Crumbl Cookie Making $1B/ Year, AI In Sports, and Underutilized Assets Create Businesses

And again, remember, percentage of their readers are ultra-wealthy people who are like, yeah, great, I want to have a home on, on the East Coast that I could park my private plane in, and that'll be one of my hubs. And I'm pretty sure— okay, I don't know the exact numbers on this, but I can triangulate a little bit. I think they've done at least $25 million in pre-sales on this thing.

That is crazy.

And it could be— it could easily be double that. But, um, but that is a, a really awesome and impressive like way to take this niche hobby, take, find a, find a kind of media publication that, that, that works and go content to commerce.

I have a, I have some stuff for today. You have something that I know about that I've kind of mentioned, but I mentioned it without saying their name. Craig Fuller. Now we can mention it. Let's talk about it. Did you get permission from, uh, about this?

Uh, yeah. Um, I think so. So we got, uh, some of this is public, but let's, let's talk a little bit about this. Okay. So there's this, there's this business called, uh, Flying Magazine or Flying Mag. And, um, so when you look at it, you're like, okay, well, what is this? And so basically the story is there's a guy who bought this magazine called Flying Mag and Flying Mag produces this beautiful magazine, amazing photos. And if you're a, a flying or aviation enthusiast, you will love this magazine. He bought it for like, I think like not quite $10 million, but a little under that. So maybe somewhere between, let's call it $5 to $10 million.

Uh, my guess is a fraction of that. I think it was closer to $1 million. Do you have any, any idea?

Yeah, we've got a little source here saying high 7 figures. So let's, let's, let's assume the source is correct.

Okay.

So, Um, but then I was like, well, where did this person get high seven figures to go drop on a magazine? That seems like a, a pretty indulgent purchase for somebody unless they have a lot of money. So he started a company before that called FreightWaves, which, uh, basically is like a data company for the freight shipping industry. So they're like a, uh, a price reporting company. So they, they provide data that shippers and freight companies use to, um, you know, inform themselves on what's going on in the market. They also have a SaaS tool, so they kind of have like a media side, which is the, you know, content that they're producing. That's pricing information. And then they have a SaaS business called Sonar that's in it. And they've released a public press release, so you can kind of see some of their numbers.

I saw they did that. That's very weird that they did that.

But it's growing 70% a year. It's growing quickly, almost.

And it's been around, I think, for a little while. Um, so, so, you know, it's done well. They had $28 million in cash, just like it on the books, on, on the balance sheet. So, you know, the, the business was in a, in a, in a healthy spot. So I think Craig starts FreightWaves. He then separately buys Flying Mag. One of the interesting things about Flying Mag is that if you think about who are the readers of a niche magazine like this, you have Two categories, Uber nerds and Uber nerds who are rich, because you know, you gotta be kind of nerdy about this hobby if you're gonna be like reading about this. Like we had a guy once who we hired as an engineer that used to have an app on his phone where he would listen to the, uh, uh, what's it called? Air traffic control. He would just tune into the frequency of air traffic control and listen to it at lunch. And like, I gotta tell you, never had a worse lunch with anybody in my life. Like, you know, dude, me, him, and his phone on with air traffic control was our lunch. And I was like, Hey, man, I'm going to go back for seconds and then I'm going to go kill myself. So see you later. This has been horrible.

Thanks. I do that with the police scanner. You ever do that with the police scanner?

At least police scanner. Look, there's a show called Cops. There's no show called Safe Landings because that's all air traffic control is. There's no show called Which Way Is the Wind Blowing?

But there is a video game called that. There is a video game where all you are is an air traffic controller.

Yeah, fair enough. Okay. So anyways, the back to, back to my Flying Mag story. So a big percentage of the readers are like rich people with private planes or like you see this a lot in tech for some reason. Like, um, my buddy Furqan did this, sold his company, immediately starts, signs up for flying lessons, wants to get his pilot license to like go fly this like, you know, 5-seater or 6-seater or 2-seater plane. Um, they love that hobby and it's a really expensive hobby. Um, So one thing that they did recently that I think is really smart is, have you heard about this, this community that they're building in Atlanta?

So he told me, I, I'm not gonna steal your thunder, but he told me what he was gonna do and he, he goes, I'm flying from New York to go see this property I'm looking at and I'm flying my private plane. Do you wanna come with me? And I ended up not going because I had to go up to Teterboro, so in New Jersey, and then fly back down to Atlanta to see the spot with them., but he asked me to go with him and I almost did it. And he was, and so, uh, I've known about this for about a year and a half now.

Yeah, that's great. So, and so the, the interesting thing is they're basically building a community in Atlanta. And I think the reason people build these communities is like, there's like a, uh, a, what's it called? Like a landing strip, like in the middle of the neighborhood. So you could park your plane and if you wanna take off, you could just like go take off.

It's like, like the driveway of the community is like a, a, a, it's a, it's a, it's a, so it's a country club with golf, with homes around the golf course, but instead of a golf course, it's a landing strip. That's exactly what it is. So it's a, it's a country club, country club for flying. And so you purchase, I forget how much a piece of a plot of land costs, and then they build a, build you a home and now you are part of this aviation community.

That is crazy.

Yeah. Look, you have BuzzFeed doing it with stuffed animals, which is pretty lame. You know, they did that with house— they did it with, with houses. And this is baller. Uh, Craig told me about this about a year and a half ago, and I was like, this is very bold. And he was explaining it to me and he was very confident and it was like no big deal. And I was thinking about this and I was like, I don't know, this kind of seems like a really big deal to me.

We should do.

Well, I was like, I don't think you're gonna be able to pull this off. Well, I didn't say that, but in my head I was like, this is ridiculous. He totally did. They totally pulled it off.

We, um, we did this way back in the day. I think you had said something, you were like, ads are lame. This is before HubSpot bought the podcast. So it was basically like, ads are lame. We're selling ads for the podcast, but like, what would be a better business for, for My First Million to do? And I think at the time people were like, you should create like a WeWork, like a branded version of WeWork or like a white label, like a coworking space or something like that, which sounded crazy. But I actually think that there was a version of that, that, that's a true, like basically if we just bought like a 8-unit or 16-unit apartment building in San Francisco, but it was only, you could only go rent there if you were part of our community or you could buy units there if you were part of our community, something like that could work because people would rather live in a community of like-minded people than a community of absolute strangers. I think there's a huge number of people that would do that.. And so then you get into the real estate game. These units in San Francisco go for, you know, $1.5 million, $2 million on average. You know, they, they, so, so you could do these things where you, you know, in theory, a, a brand like ours could also do that and say, yeah, if you wanna be around other entrepreneurs, other business people who are, you know, share this kind of like this ethos that we have, then, uh, you know, you could do that.

But there's a problem, which is you and I, I don't know about you, me, I wasn't even bold enough to like consider that. I thought that was stupid. Now I've got a little bit more experience and I kind of understand like our pull a little bit. Now I actually think that that could work. But at the time I was like, that's ridiculous. There's, there's no way that would work.

Dude, my brain is like a metal detector that's just looking for something that's gonna scare me to do. I'm just like, where can I get the maximum thrill? The business thrill? Like we're gonna get the maximum reward plus I'm down with the risk and saying, like, if I said out loud that I was doing this, that I think would get other people's attention, but it would also make me a little scared because I don't know exactly how to do it. Like, I am very attracted to these ideas and there's, that's not always a good thing. I think that's a bad thing in many cases. But, uh, but I'm, I hear that and I want to run into that fire a little bit. Whereas I think you hear that, you're like, there's a fire. Why would I run?

Uh, no, no, no, no, no. Now, now I'm more comfortable because I've seen some, I've seen like, well, if you do this, this and this, the odds of some type of, uh, return is positive. But like before, I was still kind of understanding like that mechanics of business and like investing and things like that. Now I actually do see it.

We are like the opposites. We're like the opposite. I get excited by that weird kind of like kind of half figured out thing. And you're like, well, why don't I want to figure it out first? But then once you do figure it out, you're like, you're like, go. And you just execute and you're like locked in and you just You just freaking go on that opportunity. Whereas I'm like, oh, this is cool. And it's kind of figured out. All right, cool. Um, like I'll kind of go there, but ooh, there's this other interesting thing over here that's like, you know, half figured out. And I, I'm not as good at the lock-in as you are.

You get bored after you figured out the puzzle.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. But for me, I have to figure out a little bit more and like, I want like a higher certainty that the puzzle pieces are even gonna be able to fit, fit, fit together. You know what I'm saying?

Right, right.

Exactly. Um, but now, and then once the puzzle's done, you're, you're like, My puzzle.

I love this puzzle, dude.

This is my puzzle. I'll tell you an example. So, uh, Sean and I are going to Vancouver Wednesday, I think. And we're doing this little, uh, meetup with us and Andrew Wilkinson. And this wasn't even that well organized. Like they've done a good job of it, but like there's no, they've not, maybe well organized isn't the right word cuz that sounds insulting. It was just kind of low key. Like we just have like a Typeform that you have to sign up for and that's it. And then you pay $50 to show up and I think you get a refund if you show up. I think they're doing it to like guarantee seats. Like the people listening to the pod, if they say, how do I sign up?

I don't even know where to—

I don't know where to go.

We're doing a meetup, but it's in stealth mode for no reason. I don't know. I don't know what the organizer guy's doing, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

Yo, what's the venue and date and time? Oh man, it's all coming together. We're working on it.

It's like, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know. Fyre Festival. What's happening here?

And then they refunded the money. And I'm like, well, I could have used that money on like my flights and hotel. I wish, I wish, you know, like I'm paying money to go and do this. It would've been cool. 'Cause like that thing, it made like 50 or 100 grand. I'm like, you know, gimme like 3,000 to pay for my stuff. But, uh, when I, when I kind of like realized that we were able to pull off some of this stuff, I'm like, oh hey, we can get people. The, the, the thing with media, what is if you can get people to buy shit or leave your home. So like if you say I'm gonna be at this location at this time, the, if you are able to get people to do that, that means you have pull. And once every once in a while when we pull that off, then I'm like, oh, we could have pulled this off, something like this. Or we still could, we still can. Then I, I, I, I start to believe it. Yeah.

That's interesting. Actually, that's a good metric cuz, um, I've been trying to think about on the content side, I'm like, you know, I wanna set a goal because I think, uh, I work better when I have a goal or a target to work off of.

You have to give context. The context is Sean is now he's considering or planning or doing to go harder on creating content.

Well, if you know, thousands would be crazy, but if I was like hanging out here all day, so it's not like if you gave it a window, if you gave it a 2-week window or a 2-week notice, 2 to 4 week notice, I think you know, I'm saying same day.

I'm just, I'm gonna be here all day, swing by if you're around.

50 to 100, I bet.

And like, I see this all the time with, uh, newsletters now because Substack has this feature where if you subscribe to one newsletter, like I read something, I'm like, yeah, I like this. I subscribe. It pops up this full screen thing, which is just like, Sean recommends these 5 newsletters and there's only one button and you're just like, uh, okay, next. And you hit that and now you're subscribed to 5 newsletters and you can see people on Substack. They're like, wow, my new, my growth is crazy. I'm hitting 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 subscribers.

No, but it's bullshit, dude.

That's Joe Rogan numbers.

That's Joe. There is not 2 million people. I know we, we, we have a podcast. I can see where we are in the ranks. I can see where he is in the ranks. I know other people that are at the top of the charts. You can look at the reviews. You could just see the cult following of certain things. Like if you said, yo, the All In podcast is getting a million views per episode, I'd be like, I think that's true. I think that they, they have really tapped into something.

Yeah.

You could see the YouTube numbers. You could, you could think about where, where the podcast starts is, I think it's doing at least a million, probably closer to 2 per episode. They do once a week. It's super high quality. It's got a broad appeal. The numbers mat— the, the data matches up to that signal. Um, but when you're like, oh dude, yeah, I get 2 million per episode for my super, you know, my talk with the third least well-known partner at this fund. I, I'm just like, there's no, no chance. And I think I, I even asked him once, I was like, Dude, how are you getting these numbers? That sounds like off the charts for what like a, a business or tech podcast of, of, of this, you know, size could do. And he's like, oh yeah, we have a big audience in Asia or wherever. And I'm just like, oh, okay, well I've been in the internet game long enough to know, like, like dude, I bought my first 5,000 Twitter followers, right? Like I, I know that you could get a, you can get any number by doing anything on the internet and it doesn't mean anything, especially for something like podcasts. Which is like newsletter subscribers.

That's like the hardest thing ever to have to do.

You click once and now you're a, a consumer of everything else. Like nobody could even measure on podcasting if anybody's actually listening to these things. And so yeah, I can go get a bunch of people to click subscribe one time and it'll auto-download my feed every time I release a new episode. Like there was a guy, uh, Nathan Latka that was doing this too. He was like, we get this many downloads per month. And I was like, oh wow, couple million downloads a month.

That's pretty good.

Huge. Yeah. What do you do? And basically he was like, and I, when I talked to him, I was like, he's like, hey, welcome to the show, Sean. He's going like hyper speed. 5 minutes, the podcast was over. And I was like, this is a 5-minute episode? He's like, yeah, sorry, I gotta hop to the next one. I was like, how many of these you record in a day? He's like, I record 8 of these a day and then we release like whatever. He was on some crazy schedule. And then I did the math and I was like, oh, he has like 7,000 subscribers, but he just releases huge volume of random episodes of these 5-minute episodes. And so his total monthly number, because podcast is just like, you know, if you just do downloads, it just adds up all your episodes times your number of subscribers. You can have a small number of subscribers and do a huge number of download, a huge number of episodes and get a big download number. And so people, I think, use these vanity metrics all the time and they're, they're BS.

So I, I'll bring this up cuz we're discussing it, but I didn't research it fully. But have you heard of, uh, Parcast? It's like my name, but cast. So Parcast.

Have you ever heard of that? Are you, are you spinning off your own solo? Did the brand breakup? Band break up? You're doing your own episode?

No, look, I, I, I wish I invented this. So it's a guy named Max Cutler. I think he's our age. I think he's, uh, like 31, 32, 33. So this guy named Max Cutler created this thing called Parcast, and the whole idea of it is it's a podcast network, but they, um, They only have like true crime, true crime. And I'm a weirdo. You wanna know what I listen to every night? There's two podcasts I listen to every night. The first one is just called Serial Killers. So it, it's a, it's, it's, it's just a, a bunch of podcasts about serial killers. I can, I, I can tell you all, I gotta, I got, I got my fantasy, uh, league of serial killers, you know, with Ted Bundy as the quarterback. And then there's another one called You know, it's, it's, this one's fitting for going to sleep. It's called Deathbed Confessions. So it's people who confess about a crime they did when they're dying.

So it's just, oh, it's just nice.

I've heard of this brand once before. Uh, I didn't realize that they, I didn't re— I didn't know the business side of it. I didn't know that they had bootstrapped it and sold it to Spotify, but I really, I like true crime. I don't know where to start. There's like so many true crimes and a bad one is like such a waste of time. But yeah, I've seen some of their shows because I go sometimes look in the browse section for like, you know, a good true crime dude.

So true crime, if you go and look at, so what's a good one of theirs? If you look at, I like serial killers. Serial killers, dude, Deathbed Confessions is awesome. I'll send you a good Deathbed Confessions one. They're so awesome. And true crime, it's, if you go to the podcast app and you look at like what are the top episodes or shows, It's always like 30 or 40% true crime, and which is, it's mostly women who listen to it. And it's always, and so like, uh, Dateline, I told you about this, Dateline from NBC, which is a show that's been around for 20 or 30 years at this point. It's still usually a top podcast every single week. And so these true crime folks, they kill it. And this guy bootstrapped this company, um, to a, I think it was $100 million cash and then a hundred, another $100 million earnout. All off of these true crime podcasts. He killed it. It's a really interesting story. I'm going to have to— I'll dive deep and do some better research on it. But I was reading about it this weekend. It's a pretty amazing outcome this guy had.

So I just read an article. This might be maybe wrong, or maybe you're wrong. I don't know. Spotify confirms it paid $56 million for podcast—

or podcast, sorry. Then maybe I got my numbers wrong. I think it was $56 and then another like $75 outcome. It was a 9-figure— another—

attention.

There was a retention according to the podcast Wikipedia, which reads as if Max Cutler, the founder, wrote it. It's very like congratulatory. It says there's like a huge turnout.

Yeah, I don't know if I trust anyone that does true crime, by the way. These guys are natural storytellers and like liars, dude.

All right, I've got an interesting thing to bring up. This is something that we talked about a while ago. I think you brought this up in 2020 or '21. I forget right when we were recording. In the original Hustle office. So do you remember that company Crumble that you brought up?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I love a good I told you so. So I'm already, I'm already glowing.

Yeah, I remember. You got this.

Crumble cookies.

Like, oh, that's cute. Fake. Fake.

But, uh, I agree. But look, here's the deal. I have a, you and I have a friend who buys broadband companies. So broadband companies are basically internet service providers. And a lot of people who are listening in the city will have no idea what I'm talking about. But where I have my country house, I have like a, this ranch way out in the country. And if you live out in the country, it's not like you're getting like Spectrum or Google or Warner or whatever the big service providers are in New York City. You're getting like a small internet provider that you pay $100 a month for. And they prob— that company probably does $10 million in revenue and like $5 million in profit. And you and I have a friend who goes out and buys these companies and everyone says to him, well, what about Starlink? Yada, yada, yada. And he was like, yeah, they'll, they'll come eventually. But like until then I'm making $5 million a year in profit. So, right. With, uh, with this cookie thing. Yeah. Maybe they'll plateau, but a billion a year is a nice plateau. I don't mind sitting on that plateau for a while. Yeah. And that's kinda, and that's kinda, that's like how I feel whenever I hear some of these stories. Like it's not gonna grow. I'm like, yeah. That's cool.

Sorry, I couldn't hear you. The money counter was brrring a little too loud in my ears. Right. That goes back to the, if anybody asked me why I sold for $200 million, you're getting a slap. Like, you know, just don't ask, don't ask those stupid questions, dude.

And, and the founder, uh, one of the cousins or one of the brothers, they, uh, he previously worked in tech and he had a Facebook app that got to like 120 million followers. So these guys are like viral guys. They know how to do this, but interesting story.

Yeah. Like, it looks like he was director of product at Ancestry, which is like one of the, like, uh, you know, just one of the gems of internet companies that's like really big, but nobody knows anybody who's like works there or nobody, nobody claims to use it even though it's like really, really popular site and did a bunch of cool like viral things and like basically did a bunch of smart product stuff along the way to like make that business work.

Dude, Ancestry's funny too because they're a, a Utah-based company and they're founded by Mormons.

By the way, this guy's first business, first business, BYU.com. You hear about this?

No.

Here's what it says on his, on his LinkedIn. BYU.com was a social network for Brigham Young University students. We, we grew the network to include half the campus in a very short amount of time, but was ultimately crushed by Facebook. So he did this in 2005. I think Facebook launched 2004. And so basically he was doing the, like, you know, the, the Harvard social network. He was doing that just on BYU's campus, but like the Facebook wave, you know, swallowed it. But that's, you know, you're putting on green. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. You're landing on the putting green right there. If you're creating a social network back in 2005 for college campuses, like, goddamn, you were close to being onto something. You know, like, I'm not surprised that this guy ended up being really successful.

No, it's a really fascinating story. Um, but, uh, anyway, what, where, where do you wanna go? You wanna drive?

Can I, can I tell the story really quick?

Ben has a story.

That totally like breaks my frame. I just always assumed that if you're that mega cringe, you won't win. And now, now I have to consider the possibility that every hashtag user could actually be a winner. Cause I just had a blanket rule.

If you're a Mormon guy and you're telling me you're gonna start a, a cute cookie franchise, I'm in. I mean, come on. Of course this guy's gonna crush it.

Mormon does trump cringe. So like, if you're Mormon, I have to, I, you know, the checkbook's already out. I'm just waiting to hear, you know, how many zeros I need to put my, my number here. But that's based on the idea. So yeah, you're right. That, that actually overwhelms the cringe part cuz it's like, this guy's gonna sell.

He's got a—

the person knows how to sell.

Yeah. The, well, that sucks, Ben. Yeah. You missed out on that one.

Yeah, I know. I should have just hit him up and like, oh, this looks really cool. But, uh, you know, live and learn.

I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot.

Grow better.

Um, Sean, I have a couple things. What do you wanna do?

Um, okay. I have a quick little idea. So I was watching the Super Bowl and, um, did you watch by the way?

Uh, uh, I watched the halftime show. Yeah, I watched it. I watched, no, I, uh, I, I watched like quarter 3.

Who, how long did it take you to figure out Rihanna was pregnant during the halftime show? Quick on the uptake or no?

You know, it was one of those things where my wife loves her and like, you know, you don't want to be rude when you see a lady with a lump and you want to like, you know, and I was like, I'm not going first.

That's, I'm not, I'm not talking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I had her go first, then I asked, but she was doing some pretty raunchy stuff as a pregnant lady, right? I mean, that was like, no, I thought that was tame for Rihanna.

That's like, that was PG to Rihanna.

Dude, I'm a, I'm a Rihanna fan. She's in my like top 5, like most beautiful women on earth. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm on team Rihanna. Rihanna. But when I saw that she was pregnant, I, uh, it was— that was surprising. I think she just had a kid too.

Yeah, that's— yeah, she just had a kid like 9 months ago. I don't— I don't— the math doesn't even make sense to me in my head. I don't know, whatever, whatever. I'm watching the football game and, um, one thing you notice if you're watching the game is that when the Chiefs were scoring, they were scoring with these like incredible plays where the guy was just going untouched into the end zone.

Like, dude, what was that thing where they like Well, they get that huddle, they do like ring around the rosie, and then they like run to the line. That was crazy.

Is that like—

didn't work.

What is that?

But amazing that they tried it, right? Like, that is, uh, that was an awesome play. So I was thinking about it and I was like, but it did stand out. They had, they had 2 or 3 touchdowns where it was just like brilliant play design, right call, and like totally worked. And then, you know, I, I've gone, you know, I love sports and I've watched tons of sports documentaries and shows like Last Chance U, and you could just see the life of a coach and a coach is like a really specific character in my head. Like a football coach at a high school, college, or even pro level is like, it's the same type of dude in most cases. And their life is football. They live and breathe this shit. They're preparing all week for, you know, the Sunday game and then they start again the next week and they just like, they just live in this playbook and the X's and O's. They all have the same value system about toughness and grit and whatever. And, um, and I was like, oh, this is another job that AI is going to replace. Because I was like, this is, this is an AI problem. The problem of an offensive coordinator in the NFL, which is basically what play should I call here to maximize, you know, my expected return.

And I think you could—

But like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's exactly the really good version of Madden. Now that we have like, you know, computers are geniuses. And so, um, so I'm pretty sure that there's going to, somebody's going to build a, uh, basically like a play caller, AI play caller that will help. Cause these guys are, you just look, they're literally looking on a cheat sheet. Like, you know, like a, like it's a open book exam or whatever when it's like you can bring in one 8x11 piece of paper and everyone's writing in like size 2 font to squeeze as many things as they can on it. That's what these guys use when they're calling plays and it's like they have, you know, 10 seconds to pick the play. This is just a job that computers are going to be better at. And it just reminds me of like how crazy AI is gonna be that like even these like total non-tech situations, not even big markets, But it's just going to be like when now when humans play against a computer at chess or, or even, you know, Go or poker or whatever, where the computer is just so much better than the human. That's what's going to happen in this play calling situation. It just kind of reminded me about, man, AI is going to be, going to be nuts because it's going to take over all these things that you wouldn't really have expected are in the line of fire for AI.

Is football as like, you know, there's obviously the famous Moneyball thing where he's like, I don't care what, who's a superstar, who's not. I'm just going to look at the math and we're just going to pick people off spreadsheets. And then famously, although I think this is highly exaggerated, Chamath was like, oh, I'm going to buy the Warriors and we're going to do that same thing with basketball. So we're only going to shoot threes or whatever. I don't pay attention, but whatever their shtick is. Sorry, I'm ruining this. But yeah. And, and I, but the reason I have a feeling it's not true is I have a feeling none of that is true. And also like, I think he said that though, right?

Uh, I don't think so, but, uh, fair enough.

Oh, well, I'm making it up then.

But, uh, other people did it in basketball. Darryl Morey famously was like the big proponent of this.

The reason why I don't believe that is I have a feeling like teams were always doing this. Like maybe it's one of those things where like, um, um, like for example, my favorite copywriter, he was like, I wrote these famous ads for the Casio, what's it called? The Casio watch. And he's like, we talked about how we use space-grade aluminum. And crystal quartz to make this watch. And he was like, little do they know, every watch does that. Like, that's just like table stakes, like every single watch, but I'm going to explain it because I know that the audience doesn't know. And so like, you have a guy saying like, look, we use state-of-the-art technology. And it's like an Excel sheet that like everyone else uses. It's like, yeah, I guess it's state-of-the-art.

But anyway, uh, we have a premium license to Microsoft Excel, unlimited seats, unlimited seats. We do not use the trial.

But is football the same way where you could just follow the math?

So there's actually, there's actually a great question. There's a, a Daryl Morey went on that guy, I forgot his name, but the Invest, Invest Like the Best guy, Patrick Shaughnessy.

Patrick Shaughnessy. Yeah, that's cool.

He went on his pod actually, it was a really, really great podcast. If you like sports and you like kind of business stuff, it was, it was kind of an amazing one. He talks about like baseball is basically the per— almost like the perfect game for modeling. Like you could basically, cuz it's like, Stationary. It's like one pit, one batter versus one pitcher. And, and then, you know, like it's a, like it's a contained problem is like, whereas in basketball you got 5 guys on the, on each team on the course, you got 10 guys all moving around freeform at any given time. The ball's moving like crazy. It's much harder to model, but we could still model the impacts of like one player in these certain situations. And so it's like the data thing has had a pretty big impact in basketball, but less than it did in baseball. Baseball was like a math, became a math equation. Basketball became more of a math equation than it was before, but still it's never gonna be perfect. It's too complex and high skill.

There's too many variables to be, yeah.

To be, to be perfectly modeled out or, or whatever. Um, but still it, it was improved, which is why you see like they, they'll post like, uh, 20 years ago, here's what the shot chart looked like. And it's just dots all over the, the, the courts. Like as you kind of expect, like people shoot from everywhere and it's like, here's what it is in 2023. It's like, people only shoot layups or threes because optimally, like, basically a three is worth, you know, whatever, 150% more than a two, but there's percentage difference of shooting it is only like, you know, you know, 5 to 7% worse than a two-pointer or whatever. So, you know, you get like way higher expected value for shooting a three. So that's why all these teams shoot threes now or layups. They try— they tell their players don't shoot this in-between shot because it's the wrong combo, right? Um, so things like that. And then he's like, football is going to be the hardest one to game because you have 11 players on each side. And on any given play, everybody's moving in different directions and you can't really figure out like the net effects of this guy running in this lane. What did that cause this other guy to do? You know, it's much harder to do. Um, but I think that's, that's true at a, like, because the reason these general managers care is because they're trying to, they're trying to like, basically it's like a stock picker. It's like, They're trying to find undervalued assets. So the way you do that is you say, this player is not like, yes, his traditional stats look like this, but his game impact is different because of whatever. And so you're trying to figure out the value of one player.

But it's the game impact because of locker room stuff and leadership, or is it?

No, no, they're looking at just the on-the-court movement. Like, you know, in basketball, for example, there's an assist. If I pass you the ball, you score, that's an assist. But if I pass you the ball, I've, I've made the whole defense shift to me. And you pass to the next guy, you get the assist. The stat sheet doesn't show that I actually was the one who created this whole play, this opportunity, by, by caving in the defense. So the stat sheets, like the traditional stat sheets, limited. So what these guys have done is figure out like advanced stats that like better, better show an individual player's impact, not including locker room stuff. And he's saying football is even harder, more players, more movement, more whatever, less plays total, uh, so you have a smaller sample size. But I think that this play-calling thing is bigger, bigger in football because in basketball you don't call many plays. Um, but in football every play is called in by the coach. And so if you can make the coach 20% more intelligent by suggesting a better play, that's gonna like, that's gonna shift the title, you know, the balance of power towards that, that team because they're just gonna get that many more first downs and touchdowns. So I think this is like, I don't know, it's kind of like really, really niche here, but I think this is an example of how, uh, AI is going to touch a bunch of areas and kill a bunch of jobs you don't expect. Barshop, you got something?

Yeah, okay, so last night the game was dictated on that terrible call that, um, you know, the, the Eagles defender, you know, got called on like a pass interference that basically made, uh, ruined the game. Chiefs win. That should have been decided by an AI ref. Like, why are there not AI refs? Why is any call up for debate. I agree.

Well, there are in some sports, like in tennis, they put a chip in the ball. So when the ball lands out, you see they always instantly cut to this silhouette of the ball and it's like it was out or it was in. And everybody's just like, it's unarguable. And why is that? Because they have a chip in the ball and a bunch of cameras that triangulate it so they can tell you exactly whatever, dude.

But that's so boring.

Well, that's the problem because in baseball you would've been like, oh great. The umpire calls strikes by squatting behind the catcher and trying to like eyeball this. Like, that's insane for this billion-dollar sport. Like, why, why are they doing this? And it turns out if you just used computer to pick that, to like perfectly call pitches, I guess the, the reasoning must be— I don't know, Ben, Ben Levy might know better, but there must be something where people preferred that their human had the like final say here versus— because like The technology is there for a computer to call balls and strikes. There's really no need for that umpire anymore.

I'm not romantic to the early part of the game. I'm romantic to fistfights. That's what I want. And that's the best part about baseball is when like they get mad at each other. I mean, that's what I watch. I don't watch any of that other crap. I wanna see them fight.

There's a demo. I sent this to Ben. I'll show it to you. There's a demo of, 'cause this, there's actually a bigger problem in fighting. Like dude, how many fights? Like, I don't know, in the UFC fight this, fight this weekend. Did you think the right guy won? I thought he, I thought the right guy won, but people were—

me too. But a lot of people did not.

People did not. And there's a big problem with like, it's these 3 judges that are gonna decide who won the fight. And, um, and it's like, how do you call it? Oh yeah. How do you judge? You know, what if this guy made the wrong facial expressions? Like, did, did he get hurt? How am I assessing damage here? Whereas there's an AI demo of basically the like, um, like the, the striking tracker where it's like, this guy did a left hook and it landed with this, like, with this level of, of impact, or this, like, clean, like, it was deflected partially there, or it was a clean shot. And they're like, we should have basically, like, perfect tracking of the fight game. But for you as a fan, would you want that? Would you want the computer to basically say who won the fight, or do you want these 3 old judges to, to scribble a scorecard?

I want the 3 old judges because, uh, that's nice.

A lot of fun. I can't believe it.

A lot. But here's why. First of all, when you watch WWF and W in like fake wrestling, WWE is called now, the best part is when they like hit the ref or they like distract him. Like sometimes they'll have like a hot girl come and distract him and he turns around and then like something bad happens. And that's like the best part of the show is like when there's drama. But also in UFC, they have a new thing where they measure aggression, you know, like who's like pushing, who's pushing the plot. And I think they do that so it's more exciting. And I don't know if you can entirely measure like aggression with, AI, but that's why I don't like it. Um, but, uh, no, I, I, I'm okay with having, uh, humans do it. The, you, I think it makes it more exciting, more exciting. We're talking about it.

They're almost always like, they're, they're only ever in the conversation when they do it wrong. Right? Like it's never more exciting cuz man, they really, the refs really, uh, added to the, to the fight there by, by scoring it. You know, like they didn't, they don't, they don't add anything. They only subtract when they screw it up. Uh, I, I'm, I'm surprised you don't want like the actual accurate, uh, score.

The only thing that I want, I want them to tell me the scores of a fight in between rounds and have that be the official thing because I want, I want the person to know when they're going into round 3 or round 5 that I'm down and if I don't knock this guy out, the fight's over. And so that would be the only change that I would want. I want them to know the real score as it's going.

I got one more random topic. Let's do one more even though we're a little over time.

Uh, well, if you're gonna do one more, are you gonna do this guy, uh, this Ahmad? That, that seems meaty. All right, well go for it.

I think it's brilliant. I see on here you have stay-at-home moms, one of the best comp— or one of my favorite companies that I've been eyeing. Is called Squared Away and their whole niche is, uh, virtual assistants and the virtual assistant is a military wife. And that's like, for some reason in my head, I think they're gonna act a certain way, which who knows if it's true, but I think that's one of the best ways of like a quote, an under, uh, underutilized asset. I love that. Um, but the problem is, is a lot of people, like I knew a guy who started a thing where you could do, it was like self-storage, but in other people's garages. And I'm like, dude, this is the stupidest shit I've ever heard of. And it was in fact really stupid and it completely didn't work. Um, and so I think that a lot of people approach this poorly.

Yeah, I think the, the, there's a lot of things you can think of. Like I know, uh, another one that people have tried a bunch was like chefs. So it's like, oh, why do you only order from restaurants? Like what if there's a lady who lives 3 doors down that makes an amazing, you know, Thai red curry? You could just order for her and she would get, you know, she'd get revenue for her cooking skill and then she could deliver it to you and it's closer and You know, it wouldn't just be limited to restaurants, but it's like, A, operationally, these businesses are usually absolutely brutal. B, there's like a whole bunch of like safety and quality concerns and like, um, uniformity of the quality concerns that, that come up. So I think that's an, that's another problem. Uh, and then the economics, like, uh, people do, you know, is there enough dollar value for there to be, you know, for the customer to pay, the provider to get paid and the middleman to get paid and the delivery person to get paid. Like you need enough value in the chain, which is why Airbnb works. It's like a high ticket second thing, uh, there's one for, uh, versus others.

And there's one for pools that I hear is killing it.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Share, like rent, rent a swimming pool by the hour. Right. Cause I have a pool. We're not using it 95% of the time. So if somebody could rent it from us and we make a few hundred bucks. Yeah. Yeah. That, that's great. Um, I wanna give you some of the best answers that came from the thread. So the first, the number one is cars. So cars I think are parked like 93 or 95% of their time, of the time. And so once we have self-driving cars, um, that car shouldn't just stay parked. It should go, go be a taxi for somebody and earn you money. So I think that's like one of the big unlocks that people, you know, people who know about this, they're like, oh yeah, that's obvious. And that's going to be a big deal. But I would say the majority of the population doesn't realize that your car is going to turn into a worker for you. Um, and people are going to just, you're going to be earning revenue when your car is idle instead of it just sitting in your driveway or your garage.

Dude, Getaround, which I used to use all the time in San Francisco, I think they raised almost $1 billion in funding and they went public recently-ish. Their market cap as of right now, $59 million. So wow. No one quite has figured it out yet. It looks like, well, at least they have.

That's a little different. That's still rental cars.

This is gonna be just like, no, Getaround's other people. Well, yeah, you're right.

You're right. Right. Like there's this, this, so, so, uh, and this is what Tesla is basically betting on. This is what Elon's betting on. He basically is like, your car is going to go from a depreciating asset to a revenue-generating asset for you, which will make the car worth 5 times more than it is today. Once it, once it's able to just run all day for you and just go do rides.

Okay, that's, that's bold, but that'd be cool if it works out.

Clean structured data. So basically there's a bunch of data that in a bunch of different companies just sitting around. And if you could kind of organize it and clean it up, that data is actually an asset that can be used. And like we talked about earlier, the FreightWaves company that's doing pricing data, Um, you know, how many companies have pricing data about like what they bought recently, how much it costs, how much with volume and from what provider, if that was available in a structured way and you could sell that to a middle, like a network, like a data aggregator, um, you know, that, that becomes a valuable asset that today is worth zero to the company that has the data, but it's not doing anything with it. And it's not their main business to be able to do something. So I thought that was kind of an interesting one.

Um, dude, someone wrote the sun.

Yeah, the sun. So they were like, the sun is basically providing all this energy, but until we have solar and batteries to capture it, uh, it's massively underutilized. Like we're getting free energy from this giant, you know, uh, nuclear fusion reactor that's in the, in the sky or whatever. Uh, but you have to be able to capture it and store it. And, uh, it's underutilized for that reason. Um, another one I thought was kind of interesting, uh, so fun one, nightclubs. Nightclubs are really like only useful, like you know, for like 5% of the time at night on, you know, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or whatever. Um, what can we do? And they're usually in kind of prime real estate in cities. And, um, I've always thought it was cool when I lived overseas in Indonesia, they used to take nightclubs and during the day turn them into like fitness day bars. So you'd go in the dance floor and the mirrors would turn into basically like a cardio session and then the bar would turn into a smoothie bar. And I was like, oh, this is so smart. They're getting like double utility out of their nightclub. Um, I don't know why I've never seen that in the, in the United States for some reason. Um, so I think nightclubs is a fun one. And then another one that was on here was, uh, specialist talent.

So like, what's that mean?

I hate when people make these claims like this is the future of blank. Like if you say that like the future is electric car, yeah, I buy that. But if you say the future of work is like Ocean's Eleven, my reply to that is like, no. Maybe the future of criminals is Ocean's Eleven, but like, that's not like— it's like the future of people getting money is to rob banks. No, maybe like a group of people will do that, but I just don't think that like— but why?

Okay, take the Ocean's Eleven analogy out, right? Like, yeah, that's leading you to bank robberies, but what's wrong with the actual premise?

Because I think most people— now it's like saying Well, most people are just gonna freelance. No, maybe 30% of America will, but I think that 60 to 70% of America, they want to go to work at 9, they want to get off at 4 or 5, and they want to play softball. That's what they want to do. They don't want to like go on a heist where they like are having some exciting mission. They just want to clock in and clock out and do the same thing every day. Maybe we think that's cool. Maybe think our listeners think, think it's cool. But I think when Naval says something like that, I think that he is in this small bubble. And although he's smart and gets a lot of things I think it's too grandiose to say this is the future of work. And I think it's really dumb. Like when people say the future of media are the creators, like doing X, Y, and Z, I'm like, oh my God, dude. Like maybe that's like a new band that you're assembling, but that's not like the, that's not like how everyone's gonna operate. I think you're just, you like to smell your own farts. So I like, I, I think you're just, you're outta your, you're outta your depth here. That's, that's what I think when I hear stuff like that.

Yeah. But I think, uh, nobody means 100% of people are gonna do this when they say the future is X. I think they mean like a lot of people.

It sounds that way. Yeah.

But no, 100% of people don't do anything today. 100% of people don't do 9 to 5s either. So, you know, not even 80% of people do 9 to 5s. So I think that's kind of, I think it's a given, right? That's like a, it's a given to be like, not everybody's gonna do this. You can't say anything is the future if you say everybody's gonna do it. There's still people who use AOL to get on the internet. Like, yeah, my mom, you know, like, of course you can't say that everybody's gonna do it. It's, it's not a, That's not a realistic thing, but I think it is real to say, uh, shit's going to change, trends are going to shift, and, you know, huge chunks of the economy or the workforce is going to look different than it is today. Because this whole idea of go to a— go to an office for a 9-to-5, that's also kind of new, and that was also a shift from what was before. So I don't think that's like just ingrained in human That's not like biological, that's not physics. That's, you know, society and economics and a society and economics tends to change.

It's not sexy enough to say the future of work is this group of people. That's a nice small enough niche that you can go and capture market share while also being big enough to support a multi-billion dollar company that can return capital at a 55% annual return. I get it. That's not, that's, that's not as catchy. Yeah.

It was just shorthand for the future. Yeah.

But, uh, yeah, that's cool. Uh, I have some more topics that I'll save for later. Yeah, but, uh, this was a good one.

All right, that's the pod.