#70 - Making Money In 48 Hours, Fat FIRE & How To Collect $2M

All right, we got a friend of the show here, Jordan Harbinger. He's one of the guys who's been advising us on how to build this podcast because his podcast is way more successful than ours and has been around— he's been doing podcasting for like 12 and a half years, which, Jordan, that's got to be as long as podcasting has existed, right?

Yeah, I think podcasts have been around for like 14 years, and I've— or 15, and I've been around for 13 of those. So yeah, when I started, there was no way— there were no iPhones, so you couldn't get podcasts on your phone. You had to use an iPod to to play them.

Yeah, straight to cassette. That's how long this guy's been doing it. So Jordan, you know, I like your show. I've been binging it while in quarantine because, you know, what else am I gonna do besides try to learn something new or improve myself in some way? And I gotta say, I like it because you do the, you know, the interview style show where you go deep with a guest. I think, you know, you had, I was listening to the one with Tony Hawk, which was pretty awesome. And I gotta say, I like that you don't do the kind of surface level, you know, just, just, you know, pitty-patting around with the questions or trying to do, you know, inspirational fluff where you're just saying, go, you can do this. So with that episode with Tony Hawk, what was that like? Because Tony Hawk's an icon. How was it, you know, interviewing Tony Hawk?

It was great. He's a really interesting guy, really open and fun. And he told some pretty funny stories. One, which was very apropos of what's going on right now, is one day he walked into his agent or some sort of marketing team that he'd hired. He walked into their office. This is like at the height of video games where he's making, I don't know, 50 million bucks off these skating games and these brands. And he goes in and he says, look, I got this backpack that was made pretty shoddily and it's got my name and face on it. I don't want any more stuff like that. And as the agent marketer, whatever, is sort of nodding his head and understanding, Tony goes, wait, what's that on your shelf? And it was a roll of toilet paper with Tony Hawk's name, face, and logo on it. And he goes, what the hell is that? And the guy goes, oh yeah, anything we put your name and face on does so "well, we were joking that we could put your face on toilet paper and we'd still be able to sell it." And he fired them on the spot because it was clear that they didn't value his brand, which I thought was a funny story. And he's got a ton of stuff like that that he talked about on the show.

That is epic. Uh, you know, I actually met Tony Hawk. Uh, we went on a trip to Africa, a charity trip together, and believe it or not, we were halfway up a mountain in Ethiopia where, you know, it's a, like, this is a mountain village and somebody saw him there and they were like, "Tony Hawk!" You know, that's probably the only English word they said to us all day. They identified Tony Hawk. Tony Hawk on a mountain in Ethiopia. That's how famous that guy is. So that's an amazing guest to have on the show.

Imagine being that famous that you get recognized in the middle of countries where like nobody speaks your language and they maybe don't even have skateboards.

Yeah. We were there trying to give people clean water. They didn't even have water, but they knew Tony Hawk. That's how famous that guy is.

Amazing.

Awesome. Well, if you want to hear more from Jordan, we're going to be having him on more and more. He's a friend of the house and you should listen to his show. It's one of the podcasts that I would recommend. If you like Tim Ferriss' stuff, if you like our stuff, you're gonna like his stuff. And so go check out the Jordan Harbinger Show, uh, on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, you'll find them there.

This guy, he was owed $2 million, and I was like, why didn't you fly over to where he lives and get that fucking money? And he was like, oh no, it'd ruin my reputation. And I was like, ruin— they'll create your reputation as someone you don't like.

Sam, what's up, dude?

Nothing.

You got a fresh haircut, but we already made all of our jokes off the air, so I don't know. We can't really repeat them now.

Yeah. I've got a shaved head. My head was itching, so I just did the damn thing.

Okay, cool. Do you want to just jump in or should we do a little small talk patty cake or how do you want to do it?

Jump right into— okay. So I want to talk about a few resources that I like and it stems off of what you tweeted. Okay, um, talk about Kanye West.

and he, he also told everyone he wants, uh, he wants them to be— he wants his name to be Christian What was it like?

No way, I didn't see this part.

Yeah, he's like, I am so mad about this, I'm gonna change my name to Kanye Christian Billionaire Good Guy West or something. Or no, like Christian Genius Billionaire West. Yeah, or something like that.

Name change is always a great celebrity move. Uh, Chad Ochocinco was the, the first I remember. You know, Ron Artest becoming Metta World Peace was hilarious. Uh, you know, that's when you've, when you've really gone off the deep end and you do the name change.

Um, um, yeah, so some of the other things through the numbers.

Okay, so he owns— okay, so from, from music, um, you know, he doesn't have sort of, uh, the billionaire status, right? So like they think that his label and music sort of worth roughly $90 million. Um, then outside of music and forgetting about his Yeezy brand, he's got $17 million in cash, $35 million in stocks.

Wait, he, he had $17 million in cash? Yeah. Wait, I didn't see that.

Yeah, so $17 million in cash assets, $35 $85 million in stock assets, $81 million in buildings and improvements, and $21 million in land. And then they were saying, you know, the $81 million and $20 million of land and homes that he owns, they're like, those aren't going to be worth that because when you do this ultra high-end real estate, the next buyer wants to customize their own shit. They don't want to buy your custom.

Well, yeah, so he, well, he cut, he built his own homes, and when you build like highly, it's like Michael Jordan's house for sale.

Yes. Yeah. And so he— and then he has $100 million in debt. So you could definitely think he's rich. I think we both like that one book by— what's his name? Dennis— Dennis Phillips?

Felix Dennis.

Well, I just wanted to— like, the headline— I mean, I wanted the headline or the subheadline to be like, "He's now a billionaire and he did it by marrying into the Kardashian family." I mean, I think that— I think that— I think they're geniuses. I think they're amazing.

And he— I don't really— he was excited, according to the author, he was excited that he was worth, you know, $300 million more than Kylie, who was just at $1 billion, a petty $1 billion.

Yeah, I think that, uh, I don't give a shit about this. I think that, uh, it's kind of— it's interesting to see what's more interesting. I like seeing how people allocate their money, and so that's cool. I don't give a shit about Kanye. Um, I think he's fine as a musician. I like some of his music. He's— I think he's a crazy person, and, uh, I don't care about him, but it's cool. I like, I wonder why he has $17 million in cash. That's crazy.

Um, yeah, I don't know. It also might be that might be part of the loan. It's just cash he hasn't deployed yet. Um, and so anyways, I, the thing I found most interesting was how much more he's been able to make off Yeezys than his music. Um, right. So like, uh, this is yet another example of, you know, Michael Jordan made at his peak, I don't know, $30, $40 million a year playing basketball and his salary there, which, you know, after taxes is going to be like 15 million bucks, but he became sort of billionaire status because of his shoe brand. The Kardashians also, they get the fame in one place but the money from another direction. I think that it's very interesting to see how celebrities are going to use their assets. We were talking about this with Lance Armstrong. How do you use your brand in a way that's going to monetize at a much higher rate than it does today, your direct job did? Um, so I'm interested in that. I think the Yeezys— the fact that Yeezys are doing over a billion dollars a year in sales on their shoes is pretty crazy.

Yeah, I think that's, that's a far more interesting angle. I mean, that's like what we're doing with this podcast. We're not going to make that much money from the podcast, but we'll make way more money and our shoe line will be fucking sick.

And, uh, you know, we won't have ugly shoes. Yeezys are ugly. Uh, so that's the other thing. I mean, who bought this, you know, billion dollars worth of these ugly shoes?

Okay, so have you heard of this subreddit called FatFIRE?

Yes, I like the subreddit a lot.

I love FatFIRE.

Explain what FIRE is and then FatFIRE.

Yeah, so FIRE stands for financially independent— I actually don't—

what's it? Financially independent retire early.

Yeah, I think so.

So there's no definition of this. It just basically means whatever you want, you could have. And so if that means you want to fly private, then it all talks about that. Typically, it probably means people who want to have income of $500,000 to $1 million a year off of their assets. Now, it's a subreddit with maybe 20,000 or 30,000 members, and it's pretty cool. And so the top headlines are, which I'll read, I was just reading it the other day. It was some, okay, so, and you have to take this with a grain of salt because sometimes you don't know who's posting and if they're legit. But all right, so here's some posts that have a lot of comments. How do real estate investors pay $0 on their real estate income? That's incredibly interesting. Do you guys find it hard to be happy and just relax? That's an awesome post. Am I crazy to buy a $2 million house in the Bay Area while on my way to fat fire? And then finally, this one was interesting, which was, oh, how much cash do high net worth people keep in their bank accounts? And then one more, there was one more, which was like, I'm an heir about to retire, about to inherit $1 billion in businesses. How do I set things up? So something like that. Like, I don't know if that's actually true. Here's another. Oh, here's one more. How has your significant other affected your fat FIRE plans? Right. So it's a pretty cool subreddit. My— okay, so there's a lot of pros and cons. The cons to this is I think these people are naturally pretty pessimistic. And so that's— you have to be careful with that. What makes you say that?

Like they're planning for the downside, you mean, or something else?

No, a lot of the people here are people who are— who like started a plumbing company. And they just grew it after 20 or 30 years. And so I think that they're not that risk-averse and that's good. That provides value though. But you have to understand who you're getting feedback from. I also think that a lot of the people who are part of this subreddit are people who work at Netflix and have worked there for years and are climbing up the chain and make amazing living. But if they got laid off, they would be fucked. So they're not necessarily like creators, but it's still really interesting to see how people think about money, how they spend. It's a wonderful subreddit. I've learned a ton. Great for resources. People— and it's all anonymous— and people be like, here's how I allocate my money. I keep this here, this here. During this whole payment protection thing, this, um, this loan thing that's going out right now, I learned a lot on how to do it in the subreddit. Uh, I learned a lot about taxes. It's an incredibly interesting subreddit. So you've been spending time on it?

So I don't go to the subreddit regularly, but I did dive in at one point when I was like— I first heard about it through the Mr. Money Mustache guy, which He's like one of the kind of like, I don't know, forefathers of this, or he's one of the kind of leaders of the movement. And I like it because it's, it's not just, you know, personal finance. It's a very specific lifestyle. And so just a high level, they have these ideas, right? So you have your savings rate. So what percentage of income you have today are you saving? So maybe you're at 25%, 50%, 75%. So one big piece is how do you save more? Because that gets plugged into Okay, if your savings rate is, you know, X and you're going to work for Y years, then you're going to have Z years of savings, uh, you know, pent up. And then they have this kind of like 4% rule, which basically means like you want to be able to— if, if you have, you know, sort of, uh, 25 years of life expense— of life expenses, then you're sort of at the 4% rule where you're able to withdraw money for living every year, but you're not like depleting your assets, your net worth. And so anyways, I like the idea behind it. I think it's great. I think everybody wants to be financially independent. Everybody wants to be able to retire early if they so choose, meaning not be obligated to do any specific type of job or work. But obviously, the way to get there is very tricky. And I like Fat FIRE because I found that when I first looked into the FIRE movement, I was like, "Oh, this is cool." All I got to do is move to a small town in Nebraska, ride my bike to the grocery store so I don't have a car and don't pay for gas, like, you know, buy the cheapest food possible, go home and like, you know, make my own fire out of sticks. Like, I was like, okay, yeah, that's— yes, I'm retired, but like, this is not the lifestyle I want. So Fat Fire is good because it's like, hey, look, I want to have this baller lifestyle. I want to have this fat lifestyle. I'm not looking to like cut back and live well below my means. That's not exactly what I'm interested in. So I like this subreddit a lot more than when I first discovered the FIRE movement.

Yeah, it's cool. It's been fun to read.

And there's some good stuff. I saw this post just now when you linked the subreddit, which is like the FatFIRE Guide to Prenups. And there's just interesting stuff that you don't hear talked about everywhere. And so I like to check those out.

And if I was you, you being the listener, I would check out some of these Facebook groups. So I've discovered all these different Facebook groups along the way that I've really liked. So my buddy Tyler started this one called the Passive Income Club. It's not that great of a group. I think it's kind of fizzled out now, but it maybe 4 or 5 years ago, was really active. Tyler who? Tyler Hayes. And, um, the Passive Income Club was cool because it was just people who were spinning up passive income projects and they would just talk about them. Um, and I thought that was cool. It was always interesting to see, oh, this guy's trying to like, you know, sell soap over here and he's generating $4,000 a month of passive income. Um, and then there's another one which is— I like joining, uh, White Coat Investors, which is a doctor's— it's a club for— it's a Facebook group for doctors who are— who want to talk about how to invest their money. And I just find that interesting because doctors think so differently than people in Silicon Valley, but there's like a lot of doctors out there, so I like that group. There's the same one for real estate investors, and then there's other ones that are like, like, you know, the Trends Group obviously is a good one where people are always talking about business. Um, the podcast has it, has a group where sometimes people talk about their businesses, but I just find it interesting to sort of surround yourself like with just a steady diet of information around the different ways that people sort of make and save money and the different ways they sort of lead their lives. Like, I think that it's just much more interesting to me than my normal Facebook newsfeed of like whatever, you know, stupid life pictures. Like, oh, you're at a barbecue, great.

Speaking of passive income, Sean, do you have income from products or businesses that you've made over the last couple years that are still bringing you Revenue?

No, not really. So I have— I basically get probably $2,500 a month off of passive income. Not a lot. Not counting like a stock investment or anything like just an actual revenue stream that comes to my pocket that I don't manage. I don't do work for that business. But it's not a lot. And because I've found over time that like, you know, sort of the passive income dream, the 4-hour workweek dream where you create this muse and it just magically gives you $10K a month, like It takes actually quite a bit of time to get there. So yes, if you do get one set up, great. It's awesome when it is passive, but it's extremely active to make something passive in the first place. And so I always get like sort of 2 days into it or 2 weeks into it and I'm like, well, you know, this is taking up so much time just trying to architect a passive business. And I tend to be like usually like I'm running a startup or I'm like, you know, have a like Okay, I'm on the exec team at Twitch. It's like I have something already that is active that makes me a lot more money than, uh, these little side things would do. And I remember a long time ago my dad told me that, you know, a small project and a big project both take up all of your time, so just choose the big one. And so I believe that that's true during the creation phase. Now it's true— now some people do get it going where they get it to the point where it's truly, it's truly passive, and so the active phase stops. I just haven't spent the time to like do that yet. And I don't know, I don't know. That's good. I don't think I ever will at this point because, um, like I would want like $20K a month coming in from it to like feel really good about it. And I don't think it's, I think it gets hard to get past businesses up to that level. I think it's easy to get it to where my current one is $2,500 a month. I think that's easy. Uh, I think getting to $10K or $20K or $30K, takes more time and it ends up looking a lot more active than you think.

I have a few things that roll in regularly and then a few things that roll in irregularly. So I've had a few investments start up. So I have— well, first of all, not now, but up until recently, stock market was paying great.

Um, but that's just more stock appreciation, right? That's not like a dividend or something.

Correct. Um, but that was passive I guess technically it was an income.

If you count that as passive, then I do that.

Right. And then I had— You have like a rental property as well, right? Yeah. I did some with family, but I don't own all of them. And then I did angel investments that paid off. So that's a lumpy. That was passive, but lumpy. It's not every month. I own parts of other companies, but I take zero cash flow out of them, but they're profitable. But then I also started blogging in 2012 and I still make hundreds of dollars, sometimes many thousands of dollars a month off of little affiliate revenue from blog posts.

Right.

Like we—

and then I— all you make off this podcast, we don't consider that passive because we actually create content.

This is income, but it's not passive income. Right. But that— so I have affiliate revenue of just stuff that just has been sitting there accumulating. But then I also made a guide like an ebook. On— I don't even want to say exactly what it is, but basically it was a guide on moving to new cities. And for a long time it was making like $5,000 a month, and it still does pretty good.

That's awesome.

Um, and I just log into Gumroad and it's like, okay, there's money there. And it's pretty cool.

Yeah, it is great, you know, like, and more power to you. I want to hear a bunch of other passive businesses because I just find them interesting. Um, but I guess like I went through the sort of excitement phase and then the experimentation phase, and maybe I just suck at it, but I definitely found that like it takes a lot of energy to get it to, to get it to that point where it's just spitting you $5,000 to $10,000 a month of like passive income.

And it's not always that. Most, most of the time, I mean, other than investments, like it's not necessarily passive. It's just something you, you build a business and then you just don't spend a lot of time managing it.

Mostly automated, yes.

What else you want to talk about?

Okay, let's pick another topic. Okay, so here's kind of— here's a related one. All right, so there's this guy, his name— I don't know how to say his last name, but Nikita Beer. I don't know if you know who this guy is. So he started a company that was called TBH. Do you know TBH?

Was it an app?

It was an app, and it got viral. It got bought by Facebook. It was a viral Facebook— it was a viral app.

Like $100 million, right? Got bought for $100 million, and these guys had been cranking for, for like 6, 7 years.

Like, when we were doing our Idea Lab, these guys were also just building social apps for, I think, 5, 6 years.

They're the guys who figured out how to create viral niche apps, right?

No, they, they were doing, uh, this thing called TBH, which was like a kind of a quiz, uh, quiz style thing that was going viral for high schoolers in America.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And, and he tweeted about how he did it, which was they created viral communities.

Yeah, it was amazing.

It was great. It was very scrappy, very much a hustler. So anyways, he tweeted this out the other day. It was very controversial. Which I'm surprised at. He goes, my favorite PM interviews, a product manager interview question, is if you had 48 hours to make money on the internet, how would you do it? And, uh, and so a lot of people were responding being like, this is a stupid, uh, interview question because why would a product manager need to know how to like get rich quick on the internet? That's not the job.

Fuck would say that? Of course they need tons of people were saying it was crazy.

And they were like, yeah, I don't see how this will tell you if someone's gonna be an effective product manager. And so he was like, because, you know, if you're in a big company, right, you're in a company like Facebook, it's not like when you get there you need to like generate cash flow in 48 hours. That's true. But his point was, he was like, look, I want to know, I want to hire somebody who really understands how the internet works and how distribution works and how monetization works on the internet. And if you can't explain how you would do it, then I don't think, you know, I think there's a lot of PMs out there who just like to make PowerPoints.

Yeah.

This guy's awesome. Great reply. This guy's awesome.

And so, okay, that's your interview question, Sam. What would you say? How would your answer be if you were put on the spot for that?

Do I have a name? Am I Sam Parr or am I— can I not use my name?

No, you're like normal. You're a normal person. You're Sam Jones.

48 hours? Well, the easiest thing is you go on Fiverr and offer a free, a cheap service. I wouldn't want to do that, but I would do that. Right. If I had the skills I had, it would— I would create a Fiverr job, probably around some type of writing or editing. And I would, and I would say, I'm going to make this yours better by 300% or your money back. Right. And I could probably make money off that right away. Or I would go to AliExpress and find some shit cheap product, right? Probably 10 of them. And I would spend money to advertise against them and get sales. What else would I do? I would create a, um, a post. I would sell some type of information. What could I sell though? Something using Gumroad. Um, that's a great question. What would you do?

Uh, so very similar. So my first instinct was, okay, the time constraint here is the 48 hours. That's the tough part. So you have to do something that can be, that can start generating revenue quickly. So dropshipping was the first thing that came to mind. So I would do the, I would do the AliExpress. I would spin up 10 stores and I would be running quick Facebook ad tests to figure out which of these products is there demand for. And I would start selling them. And I would actually first start by just opening up my Instagram feed and I would see what products are already selling. And then I would go clone that ad and I would just clone them and compete exactly. I would, I would do no, um, I would, cause I don't have time to take risks. So I would literally copy their ad, copy their product, copy their AliExpress thing. And, um, spin up the store right away. So dropshipping I think is the easiest one.

Um, or no, I think the easiest one would probably go to Goodwill and take pictures of loads and loads of stuff and put it on eBay.

No, I'm trying to find that.

So I think it's old. I think it's like gone now. I read it and now here's the story. So somebody put up a website with this really cute bunny. This is messed up, by the way. This is like a total like messed up thing to do, but I thought it was very interesting that this actually happened in real life. So somebody put up this picture of this bunny and they were essentially like, you know, this bunny's gonna get— I'm gonna cook this bunny for dinner unless you donate and donate whatever it was. I forgot, like $25,000 to this webpage right now. And they're like, you know, tomorrow's dinner will be this bunny. Toby, uh, unless Toby gets paid for. And so people started— and so this obviously goes viral because people think it's so messed up. PETA gets all crazy about it. Some people think it's hilarious. Uh, people start calling the governor, they start calling GoDaddy and be like, hey, GoDaddy, take this down, this guy's like a, you know, terrorist. Um, he's like, you know, holding this bunny ransom. And GoDaddy was like, hey, there's no rules against eating rabbit, like you can eat rabbit, people do that, so we can't tell this person you can't You can't say that you're gonna cook a rabbit. That's what people do. And so I just thought this was like a really crazy internet thing that I somehow was not a part of when it happened.

That's a good idea. Okay, here's another one that's similar to that. Abreu, do you own your own— actually, Sean, you own your own domain name?

Yeah, I do. You just take someone's domain, ransom?

Abreu.com is taken, but I could pay $70 somehow and get it. But what I think— what you— another thing I would do if I had to make money is I would find 50 of my friends and see whose domain name I could buy for hopefully $10, and I would email them and be like, "For $100, I'll have a website and I'll post your resume on there." Right, yeah, I'll make your portfolio up there. And I think people would do that.

This is a great question. I'm gonna use it. I'm using this question.

In your interviews?

Yeah.

Do you have any other interview questions that you like to go to?

Well, I already told you some of them. On a scale of 1 to 10, how lucky do you feel? Oh, that's right. And then the— did I tell you about the bottom fourth of the resume that I like to do?

No, what's that?

Nice. I like that. I think I might've— I think we did talk about this once, but I had one like this that I learned from this guy, which was he would say at the end of the interview, he would be like, say, oh, by the way, you know, I have a friend coming to town this weekend. You know, what's something fun we could— we should do? What should I do with my friend? And then people will usually just be like, if I asked you that, like you might just be, I don't know, what would you say?

I would say, yeah, I mean, I would tell you a tour of what I think you should do in San Francisco. I would say go to Twin Peaks and then drive down through Ocean Beach and then go have lunch at the Cliff House.

Right. So most people do an answer like that. And what this guy was looking for in his role, because he was hiring for, it was like, I think it was like a marketing role because he had a marketing agency or an ad agency. So what he was looking for was if the person would ask a question first and be like, Like what interests them? Yeah, like who's your friend? Is this like your aunt or is this like your buddy from college? You know, what are they into? And oh, you know, and he's like, 'cause the core thing for his agency's philosophy, and they were very public about their philosophy, which is like you start with the audience and you figure out, okay, what are they already into and how do we appeal to those, you know, those topics as well as the like emotions that they want? And then you're like, okay, cool. Once I know that, then I create my content to fit that. And so he said he liked that and he said he was saying that the best people he hired for his company, for his marketing agency, they would first try to figure out more about the person before just giving an answer.

I was like, "Okay, that's pretty good." I'm gonna tell you about this other interview I did one time. Zane and Jack, so my good friends, started Vungle, which just sold about a year ago for $800 million, and I'm— Jack's my best friend. I actually interviewed to work there in 2012. And I didn't know Jack at the time at all, other than he was the guy who I was supposed to talk to. And I was applying to be a salesperson. And Zane, who now I'm good friends with, he's weird. Zane's a weirdo. He's one of my good buds, but he's freaking weird. He tries to be a hard-ass and he comes in and he goes, "So what are you like really good at?" I was like, "I'm pretty good at convincing people stuff. And I'm pretty good at getting to know just about anyone." And he goes, well, there's about 20 employees in that room. Go out and walk around and introduce yourself to all and like get them to know you. And I was like, right now? And he goes, yeah, go, go do it. I was like, all right. So I just walked out and I just started walking around and talking to people. And, uh, and he, and I came back and he goes, he's like, hang on one second. And he went out and walked around the room to see who all met me and what, like they knew anything about me. And he came back, he was all right. You seem like you did an okay job of getting to know them. Like it was so weird. It was so weird.

Dude, I had that for when I joined Monkey Inferno. Um, they, I showed up at the office and the guy, the main guy, it was all engineers. And the reason they wanted a product person was because they were like, oh, the reason we're not succeeding is we're not talking to users. We don't understand our users well enough. So we want to see if you can understand users. And I was like, well, yeah, for sure. And they're like, cool, let's go. And we walked over to Westlake Mall or Westfield Mall right here in San Francisco. And he's like, okay, I want to get feedback on our product. So go like get me 5 people to give me feedback. And so I had to walk around and basically like a pickup artist, I had to go up to people in the mall and be like, hey. And I was just straight up like, I was supposed to get them to come over to this table and do a user interview with them as they walk through the website and like get them to talk about what they think about the website. And so I was like, okay, how am I going to do this? These people do not want to spend their time doing this. In the real world, I would just offer them like, you know, some money for this, but In this case, I was just like, hey, I'm on a job interview right now and you can help me get this job. I need you to go over here and talk to this guy for 5 minutes about his— about this website. They're testing if I can recruit users. And so it would really help me get this job. And everyone's like, yeah, did you get it?

Yeah, no problem. I mean, of course you did.

Yeah, they were like, no problem. And he didn't know that that's, you know, the— he was just like, wow, this guy's like very persuasive. He was able to recruit all these people real quick. But I was like pulling the, like, you know, that's a good one.

So you're just cold calling people?

Yeah, I'd be like, like, hey, like, hey Sarah, and they're like, oh no, this is Brad. I'm like, oh, it's not? Well shit, I was gonna call my friend and ask her for a movie recommendation because I'm about to go meet someone. What the hell? Just go ahead, tell me, what should I see? Like, you know what I mean?

So you were literally doing this to practice?

Yeah, I used to do it a fair bit.

Where did you get this idea?

This is such a random idea. I just read about it online. It was originally meant for like picking up girls, but I wanted to do it on how to sell stuff and It worked. It works great. It's a really good tool to learn how to do. I could still— I mean, I'm definitely good at it. I can do it now.

I might do it right after this. Okay, great. All right, what else we want to talk about? I see a couple of things on the list. Do you have one that jumps out to you?

No.

Okay.

I mean, they all are interesting.

You go. All right, I'm gonna give you one. All right, so this is a—

oh no, let's do the, uh, this guy.

Okay. Yeah, talk about it.

Okay, so someone posted this in the Trends Facebook group, and our Trends Facebook group If you want to join, I'm going to plug it. Go to trends.co, sign up. It's $300.

And you guys actually have like e-commerce specific ones. This was in the e-commerce specific vertical you guys have now.

Yeah. So we have, we do research on lots of different opportunities and now we have an e-commerce specific, e-commerce specific one. And one of the more active members, his name is Drew Crawford. He, uh, I think he has an agency, so it seems like he knows his stuff and he found these guys called Jaw— what is— how do you say that?

Jaw size? Jawsercise.

So someone else from the group was like, hey, I kind of have the inside scoop here, I know the people who are the people behind it, they're doing between $200,000 to $250,000 per day in revenue, which is crazy. And then the other guy was looking at the YouTube video because he's like, they must be spending a ton to market this because the videos behind the YouTube ad, the YouTube ad has like 2.1 million views. And he's like, you know, that would cost you, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars of ad spend because these are not organic views that they're getting. These are paid ad views. And so he was kind of just looking at— he originally said these guys must be printing money because look how much they're spending on this thing. And then somebody else came in and said, yes, they basically are printing money.

It's crazy. Sean, what is your take on getting rich selling bullshit? So I, I, yeah, so this, I don't think that this is, uh, I want to be careful with my words because we've been criticized for this. Okay, so this isn't a scam, I don't think, because they're saying something and they, they definitely on the site say like this is not maybe approved by, I mean, you don't have to be approved, so they're definitely not like breaking any laws here. But I think it's bullshit.

It literally says on the website, the only— in all caps— the only natural way to chisel your jawline, which is frankly not true.

Okay, so that is bullshit. Okay, I didn't see that.

But in the video, it's like 21 million views, not 2.1 million views, which is crazy.

But what's your take on— by the way, the site, super ugly, just proof that copywriting and all this shit matters way more than anything, right? What is your take on— like, what do you think about this stuff? Like, does this make you—

so let's say there's a spectrum, right? On one hand, if on the far left is like, um, I hate this, this disgusts me, and you know, these guys are crooks basically. And on the right is like, you know, total respect, um, you know, Mother Teresa, this is the best thing ever, right? So that's the spectrum of like possibilities. And I'm, you know, somewhere in the middle. So the reason why I'm in the middle is, um, I don't I, I personally don't really judge people for kind of like the, the, um, the stupidity of their schemes. So, you know, if you want to do that with your time, I view that as like your prerogative. Uh, now do I think you should defraud people? No, right? And so this is on that line where I don't care that they made a stupid product, I don't care that they're even kind of claiming that it can help your jawline. But it depends how much they're going to claim here, right? So like, you know, the only natural way to chisel your jawline. Yeah, I don't really believe that. But the other part where it's like, you know, this provides a workout to your jaw. It can help slim your thing. It's like, if you say it can help, okay, I'm cool with that. So like, to me, they're not in the fraud bucket where they're just literally stealing or taking people's money and not delivering a product or delivering something with like total false health claims. I personally don't put them in that bucket because I've seen what that bucket looks like. On the other side, I think there's a lot of merit to like building simple things that, uh, appeal to people, making money doing it. And, uh, you know, while I don't think that's a good career move and it's kind of a waste of potential, like these people could also be doing better things. Um, you know, who am I to judge how someone else spends their time? If you want to spend your time doing this, more power to you. I personally don't have the sort of— people get freaking enraged by this stuff, and I don't. I think that, you know, if somebody wants to piss away their time doing this, let them do it.

We, um, I'm friends with this guy on Facebook who has this business called Snow. Have you heard of it?

Yes.

And he— yeah, and what it is is they— it's like, it looks like a mouth guard, and you put like some goo on it, which I imagine is actually the whitening part and then you put this light on next to it and it like somehow— they say it whitens your teeth, right? I think— I don't think that shit works.

I think it works. I think it works. I've tried that before. I've used a— not Snow, but I've used a different product like that before because Sony was doing it before our wedding and so she was like, try this thing. And so I tried it. It just made my tooth feel real sensitive, but so I didn't really like it.

But was it Crest White Strips or was it—

the white strips have been around. This was the— this was the put in your mouth UV thing and you do it for like whatever, 10 minutes, and it's supposed to make your teeth whiter. And it did make her teeth whiter. I personally was like, this is annoying, I don't want to do this every night. But, uh, you know, I, I think it does whiten the teeth. I think it's temporary though.

Yeah, you know, I think it just comes down to is it an actual scam? And like, if it's a scam, then obviously—

no, I don't think it's a scam. Like this Jaw thing, I don't think it's a scam because like it might work a little, right?

It might actually exercise your jaw muscles, which is, you know, what it's claiming to do, or your cheek. Um, does that give you a chiseled jawline? No. Does snow actually whiten your teeth? I personally think it does, but, um, is it the best way? Probably not. So, you know, I don't know, like, like, it's like those infomercial products you would see back in the day of like, you know, the electrical stimulation on your abs. It's like, just sit there and watch TV and eat chips and watch, this will work out your muscles for you as it shocks your muscles. And it's like, okay, you know, if I'm dumb enough to buy that, shame on me. Uh, that's kind of my, my feeling on it.

Um, can I bring up something funny? Because it just popped up. Um, so one, one thing that I love— I just saw a notification. One thing I love to do is engage with trolls and just idiots. So with The Hustle, we have, you know, well over a million people who subscribe, and people reply, and a lot of times we don't reply to them because it's just like stupid stuff. But this guy was like 'You're—' he goes, 'You're linking to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Like, you must be getting paid by them because they're paywalled content.' And I replied with, 'I wish they paid us, but they don't. But I'll go ahead and unsubscribe you.' And he replied back just now, and he's like, 'You're showing how unethical you are.' And he taught— he's talking about how I'm in cahoots with him, and he has his phone number at the bottom. I'm just— I'm thinking I'm gonna call this person and be like, "Walk me through this process. Okay, pull up the URL that I linked to from the New York Times and show me how I'm able to make money off of that." Right. Because I want to know. I want to make money off of this. Right. This is awesome. If I could, I would. Do you engage with people like this?

I do all the time. I love it. I don't, and I usually don't as policy. And sometimes on Twitter, I can't resist and I'll do it., but for the most part I don't, uh, cause I've also had these things like escalate. Like I've told you, people have sent weird stuff to our office before. I've had like mystery piñata show up and I'm like, is this somebody who loves us or hates us? And I don't know what's inside this piñata. I've had people send me a full manuscript, 250 pages of, uh, of a fake movie where I'm the character. And so is my CTO and my chief marketing officer. And we're just talking and it just makes us, it's like, just shows how much we're idiots. And, uh, like somebody wrote that screenplay. That's kind of weird. So there's just people who've escalated. There's people who've called me threatening me saying, uh, you know, there's one guy was just like, you are spamming me. I'm like, no, no, sir, your friend emailed our thing to all of their contacts. Um, you know, yeah, that's not good. You didn't maybe want this email, but like your friend sent this to you. Uh, I did not send this, send you this email. And he was like, sending me the CAN-SPAM laws and all this stuff. I've gotten into some weird situations where I'm like, "Why are—" I'm not actually doing anything wrong, but people are either mega fans and it's weird, or they're mega haters and it's weird, but I don't know. I'm trying not to get too mixed up in it.

Let me bring up one more, which is you, me, and one other person who we won't name. I don't think we're saying anything bad, but we won't name them just in case we do. We're talking about what would happen if a person owed you money, like a customer owed you a lot of money and they didn't pay. And my response is, I'm showing up to their house and I'm not gonna hurt anyone, but I'm knocking on their door when they're at home and I'm asking for that check. And he thought that was ridiculous. Right. It was ridiculous.

I think it's ridiculous. Why is that ridiculous?

Walk me through how that's ridiculous. How would you not— why would you not do that if someone owes you? In this particular case, this guy owed this guy 7 figures. Yeah.

If someone owes me 10 grand, I'm doing that, right? Okay. It depends.

Also, if someone owes me— if someone owes me $1,000 and they live within an hour, I'm showing up their house.

It depends if you know the person, but it's— I mean, that's just like the— that's like, you know, that's like the thug move, right? The thug move is stealing. Sure. But I guess what I'm saying is like, you're putting yourself in a pretty risky situation, right? So like, what can happen there? It's going to like You're putting yourself right at the line of escalation. So what's gonna happen? Either something physical is gonna happen, or you're gonna be threatening the other person. And like, I don't know, it's just like, you trying to go to jail? What are you trying to do here? I'm trying to get paid.

I'm trying to— but more importantly, I'm trying to— if someone— I don't care about contracts. If someone shook my hand and we agreed on something and they don't follow through, I'm gonna do everything necessary to get them. Everything? No, I would only ever break the law if like my temper got the best of me and I would regret it. Right. But I think I would do a really good job of controlling my temper and be like, look, I'm not going to hurt you.

I see what you're saying.

It's like, I know where you live though. It's easy for them.

And you're just not making it easy for them to not pay you what you're owed. You're showing up and you're reminding them, I'm owed this money. It just reminds me. Why would you not do that? It reminds me of every, you know, gangster and every gangster movie that I've ever seen. And so I'm like, would I realistically do that? No, I'm a strongly worded email kind of guy. I'm a phone call kind of guy. I am not going to show up at your house. Or I believe the suggestion was actually to send two guys to their house to remind them. And so I think that that's where it's like, all right, this is some gangster shit.

I'm, I'm, I don't want to say incriminating. I, uh, but like if I, uh, all right, I've got a bunch of hypothetically, let's say St. Louis. I grew up in St. Louis. I've got friends who are, maybe they're kind of tough guys in St. Louis. And I would be like, hey man, can you just go knock on this guy's door for me? Like, I'm not in St. Louis. And just, can you collect this cat? Don't do any, don't hurt anyone. But just like, can you go and grab that for me? Why wouldn't you do that? Let's say you own like a flour mill and a bakery, like took like, you know, tons of flour and you're like, hey, you haven't paid your $10,000 bill. You're not going to go to that bakery and like demand—

No, I would, but I would go with just basically like a legal threat. I'd be like, okay, cool, you owe this money. If you don't pay, this is going to get collected on. It's not going to be collected on with physical— like physically, it's being collected on legally.

I never said I was going to hurt anyone. I never said I was going to hurt anyone.

It's implied when you show up at the door and you're like, hey, you owe me money, and they're like, nah, I'm not paying you. What do you do after that?

I'd be like, "All right, I'll be back tomorrow." And then I'll be like, "I'll come tomorrow." I mean, what do you mean? I'm just going to show up again. Like, I'm just going to annoy them to death. But I like, I guess my point is, is I firmly believe in crossing this threshold of internet and going face to face. 100%. I firmly believe that. I've done that before of like someone tried not to pay us. I was like, all right, I'll just walk over to your office. Right. Like it says right here where your address is. I'm just going to walk over and I'll ask your secretary, like, can you please grab this person? They owe us money.

Yeah, I'm definitely a fan of that. In other cases also, like I advise this a lot, like a lot of our team will be like, yeah, we sent them a message. I'm like, yeah, but you need to like call them on the phone, go talk to them. You know, like, whatever. And it's not about collecting money. This is just in general when they need to remind somebody of something, or you need to basically break through the noise and get somebody's attention. Now, uh, in terms of collecting money, I don't know, to each their own. I, you know, on behalf of this podcast, we do not officially endorse the physical collection.

Oh, I don't endorse, uh, I'm not endorsing breaking the law. And I, I don't think I, I actually, I don't know what the law is. I, I, I, um I had this guy who owed us money and he goes, fuck you, I'm not paying you. That's what he said. I was like, look, Mark, it says you have to pay me. Like, you— I did a service for you, you're not paying, right? And he goes, he goes, I have other bills to pay. You're at the bottom. If I get to it, I get to it. If I don't, I don't. And I contacted our lawyer. I go, hey, can I like tweet out this whole— can I take a screenshot of this and tweet this out? And like, what, what can I do to publicly shame this person? Right. And they're like, you can't do that. And I'm like, why the fuck not? And that's when I learned that if you're a debt collector, you can't— there's rules as to who you can talk to. Interesting. Which is— I got— I understand why those rules are there, but I wanted to ruin this guy. Like, to this day, it was, it was only $2,000. This happened 6 years ago. To this day, I know his name, and I like— I don't— I see him, I would totally confront him. He lives in Oklahoma, but If I saw him, I would absolutely confront him. It bothers me so much, right? Yeah, so much.

You know, I think they do this in, in like therapy or coaching. It's like, okay, that's how you feel. It's like, and then they sort of drill into like, so what value of yours do you feel this other person violated? It's like, I can tell you're that person where it's like integrity, right? It's like, I'm a man of my word. If I tell you something, that's how it is. And if I feel like you've told me something and and we've shook hands on it or wrote it down, doesn't matter. If you violated that, it's like, you know, violating your core value there. Totally.

The funny thing is, uh, now that you've shaved your head, you look a little bit like the guy from Breaking Bad who, you know, built his reputation as, as the enforcer. And so it's all just working right now. It's great. I love it. The image is— I just— the image is built.

It just boggles my mind that like our friends who are all internet nerds, I'm like, you guys, You gotta just show up and get it. And so I'm curious what the listeners are gonna think of this. And, and, and just, I had not once did I ever say I want anyone to break the law, unless showing up is breaking the law, which then yeah, I did say that. But I didn't say hurt anyone. I didn't say threat.

You're talking about like a landlord. You go and you say, hey, the rent's due. Hey, the next thing, yeah, I still need that check. I still need that rent check. Hey, you got the rent check yet? Hey, you got the rent check?

Um, Yeah, I'm not saying harm anyone. I'm against violence in most cases, but it's like, get my money.

But you work out just in case. All right, let's cool it down with— I have one random idea and we'll treat this as a cool down because this podcast is getting heated. So, okay, I had this idea which was based on my experience with my last company. So with the last company, we were building this tool that was really useful for a live streamer for a video game, which was basically— Twitch is the biggest player, but YouTube is around, Facebook cares about live game streaming, that sort of thing. And we hit a point where we were like, you know, this is probably not going to be a huge business, but this is definitely a useful tool. It solves a real problem. And ultimately what we ended up doing was selling to, uh, to Twitch. Now, um, I am surprised that companies don't do this proactively, meaning why don't companies do XPRIZEs for their company? So if you don't know what the XPRIZE is, XPRIZE is a thing created by, I think, Peter Diamandis. I don't know how you say his last name, but where is this on the sheet, Sean? Um, it's kind of at the middle bottom.

Oh, I see, I see.

That sounds pretty awesome.

And then you have a guaranteed payout. And so it's not like a startup where you're like, oh, I hope I win the lottery and I have to like raise round A, B, C, and D. It's like, no, there's a fixed payout. For a fixed thing that any team can go apply to this. So like for The Hustle, you guys could do this. I don't know. I don't know what yours would be.

I did this for software where I told everyone I need better paywall software. That's an interesting idea. So let's start with why wouldn't people do it or why this is a bad idea.

It has to work for the company and it has to work for the, like, you know, participants.

So I think it's a cool idea. So 99designs does this really well where it's a little similar. I say, I go, I've just given 99designs $2,000. I need a homepage design. Here's what I need. All 20 of you designers start making them. The best one gets my $2,000. Right. And that works so well. Right. I'm shocked at how well that works. You use that a lot, right? All the time. It's so good.

And I know that designers kind of don't like it because they're like, oh, what are the odds mine will win? I'm going to do all this work for nothing. But I think because—

I don't think they do that much work though. It's a lot of— they just reuse the same stuff.

Right. So I think it's a low stakes version of what I'm talking about. I think when you raise the stakes, two things happen. One is that people have to commit more time and energy. They can't just reuse it like 99designs. So that's a downside. People have to put more in, but on the upside, like the prize is there and you're not competing against, you know, 100 other designers. It'd probably be like 3 teams, 4 teams, 5 teams.

Well, let's talk about why that's— let's talk about why it's a stupid idea and why people wouldn't want to do it. Um, maybe Twitch would—

I don't know why companies often believe they can do a better— so companies just believe, well, we can do, we can do a better job of it ourselves, right? So there's— which they typically can't— DIY syndrome. Yeah, which is totally wrong. But like, you know, that, that's one case. Some companies wouldn't be interested because they think their, their home cooking would be better. There's another that is they don't want to sort of publicize, you know, what their needs and requirements are and where their gaps are. That could be a thing. You know, it's not— I don't think that's the reason why this wouldn't happen. Um, I think there's a non-guarantee of quality. So like a bad case scenario would be, let's say Twitch has come out and said, hey, $10 million for the live streaming app, that's the best. But the best wasn't that great, and you got to pay $10 million for that. So it's kind of like in 99designs, if you put up your $2,000 and you're not really happy with the—

yeah, so there's no guarantee. Logistically, it's really hard. But what's interesting is is a service that aggregates all types of problems that different companies have so builders can address them. That is quite interesting. It's really cool. Yeah, that's a really cool idea.

I think this is great. I think that this is almost like your import-export list or whatever you're calling it. I think this is a very fascinating concept, which is you're trying to just meet— you're trying to get— there's no connection between what a company needs and them voicing their needs to people who can solve it. And so for example, maybe Twitch says like, man, I have this need. And for all we know, there's some startup out in the middle of nowhere who's doing something similar but not the same. And they're like, huh, you know, we actually could solve that if we just slightly repackaged our thing. Maybe that's the way we go.

So I'm gonna ask Emmett, super cool, I'm gonna ask Emmett, who's the CEO of Twitch, I'm gonna be like, hey, how come we don't do something like this? Or like, let's walk through a scenario, would we do something like this? And I'm gonna see what he says. He's a smart guy, he might have a very credible reason that this is a really dumb idea. Um, but I just think that it works on two levels. Number one, for startups, it should not be this like all-or-nothing game where you're like, it's gonna be zero, and you, you know, you basically walk away with nothing. Or we need to like build a billion-dollar business, and that's why we get funding for, for these things. Or I need to have this super profitable business. And so this gives a sort of a new asset class, which is like, hey, If you can build something awesome that fits our spec, then you get a guaranteed payout.

It's like build on demand.

Yeah, it's better than a job payout, but it's not— you don't become a billionaire, but you become a millionaire. And it's like, I think there's a lot of people who would rather do that. And then for the company, it's like you get out of your own way because companies are so much bureaucracy and such a lack of innovation that it's like, instead farm it out. Let 5 different innovative teams work all night in their little tiny 2-man, 3-man, 4-man office and I bet you're going to get a better output than if we kind of assign a group of people in our company to do this for 12 to 18 months and they work on it 9 to 5 and we get one crack at it. And so I think it's, I don't know, I'm excited about it.

I love that idea. I think that's great.

Cool. All right. We can, we can kind of wrap it up on that note. We're going to be back in a couple of days with another episode. Anything you want to shout out?

We have a guy, we have, um, 1-800-Flowers. So last Friday or Thursday, this guy emailed me and I was actually kind of rude. I wasn't rude to him, but he had emailed me a question that I thought was obvious, like, how do I sign up for this thing? And I just sent him this quick one-off fast email and he replied like, oh, thank you, I love your work. And then I like looked at who it was and it was the founder of 1-800-GOT-FLOWERS. And, uh, we invited him on the podcast, so when he comes, I'll apologize to him. I wasn't rude, but I was just like, it's on the website. That's what I said. Right. So what happened next? You treat them like you treat normal people. Yeah. No, I don't even treat normal people that way typically.

You're usually polite.

I was just angry because I was like, I thought that I had answered literally 18 questions, the same question that day. All right. Talk to y'all soon. Okay, cool.

See ya.