3 Killer Businesses Hidden in Plain Sight

alright so check this out i'm gonna tell you about three products that are hidden in plain site and the genius of these is that they take something that's free and they sell it they take a free thing and they sell it and i'm gonna tell you about one example that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars another one that makes millions of dollars and then another one that's made hundreds of millions of dollars i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel i wanna tell you about a couple of business ideas i'm gonna start with one that makes thousands of dollars so hundreds of thousands let's say one that makes millions of dollars and one that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and they're all products that are hidden in plain sight so we've all seen them but you probably never even realized their businesses and secondly the magic thing about all of them they sell a product that's actually free what inspired this did you just see something found one found a second found a third drew line three dots make a line so that that's kinda of what happened here so first is i'm on twitter and i see joe ga who's the founder of airbnb friend of the podcast i see joe tweet out something about a screenshot of an app that was checking water water quality so the cleanliness of water it was this app called oasis i thought that sounds familiar sam mentioned that like i don't know six months ago sam mentioned that in passing but i never really paid much attention to it what is the story of this thing oh oasis so here's one that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling a product that is free and it's hidden in plain site and it's just water quality testing so there's a kid who is behind this and we we we chatted with him so oasis is a app it's an app that checks the water quality it'll tell you if your city's water is clean if your county water is clean it'll tell you you could hold up a bottle of this aqua right here and it will tell you is this aqua actually clean or does it contain you know p fast forever chemicals that whole deal right what's in and a website right it app been a website and it started by this guy named cor and cor is from minnesota which is known for having really fresh water he said drink growing up he would just drink tap water no problem we drink hose water like you sam and that was what he did and then he moves to la just start doing the same he starts drinking a tap water he notice tastes a little bit different and he gets an upset stomach he gets a little bit sick nothing life threatening but he's like dude that's weird i'm like i just i just drink the water like why is the water so much different here so he tries to look it up he says how do i find out if my water is actually safe to drink out of the tap and it turns out that you can go to any city and then you can request a report you can request a report about the water quality in your area so he does that and he finds oh man there's tons of contaminants in my water and so he stops drinking in tap water he goes to whole foods he buys water from whole foods he says well let me see if this one's is actually contaminated too it turns out you could contact any bat bottled water company and they have to provide your report about the testing of their water and he finds that the water you sold in whole foods also has lots of contaminants today and then he's like what that what's going on here and so he creates a app really for himself but for others too to be able to check the quality of water for whether it's your city your town or bottled water that you're drinking and he's basically just aggregating free data that already exists that anybody could go request so when we first mentioned it it was on the jeremy gif episode few months back it was at ten thousand dollars a month in revenue and the way that you make revenue is i think he has an affiliate scheme where like if you buy something that he recommends he gets to cut no so you pay fifty dollars right there's a pay yeah so you basically you request a report you can get someone fresh free if you want like you know the full report or whatever you pay forty forty five bucks forty nine bucks or something like that for a free for annual membership to this app so you can continue by the way when i share this i knew it was a pay and people were like who the hell would pay for this and i was like a net camp at first that then i start clicking around the website out of i'm like oh my god my towns here right and it says it might be dirty but i can't see the results unless i give them fifty dollars and so like i understand why it's actually incredibly valuable i mean look at the numbers so it's doing let's say forty thousand a month now in revenue so forty thousand a month so basically a half a million bucks a year and but if you do the math forty five bucks if it's a you know forty five dollars trip i know he's only got a few thousand subscribers to this thing so it's not like it's it's not like everybody's paying for this but it a small number of people really care about the quality of water and are willing to pay and get the information and he's structured it and so what he did was he start off with all the free reports and then when he you know couldn't get the free reports or i wanted to test more things he's or wanted to verify their reports he'll do his own independent testing but it's very expensive it's like you know a couple grand to do independent testing of a product to find out does it actually line up so he's slowly doing them one by one as he gets more money and he said you know we live in a world where we think we live in abundance could walk to target trader joe's you'll find twenty different protein bars thirty different waters but the problem is most of it's filled with toxins none of it is actually healthy so my mission is to build a hundred percent independent platform to test products and provide healthy alternatives and i think this is kinda awesome right like i think this is is kind of amazing and the way that he's growing this thing because you might wonder how does he get customers for this is he just does tiktok that go viral so check out this video so it's a video about like liquid death right here right and so he'll post this video tiktok just very simple green screen over a product and he's talking about how you know i used to think this is really healthy but actually it's full of chemicals and blah blah if you want more if you wanna figure out which products are actually clean use my app and this video will get you know a million plus views and it'll drive a bunch of bunch of attention and it actually go and then drives people go download the app and and go ahead and and and sign up so very simple way to to test this to to drive traffic as product and something you can do over and over and over again apps like tiktok and instagram rules to a slightly lesser extent youtube lesser extent you can just once you find a format that works you can literally repo the same thing and the algorithm is just gonna say yep humans like this and it's just gonna keep serving it up to a lot of people even if they're even if they don't follow you and so when people have figured out these like simple formats that work they just copy paste and post the same ninety percent of the same video over and over and over again and i know several people that are building multimillion million dollar business doing this i'm so turned on right now this is the greatest that you dude this this guy so he shows his revenue on twitter which is pretty cool so oasis metrics over the last twenty eight days monthly gross revenue he shows his twenty five thousand and then he shows his churn shows everything i i actually predict this gonna be a significantly larger product than like i think it could be can be many tens of millions of dollars or even more the reason being is the way that these review websites work is you typically have to hire a lot of freelancers in order to go out and write all of the articles but if you're just using data to like organize as a table it's way more profitable also he's getting early in he's getting in early on a trend i think this water thing is still tiny tiny tiny compared to what it's going to be like in the next ten and twenty years i think he's on to something life changing for himself yeah absolutely okay so i promised you i would tell you about a company that's hidden in plain sight that is using free selling free information and making hundreds of thousands check now i wanna tell you about one that's making millions and then we'll go to the hundreds of millions okay so the millions one and we've mentioned this once before but it was years ago so i wanna bring it up again if you've ever been to a company's office and you walk into their break room or there maybe they're their kitchen where they have snacks you'll always notice on the wall that there is this poster and our eyes just glaze over it we don't ever look at it looks just like a looks like you know when you're on an airplane and you see the safety thing and the the seat back in front of you it looks like that but it's on the wall and this is a labor law poster and the reason that your office had it is the reason that all offices have that it's required by law that you have to post this in your cup your employee in a break or or open area and these labor law posters they update every year so you have to get a new one every year and they're required by law okay so that's the that's the good news the bad news is you have to buy them or do you and so here's the the interesting thing about this business there's a couple of companies that do this i i i i don't have all their their names and information here but i remember finding one that was like based in minnesota and what the guy was doing was he's just all he does is print labor law poster so what do what they'll do is they'll mail you a letter to your business and the letter looks a little bit scary and it says hey if you don't have this post rep you were in a violation of california labor laws right now and you must have this up it is a is a requirement by law it costs forty five dollars tick this box send this back to us we will send you your poster and you do that and you said they send you a poster post you put it up on your wall you forget about it you move on this is a private company that sends that letter correct now the thing is these labor law posters are actually free you could just go to your state labor law website you can get the labor law posters but companies have realized that using this sort of like awareness tactic tactic making it easy sort of scaring the hell out of you is a way to make a couple million dollars a year on super high margins because all you do is printing the same poster single sku single product one one product a year and you just send it out to businesses and then then fair description i'm on i'm on the government's website and figuring out how to order the poster for free is actually hard of course of course just like filing your taxes is a little bit confusing and turbo tax and others have made a you know they they turned the button into bright shiny green buttons instead of small gray buttons that you don't know which one to click right so there is a tremendous amount of value and simply either aggregating and structuring data and making it available for people or helping you just comply without you know having to figure out how to comply and you know maybe the fifty dollar taxes is worth it every year as your subscription but that's what these companies do so labor law posters a way to make millions of dollars selling a product that's free and a business again that's hidden plain site that bring this up because one of the great things about this podcast that i hope we do for people is that you will go from a mindset where success seems rare and hard to grasp and your sore thinking and what is it i need a great idea and great ideas are rare they're hard to find to a mindset of everything i see in my life every object in my view it's not there by accident that is that sign is there for a reason that cable is there for a reason somebody realized you needed that and they created it that once you realize that you realize oh my god business is everywhere this is a business this is a business this is a business and then you realize wow all i gotta do is figure out one of these that seems easy right it's like in a jar full of skittles picking one it doesn't seem that hard and that's what you know i i think i hope to to sort of achieve by bringing up these businesses because not only they clever little business models but it just points out that your eyes are just gl over million dollar opportunities everywhere you walk because they are literally everywhere if you will go into a parking lot look at the ground somebody painted those stripes and when you go look at it you go you can go ask the owner of the real estate you say who paints the stripes for your parking lot they'll say we use these guys you go talk to them and you say wow you just paint straight lines in parking lots that's what you do yep how much money do you make you know is this a small business oh you did seven million last year f no profit oh my god right and then you you realize oh my god there's somebody who makes seven million dollars profit painting white lines on the on the road dude i when i first moved to san francisco i lived with this guy he was one of my roommates and he was a piece of crap but he was telling me out how he was making hundreds dollars a month because apparently the church of latter day saints mormons they you can order a bible for free on their website i guess but they like it's like legion and they'll all like come and hand deliver but they'll like try to like you know convert you to their faith or whatever and he created an online store selling bibles for twenty bucks and somehow ray on google and he just went and took the person's information and put it into the morbid website and on his website they're like you know we had deliver bibles or something like that and it was like oh that's hilarious and i i remember this guy and i was like this is a horrible scam that's amazing but it was very funny he was thinking like five hundred dollars a month doing this that is so funny oh my god is they even what happens guy i he's one of those guys you know how like you have these friends and frankly you and i are those people maybe where they're like do hack shit you have those friends it's like dude do remember how we met yeah where it was like you do this hack shit and you're like this is gonna go one of two ways like it's gonna go the right way or the wrong way miles was the wrong way so like he like kinda disappeared he probably got in trouble for a crypto scam what's the yeah it was like it was crazy but it and like his about page she was like why did my why did the person to deliver my bible wanna talk me and his his thing said yeah they tend to do that mormons loved it it's like it said like right like you to explain like you're gonna get hand delivered by these mormon guys what's the third one okay third one here's a product that is used i believe six billion times a day it is a product that time magazine said is in the fifty things that made the world economy work do you wanna take a guess what this is it's a hard one i get this is this is pretty fun do you have one or two more hints like many great inventions it was invented maybe twenty years before it actually got used so somebody invented this thing like this is cool but how do we what do we use it for it couldn't find a use case and finally they found a use case oh i'll i'll give you another example every time you buy a product you use this product i feel like i'm doing those annoying riddles where it's like i'm i'm awake at night but not during the day what am or like you could sit on me but not take me with you scott alright i'll end this suspense the answer by the way the chair what is that it's a barcode so oh that's cool do you know the story behind the barcode no alright so let me get a little history lesson i know you like history so barcode is invented by these two guys norman woodland and bernard silver and these guys are inspired by morse code they realize like wow morse code is so simple it's just basically it's dots and dashes the dash i think is a like a rest basically in the dot is like you know the sound and they're like could we create another system that's like that maybe a visual system so they create a system actually looked like a circle at the time so it was like a circle and they're like oh look with thin lines and thick lines we can create like an easily an infinite number of unique tags for something and they're like oh this is great they patent it but there's not really a good use case for it and then people try to use it for a couple things you know they realized oh you know what we could do could track train containers so you know i always was wondering where those containers are we're in the route that they are and if they ever get unloaded so they put a bar on the side of a train container and it works great everyone's really excited that's working great for a second and then the problem is trains are outside they get dirty and as soon as any dirt gets on the thing it ruins the barcode so they're like i got out this bad idea take it off scrap it and then they tried it on some second thing doesn't really work either and and basically for like i don't know couple decades or something nobody's using barcodes at the same time in another part of the world you get the invention of the laser and the laser gets invented and the lasers is a really great way to scan something that that becomes interesting but but they don't really know what they're scanning why what are we scanning this for lasers have multiple uses but that gets invented and then in the third part of the world three things come together the third part of the world is grocery stores are having a really tough time because they air trying to stock inventory and they're sort of by hand keeping track of all the inventory they have think about this in a store there's so many units is taking so many hours labor and then if any customer checks out it's so slow because okay every item you have gotta punch it into the register exactly what this is i gotta either remember the prices or i gotta write this in and then i have to keep stock of the inventory levels it's a pain in the ass so they create do do do you think that like when so walmart was invented created it founded almost around this time do you think that a barcode is one of the reasons like would that have prevented companies subs scaling is just the operational hundred so walmart opened their first door nineteen sixty two this was now ten years later since is seventy four when this starts to happen is they're they're hearing this problem it's too slow too much labor too expensive so they create the ad hoc committee for the uniform grocery product identification code and they go into the lab and they're like alright we need something they find this technology they're oh remember what's that guy norman of always was talking about the goddamn barcode what if we use that what if we use this laser and they come together and they create the barcode and they change the shape of it instead of the circle shape they change it to the rectangular shape that we all know and love today and the first barcode ever gets scanned as a pack of w gum in nineteen seventy four and so and they're like wow that just took it knew the price it i took me one second and it's deducted my stock level by one oh my god that's this was magic and so you know this is like the blockchain getting invented right i like oh my god how do they convince all of the manufacturers to put this on their thing they just like rally retailers demand it so the retailers are saying this gonna they're they're the ones with the hair on fire problem right they are spending all this money in time on labor so they say hey if you wanna be in our store you gotta start adding these things to your product and and so for a manufacturer you're like oh if i want shelf space which is the most important thing for me oh i'll happily stick this this on here and so they're all working and the where do but the problem is where do they get the code and how do i make sure that your code is not the same as my code right like what what's gonna prevent that well we all go to go through some central thing that's gonna you know give us the barcodes codes that are i can use for my product to make sure nobody else can use it it's like reserving name space or a license plate it's like how do i get my my exact license plate that nobody else gonna have and there became what's known today as gs s one gs one is the non nonprofit that issues these barcodes and keeps track of who owns the barcode space and to get barcode space you gotta pay but again remember every store has standardized on one thing so if you wanna be in a store or you want your goods in an amazon warehouse for example you now need to use their system which means they have infinite pricing leverage and they charge a shit ton for these barcodes codes and so i he's a gs s one who's charging s one so gs s one we saw a little bit of about this this nonprofit you can go look them up because they're nonprofit so last year eighty eighty one million dollars in revenue barcode sales makes up ninety ninety three percent of this and then again a barcode is nothing it's literally like just a set of lines that they're selling for ninety million dollars a year and they now have four hundred and sixteen million dollars of assets that they've just been stock the ceo makes three million dollars a year the cfo makes a million dollars a year the sv of community engagement which god knows what that guy's doing make an eight hundred thousand dollars year this might be the job of all time used do see is happy hours exactly like what do you do and they you know they stash thirty million dollars and overseas places like the caribbean and central america and all of their expenses pretty much half of their experiences are they like staff salaries lobbying against the qr code is there like a barcode code qr code like lobby or they're just fighting each other i think qr codes are just a type of bar they're just a three minute shot it okay two d sorry so yeah that isn't that crazy though that this this nonprofit now has half a billion dollars in assets just selling barcodes and any retailer anybody's ever had to like get your products you know you let's say you wanna sell on amazon amazon says you gotta do this it's a racket you end up just having to pay whatever they demand in order to to get your products on the shelves do you know how like there's been a lot of cool movies lately there's been a cool movie on the guy who created blackberry i think there was one on the person who helped create tetris and then there was another one for the person who helped create the pop tart he's like kinda cool like product creation stories go i wonder if is there an interesting one here just guy was like what if podcasts were movies then they just turned out every episode of like acquired or how i built this into documentary dude well this guy bernard silver like that that this is actually a way more interesting story than i would have thought because this is something that changed culture it changed it changed so many things like it you know we talk about inflection and how like you know the iphone was invented which had all these ramifications including a gps being there which now means that uber has the ability to exist and then there's like million a million examples of that this is one of those inflection where like this barcode helped to create let's say or made walmart possible made of this other thing possible which like literally shaped a history and and this is actually really fascinating stuff yeah exactly so so this is just a it's a space that you again you don't think you don't even think this is like a you don't think where does this come from where does this little thing come from and again it doesn't come from nowhere somebody creates it and then that person who creates it now has you know something they can charge for and there's business everywhere so it's so funny that this episode is accidentally turning into a theme a theme of things that you don't really think about but how they became a thing i have actually an example of one of those can i tell you it yeah go alright so in the nineteen sixties in hawaii it started to become calm and i think it was because of like one hotel where your employees were allowed to wear in whole a hawaiian shirt to work on friday because for the most part you had to wear a suit you know like dressing formal was how business people operated all of the time and this whole casual friday idea it's sorta of started getting popular in mainland latin america where like in the nineteen eighties hp was like hey everyone you can wear a hawaiian shirt to work on a friday which was a big deal because they employ tens of thousands of people so it's like a it was kind of like a statement but in reality up until the late eighties and early nineties virtually everyone wore suits to work all of the time however this executive at levi's so levi's had just launched docker and docker were khaki pants up until then khaki pants were almost considered you know if you look at like the history of of of fashion like suits were considered like the that's the standard that's what you do khaki were basically casual wear even though now we don't look them as casual that's what they were they were casual wear and levi's creates docker because they wanted need the khaki business but still people are like this is too casual we can't wear these any other time except for saturday and sunday and so this marketing executive at levi's has this brilliant idea they print up forty thousand pamphlets that explains to hr professionals here's this new thing called business casual and casual friday and here's the rules of this holiday or this like new tradition it was just an eight page pamphlet and it said it didn't promote levi's or docker though but in all the photos you'll see like a picture of someone wearing jeans and it is like a levi's logo or you'll see a picture of someone wearing khaki and you just assume that it's docker and so this thing takes off it works so they go gotta read this a guide to casual business wear ideas for dressing professionally at work and then it basically shows like pants jeans like it's showing like options ideas for it and then is there a rules for it so one are the rules that they said yeah and says don't wear like tat or jeans but they should be nice new jeans right or like like they can't be stained or what else does it say no list no tanks oh man i'm man well discrimination discrimination baby stuffs maybe we're going we're going from to khaki like you know like it takes time obviously we guns at wednesday do you think we can make this happen i i i well i'll be actually gonna talk about that in a second but so it's a good avoid lingerie okay fair enough save athletic wear for after work and don't forget to check footwear open toe sandals are gross no no i just says it's not appropriate yeah it's a great little pamphlet so they sent this out to literally forty thousand hr executives and they even go as far to create an hr hotline so if you work at ibm and you're like you know i actually don't know protocol for like our open are our sales allowed are like whatever i can call this hotline and i could ask the adventures of casual friday hey sydney where like open our our our shoes allowed or our toes a allowed to be seen even if like their toenails are polished like whatever like if could like ask these questions and it takes off and casual friday officially becomes a thing and so it literally shaped culture and it was all because levi levi's was like we gotta sign these guys up we gotta start selling some of stuff and like back then it was kind of the american apparel industry was a little bit a rut they weren't doing that great and this changed everything and so people started buying docker buying the levi's because this movement of casual friday i totally picked up and it got me thinking this is like some pretty brilliant marketing i called this marketing you can call it cultural shift marketing or tradition hijacking and so people who have like found little traditions and they blow up the tradition or they blow up this idea and then they say and by the way if wanna buy inside the idea we just so happen to have the thing i can make your like what are your matters and so there's a few other examples of this that i i can present to you so the first one is dab beers so they're a diamond company they've been around i think for hundreds of years actually in the nineteen forties they ran this campaign called the diamond is forever and it was this idea that like diamonds are special because up until the nineteen forties diamonds were special but they weren't nearly as special as we think they are now and they also came up with this insane idea which is they're like this campaign to come up with how much should you spend on a diamond and they said roughly two to three months of your salary which is like outrageous i but that alone is like what that campaign is credited as helping shape the diamond industry they even rent further campaigns that on certain anniversaries you have to get your wife a diamond another one is breakfast being the most important meal the day kellogg invented that idea and so like we grow up now we tell our kids you have to eat breakfast is the most important thing kellogg invented that prior prior to that people didn't always think that right two other ones are baby showers and and wedding so baby showers weren't a thing until johnson and johnson started running ad campaigns figure you have to have a baby shower if you're pregnant or if your macy's came up with the idea of wedding regis registry they said you're gonna get married you gotta people gotta buy you all this stuff and and and in fact you don't want people just to buy your random stuff because when's if they buy you the same stuff that you already have or to guess buy you the same thing like that's ridiculous you have to create this registry at macy's that you can register and then finally spring cleaning is another one that really wasn't a thing until l came up with this idea of spring cleaning oh dude these are great i love what i i i don't know if other people get us fired up about these i get so fired up about these i think because it's the same idea as oh wow these businesses are hidden plain side you know this object just didn't just get hear someone made it come here all of these occasions these these sayings these these holidays it didn't just pop up out of nowhere somebody made them happen and when you find out that it's some marketing do it's some marketing door somewhere that was like you know what like how do we spring sales are slow spring slow spring spring fling no spring cleaning no spring cleaning there is like yes that's how we're gonna get people to buy cleaning products this in the spring i love that i love that just a a mad ad man somewhere in the world can just shift how people do things there's a grip we did episode with craig clement about exactly this was it like leaky gut he did he did but he didn't talk too much about that it was was he was talking about the ones that have like the ones you're talking about like why we bake it for breakfast why we need drink orange juice right like where juice came from and like all these things that today just seem like i don't know this is what we do it's just staples of the of people's diet it's just tradition and it's like no that wasn't tradition or you hit the classic one is toothpaste he talks about how at a certain time about only six percent of the population brush their teeth and so when they wanted to increase sales of toothpaste said well we can't just sell more toothpaste to the six percent of people who already brushed their teeth we need to get the other ninety four percent of people to start brushing their teeth how are we gonna do that and that's when he came up with that campaign not craig but but claude hopkins it was it was like rub the tongue on the on your teeth and you feel that film yeah one of one of them exactly it was like you know basically saying to take your tongue rub rub it on teeth you feel that film that's and and people did that as soon as they read it they do it they'd stick the tongue there and then it's gross and you're like there's a way to get that off and then you'll have that hollywood pearl profile and then people wanted that right and so that created this movement and then by the end of that campaign something like seventy or eighty percent of people now brushed their teeth in america it was like a huge shift that happened just off of that one admin that single big idea and i love because i've i've really actually like toy with the idea of writing a book about just these these these crazy admin and then the way that they've actually shifted culture yeah and and and that passed to me as well and like another one is like wall street journal and so they try to like they they they sorta of nailed it but they it hasn't it hasn't stuck with but it was the idea of once you graduate college the gift that you get is a wall street journal subscription just like i think rolex did it was like once you you know president's club is you get a rolex if you sell if you hit some sales quotas right like or you become president of whatever and so i was thinking what other things haven't to been hijacked that can be alright so i've got a few examples go what the first one being friends so friends is what like twenty somethings who are single is what they celebrate instead of a thanksgiving with a family they do friends in their town or in the city that they're living in and so i think friends giving is one that there's not a clear winner as to who owns friends giving but we can make it an entire week of being thankful for your friends and you will do various gestures including having them over for dinner to show your how appreciative you are that they are now your friends and so we could sell gift boxes we could sell gratitude journals we could do digital cards we could do all type of stuff and by the way speaking of cards hallmark is like one of the adventures of like valentine's day mother's day things like that the other one graduation season so turning into a life transition planning or celebrating new life phases all because of graduating so we're gonna call it graduation season and so what do you get for graduation season you get financial planning subscriptions productivity tools career coaching travel discounts that's for graduation season oh you said you've thought about those what are other the ones that you thought about oh i mean come on i'm like no no no no no no like examples of things where like that's amazing that they pulled that off like craig talked about the otis elevator one which i thought was amazing did you do you was that he basically talked about how back the elevator got invented far before they were used what does that mean so the elevator gets invented but people didn't wanna use them and they didn't wanna they didn't scared were scared because there were so situations where elevators would just plummet it and you just plummet your death so it's like okay no thanks and the the cons that is think about it if you don't have elevators you don't have toll buildings right because people only gonna go up so many flights to stairs so like new york was like you know four stories high there was just no there was no buildings taller than that so cities were kinda limited in how big they could be and sky otis ends up creating a an elevator with automatic breaks k so otis creates the automatic breaking elevator he's like this is it this is gonna be amazing everything's gonna buy my elevators and if you look today by the way go to any elevator you'll see a little thing on the wall almost always says otis but it didn't happen right away and he couldn't figure out why he's like this has automatic breaks it solves the problem but nobody believed it and so craig talks about how one of the techniques that the marketer use is a but they like break the elevator and like a film it like getting caught well exactly so the world fair was going on and otis decides to go all in and he creates this show basically so he creates this exhibit where he's got an elevator suspended in the air hanging by ropes cables like they would and he because he had watched cirque des sole late he was kind of like inspired by oh wow cirque say man their stunt under their spectacle are so awe inspiring you can't help a look at it so he said i gotta do that so he gets somebody up there and he stands in the elevator and he says ladies and gentlemen i have created the the world's first safe elevator the elevator with automatic breaks and he gets the guy at the top to swing an axe and he cuts one rope and the elevator starts swinging and swinging and he's hanging by a thread now and everyone's gasping in the crowd and he's like cut the rope and then the guy swings he cuts the rope elevator starts to go down two feet and then it automatic breaks and it stops and he says all safe gentlemen and he says something like whenever he says some famous phrase that basically says like otis elevator when you're in a notice elevator you you know it's all's well all well you you will be safe and elevator sales take off from there and then when elevator sales take off now buildings can be taller it literally reshape the way that cities work all because this guy realized that he needed to think out of the box in terms of his marketing and he needed to do something that would break through the noise and it would actually shift culture shift perception about a product in a dramatic way and one tool of the tool belt is that craig called these the hijack of the human mind seven human hijack and he's like one way to hijack the mind is a spectacle like this does craig have a book i gotta re listen to that one does craig have a book this is after that episode i hit craig up and i was like hey i wanna write this book with you and we talked about it we're both are really excited about it but we're both busy so this might be the motivation to re handle that project through the seven hit human hijack i wrote the signed me i wrote the intro for it it's pretty dope i'll read it to you sometime time oh that is awesome i'm gonna have to go listen to that because i was like two years ago and i remember listening to it and think he's amazing can i read you the internet of this book yeah we can cut this out support but just wanna i to get your opinion on this alright so i wrote this while back alright it's called high hijack are seven human hijack confessions of a billion dollar marketer okay so that's correct craig craig sold over a billion dollars of products support online himself okay so i said here's it goes if you read this book and agent make me promise repeat after me i promise to use these tactics only for good and not evil because the techniques in this book tactics they are hijack the same way a terrorist can hijack an airplane marketers can hijack the minds of consumers to get them to buy products they didn't even know they wanted you might be skeptical in fact i think you should be skeptical skeptical somebody making such a bold claim but i could tell you that these product these these hijack have been used to sell i've i've used these products i've used these hijack to sell over a billion dollars of products personally that's one billion with a b in case you lost count but rather than convince you let rather than let me convince you let me ask you did you brush your teeth this morning more importantly why who told you to do that who told you to brush your teeth in the morning your mom well who told her her mom well yeah before that who told all the moms to do this there must be the dentist right but wait who told the dentist the answer it turns out as a man named claude hopkins because before claude hopkins only seven percent of the population brushed their teeth sidebar and you imagine dating back in nineteen thirteen nobody brushed their teeth feel bad for grandpa after cloud hop sixty five percent of population brushed their teeth and claude didn't just sell toothpaste he eight literally changed the world he got millions of people to change their daily habits with one brilliant marketing campaign i'll show you in chapter two but before i show you how you did it blah and then i go and then the chapters are like how diamonds became a girl's best friend and blah blah like each of the different products that that got you know embedded into culture what are the seven human hijack like what are they sounds like i succeeded and got you curious you're gonna have to pay fourteen ninety nine and get and get the book like is it literally like seven different like tactics or is it several different examples of tactics tactics and then each one has example and and you stack them so what he showed was like you know for example one of the tie tactics is the spectacle like i told you about the otis elevator so like a spectacle would be one of the seven yeah like spec was one of the seven but like even the thing about like take your tongue and put it on your teeth so like a like a like a magic trick basically it's like the you know but remember the thing where people used to that power band or whatever those bracelets and they made you like cold your arm and they're like look you see how to put your arms out that's i can't push you over right and wow sort of that's why i forgot what he called it but that's sort of magic trick is is one of the things where it's a it's a demonstrate a powerful demonstration right so you can demonstrate on the person themselves you can get them to feel feel it themselves in order to to to wanna buy a product did craig come up with this idea of seven she been hijack or did you come up with it on the pod so he he was gonna come on and it was like cool we could talk about your business we could talk about whatever and i was like you know i said i someone one question this is very valuable question i said what's the best talk you've given recently like have you given to like a presentation or a talk at all that just like really killed like you could just tell the audience loved it he's like oh dude i did this one talk inside my company just to get them fired up he's like based in my company he's like a giant marketing company and i wanted them to come to work and not just feel like oh we need to raise sales by like seven percent this quarter like no like he's like i wanted him to realize yelp markers you don't just drive some revenue or lift sales by x percent like a marketer can literally change the way that society works and he's like so to to get them fired up about that i told them these examples of stories that they did and then i he's like when i putting them together i realized it's the same set of techniques that they've been using across these eight ten examples just the same same set of tactics these hijack that they've been using and he's like that could be cool and was like yes do that on the on but check this out if you google seven human hijack craig clement the first post is on reddit and it says craig clement on m talking about the seven human hijack and how to use them in your marketing and it links to this amazing post that this guy wrote where he list the seven on r slash marketing yeah it's so good so one of them for example is he talks about like the act rebellion so how do you make your consumer feel like they're giving the middle finger to the man by buying your product so yeah the example gives us back in the day when cigarette sales were are flat and cigarette sales was flat because basically cigarettes were only smoked by men and so and there were so it was already super saturated like dude we can't really get more men to smoke they kind of all smoke already and so they realized like the only way we're gonna grow sales by getting the other fifty percent of the population just start smoking how do we get women to start smoking at the time it was seen is not cool it was seen as sort of like you know it was like a kind of dirty masculine thing to do and so the guy behind the campaign basically what he did was he used influencers so influences one of the hijack so he got all of the like whoever like the kardashians of their time were so he got like thirty of them together all at once and at was that a time where the big problem in culture or society was like i forget forgot if it was like women being able to vote or it was like some other thing where was like women were repressed in some way and so he got them all to go to this the parade or the fair the the you know the new year's fair the macy's fair or whatever it was like the the the parade that happens in new york and they all stood on this float and he gave him all cigarettes as he said alright when you turn this corner you're gonna light that cigarette right when the journalists are all there they'll all have their cameras pointed at you you're gonna light this right and you're gonna defiant smoke the cigarette in front of them and you're gonna do this thing that women aren't supposed to do as an nobody called them he called it he called the sig torches of freedom exactly exactly and that's what the the newspapers he so he then put somebody in the crowd where the journalists were and he said that out loud to the journalists who then went and wrote that in their story like they they lit up these torches of freedom you see those lady's up there guy those are those are those are torches of freedom that's what those are what jewel needs to do he's to be like these are vape of freedom that these guys are using oh look at that guy that's that's a sex machine that he's using he said have sex with so many people because he's using that thing i think he even even that same something i think it was like lucky you strike or whoever their brand color was green and green was like not invoke at the time and he's like yeah the women don't wanna buy it because these sicker the box is not fashionable like do we need a re brand he's like hold my beer don't re brand and so instead he got those same women to go to the whatever the big like fashion like know like like the met gala type of thing and all of them wore green they all wore that same green color dress and so then green became cool for women like you know it's basically it became in trend right after that and then you know the sales of that that that brand went up basically because he he made the color cool and this is it's kinda cool to see somebody who can puppet tier society in this way i'm i'm summarizing it like a nine month old episodes i i might have some of the details wrong here this reddit posted said side note and a lot of these stories are documented in this amazing book called propaganda yeah and that's the be book right it's hard read dude i have wanted to read it but it seems like intimidating what's so hard about it you know these old books that are just like so dense so there's like it's not a easy read i don't know i my brain is very simple like a lot of people recommend books to me that like there's a great book have you read you know renee like meme theory it's like i'm interested to go buy the book and i'm like i'm just too dumb to read this like i'm too i even read do not have the pension span to read something like this i read like the meme theory like summary book like what was that one that came out recently and was still hard i still like i that one i read that that was like the the malcolm glad version of like renee gerard art and i like read and i'm like so i want what other people want is that it right like that's the it was i read the whole thing and i was like i understand why this is so many words what am i missing and so i'm i've heard about this book dropped i've i've heard all about this book propaganda i would be fun to read or at least try to read there's something this said like more than fifty years old where their brains were just able to like you know they spoke differently they talked they they talked differently they they they write differently and for whatever reason my brain can't really process it very well so i kinda need somebody to like translate into modern speak aaron into like simple speak for me yeah i think maybe i'll try and do that this guy this seems to like a cool oh the guy who wrote it it was born in eighteen ninety one died in nineteen ninety five wow i saw a lot alright let me tell you let me tell you about something that i did so on did you see you probably didn't see but on friday i tweeted that i'm going to yale campus i've tweeted that i'm gonna go check out yale be because it's like an old historical place and i wanted to like do something interesting for the weekend something easy on saturday tweeted it out i got like a lot of replies and it was like kind of overwhelming on what to do so on saturday morning we just drive up there and i just go to the busiest just like part of the town where i think like i'll just figure it out when i get there i show up i see a student tour like if you're a prospective student you know like when you go to your mom and dad and i just like slipped tag yeah i just like get just like i just like pop it and like it's pretty funny because it's sarah and i who i don't think either of us look young enough to be students and then i've got my baby like strapped to my chest well i get it away yeah so we're just like to tad we're like we like this like our at the back of this like student led to our listing in and then out of nowhere this kid i guess he's not that much of a kid but he's like twenty years old he goes hey sam and i go what's up man he goes hey i i'm a big fan of the pod list from religiously i saw that you were gonna be here so can i show you around i was yeah i love that what are you what are you doing here what are you doing today he's like well i saw that you were coming and just went mentioned to the most busy place there was and i just hope that i was gonna see you and here you are it's so this kid came me now i didn't think through what happens after that if but it was great and like by the way that's like the third time that's happened and i love when that happens because i like he's doing me a favor of like i would love like a local to like show me around and so he shows me all this amazing stuff so i've heard of skull and bones the secret society of yale or presidents are in all that is it what legit what what what is it it's quote a secret society but i don't know like how much of a secret it is when there's like a building and like it's like a like it's like a profit with like an a endowment so like i don't know like what i don't know what the secret is i don't know like what what secret but it was just cool to like see this building that i've read about and then we went and saw this old graveyard the oldest graveyard in america and i was looking through it and i'm gonna explain to you why i'm obsessed with old stuff particularly the ivy the ivy league so it's kinda of like a nerdy thing of mind where i liked i've been to harvard princeton yale a bunch of others because i just love like touring these old schools that are cool we go to this old graveyard and we saw noah webster great you know who know webster have you heard that name dictionary webster does that have the dictionary miriam webster dictionary the guy who invented the dictionary and i just was like looking at the this this old graveyard and next to him was charles goodyear the guy who created vulcan rubber which created goodyear tires and it was awesome it was so cool and i'm actually really en of you that you went to do this like historical old institution because it was so cool to like be around history where like someone came up with some and they literally invented or or standardized the english language like somebody that like shapes history and it's still in know they've still impacted the way that we've done things and so it was an awesome awesome weekend to like see all this old stuff because it inspired me you know how like when you get behind the computer like every single day and you're like i'm gonna do something that just makes a little bit of money sometimes so you kinda get these rut of like thinking small right it was very inspirational to like ceo and see this old institution that has lasted for centuries and how big global was it was very very cool and i wanna give a shout to that kid wanna say his name because he said he wanna to be low key but i wanna give a shout up or show me around that's awesome most white person hobby ever to go to a graveyard you'll never you'll never see non white tourist hanging out of the graveyard it's not not a another thing we do dude it was awesome it was so you you saw the webster dictionary goodyear year and you're like alright i'm gonna come back and podcast what what what was your what are you gonna do what's the move you know it it kinda put me into a little bit of a crisis where like i was asking that but like you know this podcast is definitely part of it you know i don't know about you but i sometimes think like this is like a podcast is not like impactful compared to like we're talking to guys who are inventing robots that are doing x y and z or like right we're going to the moon but where a lot of these guys were authors that i who's like who's great saw and i was still inspired by them and so i felt a little bit of inspiration of that but there was a little bit of a crisis of like oh man like it's important to do something like that can impact people for for centuries parse the soar i don't know just putting that out there see what you see how that lands i feel like you're good with coming up with altered alternative phrases for things so instead of saying you know not just because i don't know the real phrase and i can't pronounce the words so when i'm mum it just sounds like did you did you get this feeling at duke where it was cool to be around like old like historical things that have lasted for a long time i know exactly what you mean there is definitely a vibe and a feeling when you're at something that is not just bigger than yourself a sort of timeless the problem with duke and other southern schools that have this is like you're like oh wow who made you know what it what is this it's like like this is the slave wall it's like oh yeah never nevermind it's like what what's the name of this road like this is tobacco road we had tobacco plantations like everything is there's like a sort of a dark side a lot history there so that wasn't cool but the rest of it is in fact i used to love going to the the chat like the center of duke campus is the chapel and i used to go there all the time even though i'm not religious but just the aura the vibe like the vibe of a church is kind of unmatched to be honest great and so yeah i really love really love that here's why i like silicon valley i and why like old stuff it's it's kind similar which is i love thinking about things that we take for granted so for example like buildings that have been there for a long time or that are really large or even just like your streets or institutions like yale and i'm like how did someone create something that became such an institution that we take it for granted and we don't even like reflect on like how this became a thing and silicon valley is cool because it's ideally the outcome is that you are creating something in real time that will be become an into like an airbnb like a google where it becomes a verb right like i'm gonna you know what i mean and you get to see that happening and i think it's really cool to be in silicon valley to see the beginning of hopeful institutions in the in the making and then also go and see the old stuff of like this is how it's done so we just had gary tan on don't you think that yc should just have a campus and it should have this sort of gothic you know a old school institutional vibe and even if they're if they're not gonna do it why wouldn't i just go create a campus a small micro campus for yc people free free free room and board so free place to live free food that's healthy and all i do is just cherry pick investments from people on campus i just get to invest in their companies it would be i don't even need yc to do why wouldn't do this there's or even just a museum have you ever heard of the museum of american finance it's this thing in new york city where it's like a it's like a museum for like the history of finance and frankly it's badass it's awesome and just like a place to like go and like physically explore all that yc has done it is kind of interesting it's just like bill act loafers first what's inside this thing well what is the museum of modern of what a finance yeah it's it's a museum of american finance so if you look at a photo it's just like it shows like here's what like the stock ticker used to look like and people would stand here and like trade like in the eighteen hundreds and then like then it switched to have like to the phones were on the floor or you do this whatever like tells the history of it and then like important things related to it but it's museum in downtown manhattan that's cool i like that dude this is a fun episode yeah that was a bang alright that's it that's a pod i feel like got rude wear i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like the days all on a roll less travel never looking back