#109 with Jonathon Barkl - The Founder of AirGarage Jams Out on Ideas

So we've got a guest with us today, uh, Jonathan Barkel, as he says, rhymes with sparkle. And, um, he's the founder and CEO of Air Garage, which is a company I heard of because I invested in my friend Ryan Hoover's fund called Weekend Fund, and Weekend Fund invested in you. And he sends out these amazing updates. Like, I don't know if you get the updates, but he sends out these like amazing investor updates and he talks about some of the companies he's excited about. And he was excited about you guys. And so that's what I first heard of you. We've never met, but you sent me a list of ideas and I said, okay, that's the ticket of entry to this podcast is a lot of people reach out saying, hey, I'd love to come talk about my startup. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't know if that's what people want to hear necessarily. What you did was smarter, which was you said, hey, I got a bunch of ideas. You know, I can't resist that. And of course we will also, you know, talk a little bit about Air Garage as well. So welcome. How was my intro? Was that, was that on point?

Yeah, that was awesome. That was everything that I could have hoped for and more. And I'm glad that my list of ideas was a good enough ticket to get me on. Cause I mean, the reason I love and listen to this podcast all the time is because it's something that I do constantly is think about startup ideas and just think about ways that things could be better in the world and like You and Sam are obviously doing that constantly. And so this podcast is perfect because one of the unfortunate truths about being a startup founder is like you always want to be thinking about new ideas, but then once you kind of have a semblance of product market fit, you just can't think about new ideas all the time. You need to do one thing day in and day out and like focus. And so then like my release is listening to this podcast and like thinking about new ideas on like walks through San Francisco as I'm like trying to unwind at the end of the day.

Yeah, for sure. That's exactly it. It's sort of, it's meant to be an escape. You might learn something, but it's meant to just be, you know, shoot the shit and kind of get that part of your brain going and exercise it. And for some people like you who need to be super focused on your idea, it's like, cool, I worked that muscle out and it's like tired. It doesn't have this like pent up, you know, idea juice that's just waiting there. And on the other side, for people who don't have an idea, it's like, oh, it changes, hopefully it changes the way they see the world where they just see opportunity everywhere. They see different, pain points that could be solved or different business models that are interesting that they might be able to adapt, that sort of thing. Um, so I'm looking at your list right now because it's got a whole bunch of interesting things on it. One that I just actually mentioned on a previous podcast I recorded is that stands out because it's a pain point I'm having, which is lemonade.com for general commercial liability insurance. So are you having the same problem as me, which is that it's kind of a pain to get insurance for your business?

No, definitely not. And every time that I talk to a broker, I just am totally afraid that they're scamming me or leading me in the wrong direction just because I know that they're getting paid by, you know, the other people, the other party. So it's like I'm not the customer, I am the product. I'm being sold in this transaction. And that's the status quo. And it's like, I hate— like what you said is, you know, they talk to you about, oh, hey, you asked for commercial general liability insurance. Did you know you also need, you know, workers' comp? And do you also need this, you know, earthquake insurance? And you also need, oh, data and warehousing or, you know, directors' insurance. And I'm just like, I've never heard of these things. Like, you're not doing a very good job of educating me. And I just obviously know that you're getting paid to shill these things. And so, yeah, I would love to spend like 30 minutes on one call with someone that would just basically walk me through, okay, here's what you need. Here's where you can go to sign up for it. And I was just talking to some founders yesterday. They run like this mailbox startup basically for startups. It's this, you know, virtual mailbox. Like instead of us every year when we move offices to upgrade to a bigger office, having to reroute our mail to different locations. We just have one address and we use that address forever. And I'm super excited about that because I've thought someone should build this for forever. I've been waiting for someone to build this. I used to work at a UPS store.

What's that called? That's a good idea.

Yeah, it's called Stable. So they're friends of mine now, and I've been giving them a ton of product feedback. I think their website is, I think it's joinstable.com or usestable.com, one of the two. And it's basically, yeah, like stable mailbox, one place. But I was talking to them about how, you know, one of the things that they could do to improve their onboarding flow is they sent me like this long checklist that was super comprehensive of like, here's all the places that you should change your address based on what we know about your business., oh, you need to change it in Stripe. You need to change it in your bank account. You need to change in your credit card. I was like, that was awesome. I'm glad you did that. You did all the thinking for me, but I'm still an awful lazy founder that hates ops stuff. And I still didn't do it because like it's neither important nor urgent. So it doesn't ever fall on a, you know, my calendar when I want to do it. Uh, and so basically I told them like, yeah, you need to sit down on a call with me and basically say, during this call, we are going to onboard you, AKA we're just going to watch you do this checklist so that we know that it got done. So same, same kind of concept of like just having someone baby me through insurance broker stuff would be exactly what I want as like a first-time founder that has no idea what actually matters in the insurance world.

Yeah, exactly. And I wonder, so those guys are doing it for business, the stable thing. What was— what do you think was the calculus of why do that for business versus for, you know, personal?

Dude, Jonathan for president, saving the USPS. I love it. That's great. So let's jump through some of these other ones on here. Which ideas on here are you excited about? Which ones really pop out to you?

She gets to work a set, you know, like flexible hours from home. It's not too hard. She's not trying to progress in her career, but she gets money that she uses to like take us all out to dinner, like get a manicure or whatever she wants. Right. And I think that like, A lot of people underestimate how valuable that is. Rev.com is another example of that, which are transcribers that are like that, you know, English-speaking transcribers of podcasts and other things. Yeah. You know, one challenge with these is a lot of them are vulnerable to like AI eating all the jobs. But like, you know, you can kind of have human-in-the-loop solutions where AI does a lot of the work, but you have a human just sense-checking it to make sure it's good. And so I like the idea of just working backwards from What are things that, you know, 65-year-old people who are English speakers in the US can do? And then could I aggregate a bunch of supply of that workforce and then create a service, you know, for that? I think that's a, that's a really powerful way to—

Yeah. And I think they're definitely this like under-tapped, underutilized, like group of people in the United States. I mean, my dad specifically, right? Like he's, you know, kind of semi-retired, has been for several years. And so he's like constantly basically works with my mom who has her own small business and then also works with me in Arrow Garage and like helps us out on random stuff on the ground and in like the Phoenix metro where he lives. And so it's like, you know, he's constantly just looking for things to keep him busy because he, you know, doesn't have a full-time job and doesn't want to just sit at home in front of the TV all day. And, you know, that's like valuable labor where, you know, he doesn't want a full-time job. He doesn't want to go look for one. And so he's looking for things that will keep him busy that'll make him a little bit of money to supplement his income. It's kind of the perfect match there. And I think it's kind of like this mixture of like, how do we find work for those people that are kind of in those later stages of their lives and don't want full-time employment? And like, how do we basically bring the gig economy like into the home in some ways where like a lot of the gig economy things that are happening are, you know, in-person physical labor type things, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.

All right. Today's episode is brought to you by Tempo. Tempo.fit is the website. I actually use this. I've used this for a few months now, and it's this machine that has a touchscreen and this 3D sensor. And what it does is they give you weights, like 115 pounds in weights, and it's for strength training. So what it is, is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in, what your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workout to do, whether you want to do a 20-minute, 10-minute, 50-minute workout. It's pretty amazing. But the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool, but I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing, and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight, or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun. And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer. And this product, Tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today. If you use the code TEMPOHUSTLE, you'll get $100 off. So tempo.fit is the URL, and TEMPOHUSTLE, one word, you'll get $100 off. So check it out. I use it. If you look me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard because I actually love this thing and I use it all the time. So check it out.

Give me one more and then I wanna talk about Air Garage a little bit. So give me, give me one more idea off this list that you think is interesting, want to chat about.

Yeah, I think one of the things that we think about a lot is like getting user feedback, of course. And so getting ratings through our web app and through our mobile app. But one of the things that's challenging about that for us and for small businesses, I think, is that those ratings are all in different places and everybody's looking at different sources. So you may go to a Yelp page for a business and it has like, 5 ratings, you may go to a Google listing for the business and it has 500 ratings. So it's not really very clear, like, okay, what is the trustworthy source? And so I think a service that one could build for small businesses would basically be some sort of service that uses the Yelp API, uses the Google Maps API, and you send this like one rate, one rating kind of platform to your customers. And the customer leaves one singular rating. They say, oh, it's 5 stars. Here's what I have to say. And then that one rating service then turns around and posts it to each of those individual rating sites so that then as a business, you have this kind of cohesive all over the place, you know, brand rather than having to say, oh, hey, you rated us on Google. We really appreciate that. But actually we needed it more on Yelp because our ratings over there are worse and we need to improve our ratings on Yelp so that people will come in. And so this is one of the things that we deal with a lot because we actually, you know, on Google have listings for every single one of our individual parking lots and garages. And so there's like hundreds of different locations. So like this property manager that we're working with that works at a large regional property management company left us this stellar review the other day. Super generous of her to do that, you know, really kind, had good things to say, but she left it on like the parking lot in Salt Lake City that she like owns. So like nobody's ever going to see that, right? It's like, you know, would have been great if she could have written that once and then it gets posted to a bunch of different places so that people actually see it in the places they're looking.

Right, right. And so tell us about Air Garage. How did you come up with this idea? So explain what the idea is and how you came up with it.

Amazing. And how many different parking garages or parking lots are you working with?

Uh, yeah, good question. So in August we had a little under 100 locations across the country. So that's up pretty significantly in the last few months, which is awesome considering things have been slow because of COVID Yeah, I was going to say, uh, you're one of the businesses that probably are negatively affected by COVID.

People aren't driving around as much.

Yeah, definitely it was a negative impact in the short term. I mean, you know, our revenue dropped from like, you know, basically say it was like 100% in February, in March it was like 50%, then in April it was like 15%. So it was very painful in the short term, but it actually has turned out to be this great thing in the long run because it forced us to really ask like, okay, why can't we grow? And, you know, really we're such a small company and we're sufficiently small, the market is sufficiently big. That even in light of COVID we should be able to grow regardless. And so what's stopping us? It's really just ourselves. And so we started focusing on different sales channels, different customers, that kind of thing to get back to growth.

And so what is it now? If 100% went down to 50, then 15, you know, here we are in the start of September. Where is it? Is it at 50%, 60%? Is it 150% where you were yet from where you were pre-COVID?

which is great because when COVID returns, you'll sort of— you'll see the true gains of this. Ideally. And also, is it true that, you know, now these folks who are the owners themselves who have lost their foot traffic and revenue, they're now looking for additional revenue streams, or is that not true?

So it's somewhat true. You know, what we've found basically in the last 6 months is, you know, basically the way the parking industry works is there's like the owners on the bottom level Right above that is like the parking operators, and the parking operators are the equivalent of the property managers in this world. And then on top of that, there's like all these tech companies that have come out in the last 20 years that have tried to sell technology to the parking operators to improve the industry. Hasn't really worked, but we work directly with the owners, not with the parking operators, right? So we are a parking operator. And so what we've seen is a lot of the old school parking operators, the way their business model works is they will come to you and say, hey, I want to lease your parking lot for 5 years. At $8,000 a month and you say, okay, sounds good, steady revenue, you know, income stream for me as an owner. And then they turn around and make $16,000 or $20,000 a month on your parking lot and they take the cut. And so they've been happy to take that, you know, upside when times have been great. But then as soon as COVID hit, they were basically going around talking to, talking to owners and canceling their leases. And so we were kind of scooping up a bunch of parking lots from that where people were rubbed the wrong way by these old school companies coming back to them and canceling leases or just not making payments during COVID And do you guys do it the same way?

You offer them a fixed rate and then you, you're very, you might exceed that or you're on the hook or do you just say no rate, but let's share the revenue or how does it work for you?

Gotcha. Okay. And I see like a bunch of your ideas are sort of like in this kind of peer-to-peer or, you know, marketplace style thing, just the way that you're doing with AirGarage. It seems like here's a couple of them that you have, right? So another USPS idea is partner with them to create a real-time Street View competitor for Google Street View. That's a similar thing. You take sort of excess capacity that they have, you use technology to create new value, right? You have another one that is, let's see, this ads one that you have, which is basically like it's Airbnb for billboards. People in cities have a bunch of unused space called their windows where you could put a bill— like a mini billboard. And so you could turn a non-revenue-generating asset, your window space that you're not really using or looking at, and you could start generating, you know, some, some revenue from that. Um, so is this where your brain goes? Is this what you like to brainstorm the most or why is that the case?

Like, here's another one you have on yours, which is a shipping service that's peer-to-peer. Basically, you used, uh, when people don't use their checked bag allowance, and, uh, you could use that to ship an item, which I think is practically so hard to do. But I love that you're just identifying what are all the inefficiencies and underutilized resources. And, you know, some of these, one of these, when you get them right, uh, these really do change the world, right? They really do make the world sort of more efficient, more effective, bring people new revenue streams where they didn't have it before.

Yeah. And I think the interesting thing about them is like, even if they're terrible ideas like that one would probably be super logistically difficult to make work and the airlines would probably catch on so fast and just cut you off. But, you know, for example, like every time I fly, I'm flying on like Southwest or whatever, 2 free bags. Like, why am I not using those? Or if you're flying international especially. But yeah, I mean, it's like it's so interesting because the resource is so, so just widely available. Like those checked bags are just so widely available. And if you could crack the code and get it quite right, you could scale up so quickly because that resource is available among so many consumers and so many flights being done each day that if you could figure out the formula for actually how to distribute the product and make it work and not get caught and, you know, figure out the logistics, then you can scale from, you know, zero to the moon really fast.

Right. Yeah. I feel like two of my favorite ideas are in this category, which is I forgot the name of it, but there's a company that started a while back that does— they go to hotels and they say, hey, you know, person stayed here for one night, they opened up the shampoo, they used it once, and then half the bottle's left and you have this plastic bottle and half the shampoo. And so they basically said, let's collect all that. We will recycle it, create a new product of the leftover sort of shampoos, soaps, and conditioners and whatnot that you guys can't serve to the next guest. And they created quite a big business sort of recycling this inventory and these assets. And it's a feel-good story for people who want to be more environmentally conscious and take advantage of some of this otherwise luxurious waste that we create. And then the other one that's like that is Unclaimed Baggage, which we talked about on the podcast before, so I won't go into too much detail. But basically, like, I don't know, 0.3% of all bags that get lost never get picked up.. And so like the airline has to get rid of this. So they basically say, they basically get paid, I think, to take these bags away and then they auction off the items in there and give the, you know, a portion of the proceeds to charities. And I think, um, like who, who knew, right? Uh, but of course if you look around, there's just excess capacity, there's excess resources. There's sort of these inefficiencies in the world where you can sort of tie two things together and say, okay, we've created value on one side and we've reduced waste on the other.

So you're an interesting dude. What's your information diet? What do you— I'll ask you a couple of specific questions, right? You wake up in the morning, you look at your phone. What are the first 2 or 3 things you check?

Great question. So actually, I try to avoid looking at my phone first thing in the morning. So my habit lately is that I wake up first thing and I read a book for an hour. So that's not always been the case.

Wake up and you read a book for an hour? I really—

I try to wake up and try to read a book for an hour. So right now I'm reading this book, like I said, called Superpower. Right before that, I was reading this book called— about Genghis Khan, which is an amazing book. It's called like Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World or something.

I don't care about any book. I don't care about this habit. This habit is incredible to me. So do you even get out of the bed, or do you just turn the lamp on and start reading in bed? Yeah, you get up, you brush your teeth, you do whatever, or do you Just start reading.

No, because if I get up, I will start basically getting into the morning routine and then start working. And that's what I'm trying to avoid doing is I'm trying to like basically spend the first hour forcing myself to read a book because I don't get any other time to read during the day. And usually at the end of the day, I'm too like wired and like amped from working all day. And then I don't want to sit down and like read a book. And so I'm distracted. And so I try to do an hour a day in the morning because like it's the morning time. Nobody's bugging me. None of the, you know, team members have asked me any questions yet. There's nothing exploding. So it's like one peaceful hour in the morning of like getting some reading in.

Okay, amazing. I'm glad I asked that question. I didn't, I didn't expect that. Okay, so, so your information diet. So you're reading books, you're reading the Genghis Khan book. Sounds like you read books that— what's your criteria for books? Is it stuff I see people recommending on Twitter? Is it I like biographies and I only read biographies? Like, how do you pick your books?

Yeah, I've been trying to make it a more diverse set lately because I realized that I read a lot of like obviously books that a tech startup founder would be a fan of about biographies and things that are like tech companies that have been built and things like that. So, definitely been trying to diversify, but usually what I'm doing is either seeing people recommending books on Twitter or finding books in old used bookstores and then buying them and just going based on the COVID and totally judging a book by its cover and picking it up and reading it. So, the superpower book that I'm reading right now, I saw because this guy on Twitter who works at Stripe in their clean energy department, I think his name is Ryan Warbuck. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Was, you know, he posted this thread about, you know, does anyone have resources about the grid and like how to learn more? And this was one of the books that was recommended there.

Love it. Okay. So that's the book side of things. What else is your information diet? Where do you, where do you find yourself spending? Tell me about your, either your junk food or your healthy food for your information diet. Like what are the resources that are helping feed your brain? Or, you know, relax your brain. What do you like?

Well, let's start with the junk food is definitely TikTok. Like, I don't know about you, but as a member of the Gen Z, quote unquote, like TikTok is a drug. How old are you? I am 20— 23? 23.

Yeah. I love that you didn't know. I'm the same way. I actually just keep saying the wrong number and people think I'm like trying to— I'm like, no, in my head, that's just the last time I remember my age. And then I just keep saying it. Uh, but I think I'm 32. Yeah. Uh, okay. So that's amazing. You're 23. That's great. Um, so you, so TikTok is good. You, uh, and TikTok is crazy. Like I liked a video once of someone, someone sang, um, you know that song Old Town Road?

Yeah.

They sang like a Jesus version of it. And I thought it was a, it was a clever little remix. So I clicked it and now TikTok thinks I'm like this devout Christian and just gives me like all of like religious TikTok, which is kind of a rabbit hole I didn't even know existed. Or it'll switch to like sports or whatever. But what do you like on TikTok?

Well, so I think one of the things that I love about TikTok is like when I go on Twitter sometimes I'm just so sick of being in the information bubble that I'm like always in, which is like tech and VC Twitter and like, you know, there's, there's benefits to being inside that bubble, but there's also detriments. And so the thing that I like about TikTok is it does not have any clue that I like work in tech or that I like work on Airgrudge. And so like I've basically curated my feed to be mostly like garden videos, cat videos, because I adopted this cat from like, like basically a stray cat like 6 months ago. Like all these things that are like totally just like pure fun and release and information. And so like, but I think there's, you know, there's, there's value to TikTok. Like we get a lot of ideas for like DIY projects on TikTok. So like I'm literally sitting here, I'm sitting in our backyard staring at these two like giant basically raised garden beds that we built this weekend over, you know, the weekend and used instructions that we found on TikTok. And so there's actually like a ton of valuable information on TikTok, but it's nice for me. And like the reason that I like it for like 30 to 45 minutes a day is because it's just a pure escape from my reality. Whereas like going on Twitter is just more of the same. And I feel like I walk away. Yeah, I walk away from it just super frustrated because I'm like, all these people are like annoying and just talking about these dumb things that don't matter. Like, you know, who is the, you know, VC brags. Meme thing.

So yeah, yeah, everybody's talking about how it doesn't matter, but then they're all talking about it. So, so, okay, so I like that. So that's the part of the junk food. Anything else in the junk food category, or let's go— or we could switch to the stuff that's feeding your brain.

No, that's the other— it's mainly the junk food. I don't think there's really any other junk food besides maybe like going through Craigslist in the free section. Like, it's kind of my junk food too.

Did you go pick up the stuff, or you just want to see what's out there?

Oh, well, I mean, we pick up stuff. Like, most of the furniture in my house I think has come from Craigslist free section. Like, we have We have these Adirondack chairs, we have these like sofas in the backyard, we have this, you know, these couches that we got for free on Craigslist. It's just such a dope hit to like find something cool on Craigslist. I think it's the same, like, same dope hit that I get like from like recruiting when you're like going through like on AngelList looking for people and you find one, you know, diamond in the rough and you're like, this person's amazing, like match with them. It's the same exact dope hit. And it's like trying to direct the dope hit in like a positive, constructive direction.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very true. In fact, I think more products should be designed for that. Like, the human brain loves this, like, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, find.

Yeah.

And then, like, might not find again for a while, but, like, you know, that, that, that the rewards of the hunt, um, as Nir Eyal would say. And so I think, uh, there should be more products designed not to just give you good stuff, but to give you a very easy slippery slope to browse and find something good, um, that it could be in the most arbitrary way and people will do it.

Right. No. And that's, I mean, that's, you know, how TikTok works exactly. And it's like you find the one TikTok that you want to watch and it's like such a dope hit, but then like TikTok, you walk away not having gotten anything except maybe information about how to build some garden beds. But, you know, with Craigslist or, you know, Facebook Marketplace, you're scrolling through and you may find something that actually, you know, has a positive impact on your life, I think.

Right, right. Okay. I like that one. And what about on the feed your brain side? How do you get smarter, more knowledgeable? What do you like to— what are the like kind of best sources for you of that information?

Yeah, it's good. And I'm trying to think, and I mean, I think the vast majority of it is just through reading books. Like, I just love reading books and like try to do as much reading as possible. Like, I'm not going to claim that I like read 100 books a year or whatever those fake metrics are, but like I just try to consistently do the input of reading like an hour a day or, you know, X number of hours per week. And I think with that comes a lot of like positive information. And like, you know, I learned so much about, for example, I read this long biography of Deng Xiaoping, you know, basically about, you know, he was basically the premier leader, the top leader of China for X number of years. He was never actually officially premier or chairman of the party. But there were so many things that I just hadn't even heard because I live in this American bubble, such as the fact that like China went to war with like Vietnam in, you know, like the late '70s. And it's like, something that I had no clue existed. I also had no idea that China and the Soviet Union were like basically arch enemies for a while during the '70s and '80s. And it's like, those are things that in the American bubble, I just assumed were not even true or not even possible. Right. And, you know, constantly learning those things through books. But I mean, I do definitely listen to a lot of the podcasts just through, you know, walking and going on walks just to decompress, especially during quarantine, like trying to get outside and just go for walks and listen to a podcast. So, you know, your podcast has been one of those that I've been listening to consistently. I think my other favorite podcast is probably Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best. I think he just does a great job, especially when it's like operators on there, of asking them the right questions that I want to hear. And so I really like that.

And what about— you strike me as somebody who I think might have a good answer to this. No pressure. But Tim Ferriss has this question which is like, what's the best purchase you've made for like under $120, under $100 that's like improved the quality of your life? And for you, you might not have even purchased it. It might have been free off Craigslist. But is there a thing that's improved your quality of life, a purchase you've made? And if not a purchase, then maybe a habit you took up aside from the reading an hour a day.

Okay. Not— sorry, it doesn't fit the criteria of like under $120.

It's okay.

Criteria are okay. So actually, actually it does fit it because I split the cost with my roommate, but we just bought a new Dyson vacuum. And like before, we just had like this crappy stick vacuum that my parents had handed down to me and I had all through college.

And these are the electric ones, right? The kind of cordless electric ones, right?

Very fancy. Like it's like this, you know, this amazing contraption that you can carry around your house. It sits on your wall and charges, and then you could just like pop it off and go walk. And, you know, it makes it so much easier and more enjoyable to vacuum because I think they designed it correctly where you see everything that you vacuum up. And so it's like this amazing satisfaction at the end. It's like the story— I don't remember where this is from, but some book talks about how like Febreze was this big flop until they added the scent. And then it became like, oh, you know, if you clean your house and then you Febreze it, you get the nice like completed sense of like accomplishment. And I cleaned my house and I Febreze'd it and I smell it. It's the same thing of like, you know, with my old vacuum, like, A, it wouldn't suck anything up because it was a terrible old-school vacuum. And B, you know, you couldn't see anything that did suck up while you were vacuuming. So you didn't know, you didn't know what you were doing. And so weirdly, I think that's one of the things that's been amazing the last couple of weeks. We just bought it 2 weeks ago, which is why I'm weirdly still excited about it.

I have, I have that same vacuum and I vacuumed for the first, probably first time in my life., the other day just to like, I was just trying to show my cleaning lady how this, like, try this one. I think this works. And I did it and I was like, oh, nevermind, I'll do this. You go do something else. Like, I love this. It was very therapeutic. Yeah. Uh, like the suction was great. The, like you said, it's being able to see like all the dirt just going away was like amazing. It was like totally cordless. It was like the Tesla of vacuums. I loved it. Uh, but as you said that, it kind of reminded me, I think somebody could make a kind of D2C competitor of this vacuum. And brand it better because I don't think most— I don't think they advertise well or advertise in the modern channels or in the modern ways. And also, it should release a scent. It should have the Febreze thing where your room smells clean through the vacuuming and not just the lines on the carpet or on the wood or whatever. And so I think that that would be a nice little addition. So D2C, D2C vacuum, I think would be another little idea for you.

It's the Southwest model. It's, hey, free ink 3 times a year. Like, hey, this printer comes with free free ink recharges, and it just has some caps so you can't like totally abuse it.

Yeah.

But just build that, it's like the free shipping thing. It's like, okay, cool, you add $12 to the price of the thing, and I'm happy to like, you know, do that or whatever. I don't know how much ink costs, but like whatever, you get the idea. And I thought printers were dead, and then now I just like somehow constantly need a printer at home. I think that's like getting older, you just need printers.

Yeah, it's weirdly convenient to have a printer. I mean, it definitely is not something that you should have to buy.

Especially with work from home, right? 'Cause you can't print at work anymore.

Well, and personally, like one of the things that, okay, so actually I have another answer to your question about what has been a purchase that I've made recently. I love using like paper. And so like I just bought one of these paper tablets. I don't know if you've heard of these, but—

What's that one called? I get ads, I think, for this all the time.

Yeah, it's called the reMarkable tablet. reMarkable. And so I just bought one of these. Basically, they're about to come out with their version 2 of it, but the version 2 is getting roasted on their subreddit because it's been delayed like 5 times in the last few months. Doesn't seem like a massive upgrade to me, so I just bought the version 1, which now is like $300 from them directly with the, like, with the pen and with the case that were like an extra $75 or $100 before. So it was like $600 before, now it's like $300. I've always wanted one, and I love like writing things down. Like when I make a to-do list, like, I am just like always like scribbling on papers. Yeah, like I'm always scribbling on papers. It's so obnoxious, and then I always lose them, and I was just like hating my workflow and this fits so perfectly in my workflow. So I would say this is the thing for me because then also I can read ebooks on it. I can read PDFs on it. And it's been great because I literally carry it around with me all the time. And it's replaced, like I literally, like when I would read like lease agreements or documents for our company, I have a printer just so I can print them out because I can't read those things on my computer for some reason. I just have too much like ADHD of like Slack notifications coming in and emails and X, Y, and Z, and it's like hard to focus on reading a legal document because they're so boring. So I'd always print them out, but now I've been reading them on this tablet instead and, you know, saving the earth 15 pages at a time.

So this thing is good quality, this Remarkable One?

You know, I'm satisfied with it so far. I think I've had it for like 3 weeks, and I bought it because they have a 30-day unconditional return policy, which was awesome. But I have no intention of returning it, and, you know, I've basically forgotten that I even paid $300 for it, even though that seemed like a ridiculous sum to pay for something that is literally just like a digital notebook.

Paper replacement.

Totally worth it. Their big, their big claim to fame is that writing on it feels just like writing on paper. And I would say it's 90% accurate. Like it's very close, very similar to the feel of writing on paper. Close enough that I'm, I'm willing to live with it because I'm not a snob about what paper feels like. But people on the subreddit, you know, are very picky, picky, as you might expect, right?

Yeah. People on Reddit, you know, they go to the nth degree about everything, which is their blessing and their curse. All right, cool, man. We're gonna have to wrap it up in a second. How should people find you? How should they— who should be talking about Air Garage? And then how should people be finding you for any more of your thoughts? Because I think you're an interesting guy. We had never met before, so this was kind of like a first date, and we did ideas, and then I asked you a bunch of questions that I was curious about. I don't know if people will care about your morning routine as much as I did, but I sort of have this thing where when I meet interesting people— and you're, you're clearly an interesting person right off the bat— I try to figure out a little bit about what is their method. Interestingness is a byproduct of a set of habits or lifestyles, or lifestyle that you live. And so I try to understand what's this person's routine? What's their information diet? What are the products that they use? Because I think that that's the thing everybody sees and likes and gets interested in. Is the output, and you can't copy the output. The output is impossible to copy. It's the input that you can start to, you know, pick up pieces or try things for yourself and become yourself a more interesting person. So that's why I ask those questions.

Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And I think, you know, your inputs need to be unique to you, but like finding other inputs that make sense and kind of mesh with what you're interested in is always something that you should be doing. And like changing your inputs daily or like monthly or whatever to iterate and find what those inputs should be. Yeah, exactly.

Like, I'm definitely not gonna wake up and read an hour in the morning. That would be an awful input for me. But, um, I have been thinking about this cause I pick up my phone every day and I, because like right now I'm in some weird like financial, uh, fall, uh, fall season where I'm just reaping rewards everywhere and stock market's going up and cryptocurrency's going up and all, all my shit, you know, sales are up and all that stuff.. And so I'm like, this is very addictive to wake up and just see the green right away. But I'm like, this is an awful habit. Um, first because these will turn red and not be green. And then I'm letting my first kind of reaction of the day be to something I'm just not control— that I can't control. And frankly, it doesn't matter. Um, it doesn't matter over any short period of time. Over long haul, sure it matters. And so I was, I was thinking to myself, what, should I replace that with? I don't want to go into Slack or email and just start doing work. I don't want to be checking Instagram. I don't want to be checking the stock app. Um, so I was thinking like, what do I want the first thing that I take in for the day to be? And that's an open question for me, but I was thinking about this morning, which is partly why I asked you that question. Uh, so I'm going to figure out what's the right first input that will set me up for success every day and having a great day. Um, and I don't know what that'll be, but if people are listening and they have a good system, Tweet it at me, and I'd love to steal from your system if you figured out one that works.

Right. And now you have Twitter plus guilt. Yes. Cool. All right, man. Where should people follow you or find you or what's the URL for Air Garage?

Shout that out. Yeah, good question. So the URL for Air Garage is not the .com unfortunately yet. We're working on it, but it's basically airgarage.ge. So it's Air Garage with a dot before the G and the E. Uh, so easier to just Google Air Garage, or you can also go to airgarage.co, and I'm pretty sure it'll redirect you. Maybe. I don't remember. I haven't checked in a while. Uh, I'm on Twitter, uh, @JonathanBarkel, also spelled weird, so probably just Google me too, right?

Okay, just Google Air Garage and find you right from there. Yeah. Listen, man, thanks for coming on. This was fun. And, uh, yeah, let's, let's keep in touch.

Yeah, sounds great. Thanks for having me.