#189 - Second-hand E-commerce, Door-to-door Sales, and Live Show Recaps

This is why on all my landing pages I always ask for email first.

Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. What's up? We're back from Miami and we got a new nickname. I am Sean Fury, he is the Vanilla Gorilla, and we are back. Uh, we had to wing it this episode because we had a guest cancel last minute., but I think it turned out pretty good. So Sam, what do we talk about?

Yeah, so this episode actually turned out, I think, to be one of my favorite in a long time. We probably discuss maybe 20 or 30 ideas. Um, the ideas start about halfway through, but we have a bunch of interesting ideas that are scattered throughout. So a few things that we've discussed. So businesses that we've both invested in recently, including an event business. We've talked about slingshot ideas. So slingshot ideas that are, ideas that have been kind of under the radar because of COVID but now that there's a lot of pent-up demand for events, for interaction, things like that, these are gonna be slungshot. Is that the right word? Slungshot? Slung-shooted back into popularity. We talked about litigation finance. So basically there's a whole bunch of people that will finance lawsuits and then take a cut of the winning settlement. Kind of interesting. We talked about secondhand stores. Shockingly, that's actually, it seems like a huge idea. And then finally we wrapped up with one of the best Sean stories I've ever heard where we talked about door-to-door sales. Trust me, it's gonna leave you fired up. It's in the last 15 minutes. It's awesome. We were supposed to have Bill Smith from Hello, Landing on. I got an email from his PR team literally 60 seconds before we were supposed to hit record saying he's not gonna make it. I don't know what we're gonna do today. I'm so angry about that. Oh my gosh, I'm frustrated.

I gotta give you credit. You replied back to the email to the PR person. The PR person said, 60 seconds before the podcast is supposed to record, right? We're in the sound room, green room, getting sound check, and it's like, hey folks, sorry, not going to be able to make it today. Looking forward to rescheduling. And Sam just goes, are you kidding? 1 minute before the podcast? No context. And I thought the are you kidding was very ballsy. I would have just ate it, just took the slap. And I think you rightfully You're rightfully like, what?

I mean, okay, so I'm reading this book called Nonviolent Communication. I'm reading it for— I'm reading it for two reasons. The first reason is I've gotten repeated feedback from you and Abreu and my coworkers that I have a temper. I don't think I have a temper. So I'm trying to get that. And my wife, Sarah. The second reason is that—

And this feedback is pissing me off.

I, yeah, I think I could be a little hot.

But hey, we got to say, I was with you the whole week. We went to Austin, Miami, and you were like an angel. You were totally patient. You were just being grateful the whole time. It was amazing. And then I think you even noticed at the end, I was going to tell you, and then you go, I've been really kind this whole trip. I'm feeling really kind and grateful.

So I guess we can talk about that. But yeah, so Bill Smith, sorry, brother. Like, I have a feeling I have a feeling it wasn't Bill's fault. That, that's what I would bet. I bet he's got people, and I bet that he screwed that up. Uh, they screwed it up, not him. But I, uh, I—

you know what happens? Like, sometimes you, you don't sort of— you don't really think about the other side. You're just going about your day. One thing is rolling over, this other thing comes up, and you're just like, uh, we got to move that call thing, we got to move that podcast thing. And, um, and so, you know, I've, I've been on that side where, you know, I don't sort of fully appreciate that the other side of it has— there's a lot of prep that goes into a podcast. There's like multiple people on board and timing, and then you need to record because you have to release, and then you're preparing for him, you're researching him, you're not researching other topics. So then you got to go live without him.

But I think the show goes on. Look, we're not big shots yet. I would love to be a big shot. We're not big shots yet, but I would say we are big enough shots that like it would be wise to take this at least seriously and give like a little bit of a heads up. I'm not saying that we're like big deals, but like it's a good enough platform.

He wouldn't have rescheduled Tim Ferriss a minute before the pod. Is that what you're saying?

Oh, definitely not. Look, I'm not saying that we're big deals, but I am and we are.

All right, whatever.

Let's roll. So I hope you come back. So I don't know what we're going to talk about, but you want to do a recap of this weekend?

Yeah, let's do it. So we had a fun week. I went to Austin, which is your hometown, stayed at your house.

Not my hometown, where I live.

Oh, your current town. Yeah. And we did a live show. I don't know, about 100 people were able to fit into the venue. We did it at the AppSumo office with Noah Kagan. That was fun. Then we hopped on a plane next morning, 5:00 AM, and got to Miami where the Bitcoin conference was happening. So there was like 10,000 to 20,000 people in town for the this Bitcoin thing. And we were there for our Miami show, and I think, I don't know, a few hundred people. I don't know how many ended up being. Maybe, I don't know, what do you think, Dan? 250, 300 people, something like that?

Well, 300 people RSVP'd, but I think— or no, sorry, 250.

200 show up?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. So 200 people showed up or so, did the live show there, met a bunch of cool people, people who flew in from Paraguay and all different types of places to attend. And Yeah, then we hung out and we flew home. So that was a— that's what happened. But there were some interesting things that were going on. Give me your kind of like, what do you think would be the most interesting one or two things to talk about from the trip?

I have a couple. So I have a bunch, and, and thank you, Bill Smith. So I'm just rattling this off the top of the dome. There's no research here. But, um, the airports and hotel situation in both Miami and in Austin— bananas. Absolutely crazy. We went to the airport. I think we got there at about 6:00 AM. We left my house at 5:30, I think, and it was like an hour-long wait including TSA PreCheck to get past security, and it was booming. I went to Miami. The reason I came home early is because my hotels— I went to book on HotelTonight and they all got canceled for some reason, and I couldn't find a single hotel in between the ranges of $200 and $2,000 in Miami. I had to go stay at a family, uh, family's house Travel is crushing it right now. I'm just shocked at how booming everything is.

Yeah. And also I came from California and in California there's just like COVID precaution everywhere. And as soon as we got to Austin, you were like, oh yeah, this is my favorite, like, you know, coffee shop slash bar. I don't even know what the place was, Lazarus or whatever it is, whatever it's called. And we walk in and I was like, it's like stepping into a time machine. I was like, whoa, everybody's just chilling. Everybody's hanging out at a restaurant indoors, no masks. The average— some people had their mask on. That's cool. That's their choice. And other people didn't. But it just— it was like, wow, life has really gone on and people are back to normal. And because in Florida and Texas, I think they're probably two of the most like kind of forward states as far as like returning to the norm. And then, you know, California, I come back and it's sort of the same thing. You know, you— if your nose peeks out of your mask, you get three dirty looks. And I'm over the mask time. I'm like, I'm vaccinated. Let's, uh, let's roll here.

Yeah, so that was a takeaway, um, with some COVID stuff. My thing, where do you think that— do you see any opportunities right now? So like, you had heard about pent-up demand and how the economy is going to bounce back. After seeing Miami, after seeing, um, Austin Airport, um, I've seen a little bit of New York, it's just, it's booming. Where do you think the opportunities are? Do you have anything off the top of your head that you're looking at?

I'm glad I bought Airbnb stock when it was down because I think Airbnb is going to do very well because I do think people are pretty roaring to get back out there and doing things, traveling, traveling especially. I know a lot of people that haven't seen their family in like, you know, a year and a half type of thing. So I think that people are going to be coming back out. That's not that like, you know, insightful of an answer. It's just sort of obvious. And I think that a lot of things that we did as a necessary evil are going to go away. People are going to ditch those with quickness. The same way I was ready to just ditch my mask as soon as it was okay to do it. I think all the remote learning stuff is going to go away pretty quickly because people, if it wasn't a better experience, it's like going to the graveyard as soon as you don't have to do it. And I think remote school is one where Every parent, every kid I've ever talked to that had to do remote, like, you know, Zoom school, they are not like, oh, you know, I really, really enjoy, you know, school from home. Like, there's people who enjoy work from home. I don't know anybody that enjoys school from home. So I think that's— that side is like going to take a big hit.

Did you see this company? So I'm going to talk about a startup real quick that I just invested in. I bet you looked at it as well. It was called Mary. Have you heard of Mary? It's BeMary.com.

No. Tell me about it.

So Ankur, so basically I'm friends with this guy named Ankur who's a successful entrepreneur and he invests in stuff and he just sends me interesting stuff. I thought you were on that list because you—

maybe I just missed it.

I think I have a feeling you missed it. And so there's this. So basically I'm on the lookout for companies that are going to be taking advantage. We have to come up with a cute name for this, like pent-up demand, because it's like, what are people going to care about right now?

So slingshot startup. So I'm looking at like event, event-related stuff. Um, I think sex-related stuff is gonna be quite interesting.

What are some of those stuff?

Uh, what are those?

I'll give you two examples. I invested in one company called Fitness AI, and this was like an app you use when you go to the gym. So it's like a trainer when you're at the gym, it would be like, hey, cool. Like it knows your progression. That would basically say it tracks all your reps, so it knows what weight you need to do next to get the maximum gains over a few-month period of time. Now, when COVID hit, gyms closed, his whole app became useless overnight. And so he had to re-architect the whole app to do in-home fitness. But the reason I would say is it's not that this startup necessarily benefited from it, but you got to see what different startups are made of when you saw the entrepreneurs pivot the plane mid-flight and find a new path and actually start growing at a time where they should have been having a setback. Another example is there's these guys who keep emailing me, Guru Hotel. They were a YC startup and they were software for hotels to increase their bookings and focused in Latin America. And of course, COVID hits, nobody's booking hotels, their business should really struggle. And they just made all these tweaks and all these adjustments so that they first stayed flat and then actually started to grow at a time when their business should have cratered and many lesser, less determined entrepreneurs, less adaptable entrepreneurs would have, would have gone under. And so I think it was a great, the great filter. It weeded out the entrepreneurs and you got to see the entrepreneurs who actually succeeded despite the circumstances. And those are the ones I think worth betting on.

What's Guru Hotel about?

I don't know exactly what they do. They basically— I think what it is, is it's like Shopify for a hotel. So most hotel websites suck. So what they did was they just make— they make your hotel's website higher converting and higher upselling. And so you're going to get an incremental 10 to 15% in revenue because instead of paying some, you know, your nephew to build a WordPress website for your, your hotel and it hasn't changed in 8 years, and you, you know, you don't even touch it because you don't know how to code it. They basically take over the front-end website for your hotel, and in doing so, they generate more revenue for you, and then they take a cut or they take a fee.

That sounds pretty great to me. Have you heard of Mindbody? You know, Mindbody? Yeah. So Mindbody, they're publicly traded. They were started in 2000, so they've been around for a minute. And basically they kind of started out doing that a little bit. Just helping a, a, a yoga instructor. I think it's mostly like it's health stuff.

I don't know. Studios. Yeah, so it's basically like yoga studios, Pilates studios, stuff like that. And they became the website and the booking system and payment system for all those, um, physical, uh, like locations.

Yeah, crazy good company. Um, kind of quietly— I think they're based out of San Luis Obispo, so they're not Silicon Valley. And so they've probably been quietly crushing it And what's this called? Hotel Guru?

Guru Hotel.

Yeah. Oh, they should call it the other.

Yeah, they should. They should switch it.

It should be Hotel Gurus. They should switch.

It's like so obvious when you said it. I hadn't even thought about it.

Yeah, they, they, they need to change that. Guru Hotel.

Oh no. Never mind.

Rescind all positive compliments. They, well, like, I think there's a mind-body component here of like you just create the first thing and then Next, next, next, next, next. So I— are you going to invest in that company?

So yeah, I know. I mean, anybody else I'm the same way. I'm like, oh, you, you're willing to like, it's like, that's what I felt like when I was dating. Like, oh, you like me? Something, something's bad here, right? This is too easy. So there's, there's this company called Merri I just invested in. Like I said, we send it to you and I'm not sure if this is going to be the biggest thing, but I think it could definitely be a very profitable investment. It's called Merri. M-E-R-R-I. Did you go to it? It looks like a very— bemary.com. I'll tell you why I'm interested, but I'll tell you first what it does. So what it does is you need to organize an event. They've uploaded, I don't know how, maybe there's a huge database out there, but they've uploaded massive amounts of renderings or like floor plans of event space. And then they make it really easy to drag and drop different tables and chairs and whatever you need for a wedding or a conference. And you get outline what the event is going to look like And you do it in 3D because somehow the floor blueprints—

it looks like, it looks like The Sims. So it's like you take, you have the venue and then it lets you upload like circle table chairs, banquet chairs, you know, like speaker, like, uh, podium or whatever. Right. It looks like The Sims. You make a little 3D rendering.

Exactly. And the reason I invested in this was because of something that Andrew Wilkinson said on this podcast. He called something an airport business. I think he called— what's that thing he owns?

Dribbble?

You're a captive audience.

Yes, you're a captive audience.. And what Mary did is they made it where they uploaded all of these venues. And so people who are executing weddings can go on there and pay a fee to use their software to drag and drop and like organize stuff. And then what they've done is so the vendor can come on and put their, the stuff that they want to sell. So like certain types of chairs, whether it's for rent or to buy, it could be on there. And then as the, um, event planner is on there doing their thing, that they can sell just the event planner loads and loads and loads of different stuff. So they can make money through affiliate, they can make money through subscription fees, they can make money through a lot stuff that they're on there. And the reason why I invested in this is I think that this is a boring, boring thing that could work quite well, and, uh, there's going to be a massive pent-up demand for events. And so we put a little bit of money into it. We'll see if it works. But I love the business of Houzz. Do you know Houzz? H-O-U-Z-Z.

I've, I've heard of it, and I think you used that or something like that for your, your house, right?

No, I use something like that. Yeah, so I use what Houzz is. You probably don't know Houzz. Is probably the audience is probably majority women. It's a— you basically can design your kitchen or your bedroom on Houzz and they make like $1 billion a year through affiliate fees. It's quite amazing. And it's a multi-billion dollar company, but it's kind of been quiet in the background. It's kind of amazing. What I used was— what the fuck did I use? I used this service where you take a picture of your house.

Modsy, I think you told me.

Yeah, Modsy. I took a picture— this thing where you take a picture of your house and then they— you pay $300 per room. So I think I paid like $1,200. A designer designs it, and then if I choose to, I can purchase all these stuff that they're telling me to buy, or I can just go buy stuff on my own that kind of looks like it. Right.

I didn't know that was a thing.

You never heard that in sales?

No.

Puppy close. Basically you give them the thing and then instead of having them opt in, you have them— okay, you can opt out if you want and nobody ever opts out.

Do you— what are some other slingshot startups that you're seeing or slingshot opportunities?

So the slingshot. So it has to be something that was set back during COVID So what was set back during COVID I think physical— anything physical— retail, schools, travel, hospitality, like we just said. Um, there's other things that are like, you know, like concerts and stuff like that. I think those are— I think those sports games, concerts, I think those are all gonna come back. So I'll give you one, which is, um, sports games. So the NBA playoffs is going on right now, and, um, I always wondered, would people have kind of like PTSD from COVID where they don't want to be in even when it's safe, they just don't want to be close to other people in confined areas. But these arenas are sold out. As many people as they'll let in, it's packed. People are going nuts. They're having a good time. And it just feels good to be back in a high-energy place again with a whole bunch of other screaming lunatics. But I think what happened is, I think it's sort of like the NBA franchise or the league had to get pretty— had to get like double resilient because all of a sudden this thing it just took for granted, which is all this ticket revenue, went away for like a year. And so now they open their mind up to, well, what other revenue streams should we have? Should we allow sports betting? Should we like— should we do that? Should we sponsor things that we weren't sponsoring before? Should we do NFTs? Oh, okay, cool. You know, NBA Top Shot, we'll do NFTs as a source of revenue. So I think it's pretty interesting that I think all these pro sports are going to bounce back because they were already a premium in-person experience and now they were kind of lazy before at innovating. They didn't have to innovate and COVID made them innovate the fan experience and the business model. And I think we should see some good things come from that last night.

So did you watch the Logan Paul Floyd Mayweather fight?

I watched a little bit of it. Yeah.

A little bit. Really?

I was in a warehouse where we didn't have streaming internet very strong. And so I, you know, it was choppy, but I got to see the last two rounds only.

So it was, it was exciting. So basically, if you were going to go, I was going to go, but then I realized I didn't. Two things happened. One, someone gave me tickets and then right before I was about to go get the tickets, they were like, also, like, are you going to mention us on The Hustle? And I was like, no, not a chance. I thought this was a gift. Thank you, but no thank you. I didn't know there were strings attached. I'm out. So I gave up the tickets. And also, I didn't like Miami, so I came home early, right? It wasn't for me. Not for me at all. I can see why some people like it. It ain't for me. So last night, basically, Logan Paul is a 6-foot-2, probably he weighed in at 190, probably fought at 210, 210, 205. Huge guy. And he fought Floyd Mayweather, who's 44, best boxer of all time, but 44 and 160 pounds at his heaviest, right? And I thought for sure Floyd was gonna win. Um, it ended up being basically a draw because they don't declare a winner because it's an exhibition. But Floyd did not do well, and Logan did as good as he possibly could have, which is he didn't get knocked out.

Well, and from what I understand, Floyd did the Floyd thing where he just didn't do anything. He just played defense. He just let the clock run out. He didn't— was it that he was unsuccessful on offense or he just didn't try any offense because he didn't need to because he got paid either way?

I think he's old. I think that he— I think age was a factor here and I think that he— size is a factor here. I think that the reason why everyone says Floyd lost, because a loss for Floyd is not winning and not knocking him out. Everyone, including me, thought for sure Logan's going to get knocked out. He didn't. He did great. He's a winner. The guy went from Vining to fighting Floyd in a stadium. Total winner. But what he did before the show was— Logan is known for collecting Pokémon cards. And there's this whole trend, if you don't know about this, of unwrapping cards. And so I actually love watching unwrapping NBA cards. I don't even like the NBA, but the title will be like, I don't know, "Unboxing a Michael Jordan card." I think it's awesome. I love doing it or love watching those. Logan has this whole thing where he does it and he in his— he created a necklace that was basically the most expensive or most rare Pokémon card of all time. And he like put it in some type of like safety thing and he wore it around his neck as he was walking out. And what I think is going to happen, it was what I would look like, what he's setting up is that he is going to sell that. And I think that what his brother did, Jake Paul, was they during the knockout when he— when his brother fought a few weeks ago, they had an NFT right after the fight.

Right.

And I think that them selling the memorabilia right away after the fight is a brilliant idea. And that started a little bit with NFTs. And I— but I think that that idea is here to stay.

That's interesting. Yeah. So, so just for the context, so he basically had like the way that most fighters come out, they come out with their gold chain, their, you know, they come out with diamonds on., and he basically had a sort of diamond chain, but the pendant was a Charizard, a $1 million Charizard card that was laminated as a holographic Charizard rare, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, I'm wearing $1 million on my chest right now. And it just helps because he's already invested in Pokémon. So him giving it that shine and giving it that credibility using the platform made his own collection worth more and made that individual one worth more because it now has the story of this is the one that you saw on TV, not just the fact that it's a rare Charizard card. So smart, smart move all around. These guys know how to make money. Floyd had his mask sponsored. He had like everything sponsored on his body.

His mask was sponsored by ethereum something dot org. Did you see that?

I don't know what it was. It was crazy. So his hat, his mask, everything was sponsored as he walked out because these guys, this was an all-time money grab. It was great. So I want to tell you a cool NFT thing. Most NFT things, by the way, not that cool.

You, you, you, you have to explain what it— we're adding so many listeners, Sean, that you have to actually say what NFT is. Cause I think like a lot of people don't understand. I've got, I've got an aunt and a, and a mother-in-law listening. You gotta explain what an NFT is.

All right. NFT is a piece of art that is, uh, digital. That's, that's the way that most people are using it today. It stands for this thing from crypto. So you've heard of Bitcoin. Might have heard of Ethereum. Ethereum lets you create this thing called an NFT. An NFT just means it's a unique, a unique thing. So for example, if I have a $100 bill and Sam has a $100 bill, we could swap it and we would just know they're all the same. $100 bill is the same as the other. But if I have a piece of art on my wall, Sam has a piece of art on his wall, we can't just swap it because my art is unique and his art is unique and they're not going to be worth the same amount. Even if we had sort of the same pair of Jordans, they might be in different condition or different years, whatever it is. So an NFT is more like a pair of fancy basketball shoes. It's something that collectors will own. It can be used in many other ways, but the majority is that people are using to collect, sort of to create and collect digital art. They got popular because a whole bunch of people who were what I'll call crypto rich, right? They made their money on Bitcoin, they made their money on Ethereum, they got tons of money from that. And when NFTs came out, they were using their winnings to buy NFTs. And so they were buying NFTs for literally millions and millions of dollars. So, and it blew people's minds. It's like, wait, that's just an image on a computer screen. Why are you buying it for millions of dollars? And they would say, you know, what's the Mona Lisa but some, you know, but some paint on a piece of paper, right? Art has— its value is in the meaning that people give it. So anyways, NFTs got popular. They've had sort of a crash since the hype cycle because everybody poured in, thought there was a chance to make money. And then it's down. The NFT market's down like 80-plus percent right now from where it was just a few months ago. So it's been very up and down. But I'll tell you something cool, that the people who are not— there's a group with any technology, there's a hype cycle where people jump in just to try to make a buck. And then there's like the people who just believed in it the whole time. And when the crash happens, they stay, they don't go away. And so I'll tell you a cool NFT example. So do you know who LaMelo Ball is?

A basketball player from the Ball family. And they're kind of like a little obnoxious, like the Kardashians of like NBA.

So go to lameloball.io. So I met this guy or, you know, actually I haven't met him yet. Ben met him because we thought this project sounded really awesome. So he partnered up with LaMelo Ball, and LaMelo Ball created his own NFT. Now here's how it works.

The website looks awesome.

But the price isn't— it's not worth more necessarily, right?

Well, you know, it's like most things, right? Like if I buy a Michael Jordan rookie card and then Michael Jordan becomes the greatest player of all time, that rookie card's worth more than it was when he was a rookie and nobody knew how good he would be.

How do they literally— so what I'm looking at here is basically this 3D rotating image of Lamelo playing basketball trophy almost. How are they making— I mean, this looks awesome. Like the resolution's amazing. Everything about like the way it looks is cool. How are they making that?

I think it's just 3D animators on the internet, right? They get them to make some custom stuff for them. And by the way, that's a group of people who've had a renaissance right now because there's a whole bunch of famous people that want their own NFT. And to do that, you need a digital artist to make you your cool thing. So anyways, one cool thing about this, by the way, you buy the thing and it comes with access. So like, let me just read off the perks. If you bought like the most expensive one. So, so the gold, the gold Lamelo one is the Rookie of the Year one. It is guaranteed to evolve if he wins Rookie of the Year, which by the way, he will this year. It comes with a, it comes with a physical card. It comes with $750 in guaranteed endorsement deal rewards. So basically his endorsers have to give you free stuff, which is kind of cool. It comes with some official merchandise from him. You can— you have a chance to win NBA game tickets valued up to $5,000. You have a 50% chance to receive autographed memorabilia, and you're going to get exclusive access to video calls that he's going to do with holders of his, his collectible. So it's kind of cool, right? What if a basketball card came with access to the player, right? Like, you know, you buy the LeBron card and LeBron, for all the holders of the, of the platinum card, he's going to do a Skype call with them or video. Why the hell did I say Skype? A Zoom call with them, you know, once a year or something like that. Or you get, you know, a pair of Garrett game-worn shoes. You have a 10% chance of getting those or something like that.

This is great. I think this is so cool. What I want to ask— well, I'll ask that in a second, but this is awesome. I think like I'm not necessarily the guy who made this.

I think he's like 20, 21 years old. He's like Steve Bartlett type of— I'm seeing shades of Steve Bartlett again in this guy who's a hustler who made this happen.

So that's actually what I want to ask about. I wasn't going to skip ahead, but I do— we'll come back to this. So what I'm seeing on this website is that this is basically— this LaMelo thing is basically a creation of a company called Ethercards. Is that right?

Yeah, maybe that's the name of his company.

Yeah. Yeah. His company is called Ethercards. I'm looking at the traffic. If you go to SimilarWeb and look at the traffic, basically nothing, nothing, nothing. And then In one month, 3 million visitors. All the traffic is direct, meaning someone very likely is— there's just 3 million people in the very first month of this thing being launched in March typing in ether.cards. Those numbers, if you don't know anything about these numbers, that's a really— that's phenomenal. What I want to know is how are people discovering these types of things?

Walk me through how this young guy made Ethercards. Cards in this business. So basically, Ethercards, he just, you know, he made the website. It's very slick, very cool. How is the tracking of all these cards possible? The backend technology of like tracking the payment and all that, do they actually make that? Are they building on top of something else? I don't know.

I think they're probably building on top of something else. It's one of the best parts of crypto is that because crypto is open source, crypto is about building protocols. You can use those protocols to do anything. So we had Furkan on here. I don't know, did he talk about Pack Protocol?

I don't know if he did.

He's building— Furkan's building something called the Pack Protocol out of his thing, NFT Labs. Yeah. And basically it's just a protocol where you or I can go on there and say, hey, you know, just like you said, you love to watch people doing pack breaks of NBA cards. We could make our own MFM packs, just like Jack Butcher, I think, did with Visualize Value. We could say, great, we want— we want to— we're going to offer these 10 possible cards right inside. One of them gives you like an hour of business coaching. Another gives you a shout out on the podcast. Another gives you a free shirt. Another gives you just a Twitter follow, whatever. We come up with our rewards, we just type them in and it basically says assign the probability to each. It's like, oh, you know, the follow is high probability and an hour of business coaching is only 1% of people should get this when they open a pack. We set the price and it'll basically spin up like Shopify for NFTs. It'll spin up a website where we can sell our packs and fans can come, they could buy them and they can open them up and they can have a chance of winning X inside. We didn't have to do any coding to make that happen because they have built the pack protocol to make this happen and it's all saved on the Ethereum blockchain. Uh, like all the ownership is there. And so, and they just take a cut of every buy, um, in exchange for having built this technology for us.

So back, and but back to the EtherCard. So, so, so these kids like built just the front end and used someone else's protocol, and then they hollered at— they somehow got in touch with Lamelo. I mean, like, hey, do you agree?

And by the way, sorry, just to cut you off one second, they— I don't know how we got in touch with Lamelo. I'm gonna ask him. But, uh, after launching this project, uh, so this thing did hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first day when it dropped. Um, so, you know, just the Lamelo thing, or just the Lamelo thing did, uh,, I don't know if I can say the exact number, but north of $300,000 in during the drop. Um, and then, uh, other players—

by the way, it's so funny saying like north of $300,000, like, yeah, it did over $300,000, $433,000. Like, that's it.

Like, yeah, you know, you got to give the people the information without giving people—

I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with $700,000. Like, that's like what you're saying.

Yeah, basically. So, uh, other NBA players, including one of the most popular NBA players on the planet, hit him up and was like, hey, saw the LaMelo thing, let's like talk to my people, let's do it, let's do my own.

And did this kid have a following already on Twitter, or what platform is he using?

So he, uh, I'm gonna chat with him this week, but Ben talked to him while we were, uh, in Miami, and, uh, and what he said was that he got big. He— his claim to fame before this was helping artists go viral on TikTok. So he partnered with a bunch of musicians. He's like, yo, you know, a bunch of the viral things you've seen on TikTok, I kind of architected those behind the scenes. I don't know what that means, but I'm like, oh, you got hustler dripping off you. Like, this is good.

And did you— how did Ben— so Ben, if you're listening, is Sean's coworker. Basically, they scheme together. How did Ben find this?

But we saw the announcement on ESPN announced LaMelo Ball is doing his own NFT. We saw an article. I go, I read the dynamic NFT part, how it updates based on the player's actual achievements in the real world. And I go, I just messaged Ben. I go, this is fucking genius. Find the genius who made this. And he went and he found the guy who made it. He scheduled a call. I couldn't make that call. Ben, Ben did the call and Ben gave me the lowdown on like who this guy is. He's like, he's awesome. You should talk to him.

And Ben met him on social.

Yeah, just DM'd him. Ben has my— I don't know if you use his Twitter or he has access to my Twitter where he could just DM anybody from my account.. And because my account has more followers, I get a higher rate of reply.

So let's do— there's so many takeaways here for a listener. I want to actually want to go through these takeaways. The first is like, I'm actually amazed at this. The way that you found this was not special. Correct. Maybe if Ben used— so Ben doesn't have a big following, right? He's just— no, it looks normal.

BM Levy. Ben Levy or Ben M. Levy. Fuck, I don't know his Twitter. Something like that. Ben M. Levy.

So yours looks special. You have 144,000 people. Most people would reply to someone. They have 144,000 people, but Ben doesn't. All he did was DM them. Does the kid even know? Does he know who you are? Like, does he know Sean is like a popular podcaster or anything?

No idea.

Okay, great. So that's the takeaway here, is that like you found an opportunity by seeing it on ESPN. You had Ben, but you didn't have to have Ben.

No, I've done this myself. That's how I found Ben, by the way. Same thing. Just cold reach out.

That's a huge takeaway here. The other takeaway is just that this NFT thing is cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think you're going to see more of this. You're going to see famous people launching their own limited edition NFTs that come with access to the person and they own the whole thing. So they're not using— they don't have to sign with a label or sign with or like rely on Topps to go make their card for them. They're going to release their own cards and they're going to own their own upside, which is obviously a much better thing for the talent.

Yeah, this is amazing. I love this.

I have a couple other topics if you want to go.

Go, go, go.

Okay, let's do— let's do two things.

How do you— how— so normally when we, when we research, we have a document. What are you using?

Mine's just on my notes on my, my, my— it's for my phone's notes because I was typing it while we were like— we'd be out, we'd meet somebody. Like, for example, at the event where we did the podcast, some guy came up. He's like, hey, I'm a lawyer. I, I've been a lawyer in Dallas for a long time. I drove down for the event, drove from Dallas to Austin. And, you know, I just love you guys. Always get the wheels turning. In fact, I can't just like be a normal lawyer anymore. I really want to do more. And he has this idea for litigation finance. He goes, you know what that means? Did you talk to this guy?

That's how it could work. Exactly. And he did. He— they did the lawsuit. They bankrupt— they basically put Gawker out of business. Gawker no longer is in business. The guy who built that site over the years, it all came falling down because he pushed it too far. He pissed off the wrong billionaire. And by the way, some people think this is bad.

Whatever.

I don't care.

So what litigation— Not that you don't care if it is or is not bad. You're saying it's interesting regardless.

I'm saying irrelevant to what we're talking about is whether billionaires should fund lawsuits and take down media or not. Okay, whatever. So litigation finance is exactly this. So basically what he does is they— he's a lawyer. He analyzes cases that could be pursued. So, oh, you might have a lawsuit here that you should be pursuing. You, for whatever reason, maybe you don't know if you could win. You don't realize it's a—

you could potentially sue for being wronged. You don't have the money. The, you know, the corporation can, can throw all their lawyers at this and you don't want to go broke trying to, trying to just sue. So you kind of sit on it. So I think it was like 70% plus of potential suits go unfiled because of one of many reasons. And so the idea here would be, if you see, you can submit to them, hey, would you back my case? And they basically underwrite the risk of it. They look at it, they say, oh, I think you have a really strong case, or no, I think you have a weak case. If you have a strong case, they'll say, great, we will fund the lawsuit. You get a piece of it if it works. If it doesn't work, you lose nothing. Basically, the guy has now raised or is raising millions and millions of dollars from family offices and other folks to fund these cases. And so that's what they're doing now as a thing. Anyways, I thought it was a cool listener idea. I don't know what you think of that.

How much have they raised? How much has he raised?

I think they raised something like $6 million so far to fund this. And he's trying to get— basically, it's a proof of concept. If they can show that, yes, we are successfully able to underwrite these cases, meaning we can correctly select the winners and offer a payback, great. If once we know that we're able to pay you back 25%, 30% on your, you know, annually on your, on your, on your financing here, then we can go raise 50 or 100 or 200 million to do more.

Okay. I've heard of this. I didn't realize this was such a thing. I am so in. So there's a company called Burford Capital. It's founded in 2009, located in England. Did you see it?

He told me about it. He goes, this is big in England. There's a multibillion-dollar company, Burford, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, exactly. So he was like, you know, I'll send you the information. Uh, and I told him, I said, look, this sounds great. Uh, I don't know anything about this, so I'm probably not going to fund it just because I have two options. I can either invest in things I really understand, or I can invest in things I don't understand. I used to do both, but now that this podcast has gotten so popular, now the number of opportunities that I do understand are so large, they they exceed my investable capital. Now I don't have to do shit I don't understand anymore.

This is a really interesting business. This is— but was— so when I— you're further along, and I would actually say you're probably a better investor than I am. When I look at these types of companies, I think like, what's the idea? That's important, right? I think of, I don't have enough time to go and verify if this is like a solid market. So I look at who else is investing, right? That's probably— a lot of people say, oh, that's boring, you know, are you ever going to take a chance? Well, probably not, to be honest. Like, I like looking at that. But then the third thing is I look at the person. Are they a competent person? Right. Like, so does this person seem like they're going to build a huge company off this?

Yes, but you more likely than not need some type of charisma in order to be— I mean, like, you either do need to be a genius, so you do need to be like a Peter Thiel type of guy. You do need to be maybe like a— what are you— like, you or me type of person, which we don't really know how to do that much., but we're charismatic enough to convince other people to come work at our companies and convince them to do the work. Yeah. Like, and then you have like a few like industry knowledge where maybe this guy has, but you need something. Yeah. You need attributes. As Conor McGregor would say, if you're gonna beat me, you gotta have some attributes.

Yeah. If you're gonna beat me, you need some attributes.

Yeah. So like, look, if you're gonna like succeed, you need that. You need some attributes. So what are the attributes gonna be? Like something like when you're building a fighter or building a sports team or building like an NBA player on video games, and you can like put like, do I make this person like as fast as possible? Do I make them as tall as possible? Do I make them as strong as possible? You need something there.

I think that's the next shirt. You need attributes to beat me.

Yeah. So like, what attributes does this guy have? So that's what I'm curious about.

Yeah, I think his is domain knowledge. I think that's the biggest one.

Do you agree with me, by the way? You need some attributes.

You do. And what I guess like the only point I was trying to make is that some require more attributes than others. There are some where you have to be the smartest and the fiercest and the fastest. And, you know, like, that's— there's some businesses that require that, and there's some where you can be the tortoise, not the hare, right? And I think this is one where you could be the tortoise. You just have to keep going forward.

And that's an attribute, by the way, determination, and just, I'm willing to do it all the time.

Exactly. And, uh, you know, having the steady hand and being, um, being good at actually selecting the cases, right? Because that's going to just prove the track record out over time. So I think the domain knowledge matters. All right, I want to do some other topics. So I have like 3, but I don't know which one I want to do. Okay, I'll give you some options.

This is amazing, by the way. This is turning out to be quite good.

Totally unplanned. And by the way, I wrote these down just while we were talking at the beginning when the guy canceled. All right, so Bitcoin Miami. I have a few comments on what was going on in Bitcoin Miami. I don't know if—

I heard it was horrible.

So we could talk about that. We could talk about— I have a thing on secondhand e-commerce, if you want to hear that. Also door-to-door sales. I have a story there. And the last one is a framework about the next Apple, the next Google, the next Facebook.

So, so tell me, they're all great.

Give me which one you want to do.

Uh, the second one and then the fourth one.

Okay. The second one I think was, uh, the, the secondhand e-commerce thing.

Yeah.

All right, so let's do that. So as you know, I've been dabbling in e-commerce and have built a brand and then have built a community called Club LTV that has, I don't know, 100 store owners each doing somewhere between $1 million a year and $100 million a year in sales. And so in that, I've started to learn some of the pain points of e-commerce. One of the interesting things that I didn't know about that you might know about, because you've used Poshmark, I think when I was at your house you told me Guess what me and Sarah did this weekend? We sold like $97 worth of old clothes on Poshmark. And I was like, dude, what's happening? This is your hobby? And you're like, yeah, I love this shit. I didn't realize how big the secondhand market for e-commerce is.

Dude, Poshmark's huge. It's crazy. So let me tell you, Poshmark going public, multibillion dollar valuation.

Is it public already? Yeah, it went public.

What is it?

I don't know. We'll look it up. But yeah, it's a public company.

Okay. There's ThredUp, spoke at HustleCon, raised $250 million, either going public or went public already. Uh, there's Grailed. I discovered Grailed in 2011. I didn't have any money. It was launched, uh, for—

Poshmark's $3.6 billion.

Great. There's Grailed. I, I DM'd this guy because— or I messaged him on Reddit years ago because I was on the day he launched it. I was going to the website. I didn't invest in it. I think it still could be great. It's basically Poshmark for hip dudes. What else is there? I mean, there's like 8 others that are like substantial.

So let me tell you what I think is interesting here. We, for our store, for our, our, our DTC brand, we have a large amount of people who buy new and they, they're willing to spend more buying new because they know there's, this has like secondary value. They know they could sell it 3 months from now, 6 months from now, either new or used and recoup a good amount of the money. So, uh, certain, certain categories you could do that better than others. So anyways, the, uh, but the, but managing this thing is, is really awful. So the way that people do it today, is sometimes they list on Poshmark or The RealReal or like, I forgot the other one, Mercari. Mercari is huge. They go, they go list on those exchanges. But a big part of it is they have Facebook groups for every brand. So every brand will have— any brand with a cult following will have a secondary market Facebook group called Buy, Sell, Trade, BST, BST, BST. So you can look up any brand name on Facebook, go type in the brand name and like, I don't know, your favorite boots or leather jackets you liked or whatever. Just type in that BST. So what you'll see is that there are these, these private groups on Facebook communities for buying, selling, and trading what you already have. What you do is you take a photo of your closet or your item, you lay it down on the floor, you take a photo of it, and you just write, you know, like there's all these acronyms. Like if you go in there, it's another language. It's like MWT, that means new with tag. Okay, great. Or like, you know, ISO, in search of. This product. And so they have their own little lingo. It's this insider community. And you post the item, you just say, here's what I have, here's what it's for. I have no pets in the house, no smokers. And then somebody in the comments will just say, they'll just type in a number. It's like a little auction. Those would be like $40. And then you just say, done, send me your— what's your email? I'll send you the PayPal invoice. So there's this like, it's like this kind of like stitched together experience. Where then you have to send them the PayPal invoice, they have to pay it, then you have to like find their— get their mailing address, you have to ship it.

And then I just Googled BST. I just found one, Paintball BST, 20K members.

Right. And that's what they'll have. They'll have tens of thousands of members often, and they're very active. And for the brand, for the brand themselves, this becomes kind of a headache. It's good, but it's bad. Why is it bad? So the first thing is a bunch of people will buy your product just to flip it. Right? So they'll go and they'll sell it for more. So we have a product, we have one of our products, it sells for $65 and then it immediately— so it sells out the first minute we release it and then it immediately starts selling for 10 times more. So $500 or $600 on Mercari or the secondhand websites.

What's that Mercari one?

M-E-R-C-A-R-I. You've probably seen their billboards before. They're very big. That's cool.. So anyways, so one pain point is these flippers, but that's okay. The other part is you don't benefit from the secondhand market directly. You don't get any cut of those sales that are happening, but you do sometimes have customer service problems because people complain, oh, I bought this thing from the official BuySellTrade group and they scammed me, or they didn't send it, or they sent the wrong item. And you're like, dude, this is not my problem. This is— that's not even us. That's like Craigslist. So like, you can't complain to us about what's going on on Craigslist. So this company we found has a very interesting take on this. So I'm trying to invest in this. It's called Tread.

How did you find this? How do you find all this crap?

Guess who?

Can I— how do I share him?

You need a— you want to give a love letter to Ben? I think you fell in love with Ben on this trip.

I did. Tread is tread.com. So Sean has this guy who he pays a great salary to, and his name's Ben. And I hung out with Ben for the first time. And what Ben— I admire him so much. Ben is, and I say this with love, pretty nerdy, a nerdy guy. And not like in terms of like looks or acts, but like just like his interests. Like he just loves like gadgets. He loves new stuff. And I started talking about him and he just brought— or talking to him and he just told me he just browses the web to find the latest and greatest stuff and he'll use it and then he'll DM or email or message the person who starts the thing and just say, this is neat, here's tips that I would do to make it better, or here's been my experience using your thing. And that's all he says. And in doing that, he sees everything and knows everyone. And I think it's so fascinating.

Right. He's just, he's just helpful. Okay. It's not, it's not Tread, Treat. Is the name of it. Treat.co. I'll send it to you. T-R-E-E-T.co. Okay, so check that out. So what they do is they have this idea of circular commerce, meaning you make an item, you sell it, and then that person, instead of it just going to waste, they can resell it to the next person and they can resell it to the next person. Sort of a circular commerce model.

So what they do is— say the URL again.

That's crazy. I don't know if this is a good idea. How would you feel As a business. I mean, you do.

I'm going to use this because I want this for our business.

Do you think a lot of people feel the same way?

I don't know. We'll see.

You know what my gut says? Super early. Make more shit. Like, why are you selling out? Don't sell out. Like, is you selling out? That sounds like a you problem, not a you need a plugin problem.

Well, it's not just— not just for selling out, right? Some people just can't afford the full-priced item. Like, I don't know, you bought those dumbbells in your, in your garage, secondhand off Facebook Marketplace or whatever, right? Like if you can get the good, the item in good condition for half the price, uh, for a lot, that opens up your buyer pool into a different segment that can't maybe always afford the full price item and you don't have to do heavy discounting as a brand.

Okay, so I'm just Googling as you're talking cuz we didn't have time to research, but, uh, so Patagonia's CEO has this great thing where he goes, I actually don't want you to, uh, buy more stuff. Buy one thing from us and if you— if it rips, if it rips, we'll fix it and, um, it should just last. So like only buy one thing. So I just Googled Patagonia pre-owned. They have a URL that's dedicated to it called warnwear.patagonia.com and I'm pretty sure they have their entire— yeah, they have an entire way to buy and sell, uh, their own, their own gear. Kind of cool actually. It is actually cool. You know who would buy used Patagonia stuff? You? Me. Me. I buy used clothing all the Whenever I buy Red Wing boots, I always buy them used. I actually changed my opinion very quickly. I think this is cool.

All right. I'm glad Patagonia got you across the line. Okay. I have another topic for you. Do you want to do another one or— Yeah, keep going. Wrap it up.

No, keep going. This is good.

Okay, let's do one more.

Well, no, you had 4 things.

We had 4. Which one you want to do? So your remaining options. Door to door. Door to door. Okay, so this is a little bit longer.

Patagonia's pre-owned website, by the way, is fucking sick. $90 jeans for $38. On board. But could TREAT be a big business as a Shopify plugin? Am I being a hater just because it's a simple Shopify plugin?

Well, I don't even— it's not— I don't even think it is a Shopify plugin, but I know what you mean. Yeah, I think it's— I think it's the wrong way to think about it, because if you look at how big the centralized marketplaces are— Mercari, Poshmark— those are $3 or $4 billion. This is that same thing, but just decentralized. Instead of one website where you go to find all the brands, Every brand has your little marketplace embedded into it. So I think it's a smart strategy where you give the brand the marketplace instead of trying to get the customer to come to your app.

This is fucking awesome.

Yeah. So here's some more. So door-to-door sales. So this thing has been happening recently and I know you love the Mormons, so I think you'll dig this.

Love the Mormons.

Love the Mormons. So I have met in the— I've heard these stories in the last few days. I'll give you two of door-to-door sales. I have never done door-to-door sales, but I'm almost jealous that I haven't now. So I'll give you two— two examples. Do you know who Bryan Johnson is? Generic name. Might, might not be— might be hard to place.

Yeah. So I know two different Bryan Johnsons. One sells books online and the other started Braintree.

Braintree is the guy I'm talking about. Okay, that's, that's pretty good. You know, you get, you get 200 points for your house there. All right. So So Brian Johnson, I was listening to his interview. He went on Lex Friedman's podcast. I was listening to it.

Does he still work?

Yeah. So, so his story is insane. So he basically creates Braintree, which is like a payments— it's basically an online payments company.

Stripe before Stripe.

It was Stripe before Stripe. It didn't become Stripe, but it sold for about $800 million, I believe, to PayPal.

And he owned most all of it.

Yeah, exactly. He owned a huge chunk of it. He also— I think they bought Venmo along the way. So, so He had the strategy early on, which was like, we go to the merchants, we get the merchants to use us because we're so easy to use online, and then we'll build a consumer-like side of— we'll buy the most hit consumer app. And that was Venmo. And that will be a valuable company. And anyway, so he builds this company for $800 million, he sells it, and he decides what he wanted was he wanted to have a huge nest egg to just reinvest into a world-changing idea. So he's like, how do I get as much financial capital as possible in the next few years so that I can self-fund and work on one of the most like gnarly, you know, like huge life world-changing problems? So the thing he's working on—

and by the way, he thought that Braintree wasn't going to be— I mean, that's like pretty—

and Lex even brings this up. He's like, you know, online payments actually does help the world. He's like, yeah, that's true. But I knew that if I didn't do online payments, somebody else would. I wanted to work on something that if I didn't do it, I don't know if anyone else would. And so the thing he's working on is that same thing that Elon is working on, Neuralink.

So his is called Kernel.

Kernel. It's a brain interface. So what that means is you put this like helmet on, it looks like a bicycle helmet, and it's basically reading your brainwaves while you're sitting there. And so, you know, what does that mean? First, it can analyze your brain while you're just doing things. So that's interesting. You can get more insight about yourself., and there, what his, what his company's trying to do is basically spit the data out so that all he's trying to do is be able to read brain data. Then any developer can take that, those data, that data and those learnings and actually build any application to improve your life off of it. Um, so that's what they're trying to build with Kernel. So, and by the way, he took, I think, $60 million after he sold Braintree and he funded the first $60 million into Kernel himself because—

yeah, I'm reading about that right now. He put, uh, So they've raised $53 million from outside, $54 million from his own money.

Yeah, $54 million of his own money. Exactly. And so I think most investors didn't want to touch it because it's like, dude, this is just going to be a money pit. It's the hardest technology, requires the most expensive engineers. We're not there yet. It's going to take 10 years. And he's like, yeah, don't worry. That's why I have this nest egg to fund this thing myself.

How much did he make when he sold Braintree, you think?

I don't know. I don't know the exact number. But anyways, this doesn't even matter. This is just setup. That's the guy. Cool guy. I would have featured him maybe as Billy of the Week and maybe we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive.

Hey, Dan, let's get this guy on the podcast. This guy is cool.

Yeah, we'll get Brian on. The part I thought was pretty remarkable is his door-to-door sales part. Okay, so what happened? So before he starts Braintree, he— I think he had done a startup and it was failed. It either had failed or it was failing.. And what he did was, I hope I don't butcher the story. I'm just trying to remember this off the top of my head because we didn't have time to prep today. So what he did was he needed some money. So he's like, okay, how do I get money fast? My startup's failing or it already failed. He's like, okay, I need like a sales job. So he goes and he gets a sales job with some kind of like financial product company. I think it was like either like credit cards or something like that for businesses. And so he's like, he's basically a sales rep.. And he's like, okay, how do I, how do I become like the best sales rep for this? And so it became a door-to-door sales challenge. And so he was going door-to-door to each merchant and he was selling them on the benefits of this product. And he would then get a commission off of like kind of the whatever the value of that customer was over the next period of time. And, and so I'm going to butcher this because I can't remember the hack he used, but he had a, he had a very clever technique he was using when he was going door-to-door. That enabled him to become the top salesman in North America. And so I'm going to go—

Brian.

Brian did. Yeah. So he became the number one salesperson. He basically goes door to door and he figures out how to sell this product. And what he said was like, door-to-door sales is like just this, like, really formative, formative experience for anybody because you have to have like an incredible amount of determination. You're going to get rejected all the time.. And you need to learn how to get your foot in the door, how to get somebody's attention, how to get them interested, and how to close them in order to sell any product door to door. And then I heard the story from Brian Johnson, and he talked about how important that experience was to him. Next day, I go meet my uncle. I have an uncle who I've talked about on the pod before because I consider him to be the happiest man on earth.

He's real estate uncle.

Real estate uncle. His name's Uncle Vinnie. Literally, people just coined his name Smiley. So they just stopped calling him Vinny. People just call him Smiley because he's just so smiley. Like his company, they got him a trophy because he was the number one salesperson. And on the trophy, they didn't put his name. They just wrote Smiley. And that became kind of like the nickname that stuck. And they didn't even ask his permission. They just knew this is the right name for this guy. So he's incredibly happy, but he's also been incredibly successful. And I would say I don't think he's— in all of my, my aunts, my uncles, in terms of IQ, just raw intelligence, I don't know, he's probably either 50 percentile, maybe even less, maybe half. Maybe half him.

Sorry, Vinny.

No, I mean this with love because the point I'm making is good thing they didn't call him dopey.

Smiling a lot better.

He's the most successful of anyone in our family, but it's not because he had more raw horsepower in the brain. That's not the reason that he was able to do it. And so I was telling my trainer about him and he goes, I'd love to meet him. And I go, what? He goes, yeah, does he? Where does he live? I go, he lives in Danville, actually lives not far away from here, 30-minute drive. He goes, could we just go meet him? I was like, yeah. So I texted my uncle. I said, hey, I was telling my trainer about you and he just wants to meet you. And he goes, he was like, sure, come on by. No problem. Yes. Like, can't wait to see you. And I was like, I was like, who does? And I was like, I noted to myself, he didn't even ask why. What's the context? Do you want something from me? He's just like, yes. You want to meet me? Yes. And I also thought to myself, what a goal, by the way, to be the type of person that people want to make a pilgrimage out, you know, to go drive an hour to go see just because of a description of the way you are. I thought that's kind of amazing because he doesn't want anything from him. He's not trying to get a business deal or get a customer out of him. He just heard how his personality is and was like, I got to meet this guy. So we go, we drive out there and we sit down and, you know, he's already on level 10 excitement and we're having a great time. And I start asking him, I said, you know, when did you become you? When did you become this way? You weren't born this way. So how did you become this way? And he's telling me the long story and he talked about this door-to-door sales job. He goes, I came from India and I'm a student at university. He goes, George Washington University, I think. He goes, I needed a summer job. He's like, I came here, I only had enough tuition. The government paid for my tuition for the first year. I had no idea how I was going to pay for the second year, but I have one summer to bridge that gap. How the heck am I going to make next fall's tuition? So he looked for a job and his roommate was like, hey, I work for this company called Southwestern. I don't know if you ever heard of this company. You're going to love it. But basically it's a company called Southwestern, and what they do is they sell books.. So they sell books door to door. They have this fleet of college students that will go out and they'll sell these books like encyclopedias, dictionaries, Bibles, you know, any textbooks of any kind.

And Southwestern Advantage is what it's called.

And so— and they've since grown like crazy. They acquired all— now it's like 20-something companies and it's like a multibillion-dollar company. Crazy story about the founder. I'm going to have him as the Billy of the Week as a special profile, but I'm going to tell this door-to-door sales story. So he goes, Okay, great. So what do I do? He's like, you know, I can barely speak English because I'm just here from India, but okay, I got to go do door-to-door sales. How do I do that? He's like, they gave us this training where you— they give us 7 books like, you know, How to Win Friends and Influence People, you know, you know, like these 7 kind of classic self-help books, Tony Robbins and whatever. He's like, read these 7 books and then come to this training seminar. He goes, I go to this thing, it's an auditorium and it's me and like, you know, the 50 other college students. And there's this stage and there's just a doorframe on the stage and you'd have to get up and you'd have to knock on the door and then they would have an act, you know, like the person from the company on the other side, an actor who is like, I'm Mrs. Johnson. And you open the door, Mrs. Johnson. And she would simulate like slamming the door on your face and being like, like, stop bothering us, right? Or somebody who's like lukewarm or somebody who's interested. And they would teach you how to sell door to door. And he talked to me. He's like, I used to— they used to— but my job, basically every day in the summer, and I'm in the heat of summer, I would— my roommate would drive me to some neighborhood, any neighborhood. I would just pick a different one every day. And at 9:00 AM, he would drop me off. I didn't own a car, so I needed him to pick me up at the end of the day. So he's like, 9:00 AM, he dropped me off in a neighborhood, and 9:00 PM, he'd come pick me up at the end of the day. And he's like, I would go door to door and I would knock, and they would teach you the skills of selling door-to-door. So do you know, I don't know if you ever heard this. I was fascinated by how you act. What is the actual method of selling when you're door-to-door? Have you ever heard this?

No. What? Well, so you typically say, hey, I was just talking to a bunch of your neighbors and they thought this was interesting. And so here I am talking to you.

That's definitely part of it. But he broke it down step by step. He's like, there's a science to this that they taught us at this training. He goes, first you ring the doorbell, you knock on the door and you don't look into the door because when you look at the door, it's a little bit intimidating and they see your face, they recognize that they don't know you. He's like, you want to look slightly off 45-degree angle away so that they're going to like, when they look through the peephole, they can be like, okay, I don't know who this guy is, but he doesn't look too threatening.

And then what do they try to get you to do? Like to step your foot into the door eventually?

Basically. So they open the door and you explain the pitch that you just said, which is, you know, hi, my name is, my name is Vinny, and I'm a student here at George Washington nearby. And I actually have been, you know, I've been talking to your neighbors We— what we do is we sell, you know, we sell tech or whatever it is. He's basically saying, I was talking to your neighbors and I wanted to stop by your place. I'm a student nearby, right? So you become a local. You're not a stranger, you're a friend, right? So you position—

I imagine you want to put like a timestamp, like it is only going to be— I actually, I have to go in a second.

I was about to say this. This is why I always say longer is better. I want them to fall down my slippery slope.

And explain the slippery slope. It's like the first line, the goal of the first line.

So now, by the way, this is why on all my landing pages I always ask for email first, because once you give me your email, you're just You're in the door.

Exactly. And, you know, they might offer you water or a drink. You say yes, you don't say no. Now you're both sitting there, you have your water and you start to explain to them. And now you need to put it in the context of their problem. So you look around the house. Oh, I see you have children. How old are they? Oh, I got a boy and girl myself. Yeah, you know, blah, blah, blah. This, this age is the craziest, blah, blah, blah. You know, what are your kids doing for— what do you do for kind of afterschool education? For your children. And that's how you're leading into the encyclopedia sale. That's how you're leading into the textbook sale is you need to frame your product as a solution to their problem. Right? So this is all like, you know, this is common sense, but I just love to hear it.

It's not that common, dog. I think that like a lot of people don't know this. I think you want— so I learned it. So I read How to Win Friends and Influence People. And by the way, all those old like fuzzy books, like How to Win Friends and Influence People. Influence People, Think and Grow Rich. It sounds silly. I endorse all of them fully. That shit totally helps you. Tony Robbins totally helps you. I'm entirely on board with that, right? The founder of Panda Express makes all of his employees go through a Tony Robbins and How to Influence People seminar. Totally on board with it. It's that I learned how to do this when I was selling hot dogs. And then, you know what else I did? Like every other 18-year-old, I use it to meet girls, right? And it totally worked. And I mastered it. Well, I wasn't like that good, but like I stepped up my game significantly when I learned how to do all this.

Right, right. Exactly. And so he told me a couple of things out of that. He goes, he's like, here I am. I'm a Hindu selling Bibles to— I'm an Indian Hindu selling Bibles to Americans. And he's like, that experience, that whole summer, he's like, you know, it changed me. He's like, first, I'm working hard. I'm there at 9 a.m., I'm walking around. Carrying loads and loads of books, and I'm walking door to door and I'm getting mostly rejected. But then, you know, if I got even an inch, he's like, I used to schedule a same-day follow-up. He's like, so, oh, now's not a good time. You know, would it be better this evening when your husband's home? Like maybe 5 p.m.? Great. I'll be back because he's like, I'm just walking around this neighborhood anyways. I'll walk right back to this. He's like, so I was scheduling same-day follow-ups to keep the— keep the leads. Like, by the second time they met me, Now I'm not a stranger. He's like, nothing has changed. They don't know anything more about me, but it's just the second time they've seen me. And, and so there was all these little things I thought were really applicable to sales. But also I started thinking about these formative experiences, the really hard experiences, like what's a hard business experience? And I think this is actually pretty underrated. So he said, I learned to work hard. I learned how to sell. I learned how to build rapport and talk to people. And he's like, I wasn't doing it to manipulate anybody. He's like, I just genuinely— life was a lot more fun if I got to know the person. Rather than having a standoff relationship and then them being angry that I'm bothering them that day. And it got to the point where one woman would be like, are you walking around carrying all these books? He's like, well, yeah, I have to. And she's like, here's the keys to my car. Here's my van. Drive my van around the neighborhood instead. So she gave him his car to actually do the sales. So it went from most people slam the door on a door-to-door salesman. She gave him her car. To make it easier for him to go do what he was doing. He still keeps in touch with her 36 years later or something like that. 40 years later, he's like, yeah, you know, she just sent me this cake. And like, Mrs. Whatever her name was, he's like, we're still good friends actually, because— and we met because I sold her, you know, a Bible back in the day. And so I thought this was interesting. So I think there's something to this. And from two levels, what are the opportunities here? I thought, hey, who's doing door-to-door sales now? Are there still companies that primarily sell door-to-door, I'm going to research them and find some of the best.

What comes to mind? I mean, like, some really— the probably the most famous one is Cutco. You know Cutco?

No, what is that?

Um, wow, you've never heard of Cutco? So they make knives and kitchenware. Their knives are actually pretty good, but their whole business model is, uh, door-to-door. And, um, like, I've got friends that have done it. It, it's reputable in the sense that it's a good product, right? Some people think it's scammy, but because they're like direct sales and multi-level marketing, but it's legit, right?

Well, you want to hear something funny? You know who Jordan Belfort is?

Yeah. The Wolf of Wall Street.

Oh, we talked about it this weekend. I think you haven't read his book. You should. So Jordan Belfort was the Wolf of Wall Street. He made hundreds of millions of dollars selling penny stocks to rich people, and he was a great salesperson. He created this thing called straight-line persuasion. He started by selling fish and steaks door to door. That's how his entire thing started, was door to door. Yeah, it's a great book, but it was all— it was all door-to-door sales.

Yeah. So I don't really have— I don't really know what the point of this is. It's more like I loved hearing these stories. I am sort of jealous I never had this experience because I think I would be better at what I do if I did. And I want to go further. I want to research these companies and I want to start hiring people out of this pool of talent. I think it is an underrated pool of talent, just like we talked about, you know, sort of Mormons who go on the mission and they have to sell sort of the hardest thing, sell a religion to somebody who never asked you to come sell it to them. And they have to do that for 2 years. That does create a certain sales ethic and work ethic in a person. And we've seen that take place. That's why almost all the direct sales companies, all the, the successful direct sales companies are all based out of Utah because That's where the talent is that knows how to do this sort of thing.

I think for— I would say for not preparing, this episode turned out to be pretty amazing. And I would say even amongst all episodes, this has been one of my favorite. Dan, do you agree that this has been fire?

This has been great, guys.

Come on, door-to-door sales was awesome. What about the other stuff? The other stuff was good too.

You guys just finished with a big bang.

Yeah. Um, I think this ended up being a winner. Um, so that's the episode, I think, right?

We're going to wrap up there.

Let's wrap. Um, tomorrow or Wednesday, I want to talk about coworking spaces. I think we have to have a My First Million Coworking Business.

Yeah, you like that idea.

I do. That was another Ben idea, and I think it's wonderful. So I tweeted out who I could talk to. I got a bunch of interesting stuff. Um, we're going to talk about that next week, uh, or Wednesday.

Let's do it. Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Life.