Someone Paying Our Producer $100K for Advice? - Here's the Story

i think you should go hard on this so you have a a hundred thousand listeners a month you're making single digit thousands of dollars you you would make like six figures a year for sure doing this alright good so sean what's good what's going on sop us up you got ben still on the line what do you what do you got for ben normally you're like he turn off your video we need to focus i'm gonna tell you why so ben made a comment to me maybe to you too i think you were here like a while ago a month or two months ago and i've been thinking a lot about it and he kinda made it not a big deal but it's kind of a big deal to me so ben i'm not i'm not gonna i'm i'm gonna only i haven't told you to bring a about this bring this up i'm only gonna like kinda mention the thing and then you could you could kinda explain how you want to but basically ben wilson has his podcast called how to take over the world and you said that a very wealthy person like a hundreds of millions of dollars person has you on retainer and basically tells you the strategy that this person's going to do in business and you tell him stories from history to let him know what you predict will happen is that right what yes yes he made is that crazy he didn't explain it that way but that's exactly what happened it's like a sugar daddy but it's like a history daddy there's like a history baby i guess sugar baby okay that's true did i get that act did i explain that yeah so here's the full story i get a lot of people who reach out to me at this point basically any fan who's like hey can i talk to you for a little bit i'm just like yeah i'm not that big yet if you're big enough that you wanna if you i think i'm important enough that you wanna talk me yeah i'll talk to you that's starting to change a little bit a lot of people want my time now but this was a while ago and so i said yes i'll talk to you he's like i'm thinking of starting something on a talk you about it i was like okay this guy is probably a joker but whatever he reached out me i'll talk to him so we hop on a zoom and first thing like he's got a glass wall behind him and you can tell he's in like a very very very high high rise in new york city you can see the whole skyline behind them so immediately i was like this is not what i thought it was going to be and so he was like yeah i'm a managing director at x y z bank one of the biggest banks in the world and i lead their ex division very very big financial division at at this big bank and he's like i just randomly found your podcast and you don't know this i've been listening to you you're my guru now so i wanna talk to you about like what i'm thinking of starting and i would just wanna bounce it off you and see what you think about it and so he gets to call me whenever he wants to and not sounds more normal sam was saying is he specifically wants you to tell him based on history here's what's gonna happen is that that's that's what you you met you go you said you said that yeah like i said i explained it differently but that's what's going on here like he likes you and he wants you to like tell him like how would julius caesar handle this or how did julius caesar handle this tell me like what what to do that's that's basically the angle he's going for yeah because he knows me from how to take over the world so yeah oh my god that is amazing that isn't that awesome well first of all hopefully me laughing about it it doesn't blow this for you but but wow but listen i wanna ask you more questions about the spend but i had the same reaction sean i was like wow it sounds like a scam but i i've been thinking a lot about this and i actually think that's a great idea i think that is a wonderful idea what do they say history may not repeat itself but it definitely rhymes if you could tell people what behaviors to avoid or like how other people have had the same move and what happened i think that's great how much is he paying you zero what zero pay you i thought you really got retainer no no no he's paying these it so he also so he offered to pay me and i much the offer how much of the offer well he didn't offer explicitly but he he said bay he said people he said people who do what you do who who consult people like me often make upwards of five thousand dollars an hour i don't think he would pay had never done it before i'm not like a high level coach but i was like that's a pay range i was not considering i must admit but he said i will pay you but then i ended up telling him no don't worry about it and i just think it's better to have the connection and have him think that he owes me at this point okay that's fine i but i actually think that there's like is something interesting here like because like i alexa friedman or like these like thinker type folks like they definitely could get paid five or ten grand an hour yeah but this to me is more like when you the way you described it it's more like you know in billions or whatever it's like the guys got a can't get it goes to like get dominated by some shake a mask with a whip to me it's more like that or it's like some rich guys just like hey i need you to when i call you i need you to tell me that i'm a i'm a huge fuck up and i suck and then that's gonna motivate it you go into this meeting improve myself daily and i will pay you two thousand dollars an hour if you are a hot roman who tells me you know i suck and you spit on the webcam to me that's that's more where the opportunity is than like telling me about lessons from history no this is good because it's like let's say that this he's like i'm working on this thing my opinion of it is this this and this and he in ben goes well you know roth child he actually the reason why they did really well because they just got information just a little bit faster and they did this but do the business is so context dependent it's not like you actually need the strategies of the ross house or or julius caesar i i don't think i think it's motivational to hear these stories right like i i use one story why it matter if it's motivational or if it's like strategically well that's actually accurate because you gotta know what am i delivering right what am i actually selling this person am i selling them strategies from the you know eighteen thirties or am i selling them that hey you know for example ben i use this anecdote you have from from how to take over the world where you talked about you know edison used to go edison used to be like he was amazing he was like had done so much by the age of twenty five and he's like you know but nikola tesla had already done x y z by this age i'm so behind and even though he was the greatest inventor of our age he personally felt behind because he was comparing himself to someone and then he read that julius caesar used to go look at a statue of alexander the great and be like what the fuck am i doing with my life alexander the grade already ruled you know the the world by now and to me that lesson was like you know that was actually a pretty important lesson a lot of people feel like they're behind or feel like they're they're they compare themselves to others who are doing better it's like dude there's no end to that julius caesar used to do that and feel that way so you know that's a trap you know that there is no amount where you'll stop feeling that way so might as well just let it all go and that's kind of the same thing you're just talking about life strategy i mean it's kinda yeah i agree with you i'll tell you how it actually went because the because what you said sean actually plays into it that he said i'm thinking about starting this thing it's a higher possible outcome but if i stay where i am right now is just a more steady like i can go from whatever i can go from two twenty to five hundred hopefully in the next ten years but i'm not gonna become a billionaire essentially but if i go start my own thing i could lose a lot of money what what does two twenty mean two hundred twenty million oh that's what he's worth no i'm i am saying number i'm not gonna tell you what he's worth but he's but he is in the hundreds of millions sound pretty to me alright go go i would like not number alright got it and so and so he was essentially like should i do this thing so i tell him i i talked about the i talked about the concept of exactly what you're saying first of like so much pressure on you to say something that's not fucking stupid so much hundred percent i was literally as you saying this i was like why the hell are you talking to me like like it was so funny to me but he loved the podcast he thought i'd have something interesting to say so i was like literally just grasping in my head i'm panicking a little bit i'm like what am i gonna say to this guy and so i start talking before i even know what i'm gonna say i said okay well have you heard of loss of aversion and i brought up the idea of loss version which i'm sure you heard of that he hadn't heard a loss version so i explained to him a little bit what loss of version was spikes explaining for some listening thing who doesn't want go look so the loss of version is the idea that that you value not losing your money more than you value gaining money so you put more emphasis on it so i essentially said you need to make loss of version work for you essentially if you believe that you're going to be successful then you need to visualize that success and say to yourself and and realize every day that you delay starting your your new thing is gonna make you billions you're losing millions of dollars because you're you're failing to act and he was like that was amazing that's changed my whole perspective he was he was blown with that's why really good my ben yeah ben i i think that you're doing something that's like so common which is and i do it too you sean does not do this you you you aren't putting too low value player yeah how it ends though let me tell you how it ends so it was like a month later i was in in new york city so i said let me meet let's get lunch we went to a really nice restaurant and he bought me lunch which is very nice and i was like so when are you starting the thing and he's was like well i'm not actually doing it and he like gave his reasons why he's not he's not starting it yet and i was like okay well he sounded good when it came out of my mouth apparently my advice was not that valuable he's fitness his water drinking it exactly that's what you need to go dominate dude it's a yin yang good cop bad cop or thing i think by way i think that the loss of version thing i think the in the numbers are two to one meaning you you'd have to make two dollars for to feel the same as losing one you'd have to make two thousand to feel the same level of emotional hit as as losing one thousand would be i don't know if that's bullshit and i've read that that's the the ratio of like how much we value lost more than gain sean do you get asked to consult and like do this type of stuff i get asked i'd never consult anymore but i basically run a simple filter which is would i do this for free that doesn't mean i'm gonna do it for free it's what i do this for free so for ben and ben's case ben's like oh this sounds like a super interesting guy i did do it i'm gonna learn as much from this guys he's gonna learn for me if not more so you know i'm happy to to do my do this with my time so that that's one thing and then the second part is dude you get paid crazy money for doing this type of shit like so you do these gl calls have you done any of these i you i i used to i think i was getting paid a thousand dollars an hour yeah exactly i set my rate at the max that they let let which is now two thousand thousand it's two thousand that's what it was and and dude i'll get paid two thousand bucks to just do like a forty minute call with some re like first of it's kinda funny because they're like it is this like weird underground dom shit where it's like i'm a manager i can't tell you the fund i can't tell you what i'm looking at i can't tell you my name but i like it's like a one it's a one way transaction it's like i'm the masse asus and they're laying face down i can't see who they are and and then they're like okay say the word med and i'm like med my are tell me tell me who's gonna who who's which stocks you because of the med i'm i don't fucking know and they're like what and i'm like yeah but i could tell you you know you hear some things i i think well well whenever i do those things i talk really slow yeah because you just make to pass yeah you you i always talk really slow and i'm like wait hey hang on let me get my hip headphones yeah does in a better way i i can't talk slow it's like too nervous like like i said with ben you feel it'll a troy us i wanna pressure it doesn't really matter how much money you have when somebody's paying you something i would never pay someone to grand for a phone call even though i'm sure there's an economic case where it makes sense it's just a big number to me to just pay for somebody to talk to me i'm so i'm so i'm so i'm not used to it that when i'm on the other side i'm getting paid i'm like i need to deliver this guy like some insane insight that they've and i put this weird pressure that just is una una unbelievable but i'll be like i'll say my point and i really have one point and i'll be like another way i think about it is i i'll read back it's the same idea with like some metaphor or some analogy just to fill space because like like in reality it's one idea that that's worth it for them or not and i don't have like ten amazing ideas i have one around one topic you know i don't have but there there's a there's that's why ben sc is amazing because sean well you can only consult on your life experience and you like you can't live that interesting of a life all the time and whereas ben can just steal he just read a book a week and he's gonna have like you know fifty two new ideas a year the thing that this guy was trying to sell me on was that i should come up and speak to his bank and he's like you could get paid like easy like fifty grand to pop to come up and give you that's and do ten grand for zoom at home to give a speech to somebody now and how many like why aren't i not doubling my price like if they're not saying i need to basically the pricing strategy is unless half of the people are saying no you're priced way too low and so right now everybody saying yes why not price double that i i did one recently it was twenty five thousand but it was in person yeah yeah how many of those zooms a month how many zooms a month do you do more the money one a month one every two months probably is the the current it's pretty sick to me though yeah i it's great it's i mean it's a it's great money because there's this other thing ben i don't know what this what the history or psychology will tell us about this but there's extra joy in making money when you can assign what that money gets to go to versus just generally making money and it's gonna go into a general pot of a bank account versus like oh ten grand alright if i'm like i do these two speeches this week this month i'll go buy that car or i'll go get my wife this gift and she's like wow that's great that hey this this work you did was awesome and i don't know what the name for that metaphor is but i abuse the shit out of that consumerism and just consumerism so you guys can tell me if there's ever a moment like the reason i'm not doing any of this stuff is i just feel fraudulent like going up there and that's normal but yeah maybe i just need to get over it i don't know a hundred percent you need to get over it like the way you should think about things is most of your life you're basically underpaid you're you're underpaid and underappreciated and you know the universe has his way of evening itself out where like you know sam will make more money off of like some random investment he thought about for five minutes than he would have you know grinding some business that he his apartment roommate find business he did for two years or three years and so like you know the inputs don't always is match the outputs in life and once you sort of acknowledge that you accept that that's like the first thing you've have to acknowledge which is like the level of difficulty for me is not what dictates the value for somebody else that's number one yeah the the the the effort is not in proportion to the it's irrelevant all that matters is the output the fact that you know input is a liability for you it is a weird psychological liability you would be better off not knowing how hard it was to say that one thing to that guy at that moment so the second thing is that the you know mister market will decide what it's worth and like you might be you might get lucky once you might get lucky twice but if people consistently pay you for something it's because that's what it's worth to them if not it's worth not being worth more right they're they need they need a positive roi on that on that interaction and so just let the market decide and the market over time will balance itself out maybe maybe one one off yeah that was just a fluke but if it happens consistently enough and you should just expect it to happen consistently then it works i i i think you should lean into this hard because how much money are you making on ads for your pot let's say say the numbers can you say the number do you wanna do it yeah i guess i have one sponsor right now it's whole punch lunch shout out cool cold lunch go to the cool sam sam carrying that sponsorship use code ben wilson for i don't remember how much off a hundred fifty dollars off or something like that so i i will say i'm making four four digits per month low four digits okay so one to five thousand a month by the way also the hack when somebody says how many digits just take the bottom three numbers of that range suffice say i make seven figures i'm saying one to three million in salesforce we sold for eight figures it's ten to thirty million if something's hey right like nobody if you're over half you're you you usually say it differently once you're once you cross the if you cross over fifty million you would say over fifty million not eight figures or like the figures can include the dot zero zero yeah there you go that that's a figure nine figure exit so i think you should go and and do this ben i think that you should include i think you should go hard on this so you have a a hundred thousand listeners a month you're making dial single digit thousands of dollars you you would make like six figures a year for sure should do your own ad rate which basically says look yes you listen to this and you people who listen to this tell me they got a bunch of inspiration they got you know some strategies they got they you know they filled in the gaps something they didn't know about history and they can see you know their place in the world today through that like what i blah blah simple shit and you basically say you know i used to run ads for you know cold plunge by the way use code ben wilson at checkout if you if you want but you know actually what ended up happening and you just basically say this is what this is what ended up happening company started hiring me to come in and talk to them about lessons from the greatest you know the greatest blah blah blah history and it's motivational for the executive team it's a great addition to any the off upside blah blah blah and so that actually ends up making me more money than the ads so if that if you're interested in that you should contact me blah i bet if you do that you'll get one of these a month and it will quadruple your current ad you know add add revenue for the month dude you gotta do this man you gotta do this okay next next month we'll do another segment in ben's first million and and and the outside one you you can make it as simple so my best friend neville maduro he has the things that he calls consults and if you go to his blog like copy course dot com slash like consult there's just like a checkout page and it's a thousand dollars and you booked one hour with them and you just you pay and then you just like select on calendar and then every like tuesday and thursday from like nine am to like one he just knows that he does call that's his call time and he makes a lot of money from at a year you you could do it as simple as that the other thing by the way you need to do like a profile of how to for the world of like i think you know you've done jobs but i think if you do like pixar right now and you say yeah know here's pixar is gonna creativity process how pixar consistently has creative hits and you know storytelling or something like that that opens the door for you to basically teach the pixar way to a bunch of companies that want to be better creative you know more creative or storyteller or whatever and replace pixar with any company that's excellence in x category and you just tell your story as you always do and then that becomes part of your slightly more corporate repertoire that you know maybe they don't wanna hear the putin's putin's story but they they wanna hear the pixar one yes you select the people by who will listen to this and then pay me money to consult consult backwards from that yeah i'm gonna go to apple and give them the the putin speech and then all of a sudden google employees start mysteriously dying i think i think this is good i think that so right now you're you're you're slum because you've got a small business that you're just starting and it's gonna take time to get going we this will just super charge it a little bit i think and by the way i always whatever i give advice the way i explain to people is i'm gonna say some things that make you feel uncomfortable ebook book either because you personally would feel nervous saying the thing i just said just to a customer or quoting a pro a quoting that price to a customer the second reason is your moral code says well that's not what i wanna do with my content i don't wanna feature pixel r because i wanna give talks about pick you know creativity and storytelling okay cool i'm just telling you if you crank the commercialization like sellout out knob to twelve here's what you could do and then you could decide to dial that back to nine or eight whatever you feel comfortable with and i always would say it differently i say do you want your future kids to have braces or not get the fucking work i like you ever been to an north ortho did my friend it's expensive get to work it's amazing it's too good alright let's do some other topics thank you ben i i appreciate the ben good help i appreciate the advice i really do thanks guys that's amazing right that that i was thinking about that for like about a week thanks hilarious i had no idea that was going on alright he mentioned it to us but yeah he didn't make a big deal out of it what do you wanna do you wanna talk okay i know what i wanna talk about well i don't know if this is interesting to you but do i've noticed that your angel investing is on a tear our friend sue just said whatever sean what do did is what is say whatever sean joke he was like oh i got this new brilliant investment strategy sean invested something and then he tells me about it two weeks to two months later and then i paid ten x price for the same item for the same company it was great which is and he's like and anecdotally like the he who's joking obviously obviously that's not great he's like making fun of himself because that's literally what's happened in like i think six or eight deals now where i'll i'll i'll even tell him about it but he just delays responding for a couple weeks or i forget to tell him and i tell him or he tells me about the company a few months later i'm like yeah i invested in that he's like awesome can you make an intro i make the intro and but the price has gone up like dramatically because the company has more traction or more whatever so that's what he was joking about so i we i put you on like an email list for my friends where i'm sending you everything are you getting those no i didn't see anything i sent you two of them so far okay maybe i need to to i'll forward it to them one of them i'll send you after this but anyway so i'm i'm starting i'm i'm i'm starting it off or i'm sending them to you so you gotta hopefully if you find some that interest me you'll send back yeah but how are you getting such good shit i don't know like dude it's amazing so i feel like there's i think the easy answer is oh cool i do this podcast and because of this podcast people come right the bigger this podcast gets the more people want you to invest and there's this great thing my buddy michelle taught me which she goes startups are the only asset class like real estate doesn't work this way stock market like in real estate if you wanna buy it you go buy it if you want stock if you wanna buy it you go buy it startups up so the only thing where even if you want in you don't just get in the security selects you the asset selects you just as much as you're selecting the asset and that one insight is pretty important it basically means you need to build your brand and your like reputation so that people want you in deals because the best deals are all like kind of like super competitive to get into and you want people to win when they're first thinking of an idea to reach out to you because they know oh you know like for example i did a great deal recently and it's so funny you're gonna hate this you're gonna is gonna piss you off so much you've been talking about short term rentals somebody came to me with a short term rental startup up idea because they thought i was you or something or somebody who was like hey bro why did you send it to me i will the by the the subject line that she reached out with was last one in it was like hey i have i have the smallest bit of allocation left in this mother i god this called host you'll love it because it's it's literally exactly what you're doing you should get it i'll i'll answer you you will get in but but basically what they're doing is you if you own a bunch of airbnb bs which kind of like a new market it's basically like your property manager so you're more than just renting out your home or one home so you have multiple properties but you're not a traditional property manager who owns a multi family you know like building of like thirty two units and so this is for people who run multiple airbnb and it's just like it makes your life way easier as the as the owner of that and they have like few million dollars of recurring revenue the valuation was great founder was really impressive so i was like oh yeah great saas software for people who manage multiple vacation rentals and then you're over here building short sam short term rental club building this community doing this thing and i got the benefit because people thought i was you that's that's one answer the piss you off offense that's ridiculous that is a piss office or whatever it is what it is you send me that what i'll send you what's a company called and we talk about it yeah host host fully well then i i can just email her it's is it do they have a bunch of of vcs behind all angels i think this rounds a lot of individuals i'm not sure it was like i was kinda late to the party so i was just pretty quick to just be like okay this makes a lot of sense you know the once once you have revenue in a few million dollars that's recurring and they really haven't even like figured out what their marketing strategy is gonna be at it's like okay that's a pretty good signal that this is gonna work and it's a pretty indispensable tool for a property owner so i like that one but i would say okay here's here's some of the things that have happened one is when i share deals with you you share deals with me my buddy julian shapiro chairs like some of best deals he's just very active he's very like consistent with it meaning like every week he's sending me some good shit that's i would say forty to fifty percent of the portfolio is relationships with friends who themselves are experts and specifically people who are experts in one niche so it's like we've been doing a bunch of like sales person software and it's because we like have a relationship with craft ventures who it started by david sacks he's kinda like the enterprise saas guy he built yammer hold it for a billion dollars his funds specifically just focuses on saas companies and what you're you'd you talked to to david since you son david not not me particularly so my partner ram who runs my fund he basically has a good relationship to somebody so for example when they're seeing something good they're just trading notes all the time and so we're getting to get in on a lot of their deal so if you if are they giving you the deal just being deal but do do are they giving me you the deal because they like sean or they like rom in this case is ram romaine because he has that relationship he's catching up with that guy every two weeks goes get coffee or whatever it is and but then i do the same with my guys right so i do the same with the people in india or the people in southeast asia because i'm like i think that's where a lot of opportunities and that's where i have the right relationships so we're sharing stuff just amongst that so and then the other thing is like themes so for example once i decide that a theme is correct like worth worth betting on what i learned from sue actually is the level of aggression you need to have once you decide x is a good idea you need to go invest in that company and then like the five other companies that are like adjacent to it so for example there's this trend of of of banking of like neo banks right yeah so this started several years ago where people basically were like look banks are something everybody uses but has super low customer satisfaction scores like their apps sucked their marketing sucked so basically people are like look we can create like a digital first bank and this like new bank is is probably the best example of this it's in brazil they're like oh look yeah and they're about to go pop they're under bank there so they start a new bank a friend of friend of mine was like led their investment and now it's a ten billion dollar company and it has like millions of customers in brazil and then the same thing happened in the uk with resolute and mon or whatever so this idea of neo banking basically of can you make super slick like slick app for customers digitally market to go get customers and basically you're building you're actually not building the banking part you usually go partner with like some bank like bb or something like that on under the hood it's bb but the customer relationship is with with a company that's really good at at taking care of customers and building good user experiences anyway so that's the the short answer is like okay decide that that's a good idea and that takes many forms so like we talked about this before like ramp or b these are like brexit i think was the fastest growing yc company in the last few years and you look at it you say is this a good idea you say well what are they actually doing they're basically giving credit cards to some group of people that were dissatisfied with current credit card providers brexit did for startups and they get a portion of every time that card swipe oh interesting so if a million people are spending a thousand dollars a a year on it and they're keeping one point three percent of the interchange fee of the debit card or whatever you can come up with some number where you say wow this company is gonna get big pretty fast so we did that math of neo banks how much is a neo bank customer worth and how much is a credit card customer worth and then we went and did it in every niche we could think of so we we invested in keep which is doing this for canada and then we invested in pluto which is doing this in the middle east but but did you holler them yeah then we go search and destroy basically it's like how do you go hunt for the best companies that are doing this in in either this geography or with this customer base so for example and you just dm among twitter probably yeah exactly we just reach out cold dm and say hey i'm a believer in this for this isn't and this reason what you're doing looks super interesting would love to invest and sometimes it comes inbound sometimes it's oh you got a hundred things inbound but you know what you're looking for so you quickly pounce on the four that fit your your your thing aren't you out of money at this point from the fund though i raised more money because i was like was like before i thought dude you know will i get a million dollars worth of deals every quarter that are good deals i'm not just trying to invest in crap so i need to invest in good deal so i i was like i don't know how many high quality deals i'll have and now i realized that like whatever i whatever i had before was too so now we're doing almost two million a quarter we raised more money because we just had better deals man i've because i'm starting so i started investing almost one year ago well i i did it five or eight companies person in the last before that i forget and a couple of them have turned out to be like meaningful like turning twenty grand into like three hundred four hundred five hundred thousand dollars and i'm like holy shit this is awesome yeah and and like but like it it sucks for a while right because you just invest it you're like money's gone and you don't ever hear bottom and you're like oh nice it works and so i'm like in some some of those cases those are huge markup in other cases i'm just now experiencing like two and three and four x markup ups and i'm like that's awesome what would happen if that was had i invested in this company had a ten million dollar valuation instead of a fifty million dollar valuation that would have been wild and like how do i do that well one of the reasons so i hated start investing for for a while because i was like you know is this the best use of time and money it feels like a an expensive hobby i'm just spending money and not getting anything in yeah and then i then i realized two things which is bezos has this quote which i believe he goes one of the biggest competitive advantages you can have is being long term oriented basically if you prioritize like if you have a ten year view where you're like okay i'm gonna maximize what i can do in ten years and the other guys trying to make the most i can make you know for their quarterly earnings call right this what this is how amazon worked right amazon is basically like we're willing to lose money to invest so that we provide two day shipping instead of seven day shipping or free two day shipping or a larger selection but it's gonna cost us more because we're gonna have more inventory or whatever so we're gonna go into all these other verticals books cds whatever they basically said like his strategy was long term this is gonna be the most valuable strategy short term we're gonna get punished by the market because our quarterly earnings are not gonna look great but that turned out to be the like magic you know they're the sort of like the biggest competitive advantage amazon add was their ability to be long term oriented i think this is true just in general which is if you're competing at somebody who they need to result in one year and you're willing to be patient and get these result in five years seven years or ten years you can make bets that they can't make so that means you get to have lower price bets that will pay off bigger just over a longer time horizon so i think if you have the luxury of a long term horizon that's a competitive advantage that's how start investing works is if you need money or you want you need to see positive growth in one year start investing sucks if you're willing to play a ten year game this can be an awesome game to play and so do you think that well but do you think is you at you told me you're like man i think i could three and a half x my fun because that's average now it seems like it's gonna be significantly more yeah like you know you think about kinda like what's the floor you know i think a three and a half x would be you know a a a solid outcome but you know nothing to write home about but like with a small fund like ours you know you could see things where you you can get a a fifteen x you can get a twenty x extra they're literally crypto small funds like ours that that have had a hundred x the hundred x the fund in in in the period of time right so so you know you shouldn't really the ceiling is high but but the floor is is is pretty reasonable so the first thing was okay long term oriented is a competitive advantage i i like start investing for that reason the second one is you wanna do things that compound so for example if i wanted to beat the market in the stock market right i wanna beat the s sp five hundred i need to have proprietary like intelligence i need to be smarter than anybody else about something and i think just being smarter at a game where money's is on the line is just really hard to do whereas if you do if you basically say hey my advantage comes from my reputation or my my my network of people that i know that's just gonna compound every year the more deals i share with you the more deals you're gonna share with me the more companies i have that are winners that's gonna make it easier for me to get into the next winner or for founders to come reach out to me because they'll say oh i saw you did these five indian unicorns i'm in an india i wanna be the next one of them so you should can you invest in me so compounding also comes into play here in a way that doesn't happen in the stock market and doesn't even really happen in real estate real estate has it to an extent but but not in the same way as how fast your reputation can compound and start investing so anyways those are my two reasons why i now actually view start start up investing as a as a game worth playing because it it uses two of the super superpower that that i believe in that i think most people undervalued is it gonna what do you think we'll earn more of the e com thing or this angel investing thing probably the for me personally the e comm thing because i just own the majority of that company so you know if it sells for fifty million dollars or a hundred million dollars you know all on the majority of it but whereas i to start investing you know it's like my fund invest a hundred thousand dollars we own point eight percent of this startup i personally have twenty percent of the carry but then i share with ram romaine and ben zach so i personally own fifth fourteen point something percent of the carrier or whatever so it's not like you know you're owning a slice of a slice of something big versus just owning the you know how it is owning the majority of something that sells for a a decent chunk is is just better essentially it's so much better and yeah i i think that whenever people raise money i'm like are you sure man you might be able to sell this for fifty million dollars and you'll make more money than if you raise money and sell for five hundred yeah exactly now you know but i have to operate that of the business whereas start investing is like you know a joy right you just read about cool ideas as you meet meet awesome founders and you say yes you're right the check and then they go do the hard work so it's a you know just a different thing can i so you brought up sdr short term that's what i they're called short term rental sdr have you researched that at all so i joined your club but fucking crazy right thing you just review yeah i was i'm i'm been looking at some of these posts dude did you see like it's it's like techie guys it's like people who have like hundred million dollar company by way i don't know how you honor of facebook but like every time i open facebook whatever you're working on is always the tough fucking post on my feed i don't know facebook just knows that i love you but like if it was trans trans only the top if it's sam talking about his cold plunge just sam's video of his cold plunge naked at the top like you know the what hits in the facebook algorithm in a way that like i don't understand i've always been like that it's always been that way for some reason i mastered facebook and that sucks because it's the least valuable there's something figured i what you're talking about well do i out that only for i only help because i only have five thousand friends on facebook yes your groups are big okay so but tell when that group is sick right how many people are a thousand thousand people in this group and people are basically posting hey guys here's the properties i own and they show a bunch of cool photos my strat like for example my family owned five big short term rentals in kiss florida which is five miles from disney world so my strategy is basically airbnb b near disney world i have a full time job i'm a phd student blah blah and and and then they're showing like these disney themed rentals that they have and the people go ask questions at the comments and then everybody's got this like you know you're doing your your magic thing where everybody feels comfortable just telling how much money they're making and everyone's sharing a bunch of good info so i i think that's really cool i what i wanna hear from you is give me the top two most interesting stories that you've learned i'm gonna tell you i i've gotta be a little subliminal about this so in that group there's eleven or hundred or a thousand people i'm met one person that's got thirty five million dollars in homes he owns about twenty of them and he's currently making about a million close to a million dollars a month in profit and was this person wealthy before this how do you get to the thirty five million dollars worth with the real estate they were mildly wealthy they were worth probably fifteen million dollars they had a business that they sold yes they were not poor right and they invested a lot of it into into into short term rentals and now they have a staff of a couple people who are full time and his take is like eight hundred grand a month and i met another guy who worked at a hedge fund and he his name richard if google richard he'll he has a story in there and he eventually quit his hedge fund now he owns fifty million dollars worth of short term rental rentals and the themes that i'm seeing are this one institutional capital has not come into short term rentals a significant amount two the numbers might be inflated because the economy is crushing but i'm not entirely sure if that is totally the case but definitely could be the case three a couple years ago it was people were just buying places without doing much math and the math like worked out when you they're making twenty five percent returns it's crazy now it's a little bit more challenging but it's still a lot of opportunity and it's sick man like i i've i've been learning all about it it's why so of all of the things you've read in here what peep what what seemed like the smartest what i'll call small ball strategy so throw out the guy who's had fifteen million bucks now it's built to speak thing who's done a small ball start small grow grow it and maybe in some niche that's a cool cool story out this or you don't say who but what what is the what do they do is a million dollars considered small so if you if you buy property for a million dollars you're gonna put down a hundred and fifty grand for some of these guys that that's the guy in there yeah if you go are you in the group right now search the word coconut there's a guy who bought a plot of land on a it was a coconut farm in mexico and he put four i think tiny homes and he rents them for a hundred and fifty dollars a day in mexico and he did really nice landscaping but not complicated stuff it looks beautiful do you see it is it something farms yeah you can i say the name or no saf farms yeah yeah soft forms so click it so six can created this like so so it says a tiny eco hotel slash form six cabins one house in ground fire pit at a pool in mexico and it looks cool it's basically like a bunch of wooden cabins that look like really small you know one person two person kind of stays and then like really cool outdoor area with hammock and pools and you know common areas and places to go to yoga with like chickens running around you it's at wild and he talked about it in the post i don't think he's spent a significant amount of money to set that up but he just it's minimalist ish it's kinda nice but is definitely minimalist but it's it's lovely and so that's a really cool thing i've seen a guy like that like that is really interesting and what they do is they go and stay there a couple weeks out of the year dude how cool is airbnb that they created this opportunity for anybody to say hey look if you can create an awesome experience for people like a great a great place to stay a unique a place to stay we will give you money you will be able to make money just by creating this cool little farm and hut set up in in villa corona mexico and how sick is that and then on the other side it's like hey you wanna travel here's the here's the the the buffet of like dope experiences that's not just cookie cutter hotel that you can go stay at like how sick is airbnb be that's just it's it's in a respect it's amazing that it's it it's amazing and what i'm learning is so basically the order of importance is when you're looking for it's just like content it's just like scrolling through youtube and so if you look at it through that lens you can make a lot of money for example when you're buying a property you go on zillow and you look the their thumbnail pictures and you're like what catches my eye right and then if you don't see anything there you're like alright that nothing here but like oh they took a bad picture here but if they changed the angle here and they made the light at sunset this will look beautiful and so you're basically shopping for thumbnails and and then the second thing that you're wanting to do is you're not shopping in any place in what you have to create demand and so you use air dna and it showed you what who has the highest bookings booking rate and then the third thing you do is you pick a very specific niche and you have one unique thing about the property for example you call it a zen a zen thing because you got like little pond right the front or what i'm gonna do is you call it like has a fancy gym or has a putt putt course or has like one unique thing right right right like deck with view of sunset and so you want that one unique thing and that's the same thing that's the same way how content okay because it lets you reimagine okay if this home was not for a family of four to live every day and go to go to the grocery store and come home well then maybe this little space instead of a you know a living room that's about you know just two couches and a tv it's like maybe this is actually where companies are gonna come for their retreats and it's actually gonna be different groups of twenty five at a time and they need a big sauna in one area and then they need a a pool area at a barbecue pit that's like i will over invest on these things and i will i don't need to have these daily utility functional things that a normal house would need right and it's just been so fascinating because i didn't realize how many like tech nerds are into this stuff that group is so cool it's so interesting and anyway we don't we can move on but i thought i thought that was i thought it it's just an interesting world that i'm falling into so like you know rohan from price he basically it he didn't tell me this but it appears as though price economics is on the back the back burner and all of his time is on short term rentals and he owns like seven of them it's it's badass man it's a super interesting market yeah i just wanna give money to this group and just be like hey you know anybody who wants to like trick out their their place and you know whatever or buy their next property hey i'll just finance with you and share cash flow if you wanna you know how you can have some preferred return that's fine so that is the thing that's interesting to me there's no such thing or there aren't many funds so like you and i have invested i think you did as well in like a black rock like investment fund that like buys like five hundred walgreens and they just make five percent there should be one of those for short term rentals just because if you believe in that category you can have a reit or skin in the game somehow that's passive right yeah that's wild okay let's do let's do one other thing let's see i got a couple let me give you let's do let's do two quick ones okay tailgate guys have you ever heard of this business no nice so this this came up at farm con so i go to this dinner with this guy he listens to the pod and he was telling me i was like you know i'll trying to make small talk at this dinner where i was like okay i hate normal small talk like i'm not to oh yeah how's the conference going good yeah good w good good and i also don't know anything about farming so like it's not relevant to me so you know okay i can ask them a bunch of questions you like corn too yeah exactly i don't have much to add so your favorite type of corn so was a bit of an ice breaker i was like i was like first job like what's your first first job first first first or i asked did you have a side hustle in college and i went on the table like did you have a because was doing something different now and they're all established now but did you when you were in college have a side hustle and everybody had an interesting one so this i put that in my question bank of like interesting you know fun little combo winner you're in a in a kind of entrepreneurial group so one guy tells a story he goes yeah dude i i think he went to like ole or like what are the alabama like what are these like southern football colleges and he's like i created a like tailgate in a box it's like what he's basically like yeah like tail is huge before the football game people go to the parking lot and they wanna grill and drink and play beer pong and do all the stuff and he's like you know for he's like my family used to like to do it so he's like first my family it was so competitive so you had to go wait like kind of overnight to get your spot he's like said they would send me i'd have to go down to i forgot what's was called the grove or something like that and i'd i have to wait in the parking lot and hold my family spot then i started to be like okay cool you got the spot well like well you got set up tailgate for us like come on we need a table for beer pong and we need this and that so he's like okay i'll i'll get the stuff every week and i'll go do it and he would create a good setup and then the that space next to him was like hey dude can we next week can we just will you set ours up and he's like alright like give me like two hundred bucks i'll i'll get you guys some stuff yeah sure and then the price goes up and he's like my i can basically charge each little tail square like each little group of friends five hundred dollars to just set up a cool tailgate spot for them turnkey tail and so he did this at his college and he's like dude i was making thousands and thousands of dollars every semester running this and i was like is it i googled tailgate guys did it get acquire so so that was their competitor so there was nationwide version of this he was doing this at small scale that was his call side hustle just to make a little bit of money he's like yeah tailgate guys tried to come in but they couldn't break into our market like we owned our market and i was like who's tailgate guys he's like oh these guys basically took this idea and they started doing it nationwide i was like that's really smart he goes yeah but the how's it work do you have like you just hire college kids an example give you fifty fifty dollars an hour for three hours on saturday we get fifty you get fifty exactly and then do they do the kids go to like walmart and buy this i think either you give them the supplies in bulk or or they have to go grab it and you tell them hey you need to get this table and these balls and this beer this what whatever and you use like a company credit card exactly in the house exactly and so tailgate guy and what they do though that he is they would partner with the school they would say hey we'd like to be the exclusive tailgate provider for the school and the school would give them the license and so they had a monopoly and i was like what and it's like yeah actually this pretty common that schools will basically pick one vendor or provider they'll sell the license rights basically they'll let you become the official you know north carolina you know you know the tar heel to and stuff you call it tar heel tailgate and it's like their thing and you pay them a fee or a revenue share of what's going on but in change you get a monopoly you get to be the only provider of this shit and it's like super viral right because you're just like everybody sees wow that setup looks not boot leg what is that they use tailgate guys or whatever okay cool we we should use them next time and so tell you guys apparently like i think they got bought out by private equity or something but they they were doing like i don't know thirty to fifty million dollars a year doing this what and and i thought what a great example of a college hustle that you then scale up you say alright if this works at my college it's gonna work at every college and every college has a football program that has tail and then we have this repeatable sales model of going to the university and we tell them hey these other eight universities partner with us we'd like to partner with you you get extra income and we will provide a safe you know convenient way for your your fans to do this i thought that's pretty much really cool little niche business and then i started thinking well what are the other ones what are the other businesses that use the same sales tactic of basically partnering with the school and becoming the exclusive provider so we had a mini brain and many because the guy listed a podcast so we had like a mini brainstorm session at dinner where he's like dude this is happening also with scooters when like bird and lime came out in cities companies decided oh shoot we should become the exclusive scooter provider on campus like we'll go drop these scooters all everywhere it'll be branded by the with the school the school we get a rev share for every scooter ride that happens and we get a captive market that nobody can compete with us in and so this started happening with scooters and i was like oh damn what else could be done because scooters are cool because it's a new category right tail worked because it was a new category so you just have to think about like what's something today that they don't even really have a like an option for like they're they're not really there isn't really like a market for it you're creating the market what did he say well we were kind of brainstorming you know he's he's like you know one the hard things is now schools have gotten slightly wise to it they won't give the license up super easily meaning like they wanna make sure they get a fair shake so once you come to them with the idea they're like great hold on ninety day proposal request for proposal period where we're gonna go like see who wants to offer this to us so we're gonna go talk to five companies before we just say yes to you but in the good old days it used to be like oh they used just like sure you know you came to us so you get the deal i i i i i've learned a little bit about selling to schools so i i east frozen me are your i sent you this company it's called kira covey it's kind of a bad name p covey but basically it's i i just sent it to you actually i told joe to sent it to and you see it no it should it'll be baby and what they do is it's like the most boring thing ever so basically this guy steven he had an autistic kid this kid was diagnosed with autism and he goes i don't feel like sending him to a normal school i don't think they're gonna do anything so he started a school and he like twenty kids in the neighborhood went to the school and he was like man managing the school so first of all that's amazing second of all he was like manager the school is said pain in the ass right and so he so he found another parent in he he lives in oakland so the parent other parents are like tech guys and he found this guy who sent his kid to his school and they decided to build this software together that basically makes it really easy to collect tuition payment and also pay your bill so basically like a bill dot com or and then plus a quickbooks and then plus event right so you can like check into after school programs and stuff like that and they are crushing it and it's just four guys and they got it up to like two point four million in revenue room recurring revenue and but he's telling me all about selling into schools and it sounds like a nightmare selling into a school yeah i think it is you know the company who i think has done the best of this is mystery science have you seen them is that like a tv show what is that kind of okay so basically oh wow they got acquired i didn't realize they got acquired last year no way a hundred forty million dollars good for them they okay so this the what mystery science was doing was they were like alright how do we make like entertaining videos sort of like you know i don't know pick your favorite analogy like blue's clues or whatever you know reading rainbow or whatever the hell that's called magic school boss whatever and basically it's on every topic so if you're like you how do wire are plants green so they're like we start with a question that any kid would have wire are plants screen or like you know how hot is the sun and they're like we're gonna make the definitive most entertaining simple and answer to that question and it turns into in some ways like a it's like a game where it's like the teacher can just pick one of those questions and be like hey class today here's the question who who wants to know the answer to and was like yeah i wanted know to answer they're like great we're gonna like have this little worksheet and this video and the video is gonna like tease us part of it and then we have to go figure out the next bit then we watch the next bit of the video so it makes it easy for the teacher to like teach a question that people are really interested in and they reached like four and a half million teachers country like i think at one point thirty or forty percent of all elementary were using them so they had like dude how do they only sell for a hundred and fifty million dollars incredible penetration it is it was absolutely insane they i don't know why they sold for a hundred forty million but i know that they basically raised very little money and they were super profitable and so i think you know for the guys they probably made you know over a hundred million dollars off this deal and you know they raised i think they they raised only four million dollars like lifetime got it it was a bit old they started in two thousand fourteen so you know seven seventy years or so and i think you know charging money is always is always hard but but they these guys are super smart doctor to they guy got keith and i just really respected what they had built i thought wow what a cool product amazing that they've gotten this level of saturation and it was like the way they sold was it was like you know like bottoms up in a way i think where like teach it was just so like teachers couldn't help but talk about it other teachers because they were like oh this is amazing it's like normally when i wheel out the tv yeah job easy guilty i'm like popping like yeah we're gonna watch a movie today class but like this is different this is like it's interactive it's based on questions based on science and they're like we're just gonna teach science this way and yeah i thought it was amazing that's so good this yeah they reach fifty percent of the us elementary school market which is how much revenue were they make mild i don't know at the time i was talking to them they were doing like somewhere between ten million and twenty million and revenue profit and did it make wearing through ads or they like sold work they sell the like subscription i think to the it was a subscription to the software dude how do you reach that many teachers but only have an only self one forty that's crazy to me yeah yeah i don't know this wild anyways i gotta run dude i a call with this crazy crypto thing that i'm trying to get into so wanna see if i can do that alright we'll talk soon oh alright sean if you wanna leave you can leave i think ben do i gotta read out some names yes actually just one name alright we did this thing where we gave sixty minutes of sean and time what did the person have to do to win they had to review rate and review us on apple podcast great and the winner is it's is it s s yes spencer scott you are the winner has spencer i he follows me in twitter he always already replies to my stuff does he know that he won other than right now yeah i told him nice alright spencer got the winner last week we gave the winner for the tiktok thing we did this tic tiktok thing where if you made videos on any platform and you used the m m clip hashtag you you could win five grand we gave three do we have three or two two two so and then before that we did a contest where if you're ready and review us you want sixty minutes with sean and i so we gave you that one to spencer scott and we're gonna keep doing these we're not doing it yet but we're gonna keep doing them so that's the episode that's the winner check it out