How Nick Saban’s Side Hustle Might Make Him a Billionaire

where were you and you were thinking about this i have this room in my house where i have the best ideas it's a cool room because you need a shower you're already there it's just the bathroom okay so i'm in the bathroom i feel like i could rule the better and know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a days off on a goal less travel never looking back alright i got a business i can tell you a little bit about that kinda of blew my mind so i was on tb vpn by our good buddy john k i was i went on there and they asked me a question they go so you're a creator and you've got this kinda like cool business you know business underneath your yourself as a creator are you bullish on investing in creators right now and i go no but i'm bullish on creators investing in businesses and they are like what do you mean i said well actually like what i'm doing is it's not that somebody invested in me i'm investing i'm buying pieces of of businesses that i think you know should exist or that i can accelerate in some way and that's going really really well for me so i think that's gonna be a model that people do and so i started thinking about this and saw an example today that kinda blew my mind so do you know who nick sa is i i smell what you're stepping in great that great yes i i love where you're going with this yes i do know who he is you toot my horn yeah beep my friend i like nick save alright so nick sa who is the he was the coach football coach at alabama and ls you and he's like probably the most successful modern day college football coach the guy made probably a hundred fifty million dollars as a coach amazing money is that real a hundred and fifty mile as a college football coach he's he's like his fifty so he's been doing it for a long time but like his last busy was basically a ten year hundred million dollar contract he's he's making he's was making a ten to twelve million dollars a year his last contract wow but the excitement is actually gonna be a billionaire and he's gonna be a billionaire because of car dealerships and i found this pretty fascinating i i couldn't believe what i was reading so the story is pretty cool here's how here's how it goes so nick sa has partnered up with this guy i think his name is john ag and the the headline of the article was the man who will make nick sa a billionaire and it talks about how sa after while he was coaching was deciding like you know what i think i might go into car dealerships and car dealerships have had like an interesting history with athletes i remember growing up in colorado john l all the car dealerships had john name on it and he was our he was our active quarterback at the bar and i didn't really know this because i was just a kid at the time but i went back and looked i what happened with john lo car dealerships and it turns out el basically had this insane story where he he while he was a player he started these this car dealership brand selling toyota and like chevy or something like that and before he retire he sells his car dealership group to auto nation for eighty seven million dollars mostly stock and so he gets he gets paid out ninety million dollars which is more than he was making as a quarterback for you know the professional quarterback in nfl and he then also licensed them his face and his name so that they could continue using his brand all the way for like another ten years anybody had a non compete during that time and two crazy things happen one because of that because of that deal structure john l both may he made a bag and he lost a huge bag at the same time so he made eighty seven million dollars but then when he retire it turns out that the owner of the bro offered john l an incredible deal he basically told him you can buy ten percent of the team for fifteen million dollars today and actually i had i owe you this like deferred salary because you're gonna retire earlier somebody they had he owed him twenty one million dollars of deferred salary he said you know what i'll let you buy another ten percent for that twenty one million and he's john l is like i don't know that's a lot of money and the guy goes i'll make it even more of a no brainer for you if you want us if you change your mind you don't like it you wanna sell the team within the next five years i will pay you back everything you may everything you put in plus five million dollars and eight percent annual interest so you you literally can't lose money in this deal like you're gonna only make money who owned the bro at the time bernie made off because this sounds like a deal too could be true pat bo and so pat wanted john way to be part of the team so he wanted them also to work as an exec with the team got it and i guess he was like i'm gonna pay this money either way how about instead i trade you stock for the team okay so la actually turns the deal down it turns it down for two reasons one he's ill ill because he sold for eighty seven million but it's auto trader stock hey and so he didn't have liquidity at the time maybe we couldn't sell right away he didn't have the fifteen million cash on hand because he had also just made an investment for fifteen million dollars it's some guy named sean mueller who was actually just running a po scheme that ended up failing and he lost you know half of his money in he got half of the back lost half of it so he didn't have the cash he's like oh i can't do it and then he's like you know also dude he listen to the the rogue po team guy i thought it was the bro guy church thought it was the other guy exactly and by the way that stake that twenty percent stake that's about a billion dollar stake today in the team the team just sold for five billion dollars so loa missed out on that and after the non compete ended he then went back into the car dealership business and he he's built it backup up and now with that car dealership business does like you know again over a billion dollars in sales and he's worth a few hundred million dollars from his second rodeo on the car dealership side so i i don't really don't know i didn't put it enough respect on the car dealership name let me tell you about the the save one now what caught my eye is that a story came out saying that they bought two dealers two dealerships in miami two two car dealerships in miami guess the price twenty million dollars i don't know ten you're only off by six hundred and eighty million wait they bought two dealerships for a reported seven hundred million dollars in miami oh my god oh and they're mercedes i'm looking at the ark mercedes mercedes dealerships i think they have like an exclusive i think they're in the like the the prime ultra rich area of of miami but dude i had no i actually spent thirty minutes this morning figure out is this a typo because i was like there was no way that individual dealerships can be worth three hundred fifty million dollars in fact i'm still like twenty five percent convinced that might be a typo and it might be seventy million but i couldn't after thirty minutes of digging i couldn't find it but it's pretty insane their dealership group they now own like i don't know ten to fifteen dealerships across like alabama where he was the coach to now miami and he says that the guy said that they sell twenty two thousand cars a year twenty thousand mercedes a year which is and he says they do about two billion in revenue on that the same partner is now worth a billion dollars i'm paper and sa will probably be worth a billion dollars after these deals isn't that wild it's crazy i did i not bring this up a while ago i thought because i i think i i read some i didn't know that he was a billionaire but i read some stat about car dealerships it's crazy and you told me when to cover car dealers interestingly recently forbes they did an article with another beautiful title it was called the car dealership billionaire no one knows and it's about this guy named terry taylor who owns i think a hundred and twenty car dealerships and he's also lives florida but they they came across them because they're like well this guy doesn't do any interviews he we've never seen a photo of them we don't know what anything think about them but what we do know is that someone recently bought tommy hi they bought his thirty million dollar mansion in new york city and turns out the same llc owns two hundred and fifty million dollars with a real estate who's behind this and they find out that it's this auto dealership owner who owns practically the whole thing and he owns a bunch of them and he's just making a lot of money and they eventually get a hold of him and he goes i heard you've talked to all my associates fine i will answer just a few questions for you and he go and the whole story is how he purposely is trying to be low key and under the radar but they uncover that he owns you know eighty million dollar jet he owns all this amazing stuff and so turns out car dealerships shockingly amazing companies if you shockingly amazing yeah like i think they get little local mono monopoly because i think you get like a territory you might become the only dealer for that brand in that area and then depend and then people tend to buy from you know a local radius if they're not buying online and i think the way that they work is like the car manufacturers basically do like floor financing or something like that they basically like lend you they basically finance you own the inventory so you're i think you're you're not out of pocket as much as so much it's very bank friendly so in this article the get the they were talking about how once you've proven to mercedes or whoever that you're a decent operator they you know they'll they they're like yeah we would love to expand your trustworthy let's go and then the banks will be like yeah like this is a very like predictable business like we've seen this for a hundred years we will loan you money once you proven it to be successful so it's a very loan business and the way that this happened was sa was sponsored by mercedes so he just got done some events show what he some pictures kiss some babies and so he goes to these mercedes events and he's like oh okay like i think like mercedes great so he talks to them he's like i'm interested actually like i might maybe just should like doing a dealership and they go you listen you're not gonna wanna operate these things you keep in nick saving god tier football coach you go ob obsessed over that let's inter we'll introduce you to four or five of our favorite franchisees that we think duke kick ass we have all the data we know who kicks ass you might be able to partner with one of them so he does a four hour meeting with the first guy they introduced him tooth this guy john and he takes no more readings he agrees after the four hours i'm gonna partner with this guy and he goes it's like interviewing an offensive coordinator when you know you know which is so romantic thought he would use like a love analogy but he's like offensive coordinator and this guy john is a hustle so in addition to the car dealerships they had a a new bourbon company that they started kentucky bourbon company him sa again and then during covid they created a medical supplies business called dream medical group so they dream auto group and the created dream medical group and sold over a hundred million dollars of ppe during covid nineteen this guy's doing shit that by the way whenever i hear that story of someone doing ppe during covid always well if you go one of two ways you're always a hustle you're in that circle but it's like you're either full of it or good hustle or bad hustle yeah like there's something about it how fascinating i did not realize it was that big it seems like the key to this is two things partnering with the right dealer before like you know i own a mercedes and it seems like mercedes has been booming for the last ten years like they're cool now they were always they're they were always cool but now they're like they have it's like they have some accessible models that many people can buy so they i imagine they're selling a lot but also he picked the right cities so he picked nashville in like two thousand and sixteen or something like that you know what mean like picking like the right geo that are growing with richer people to be able to support a dealership and where your name if you're an athlete or a coach carries weight like it's kinda silly but like just the jump the what is what is the l one called i think it's called john l chevrolet it's the number one chevy dealer in the country because guess what we like we like our hometown kid we like the local hero you know the local quarterback who brought us the super bowl right like the that's a heroic guy and john lo chevrolet it does fifty dollars to a hundred million dollars a year in revenue just that one one one dealership and and you know that that's pretty crazy and so i think these guys have done a good job by the way here's a quote from this this dude tell me what you think of this so it says they're talking about scott john they go he's even more obsessed with the financial details but he's a former accountant and he compile his own monthly statement for every single store quote if you say to me how's march going i can look and say color base sold thirteen cars last night eight new five pre owned i can tell you who the sales we were i can tell you that evelyn bought one i know every name every car sold how much money we made and i track them on parabolic curves to make sure we're not over charging or under charging anybody what it beast man the only thing is what is you talking about parabolic curves for what could that even mean i tracked them on parabolic curves track is it's in a parabolic curve like at the beginning of when exponential growth happens yeah but what does i mean i i tracked them on parabolic curves what what does that i even mean patrick allison tweeted this thing the other day and he used the freight phrase local maxima did you see that love that love love breaking through a local maxima i i had to like go and figure out what all this meant he said i think i i think worry about local maxima comes from imaging the three d world where it is in fact easier to get trapped i i didn't know what that meant i had to go figure out like word had to be individually looked up i did not know what that sentence what that sentence meant at all and then he goes but company space has many more dimensions and a and so most critical points are as you say just saddle there's almost always a positive gradient you can t along i did not know what any of that any of those or do not i did not and so i had to i i shared i said could somebody explain to me and they he and he explained what it said it it's actually brilliant and it i totally got into this what means it means people often worry that they're gonna that they're gonna grow their company a bit and hit a ceiling and get stuck like reaching a small success and thinking that's as far as it can go but the original quote says that business isn't like climbing a simple hill where you can easily get trapped in a small peak business has many moving parts product team market pricing strategy etcetera and that creates lots of directions to explore so even if growth stalls are slows it's rarely the true limit there's almost always another path forward something you could tweak improve change to unlock more growth most stuck points in business are just temporary plateau toes not dead ends and the saddle thing kinda blew my mind it's a mathematical it's like a it's like a mathematical thing but if you google like if you're or if you look you could you could i could show you this but oh i see the picture of a set you see this shape yeah it's kind of it's kind of mind blowing actually when i like solve this photo it's hard to explain to the listener we'll put we'll put the the photo up but it's basically looking at a normal like x and y access but now there's a third and it's three d and it shows that you can go forward or back up or down and it actually kind of voiced mind blowing i i felt like tom h in the show parks and wreck where he like sees like a piece of art and he's like this makes me feel something that's so strange and someone explain doing that's like yeah that's what art does like it makes you feel something and i remember seeing this this weekend and i just sat there and i'm like i feel i feel i feel special after reading this like i've just learned and and and it was kinda cool i i think you got you got reality distortion field and my friend i i he just rd my ass hard telling somebody they're at a local maxima is always was one of the like patch you on the head it's like wait are you patti me or you like telling me i'm little boy right if you ever use that on somebody it's a great backhand at dis just says like you're doing great if you don't realize you're still at the kids table right now and there's this other game that's the global maxima you gotta throw in a bud there like local maxima but local maxima in fact this article with the car dealership guys is an article on forbes and at the end of it they go joe loves deal making so much he you know in the middle of our interview i to apologize sorry pal don't mean to be rude i just really gotta close this deal i was like oh damn he just pal you and you put that in you put that in the article joe a joe sounds cool but also like a douche he's got into the whiskey business too check check check he's called jealous name's john i'm just local maxima but i don't remember for don't remember don't remember her names that's hilarious that was the that was the virtual version of slapping someone on the ass and say go get them the call by the wrong name alright what else we got i have some other stuff alright so in ai there's been these like waves where four five of the same company will get started and they'll all get like an incredible amount of traction so few years ago this was when chat maybe gp three or three point five was out it was like copy services so jasper copy ai there was a whole bunch of companies that just exploded past ten million in revenue very quickly with a with the same idea which was like hey we'll help you write blog post and marketing copy right marketing copy written for you that was like one idea and that and then they got kinda wrecked by just chat gp just became good enough where you could do all those things you didn't need a separate tool so that they they ran into trouble i say they got wreck but they ran into to some headwind where the growth the explosive growth didn't last forever and then the current batch of ai companies that's doing this is these website builders so lovable is one of them rep is another bolt is another and so there's these website builders which is very simple like just the way you had squarespace and wix you go drag and drop and make a website without code now you don't even have to drag and drop you just say what you want you're hey i a website for a law firm and then just gives you a beautiful website for law he's like make the hero thing a carousel and it makes it a carousel like you don't have to you don't have to code and you make these sites and so these businesses have now exploded they're some of the fastest growing companies i don't know the latest revenue numbers is cursed one of them no cursor is a little different cursor is a tool for existing developers but like you know lovable hit four million was doing basically say a million dollars of of arr every week for the first four weeks since it's now at twenty million plus that's insane bolt is at twenty million levels at twenty million it's crazy right so like they're they're growing really really fast and so those are there now but i also kinda predict that that's gonna be a very shaky space to build out i don't know it's gonna be like a group on you know like could be could it might be that they're the next squarespace squarespace you know eventually become a public company but i don't i don't personally think so i think that that's gonna be just like a feature inside of chat it's like make me a website and i think they're gonna be able to do that something like rep a little different because you got a whole back end or whatever anyways that's all nuance what i'm saying what i'm trying to get to is it got me thinking what would be a more def def ai business so what's a simple business that's about about ai but is not gonna get just wrecked by the next chat update and so i started thinking i was like well some of the most def businesses are marketplaces and nobody's really built a good ai marketplace yet what would that even be you know why why not we all know that marketplaces are super super valuable when they get built right ebay amazon airbnb etcetera uber you all these are all marketplaces supply demand where were you and you were thinking about this tell me it walk me through like when you're having these these very strange conversations with you where i have these i have this room in my house where i have the best ideas and it's like we have tile on the floor it's a cool room because if you need to poop a pee you're already there if you need to shower you're already there it's just the bathroom okay so you're just sitting at the math that thinking about def def def def ai companies like as as one does as one does and so i'm thinking i'm like why isn't there like a high end like you know one of the hardest things about ai right now is just keeping up with the tools and being able to do something and i was thinking somebody should make a upwork or fiber that is just for highly skilled ai doers so a place where i can go and i could just put up a task that i know probably somebody with ai can either do it build it for me or show me how to do this on a recurring basis and make a very skilled marketplace where people can go earn a ton of money for their own ai enthusiasm because i know a bunch of people that are like really enthusiastic about the stuff and they build their own pet projects they try every new tool that comes out but they don't really have like businesses where they need to use them because they're just like ai enthusiasts they're just like kinda bored on twitter all day and i think that you could if you even just had like a hundred and fifty people on the supply side for this i think every a lot of businesses know that they could probably benefit from ai and i think if you went there and you were able to just like state your problem and then have people sort of like tell you what they could do with ai to solve your problem and you just pay them to do that i think you could build a marketplace around skilled ai practitioners right now i think that i think that could be built it's like the upscale version you know you go you go to like the the top kind of like one percent level of quality of job on upwork or five or ninety nine designs dude i always thought that like somewhere your company somewhere or something like this should just make it where i can hire an expert and they could come and i they could spend three or four weeks looking at my company and saying i could make this better this better and this better because that's what i want because i see online that everyone's like you know i think shopify made this announce meant they go instead of hiring you first must say can i hire ai and if you can't then you can hire human being and i see these things like this and i'm like oh man i feel left out i don't know how to do any of this like it like i want i wanna debate all this when you say ai to me i'm still on level one it's just me talking to chat gp but then i hear about all these other things and vectors and all this stuff and i'm like i know it's important but i don't know how to do any of it do do you know what i mean it's like saying like how sean do you want the v six or the va car and you're like i don't know what any of that means but i know that the va is better i like that's how i am with ai and i wish i could pay someone to just come and do this so i think this is an excellent idea by the way so you you can there's there are consultants that will do this they'll shadow your work they'll they'll come into your company they'll do a a discovery phase and i mean all the way up to accenture i think is gonna do a billion dollars this year in ai consulting like big companies are hiring mckinsey in an accenture to do it and then small companies can hire these like indie shops to basically say alright i'll pay five to ten grand to come do a like six week program where you kind of figure out where you can optimize and then and then optimize but a lot of that's so speculative and like what if what if you don't find anything that sounds like work on my end here's kinda how i want it to work so what would you call this what would i call it i call it cute name up slice top slice i call it top slice do you remember we that's not bad do you remember that's actually kinda cool do you remember when we talked about eighteen i thought that dave was so good eighteen is fantastic it was a fantastic dave eighteen well i went back for everything when we just give out some marketing some absolute marketing gold here have you ever heard this phrase i i'm almost scared to say this because i love like the marketing genius of this phrase is so good nobody ever talks about it and i really wanna use the same principle on something but i'll give it away here have you ever heard of marry me chicken no i don't know what that is that a nursery rim no it's a chicken recipe and it's like you ever it's like oh if you wanna learn how to make my like this is this chicken dish is called marry me chicken because if you make it for a man yeah he will be like marry me right away and it's this thing that women say it's like a it's a it's a dip it's a way to say the recipe and it's like if you just think about that there's a thousand ways they could have described like this creamy chicken recipe right creamy chicken it could have been like named the ingredient it could have been the the cooking process no marry me chicken love that phrase love the idea of marry me chicken i think for any business you should come up with like a merry me chicken level description it like what the person really would want like how good must it be that they say marry me at the end of it right so i love that so so i i i'd love to come up with something like that for this but yeah i think that there's an opportunity to create create something of this here's why i would want it to work so i have a buddy who invest in this e commerce company i was like why you invest in that and he goes he's doing really stuff for ai and honestly i wanted to invest just so that i could like see what he's he's trying to build the the company the whole company ai first so he's can trying to hire just trying to do ai for pretty much every job it's e com in the sense of they make a product and they sell it or it's like amazon like it's like a it's like a platform make a pro it's like a brand like you buy the supplement and then you and then they you they sell it on shopify not and i was like oh fascinating so like what's you doing i really wanna know i got an comm brand and i think actually that's a that's a kind of a good hook which is instead of saying let me study your business or you come in and you described the problem that you know ai solve because that already pre suppose as you know quite a bit about what a i could could or couldn't do for you but if i just subscribed i was like hey i want you to tell me once a week what somebody paid somebody to build for their e com brand here and show me kinda of like how it works i then as an eco store owner would be like oh you can just i don't have to do product photography anymore i could just use this thing to do all my photography it actually works like wow that's great i didn't even realize that and then oh the next thing oh they set up this agent that manages the supply chain so it takes every freight forward invoice and it puts it into the sheet and then it checks that sheet to make sure that there's no over is and then it and then it posts in slack that's great i have a person doing that today that's awesome well you know i'd like to take that task and sell it to ai instead and so i think the problem with most businesses adopting ai is a problem of imagination not capability like you could sit down and figure it out or you could hire somebody to do any of these things is an imagination problem for most people they don't even really realize where they could be doing anything so for you with hampton for example you might maybe it could be as granular as like membership your paid communities or something like that or it might just be like somebody who's doing sale it's like you subscribe to the sales feed it's like cool anytime somebody comes in and pays for an ai ai job that improves their sales process i wanna know what they did like i'll give you an example in one of my companies i have and this company is going really fast it's so fast that we literally can't get enough proposals out the door like customers wanna pay but the sales guys have too many proposals to create and so what he did was he created this our cto created this little agent that will listen to the sales call and it knows what our capabilities are and it just it's it's listen to sales call and it knows our capability capabilities so it auto generates a a draft invoice of what services we should package to this customer and there probably wasn't like a good plug in and he just customized it for you yeah that didn't exist in fact i think that there's a whole startup idea somebody should build but like he built that internally and hour sales guys as soon as they get off the call the draft proposals ready there's just need tweak three things and i was like wow this is genius and again like i that should just be a startup idea altogether it's like a you know a a a a tool for salespeople people that like by time they get off the call the ai agent has already figured out the follow email the draft to proposal the crm thing that it needs to input etcetera this is kind of a ten out of ten idea yeah i think so i think this might be a ten out of ten i don't marketplace or the sales thing i said because they're both kinda don't well the i don't know anything about the second one but yeah that's cool but the first one because i'm like thinking like i i i guess like i would easily give money to someone right now if the if like because a lot of times ai it feels like i don't know what i don't know but i know it's important yeah and it's like if just give me all the examples of how this is helpful for me and just do it right you know what i mean like that now the the the hard part about a business like this is of course marketplaces are incredibly difficult to spin up right it's a chicken and egg problem how do you guys supply where there's no demand do you get demand or there's no supply how do you how do you increase are you how do you figure out are you supply constraint or demand constraint that initial cranking of the crank is really hard so this is not something that like i would say a be b minus entrepreneur can do you know like i think i think you basically have to be an a plus entrepreneur to do marketplaces as just like maybe a personal belief because this i think the initial cranking is so difficult and take so much kind skill and hustle to do but i think it's a a great opportunity because when you build them they're very valuable when you when you do build them and so if anybody wants work on this feel free to email me sean upgrade dot com or dm m me i wanna i wanna hear if anybody tries this or is interested trying it well how is fiber taking advantage of the ai stuff have you seen anything dude i to use fiber so much i don't use it at all anymore we'll know from the homepage it's still the same old junk and i feel like i bet if i had to imagine a lot of their business was graphic design and now it's basically just taking advantage of people who don't know that chad and they're like yeah and they're like hey can you like oh i could just pay this kinda of make a image she gets back to me so fast it takes a lot of information out but but you know what and one thing i heard people do i think there's a there's people who are rolling up the top five accounts because they're like cool you have top real estate under graphic sign on fiber so you're just automatically getting you know hundreds of jobs a week input it to you so they're buying them and then they're just replacing the creator with ai and like an ai managed service underneath it and i thought that was pretty fascinating it's like buying you know beach front property on the world horrible the world studio island but this is yeah there's something horrible idea because that's like you know what happened to the t property like right where the hurricane keep hitting in lazy louisiana i yeah i mean this sounds horrible so you know the the key with any roll up is like yes either you're gonna get extreme durability in which case you pay a higher multiple or you get unknown durability but if you're buying it like one x for example or are you buying it like one and a half x or two x or something like that you can make it work right like you can you can end up looking like a genius if you if you buy it a low enough multiple so something like this i bet these people have never been offered anything before i it's like oh you'll pay me like a year of earnings or two years of earnings for for if i just walk away right now and then i know that i can kind of increase the the earnings of the cost potential you know the the cost savings by you know thirty percent and as long as it holds for you know two years as long as fiber doesn't just go under the next two years every year after that it's profit right so you know you could make it work it's not like it's not it's not a horrible idea that's what i'm saying my mother law's has this pillow business and it does many many hundreds close to seven figures a year in revenue and it's quite profitable like she's paying herself a good salary and you know now that she's got some a bunch of grandkids she's like i guess i'm just gonna shut this down and i was like you know smith i i don't know anything about the commerce but i'm pretty you you know you could sell a business and she was like what do you mean i was like well someone will pay you something like it could be one times it could be eight times i'm not sure your your salary like they'll pay you that or your owner's earnings to buy your business and it blew her mind and she was like someone will buy this and it it it it was like amazing to hear this woman who's like killing it just on etsy realize that someone will pay her money i'd like to own this thing and i don't i have no idea what it's worth i don't know if it's one times if it's five times what it's worth but it was pretty cool to see her go this exercise are you doing are you actually using ai in a meaningful way in anything in your company or almost differently are your employees using you i'm sure you use it as a thought partner are you using it like are your staff using it on a daily basis where your has gotten significantly more productive well the example i just gave you on the sales side that's probably that was one great most the most impressive example i would say other than that it's like more chat plus you know what i mean it's kinda like review this email it's like hey we need to write this thing we need to like research this thing we need to draft something stuff like that is like the daily stuff i don't we haven't like replaced job functions yet with ai that's the that's what i'm waiting for is like basically like oh we don't need to hire this person because ai an ai agent or this person with ai is better than this person with another person but that's where something like the service is this actually plays like an interesting part here because you know it's important but you for a variety of reasons haven't implemented it then there's anymore so you know i'm not the ceo of any of these businesses so you know they the people who run these businesses are their their heads on the business they're not as ai curious as i am and yeah but they have the same mindset which is either i'm either too busy right now or i don't exactly know how to do this or this sounds like a project that i i'm i'm a little bit ignorant on but i know that this is interesting and then you have all these guys who have like in the past three years have been like raised on this stuff and they're like are you a fool why aren't you doing it this way this way this way you know what i mean and there that connection would be very valuable i remember so you we both did the newsletter business and the workflow for the hustle was probably similar than the of the workflow for the dude it was so jan so like it what's the output the output is we gotta write an email we gotta write an email that's gonna go to you know hundreds of thousands or millions of people tomorrow morning and it's got basically say here's the most important stories that you should care about here's what happened here's our kinda quick commentary of what it means and let's make you laugh right and let let let's entertain you along the way and they'll put in the sponsorships and all that and there needs to be the right ads the right ads need to be in the email i had a full time person whose job was to do that and would you say the right ads what do you mean by the right ads just explain the complexity for somebody who's like why do you need a full time person to what you mean the right ads just put the ad in because if you're sending an email to let's say three million people and you make a hundred thousand dollars every time you hit send sometimes like let's say target will say i wanna spend one million dollars with you over the course of the next three months and then war parker will say well i wanna spend twenty thousand dollars with you over the next three weeks you have to figure out how to mix and match so today's email to three million people five hundred thousand is gonna see the war parker ad one two point five million is gonna see the target ad and then next week it's gonna be swapped and you have to make sure that they're not the same people are seeing the same ad and no technology at least when i started did any of that so i had to have one person manually do all of this right and it's not crazy complicated but when the stakes are high and it's like my whole business it and you have an ops was kind of the name of the job right like you're not the salesperson but you're the add ops person in between so okay great so i met a guy who is doing it there's multiple ads per email but even if you take the ads out for a second if you just take the content itself okay so what do you need to do that means every day somebody's figuring out what are all the top stories today so there's like a search and then there's a curation and then you have to like so you you find all the top stories you make a judgment call and which ones are worth talking about then you have to research those topics and then you have to write about the have to summarize them and then you have to maybe add some commentary some value at okay so we gonna do that every day and you know we did it with one or two writers i think you did it initially with a few writers and so let's say the the cost of production there was like you know let's just call it on the lowest end two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year if both of us weren't so scrappy like another person running that business in fact when we sold the business it became like closer to a million dollars a year of cost to like do the editorial yeah we were we were definitely spending seven figures and so i met a guy who's doing this entire workflow with ai so you just did that thing and he was like i'm gonna do this that so he's like he he was using ai to scan specific sources to figure out what stories are hot then he would use ai to summarize those articles then he would use ai to check which influencers were repo those articles on twitter as a signal for like social signal of what are what's important what's what's what's generating buzz then he would take that final thing and then he would send it to a human dude who was living in japan who would just like proofreading it overnight and then be like this all this just like legitimate fact check just kind of like make sure the ai didn't loosen he's paying that guy like whatever fifty dollars an hour to spend two hours on it like a fifty or a hundred bucks a day on this all the editing and then he never wrote he never wrote it and he never had a writer and it within it auto formatted it for him so it created an html email for him and it inserted the ad and then it sent it out and then tracked results and it sent him a report to take it even a step further that sounds like i'm gonna one up one up you i know a guy who is doing the same thing but it's for local newsletters and the thing about local newsletters is it's a fantastic business minus the fact that the profits are totally destroyed because you have to have local ad sales and local writers for everyone but if you could just have like lots of newsletters it for raleigh for nashville louisville but not have the writers it'd be a very great business right and he's doing what you're describing but for local news and it very quickly spins up a place a newsletter that says like hey and it makes an ad and it says hey dan in california do you want news just for dan it goes to a dan dot com or whatever whatever and he's built this whole local newsletter empire all automated how's it doing it does six figures right now a month in revenue and it's just him doing it and so it's him and and buying ads on facebook targeting local people to get subscribers that's awesome that's great very cool dude our business is like oh my god thank god right thank god we got out it's but but what why are you saying that you're saying that god because it's it's just way different it's it's more competitive now or what what do you what is the underneath what is the underneath that feeling i have the same feeling but i think maybe for a different reason i think okay so when i started in two thousand sixteen people like laughed at us and i know you hear that story a lot but like people were literally like you you were that last person yeah you said why are you doing this drink yeah you said people laugh you're you're like why are you doing this silly thing and i was like no it's like if you run the it could be big now like i like i i know these like hips like hips have newsletters like it's like it's everyone has a newsletter and it's way more complicated inside of someone's inbox to stand out and so it was i think i succeeded because it was a silly business that i took seriously and there weren't that many serious operators in there and you could say i wasn't even that serious an operator but i still succeeded now there's actually really smart people trying to win the game and makes it much harder for just like you know it's just harder let's say you were motivated to start the hustle this year what do you think would be the outcome four years from now so the caveat is you're committed to doing it you're gonna work hard on it does it have to be the same genre of content could be different i think i could build a significantly larger business i think it would look a lot closer to industry dive so where it would be lots of different newsletters built for job titles that are kind of forgotten and ignored and then to monetize it it would be newsletter it would be advertisements but then also it would be community peer groups sort of like hampton would be on the back end and i think it wouldn't grow as fast and i could own it forever i think it would be very very hard to grow as fast as i grew it the hustle i what if you did the hustle idea again i don't think it would succeed i think that it would i would not succeed dude i to i got to like three hundred thousand subscribers organically in like two years like it was so easy looking back on it that would never happen again it there's too much noise i think that to buy subscribers on facebook it's actually shockingly the same price i don't know if you know anything about the market i don't but i hear it's still like a dollar fifty but we grew organically because we got popular on reddit on hacker news the places like that and it was considered outlandish and silly in remarkable what we were doing it was noteworthy rather it's not noteworthy anymore so it's too hard to have something spread viral now if you agree yeah i think i think all the things you said are true i but i do think you could do it again and you i think you could i think you could do it again and win because you're good at that type of content and that type of business so i think you would i think you would figure it out again and i think you'd have other advantages which is that like you know newsletter advertising is a lot more sophisticated and like available than it was back then so like it's also cheaper now though so we used to charge i forget will be charged but i think it was twenty five to forty dollars per one thousand cents i'm hearing now it's much cheaper because there's so many options interesting i i didn't know that when we were doing milk road i think we were charging that or more and that was only two or three years ago so maybe it's change or maybe it crypto so it was like financial financial newsletters i think definitely command a premium so i'm not sure but i would never do it again it's hard it's a way harder business than people realize it's fucking hard can we wrap up with me telling you something funny k let's do it go to this go to sperm racing dot com have you seen sperm racing what you go to it if it's my home homepage yeah i mean you seem like a spur horse sperm race exam yeah they probably they they were they were trying to figure out who to set sponsorship deck guy they're like sean seems be like a sperm guy like guys the words blank check alright so the world's i go there the world's first sperm race and one of the most epic little videos behind it okay so what what is this so click manifesto and just read the first couple lines alright so sperm racing when people hear it they asked me the same thing every time wait is this really happening and the answer is always hell yeah it is but here's a thing sperm racing is not just a joke it's not just some viral idea for the internet to laugh at it's something much bigger alright that's let's see let's see if they could pay off that promise male fertility is declining like a lot it's happening quietly steadily and nobody's talking about it and then there's diagram of the average sperm count in a man from the nineteen seventies student today and it's basically cut in half so we have half as half the much sperm per milliliter of semen wow a metric i didn't even know i didn't even know you could measure that i didn't even know that existed that alright t i l alright and sperm mobility which is how fast it moves which is a massive factor in fertility and getting pregnant is a measurable tract thing just like running a race or lifting weight it's something you can actually improve and nobody's cared about it until now so we're turning a health into a sport and where they built a race track for sperm two competitors two samples one microscopic finish line and then they have a ms paint diagram of the track this is a real thing here's a joke it's one hundred percent real can i watch this live can i pay pay view for this so listen to what they're doing so here's this is from an article of the times dot com so once the samples are taken which i assume that means they have to go backstage because like it's gotta be like ready to roll right away it's gonna be placed into the middle of the stadium and a live video feed that's magnified forty times to displayed the sperm will track the samples of progress and the sperm are gonna swim through a they typically spend swim five millimeters per minute meaning this race is gonna take forty minutes because they're gonna have them swim through this course the event will run over three races in front of a crowd of four thousand spectators and feature play by play commentary instant replay and leader boards in this company according to this article is run by like three seventeen year olds and they've raised one point five million dollars this is zone this everyone else out there who is working on a product that isn't working take notes alright high agree was amazing i genuinely think we should be sponsoring this and or we should be the the presenting sponsor yeah representing podcast of the or biased baby so but what are they really trying to do okay so they they're gonna sell out this venue five thousand attendees to watch this which is hilarious they're trying to raise awareness but is this just an awareness is this oh an offs shoot of a bigger brand or so they wanna make this a sport i don't know it's hard to that they haven't questions so they've done the right thing so far which is they have it relieve the tension from the joke like you know the that's i think the way to go about it but look at the photo that i posted on here where this guy wrote i know this photo of them eric and it says the future of technology how beautiful is this and so i assume that this is all about like content marketing for some type of male fertility startup up but they've done the best thing ever which is they've not acknowledged that it's a joke and you might and apparently the founders is eric zoo z h u but that's like a pretty common name so you probably know no i know this guy i did a phone call with this kid he was doing a a different startup before this that i didn't think was that like did you was the advise them dick did you advise them you're like i i got an idea hear we out i said just i said just dream about the future you want to build and this what he came up with what the secret eric that you know that no one else knows we wanted fly cars and we it said got sperm racing yeah wow this is this is crazy fun project though you know i've talked about this before actually but i think that silly projects like this and not to be insulting because this is actually greatness but things that to others might seem silly are amazing starter businesses and i think that one mistake a lot of people make when you're early on as a founder is you try to do a what you think will work so you end up doing some like i don't know some a boring business that you're not really you don't really understand very well but it sounds good on paper or you try to you know shoot for the moon where you're not you know you shoot for the moon but you don't have a rocket right you don't have the skills the capability the network they the whatever and of of course those could work and there's no i'm not saying don't do those but i think another path that i did which was like my first business was a sushi restaurant chain like most outlandish idea yours you were doing like i don't know what your first first was but like you did a hot stand you worked for the american picker guy right you did like a bunch of random things that the business itself isn't great you know opportunities of sort of three out of ten four out of ten but at the time if you don't know any better but the important thing is that you're gonna build a bunch of like random skills and so like for example with our sushi restaurant i learned because we were trying to make stuff i learned how to pitch investors i learned how to do i learned photoshop i learned how to use after effects a little bit i learned how to use imovie we created a youtube channel we'd learned how to do you know door door sales we learned a bunch of random random experiences that i wouldn't have got had i just a had a traditional job or b if i had done a startup that was just like more serious in nature i guess because the startup was like a little bit fun i was willing to do things that or it felt normal once once the first idea is a little bit fun you you know you then your marketing idea can be a little fun and out there and then your hiring practice can be little fun and out there you could just sort of stack on from there when you kind of have like what field more like a sandbox where you could be creative versus when you feel like you have a you're on tight tight rails of what you're supposed to do i don't know if that makes a lot of sense but that makes a lot of sense and i agree with it i you also think reminds me of me we didn't do something as anywhere to near as interesting or cool as this but like we've talked about henry and dylan those those guys who were doing clip they were making content they have this like yeah little like animation what's it called like a service business like a on a newsletter they'll do like they came to our house and they built our podcast studios they're just doing a bunch of random shit that was like building little skills for them they weren't experts in any of those things but they became expert level doing them and they started pivoting from what i do the next and to others it might look like they're sort of lost but i've seen work out very well for myself and my friends who i was doing it with and so i don't know if you could advise people to do that but if you're already doing that i would say don't sweat it that can it can actually pay off and eric zoo is listening to those podcast right now and he's saying i need to clip this and send this to my chinese immigrant parents who are like it's like they still the you know they're not a board with sperm racing and imagine being seventeen years old and selling out a four thousand person at stadium i mean that's pretty it's pretty baller yeah although they're just saying it's sold it is it actually sold sold out when you go to the ticket ticket let's when you when you when you go to ticket master to buy a ticket there's a lot of blue you know there's a lot of open seats so i i i don't know you know i i'm not exactly sure but i could see this being a pretty fun thing pretty much of college kids like are i get go watch the sperm of it this firm race even the logo is so good everything about the branding is is extremely well done oh no event canceled what oh no alright update from the sperm guy he's goes is the event canceled i don't see it not ticket a faster he goes no we got leftover over by by the palladium and i guess the the tree the venue they weren't happy with the tmz interview and some other stuff and then he goes it's still the same day but we moved into la center studios tickets will red drop tuesday oh my god what is what is the that's the other stuff is sounds like a sticky situation yeah i was like i wanna know yeah alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a less travel never looking back we're