#66 - Life Coins, Amazon FBA Rollups & Going Back In Time

alright we got a friend of the show here jordan harbinger he's one of the guys who's been advising us on how to build this podcast because his podcast is way more successful than ours has been around he's been doing podcasting for like twelve and half years which jordan that's gotta be as long as podcasting has existed right yeah i think pod podcast podcasts have been around for like fourteen years and i've or fifteen and i've been around for thirteen of those so yeah when i started there was no way there were no iphones so you couldn't get podcasts on your phone you had to use an ipod to play them yeah straight to cassette that's how that's how long these guy's been doing it so so jordan you know i like i like your show i've been binge binging it while in quarantine because you know what else am i gonna do besides i just try to learn something new or improve myself in some way and i gotta say like it because you do the you know the interview style show where you go deep with a guest i think you know you had i was listening to the one with tony hawk which is pretty awesome and i gotta say i like that you don't do the kind of surface level you know just just pit you know pity padding around with the questions or trying to do you know inspirational fluff where you're just saying go you can do this so with that episode with tony hawk what was that like tony hawk an icon how was it of you know interviewing tony hawk it was great he's a really interesting guy really open and fun and he told some pretty funny stories one which was very apr rapport what what's going on right now is one day he walked into his agent or some sort of marketing team that he'd hired he walked into their office this is like at the height of video games where he's making i don't know well fifty million bucks off these skating games and these brands and he goes in and he says look i got this backpack that was made pretty s and it's got my name and face on it i don't want any more stuff like that and as the agent marketer or whatever is sort of nodding his head understanding tony goes wait what's that on your shelf and it was a roll of toilet paper with tony hawk name face and logo on it and he goes what the hell is that and the guy goes oh yeah anything we put your name and face on does so well we were joking that we could put your face on toilet paper and we'd still be able to sell it and he fired them on the spot because it was clear that they didn't value his brand which i thought was a funny story and he's got a ton of stuff like that that he talked about on the show that is epic you know i actually met tony hawk we went on a trip to africa a charity trip together and believe it or not we were halfway up of a mountain in ethiopia where you know it's a like this a mountain village and somebody saw him there and they were like tony hawk you know that's one of the only english word they said to us all day they identified tony hawk on a in ethiopia that's how famous that guy is so that's an amazing guest to have on the show imagine being that famous that you get recognized in the middle of countries where like nobody speaks your language and they maybe don't even have skateboard yeah we were there trying to give people clean water they didn't even have water but then knew tony hawk that's how that's how famous i got amazing awesome well if you wanna hear more from jordan we're gonna be having him on more and more he's a friend of friend of the house and you should listen to the show it's one of the podcast podcasts that i would recommend if you liked tim ferris this stuff if you like our stuff you're gonna like his stuff and so go check out the jordan harbour show on itunes spotify wherever you get your podcast you'll find him there alright we're a back man i started off with a big that's not cool sam you are wearing a harvard shirt of why i go to the school when you can buy the shirt for thirty five dollars and get half to benefits it was sixty dollars sean but whenever i wear it they go you went to harvard yeah i went to harvard i've been i been harvard i took a i paid twenty dollars got a tour there last year when i was twenty eight that's actually a great conversation conversation starter and then they don't know how to escape but they thought they were gonna have an love alumni chat weird yeah i went for easter took a tour it was lovely it'd be a great school to go to oh that's great that's great i okay i actually this is like a weird thing i i a lot of weird collections and one of them i like collecting university sweatshirt so i have i didn't go to a you know an elite school but i respect them i have a stanford one i have a harvard one i think i a darth one i've got all the cool ones my wife have ivy a pen i have a pen one i have a harvard one too i don't even know why i don't even know it i don't even think i bought it's just at my house somehow and i wear it and then i didn't buy any of my college gear when i was in college because i was like this is expensive and a little bit lame how people would wait in line for hours for free shirt how do duke one though you a duke yeah i went to duke and but i like the stuff i just didn't i thought was too expensive and then now like literally during black friday everybody was shopping and i was like oh shit i wanna shop i got the urge to shop too but i don't know what the hell to shop for so i bought a bunch of university shit ten years later ten years later and so now i have like all duke care i wear like you know every day be close that i would wear duke stuff too i i would be proud i think dude hook i i have a bunch i would get you a duke well probably has like really good dry fit basketball gear and stuff like that i'm gonna i'll go and buy some i'll buy some from duke what should what else should i add to my collection cornell now and that's like a cool one because they do like an edgy one of some kind like you should get like you know what school is sort of fallen out of favor or you just do like the like there no shirt or like sam school church or something no i want universities like a i i don't know maybe throw a little oxford in there go international oh i could do oxford or like a like is rhodes scholar a thing i think that's i think that's part of sure i don't know i alan just called me to where a university is sydney one because i i did go to university sydney for a year yes it's less interesting when you actually went there i know so anyway alright we're harvard just wanna and i'm drinking ko aid yeah he's drinking a glass ko aid the mood is set that is the perfect formula so let's let's jump in what do we got we can talk about a bunch of interesting things you wanna bring up this amazon company yeah so this company i don't know how you say it exactly i think it's called t so saw the news recently i think probably a lot of people listening if this have heard of this so we'll just give kind of our opinion okay so so t is the name of it it's a roll up company so we've been talking roll ups you know here and there so this is a roll up company and what they're doing is it rolling up amazon fba businesses so brands that you know are built and sold just pretty much exclusively on amazon and these are usually like private labeled goods so they you know find some shit in china slap their name on it posted on amazon and they try to just surf the search traffic on amazon and so these businesses are you know they can be be decent and so these guys have rolled up so many of them that basically so they just raised a hundred and ten million dollars at a seven hundred eighty million dollar valuation and it's only a year old or two years old two two years old exactly so two years old and they've built a ton of value so the you know this valuation at seven hundred eighty million is thirty times what it was eighteen months ago so they've built a pretty big company so the holding company they they say their gross revenue is over two hundred million and they have thirty five million in trailing twelve months eb so thirty five million of eb the last twelve months not bad now this is a little bit controversial so when i first saw this i was like oh that's interesting that's smart they own a bunch of brands like i think they own thirty five of them or two hundred of them forty three forty three brands they do all cash transactions and so some of the examples they have a a brand called beast gear which i think is a fitness brand they have a a trail buddy hiking poles i i've seen that anti fatigue floor mats pet d rise so all these like little niche businesses that will do individually you know single digit millions a year in revenue and they're rolling them up and so on one hand i was like okay this is a quick way to like build a lot of value because you know the the the sellers in these markets kind of know they built a thing to you know let's call it four million dollars in revenue and they're doing alright but they you know if you if you would pay them out three or four million bucks they'll take it because that's three years of you know cash flow and they will they they know that fba businesses are very f so that was but where the butt where's the butt the butt is amazon fba businesses are not durable or def def now maybe i'm wrong maybe these guys have contra point of view that's correct but the conventional wisdom here is it's very easy for a competitor to come in and compete with you it's very hard to build any kind of mode because you're just hoping to be at the top of the rankings on top of that amazon themselves is going into different categories and creating amazon basic brands yeah i mean i just i just i typed in anti fatigue map their brand is number two and the number one brand is amazon basics and it's ten dollars cheaper and then there's probably know how many more like right next to that there's probably like a bunch more that are in that same category yeah and you know what works in the algorithm for some amount of time like let's say you bought a bunch of fake reviews or something like that that can get penalized and then boom your brand drops to essentially zero or it can it can drop like a like a rock okay well let's play devil's advocate here though let's say here's let's explain how this can be great so if you let's just type in phone charger amazon so there's this brand called anchor a and k e r you know that brand yes start in china and what's the silicon valley of china it's called show chosen or i don't know i think there's a few different hubs there's like a manufacturing hub there's a tech hub there's a there's different hubs here's alan messaging me chen shenzhen shenzhen shenzhen okay the guy he worked at i think his name was peter i i believe he worked at google in san or in california and then he's from this area and he moved back there and he started this charger company called anchor and he goes when we when we start this business our goal was to be at a we would wanna rest in the four to four and a half star review on amazon so we wanted to have products that were pretty good but a four and they started making phone chargers and it's a billion dollar company now and they lived on amazon for a long time and then have since built a brand beyond it and i love their products so it is definitely possible to build beyond but there's so many amazon only companies that just suck right yeah and so the the question i have for these guys is what does the hit rate need to be for this to work so like out of every ten businesses they buy if one or two of them next year have been out competed or d listed or der ranked in the amazon search and you know revenue drops by forty percent fifty percent eighty percent which can totally happen on amazon can their business still work or do do they need a high hit rate or do they have some sort of durability where they can take some some losses along the way like right like a venture capitalist can invest in a portfolio of companies they don't need most to work they need one or two to work for the whole portfolio of return but for other types of businesses when you're buying you know you're buying based off of eb i don't think you have that same luxury so i'm very curious how this works now what i will say is if you're the founder kinda had nothing to lose doing this right there's an opportunity to do the roll up you used other people's money to do it you've built a you know presumably eight hundred million dollar company in two years wow you could take some second very off off the table and and then your free roll in the rest and maybe this works if even if there's a twenty percent chance of it working you you know for the entrepreneur entrepreneurial i think it was a good bet for the investors i don't know so that valuations and it doesn't seem crazy rich to be honest thirty five so that's only is that twelve times profit yeah which is a lot for and these fba businesses individually are selling for i don't know two three x so but none of them have thirty five million dollars in profit and do they to get thirty five million dollars of profit in two years yeah but like there's not they're they're not growing at a rapid pace because they're you know one company is growing they're just they're paying for each grow each you know incremental growth right they're acquiring companies to grow and so and i agree with you i'm just watching the group would be worth more i'm just playing the other side here instant pot that was basically an f b or that was like lived only on amazon i mean so that happened that's a def defensive product right so like if you go as i have on alibaba and you go try to find an instant pot competitor it is not easy to get a product that is of the same quality as insta pot it is not a it's not a easily c business whereas this you know the business they wrote in here beast gear the number one selling product looks like it's hand wraps for like boxing and is you search wrist wraps in amazon and you get tons of competitors i could go start a risk wrap you know boxing gear brand tomorrow like give me eighteen hours and i'll have a a clone of beast gear spun up that doesn't mean i'll be able to rank as high right away but it's gear is is it gear beast yeah gear beast ton they've got a cell phone holder that goes on your water bottle that's kinda cool be no beast gear not getting out of gear beast oh i'll quick yeah well so the it's it's all fit fitness equipment i'm nothing saying is bad it might be fine fitness equipment what what i'm saying is this is a clearly you know private label amazon supplier you can find this in in a very you can comb the product in a very short amount of time yeah i'm more part is being year this looks like shit yeah the harder part is is to rank high right so but the problem with that is just like you know we have a friend who has a business that he bought for a million between one and two million dollars and and was heavily dependent on seo as well as youtube so it was doing great in seo it was doing great on youtube i had was bringing you know close to a million dollars in revenue a year and you know the seo and the the youtube bank was very strong now two years later i got just talked to him and you said it's followed on for cliff youtube changed their algorithm and google changed their algorithm slightly and my business is essentially dead and now that's a you know that's a business he bought for for over a million dollars you shouldn't have bought them in the first place it was obvious that was gonna happen but and so these are you know the number one thing you know we just had andrew wi on the podcast and he's talking about buying businesses i think you know my point of view is aligned with is which is that durability is you know one of the top characteristics that that you look for when you're buying a business yeah i i i think that this is a risky bet but the guy who started it seems really interesting what's his story he worked at seamless i mean he seems like a like a i i think he worked at seamlessly he just seems like he's just been around a bunch of fast growing companies let me look him up what what was the yeah he just he like i think i believe he's in new york and he started a bunch of companies and then the guys who started seamless are are a bit involved so he seems interesting and the people invested in them said that he was kinda a forced to be reckon with so maybe they know something we don't not this is not easy to do so you know i definitely give them credit for doing in such a short amount of time again as an entrepreneur i think it's a great bet as a do i think that this business is actually gonna work and would i invest in this business no yeah i i agree with you but yeah it's pretty amazing what they pulled off so good for them okay i got i got a another i got a half baked idea for you okay so i don't love this idea i'd give it a four out of ten but there's something there i think it can be improved a little bit so it's the second one so right now everybody is at home and a lot of people are sort of you know finding in home entertainment some people watching netflix you know twitch youtube etcetera some people are trying to figure out okay how do i do homework workouts how do i improve my fitness some people are take you know doing online classes and so online class is kinda interesting to me right you've taken a bunch of online classes you guys offer online classes i've taken a bunch as well i pay for it and i was wondering you know like every time i see an interesting online class i'm like okay you know the risk of this just being some like shitty you know good sales pitch shitty class is too high and and i'm almost was just like i wish could i just you know kinda try this or have a kind of an all you can eat pass where i could just try as many of these as i want so the idea is why isn't there a class pass for online courses or even better why isn't there just a pirate bay for to have all these for free that's the boot like there is a pirate bay for it i mean i i've downloaded a bunch what is the part is it just the pirate bay or is there a different one no i mean look you know how likely we find like illegal streams of you seen and stuff like that and you just like know it to google like you c crack stream or like right allegedly yes yeah or on reddit you could look it up on reddit or if you look it up on twitter right there's the same thing so like for example there's this fitness guy who advertise on youtube called kin body and he's like shredded kin body dude that guys got the best ads his ads are so funny and i was like i just gotta buy this just to see what like what it's about like i don't even wanna do it but i just typed in like kin body torrent dropbox or something and i don't say able to download it for free amazing okay this week's episode is brought to you by neville maduro copywriting course if you listen to sam you've probably heard him say the word copywriting a million times now he did a whole podcast talking about one of the skill sets that has helped him the most as well as you know it you you did this in your recession proof skill sets podcast i think and a lot of people were asking okay where do i go to find it when you did it back then you were just saying you know the tools and the books and the stuff that you know the things that have worked for you you were not paid to say it you would truly believe it this time it's an ad we are paid to say it but we still believe it i actually have bought the course as well i've gone through it you know two months ago three months ago and i mean it's amazing if you wanna the fastest way for me to increase sales or increase conversions or increase growth has been to change the words on the page or change the words in an email it is way faster than trying to come up with new features or holding new ideas to just try to grow so copywriting i'm a big fan sam what do you think yeah so i think that it definitely changed how i wrote copy and i got more sales but more importantly to me copywriting routing means understanding what motivates people and figuring out how to communicate how my product will solve a problem in their their life and i took neville course in two thousand and thirteen i believe and it really kinda opened my eyes so how to do this so if you're into this if you wanna try it just go to copy course dot com that's copy course and neville is kinda funny he's a he's an odd ball and he's spelled copy with a k and course with the k so just google copywriting course and you'll see his blog and you can sign up to his course if you want and if you just wanna go straight to the course just google copy running course join and you will see a link for okay so for google who haven't heard body you need to find this guys youtube ads so just go facebook ad library which if you didn't know is amazing you can go see any brands facebook ads so if google facebook ad library then type in kin body and then watch these guys ads this guy basically he tries to position himself as like bruce wayne bruce wayne yeah he's like in front of a castle he's in front of wayne manor and he's out in nature he's shirtless and he's super ripped obviously and he's just stretching he's just doing his like you know push up to in front of a ferrari and then the ferraris behind him and like a woman comes up in hand him with glass of champagne he drinks the glass and then he continues his workout and it's like this over the top ridiculous lifestyle and it's like ty lopez as if ty lopez was jack it's so funny it's it's it's great you know i've actually i like got caught on the end i was like this guy's is funny like i gotta dude i bookmark and i sent it to friends i was like this is the best ad i've ever yeah it's it's like i feel as though he's definitely mocking himself a little bit like he's it's like and i did research on him his name's is greg and his family is wealthy not like billionaire wealthy but just like good gigs and stuff like that i think they live in canada and his programs put it's fine it's great advice it's you know the good thing so so you click the ad and then it basically takes you this quiz of like you know the reason i haven't been able to get it as soon as i want is it's hard to stick to my diet or don't like going to the gym you start taking this quiz and it's just two giant buttons on the screen and you're just picking your answer and like ten questions in he's like alright i'm formulating the perfect plan for you and of course it just spits out the same three plans like do you wanna be a greek god body do you wanna eat the the light embedded machine or would you rather be you know whatever you and not buy my program and you just pick one of those and it's like sixty bucks and i think this guy's making like somewhere you know six seven million dollars a year i it up i think it was like to ten eight ten yeah so he said it in some interview and you know i would totally believe that that makes sense to me yeah it's he's got a great youtube channel i love that guy what's the name great greg mca or greg no no it's something else it's he's great you know he kinda his whole brand he's like gallagher gallagher he's got this brand that's like a mix of bruce wayne in american psycho and his youtube ads are so good and what i always tell people who are interested in internet marketing is i go find out what the affiliate marketers or the fitness people or anyone you think is scam me find out whatever they're doing and copy it right and because it works it's so effective and they have it's not the best way to change the world but it is an amazing way that advice is an amazing way to actually build the course skill set you need to sell anything and make anything successful and like if i was you know twenty to twenty six i would be on that i'd be like okay hey it looks like this gamer energy drink is being you know s around and doing twenty million dollars a year okay i'm gonna make my own gamer energy drink or i'm gonna make my own kin body or i'm gonna make my own whatever and i would learn a core skill set of internet marketing to be able to succeed in anything because usually these guys they typically they're they have a moral compass so they're willing to do some things that most people are not willing to do and also they start with nothing and they have to spend dollar and make more than a dollar and so what i like to say is whatever tactics they're doing just take all the silicon valley funding that you've raised and definitely be ethical and have a really good product but also do all that stuff that they do right and you can set if you can sell a shit product you can sell a great product yeah one we that's one we've thinking about it right and so whatever the internet marketers do do that so there's a reason why you see those internet marketers with long sales pages with lots of text there's a reason why you see them you know with a ferrari in the when the background it works so on the y comb application if you wanna apply to yc they have one question that's kind of the famous question is tell me about a real life system you've hacked to your benefit and what they mean is basically like tell me where you you know didn't follow the standard playbook you came up with some clever solution and you got a good result for yourself out of it and they're not looking for anything unethical they're just trying to say like you know oh you know i realized that you know i really wanted to place you know during during covid i realized that you know grocery shortage was a big problem i realized i could scrape all the availability windows at midnight every day eastern time because that's when their service updated and i could find the times and i could book them my family or whatever right what's your answer sean you know i had an answer for that because i did apply to yc i just try to think of what it would be i'll tell you mine what you think go yeah go it i have too many that i don't wanna say on air because for a bunch of reasons i don't increment inc myself or also look bad when i don't think it's actually that bad but but i'll say i'll say one when i was in college they let you take twenty hours up to twenty eight hours of summer school but they don't define what summer is and so what i would do my and during a semester was i found out that summer school could also be online school and ls you has courses that you can take that only cost six hundred dollars or four hundred dollars whereas at my university like the credit i forget how it was structured but like the equivalent was like ten grand and so i signed up for twenty dollars through ls you and it was all online and you could sign up for these bullshit classes and then i hired an indian to do it for like fifty bucks like so cheap you just wrote these crap essays and then a ta like rated it and so i a whole semester of school was just that way dude that that's hilarious i don't know what mine would be but i a very similar one which is when i was at duke i had this i i was doing so poorly in all my classes i was like a very mediocre student and i was like man these people all work harder than me and are smarter than me like there's just not really like a great path for me to you know in high school i was the smartest kid and didn't have to work that hard and here everybody is the smartest kid from their high school is all here so now that doesn't work anymore and so i looked around i looked around and i realized man what are all these athletes doing because the only not smart people on campus where the athletes for the most part except brian z shout out to zoo back for being smart so i looked at what the basketball players would take so i found a way to look at their class schedule and i signed up for all those classes and one of them in particular that i i saw all of them were anne was this one there's like business it was like this business course and so i signed up for it and first day of semester i was like okay where do i go like there's no classroom listed here i like emailed the professor i'm like hey there seems to be some error there's no classroom listed on the thing he was like oh yeah this is a virtual course you just need to read these three books and they were like it was the lance armstrong book it was like two like other like super light like breezy reads i was like you have to read these three books the whole semester and at the end pick one and write one page about it stupid just email that to me i got an a and it was just me and all the athletes in this course and nobody else even knew about it and so i got it that's so stupid and that course for i don't know if you're in scholarship or not that that was probably ten grand yeah well that's the thing we for them they're on scholarship i was the only one paying for my two i to pay grand for that that's so safe stupid but this is why i don't want people to bail out folks who have loans because i know it will hurt them but in the short term it will hurt but in the long term it should make these schools should go out of business when i was in school i i would went there on a track and field scholarship i had to take a gym class so i took a aerobic walking right oh god literally like rocks for jo and all like you know secret classes that were so easy to be in it it says the guy who is wearing the harvard sweatshirt right now hey harvard seems great oh i thought duke seem great but the fact that those things think exist to that's so stupid to me dude another one like that so harvard has this thing called the extension i mean if you're heard of the harvard extension yeah it's like people go like executives go and they pay and they let everyone in and then they're linkedin they put that they went to harvard no so that's the that's the executive mba which is just straight up yeah it's you pay absurd amount of money and you take this thing online and tyra banks is linkedin it says graduate of harvard right and she went to an executive so my cousin had this where he had a harvard thing in this resume and i was did you went to harvard and he was like oh no no there's this extension school it's like two blocks away from harvard and anyone can get in you just pay and you go and it's called harvard extension he's like but when people read the resume they just stop at harvard they're like okay cool you know they don't even know what this other ex xt stands for i hope your cousin is listening oh yeah he's he's great he's actually really smart and has been super successful since then so yeah anyways okay great you i wanna talk about some hacks i wanna talk i wanna talk this jim patterson guy and then i wanna tell you and the listeners is one thing that i do i told andrea about the saturday day and he loved it have you heard a newspapers dot com no first of all awesome company love this business papers dot com art i'm going by i believe it's owned by ancestry it's owned by ancestry it's amazing i'm a subscriber i pay ten dollars a month maybe twenty dollars a month i forget i love it and it's what do you do with this i always tell you it's an aggregation of all the newspapers ever early say try to make it that and what i love to do is whenever i read books which i love biographies and i love books so right now i feel like a do should admitting this i'm reading the fountain head i've never read and ran but i've never read it either it i've never read leave that but everyone says that i should so whatever i read it it's based in nineteen thirty three and so what i'll do and they talk about architecture in architecture nowadays that doesn't that's not like a particularly like a sexy job but i guess it's according that book it was and so i'll use newspaper dot com and i'll set the time range from like nineteen twenty eight like nineteen thirty three and i'll type in like new york and i'll read cool new york article articles about architecture and i'll come or like the book is based on frank lloyd wright so i'll look at articles about him or when i read the biography of ted turner i'll type in ted turner he had an advertising company in in nineteen seventy three but the problem is if i google that il ted turner cnn will show up in google and exists in nineteen seventy three so i wanna look up articles about it'll say like edward turner buys new billboard in right athens georgia are you trying to see what were they sound about this back then yes what did people think back then enough knew yeah before they knew what the outcome was gonna be so another example i i started reading about dan gilbert the guys started quicken loans and he some like he owns all this stuff think deal he's re rev to troy everyone knows his name i was like what let what was his path like what did he start and so i went to dan gilbert nineteen ninety four quicken loans and it was like his company was six years old and i looked at how they were describing him and and they described him as very similar to what they described him as now like wow like i like kinda had the factor back then and it's really fun to see that same with the have you heard of fossil watches yes that guy who started it he also now owns this thing called shine which is cool and everyone knows him as shin but i just like i was like wonder why he was like when he was like younger and just getting going and i just read all about it him and his brother starting with fossil watches and they show them in their garage and it's just really cool to to read all about that and so that i use it like crazy or and i read a lot of biographies set in the nineteen twenties thirties forties i'll be up to the seventies and it's the only source that you can go and get real facts and information about it i like that a lot i i'm a little different than you and that i don't i don't a do as much biography type of stuff as you do but b my method for this i i have the same h i try to scratch but i scratch it a different way so i think we've talked about this once before but if the itch is i wanna know know what people were saying back then when we didn't know what the outcome was gonna be because in reality when you look at today that's what today is today people are talking about and they don't know what outcome is gonna be mh and so to train your mind to understand how like not just to believe everything you read today and how to put this into context and man everybody was wrong about x i have a bunch of different like methods of doing this so first is we've talked about these like memos before like the original memo when they were like hey we're gonna create powerpoint or the facebook memos would be like hey i think we should compete with you know we should buy oc for this reason and the best in the back to this is you worked with emmett the founder of twitch and he wrote m a memo or wrote a bunch of stuff saying why they should pivot the company from doing this what they we're doing this with your company i emailed to see or not email i slack them and i said hey do you have any of the original documents plans pitches that you had from when you started the company ten years ago before this was a multi billion dollar company and he sent me a of the raw research like user interviews powerpoint presentations he was giving the like investors and it was awesome to see that's what that's how sophisticated it was back then and also that's you know there were certain things that were totally wrong about and and so what that so when emmett was starting twitch you're saying i'm saying you know like when you look at the pitch it's not a polished thing there's not a ton of well researched data same thing we you know sue or friend who started a really successful mobile gaming company called tiny i ten i had asked him i said hey you raised all this money from and h he raised sixteen million and if you go look ben h writes a blog post about him and says like this founder kicks ass and this company is gonna be awesome and here's why and i was like dude what was your pitch to them i wanna see the deck you sent that now and he sent it to me and it was no joke all black and white like no styling like two images in the whole thing there some really black bold like proclamation about what they were trying to do and why why i was gonna work and that like it was so interesting to see the content like the name of the company was something totally different back then yeah it was called like brooklyn brooklyn packet company yeah and so yeah it i like i like seeing stuff back when it started when it was unclear what the outcome was gonna be the other thing i do with this is my own emails so i frequently if i make a decision i will email the decision out to the people who are involved in it and they're like yeah i know we just talked about this on the phone for two hours like why did you it's like diary it's a diary and then i go back and i look at this i'm like okay i was a dumbass what was i wrong about then that i now can see and i'll go back and i'll read my old emails to like help refine my own just my own game so i can make better decisions as i go forward that's a great you asked that question all the time what am i what say it again like what am wrong about my question is when if we look back in twelve months or six months from now and we say hey man that podcast was great you know you were really excited about seemed like it was gonna work and it let's assume like twelve months now it's failed what's the most likely reason you're gonna say why it failed right that's a a a question i asked myself on any project i do what's the if six months from now if we fast forward to there and it's failed what's the most likely reason i'd be giving you over a beer when we're like dude what happened that was great and i write that down now and i start to work on it now but then i when you know six months later i'll go back and i'll look at things and i'll say okay what was right about what was i wrong about and it's really just a humbling exercise because i'm like okay cool i know you know today how like not to take at sort of face value all the stuff i'm reading from others as well as things i'm thinking myself because i just seen over time how wrong people are yeah i've stolen that from you i was asked i have been asking myself what exists now that i needed to take advantage of that won't exist in the next ten or twenty years for me right now it's called the emailing i think it's pretty crazy you can eat email anyone like this hole is open yeah i think it's nuts it'd be like if i had anyone's if i can easily guess everyone's phone number right it's like why wait so here's here's another version of that so paul graham again yc has this and he's talking about like how to get great startup up ideas and if you're listening to you wanna get great startup up ideas i would go i reckon recommend when you go read this is paul graham dot com i think it's just slash ideas is this the one called sc no that's a different one but this one he he basically says look the easiest way to invent the future is to just live in the future and then figure out what's missing for others right so he was like you know mark when he created facebook he already was blogging on these like you know kind of blogging he wasn't as big with him but he was blogging he was top he was sharing life updates and photos online with other people who you know he didn't even know super well but they were just following him online and he's like for him living online and posting your photos your status updates your thoughts that was normal but for everybody else who was abnormal so he was sort of already living in the future and he just needed to build what was missing for everybody else who was currently living in the present and and there's like so the there's the blog post is really good to talks about the same thing with like a it's the there's old painting quotes like how do you paint the perfect of painting it's like first you become per perfect and then you just paint and it's the same idea which is like it if you are already living a lifestyle that is awesome for you but you are doing it in a kind of manual way or you've hacked to the system into into where you are you have these products or benefits that other people don't have just have to figure out how to make that accessible and educate the market on those things and so that they can come live the same lifestyle you're living so i have an example of this i was reading something recently that was really interesting there's this guy named alex something know it doesn't matter what his last name is so his name is alex and he did something very interesting so he created he's in the crypto space and crypto has never been more interesting to me than it is now because now everybody who was like here for the bandwagon has jumped off and has moved on to the next shit and so only the real diehard is still in it i'm just making progress every week and so this guy one of those diehard is still in it and what he did was he created what i'll call a life coin he created his own currency called alex it's dollar sign alex if you wanna buy it wait a a a life a lot a life coin is the life point term that's not like what they call it but you know it could also be called a personal ico he created a social currency for himself the there's no like terms for it that's how new this idea is i call it a life coin basically he created he mint ten million alex coins and of the ten million alex coins he start you he keeps a bunch for himself and then he's like okay i will sell some alex coins to the general market and the contract is this he created income sharing agreement he's like hey i'm twenty i really wanna go to this crypto conference and you know i don't have the money to pay i don't have to three grand i can go pay for this now and some guy twitter reached that was like i'll loan you the money you just pay me back and he's like but let's do it through a smart contract using crypto and so they that was kinda how they started and so eventually what he did was he did he financed his education doing this so he sold twenty thousand dollars worth of his student loan basically and he has an income share agreement which means after he graduates whatever job he gets first three years he's gonna pay back the holders of this eric's point at some predefined rate yeah i have i i just google it this is amazing it's smart kid he's only twenty one or two or from france right and so he he did this and so i've i've started looking into this because i'm very intrigued by this is because there's so many people who i'm like like we have this friend vis michelle he's really young he's like i think twenty two now but for two years now i've been like this guy gonna be a billionaire someday if i could just own five percent of vis y'all future earnings i would pay a lot of money for that i wouldn't bet on every individual venture because dude i don't know it might not be this one you know but but by the time this guy's forty he's gonna be a billionaire and feel him what's that you feel then about him oh yeah for sure you he's also man focused on becoming a billionaire it's the only thing he does and cares about in his life he doesn't date he doesn't work out he doesn't have hobbies is hobby is making money his interest is making money his friends are people who have money like that's who this guy is let's we gotta spell his name so i don't i've never met michelle even though he's good friends with you yeah we should have him on the podcast what's his name so it's vis michelle v i s h a l and his last name is if you just do his twitter it's vis michelle har spell the last name h a r p h a r p yeah jean harp i gotta find him so i have confidence that this guy's be a billionaire someday and so i would love to invest a hundred grand right now and own a piece of his future earnings now he might not take that trade but there's many people out there who don't have access to capital don't have access to to fund their education or they're just they're being like a an nba player is a great example of this so there's this nba basketball player called spencer din who did this also he just signed a contract with the nets there's a four year twenty nine million dollar deal a three year a three year twenty nine da or something like that and he he wanted to basically sell fractions of his future nba earnings through crypto the nba ultimately blocked in but he was literally trying to it was like hey look i just signed a thirty million dollar deal and i'm gonna sell off part of my future contracts today i want capital today and if you bet that i'm gonna get my next contract gonna be bigger then you're gonna own a piece of something that's bigger it's like a stock but it's my future earn well you know people do this illegally obviously like this is what you do in high school when you when you see it like this happened all the time where like a good high school or would be we'd be great at basketball and i gotta be like alright i'll buy you a car now and i'll buy you a house now but when it comes back you got me right and the nc tries to block all this and like you know nike does this all the time where it's like oh why does this guy's uncle why is he now like a senior vp at nike it's like well because you know that's their workaround to like get in with this guy so he signs with nike and so anyways i think this is interesting for musicians i think it's interesting for athletes i will say upfront i don't think this is really a thing but if this was a thing it would like change the way the world works so i'm very intrigued by it i'm very keeping very close tabs on every example that i see of these and in fact they they this guy alex is using this company called roll to do this i think it's like know try to roll dot com or some shit like that and the founder reached out in dm mean and he was like hey you know you guys could do this for your podcast like let's say you created the mill coin and you created a ten million mille coins and you could they could be redeemed for you know if you have two thousand you could get a sponsorship slot on the on the podcast so you could let's say buy slots today that could be redeemed in the future as the show continues to grow and now you're getting better value or it could be used for a one hour coaching session for us or what right like we can create a social currency within our community that can be traded on the market as well as redeemed for value with us or our podcast that's i think fair i think it's very interesting i'm like kind of tempted to try it because i just again this is one of those where i wanna try to live in the future maybe this is the future did you see sent it's called the pan pooling dot com i have not seen this look up pan pulling dot com it looks like a sort of share your future earnings like sell off your future earnings or whatever yeah it's interesting dude this is there's something to this or i would i shouldn't say that i think that this if this worked it would be it would change a lot of shit and so i wanna i want it to be the one of the first people to test this out and see see what's what that's cool this is yeah there there may be something here i like this because it's really weird and i don't think it would work but most cool things that are really innovative won't work right initially yeah initially at least maybe never i mean it was kinda like bla though where you were saying the other day that if vlad existed today it would it would have worked really well and if your first cloud kitchen would have existed today would have at least worked survived yeah so maybe it's just maybe a one day it oil work but not for a while yeah you know i i i tweeted this out which was being early is the same is the same thing as being wrong or or another phrase of that is if you do the right thing at the wrong time it it you get pain you don't get pleasure right and you are just two years off yeah i a few few years off but you know and then a lot of people were like oh well if you guys are just persevere you know oh yeah who the hell knows you know you wanna talk about this guy named jim patterson who i discovered yes so this is the billy of the week cue the song we should make a song for the bill of the week here's why i like this now sometimes i wonder like do you so this guy who i'm not to mention he's interesting and i'll explain why but he is like people who i bring up a lot which is these old companies that i don't think they grow slow i mean but they definitely like it's not like a a zero to massive in three years so right but it's definitely massive and mark and jason has like a famous quote that i can't find but he's basically trying to say that he's like mark says the things that warm warren buffett loves see candies because it grows just a little each year but it's really stable i'm trying to build things that crush warren buffett things most of them won't but some might and more said that i believe he did yeah he was like with sees candy he's like that's great for him and it definitely works but i'm trying to build are the things that will crush that he goes we're not gonna invest here willie associates goes we're not trying to invest and seize candy or coca cola we're trying to invest in the things that crush them interesting so hey let me find the exact is it on here anyway yeah he says absolutely he goes you're you're not trying to build the next candy no absolutely not and every time hear a story likes these candies i want to go and find some new scientific super food candy company that will them right out of the water wired completely opposite in that sense basically we're betting against change we're betting or he's betting against change we're betting four change when he makes some a mistake it's because something changes that he didn't expect when we make a mistake it's because something doesn't change that we thought would and it's just two ways to look at it both are six that's very interesting that's that i i like when people can distilled their whole strategy down into like two lines and that's what it's exactly yeah and it's great it's just different ways to go about looking at things i tend to lately i've been liking things that are more long lasting and so anyway let me pull this up there's a guy named jim patterson have you ever heard of this guy sean not until you mentioned them okay he's interesting because for a bunch of reasons first of all he owns this thing called patterson group now from the looks of it he owns one hundred percent of this company and it's in canada and it and it's privately owned i don't think it's true that he owns one hundred percent of it because don't know how that would work that that just seems like impossible but anyway he owns wants one hundred percent of it it does ten billion in sales and they own roughly twenty five divisions of the business so ranging from lumber to rip please believe it or not to guinness book all records to thirty different car dealerships they own just everything and he's this like shorter guy he's like five four or five five he's ninety years old he drive he's like this like not a hill bit but like this like down home like he drives the same pickup truck forever and he's really smart and bright but he like walks around eating popcorn like you know he's supposed to be this like normal guy that's like the sc and it seems legit and he's bullish on lumber he owns lots of lumber companies and i posted the growth of his businesses so in the in the group channel are in the doc but he has forty five thousand employees in canada it's just super fascinating guy and some of the brands that they own and i'm on their web right now so some of the brands that they own are here's the ones i recognize guinness book of world records ocean brands rip please believe it or not those are the only ones i recognize and there's looks like there's a bunch of food advertising media they're in a you know a difference they own own wine they own gold seal they own oceans which is is that cranberry juice or check what i was thinking when i already but maybe that's a different brand i think it is they own mines in canada they own dozens of car dealerships he started it as a car dealership in nineteen sixty one and there was she says tuna by the way oh tuna sorry i do know he owns fishing businesses then he par laid that nineteen sixty one car dealership four years later he bought he bought a radio station then he bought like an advertising and billboard company then he bought like magazines then he bought a mine then he bought more car dealerships then i think they bought like like and then he like bought rip believe it or not because he went to an auction and it was like he like went to an auction or something like that and it was like for sale and then he also bought like marilyn monroe dress that she's saying happy birthday mister president to jfk for like five million dollars i was like alright we're in the like souvenirs and like museum business now like just super interesting and a little sporadic and very quick and let me ask you how did even discover this guy i'll show you where i'll tell well for that the way that i discovered him is how i discover anything which is anything i find interesting so like rip believe it or not has always interested me so of get us both book world records you and i one time talked about the business behind like certifying and like giving like a a seal of approval i got interested in that and i thought what what out there is kinda like that and guinness book of world records was one and so i clicked on it and i always do the same thing where i go at the very far right and i see who's the parent company and owner and then i click that and then i read the history and it says this person bought it sold it to this person sold it through this person i always open up all those tabs and i like to see how they're connected and i like to see the history of person and so when i did that with guinness spoke world records it said patterson group and i clicked that and it says they own dennis world world world records and they own car dealership and i was like okay interested what's going on here then i go to newspaper dot com and i type in jim patterson and i read all about them and that's how by the way i remember you know i've wanted to have guinness book a world record record for a while just because again i'm a sucker for the credential and it's hard to get because they have to like come out and there's like all these rules but there's a startup that chris socket others investing called record center where it was like way easier to just like get the actual records that you just have to like submit a video they did i've send an official person out or whatever i wonder if this thing succeed is a while back i'm gonna see if they've doesn't look like it's doesn't look like they succeeded so they're are one point five million raised start two thousand and yeah so probably either dead or dead or extremely profitable i think there's there's only two paths for for why that how that that how that happens yeah so what i learned about dennis spoke records is jim patti changed the business model so like you can pay like a hundred grand and then they like send coaches to like show you exactly how to break the record and it's like so like for example toyota wanted to set some world record on x y and z and so they sent like these scientists to toyota and they go alright so in order to break it you gotta do this and this the best way to do that is this this and this and just get it already and we'll be back out in the about a month and we will give you the records as long as you achieve it that's amazing and so anyway jim patterson super interesting ninety years old still working there was a story that i saw about him that happened just a few months ago and a camera crew went with him he wanted to go drive and see one of his supermarkets somewhere south of vancouver and he drove his car like six hours slept at a days in motel got up went to the supermarket announced to checking on things and then drove home really interesting guy and well liked do you wanna be a billionaire is that a goal of yours i wanna get into trouble and and like like schemes until i die and i and i believe i believe that massive amounts of wealth are gonna come from that oh that's perfect so like even yeah like i just love i love the thrill of doing shit like the it it just excites me more than anything and so yeah like for example i am with you dude don't like going to it like just seeing a a grocery store for sale and it's like this is cheap i bet maybe i could it's like i gotta give a shit about grocery stores just like the act of doing right it's like a business fantasy plays out in your mind what if i bought this grocery store and then what what if i do what i do and so like i i think that i i for sure think that before i think before forty for sure i'll be well worth over a hundred million dollars and be very liquid nice okay great love it i would bet that too i would buy your life client you i you wanna talk about one two more things yeah actually let me ask you that if somebody was if i wanted to buy ten percent of your lifetime earnings so whatever you're making per year i get ten percent what amount would i have to give you today in order to get ten percent of your lifetime earnings i would never do that but there's no price that for a billion dollars you wouldn't give up ten percent of your earnings okay yeah there's a price i don't know what why were you allergic to it just now because i'd rather be poor than have to owe someone something like that or like be told what to do you wouldn't be told what to do yeah what i don't really just it's like hey if you had ten million dollars right now would that making you more dangerous would you be able to build more faster and do more interesting things okay you know we think that would make me more dangerous because i have access to that like capital is the easy part so maybe twenty million bucks right now i don't even know that's what people don't understand is like act capitals is rarely rarely is capital the the missing equation right yeah i think it is missing for a lot of people but it shouldn't be and i think you're right that like you can get yourself to a point where accessing capital is no longer a bottleneck at all first a lot of people that is the bottleneck they're stuck on but but i just think that convincing rich people to give you money typically is not the hard part about making like getting wealthy right so like building a company convincing a rich person to give you money is the easiest part because what you're saying it's all false like it's all like there's there's no truth to it right there's like ideas and there's promises but as long this all false it's un fa right like we prove what this is or is not gonna happen yeah so i can tell you like look this is gonna happen i'm gonna do this this and this and i think it's gonna work and you could tell people anything and as long as your charismatic enough you get the money yeah or credible enough yeah yeah but most people are credit i mean they're you're credible in that like dude when alright i raised a little to seed money and i had people we most people invested twenty five thousand dollars a piece and we raised now a lot of money i called email people and i met with them for thirty minutes and then they gave me a check for twenty five grand and i was charismatic and credible how did they know i was credible well you've done stuff right you guys had built a list you had done events you had done things before yes yeah that's true and you could speak with confidence and clarity or that's my point that was just like a false like it was i just i thought it might work and i had an i'm like you could do the math you're like alright i think this this i this works i think but anyway my point is that i don't i think that people would be shocked at how getting access to start up capital is typically the eat one of the easier things in in the progression right you wanna talk about one or two more things yeah let's do one more what do you wanna talk about let's do this notary thing because i know this company and it's huge yeah so okay so i just refinance my house and you know every time i go through a process i've reframe pain and annoy as opportunity and so now so going through this process and it's like the most annoying thing to refinance your house or get a loan in general if we forget a mortgage loan and so you know it's taken us months to do this to finish this mostly because i'm too lazy to do the paperwork that they this endless amount of paperwork that they keep sending me but we got to the last step and the last step is basically hey you need to sign your documents and with covid you basically they needed to send a mobile notary to our house so they sent a mobile notary he got guy shows up at our house he stands there and sort to set sign here sign here sign here okay cool i'm an official notary to read this is now an official document and then that goes to the title company and the title company just does like nothing because again i already own this house and i'm gonna own this house again yet they're gonna make five thousand dollars out of this transaction the notary said he can make you know between a hundred to five hundred dollars depending on who dispatch him out he's an independent contractor so anyways as i was going to this process i was just trying to figure out okay what is this whole space and where where could this be improved it's crazy it's there's so much money in it and it's still so archaic exactly and so the notary thing it looks like it's being modernized and a company called not which is sort of leading the way here so these guys are raised about fifty million dollars i was just messaging with the founder right before we went live and i i basically said hey give me you some numbers that i can brag about that that you know you could share what it are you messaging them on twitter yeah just twitter because i've been following them for a while i like this company and so i just reached out and said hey i'm about to i'm about to shout you out on the podcast tell me something send me some of these things and so i'm pretty certain that they're doing over emailing a year in revenue he didn't say that but that that's not recurring though is it no and how do they make money well part of it is recurring in the sense it's not a it's not a a subscription but their customers are essentially the the title companies the escrow companies the banks and so they're they just have this sort of you know trusted set of vendors that they'll use for not and so he said that this month alone twenty five hundred lenders and title companies have come inbound to their to their service the volume is doubling every week every week right now and they're hiring a thousand notary right now to meet the on demand to meet the demand for this sort of mobile node they also have a online notary function that they've created which is great because you don't have to send the person in person to to your house or or whoever to sign and basically you know what they're just trying to do is make this less painful so how make it more convenient reduce errors like the guy who came to our house he made an error he's gotta come back again today to do it again because the paperwork has to be air tight you know it has to you know be instantly given to the title company so that you can close your loan quickly so anyways i think this is very interesting they have this fleet now of thousands of not that are like cool i don't have to work for a company i work for myself like a uber driver and not basically has aggregated the supply of not and then the demand side as well and so i think this is an example this isn't the opposite of the company we said at the beginning of the podcast t which was like kind of like a you know house of cards versus this to me is a simple durable def profitable company that will be built in this space and it's kinda of boring because nobody gets up and says man i wanna change you know the notary world but i think these guys are actually gonna do it this is awesome there's another one snap docs have you seen that one they they're in a similar space they've raised fifty five million dollars a big company it looks like not rise is literally just not no no notary right how do you say it notary notary yeah notary yes so snap doc is similar but a little bit more it's notary but just for real estate yeah huge huge huge space i love this you know this reminds me of checker give me no checker yeah checker my there's another one where i was like as soon as i saw it i had to like take a time out for ten minutes and be upset with myself that i didn't think of this i yet so checker it's checker but there's no r so the word check and then the letter no e sorry no e it's the word check and then an r raise a hundred and fifty two hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation and it's crazy simple all they do is they do the background checks for particularly for a lot of the gig gig folks so like uber and lyft whenever they wanna they you know they don't they don't let people with dui and things like that be drivers and so they they do that for them and crazy simple incredibly effective huge company got huge very fast and they they basically turned a background check into like an api call and it's as simple as that yeah amazing company they just laid off a ton of people i guess because you know there's not as many people wanting background checks right now but i still think it's gonna be great okay maybe it's not as profitable and durable as i thought well i think they got huge fast like they hired a ton of people quickly and uber revenue for driving is just going down like crazy so i imagine they just aren't having to do a lot of background checks at the moment ill i believe that will you'll always need that it's just a matter of how much will you need and when yes okay cool this is interesting alright so notary background checks is there anything else that's in that category if there if there's something that category tell me i bet you another one is locksmith i would love to know what else yeah and if anybody can figure out how to take a ref refill and make it ten minutes online that would be amazing and i would invest in that company i don't know don't know what the bottleneck don't know why can't be as simple as that but it should be as simple as hey here's your current rate here's the you know the here's the rate you can get on the market that's cheaper if you'd like to ref refinance ten minutes and you're done that's how it should be anything else i wanna go you wanna same for the for the for for thursday alright let us know what you think about this tweet at sleeve reviews and we will talk to you soon so yeah