#147 - How Sam Hacked Amazon's Book Rankings, A $600m Exit, And Crypto with Brother Aaaron

On this episode of My First Million, me and Sam, we talked about the idea of romance and romantic fiction books. I feel like we talk about that a lot, but we did it again because Wattpad sold for $600 million. So we got into Wattpad, the idea of romantic fiction and how you would build a business around that, and an experiment that Sam ran in that space and how he made a bestselling book in the romantic fiction category on Amazon Kindle. We talked about an idea around the COVID smell test. And, uh, and at the end, the last 15 minutes, we invited Brother Aaron back on to talk about his latest from the rabbit hole. And, uh, so that's at the very end, last 15 minutes.

All right.

Enjoy this episode.

So today's episode, I thought we could dedicate— because it's the inauguration day, I just wanted to talk all about politics for the next 2 hours. Are you okay with that?

Yeah, people love that.

So I'd read a couple articles, I think I know what I'm talking about. I figured today strictly politics.

If you read a couple articles, then I mean, we have an expert, so that's— we're good then.

Well, I read the headlines of a bunch, so I read the comments and Reddit. I think I know what I'm doing. So if it's okay with Abreu, if it's okay with you, we're gonna dedicate the entire episode to politics, particularly our opinion and why that should be the rule of the land.

I tweeted out a thing, just a bunch of memes basically celebrating Trump's last day in office with like a bunch of funny Trump moments of the last 4 years, and I got 3 DMs just now saying, bro, I didn't follow you for politics. They're like, hey, you said you tweet about business, this is not business.

I was like, well, but it's also funny.

Yeah, I was like, this is a joke, this is not politics.

Yeah, like, we'll see if they like that response.

You know, we actually get a lot of compliments that we stay away from from politics.

I wouldn't say I'm not a political person. I wouldn't say I'm not, not— I don't know, I'm pretty— well, I'm mildly interested. I think you are too, but we don't talk about it here because it's not really important. And if we do do it, I think it's from a relatively objective standpoint.

I don't know if I agree with any of that. I personally don't think— I try not to spend any energy on it in my own personal life. Therefore, I'm pretty badly uneducated on it. Therefore, whenever I speak on it, I'm kind of speaking out of turn. But, you know, I think most opinions are quite uninformed also. So I would say I'm just— I'm right in there with everybody else of mostly uninformed bias.

I want to bring one thing up. Last episode that I didn't make it, it was you and Sully. You guys, I heard, talked a lot about religion, right?

We had a segment on, yeah, creating a new religion.

You just admittedly aren't a political guy, but— and I don't give a shit if you listeners think this is fake or real. It's interesting to me and it's interesting to you. I'm going to sound like an idiot. I'm like, you know what Bitcoin is? Are you familiar with like QAnon?

Yeah. Like, I don't spend a lot of time figuring out what the QAnon conspiracies are of the moment, but I'm aware of it.

Yeah. But do you know the origin?

No. Tell me about it.

So this is just someone who has listened to a 60 Minutes podcast, and I don't care if it's real or fake, whatever you believe, whatever. But basically it started, I think, in 4chan. This right when Trump got elected, this guy, just an anonymous guy, no one knows who this person is. He says that he has the highest level of clearance at the White House called Q. I guess it's Q clearance, so they call him Q. And he starts writing these vague messages on 4chan, and he sends updates every couple weeks, a couple months about what's going to happen. They're all relatively vague, and they're kind of like puzzles, and the people believe it. So a lot of people who stormed the Capitol, I believe they were Q folks. But I just think that, like, just let's just be objective. Let's just— who cares what he's saying or she's saying? How crazy is it?

Hold on, is QAnon supposed to be a person? I thought it's a group or like an ideology.

It's a person, and these people are all followers, and they, they'll say like Q's patriot. We love Q, you know, Q's not gonna let us down. It's probably fake, right? It's definitely fake. It's definitely like a young person. They've made some predictions that are mildly true, like for example, like finance in Hollywood is controlled by pedophiles.

You're saying it's a person? I'm Googling right now. Everything I'm Googling says QAnon is the umbrella term for a set of conspiracy theories and a kind of a set of believers who believe, you know, for example, there's a satanic worshiping you know, pedophile sex ring.

Keep reading. It comes from one guy named Q.

Okay, yeah, Q is the, is the, is the clearance patriot. October 2017.

Yeah, he writes all these things and they believe that Trump is like their, I think, like the savior, or who's gonna like right a lot of the wrongs that Q is saying exists. And so they like, I guess technically like maybe he was right because Q said that they're like pedophiles controlled or were powerful or something like that, and like Jeffrey Epstein And so the fact that Bill Clinton rode on Jeff Epstein's jet, like, you'd be like, oh wow, he predicted it, whatever, yada yada yada. But it's just crazy that a guy behind his computer is making this up. I mean, you guys, I'm sorry if you believe this. Like, you have to imagine, you have to believe this is probably made up. It's amazing that this person is convincing all these people to do that. I find that to be amazing. It's crazy. Hopefully this Q is selling his own t-shirts.

If not, who is? I think that these guys are, you know, totally crazy, but it would be interesting to know who is behind this. And I bet there's, you know, elements of truth to their story. Like, I bet I would believe you if you told me there is somebody with a high level of clearance, or maybe it's like the IT person or whatever, like somebody who has some kind of access in government who, whether for fun or out of their own kind of mental illness, decides to propagate these conspiracy theories on 4chan. And I also believe that just like Jeffrey Epstein and his island of like young girls that Bill Clinton and whoever else were going to— look, when there's powerful people, uh, powerful people do some pretty disgusting stuff. And whether, whether it's a satanic worshiping, you know, pedophile sex ring, I don't know. But I would bet that this person does have clearance, that there is somebody who has clearance who is posting this stuff, and that there are elements of truth to some of the things that they do. Now, people are going to be like, you're crazy. I can't believe you're validating this stuff. I'm not saying it's all true, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was such a person doing such a thing.

Maybe. But the reason why this interests me is it's the same reason why— does it interest you who created Bitcoin?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

It's really fun.

Okay. I should say it interests me, but I also— I'm glad it's an anonymous person, and if I knew their identity, I wouldn't out them type of thing.

Sure. But just from like, I want to watch a documentary that speculates, like, it's fun.

Yeah, because this is like movie shit, you know what I mean? It's like, oh, this mysterious creator creates this digital gold, becomes a billionaire. It's like, okay, that's cool. That's like a sci-fi book and it's real life. And then same thing with this QAnon thing. It's like this underground forum of internet trolls and hackers. They actually crack a conspiracy, but nobody takes them seriously and everybody discredits them. But, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, I just think that that's like movie shit and therefore I can't look away. I'm rubbernecking, you know, looking at it, even though I know I should probably just ignore it.

So I've been fascinated by this, and, uh, it's cool to me. Just like the same thing with like the Ross Ulbricht, who all was behind Silk Road. That stuff's quite interesting to me. This whole Q thing, you know, I got into it since the storming of the Capitol. I got curious about it. Fascinating. Very interesting. Had to do with what you guys were talking about, religion. And then let me tell you one more tangent before we get into it. And I've got a couple ideas I want to run by you. God, I sound— I kind of am embarrassed to say this, what I'm about to say. You know how we were talking about collectibles? Yes. And we were talking about different categories that are interesting. So I'm a big true crime fan, right? I like Dateline, I like Q. I mean, that's all like— I like Silk Road stuff. I love like these mysteries. They're just fun. It's just like a man version of a soap opera. I watched The Night Stalker on Netflix about serial killer— about that serial killer Richard Ramirez. Horrible guy, raped kids, killed people. I think he hurt 30 people. He's the guy who held up his hand and you see like the, uh, pentagram. You know I'm talking about that picture?

No, I have no idea what you're talking about.

All right, type in Nightcrawler. I bet you know this photo. It's like a very famous picture of him in court. Or sorry, Night Stalker. Night Stalker.

Okay, Night Stalker. Okay, I see the guy. Yep. And I see the hand thing. Yes, I've seen this before.

Yeah, it's like real famous, whatever. And I started thinking, like, I'm a huge fan of American history. This Night Stalker thing was a big thing of history. You know what else was, was Ted Bundy. Everyone knows that name, Ted Bundy. Yep. Everyone knows the name Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson. I kind of was curious. I'm like, well, these guys are in prison. Can you buy stuff from them? Like, can you buy like a Charles Manson, like, piece of art? Or can you buy like a—

You're trying to wear like a Unabomber hoodie?

No, I don't want like— I don't want like memorabilia. I want like artifacts, like historical artifacts. For example, you could buy the confession letter or like when Bernie Madoff went to jail, you could purchase like his Mets baseball hat. You could buy even his underwear. Like if I was old enough, I would totally would have bought something like that. I've been so fascinated because like we love crime in America, right? Obviously true crime is the top podcast stuff. Like I'm incredibly fascinated and I went and found a couple auctions. That do sell this stuff. It's so weird and so fascinating. It's kind of neat. Is that kind of creepy that I'm saying I might collect that?

Yeah. And actually, uh, so our friend Ramon had this idea not too long ago that's totally tangentially related, but you said true crime and it reminded me, which was to do true romance, which are basically like a blend between the true crime genre and romantic kind of fiction. Like, you know, whether it's Fifty Shades of Grey or more recently, like, uh, the number one show on Netflix, Bridgerton, is kind of just like this, like you know, romance thing that like every woman in my life is like, oh my God, I love Bridgerton, I love this dude on Bridgerton, the Duke of Hastings. And so he had this idea of taking, you know, creating these fictional stories, whether it's audio or in text format, and making a subscription service, but have the content be like true crime, where it's like you take these crimes but then you like— you take these famous names but then you like do the romance version of what's going on behind the scenes, or you just make it up altogether. It's like the Clinton and Lewinsky story, and you just use their names. You use like either their names or names like theirs to, to do this.

Splitten and Kalawinsky.

You know, that's how Fifty Shades of Grey started, right? Like, it's a fan fiction off of Twilight. So there's the Twilight series, which was kind of like romance/vampire stuff, and then Fifty Shades of Grey was just somebody in a fan fiction forum on the internet was like, I wrote this thing, and they used the names, you know, from Twilight, which is like Bella and I forgot what the dude's names are, but it's like whatever, Team John and Team Harry or whatever their names are. And basically they just used that and they wrote kind of like a raunchier version of it, and that was Fifty Shades of Grey. But then by the time the book came out, they changed the names. They couldn't use that IP, so they changed the names just something else altogether. I'm like 95% sure that's the story behind, uh, Fifty Shades of Grey, which is the most best-selling book in like last decade or something.

Mm-hmm.

So I've been following this company Wattpad and we brought it up a bunch of times, I think. So did you see that they were acquired today for $600 million?

Oh no. I, uh, I, I think I was, I was just on the founder's Twitter. They replied to my tweet or something recently, so I was just checking them out. Oh, they sold to Naver. Wow. $600 million. Amazing.

It's owned by, uh, so check out, so in this article about the sale, they say Wattpad, which is like 14 years old, sells to Naver, which is a South Korean, like, kind of like media conglomerate. They also have like a messaging app that's really, really popular. They said they plan to incorporate it with Webtoon. Have you seen webtoons.com? No. So webtoons.com is Wattpad but for just creating comic strips. So anybody can go publish a comic strip and other people can come read them. And then you could look and like this, the top one on there, right? Today, so it's Wednesday, True Beauty is the top one on there. It has 31 million likes. It's on episode number 129. If you click it, you just sort of start scrolling and it's like— I mean, I wish this is not a podcast. I wish you could just see this. I'm literally going to share my screen so you can see and react to this. But look at this shit.

So let me explain what I'm seeing. It's like a clearly like a— is this a, uh, an Asian company?

Yes, South Korean.

Okay, so they've Americanized these Asian women and they make them look like hot, like big boobs, big butt. So it's like clearly there's some like sex appeal thing going on here.

What this says. So this says, uh, so this guy sees this girl, he says, what on earth, there's a celebrity here. She turns around while holding her Starbucks coffee and it says, hey, what diet are you on? You've gotten super hot. I saw your Instagram, you've become even prettier. And it's just people like complimenting this pretty girl and she's on the breakup diet. And it's like, I don't know what this is, but look at this, like, and look how like this is just like mobile optimized for Webtoon. So I feel like something like this can exist.

It looks great.

Yeah, exactly. I don't know how— if this is amateur publishing this, I can see why this has 31 million views. And like pages and pages of comments, 4,000 comments on today's episode.

This is crazy.

So that's pretty cool. I really like this. This is like, you don't really hear too much about this in the West, but honestly, like somebody could do this for the US. Somebody could do this for India. Somebody could do this for the Philippines. Like you could build a business that does exactly this in different regions. And like the way to, one way to start it would be to like just honestly kind of rip the content off one of these sites. Translate it or have it modified, but just take the core stories and seed your platform using this type of content.

I've actually brought this up before, but I'll say it again. I think there's another website. There's a bunch of these. There's one called, I think it's called Lit Erotica, like literature erotica. Is it called Lit Erotica or is it called, it's, it's called something like that.

Lit Erotica.

Lit Erotica. Do you have similar web on that? I think it gets like 50 million monthly uniques.

50 million monthly visits.

And look at the time spent on the website.

16 minutes. That's like an eternity for time. Average visit duration. Are you kidding me? Like, that's insane.

And it's like a GeoCity looking website, right? Like there's nothing special.

Oh my God, look at this. It looks like, I mean, it's just literally a black and white website with text and blue links, blue like URLs to different, different things. This was the MVP of how we were telling, or at least how I was telling Ramon to do his, uh, his site was just like, hey, make a page like this.

That's what ours was. You want to see it?

Yeah, let's pull it up. It was like, let me put in my email and just get the next story in my inbox every day, or text it to me, or something like that. So I, you know, you can hook them. But it's really simple. It's like people just want to read. There's a lot of people that just want to read stories. And I think fan fiction works. That's a lot of what was on Wattpad. I think kind of this like romance slash like literature erotica, that works. I know somebody who's doing this for audio erotica, basically. It's so— it's like, it's like a podcast version of this. It's kind of like two characters reading, you know, like kind of like doing the dialogue of the scene and it's, you know, supposed to get you all hot and bothered. And I bet you that shit's gonna work. Like I don't think these are big VC-backed things.

Click your Zoom thing.

What is this? So this is shortbutromantic.com. This was your landing page?

I built this.

So people could check this out. So shortbutromantic.com, daily short romantic stories. Exactly. The header is perfect, guy next door. And it's this girl who's literally taking her shirt off. You can't see anything yet, but she's got her hands in the right places. And this guy who's like super into her. I see audio and then I see the story.

Yeah, click it. You don't see the story?

I do see the story.

Yeah. Oh, click audio or click that button.

Dude, the audio is hilarious already. Who's reading this?

We paid a guy.

That's so good. And then, did you like the story? Hey there, I'm Carly. Carly's a fake person.

Yeah.

And just for the record, this was all Ramon's idea. I just, we were sitting at my office one day brainstorming it and I go, we go, I go, watch this. I'm just gonna make it right now. We made it in 30 minutes and got sales that night.

Uh, yeah, I think probably like literally, I think 50 people who listen to this are gonna go do this. This thing, because every time we talk about this, 2 more people go start this business. A few people have had success with businesses like these. They've came back and told us, and I bet you more people will do it after this.

So let me ask you this, Sean. I've got 2 questions for you, and you have experience because Twitch has been acquired. So my question is this: I think they are the leaders in this space. After they get acquired, do you think that that means there's more opportunity for upstarts? And second, Wattpad was terribly, horribly undermonetized. They had something like 150 monthly users and they made $25 million. They could be saying like, well, we're building up the audience and we're going to monetize. I guess that's an okay shtick because they actually did have the audience. But how would you have actually made this more money? Because China Literature has $800 million in revenue. There's a way to do it.

I'll give, if you're thinking about doing this, I'll give you a little bit more feedback because I actually, uh, researched this quite a bit. I think romance novels next to business is the hottest, has the most movement on Amazon Kindle. And there's subcategories and like, I'm just going to say this, but I'm not saying like it's cool or whatever, but like there's some really weird and odd subcategories. For example, women who want to have sex with werewolves.

Tell the story. You guys published a blog about how you created a, uh, I don't know what the idea was. It was like, let me see if we can game the bestseller charts or something. Right. Tell the story, what you did.

What was the book called?

It's taken down. You can't find it. Okay. Captivating.

Oh, that was the name of the book.

Okay. Yeah. Captivating Claire. And, um, we, um, got fake reviews off Fiverr and we got to number 1 in the category for a few hours and it worked out well. It was, someone's asking me, is that it? Captivating?

Looks like it.

Yeah, that's it.

It's taken down. It's still there, but it looks like it is there.

Yeah, it is still there. You can buy that. I don't know what they did. We, we did our part because like the publisher, we told the owner of this what we are doing and they went along with it. And afterwards we did our part to take it down. I don't know how it's still up there.

What did you learn from this, uh, test?

This little— that it's easy to game Amazon Kindle. I mean, this was, uh, how long did I do? I did this 3 years ago. So the rules may be—

how do you become number 1? I missed that part. Well, what did you do to become number 1?

It's about velocity of buys. And you can get a bunch of friends. There's like rings of these Kindle writers. There's like a whole range where they go, all right, my book's out, everyone go buy it. And then you just do that with all one another. And then you can get fake reviews on Amazon.

About how many buyers do you think it takes, or did it take at that time? Are we talking—

I don't remember, but it was in 10,000. No, it was about 500 for us. Gotcha. It was about 500. And you got to game the category. So there's like a whole way to game it. I mean, like, if you just look at like Amazon, right? Yeah, this for sure is not ours because ours had reviews and this says there's no customer reviews. So I don't know what's going on here.

Dude, these names— Carter Voss, he's damaged. Sophie Woodruff, she's a virgin.

My friend's name, my best friend, my best friend was, uh, Josh Woodruff. So, uh, but so here's my point though. There's all these categories of like women who want to hook up with billionaires, women who want to look with werewolves because there's a category of women who want to have sex with werewolves, women who want to hook up with, um, Military men with people of different ethnicities. There's people who want it rough. I mean, there's all types of categories that you could do this for.

I wouldn't even say it that way. Do we think that porn is good? I mean, I think that like some porn can be healthy and it teaches you what— yada yada yada. It just seems that maybe this is like the women's version of porn. Like, this just helps people get off. So I wouldn't even call it trashy. I would just say it is what it is and there's a place in it.

That's a good rule. I always used to say, if it makes you, like, more powerful, more money, look better naked or have better sex, like, it's probably going to work well.

Yeah, exactly. All right, what else you got? What else should we talk about? We, we did, uh, politics and porn, so I think, you know, that's, that's off to a good start.

Well, you had Nitro Circus.

Uh, I don't want to talk about— I was going to do research on that one. I, I— you might actually know much more about it than I do. I just knew—

I know a little bit, but I thought, like, I was gonna piggyback off your stuff. Also, have I talked about pickleball on here?

No, we haven't. Go ahead.

Okay, a lot of people in the South where I'm living now and where I'm from, but a lot of people are going to be like, oh, pickleball, like, that's old. Of course you guys are acting like you're talking about some brand new thing. I get it, it's been around for a bit.

Exploding. It is exploding. Sorry if you guys laugh at us. Yeah, it's popularity. It's new to me because it wasn't popular in California until— it probably isn't about, but in Austin they have pickleball courts now throughout the city and they are always full.

Dude, what is it? It's like full body ping pong or what is this?

It's like tennis.

Wait, first question, have you played?

I have the equipment. We got a pickleball like membership. Like there's like a bar nearby that has a bunch of courts and you pay money to rent and they're building out this billionaire guy's building out a pickleball league here and you pay like a country, it's like a country club only for pickleball. This is how popular it is. It's like tennis. But the court is half the length, so it's much shorter. The ball is like a wiffle ball. If you're not American, a wiffle ball is like a really light plastic ball and you just kind of hit it back and forth. There's some rules that like there's some like basic rules, like you got to stand here when you serve and for the first 2 hits you got to stand this other place. But then after that it's just tennis.

Is it okay? So is it basically tennis, but you don't have to run around so much and be as athletic? Is that what the thing is? Is that like—

easier? It's tennis, but you don't have to be as skilled. Great.

Okay, I love it.

It's not hard to hit it over the net. It's not hard to have a rally. Anyone can have a rally. It's easy to have a rally, so it's more fun.

Okay, so I'm really interested in this, and I'm really interested in just generally new sports. So let me tell you 3 things that I think are interesting. First, that story of the guy who was selling the equipment, uh, that also means that, you know, anytime there's like an emerging sport, you just take all the shit that exists for the existing sports and you say, cool, there's going to be a leader in this category. So blogs about information, rules, leagues, equipment, that stuff. Those are a bunch of opportunities. The other side of it is like, who's gonna take advantage of this? So for example, if you're Barstool Sports, what if Barstool was like, look, we can own pickleball. No one's looking here, it's still early, a bunch of our readers like pickleball.

It's definitely kind of like a bro-y, right?

It's a bro-y thing. Seems like you could play with a beer in your hand. Okay, so let's say if I'm Barstool I'm looking at pickleball and I'm saying 10% of our audience thinks pickleball is the shit and 90% has never played and never heard of it. So here's what we're going to do. We are going to go buy the league right now and we're going to own the league. We're going to basically own the NFL of pickleball. You know, we're also going to like sort of be the lead sponsor and we're just going to go all in pickleball. It's going to be like half joke and half like real content and real money behind this thing. I think there's even big companies that could do well with this. If you're Twitch or YouTube, You know, why not go pick up the rights to, to pickleball, for example? The last thing is there's other sports that are like this. Are you familiar with Twenty20 cricket?

No. What is that?

Who did this? ECB, is that like a company? Oh, there's like a board. I don't understand how this works. Is it like a board?

Yeah, I don't know exactly who invented it, but you can check that, you can look it up.

But basically, like, is this owned by an entity? It's always kind of confusing to figure out how these things work.

I think it's like a business. I think a group of people basically like made this thing and created this league.

So the guy, the people who own it, it's called England and Wales Cricket Board, and they have a chairman, they have a CEO. I don't know if it's— it's weird. I don't know how the entity is structured.

And so this got really popular. So T20 cricket, I think, is probably more popular than normal cricket, except for maybe some of the, like, once every few years big matches between countries, sort of like the Olympics. And then a bunch of the star players were like, shit, we get paid more if we go play T20. And so they started going to play T20. And so it's like, what? So you look at baseball today, right, in America, and you wonder, like, is somebody going to do this for baseball? Baseball is like the most fucking boring sport. Golf. Right? Like you have like these kind of spinoff variants, like skins matches in golf or pro-am tournaments in golf that like get a lot of attention in boxing. Now there's like the YouTuber boxing, celebrity boxing is like a new variation. Baseball, maybe somebody's gonna do like the shortened form of baseball that's like more home run. It's like, you know, sort of like bigger boobs and bigger butts. Like how do you do more home runs, less time spent and, and whatever. It's like, what's that movie? Uh, you know that movie I'm, I'm thinking of?

Baseball.

Baseball. Yeah.

It's, it's, I was thinking about this when I was thinking about Spikeball. I'm like, how do we baseball this?

Somebody's going to do a basketball, or I think that would be really fun if somebody tried to basketball this.

Well, okay. So, so there's other ones too, like these like little fringe sports. So Abreu just put this in the chat. Have you ever heard of the sport kabaddi? Uh-uh. All right, so this is Indian sport, and it's like the most fucking Indian sport there is because it's a sport played with zero ball, zero skill, zero equipment. The only thing— so here's how it works. Imagine a volleyball game. So you have two teams on two sides of the net, but there's like, I don't know, like 10 people on each side or something. It's like a lot of people. It's a bunch of Indian dudes with their shirts off. What happens is it's kind of like Red Rover, where one guy from one side has to cross under the net and go to the other side, and he's trying to tag as many people as he can, and then he's got to get back to his side, and they're trying to stop him. Here's the catch, and here's why the game is called kabaddi, which is the whole time he has to keep continuously saying the word kabaddi. So he goes over and he goes, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi. He has to keep saying it without taking a pause or a breath. And as soon as he runs out of air, he's out if he's on the other side. So they're trying to hold him onto this side. He's trying to tag as many as he can and get back to his side of the thing.

That's a joke. No one would want to care about that.

And that's the thing that's a popular sport.

That's that. That's the thing that pickleball would have to overcome, which is like, is this just going to be darts, shuffleboard, and bowling, arm wrestling, paper, scissors, rock? Yeah. Or is this going to be like tennis? Because right now in my mind, it's still a little bit like, um, darts. It's like a drinking game.

I think it can be darts. I think it should embrace being darts in the same way that like You know, they took the spelling bee and, uh, the spelling bee— I mean, literally couldn't be a dorkier thing in the world. You know, they put it on ESPN, they gave it production value, they tell the backstories of these kids. And, uh, watching the spelling bee is a great 3 days. Like, that— I've watched many years of the National Scripps Spelling Bee. I don't know if you have, but, uh, that shit is amazing.

You're genetically predisposed to like that, I think.

Um, so yeah, I think that there's a bunch of fringe sports. I think you could just embrace being the French sport and just put it like go direct to consumer, you know, behind a paywall basically with the French sport.

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Of course. WorldStar, The Shade Room.

I follow them all. Have you noticed that, um, a lot of the sponsored WorldStar ads are OnlyFans pages?

Like the individuals themselves?

Yes, these women with these OnlyFans pages are buying drops on WorldStar. It's so nuts. It's so brilliant. I mean, it's not brilliant because like this is exactly what they should be doing, but it's just neat to see that this industry and these young entrepreneurs, like these women who like you wouldn't expect to I don't know, we're gonna stereotype as like, I didn't think they'd be as sophisticated as they are. They totally are.

Yeah, I think it's amazing. I did expect it because I think that they are, uh, smart and they're kind of like ballers in their own way, and they just needed the tools. Uh, like the traditional kind of like industry for this stuff really had them at a disadvantage, and as soon as those— the power structure changed and the power was in their hands, they became like super entrepreneurial, very smart marketers, and, uh, have done really well. By the way, I just saw on the WorldStarHipHop this thing that I've just been seeing advertised everywhere. I bet this company is spending like $5 million a month right now. I see them on TikTok, I see them on— what's it called? It's called Dose of Roses, dose-roses.com. You might have seen it. They have this giant rose teddy bear, like it's like a huge stuffed animal made of roses that you can get for Valentine's Day, and it costs $60. And they've been selling this thing like on every channel I can see, like leading up to Valentine's Day. They just show these like really hot girls happy with their, like, kind of like average looking boyfriend handing them this, like, amazing—

wait, are these real roses? I'm looking at their website now.

I don't know, I haven't, I haven't got one. But, uh, and I think it kind of like breaks apart or something like that. So it's basically just a bunch of different variations of roses. And they have, you know, 300,000 followers on Instagram. And I just feel like they are, um, really clever with their marketing. So I've seen them, they market basically through memes, memes on Instagram, memes on Twitter. Memes on TikTok, I mean. And yeah, I bet this company is doing really well and they're spending a ton of money right now. And so what are you going to ask your OnlyFans creator? What are you going to— what's going to be your hard-hitting interview questions?

I don't know. What should I ask her?

I would try to figure out the marketing tactics. Like, how are you growing this? Basically, I was just trying to figure out, is this awesome for you? Are you like, dude, this is amazing. I used to do X, I used to make X and put in Y, and now I make 10X and I put in 1/10 of Y. And that's what I want to hear. And so I'd love to just hear kind of like, What were you doing before? How hard was that? What were the downsides of that? How much were you making? And then now, how much more are you making and how much easier is it what you're doing or how much more enjoyable?

She has a bio and she has like a website, like a safe-for-work website that just explains, um, everything that she does. It's called, uh, I'll see what it's called, but anyway, she's, oh, here, knowingless.com. So the word knowing and then L-E-S-S.com. And, uh, if you click her about page, she says that she got started because she has the number one post of all time on Reddit's subreddit GoneWild, and that is how she started her career.

Uh, that's funny. By the way, this website is not what I expected it to be, um, when you said—

yeah, it's like a proper blog.

Yeah, it looks like she's talking about like history or like, you know, medieval France or something like that. Like, this is this weird looking website to me.

Yeah, and she has a survey section where she asks her people survey— her folks surveys in order to learn about her customers.

Yeah, this is wild. Okay, so that's cool. What else? Let me do one quick idea, and then we're gonna bring on, uh, my brother-in-law, Brother Aaron, to, uh, give us his latest internet rabbit hole. Back by popular demand, people liked his, uh, making fun of Tim Ferriss and Silicon Valley people and how kind of obnoxious we can be. And they liked his kind of tax rabbit hole last time. So we'll see what he's got. Maybe he was a one-hit wonder. I don't know. We'll find out. But I have one quick idea. My friend is a doctor. I think there's a business opportunity here, but I don't have time to do it. He's like, there are a lot of people out there right now who have had COVID and they're fine, but they lost their kind of sense of smell. He's like, you know, to get it back takes quite a long time. It could take months to recover your sense of smell. So you have like, you know, I think 400,000 people have died of COVID I think, you know, how many tens of millions of people have had it to some level of severity, whether they tested for it or not, I don't know. But let's say you now have a new market of millions of people who have lost one of their— I don't know how many senses we have, what, 5 or 6— one of their 5 or 6 senses that we have. Can you help them get it back? And he's basically like, there's this kind of like medical procedure, like this— there's like a series of like exercises you could do to accelerate the return of your sense of smell.

He's like, but it's done in such a medical way. He's like, someone should just make this as a kit. Kit. And he's like, if anybody wants to do this, I can tell you the right process, basically a step-by-step kit, like what you should do kind of each day. He's like, but you just need some essential oils and you need a certain structure of how you're going to do it, a certain dilution for it. I think somebody should make this. And I was like, dude, that is a great idea. It would be so easy to market and it wouldn't be a long-lasting business, but you could make half a million to $1.5 million of profit, I believe, in the next 12 months if you just did this one thing. So I thought that was a cool idea.

We have friends that own essential oil companies. Why haven't they done anything like this?

I think they're just busy. I sent it to one of them. I think this is like small for them. They're big now. But I think that, you know, for somebody who's got nothing but time on their hands, I think this is a cool idea.

I'm just fooling around on this tool I had to look up how many people search COVID lost smell or anything like that. Not too much.

I know it's popular because on TikTok, one of the most viral TikToks nowadays is this one where you like take an orange with the peel on and you put it on your stove and you burn the orange on the bottom. If you've lost your sense of smell, do this to get it back. And then you like do that, and then you like, I don't know, sniff it like a bunch of times or throughout the day, and it helps accelerate the return of your sense of smell. And like all the comments are like, oh my God, I thought this was a joke, but this actually works. And, uh, there's like millions and millions of views on this thing, which means it's getting shared.

That's a great idea. I don't think this is like a $100 million idea, but it could be a good way to get your foot in the door and make something neat.

Yeah, exactly. I think I think, you know, this could make, I think it could make half a million to a million dollars of profit if done well. Easily make tens of thousands of dollars of profit.

I dig it. We gotta come up with a cute name for it and then we're gonna advertise wherever these, uh, roses company, Bear Roses or whatever the hell that thing's called.

Those are roses. Uh, all right, cool. Sam and I, you gotta jump.

Yeah, I gotta jump. Aaron's coming on now. I will talk to you all in a week.

Okay.

Back by popular demand, Brother Aaron. How did it feel to get, uh, so many tweets and all the feedback, man?

It was great. In one day, I went from 4 followers to 5 followers on Twitter. So I was like 25% in one day. If my Bitcoin was that much, it'd be great. Anything is possible, KG.

Tell people, tell me about your Bitcoin thing. I think this is funny, by the way. So you own a bunch of Bitcoin, but you jumped in kind of like headfirst, a little bit recklessly. So explain your Bitcoin thing, and then we're gonna go down whatever rabbit hole you got for for us this time.

Okay, so this was like maybe the second week or first week of December. We, uh, talked and you said something about, oh dude, get Bitcoin. And I was like, what's Bitcoin, right? Like, I know what it is, like the word, right? And so I looked at it and I was like, oh man, like that's a lot of money. And I was like, well, what was the price back then? I think it was like 18, 18.2, 18.3. And so, um, got one and, uh, went down a miniature Bitcoin rabbit hole and started being very distrustful of fiat currencies and started to understand what it was about. And then a few weeks later, I'm not going to say how much, of course, but I was like, "Bro, this Bitcoin is messing me up, man." So I just stopped. And then there was a week or two towards late December where it just exploded. And I couldn't believe it. And so then I, uh, called you. I was like, bro, man, what's up with that Bitcoin, right?

You doubled your money so far. So there's a lot of people in Bitcoin who— some people like it because it's like, ah, this is like a good store of value, it's like a digital version of gold. Some people love the technology, they're like, this is great to do a trustless, uh, system, a decentralized financial system. And then some people are like, oh my God, the government is printing money like crazy. I don't trust fiat currency. And, you know, I feel like for you, you're a man who loves a conspiracy. So, you know, you're— this is like introducing a fish to water here. What was it that hooked you?

I think it was like the whole don't trust the government. And don't get me wrong, I love America, I love the military, shout out to the troops, but the government and the military and the government and the country are two different things. And so when you started to sort of dig into the budget deficit being $25 trillion, $26 trillion, $27 trillion, and just kind of us living and understanding about inflation. And so you'll go, "Oh, okay. Well, things go up 2 or 3% a year." And it's really that your money's being debased. And so when I looked into that, that conspiracy was all about, "Okay, get out of fiat and get into Bitcoin." As you know, I got into gold and silver, so I'm also a stacker. And a hodler in one. So it's two for one. And so anything that's not a dollar, if you give me a million dollars, I might just slap it out your hand, man. You know, I want real estate, gold, silver, Bitcoin, pizza, but I don't want your paper, man.

What rabbit hole have you been going down lately? Because you told me, you said, all right, I got a new one, I'm ready, I've been down a rabbit hole, I'm just coming out for air. What rabbit hole have you been down? I don't know if I'm gonna like this one, but will you tell me what it is?

Is it better because stuff is cheaper there so you can live like a king? Like when I lived in I lived in China. I finished high school in China, and we had a private driver. We had a live-in maid who would clean everything, who would cook everything every single day. Uh, in Indonesia, same thing. We had a driver, we had a live-in maid. When you lived in Indonesia, you had a live-in maid. Can you share what you paid for somebody who— and they were happy. This is not like— this is not slavery. This was somebody who wanted this job to work in the city, and they wanted to basically work with a family like yours. They would clean, then on the weekends they would go home or send money back to their family where in the countryside. Can you say what you were paying at that time?

Yeah, yeah, man. And I actually— this is something that me and your sister talk about. I think that we only paid— we paid what the rate was, and it was like $120, $130. We should have paid triple that.

Explain, per what?

Oh, per month. Per month, right? Yeah, not per day, not per day, not per week. And it's more that at that time, this was 10 years ago, we really didn't understand. It's not that we were trying to be cheap or trying to take advantage, but we would just ask other expats.

Yeah. We were paying the same rate or 10% more than what the going rate was. It's just that the going rate is ridiculously low. Unbelievably low.

Dude, it was incredibly low at the time. Of course, as you know, no kids. So it's not like she did much work because, um, we would be at work all day, come back and, you know, she makes some dinner and it was great. But those are things that if you have a second residency or a second passport, it's not very difficult to get one of those, that what you could do is live like a celebrity there for what you're making here. And it's not as easy as just, oh, I'm just gonna get a plane ticket and go there. There's some work that you have to do.

Why, why do you need a passport? Why not just go on vacation? A lot of people go to Bali right now and they work from Bali. Why do I need a passport to Panama or anywhere else?

So a passport or a residency visa would give someone, say, who's listening to this program, the chance to work in those countries. So if you wanted to work, that's a way to get income. There's also access to health insurance there. So these are the two things that Americans think about. Oh man, I'm gonna lose my health insurance. Oh man, I'm losing my job. Yeah, but if you have a passport or residency, what you can do is avoid those. Okay, so that's the big difference between the visa. When just going through all this COVID thing, Sean, and seeing what's happening with, you know, the Capitol with the riots and the protests that have happened in the last 10 months since COVID has happened. America's, it's kind of dicey, man, like for the inauguration. I think the listeners know they had 20,000 troops and tanks for President Biden. This isn't like the Dominican Republic, man, right? And so I'm just sort of thinking about this stuff never happened when I was younger and now it's very politically juiced here, right? Like you can't post this thing or your friends will defriend you. You can't say this or you'll get fired. And it used to not be like that. So there's kind of this little shift in America, which is all good.

You said one thing before about entitlement because you live in San Francisco right now. I personally believe the reason you're interested in a second passport is not even for the tax savings. It's not even for the greater lifestyle. I think you're sick of the entitlement of San Francisco. Tell the people what you believe about the entitlement of San Francisco.

Dude, here's my hot take, and I hope you're ready for this. San Francisco— and I've been all around the world, all around America. The most beautiful city in America with the worst people. And that's because everyone here is entitled to everything. You have rich people that are entitled to this. You have poor people entitled to this. You have homeless people entitled to this. You have Hispanics, Blacks, everyone is, "This is my space. Get outta here. Your kids are too loud. Stop making noise." And it's for someone like me who's from Texas or someone like Sam who's from St. Louis, people are not like that there. And so if you offend anyone, they can call the cops, they can do this, they can do that. Now this stuff hasn't happened to me, but I see it. It's just that everyone here, I'm all about equality, but they're just like, look, my kids like should also have everything, so you gotta give it to me. That's all good, 'cause it's my choice to be here or not. But the second residency or the second passport can help you avoid San Franciscans.

You know it, bro.

It's something that in all of the research I did on YouTube, there's this one guy named Andrew Henderson, Nomad Capitalist, shout out to this guy. He would say, don't go where you're treated better, go where you're treated best. And so what Texas is doing What Florida is doing is they're saying, "Hey, look, we want you here. We're gonna give you tax credits. We're gonna roll out the red carpet." And that's why Oracle, HP, Tesla, all these big companies are taking those jobs to Texas. And for Texas, that's great. But for us, California is a lot like that great athlete in high school who has it all. I mean, he's 6'7", 230, jumps out the gym, But he doesn't practice, man, right? And eventually pissing it away. Yeah, eventually that athleticism is less and less of a factor because people have real skill. Like, this guy is saying, hey, Elon, come here. Austin is saying, hey, look, we're already like the tech capital here. And so people are moving in places like California. What this means for San Franciscans and all Californians is taxes, taxes must go up because California, unlike the government, cannot print fiat currency. And so that's going to happen for a fact because all these jobs that are leaving— me and your sister run a small business— those employment taxes, bro, man, they'll kill a lot of companies. And so the taxes on the existing employees and, uh, people that live here, 100% will have to go up, unfortunately. So that's why the second passport and second residency—

they said that there's like a $500 million shortfall already just from people who have left and companies who have left. And this has been like just a few months, so.

Sean, and that's just in San Francisco. That's not in LA and all the other big cities. There's gonna be a day of reckoning, but it's for us, unfortunately, leadership did it themselves.

I mean, it wasn't like the rest of the country didn't have to deal with COVID You've been going down this kind of like sovereign man rabbit hole right now. What do you think is the next rabbit hole? Where are you looking next?

So all of my rabbit holes have to deal with taxes because taxes in the world of business Taxes is the thing that you can control, right? And so now that we know about buy, borrow, die, now we know about why we invest in real estate and write down those expenses. Now that we have a second residency and a second passport, I think the next one is going to be more the gold and silver slash Bitcoin rabbit holes. Because if we printed trillions of dollars in this last year, the currency is going to go down. So where can we go other than a recommendation from you just to buy Bitcoin? I need to like really dig in. And see, okay, what is Ether about? Okay, I have this gold and silver. I'm like a Lannister right now in 2021. Aaron Barrera always pays his debts is the new slogan. And so I'm, uh, hoping that I can get a little bit more educated about those things because I don't know as much as y'all do for sure.

Okay, well, I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on and, uh, Brother Aaron giving us the— giving us the latest from the rabbit hole. So, uh, go back down there And we will see you again in a month or so when you, uh, when you come up for air.

Roger that. Take care.

All right, see ya.

All right, man. Bye-bye.