#93 - Why Tai Lopez Bought Pier One

alright i've been in meetings all day i can i tell you i am a time ceo i love when things are going bad so much more when they're going good why is that because you're good it or it just get you fired up it gives me fired up i love the adrenaline like when corona hit and we've done good during corona it's all good i mean you know we got hurt but like we're fine i loved it i was like oh my god this living i feel so happy yeah i love it okay so you love being wartime ceo what's the war tell us about it well like yeah okay so there's this great book that i've i'm reading and i think i've seen this across multiple books it's called ready fire aim i've heard much yes and you know it's funny it's it's published by a go that scam company that i've mentioned tons of times but that's the name of the book or just name of the framework book okay gotcha ready fire maybe it's a framework i don't know mike something math the guy created it's it's the army army guy the general right like no no no no so i think we're talking about you maybe there's two same the same thing and it just based on said like look from zero to one million you have to just figure out like what it is that people like and make it and then from like one million to ten million it's just about hiring people to like help make it possible and like just surviving and then ten million to a hundred million where we are you have to innovate constantly and while maintaining process and that's really hard to do i mean that's like a different challenge i've already i've overcome the first one i've overcome the second one now this is a new challenge and it's a challenge out for me but for all of our staff and that's super hard and so there's constantly drama of like making people happy some employees who started or not the ones to lead you know things like that and i'm dealing with that now and like part of me is like oh my god this is such a headache and another part of me is like this all can crumble and i love the feeling of knowing i can die tomorrow okay so what's your approach are you you know problem problem gets problem comes to your attention so the first question is are you a problem identifier or do you hear about the problems from somebody and then you're like oh that's a problem okay i'm gonna act on it or you the one who in your company is like hey guys this is a big problem both i both but where i am is i'm decisive like i'm not when things are going well i'm like you know just keep doing the same but more but then when people are when i hear about problems i'm like like someone before this told me of like a problem i have it and i go okay you're gonna change we're gonna hire this person and we're gonna do it today and so i said the email and i go we put this add up madison start recruiting people immediately and so to me it's like i only can hear something one time and i go we're going to do this and so what i like to do is it's like i i saw i i self identify as like a strong belief loosely held which is i believe something full heart with all my and then if i hear a little bit of information that changes i go oh okay fuck all that we're going the other way right so anyway i love like it's like in a battle like if there's if we i i so wish i could be in like war sometimes i'm like oh the enemies coming from here we're gonna risk our lives and do this this and that's and this go right so i'll think about this yesterday because of the presidential debate stuff so right now we're four or five months away whatever it is like november is is when the the election happens right so i think that's four months away and there no there has been any debates yet and i was like when the hell are the debates people are gonna are they do the debates i think they're gonna do it when are they and because i really wanna see what happens with biden inverse trump and right now all the news i don't know if you've seen is that like oh biden is crushing trump in the polls it's looking like it's gonna be a biden landslide and then biden is kinda like hey hey hey guys guys guys it's not over like make sure because you know he needs to be able to turn out people need to feel like they're gonna lose they go vote you know i i don't pay attention i i don't get a fuck about polls anymore after last election is so that's what polls are saying right now and and smart people are sort of backing that up as they tend to do at which they also did into that sixteen but anyways it's looking like biden gonna win in a landslide and so i was thinking about this and i was like to me i don't think that's what's gonna happen i would want that to happen but i don't think that's what's gonna happen so why i was i was thinking about like why do i think this is this just like i'm trying to be contra or i i don't trust the polls or and i realized what it was is i think that we are in war wartime not literal war necessarily although something kinda but kind of like there's a lot of tension with china there's the coronavirus which is like this biological war that we're fighting there's like the race tensions in america there's all the stuff so we are not in peace time in america and i think it's because it's wartime people are gonna want a wartime ceo running the country and i think trump is gonna be seen as the wartime ceo and that's why i think people are in times of tension they're gonna go towards the leader they think is the stronger more decisive more aggressive leader and they will ignore the many many flaws that the guy had so that's my theory on that what do you think i completely agree and and let's preface this by saying we are not saying what we do what we do or do not want and i always like i always talk about this shit all time and be like what do you pro trump i like well i'm not telling you if i'm pro trump or anti trump i'm just telling you what i think it's gonna happen right and not only is this not what i want to happen i also don't know shit about politics so yeah something you've be like no no trust me this polling data is statistically significant it's gonna okay sure i'm just saying based on what is a total gut instinct on what i know about people and i know that when people are afraid they flee towards strong man leaders and i think that trump is gonna be that more than biden that's that's the theory i think that they don't i mean i think i agree with you but i would say i don't think that it's just that they go for a certain type of leader i think that it's more so they don't want change and so i just googled this while we were talking i was just curious about the president third world war one and world war two so woodrow wilson was the president from nineteen thirteen to nineteen twenty one i don't think so the world had fourteen to eighteen so fourteen to eighteen so he was was between the the hoops was before and after the war yeah so he i got reelected during the war basically okay yeah so he had eight years so four two terms and then fdr died in forty five in the middle of the war so that doesn't exactly work out right but but i would be curious about like in times of massive crisis what does happen like bush one two terms right so yeah i i that would be interesting to see like what in times of crisis and i don't know how you define crisis like maybe the great depression was it the same person over and over again i don't know i would would love to learn about that if i had a bet money which i'm not going to i would bet on trump winning right so so okay we we don't even have to go to politics but i i do like this framework and i think if you're out there and you don't know what we're talking about wartime peace time you should go figure that out i think ben har his book talks about it probably also has a great blog post about it and then there's other kind of wartime peace time type of type of analog i think we talked about one on here which was like pioneers settlers and town planners did we talk about that i think maybe so that's that's like a thing with your company like there's some people who are pioneers they're gonna be great figuring out the new thing then there's settlers who basically can create the initial camp once you once you find the new land and then there's town planners which are more like the large company you know i can run a division of a hundred to thousand people and so there's that and then there's another one i was listening to so i like the naval evolve podcast a lot if you haven't listened that good better than this podcast i would say is probably you know the sort of best blend of business and philosophy out there although some people don't like them now because he's gonna i i like neville nevada i'm not a naval dick writer though yeah i think is that just because there's so many dick writers that you're like fuck that i'm not gonna be one of them or is it because you actually don't like the content i think there's a lot of emptiness in rich people saying money doesn't make you happy and right there's two ways to think about that so there's two ways to think about that one is yeah that's easy to say when you get a lot of money alright fair could be true that could be the truth and then the other version of it is what if it what if there was like this curtain and everybody wants to go to the other side of the curtain and then people who guilt through it to the other of the curb they're like hey guys wait this is not all less correct up to be maybe that would be another way of thinking about this which is that if rich people get to the other side of rich and they're not fulfilled then they're gonna go tell everybody hey guys this isn't the answer i thought it was the answer too and so i just don't think it's binary like that that's my point it's like not it's different folks for different folks not everyone is driven by the same stuff not every some people are happier rich some people are not like it's not like a you've money is not a universal rule yeah the it's money is is it's it's impossible to say money does not make you happy it's like oh some people my many people will not right by the way for naval specifically he has a pretty good line which i i subscribe to which is that money solves your money problems it doesn't solve all your problems but it solves your money problems and if you don't have your money problems solved those are big fucking problems in your life exactly so he he's actually of the type that says everybody who tells you money doesn't make you happy is kinda crazy because money solves a lot of these problems that will make you unhappy so although it won't make you happy it get rid gets rid of several of the root causes of unhappiness that people have but there are others and you should work on those too so anyways on this podcast he was talking about he was interviewing this guy and this guy was talking about in every company or really any society there's three it's like his thing was about innovations like why don't people innovate why don't companies innovate why don't society's innovate because a lot of people say america doesn't innovate anymore big companies don't innovate anymore which these three groups one is chiefs the other is priests and the third is thieves so you guys it's chiefs priests and thieves that steal innovation so okay well what what are these three groups so chiefs so the people in charge and they typically like the status quo there's priests which sort of you know are all about sort of the religion of the way things are done the way they should be done the rules and these are usually invisible mythical mystical rules that that get created so at big companies they always talk about hey what sacred cows do you need to kill in order for your company to grow and become you it's like well you need to address the priests in the company who are not gonna want you to kill those sacred cows and the last one does the did he's say fired to to does he say to fire them i don't know so he was interviewing him about a book that's not out yet so i don't if fucking i know that but i just thought this was interesting because i started seeing it everywhere when i think about the company i'm in right so i'm a company with over you know close to two thousand people i would say it is not that innovative as a company now in some ways it doesn't need to be like that the company just growing like crazy because the market is growing and it's the leader of the market but if you think about innovation and there's it's always a need to innovate if i looked around i can identify people who might be chiefs priests or thieves in the company the thieves would be people who are sort of in it for their own self interest they like to kinda hoard resources i mean they're just looking for their own personal gain at the expense of the the greater good and so i thought i like these frameworks because it helps you decode the messy human behavior and just be like oh that's that's a way to think about what's going on here here's does this lens help me if not throw it away but maybe this lens helps so that's why i wanna bring it up i think that's fantastic you know it's funny everyone i some a listener sent us this like shopify store of t shirts you made and some of them are kinda neat and i posted about it ago shit are these guys is this cool shall we sell the shit and everyone i i got people texting me saying it's cool and would be like oh i somehow got like what do like with the podcast and they also have the same shit which is sam is blunt and honest and sometimes i think it's some people are mostly right sean is the king of frameworks and makes complicated things easy to understand yeah that's cool i think that's accurate i would also give you that you're kind of like ivory like you're a hustle and a scheme in the best way meaning like you will figure out where's the action where's the money where's the demand i think you're really good at that and i think when you bring up things it's because you've sniffed out something and you're you're like you know you've gone to hunted something you bring it on to the podcast or are you bringing it into the facebook groups and for all the rest of us it's like oh shit this is interesting never i never knew this company making all this money i never knew there was this much demand for x and it's because i think you're very good at sniffing that out well i didn't want this to be a sam and sean jerk off session but where we are yeah yeah but the point is is that you are very good at this framework stuff i i'm i'm writing down chiefs and pre and thieves and i'm gonna apply this you've done that a couple times you did this another time what was it i forget when it was but i was like oh my god yes he's right i'm gonna do that so good job with that keep doing that speaking if i i want one question for you do people in do people at the hustle listen to this and is that weird for you that they listen to this because i hope my coworkers just don't listen to this yeah it is i don't wanna even have that in my head of like oh if i mention something that's gone on at my company or whatever i don't wanna have to deal with the actual people who are doing it later because this is my little private space to share with the listeners but if the listeners are some of those people oh my gosh shit it's tricky yeah it is weird so steph smith one of our she's a stars she's a star steph a star i love stuff to death she's listening to this right now but she told me she listens to every episode i'm like really she yeah so good and i was like first i it's there's flattery second it's like i can't believe people like this that's crazy because i mean i don't do you i i don't i've never listened to one episode because it's hard for me episode well it's hard i was here during the conversation right so like i don't need to go listen it i i know what we said so that it's not it's not new information it's is just hard you're like i don't you don't wanna i i call it the peanut butter and jelly problem which is like when my mother would make me something to eat it was wonderful and then when i did the same thing i'm like oh this is not that hard like this isn't special at all right this is bullshit what a fraud did that guy's get make a shopify t teacher shirt my mom makes the best peanut butter and jelly probably will alright so you were gonna switch topics what are going to okay speaking of sniffing out stuff i got some stuff that i've sniffed out just this morning and we didn't prepare too much for this because at all this is interesting you sent this to i loved it okay so let's talk about well alright i'm gonna talk about that one second the first one is wow more people are sending me the same decks so many people okay well we could just talk about it if you let's we could talk about that first yeah listen no let's talk about this other one first okay so i just read about this guy and i just tweeted about it it's so interesting there's this guy it's called bonds i don't know how to pronounce this because i don't know where the space is in the word because i'm just looking at the url okay it is fuck i can't pronounce this bonsai b o n s a i so bonsai and then mir m i r a i dot com okay are are you going to you gotta go on it right now okay so i'm seeing trees we connect we create trees that connect you okay what's happening here okay this fucking guy is brilliant he is the bob bra of bonsai trees and if you go to go to that url i said but add live in the beginning okay oh i see it now okay if you go to live dot bonsai dot com slash pricing you can get to a pricing page at least yes seventeen ninety nine per month for you can build your bonsai skills on his revolutionary live stream yes so you pay twenty dollars a month or thirty dollars a month and you get to watch him do bonsai trimming and people are loving it and i looked at his traffic and he has peaked in april and he is getting somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand people a month coming to this website and they wanna both watch him trim bonsai trees and buy bonsai trees and buy bonsai i mean i know nothing about this this world i don't know what it's just freaking crazy so he has two hundred and thirty videos in his library with three hundred sixty hours of bonsai education fifty different tree species worked on in hundreds of different techniques it is nuts this is so cool i love this and so his take is this is this is an alternative to head space okay so it's like some kind of active meditation basically and it is so cool i a i'm a big believer in this okay so this you just made me realize why i like this whole set of things meditation is cool i think everybody wants the benefits of meditation but i would say the majority of people really struggle to meditate regularly but what most people them don't realize is that meditating is not just sitting in a room with the legs crossed and breathing and not thinking any thoughts right there's a whole bunch of different forms including what this guy doing which is bonsai tree trimming but also including that workout thing we talked about the happy body it's like this low intensity slow breath based like weight lifting that honestly just felt like meditation more than weight lifting there was a there's other things why do people like hiking well it's because there's a whole bunch of things that okay i i'm i'm really on the naval all train right now but i i gotta say another line of is that's money which is most people want peace of mind but really they should want peace from mind and people just wanna get away from their mind and you know your mind living in your head makes you unhappy a lot of times and you'll notice this if you're in a social situation but you're in your own head you will not be enjoying that social situation if you are trying to give a speech but you're in your own head editing your thoughts thinking about what you're gonna say you'll will not be doing a good job nor enjoying it and so same thing here there's a whole bunch of activities that can get you out of your own head meditation is one maybe bonsai is another exercises another and so people are music festivals is another if you stimulate yourself with enough loud music drugs dancing sweating he alcohol whatever else you will stop living in your own head you'll lose yourself in the moment and those feelings are kind of fork and i think people are chasing those and so if you can develop something like that which might be as simple as those silly instagram like cutting of sand videos or whatever like there's apps in the app store that are these calming calming videos on loop so it's kinda like calm dot com it's kinda like the calm meditation app but instead it's like a tiktok feed of just soothing soap cutting sand cutting cake cutting videos and people love these for relaxation so i think there's a whole class of ideas that are like this and let me give you more classes and i am just r right now where i i have not planned this at all and i'm just this is this is all off memory okay so here's three examples the first example is there's a tv show that i used to watch as a kid that i see no one's really done a good job of making it again for digital it's called how it works do you remember that show i remember the show yeah all they did was they would say today we're gonna do ferrari factory a soap factory and a f factory that makes hoses right and still remember a what's called fortune cookie factory i still remember that episode in my head and they don't really talk much the guy talking is a it's a man that with a deep voice and he talks a little bit he goes first they source the rubber it mix it with black to make the rubber black or right whatever they say and then you just see like a machine mixing rubber for like three minutes then they go after that the people put it into a mold to make it round and then you just see that and then and then they stretch it out like next step is like boom there's your hose and they do that for an hour and it was wonderful i just watch as a kid all the time the second example is amr r barber me and my friend double yeah a s m r yeah but there's barber me and my friend neville have sat and watched this there is for some reason this is really popular in india where you type in asm asmr barber there's a barber with six hundred bit six hundred and sixty six thousand subscribers on youtube and all you do is watch him shave people's heads i have watched so many hours of this me and neville will sit down and just watch this i went to his house one time and i saw use his computer or apple tv to go to google or something and i saw that like the link was clicked i go neville do you also watch this guy is idiot who shaves heads and he goes yeah and we i go me too and we just watch him shave people's heads with a straight razor no third so is is this the sound thing where you like because there's a different barber thing i've seen where you put your headphones on and it sounds like a barber shaving right above your right ear only it's kinda like a stereo sound or whatever where you can kinda feel where it's going behind your head in front of your head it's not that that's a different experience no it's different so this is just watching the guy to it yeah and so they have so many views and i have sat for hours and watched it there's just one okay it's this indian guy i think he's indian yeah he's in india asmr sal and massage this guy has ten million videos of someone getting their head shaved that's all it is he doesn't talk all he does is shapes his head and i've watched it so many times there's another version of this a little bit it's not asm asmr exactly but this guy mu here have you seen him on instagram no there's this hair stylist in dubai or something like that and girls will fly around the world to just go to this guy salon because they've seen him on instagram and he just cut he colors and cut your hair and his he he does an instagram video it's kinda like music video basically of him just he grabs your hair he washes it so you see the wash you see the color you see the foil being wrapped then you see boom the color done and he cuts the hair and then he does this thing at the just flick the hair with his hands and the way he flick the hair everybody loves the flick and this guy mu has like i don't know how many followers it's even talking but i listen to a lot of no doesn't talk no there's nothing it's just the same song every single time so it's like h patronizing it's always the same song i believe and this guy has six point six million followers on his instagram i watch a shit ton of his videos and i couldn't care less about like women's hairstyle but there's something addictive to watching this i agree and i think that anyone who has a product or service that you can do this you guys just film it for thirty minutes and some and there's a few characteristics that people love to watch the third one is called primitive technology i was i filed this guy since the day he launched he launched five years ago he had his original videos if you go to his youtube page and do sort by old this his original videos it's a thirty eleven minute video four minute video four minute video and then i believe he used to or maybe still does has thirty minute videos he has yeah a piece of property in the woods and he builds stuff so he's building a hut he's starting a fire with sticks he's building a stone axe and he has and he blew up his very first video that he posted he accumulated like two million subscribers now he has ten million subscribers he doesn't talk he doesn't say a word all you do is you watch him build this hut and it is mesmerizing and now he has a book a survival guide to building tool shelters and more but he could he could do anything he wants this guy it's pretty amazing all of his literally all of his videos you can go and look at this have at least five million views and the highest ones have thirty or forty million views the highest one has seventy four million views and always he's doing is building a hut this is fucking amazing wild dude i didn't know about any of this that's amazing so i'm just looking at i'm just looking at his stuff right now is cool every video has like over ten million views and he's not like he's not like oh i'll teach you how to do this no he's just doing literally he he's just say word he doesn't say one word all what kind of genius was this guy like who has the creative genius to like do this come up with this and actually make it successful that's amazing i mean he has let's see he has we just do a silent podcast just know just us breathing he has close to one billion views on his video wow it's okay it's crazy this is okay so relaxation yeah i don't even know what we bucket this as takeaways is these how small i guarantee this bonsai guy makes a wonderful living and this primitive technology totally does too i the takeaways for anyone listening is these relaxation things are awesome they're probably a lot harder to do than we are like oh you do winners yeah yeah so there's definitely more to it but they work and the second thing it's cool to see people make living off small ass fun stuff yeah exactly some of these are super passionate about let's get to the lesson each thing so yeah i will set the context here so i read about this today pier one they sell betting stuff they sell furniture they sell home goods yep they went bankrupt and there was this company called retail e commerce ventures really brand name that acquired the ip i guess you could say so what they're gonna do it seemed like was they're gonna do they acquire it's like don yeah they or sorry i think they have the winning bid and the paperwork signs in like a very short amount of time i see okay and so their move is that they're gonna turn pier one dot com into a viable store and solve the stuff online i don't understand how that works would like the brick and mortar stuff i i don't quite get it but i remembered i recognize this name and i realized oh i'd had read about this when someone bought dress barn dress barn is like a middle of america store i grew up with it where it's like cheap clothes so you just go and you kind of pick stuff out of a bin and the same company bought the ip for that and i did some research i mean i just googled it it went that hard and the guy who owns that is ty lopez and for those of you who don't know ty lopez is this guy i'm gonna try and reserve judgment but many accuse him but being a quick a get rich quick guy he sells courses on how to start a social media agency here how to find your calling in life and he was most famous because he's she's one of the first advertisers on youtube and he had this video where he goes here i am in my garage with my lamborghini and i've i i read a lot of books and you should read books too buy my course and i could just teach you whatever read in these books and so he's spending thirty million dollars to buy pier one along with other stuff and we got a hold of his deck i didn't even read it but i read on i i've talked a lot and i've set the stage you wanna yeah so this is one of the most interesting things i've seen in a while so it's not just ty lopez it's all also this other guy alex mayer alex mayer was the founder and ceo of zoos he and ty lopez so zoos sold for two and four million i think it was a dating app that was really popular in the app store it's kind of like a low level dating app but they they had gained facebook ads so he had like found an arbitrage at facebook i believe early on had grown a lot through that maybe some other things i'm not super familiar with their story but successfully built zoos then him and ty has built mentor box which does pretty well so mentor box when i just do a little calculation let me just get a little estimate here yeah and on its website they say how big mentor boxes they say how big the variety of businesses are that they've acquired yeah how big is mentor box the claim it says sixty thousand subscribers yeah so so the sixty seventy thousand subscribers i don't know exactly what their price point is but i think it's doing over a million dollars a month so i think it's safe to say about ten million dollars a year i i actually subscribed to it see what it is because i was how much does it cost at this is like this there's like a one dollar trial and then i think it costs like ten bucks or something like that maybe twenty bucks you get a book or summary you get access to these videos i don't i don't use it it's not not that good my opinion but anyways this mental mentor box says over ten million bucks a a year easily and so ty lopez is you're absolutely right most people view him as kind of like he's a meme he's a joke you gotta kind of respect the hustle in a way like he's not a nobody so you know good on you but he really stalled out hard on the kind of self help i'm a i'm a rich guy let me teach you to be rich type of thing to the point where successful when rich people typically don't look at ty lopez is like someone they admire that he's not richard branson he's ty lopez and so but this dress bar thing was interesting they didn't say how well the dress barn acquisition has done since they so basically they're buying these old retail stores they have a big brand and then they're relaunch them as e commerce only stores they're saying hey what if we had the brand recognition of a pier one but none of the brick and mortar headaches that pier one has and can we just sell pier one as a e commerce only store pier one was doing about three hundred million dollars a year in e commerce revenue a billion dollars of total revenue and i i'm not exactly sure why it's going bankrupt or why they if these guys are getting this for thirty million dollars that's a if i can steal unless there's something else i don't know which could very well be the case because we don't have their books but this is an amazing business opportunity i think actually so you know props to those guys because when i saw this was this is a really smart play pier one has pure one's is actually like more of like a tier one brand like much bigger than dress on and taking if you can get the rights to the name and the inventory to be able to sell this online i i mean that's a if if the online store the online business is already doing over two hundred fifty million dollars a year you're picking up that asset for twenty thirty million dollars that's a that's a steal so i'm not sure and here's here's what you get when you buy pier one you get thirty million customer database which basically means their email address and their buying history i think i don't i don't know what else of those thirty million eight million of them are activated are active which i don't know how that's defined yep and the most of the database can be targeted on facebook and the guy who bought who's ty has his partner was a dating app person and the dating app people are notoriously and they're in the same category of gamers which is are gaming people which doesn't mean that they're scam at all it just means that they're incredibly savvy marketers and sometimes that involves like some shady tactics and but that's okay that dating apps are user acquisition companies that happen to sell dating and gaming apps are user acquisition companies that happen to sell games and so both of them you live and die on how effectively you're able to buy user and make money off that user very quickly which sounds like fall business but it is because they're typically low retention businesses you're kind of churning and burning through users at a pretty high rate exactly so you're probably sophisticated at customer acquisition and so the theory is if you could take someone who's that sophisticated at that and throw them at a more stickier product that's actually like people love or that's in a better industry you're gonna have success so it's interesting i think that these guys did this before corona and then that should happen to now all these guys are going bankrupt so we're good on i mean they're set to succeed it's interesting yeah i i think this is honestly this is pretty great so i'm kinda jealous that i didn't do this well you could with some brand list except you'd have to so brand list was a company that was like and like they brand list dot com we talked about them on here before all this happened and they sold like like basically the to target brand of stuff that brand list wanted to redo target brand and make generic brand generic brands that were high high medium quality but low priced and they went on of business but you'd have to assume i think like thirty million dollars in debt or something crazy yeah which i'm guessing is also the reason that this business is so dev slash going bankrupt right the revenues are are actually quite high but there must be some just huge overhang or debt obligation or something that's causing them to to declare bankruptcy rather than find find a buyer but yeah if they could become kind of like a way fair junior that's pretty good way fares like a seven to eight billion dollar company and if they can take pier one into an online only brand if they can shed some of that you know liability in in the transaction like that's that's a win and so i'm curious if we're gonna see more of this are we gonna see dollar general are we gonna see crate barrel are we gonna oh you won't see dollar general dollar general so do you know about the dollar stores i've heard that they're thriving during during covid in general you know no why okay so in the early two thousands i think that's on the first one i bring you you can actually look this up if you look up dollar general they're were all but dollar general and then where is the other three nate there's three of them i think the dollar general family dollar i believe family dollar and maybe there's one more dollar dollar tree those three were acquired by the private the big private equity firm so k k r which is one of the maybe the third biggest private equity firm the second one what another brand was acquired by black stone or black black stone which is i think the v biggest private equity firm and these fucking guys turn these damn things around so much they like said like alright we're gonna start selling milk we're gonna start doing this we're gonna start doing that and it cost a million dollars to open a store and they go we're opening up a store everywhere and they put on a spree where they they opened up these fucking stores everywhere and they are crushing it at the all the private equity firms pounce on this at the same time and dollar stores are killing it yeah i've i've heard about that my i know somebody who is like the preferred real estate developer for them so i was dude has covid you know you do retail development is like well luckily my tenants were hobby lobby dollar general and you know basically a bunch of stores that actually have continued to thrive even even in like even as retail continues to die so i found that kind of interesting now what's interesting here is that they're actually buying the ip for pure one they're not buying the company and so i think they're just basically buying the brand the rights that maybe the right to sell mine i'm not sure exactly this deck is a little bit light so yeah i don't know it's interesting think sharper image did the same thing if you wanna a case study on how it's done i'm almost positive that sharper image went through an issue where it went out of business and they only sold the website and it ran as as its own thing would also be interested to see if somebody's gonna do this with other struggling brands like a twenty four hour fitness so twenty four hour fitness is also closing down stores wars went through bankruptcy has a huge customer database of members who have member active memberships and if you could say okay cool we're we're gonna buy the twenty four hour fitness ip and we're gonna take it to a digital fitness brand and you basically rip off either the sweat app or like free analytics or one of these like workout apps and you like basically white label the the app experience but you combine that with the twenty four hour ip and customer database brand name i think that that is you know you could probably create a lot of value there depending on what price you could get in so i think this is cool yeah it is cool and if anyone is caring about this and we'll move on there's two other companies that i know that i've done this the first is icon brand icon brand owns a ton of stuff including rock ware jay z's thing so they bought jay z thing mud jeans you remember mud jeans bro they own ed hardy joe boxer or all these kinda like third four tier your brands right they've done it and they're quite large and then the second one that's done it even better and i was i i don't wanna give stock advice but i i think i was gonna i i like this brand it's called v corporation and they own dick vans which is on a tear jan sport timber the north face and a few others wow north face is pretty big okay cool what else what else do we wanna talk about there's a bunch of things on this list anything stand out to you or anything you wanted to bring up that was interesting i'm gonna defer to you alright let's do a quick one you saw this twitter hack yesterday that was about like you know taking it over elon and jeff bezos is accounts and whole bunch of people were like you wanna give you wanna set the con it says the story so a bunch of peep so there was a a a takeover of a whole bunch of blue check marked face verified kind of twitter verified accounts including jeff bezos elon musk bill gates and others and they went and they posted a thing so so what i saw was basically jeff bezos post something along the lines of you know guys i've done so well i really just wanna give back you know i wanna make i get back to the community for you know for the next thirty minutes anybody who sends me one bitcoin i'll send to back you know thirty minutes only good luck have fun guys and then elon account re tweets it and basically is like i'll me too brother i'm in i'll like i hacked too yeah i was like i'll do the same blah blah and so they they did this and then the funny thing is that because all bitcoin transactions are recorded on the blockchain and they posted the public address of the wallet you could see how many people in real time are getting dupe by this and so like you know last i saw it a hundred something thousand dollars had been transferred to these wallets that will never be recovered i'm looking online now it looks like a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars and then twitter kinda like blocked all blue check accounts so they kind of just hit the safety switch and just said no blue check can do anything on twitter right now to like stop the activity they figured out that the they posted something that said they think that some like a moderator or an admin had been compromised so somebody who had admin rights which gave you rights to like manage like the blue check mark accounts they either bribe the person or they were working with them or they took over that person's account or something like that and that's how the vulnerability worked that's why they were able to get access to everybody's all at once and so interesting just crazy scenario in general and then two whole bunch people were like dude if you had if you had access to jeff bezos and whoever's twitter accounts and the best you could get was a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars like i just saw that same imagination and so what and then there was a bunch people saying what would you do like okay let's put yourself in the criminal mindset for a second how would you maximize the value of this so i'm curious what what would you do i don't know i mean i guess i mean like that tap it like upside that's a i mean like they gotta i don't know how hard it was but they got a hundred grain off that that's not a lot of money but like they probably will never get caught right so if you could blackmail mail them you could say elon i know you're cheating or i know you're you'll probably get caught right what could you do so so those are the so two of the most suggested things were blackmail the through the dms or you like short the stock so a lot of people were like oh dude if you have elon account you just you know post something that you're you know you're sick and taking leave or that you're gonna do some crazy shit because you tend to tweet that stuff anyways and you short tesla stock and then that's how you'll profit off this thing yeah and i was like do that be the pot easy to catch thing you that it could be and maybe with tesla because there's so much short volume that like you would just be lost in the sea it would be like so obvious if could did it with like amazon stock or what would you write so you'd have to say like like things are not going well from elon thing or for or for bezos you'd you have to say like as of today i'm officially stepping down right exactly you say you're stepping down and like you're the key man risk of those businesses and so you know the stock market would panic if you them stepping down from tesla or something like that now i i don't or you could do the other way you could be like you you should be like we are we are highly considering buying tesla like if you're a byte bezos right yeah one one way to do it would be to send an act you know something that's looks like it's meant to be a dm but actually accidentally got deleted about like buying some penny stock or something like that you you take advantage of the pump i don't know there's there's all bunch of random things i i didn't see any ideas that i love but i did think it was crazy that this happened and it's so crazy that there's all these vulnerabilities i mean through whether it's email social media like the whole world is so fragile really like your people people's lives the companies are really fragile and there's all these other like you know risks that are that's just that are just out there that's very hard to to do like slack for example if slack gets compromised and your whole company runs on slack and your entire slack chat history gets exposed like you know you could be screwed and you know we just trust slack and we train google docs and we trust all these things should we be so well sean you do what email service provider do you guys use at twitch gmail we're or g suite account really so i think at facebook they don't use i think they you amazon runs their own for a lot of amazon doesn't use google hangouts they have chime their own shitty version of zoom but it's amazon's own so they have no risk in that sense but twitch got acquired right so we use slack which they don't get to you which amazon doesn't get to use we use google docs we use all these things as we were you know it'd be pretty disruptive to change the whole companies like operating system well i didn't know about this when i when someone at facebook was like yeah we use i think outlook i was like i'll look as fucking stupid why and they go because we don't want google spying on us right i was like that we want microsoft at us and instead yeah i was like that that would never happen and now i realized yeah it can happen yeah somebody tweeted this other day that they were like you know can we all just agree that like god mode type features of any app where basically like you know you give some super admin account that can like see other people's activities like there's all these good reasons why you would wanna be able to do that to moderate to fix issues to somebody says oh i need this fix in my account like don't i'll take care of it for you or you know whatever but there's so much harm that could be done with this and just a word to the wise if you're using a startup like let's say you're using some startup medical app like oh telemedicine and you got this you know you you you've been a little prom she came down with this std and this there's this app that's this new app from silicon valley you read about it in tech crunch and all you gotta do is take a picture of your junk and this doctor will prescribe you some medicine you don't have to go to the doctor's office just know at that eight person startup there's like six engineers that see every photo that gets uploaded into the app and there's probably like a slack bot that's just tweeting about that's just posting every diagnosis and that's usually for bug fixing and shit like that but like your shit is not secure what startups so like can hear yeah and that i i that's something that's outside of my world and i've learned about it recently where these companies are billing up i'm like man you should sell the companies instead of people and i look at their product road roadmap and they had this like sso feature and i was like right stuff fuck is ss oh like i i guess that stands for what's that single sign on sign on yeah and i was like just use like last i don't understand and apparently i sound pretty getting ignorant everyone's probably laughing at me who knows about this i guess it's security around sign everything everybody works in a big company like oh yeah you know when we need to use a service like if i log in to watch our company all hands like i don't know if you do an all hands through zoom but like when we do an all hands you have to log in with your company company user id and password single sign on in order to access it so to make sure that outsiders can't access your stuff if they had the link and you guess to like enter in your same print all your metrics all your not really fingerprint not your fingerprint sorry what's that thing called the p or oh like yeah it's like there's like a usb little thing i have where i have to push into it on my computer and that's my like hardware password that i have to use to log in to certain to go see my health care benefits or whatever and by the way there's companies that just makes single sign on as a service it's a great little start they just say hey if you wanna get your app enterprise ready you're gonna need single sign on trust me it's a pain in the ass just like you don't wanna build payment software and fraud detection and stripe just does it for you we do single sign on for you and i was like when i saw i was like oh that's a great idea isn't that with that company o is it o o oc yeah i think o might do this as well yeah yeah it's like a ten billion dollar company i know nothing about but any but anyways so what was i say oh the same thing goes for any like new email client or like oh this new email thing came out superhuman and i'm really pumped about it it's cool you could swipe to the left and the right and know it's like tinder for email or whatever and you give it access to your email like giving access to email is like insane giving access to a chrome extension when it says chrome extension we'd like to read and write all data on every web page you visit that's insane it's insane to do all sean likes mid porn yeah exactly like that's my business what i what i like to do how small we big they are anyways people are in sand there's lots of security vulnerabilities okay one last topic oh i have one on here that's not even research by this wrote why the hell do we use signatures like that crazy you just did your taxes yesterday no i know i'm do house sale stuff but they're like oh yeah can you sign this by the way if you if you sign this you know you're claiming this and i'm like dude this signature i made with like my pinky on my keypad and it looks different than every other signature ever did and in general signatures are stupid and also when i go to some place and i and they're like you need to sign this waiver and it's like nothing's in it for me it's only just liability protections for them i'd literally just write the word jane doe and cursive and they just take it and i'm like look if this ever came back to me they're like you signed it and like what are you talking about dude this is jane doe are you crazy i didn't sign that i don't understand that either we when we're doing our taxes i had to sign some stuff and i'm like and sarah had like she had like wait for me to do it and like she called me home was like hey can you come sign this stuff i'm like no just would you do it i'm when write my name like i don't understand and we not authorized to forge your signature like we're not friends yeah and well i was like i and there was another time where i was out of town and one of our accountants had like sign a check and i'm not gonna say the outcome to the story because i don't i even know if it's ali illegal or not but i go can you just like like i know what the check is i hear you i'm telling you i'm on board sign my name on it or i was like video me eating and i will watch you sign my name on it like i and a lot of people are like no we can't do that i'm like i i don't understand the intent like if the intent is there and i approve right maybe there should be like a on the fly power of attorney where you can grant like a one time power of attorney to somebody just through a little video face message some some started like that okay here's a little idea that here by the way when i was nineteen using fake ids i would like you find someone who looked like me and him hundred dollars and they give me their id i remember i would sign the debit or the i would like sign some paperwork or like no i remember what they would do they would make me sign a piece of paper at the liquor store and they're like this i got busted a couple times ago this signature doesn't look like the one on the id and that's how i got caught a few times yeah my handwriting is inconsistent i i don't don't write yeah i was like well i i've changed or i exactly or or like i've you had a buyer like i don't know dude i'm wasted like dude mine i used to because my name starts to the s as yours says too i used to do the the really if i can lame thing of doing that little chain link s as the start of my autograph you know like the three lines three lines and i make a little chain link and then like of course i got above the age of eighteen and i was like what am i doing i can't go forward like this so i changed my i signature from there yeah so it could've have changed and you probably opened a bank account when you're like fourteen and now i have to explain why i've changed and then they look at it they're like i understand bro don't worry okay here's a little idea that's sort of interesting about the house sale process i thought it was cool so i'm selling my house and i use an agent who's with compass compass has this feature that it's really cool that i wonder if it's extend to other this might already exist but i think it's a cool little thing to think about might spur some new ideas so in the house sale process the agent wants me to invest in my house and like stage it really well you know fix up the landscaping rep paint everything do all these like fix ups right and and i'm like cool like in theory like i get it you know that's gonna help sell the house but like also i've already like moved mentally and physically at this point and like like i really deal with it yeah i don't wanna deal with i also don't wanna spend twenty five thousand dollars which is what mine's coming out to to like do these improvements even though logically in my head i'm like there's probably a good roi for every dollar i do into fixing this up i just don't wanna pay more money for this asset that i'm selling like when i'm not even sure if i'm gonna make money or lose money on the on the sale and so he's like don't worry compass has this thing where we'll just take it out of the escrow so you just say yes like yes i'm cool with staging it and painting it and whatever within this budget but like you don't worry you don't have to write on a check that's what turbo text does it's amazing right and and i'm like this and it's so stupid that that changes my decision making but it absolutely does the fact that i don't have to take out my wallet and pay and i can just say yeah take it out of the sale price when it's the same thing it's the same exact thing but it's not the same thing and i instantly was like okay cool yeah and then they hit me up to like oh by the way we think it would be good if we touch this garage up too can we do that i'm like yeah put it on my tab you know it's coming out of the sale price anyways i don't have to take out a dollar yeah it's ways easier you to spend money so i found this to be it's a no and they're like no it's no interest loan and they because they know that hey getting you to do this will help the sales so they're like incentivized to to offer this as a service it's a short term like two to three month loan that they have to the front and so i was wondering a is does this exist for any house sale because it should i used it i think they use a service called notable so it's kind of an interesting company to check out i think that company might offer this to everybody but then i wondered like how many other things are there like this where get money back yeah you like it's like take it out of the take it out of the thing like taxes is another good one where it's like oh yeah i don't wanna pay for you to do my taxes just take it out of my refund or put it add to my bill later you know and so where are there other opportunities to reduce the money out of pocket up upfront and i would say a firm or after pay or a great example of this where they're like hey you wanna buy this thing on it you know but like you don't wanna pay the full price for it right now pay twelve installments of you know hundred dollars and you can get it instead of front i to question question so there i think these are these are great businesses to start if you could find that opportunity where people don't wanna pay now like maybe it's property taxes or something crazy like that maybe maybe there's some maybe it's you know i don't like income share agreements this is the same thing for income share agreements right it's like no no don't pay for school we'll take it out of your salary when you when you're done it's like it's the same thing i was gonna take a loan and pay it back after i get a job or i just don't take the loan and i pay it back after i get the job like as a shadow loan and so income share agreements work the same way but psychologically people view it very differently and they're more willing to do it that way so anyways i think that's a cool situation if you're listening to this you know another area where that would apply i wanna hear it yeah i completely agree i just like when i was doing my taxes i it was the same thing i was like oh yeah just add out out of that i'm it's like it's free money anyway you know what i mean exactly alright sean i looked at your house listing it's listed for a lot cheaper than you bought it are you gonna lose a lot of money on this or it is the strategy that people are hopefully gonna bid strategy is just to drive enough foot traffic drive a lot of foot traffic by making it low priced and then get at least two bidder and then just bend them up against other you think the listing is wrong the it it it says my house is so originally bought for two point four but that's my that's like a neighbor unit so zillow has it mis unlabeled so i got mine for two point one not two point four so it looks like it's at this huge discount which is not true that like a small discount but do you regret buying my favor yes i regret buying it would you regret have credit buying it regardless of corona or not yeah even if i had sold it for like a slight profit or whatever i just could have done better things with that money right like i had put five hundred thousand dollars down and it's like that i lived there for three years like the rate i could have grown that five hundred thousand dollars through other investments would have been much higher than the rate of my real estate appreciation or in this case depreciation that i ended up with plus homeowner strip is just a pain in the ass there's just headaches along the way and renting is way more fun way more flexible way less headache and are you ever buy well are you're gonna buy a place again so now my because i was talking my brother love about this and he's buying and i was like dude he's he's buying at expensive house like five thousand more than our house and i was like who is crazy my brother not and so i was like why are you doing this and he was like he's like the thing he's like i always lose money on real estate he's like but the thing is once you get to certain point where we're like i i i must live in this neighborhood like i wanna live here this is the this the place i wanna live goes sometimes those places just don't rent like they only sell he's like so the only time to he's like my role now is the only time i buy is when i really wanna get to a neighborhood or to a house that i just can't get for rent then i'll buy and it's my tax for for really wanting that place but if otherwise if i'm flexible then renting all day and so i fox buying a ten million dollar home people got money dude people got money what is does your brother log to for a god dan he refuses to give all the vodka guys because he doesn't wanna draw attention to to his business and what he does and all that and how much money he's got and all that stuff he must be in real estate sean str pins i think he's in real i don't know no he does something in real estate yeah it's it's real estate plus other businesses fucking a well we gotta talk about real estate that seems like i've always said real estate is has the highest ratio of dumb rich dumb to rich people like there's a shit ton of dumb rich people real estate yeah i love that line that that's another good shirt one it is i mean like if you think about like not dumb but like tech has like a lot of high iq people but maybe maybe not as many rich people real estate you don't have to be that smart to be awesome yeah if you took so the idea is if you took all people who have let's say over five million dollars of net worth and then you said okay by industry how'd you make your money and then you map their iq and you said which has the the lowest average or median iq it's either number one's gonna be inheritance and number two is i think gonna be real estate yeah for sure what we gotta talk about real estate next time alright well good episode yeah cool we're