Crumbl Cookie Making $1B/ Year, AI In Sports, and Underutilized Assets Create Businesses

again remember percentage of their readers are ultra wealthy people who are like yeah great i wanna have a home on on the east coast that i can park my private plane in and that'll be one of my hubs and i'm pretty sure okay i don't know the exact numbers on this but i can triangulate a little bit i think they've done at least twenty five million in pre sales on this thing that is created it could be it could easily be double that but but that is a a really awesome and impressive like way to take this niche hobby find a find a kind of media publication that that that works and go content to commerce i have a but i some stuff for today you have something that i know about that i've kinda mentioned but i mentioned it without saying their name craig fuller now we mentioned it let's talk do did you get permission from for about this oh yeah i think so so we got i some of this is public but let's let's talk a little bit about this okay so there's this there's this business called flying magazine or flying magazine and so when you look at it you're like okay well what is this and so basically the story there's a guy who bought this magazine called flying mag and flying mag produces this beautiful magazine amazing photos and if you're flying or aviation ent you will love this magazine he bought it for like i think like not quite ten million but a little under that so maybe somewhere of between let's call it five dollars to ten million dollars my guess is a fraction of that i think it was closer to one do you have any got a little source here saying high seven figures so let's okay assume the source is correct okay so but then i was like well where did this person get high seven figures to go drop on a magazine that seems like a a pretty indulge purchase for somebody unless they have a lot of money so he started a company before that called freight waves which basically is like a data company for the freight shipping industry so they're like a a price reporting company so they they provide data that shippers and freight companies use to you know inform themselves on what's going on in the market they also have a saas tool so they kinda have like a media side which is that you know content that they're producing that's pricing information and then they have a saas business called sonar that's in it and they've released a public press release so you can kind of see the numbers i thought they did that that's very weird that they did that yeah they're not a public company but they sort of like did a public report and i'm not sure sure what the agenda was like i think i'm just sort of naive here i don't know i normally this is we want somebody to buy us or we wanna raise money or we're prepping to go public but it's i don't think it's either any of those three because of what they said so they basically reported thirteen million in revenue for a quarter so let's call it like let's just extrapolate that out in a straight line so roughly fifty million a year in revenue it wasn't a lot in profit so it was like you know one or two million in eb in the quarter or something like that so let's say that this business is making i don't know four to eight million a profit a year but it's growing seventy percent a year it's growing almost has been around i think for a little while so so you know done well they had twenty eight million in cash just like it on the books on on the balance sheet so you know the the business was in a in in a healthy spot so i think craig starts freight waves he then separately buys flying mag one of the interesting things about flying meg is that if you think about who are the readers of a niche magazine like this you have two categories uber nerds and uber nerds who are rich because you know you gotta be kinda nerdy about this hobby if you're gonna be like reading about this like we had a guy once we hired as an engineer that used to had an app on his phone where he would listen to the what's called air traffic control he would just tune into the frequency of an air traffic control and listen to it at lunch and like i gotta tell you never had a worse lunch with anybody in my life like you know dude me him and his phone on with air traffic control was our lunch and i was like get you know hey man i'm gonna go back for seconds and then i'm gonna go kill myself so see later and this has been horrible thanks i do i do that with the i do that with the police scanner you ever deal with the police scanner at police police get look there's a show called cops there's no show called safe landings because that's all traffic because they're holding long so there's a show called which way is the wind blowing but there is a video game called that there is a video game where all you are is an air traffic controller yep fair enough okay so anyways the back to back to my flag max story so a big percentage of the readers are like rich people with private planes or like you see this a lot in tech for some reason like a a buddy for kind did this so sold this company immediately starts signs up for flying lessons wants to get his pilot licensed to like go fly this like you know five seater or six seater or two seater plane they love that hobby and there's a really expensive hobby so one thing that they did recently that i think it's really smart is have you heard about this this community you're holding in atlanta so he told me i'm not gonna steal your thunder but he told me what he was gonna do and he he goes i'm flying from new york to go see this property i'm looking at and i'm flying my private plane do you wanna come with me and i ended up not going because i had to go up to tit burrow so in new jersey and then fly back down to atlanta to see the spot with them but he asked me to go with him and i almost did it and he was and so i've known about those for about a year and a half now yeah that's it's a and so the the interesting thing is they're basically building a community in atlanta and i think the reason people build these communities is like there's like a what's you call like a landing strip like in the middle of the neighborhood so you could park your plane and if you wanna take off if you could just like go take off like i just like the driveway of the community is like a a a landing shrimp and correct it's it's it's a it's a so it's a country club with golf with homes around the golf course but instead of a golf course it's a landing strip that's exactly what it is so it's not it's a country club country club for flying and so you purchase i forget how much a piece of a plot of land cut cost and then they build a build you a home and now you are part of this aviation community right and so they pre sold the the plots of of land or the plots of of for the homes in this community so they find this kind of bear around or whatever they start pre selling the plots and again remember percentage of their readers are ultra wealthy people who are like yeah great i wanna have a home on on the east coast that i can park my private plane in and that'll be one of my hubs and i'm pretty sure i don't know the exact numbers on this but i can triangulate a little bit i think they've done at least twenty five million in pre sales on this thing that is crazy it could be it could easily be double that but but that is a a really awesome and impressive like way to take this niche hobby take find a find a kind of media publication that that that works and go content to commerce right this is the what's the turning group turning group believes in this that content to commerce so they they did bar which is what h key to h did this for watches right watch blog for super high end watches well guess what as soon as you start selling watches that business i think kevin rose came on this podcast and said it went from one or two million here in revenue to a hundred million when they flip that switch and started actually selling the watches that they've had been talking about for fifteen twenty years and so content to commerce is is kind of like really interesting play and i think that this is a great example of it been done well yeah look yeah buzzfeed doing it with stuffed animals which is pretty lame you know they didn't it with they did it with with houses and this is baller craig told me about this about a year and a half ago and i was like this is very bold that he was explaining it to me and he was very confident and it was like no no big deal and i was thinking about this and i was like i don't know this honestly you think a really big deal me we should do well i was like i don't think you're gonna be able to pull this off well i didn't say that but in my head i was like this is ridiculous he totally did they totally pulled it off we we did this way back in the day i think you had said something you were like ads are lame this before hubspot bought the podcast so it was basically like ads are lame we're selling ads with the podcast but like what would be a better business for for my first million to do and i think at the time people were like you should create like a we work like a branded version of we work worker or like a white label like c working space or something like that which sounded crazy but i actually think that there was a version of that that's that's true like basically if we just bought like a a unit or sixteen unit apartment building in san francisco but it was only you could only go rent there if you were part of our community or you could buy units there little part of our community something like that could work because people would rather live in a community of like minded people than a community of absolute strangers i think there's a huge number of people that would do that and so then you get into the real estate game these units in san francisco go for you know million and a half two million dollars on average you know the so so you could do these things where you you know in theory a brand like ours could also do that and say yeah if you wanna be around other entrepreneurs other business people who are you know share this kinda like this ethos that we have then you know you could do that but there's a problem which is you and i i don't know about you me i wasn't even bold enough to like consider that i thought that was stupid now i've got a little bit more experience and i kind of understand like our poll a little bit now i actually think that that could work but at the time i was like that's ridiculous there's there's no way that would work dude my brain is like a metal detector that's just looking for something that's gonna scare me to do i'm just like where can i get the maximum thrilled the business thrill like we're gonna get the maximum reward plus i'm down with the risk and saying like if i set out loud that i was doing this that would get other people's attention but it would also make me a little scared because i don't know exactly how to do it like the i am very attracted to these ideas and there's that's not always a good thing i think that's a bad thing in many cases but but i'm i hear that and i wanna run into that fire a little bit whereas i think you hear that you're like there's a fire would i run no no no no no now i'm more comfortable because i've seen some i've seen like well if you do this this and this the odds of some type of return is is positive but like before i was still kinda understanding and like that mechanics of business and like investing and things like that now i actually do see it we're like the opposite we're like the opposite i get excited by that weird kind of like kinda half figured out thing and you're like well why don't you yeah i'm wanna figure it out first but then once you do figure it out you're like you're like go and you just execute and you're like locked in and you just you just freaking go on that opportunity whereas i'm like oh this is cool it's kinda figured out alright cool like i'll kinda go there but oh there's this other interesting thing over here that's like get a half figured out i i'm not as good at lock in and you get forward after you figured out the puzzle exactly yeah exactly for me i have to figure out a little bit more and like i want like a higher certainty that the puzzle pieces are even gonna be able to foot fit fit together you know what i'm saying right right exactly but the once the puzzles done you're you're like my puzzle i love this puzzle dude and my puzzle i'll tell you an example so sean and i are going to vancouver wednesday i think and we're doing this little meet up with us and andrew wilkinson and this wasn't even that well organized like they've done a good job it but like there's no name not maybe it well organized isn't the right work because that sounds insulting it was just kinda low key like we just have like a tight form that you have to sign up for and that's it and then you pay fifty bucks to show up and i think you get a refund if you show up i think they're doing it's like guarantee seats like the people listen to the pod if they say how do i sign i don't even know where to i i don't know where to go we're doing a meetup up but it's in stealth mode for no reason i don't know what i don't know what to organize your guys doing but it just doesn't make any sense to me it doesn't make any sense to me so what's the venue and date and time man we're it's all coming together we're working on it's like yeah i don't know i don't know fire festival what's happening here and then he they refunded the money and i'm like well i couldn't use that money on i'm like my flights and hotel i wish i wish you felt like i'm paying money to go and do this it would have been cool because like the thing it made like fifty or a hundred grand i'm like you know give me like three thousand to pay for my stuff but when i when i kind of like realized that we are able to pull off some of this stuff i'm like hey we can get people the the the thing with media what it is if you can get people to buy shit or leave your home so like if you say i'm gonna be at this location at this time the if you able to get people to do that that means you have pull and once everyone's a about when we pull that off then i'm like oh we could have pulled this off something like this we still good we still can then i i i i start to believe it yeah that's interesting actually that's a good metric because i've been trying to think about on the content side i'm like you know i wanna set a goal because i think i work better when i have a goal or there off of you have to get context the context is sean is now he's considering or planning or doing to go harder on creating content yeah yeah exactly sounds lame something don't to say those words content creator sounds like lame i'm i'm a come up with my own words but like yeah the idea is hey i like doing this thing where i get to just like learn about stuff talk about it and people seem to like it podcast is one version of that the newsletters is another version etcetera and anyways the point is i was like what's a what's a good goal for this and i was like oh million ten million subscribers fans no what what do i want here and i was like and then i was like intuitively there's something more like that kevin kelly thing the true fans thousand true fans where it's like he wrote this blog post it's amazing that's called a thousand true fans basically says if you can have if you can have a thousand true fans a true fan being somebody who would pay a hundred dollars across the course of a the year they'll buy your shirt they'll show up you know for your event they'll buy your tickets they'll do whatever because they really like your stuff and like you know for an artist if you're somebody who's just creating thousand people who are willing gonna pay a hundred bucks sounds kind of achievable it doesn't that's not like i'm gonna be the next you know justin bieber or whatever and it's a hundred grand like you could make a living doing what you love if you get to that point that was like one of the original things that i think inspired a lot of content creators online and i was like oh maybe something like true fans but how do you measure a true fan i guess it's this hundred dollar spend thing but i think this thing you're saying is actually true which is it's like a a test it's like if i just tweeted hey i'm hanging out at this coffee shop right now in san francisco how many people would show up and like i think three years ago that answer was zero to zero to two you know like maybe just my actual friends who i who i can caught it up with them while you know now i don't know what that number would be but probably what do think if i did i idea well if you know thousands would be crazy but i was know here all day so it's not like if you give it at window if you gave it a two week window or a two week notice two to four week notice i think no forget that i'm saying same day i'm just i'm gonna be here all day swing by if you're around fifty to a hundred i bet fifty to a hundred yeah exactly and i think that there's a that's probably that's great that's it that's amazing there's some point where it's like the coffee shops like what the fuck is happening there there's like there's too many people here guys what what is this there's some point where you break the coffee shop and i'm like okay there's some way of testing that because i think what most people go is for reach and they get really tricked by these platforms that are like yeah your video got ninety five thousand views and say cool how many of them actually watch this versus just swiped by it or if they want like how many of those ninety five thousand people know your name how many of them know anything about you how many them care about you right like and so i think what mo people do is they get they just take what they're fed and they're fed basically the most large vanity useless number and i think for any business you wanna find not the vanity metric but the true metric that actually shows like the level of engagement you have the level of love that your product has and so and and different business different companies have like different ways of looking at this like facebook back in the day one of their metrics that mattered was they were like yeah of all of our sign ups fifty percent of them use this every day and that became this thing that was like okay it's not that they have the most sign ups like myspace has way more but man this facebook thing like half the use half of the total sign ups are using it every single day that's gotta be in something and the people that were able to identify that inside the company and as investors got mega mega rich whereas other people were just chasing like a total user count number but they didn't really like have a the good way to measure it so i think there's something too like finding the real metric that matters at the hustle what did you guys use because you could've have just said subscribers right but that wasn't like quite the that wasn't just a thing like do you have any examples of finding the real metric that matters dude i we we would just do replies and so every once in a while i would purposely either write about something that was a bit controversial or i would purposely have typos and i would just see how many people reply and say that they saw a typo right or at at the very bottom of the email and i told you to do this and i think you did do it i would say we're we're we're what city you in right now send me us or i would say i'm working from this brand new desk it's called this i love it take take a picture of your workspace let me see it yep and it would be just how many people are gonna take a picture and and reply back to the email and there was a time where we at the very bottom of the email we said we're gonna send out stickers to everyone that replies and we got like ten thousand replies so we had like mail at ten thousand stickers and so we would do little things like that where and this we got like ten thousand replies on like a hundred thousand subscribers and so i remember like anytime we get a reply from an email that's a that's a really good sign right and like i see this all the time with newsletters now because subs has this feature where if you subscribe to one newsletter like i read something i'm like yeah i like this i subscribe it pops up this full screen thing which is just like sean recommends these five newsletters and really there's only one button and you're just like okay next if you hit that and now you're subscribed five newsletters and you could see people on subs subtract they're like wow my my growth is crazy i'm hitting a hundred thousand two hundred thousand three hundred thousand of subscribers bullshit dude it's all bullshit and and subs like this is awesome when they're showing this i'm sure in their investor presidents look at this now we drive the majority of subscriber growth for our new newsletters there's a network effect here it's like no it's not a network effect it's a giant screen where people click next like i used to do this with our mobile apps it's like oh i wanna if i want this app to grow let me just pop up a screen where it's your entire contact list everybody pre checked as there's one big button that says next and there's a tiny black x that's like hidden in the top left corner if you could see that you're in skip it and like everybody wants to skip it but two out of two out of every ten people are just going fast and they're just gonna hit the button and they just spam all of their contacts and guess what my app goes viral is it really viral are they sharing it because they like this product no they're sharing it because i tricked them into spamming basically and subs does the same thing they basically tricked people into subscribing to these newsletters this is my opinion they i'm sure they would disagree and say no no no people just really want to be referred five news newsletters every time they subscribe to one i i don't believe that for a second this happens with podcast there's a very popular business podcast i like the guy but i think his numbers are bs it's you know should i say that i don't know i i should say the name but like do it let's just say it's about thirty minute vc it's a little less than that leave it figure no yeah he's he's a great guy and he's done a great job building his podcast up but he'll tweet out these things where he'll be like two million million people listen to the last week's episode with this person and i'm just like dude there's just no way in hell that's joe rogan numbers that's there is not two million people i know we we we have a podcast i can see where we are in the ranks i could see where he is in the ranks i know other reviews the charts you can look at other the views you could just see the cult following of certain things like if you said you know the all in podcast is getting a million views per upset of building i i think that's true i think that they they probably tapped into something yeah you could see the youtube numbers you could you could think about where where the podcast charges i think it's doing at least a million probably closer to two per episode they do once a week it's super high quality it's got a broad appeal the numbers the the data matches up to that signal but when you're like oh dude yeah i get two million per episode for my super you know might talk with a third least well known partner at this fund i i'm just like there's no no chance and i think i even asked him i was like dude how are you getting these numbers that sounds like off the charts for what like a a business or tech podcast of of of this you know size could do and he's like yeah we have big audience in asia wherever and i'm just like oh okay well i've been in the internet game long enough to know like like dude i bought my first five thousand twitter followers right like i i know that you could get a you can get any number by doing anything on the internet and it doesn't mean anything especially for something like podcasts which is like newsletter subscribers it's like the hardest thing ever click once and now you're a a consumer of everything else like nobody could even measure on podcasting if anybody's actually listening to these things and so yeah i can go get a bunch people to click subscribe one time and it'll will auto download my feed every time i release in the episode like there was a guy on nathan lock that was doing this too he was like we get this many downloads per month i was like was a couple million downloads a month that's pretty good huge yeah what do you do and and basically he's was like and i i when i talked to him i was like he's like hey from the show sean well he's going like hyper speed five minutes the podcast was over and i was like this is a five minute episode like i gotta hop to the next i like how many of these you record today like i recorded eight of these a day and then we release like whatever who's on some crazy schedule and then i did the math and i was like oh he has like seven thousand subscribers but he just releases huge volume of random episodes at these five minute episodes and so his total monthly number because podcast is just like you know if you just do downloads it just adds up all your episodes time to your a number of subscribers you can have a small number of subscribers and do a huge number of download a huge number of episodes and get a big download number and so people i think use these vanity metrics all the time and their their bs so i well i'll bring this up because we're discussing it but i didn't research it fully but have you heard of cast it's like my name but cass so park cast have you ever heard of that are you are are you spinning off your own solo did the brand bake up bam break up are you doing your own at no i i i wish i invented this so it's a guy named max cut i think he's rh h i think he's like thirty one thirty two thirty three so this guy named max cut created this thing called par and the whole idea of it is it's a podcast network but they they only have true crime a true crime and i'm a weirdo you wanna know what i listen to every night there's two podcasts i listen to every everyone night the first one is just called serial killers so it it's a it's it's it's just a a bunch of podcasts about serial killers i i can tell you i got i got i got my fantasy league but serial killers you know it with buddy as the quarterback and then there's another one called you know it's it's this one's fitting for going to sleep it's called deathbed confessions so it's people who confess about a crime they did when they're dying so it's it's is nice it's it's the best so this guy started this and it's all scripted so it has like voice actors and it's all scripted stuff he bootstrap this podcast company which is unheard of and he sold it to spotify for two hundred million dollars after only maybe five years and him and his dad owned the whole company his dad was in radio and so his dad was like a radio announcer or something like that and they producing something like thirty or forty podcasts a day like episodes and they're all highly produced stuff and it's amazing have you have you not heard of this heard of this business i've heard of this brand once before i didn't realize that they i didn't really didn't know the business side of it i didn't know that they had bootstrap it and sold it to spotify but i really i like true crime i don't know where to start just stick so many true crimes and a bad one is like such a waste of time but yeah i've seen some of their shows because i go sometimes look in the brown section for for like you know a good true crime dude so true crime if you go and look at so what's a good one if you look at i like serial killers serial killers do deathbed confessions is awesome i'll send you a good death back one they're so awesome and true crime it's if you go to the podcast app and you look at like what are the top episode four shows it's always like thirty or forty percent true crime and it which is it's mostly women who listen to it and it's all we until like a date line i told you about this date line from nbc which is a show that's been around for twenty or thirty years at this point it's still usually a top podcast every single week and so these true crime folks they kill it and this guy bootstrap this company to a i think it was a hundred million cash and then a another hundred million earn out all off of these true crime podcasts he killed it it's a really interesting story i'm gonna have to i'll dive deep and do some better research on it but i was reading about it this weekend it's it's a pretty amazing outcome this guy had so i just read article this might be maybe wrong or maybe you're wrong i don't spotify if confirms it paid fifty six million for podcast or sorry then maybe i got my numbers wrong it i think it was fifty six and then another like seventy five outcome it was a nine figure out no another attention there was a retention according to the the cast wikipedia which reads as if matt max cutlery the founder wrote it it's very like con it that it says there's like a huge earn yeah i don't know if i trust that does true crab by the way these guys are natural storyteller and like liars dude alright i've got an interesting thing to bring up this is something that we talked about a while ago i think you brought this up in two thousand twenty or twenty one i forget right when when we recording in the original hustle office so do you remember that company crumble that you brought up yeah well first all i love a good i told you so i'm already i'm already glowing yeah you've got crumble crumble cookies crumble cookies so when you originally told me about it the story was something like these two brothers or two cousins launched this thing and for some reason in my head i'm thinking like a family like cooking making cookies in their like kitchen and they start this like pandemic thing and it gets popular and basically once a week they tweet out a new menu and may have a drop you know things that like typically supreme does or like these but they're doing it with like outrageous flavored cookies well that's not entirely true they what is true is they do do these drops but it's a massive business and some sources are it's close to like eight hundred million a year in revenue and the reason i saw it was someone share this on twitter but basically over the last like couple months it's been growing and growing and growing and so the other day it was like the number fourth most downloaded app in the week and so they have an app and so their app now has two point three million ratings or reviews with like with the four point nine average and what and right now they're they're opening brick and mortar and they're opening a new store every five days they have something like seven hundred and thirty doors at the moment it's one of the fastest growing chains in america and so these guys check listen to these numbers they have eight hundred thousand followers on twitter three point four on instagram six point five on tiktok one point two on youtube and they create these commercials every single week for a new cookie drop and it is crushing it these guys are killing it it's so fascinating i never in a million thought this was gonna work as big as it has but basically every sunday at six pm they do like a new drop and their app just spikes and goes way up the charts and they are they're up there with like uber eats and all this stuff like that they're killing it and so i remember you brought this up and in my head i was like oh this is like a little like mom and pop sausage cute like oh that's cute big yeah like oh your aunt make cookies that's nice yeah no they're sharks they're killing it and so you called that pretty early on and now it's a franchise so here's like here's some stats in two twenty one the highest revenue store did something like three point six million other stores did the average was like one point six million the store with the highest net profit was six hundred thousand with the lowest being thirty three thousand with the average profit of being around three hundred fifty thousand and according to the founders twitter they did over a billion dollars in revenue and you can have to come up with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and then you can open up a franchise and they send you all of this traffic via their you know their instagram and their app super fascinating business yeah this i think at the franchise world this is like the hottest franchise right now is crumble cookie because they're just exploding and they're just super prop super popular right now i do feel like this is not like the most sustainable franchise like at one point in time wasn't like i think i feel like fro franchises were like growing like crazy like this i don't know if it's pink barrier or whoever else like you know there's these waves where this becomes the the treat but like i don't know how many people are gonna like anything that's dropped based there's a natural fatigue that sets in for the buyer and and there and there's like a vicious cycle like drops when everybody's into the drop get even more fun because it's like the hunt and you've either got it or you didn't get it and you feel special but as soon as that starts to soon as the drop fatigue are kick in and now oh notifications there but if i don't get it today i can go get it tomorrow like as soon as the scarcity is gone the drop like plummet in value and so i think that that's a a challenge for for something like this but i agree but look here's the deal i have a you and i have a friend who buys broadband companies so broadband companies are basically internet service providers and a lot of people who are listening to the city will have no idea what i'm talking about but where i have my country house i've like a this ranch way out in the country and if you live out in the country it's not like you're getting like spectrum or google or warner or whatever the big service providers are in new york city you're getting like a small internet provider that you pay a hundred bucks a month for and they that company probably does ten million revenue and like five million in profit and you and i have a friend who goes out and buys these companies and everyone says to him well what about star yada yada yada and he was like yeah it'll they'll come eventually but like until then i'm making five million dollars a year in profit so right with with this cookie thing yeah maybe they'll plateau a billy a year is a nice plateau i don't mind sitting on that plateau for a while and that's and that's got that's like how i feel whatever i hear some of these stories like it's not gonna grow i'm like yeah that's cool sorry i can hear you that money powder was whispering a little too loud in my ears but then actually if anybody asked me why i sold for two hundred million you get a slap like yeah just don't ask don't ask those stupid questions dude and and the founder one of the cousins or one of the brothers they he previously worked in tech and he had a facebook app that got to like a hundred and twenty million followers so these guys are like viral guys they how to do this but interesting story yeah like it looks like he was director of product at ancestry which is like one of the like you know just don't know the gems of internet companies that's like really big but nobody knows anybody who's like works there or nobody nobody claims to use it even though it's like really really popular site and did a bunch of cool like viral things and like fit basically did a bunch of smart product stuff along the way to like make that business work dude ancestry is funny too because they're a utah based company and they're founded by mormons i like this guy's first business first business b y u dot com you hear about this no this says on his on his linkedin by u dot com was a social network for bringing him young university students we we grew the network to include half the campus in a very short amount of time but it was ultimately crushed by facebook so he did this in two thousand five i think facebook launched two thousand four and so basically he was doing the like you know the the harvard social network he was doing that i on by use campus but like the facebook wave you know swallowed it but that's you know you're putting that's pretty impressive yeah you you you're landing on on on the putting green right there if you're if you're creating a social network back in two thousand five for college campuses like goddamn you were close to being on to something you know like i'm not surprised that this guy ended up being really successful no it's a really fascinating story but anyway what what what do where do you wanna go you wanna drive can can i can i talk that story really quick ben has a story so obviously you mentioned their utah company so of course i know well so the story is this guy asked me from utah state university looks like he's just graduating or about to graduate i have bunch of mutual friends with him on linkedin so i like okay i'll do this kid a favor i don't know what he wants so i click add and he immediately starts posting cringe like i'm starting this company it's gonna be huge and then he keeps posting stuff that's like i don't know how to describe it it's very like adam grant or dumb like business like did you know that you can increase your productivity by twenty percent by having a team off site so we're having a a hashtag team off site this weekend and i was just like who is this kid he says he's starting a cookie company well honestly when they open their first location i was like i'm am amazed i didn't think this kid would ever actually get even a location open and and it was sawyer the the founder the ceo of of crumble and this kid who just posted cringe to my linkedin timeline oh only like breaks my frame i just always assumed that if you're that mega cringe you won't win and now now i have to consider the possibility that every hashtag user could actually be a winner because i just need a blanket rule if you're a mormon guy and you're telling me you're gonna start a a a cute cookie franchise i'm in i mean come on of course guys get crush it mormon does trump cringe so like if you're mormon i have to i you know the checkbook already out i'm just waiting to hear you know how many zeros i need to put my my number here but that's based on the idea so yeah you're right that that actually overwhelm the cringe part because it's like this guy's gonna sell he's gonna person those out of cell yeah the well that sucks ben yeah you missed out on that one yeah i know i should have just hit him up and like oh this looks really cool but you know live and there i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or doing databases hubspot grow better sean i have a couple things what do you wanna do but okay i have a quick little idea so i was watching the super bowl and did you watch by the way i watched the halftime show yeah i watched it i watched no i i i watched like quarter three who no wanted take you to figure out rihanna was pregnant during the halftime time show quickly the uptake or no you know it was one of those things where my wife loves her and like you know you don't wanna be rude when you see a lady with a lump and you wanna like you know and i not going first that's yeah i'm not talking yeah yeah yeah so i i had her go first then i asked but she was doing some pretty ra stuff as a pregnant lady right i mean that was like oh i thought that was came for rihanna that's like that was pg to i'm a i'm a rihanna affair she's in my like top five like most beautiful women been on earth i'm a i'm a i'm a i'm on team rihanna but when i saw that she was pregnant i it it was that was surprising i think she just had a kid too yeah that's yeah she just had to get like nine months ago i don't i don't the math doesn't even make sense to me in my head i don't whatever whatever so i'm watching the football game and one thing you noticed if you're watching the game is that when the chief of scoring they were scoring with these like incredible plays where the guy was going untouched into the end zone like three what was that were they like well they get rebuttal mary bring around the rosie and then they like run to the line that was crazy is that work what is that but amazing that they tried it right like that is that was an awesome play so i was thinking about it and i was like but it did stand out they had they had two or three touchdown where it was just like brilliant play design right call and like totally worked and then you know i i've gone you know i love sports and i've watched tons of sports documentaries and shows like last you can just see the life of a coach and a coaches like a really specific character in my head like a football coach at a high school college or even pro level is like it's the same type of dude in most cases and their life is football they live and breathe this shit they're preparing all week for you know the sunday game and then they start in the next week and they just like they just live in this playbook and the excess knows they all have the same value system about tough and grit and whatever and and i was like oh this is another job that ai is gonna replace because i was like this is this is an ai problem the problem of an offensive coordinator in the nfl which is basically what place should i call here to maximize you know my expected return and i think you somebody's gonna build ai that basically in ingest a bunch of data that says in this situation third down in seven you know maybe even take into account the teams in the talent you know equation this is the best play to run with the highest expected value it's basically like what madden does when madden suggests like yeah run this play but like yeah yeah yeah that's really good version of madden now that we have like you know computers or geniuses and so so i'm pretty sure that there's somebody's gonna build a basically like a play collar ai play collar that will help because these guys are you just look they're literally looking on a cheat sheet like you know like a like it's a open book exam or whatever when it's like you can bring in one eight by eleven piece of paper and everyone's writing in like size two font to squeeze as many things as they i can on it that's what these guys use when they're calling plays and it's like they have you know ten seconds to pick the play this is just a job that computers are gonna be better at and it's just reminds me of like how crazy ai is gonna be that like even these like total non tech situations it's not even big markets but it's just gonna be like when now when humans play against a computer at chess or or or even you know go or poker or whatever where the the computer is just so much better than the human that's what's gonna happen in this play calling situation just kinda reminded me man ai is gonna be gonna be nuts because it's gonna take over all these things that you wouldn't really have expected or in the line of fire for ai is football as like you know there's obviously the famous money ball thing where he's like i don't care what who's a super superstar who's not i'm just gonna look at the math and we're gonna just gonna pick people off spreadsheets and then famously although i think this is highly exaggerated cha off was like i'm gonna buy the warriors and we're gonna do that same thing with basketball so we're only gonna shoot threes or whatever i i don't pay attention but whatever the their stick is sorry i'm ruining this but yeah and and not but the reason i have a feeling it's not true is i have a feeling no your team and also like well i think he said that though right i don't think so but for well i'm making it own but other people basketball daryl morris famously was like the big you know proponent of this the reason why i don't believe that is i have a feeling like teams were always doing this like maybe it's one of those things where like like for example my favorite copywriter he was like i wrote these famous ads for the cat what's it called the cas watch and he's like we talked about how we use space grade aluminum and crystal courts to make this watch and he was like little do they know every watch does that like that's just like table stakes like every single watch but i'm gonna explain it because i know that the audience doesn't know and so like you have a guy saying like look we use state of the art technology and it's like an excel sheet that like everyone else uses us it's like yeah i guess it's state of the art but anyway we have a premium license to microsoft excel unlimited seats unlimited seats we do not use the trial but it's football the same way where you could just follow the math so there's actually there's actually a great question there's a daryl mori went on that guy forgot his name but the invest my invest like the best guy patrick patrick chan yeah he went on his spot actually it was a really really great podcast if you like likes sports and like kind of business stuff it it was it's kind of an amazing one he talks about like baseball is basically the almost like the perfect game for modeling like you could basically because it's like stationary like one pit one batter versus one pitcher and and then you know like it's a like it's a contained problem is it whereas as basketball you got five guys on the on each team on the course you got ten guys all moving around free form at any given time the ball's moving like crazy it's much harder to model but we can still model the impacts of like one player in these certain situations and so but it's like the data thing has had a pretty big impact in basketball but less than it did in baseball baseball was like a math became a math equation basketball became more of a acquisition than it was before but still it's never gonna be perfect it's too complex and high too many variables to be to be to be perfectly modeled out or or whatever but still it it was improved which is why you see like they they post like a twenty years ago here's what the shot chart look like and it just dots all over the the the courts it's like as you'd kind of expect people shoot from everywhere and it's like here's what it is in twenty twenty three it's like people only shoot layoffs ups or freeze because optimally like basically a three is worth you know whatever a hundred fifty percent more than a two but there's percentage difference of shooting it is only like you know you know five to seven percent worse than a two pointer or whatever so you know you get like way higher expected value for shooting a three so that's why all these teams shoot threes now or lay they try they tell their players don't shoot this in between shot because it's the wrong combo right so things like that and then he's like football is gonna be the hardest one to to game because you have eleven players on each side and on any given play everybody's moving a different direction and you can't really figure out like the net effects of this guy running in this lane what did that cause this other guy to do it you know it's much harder to do but i think that's that's true at a like because the reason these general managers care because they're trying to they're trying to like basically it's like a stock picker it's like they're trying to find undervalued assets so the way you do that is you say this player is not like yes his traditional stats look like this but his game impact is different because of whatever and so you're trying to figure out the value the game player but it's the game impact because of locker of room stuff and leadership or is no they're they're looking at just the beyond the court movement like you know in basketball for example there's an assist if i pass the ball you scored that's an assist but if i pass you the ball i've i've made the whole defense shift to me you pass to the next guy you get the assist the stat sheet doesn't show that i actually was the one who created this whole play this opportunity by by c in the defense so the stat sheet like the traditional statute limited so what these guys have done is figure out like advanced stats that like better better show and individual players impact not including locker room stuff and he's saying football is even harder more players more movement or whatever less plays total so you have a smaller sample size but i think that this play calling thing is bigger bigger in because in basketball you don't call many plays but in football every play is called in by the coach and so if you can make the coach twenty percent more intelligent by suggesting a better play that's gonna like that's gonna shift the you know the balance of power towards that that team because they're just gonna get that many more first downs to touchdown so i think this is like i don't know it's kind of like really really niche share but i i think this is an example of how ai gonna touch a bunch of areas and kill a bunch of jobs you don't expect bar shop you got something yeah okay so last night the game was dictated on that terrible call that you know the the eagles deep defender and you know got called on like a passenger interference that basically made ruin the game chiefs went that should've have been decided by ai ref like why are they not ai why is any call up for debate you know i agree well there are in some sports like in tennis they put a chip in the ball so like when the ball lands out you see they always was like instantly cut to this like silhouette of the ball and like it was out or is in and everybody's is just like it's una unreasonable and why is that because they have a chip in the ball and a bunch of cameras that triangulate it so they can tell you exactly whatever dude but that's so boring well that's the problem because in baseball you would have been like oh great like the u empire call strikes by squat behind the catcher and trying to like eyeball this like that's insane for this billion dollar sport like why why are they doing this and it turns out if you just used the computer to pick to like perfectly call pitches i guess the the reasoning must be on a ben ben ben leaving might know better but there must be something where people preferred that their human had the like final say here versus because like the technology is there for a a computer to call balls and strikes there's really no need for that empire anymore i'm not romantic to the early part of the game i'm romantic to fist fights that's what i want and that's the best part about baseball as with like they get mad at each other i mean that's what i watch i don't want to lay add other crowd i wanna say the fight there's a demo i i sent this to ben i'll show to you there's a demo of because this there's actually a bigger problem in fighting like dude how many fights like i don't know in the fight this fight this weekend did you think the right guy won i thought he i thought the right guy i won but people were me too but a lot of people did not people do not and this a big problem with like it's these three judges that are gonna decide who won the fight and and it's like how do you call it oh yeah how do you judge you know if this guy made the wrong facial expressions like did did he get hurt how assessing damage here whereas there's a ai demo of basically the like like the the striking tracker where it's like this guy the a left hook and it landed with this like with this level of of impact or this like clean like it was deflect partially there or was a clean shot and they're like we should have basically like perfect tracking of the fight game but for you as a fan would you want that would you want the computer to basically say who won the fight or do you want these three old judges to to scribble a scorecard i want the three old judges because that's not a lot of believe a lot but here's why first of all when you watch wwf f and w in like fake wrestling and wwe is call now the best part is when they like hit the ref or they like distract i'm like sometimes they'll have like a hot girl come and distract and he turns around and then like something bad happens and that's like the best part of the show is like when there's drama but also in u c they have a new thing where they measure aggression you know like who's like pushing who's pushing the plot and i think they do that so it's more exciting and i don't know if you can entirely measure like aggression with ai but that's why i don't like it but no i i i i'm okay with having humans do it the you i think it makes it more exciting more exciting talking about it they're almost always like they're they're only ever in the conversation when they do it wrong right like it's never more exciting because man they really the reps really added to the to the fight there by by scoring it you know they didn't they don't they don't add anything they only subtract when they screw it up i i'm i'm surprised you don't want like the actual accurate score the only thing that i want i want them tell me the scores of a fight in between rounds and have that be the official thing because i want i want the person to know when they're going into round three around five that i'm down and if i don't knock this guy out the fights over and so that would be the only change that i would want i want them to know the real score as it's going i got one more random topic let's do one more even though we're little over time well if you're gonna do one are you gonna do this guy this yeah a mod that that seems meaty alright go for it yeah it is kinda meaty but let's do like a fast version of it so so the guy i'm john who's the founder of rep which is an awesome company is he tweeted this out he goes you know some of the biggest companies that were built airbnb uber etcetera were built because they took an underutilized asset and we're able to get more utilization so for example uber or airbnb said well there's extra there's an extra bedroom in your house or extra rooms you have extra space today it's not doing anything but you could rent that out and we can actually have more rooms to stay in and more options for a customer and that became airbnb this multi billion dollar company uber is the same way he goes what are some other underutilized assets i think this is a great you know framework for trying to figure out you know where where marketplace could be or where a and and i think people were doing this maybe five years ago seven years ago a lot more there was like a people realize this and started jumping on it and that's why you got wag the dog walker app you know which becomes worth a billion dollars in airbnb and the and a bunch of others and i have some examples here but but what do you think about this framework and what examples stand out to you i think it's brilliant i see on here you have stay at home moms one of the best one of my favorite companies that have been eye is called squared away and their whole niche is virtual assistants and the virtual assistant is a military wife and that's like for some reason in my head i think they're gonna act a certain way which who knows if it's true but i think that's one of the best ways of like a quote an under a under underutilized asset i love that but the problem is is a lot of people like i knew a guy who started a thing where you could do it was like self storage but in other people's garages right and like dude this is the stupid it should i've ever heard of and it was in fact really stupid and it completely didn't work and so i think that a lot of people approach us poorly yeah i think the the there's a lot of things you could think of like i know another one that people have tried a bunch was like chef so it's like oh why do you only order from restaurants like what if there's a lady who lives three doors down that makes an amazing you know thai red curry you could just order for her and she would get re she you know she get revenue for her cooking skill and then she could deliver it to you and it's closer and you know it wouldn't just be limited to restaurants but it's like a operationally these business are usually absolutely brutal b there's like a whole bunch of like safety and quality concerns and like uniformity of the quality concerns that that come up so i think that's that's another problem and then the economics like people do you know is there enough dollar value for there to be you know for the customer to pay the provider to get paid and the middle band to get paid and the delivery person to get paid like you need enough value in the chain which is why airbnb works it's like a high ticket thing there's one for versus others and there's one for pools that i hear is killing it yeah yeah exactly share like rent rent a swimming pool by the hour right because i have a pool we're not using it ninety five percent of the time so if somebody could rent it from us so we make a few hundred bucks yeah yeah that that's great i wanna give you some of the best answers that came from the thread so the first the number one is cars so cars i think are parked like ninety three or ninety five percent of their of the time and so once we have self driving cars that car shouldn't just stay parked it should go go be a taxi for somebody and earn you money so i think that's like one of the big unlock that people you know people who know about this they're like oh yeah that's obvious and that's gonna be a big deal but i would say the majority of the population doesn't realize that your car is gonna turn into a worker for you and people are going to just you're gonna be earning revenue when your car is idle instead of it just sitting in a driver or your garage dude get around which i used to use all the time in san francisco i think they raised almost a billion dollars in funding and they went public recently ish their market cap as of right now fifty nine million dollars so wow no one quiet has figured it out yet it looks like well that that's a little bit that's still rental cars this is gonna be just like no get around other people well yeah you're right you're right right like there's so so it is what tesla is basically betting on this is what you elon betting on he basically like your car is gonna go from a depreciate d depreciation asset to a revenue generating asset for you which will make the car worth five times more than it is today once it once it's able to just run all day for you and just go do rides okay that's that's bold but that'd be cool if it works out clean structured data so basically there's a bunch of data that in a bunch of different companies just sitting around and if you could kinda organize it and clean it up that data is actually an asset that can be used and like we talked about earlier the freight waves company that's doing pricing data you know how many companies have pricing data about like what they bought recently how much it cost how would with volume and from what provider if that was available in a structured way and you could sell that to a middle like a network a data ag you know that that becomes a valuable asset that today is worth zero to the company that has the data but was not doing anything with it and it's not their main business to be able to do something i thought that was kind of an interesting one dude someone wrote the sun yeah the sun so they're like the sun is basically providing all this energy but until we have solar and batteries to capture it it's massively underutilized like we're getting free energy from this giant you know nuclear fusion reactor that's in the in the sky or whatever but you have to be able to capture and store it and it's underutilized for that reason another one i thought that's kind of interesting so fun one nightclubs clubs nightclubs clubs are really like only useful like you know for like five percent of night time yeah you know at night on you know thursday fridays saturday or whatever what can we be and they're usually in kind of prime real estate in cities and i've always thought it was cool when i lived overseas in indonesia they used take nightclubs clubs and during the day turned them into like fitness day bars so you'd go in the dance floor and the mirrors would turn into basically like a cardio session and then the bar would turn into a smoothie bar and i like oh this is so smart they're getting like double utility out of their night nightclub i don't know why i've never seen that in the the united states for some reason so i think nightclubs is a fun one and then another one that was on here was a specialist talent so like what's that mean like think about somebody who's like a really great three d animator or something like that so like if a company hires you that's great but i would actually say like you doing the thing your world class at you're probably only doing like ten to fifteen percent of your time when you're in a big company a lot of your time gets spent sort of like waiting for approvals or feedback or doing meetings or doing whatever other stuff that's around it there's probably a case to be made that like people with really specialist talent you know financial modeling or design or whatever they would be better off being freelance to companies but it would need to the market needs to be more liquid and fast pace than it is today like you you would need like like neville has talked about this he says the future of work is basically like oceans eleven it's small teams of people that are within in each team there's like highly specialized you know that guy the the guy who's a pick pocket and this guy is the guy who can break codes and this guy is the guy who can do acr or whatever like the ocean's eleven that that's what they do like highly talented specialist they gang up together to go on this mission for a heist they then they split the money they go on their way they rest until they get the next call and he's like that's what and he's like that's what work is gonna be it's gonna be pods of people that work well together highly specialized they're gonna get a beep they're gonna wake up in the morning they're not gonna have a job they're gonna wake up in the morning and check their phone for possible missions they could go on they could choose to do none them and just chill that day or take one because they're like oh that's a juicy bounty they could go do that mission when they're done the employer rates them like like a uber ride like five stars you rate the employer five stars the the the money gets paid out to everybody's cell phone and you go on your way and you you wait till the next job and i just thought those are really sexy view of the future it hasn't happened quite yet but like you could see like i guess uber kinda works like that and i guess there's like you know task grab it and these other things that kinda work like that and i guess freelancing is becoming more popular maybe this is maybe we are shooting in that direction i hate when people make these claims like this is the future of blank like if you say that like the future is electric car yeah i buy that but if you say the future of work is like oceans eleven my reply to that is like no maybe the future of criminals is ocean eleven but like that's not like it's like the future of people getting money is to rob banks no maybe like a group of people will do that but i just don't think that like but why the okay take the oceans love analogy out right like yeah that's leading you to bank because what's actual premise because i think most people now it's like saying well most people are just get a freelance no maybe thirty percent of america will but i think that sixty to seventy percent of america they wanna go to work at nine they wanna get off at four or five and they wanna play softball that's what they wanna do they don't wanna like go on a heist where they like are having some exciting mission they just wanna clock in and clock out and do the same thing every day maybe we think that's cool maybe think our listeners thinks thinks it's cool but i think when neville says something like that i think that he is in this small bubble and although he's smart and gets a lot of things right i think it's too grand to say this is the future of work and i think it's really dumb like when people say the future of media are v creators like doing x y z i'm like oh my god dude like maybe that's like a new band that you're assembling but that's not like the that's not like how everyone's gonna operate i think you're just you like to smell your own farts so i like i i i think you're just you're out of your you're out of your depth here that's that's what i think when i hear stuff like that yeah but i think nobody means a hundred percent of people are gonna do this when they say the future is x i think they mean like a lot sounds that way but no a hundred percent people don't do anything today and percent people don't do ninety fives either so you know not even eighty percent of people do ninety to five so that i think that's kind of i think it's a given right that's like it's a given to play anybody else if you you can't say it's anything is the future if you say everybody's gonna do it there's still people who use aol to get on the internet like yeah my mom you know like of course you can't say that everybody's gonna do it it's it's not a that's not a realistic thing but i think it is real to say shit's gonna change trends are gonna shift and you know huge chunks of the economy or the workforce is gonna look different than it did today because this whole idea of go to a go to an office for a nine to five that's also kinda new and that was also a a shift from what was before so i don't think that's like just ingrained and human that's not like biological that's not physics that's you know society and economics and a society sense to change it's not sexy enough to say the future of work is this group of people that's a nice small enough niche that you can go and capture market share while also being big enough to support a multi billion dollar company that can return capital at a fifty five percent annual return i get it that's not that's that's not as catchy yeah it was a shorthand end of the future yeah but yeah that's cool i have some more topics that i'll say for later yeah but this was a good one alright that's the pod