not like the big shots i actually i'll be surprised if they're still the big shots would you agree so that could mean many things is it like there's the big shot like microsoft is still a big shot but and it was always a big shot but like facebook and google kind of like took all their shine for like a decade plus you know as microsoft was either flat or kind of declining but it was still big but it didn't have the talent it wasn't growing as fast stocks not appreciating as fast so is it that where it kinda stag or you're like it's actually gonna go down i think it's gonna go down and here's why have you ever met anyone that worked at google or facebook yes like they currently work there yes i think that google so google is interesting point one is that it kinda succeeds in spite of itself they basically invented this one thing that hasn't changed that significantly and it's always been amazing okay so they kinda have that going which is good but the second thing that they have is that people i don't think particularly like working there like it's not cool i think to say you work at google is like five years ago saying you worked at goldman it's not really that particularly interesting and i also think that the people who work they're unlike goldman whereas goldman will explicitly say we're gonna work your fucking we're gonna work you down to the bone you're gonna grind and most of you aren't gonna work here in five years google's is the opposite they say we care about you we do this we do that right and can i fold your laundry can do would you like a foot massage while you all your program this code right now because they do that they create entitled babies who protest and get angry when anything bad happens for example i think last year there was this big event and i don't actually know what happened i don't know the reason it could've have been just fine who knows but they had a walk out so a lot of the employees just like walked out for the day and when i saw that i was like oh this is like the beginning to of the end because if you think about google do they do things that maybe you could describe as evil or you don't agree with definitely yes but as an employee are they overwhelmingly like a soft place to work that you get paid significant amounts of money rarely have to show up and they pretty much are like oh yes honey like you need anything of course they are and if people are willing to protest that and walk out then they're soft and they're going they're gonna die soon that's why i think that soon damn rats going wrong there's like a there's like a phrase with it it's hard time hard times no difficult times make strong men strong men make easy times easy times make soft men that and that's like what's going on right now at google so that's why i wouldn't be surprised they don't exist i i had a friend who worked at facebook and they would send me there's a internal facebook group for employees and it's basically just a bitch session where they just vent and bitch about everything that's happening inside the company and he would send me screenshots of what the topic would be and it'd be like the most petty trivial like hey i noticed that the orange juice has moved in the cafeteria like you know i like to eat salads and when it was by the salad it just really complimented in my healthy lifestyle and now that it's over by the meat i feel like i've been vegan for two years and now that it's by the meat it's like a micro aggression against my vegan it's like do these people were complaining about the dumbest stuff and they would have hundreds and hundreds of comments which means just hours wasted fighting in the facebook comments amongst facebook employees and it was everything from the parking garage layout to the milk choices to the the wording and the email that was sent out to listen to the softness of the saw so for the longest time and i think he still does it but when my wife worked there he was definitely doing it z and sheryl sand but i think for sure suck or definitely for sure suck it was either every friday or one friday a month i i forget z would do an all hands and you could show up in person and you could ask them a question and it was mostly empty like you know facebook at the time had fifteen thousand employees and like a hundred people would be there and to me that's crazy right that's like imagine like going back years and years and like you get to ask andrew carnegie or john rockefeller like any question or henry ford like any question like that's it's like pretty amazed gotta be there every friday and i used to tell my i'm like man if you keep asking interesting questions he said to get to know you but he be like you know sarah that's a great idea come and talk to me i was like you gotta just be there every time and one time i heard the story about this person he raised his hand and they're like yeah wait what's your question and he goes look we have a huge problem at facebook we don't have tampon in the men's restroom and it's like it discriminatory and zach was like he said like is this really what you wanna spend your time discussing or can we discuss this at there and they're like like we have to talk about it and he's like alright head of hr headed to please come up here you want and like address this and i swear i heard the story up that someone asked that during the their time would suck is that crazy feel like we should end on this just like i'm imagine it's like just is that really why of silence for like where everything's at in the world just as like guess you really what you wanna spend your time having a conversation ex google is a better look than current google plate totally that amazing it's a such a stronger signal that you're ex google than current google i completely agree do you agree me do you think that they're gonna go down no i think there's kinda juggernaut but i do think like every they've become less and less relevant over time i think they've i think facebook particularly has done an amazing job fighting off their relevancy like tooth and nail i think z knows and therefore like is he goes to war for it but they just have all the there's the natural like father time is undefeated or whatever like basically over time there's a natural decline and then there's a talent drop off at for people that are gonna go work there versus go work at new exciting high upside things and then there's the like you know like anti big tech company backlash where now if there's a if there's a new social network that takes off like instagram did or like whatsapp was doing facebook can't buy it anymore so the next one that takes off facebook can't buy and that will because of antitrust and so they're just gonna lose their strangle hold because that was their previous way of like extending their lifespan was to acquire the next best social thing and bring it into bring it in house so that's gone for all the tech companies that they can't do that anymore i typically hate discussing big company shit like google and facebook i had to be incredibly boring and i'm like who the fuck cares like this doesn't actually impact me at all and i think that takes place or that exists for a lot of our listeners so i'll be very curious to hear if they even remotely cared about this discussion so let let's see what let's see what they have to say yeah tweet dennis alright i'm out of here we're done i feel like i could where i know could be what i want to like off never back