#73 - On-Demand Appliance Technicians, Credible Authority Businesses & Homesick Food Delivery

Alright, 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?

That is epic. You know, I actually met Tony Hawk. 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 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 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.

Layoffs happened yesterday at Airbnb. My wife works there. She was not laid off. Still sucks.

What did she say about it?

I mean, I'll say this because it's not like she's like showing me this stuff, but we live in a small house. So when she, when she talks, when her company talks to her, I definitely hear some of it, even though we're different rooms. And I think Brian handled it wonderfully.

I read the letter he put out and it was great. And I think a couple of weeks ago we kind of capped on somebody who had done an announcement that we didn't think was great. And I thought this was an example of one that was pretty great.

I also liked that the previous, when a previous meeting, Brian referenced that letter.

Oh, did he? Okay. Nice. What did he say?

I don't remember exactly, but he was like, yeah, you know, it's good that he was able to do that. Um, I don't, I don't remember. I don't even want to, I don't even want to be quoted because I don't remember exactly, but I think that he complimented it, but he handled things— Brian handled things differently. I think he did great. You know, he was crying. The other day we interviewed Sophia Amorosa. I think that I will speak for both of us because I think it's true that we both really liked her.

Yeah, I tweeted this today. I usually actually hate having guests. I prefer if it's just me and you shooting the shit. I think a guest kind of changes the dynamic, the flow a lot, but guests are good for growth, so we book them.. And also I actually like the conversation with the guest. It's just, I don't think the podcast is very, is, has the same zip to it.

Exactly.

But, um, she was great and she was great for like this, what sounds like the stupidest reason, which was she was just really honest and, um, just like said what it is and didn't try to make it sound better than it is and didn't make it sound worse than it is. Didn't make it more dramatic. Was just like, here's what happened. Here's how much money, you know, we got offered. We turned it down for this reason. I kind of regret it. I, I, I guess I kind of learned from it, but you know, she even said an urban retailer tried to buy them, right? Yeah, exactly. I was like, oh, okay. So Urban Outfitters. Is there any other? I don't know if that's like, if I have my brain's too literal or what, but I just thought she was really candid. And, uh, we've had guests, we've run, I would say 2 or 3 episodes with people that we literally just didn't publish. Cause we were like, this person came on, they weren't real. They didn't share real stories, real numbers. They kind of stayed on the surface and it was kind of a, not an infomercial, but like it definitely was too guarded. And so we just didn't run the episode. We just have it in the, in the vault. Um, and this was the opposite of that.

Yeah, she did great. I really liked her. I, uh, I followed up with her and just said thank you. Um, and I don't do that a lot. Well, I should do that with guests, but I don't.

Yeah, we should do it all the time, but we didn't. I have it, I have it written down. I'm sending one out today. Uh, also thank Erica's. Yeah, it was good. Uh, anyways, let's, let's talk about a bunch of ideas.

I have some cool ideas to bring up. Can I tell you something that I've done though since Saturday? And I didn't mean to do this, but I was like a day in and I was like, let's just try this. Since Saturday, the only calories I've consumed other than a little bit of almond milk in my coffee has been meat.

Oh, you're going carnivore?

No, I'm not like going carnivore. I was just like, meh, you know.

You happened to do it?

It just like, it worked out that way. And I was like, let's just pursue this thread. And I've already lost weight.

But, uh. So what are you doing? What's breakfast?

I don't typically eat breakfast. My first meal is typically at noon. Today I had, um. Hot wings. So just baked chicken wings with Frank's RedHot, which I guess that is a calorie, but I thought Frank's maybe was— but it was just chicken wings. Yesterday I ate a lot of ribeye and I ate ground beef and chicken.

And then are you planning to keep this up or what?

I don't know. So like, I'm eating healthy because I challenged this guy to a race. So I got to lose weight in order to get fit. And I have a planned cheat day on May 17th, and I've already ordered all my food that I'm going to eat on that cheat day. And so I won't keep it up until then. I ordered from Goldbelly, which was— is the coolest thing I've found in a long time. Have you heard of that?

Tell you, you put— you talked about it, you tweeted about or something, and I was like, that's a good name. What is this? And then it's like pies. What the hell is it?

Yeah. So this is business talk. So I'll bring this up. So what Goldbelly does is it's goldbelly.com. I think they— it's Goldbelly with one L, which I think is stupid. But what they do is— so let's say, Sean, you're from— well, you're not really from anywhere because you've been all over the place.

But let's say you grew up in Like I grew up in Texas, I spent a lot of time in Texas.

You grew up in, let's say Dallas, and there was this one bakery that you love there and they sell, I don't know what a Texas dessert is, but let's say it's a funnel cake or I don't know, some Texas-y thing. And, um, you can only get it in Texas, which is the case with a lot of mom and pop places. And you want it, you call them and you're like, hey, can I order like this one thing you guys have? And it's like a pain in the ass. Well, they're just a store that helps facilitate that. So Lou Malnati's is a famous place in Chicago for pizza. I ordered a pizza from there. There's a bunch of pie and donut and cake places in New York, and there's bagel places that I order from. And then there's some places in St. Louis where I'm from that is just— you don't see it anywhere else. And so it's just like, dude, that gives these places—

so they mail it in some way that kind of like preserves it. And it's a— it's in like if you ordered a pizza from Chicago.

So the restaurant mails it. The restaurant mails it.

What happens when you get pizza?

It's in a Goldbelly box. It's in a Goldbelly box and it has ice in it. That's all it is. Which ships really well typically. Um, so they just freeze it ahead of time. So I ordered a deep dish pizza from Lou Malnati's. It's a, it's, it was pre-frozen and then they threw ice, an ice pack on top of it and it'll probably get here in 3 or 4 days.

That's amazing. Okay. I actually like the guy who's doing it. Was it a small thing?

Right. But they know they're playing on the sort of nostalgia, the like special moment type of thing. Like if I gave somebody, if I gave my wife like her favorite thing from her hometown, it's like an amazing gift.

It's so thoughtful.

And food is like a, you know, the universal gift. So for, so a couple of things. So yes, they raised $33 million. It's Goldbelly with two L's. So Normalbelly, Normalbelly.

It was Goldbelly with one L's before.

Ah, okay. Got the second L. Good. Um, okay. So this is kind of cool. So this could be a thing. So like I grew up, you said all over the place. One of the things that happened was in high school, I moved to Beijing, right? So I finished high school in China. And then I hopped around and lived in Indonesia. I lived in Australia. And one thing that happens is you, if you're kind of an American living over there, you're called an expat, an expatriate. And so expats, like, you start to have these expat cravings for just like simple things that you just can't find in Beijing. It's like, oh dude, what I would give to have a box of Reese's Puffs cereal right now. And you'll pay like $22 for that box of Reese's Puffs cereal. And there are stores there that just do this. They just import the, like, your favorite snacks from America, and they just sell them at like a 5x upcharge. And then other people, they, they're sort of this sort of like, uh, drug, you know, camp drug donkey or whatever, uh, thing where it's like, okay, you fill up a suitcase with this one rare item that people want and you bring it back when you go for a trip. And so I could see this, you know, this GoldBelly thing. It sounds kind of— when you first started describing it, it sounded kind of stupid, and now I'm pretty convinced.

I like this. So I've never seen Huckberry either. So, okay. So here's what I would do if I'm listening to this and I'm an entrepreneur and I got some time on my hands right now. Um, you know, there, there's a version of this that is, um, you know, like Tim Ferriss and these other guys, they are kind of like connoisseurs of products. Like, you know, Kevin Rose, it's like, oh, you know, what, um, you know, what coffee mug do you— or what coffee blender do you use? It's like, oh, I use this one. It's made of matcha wood and it does this other thing and it's so special and you can only get this in Puerto Rico or whatever. And so there's all these products where people care about sort of the best of— the most well-made is how you define best here. And so, you know, whether it's wallets, headphones, it's this type of stuff you find on like Massdrop or whatever. Um, but If I was somebody, I would build a brand. I would build an email list around what is the absolute best of X product. And maybe it's something that you can only find in a local geography. Like, you know, that's what kind of Goldbelly's doing. It's like the best pizzas. Oh, you want Shake Shack, but you live in, you know, Arizona and Shake Shack's not in Arizona. Here it literally, I can see it on the website. It's $49 to get Shake Shack delivered to you in Arizona. And so if you can tell the story of how crazy good this thing is, how people go nuts for this thing and how it's the most well-made, well-crafted, pocket knife or whatever those items are, I think you could get a lot of people to impulse buy and like, be like, yeah, I want one. If you could just— you're just telling the story.

I do that constantly. I buy stuff. I go to Wirecutter on a daily basis and I'll buy interesting things. Like, I love gadgets. So I bought a power washer from Wirecutter. I don't really need one, but I bought one because it just looks like a nifty, cool gadget. Wirecutter has a long article on the best aluminum foil. I bought it just to try it. And so there's a few other— but I think it's called— I bet you Abreu knows. But all the YouTubers, they get asked the same question, which is what equipment and microphone and camera are you using? And so at the bottom, they have a link to like my kit and you click it and you go to like Casey Neistat's, uh, kit equipment kit. And, and, uh, if people buy that stuff, they get an affiliate fee. And so I think that those business models are fantastic.

Yeah. There's something cool here. I like this. And I think Goldbelly is one of those sneaky good ideas. I'm going to say, um, it's sort of Airbnb-esque in a way where it's like tapping into this thing that people want that sounds a little unusual. It's like how many people really want do that? How many people really want to stay in a stranger's home rather than a hotel? And it's sort of like that. It's like, how many people really want to order the best bagel from New York? And it's like, you'd be surprised is the answer.

Yeah, I think, um, I think that it's a pretty good idea with amazing execution. I'm very into Goldbelly. I just discovered them in the past month, and I think that had I discovered them prior, I would have loved to have invested.

Right. Okay, cool. What are some other ideas you got? You want one, or you want me to throw one at you?

You do one, and then I got another one.

Okay, I like that. I, um, I don't know the economics out of it, but I do know iCraft. Uh, you know iCraft? It was a little bit similar where what they So explain what they did. From— so what iCrack does is if you broke your iPhone 8, it's— you take it to the store and it's typically pretty expensive, $350 to fix the screen for some phones. And what iCrack did was, well, regardless of which phone you break, an iTech will come to your home and fix it for you. Now, these businesses are actually a little bit sneaky. And I would— I want to— maybe you could tell me about Nana. Is typically the way they work is they're a little bit more of an e-com or marketplace than you think. So the name of the secret to their business and ones like it is getting loads and loads of iTechs. And then on the other side, getting loads and loads of leads. So they just have to go out and buy advertising, rank on Google for repair my iPhone. And then someone comes into their system, they go, all right, I need an iPhone. And then their technology dispatch— or I need iPhone fix— dispatches that lead to any iTech in the neighborhood or in the area. And they also have to make sure that this iTech is like clean and nice and reliable and things like that and trained. And the way they make money typically Typically, is they take a small cut of the fee, which is pretty small, small enough that it's almost like they're, um, it's like lead gen, and then they sell the iTechs all of their, uh, screens and repair tool and tool. And so is Nana kind of like that?

No. So, so basically they, uh, so it's similar in some ways, but I think the economics are a little different. I think they'll end up with like a 20 to 25% margin per job. So like average job will be like, I don't know, $200. The technician will make about half of that., there, there's a parts cost and then there's what they take, right? So like, let's call it round numbers just for, just to sort of, I can't give away exacts, but let's say a job is about $200, half of that will go to the technician, 25% will go to the parts cost, and then 25% is left over for them to take at the end, 20-25%. And so they don't charge the technicians. Uh, they're not trying to make money there. In fact, they're going the other way, which is they're trying to hand technicians sort of a career in a box. It's like, hey, do you want to be making 80 grand a year, 150 grand a year, whatever it is repairing these things. Like, watch, you download this app and it's like Uber. It's like a job will get dispatched to you. You can choose to take it or not. And, uh, you wear this brand and this brand means that you are a trusted technician. And, um, it's like a franchise model basically for, for these like freelance technicians.

So I like that. I think it's awesome. Let, let's talk about reasons why this would suck.

Yeah.

The first reason why it would suck is, so the reason why I think Homejoy and cleaning services, uh, are really hard and a lot of them went out of business and a lot of them are only okay businesses. Is because for two reasons. Well, yeah, two reasons. The first is when you have a cleaner who comes in and out, often they're just shit. Like a cleaner is good after you get to know them for a handful of tries and they understand the difference between each person's clothes or they understand where everything goes. And so the second reason is also a matter of trust. You really want to trust them and you can't always trust that with Homejoy. I mean, you get a little bit of like, well, they represent the brand. I know the brand will reimburse me. And then the third reason is if I find someone who's really good, I say, hey, fuck this platform. 'Come to my house every 2 weeks, I'll just pay you.' Yes. And so that's— those are the 3 reasons why I think this would not work.

But this is different, right? Because this is not repeat. You don't have a broken appliance every 2 weeks where you're gonna like disintermediate the platform and say, 'Hey, let's just do this direct,' right? So this is a very infrequent thing you do. The other thing is that they're not acquiring customers directly. So they're not like Homejoy or Cherry, which was a car washing company, which is basically spending a ton of money trying to get a customer and then, and then trying to make back the money. What these guys are doing is they're getting free customer leads because they are solving a problem for the B2B vendor, their B2B partners, which is like, you know, the maker of the washing machine. The maker of the washing machine has the lead. They're just going to decide who do we dispatch this lead to? And if these guys can prove that we are faster and we do the job and your customers will stop calling you saying the thing is broken, then they will become the preferred partner. And so they're proving right now where they're getting— they're becoming the preferred partner for a whole bunch of these different vendors. And that's like the unproven part, but it's much better than if they were trying to just generically market on Facebook or Google and say, hey Sam, if you ever have an appliance repair, use Nana. Like, hopefully I'm, hopefully I'm putting my ad here while you have this problem, which would be really, really hard to do.

And so instead— no, I don't think that— I know, I actually disagree. I don't think that would be hard to do at all. And I think that's actually a great thing to do because when you search locksmith or broken—

search is different, right? Search, search makes sense. I'm talking about just Facebook ads or whatever words.

Oh no, no, no, that you need— what's the difference in advertising contextual and I forget— but you, you, you need search, you need search where there's intent.

I needed my— I need my fridge fixed, right? That's different than just I'm scrolling on Facebook and somebody says we fix fridges.

Why do they raise money? A business like that could be profitable pretty fast.

I like this though. I like people who are hustlers like this guy. That's a good, uh, yeah, fine.

The best, the best part is that he did it himself as a, as a repair guy for 2 years or whatever. That's like where you're like, okay, you're not just the typical sort of like opportunist who's like, oh, I researched this market and I saw there's lots of appliances in the world Did you say he—

and did you say he's Israeli?

I believe he's Israeli. Yeah, I could be wrong.

I'm gonna name all my businesses.

All right, what else you got?

Just fucking rank. Okay, a few weeks ago we talked about JD Power. Do you remember that?

Briefly. Not really, actually. That's okay. I said briefly as if I did, but I totally didn't.

Okay, I'm gonna talk about a similar business, okay? And I've talked to you about them. Do you know what Gartner is?

I've heard the name, but I couldn't explain their business to you.

Okay, so I just subscribed to this guy's subscription. It's really good. I'm gonna give him a shout out. It's called Scuttleblurb, and he's just this dork like I am, and he just talks about interesting companies, but he does incredible breakdowns. And he had this one on Gartner, and I've known a lot about Gartner because I think our company can almost become something a little bit similar, but not quite, but it's in the, it's in a similar ballpark. So Gartner, before the corona, it was worth about $40 billion, I think, or $20 billion. Whatever it's worth now, it was worth double that. And so it's a big company, like $3 billion a year in sales. It was— I read the biography of the guy who started it. He's interesting. Another is—

hold on, what do they do? What does Gartner do? What do they sell?

And so when you hear this and you're like, okay, you said, I think we could do something like this. Do you actually think about that? Like, okay, what is the modern-day version of this? Or how do we— what would be our version of this?

Well, yeah. So here's a few examples, which is Harvard Business Review. Do you know Harvard Business Review?

I'm pretty familiar with them.

Yeah. If you, if you want to see all the annual reports are online, so it's great to go look at Harvard Business School reports and the Business Review as well.

HBR. And they make money through subscriptions and then they also sell like millions of case studies a year. And why do you buy a Harvard Business Review case study? Well, just because it says the name Harvard on it. So it's real. That's the moat is building a brand that people like just trust and know. And so that's kind of hard, but that's definitely doable if you have the right skill set. But the second thing is once you get entrenched into it, your sales force gets entrenched, which a lot of people who are building stuff, they don't know this because they think to themselves, if I just have the best product, I'm going to win. That's not true. And so when I think about this, I'm like, well, I want to have the best product, but also like, how do I just like build this massive sales culture? And so what I want to know to you, Sean, is first of all, what are other things in which people need to cite someone else so they don't get fired? Uh, because that's where like the, that's like an interesting human psychology. Like that's like an interesting psychological trick to exploit. But then how do you feel about this whole sales thing? Because you read about people like— I have no idea if this is true, but let's just say like Elon Musk, he's like, no, fuck salespeople, which I think might be true. They don't hire salespeople. And that's like sexy and like romantic. But do you—

so let's talk about the first one. So the first thing is the, the learning as an entrepreneur, which is a lot of people buy your shit not because you have the best product. They buy this shit like, what is the job to be done of Gartner? Like you're saying, it is to inform. Yes, for sure. I'm gonna get some information from this. But really it's because because when I present my proposal that we're going to spend $8 million this year on XYZ, I need that to not be me, Sean, saying that we should spend $8 million. I need that to be saying Sean thinks that we should take the Gartner recommended path and do this. So it is CYA, um, cover your ass. So, so I do think there's that. Now this is just a general, and I see this with a whole bunch of different research things, right? So like, um, there's a whole bunch of market research things that, uh, right now at my company, when somebody says, hey, we want to go after this opportunity, and they present their research. And, um, you know, the source cited is, is super important. Now we pay a lot for these research reports, thousands of dollars.

Who?

So it'll be like, uh, like for example, in the esports world, Newzoo, uh, is a niche one that really talks about gaming, and they talk about esports a lot. And so you see Newzoo all the time. Forget about the fact that Newzoo, if you just go back and read the report from 4 years ago, they're like, oh, esports will be at X billions of dollars. And then this year, now 4 years later, it's a smaller number than they predicted like the prediction now for 4 years from now is smaller than it was 4 years ago about today. So like they're wrong a lot that we should not take their word as like, you know, any good here. But, you know, because they're predicting and humans are shitty at predicting. But I see that. I see it on the like kind of like market, market data. So we need data about like smartphone penetration in a country, the wireless, you know, what is the wireless speeds? What is the disposable income in this country? Should we go into this country or not? All these things, there's not us like Googling, like we have to get to some like Deloitte paper that we pay $3,000 for or some, some subscription we have that gives us this data that we can say, look, I'm not the one estimating these numbers. That's them. And they're a big brand. And so I think that McKinsey is another brand like Harvard. I think if Google or Amazon wanted to get into this business and say, hey, these are Google case studies, they could compete with Harvard. But I think as an individual person, I've looked at this because I was like, dude, I could make it. I could write better case studies for business schools than Harvard Business Review. I know it. I've bought their case studies and I know what I could do, but I'm like, it doesn't matter because they're not trying to buy the best case studies. They're trying to buy Harvard's case studies because that is better for their business school brand.

So I hear you on that. I hear you on that. And that you say in a way to persuade people not to do this, or you persuade yourself. I totally get it. Yeah. I come from the other end, which is, wow, that's like their moat. So it might take me a little while to do it, but once I do it, man, I'll make money for a 100 years.

Yeah, I think that's true. Like, you want to be in a defensible business, and unfortunately, defensible businesses are pretty hard to overtake. So it's like the barrier to entry is the same reason you want to enter in the first place. Now, I do think if you can find an angle, like you go after a niche that they're not aware of, that's cool, right? Like, I've thought about doing this, which is instead of doing case studies on existing sort of legacy industries and businesses, I know that these incumbents are really shit at, at the cutting edge. And so I'm like, I could make the school of the future. And we talk about cryptocurrency and we talk about a whole bunch of stuff that Harvard Business Review is not gonna talk about for 4 years. And so you could become the, the thought leader or the stamp, uh, the, the sort of credible authority in that news space. Like you guys could do it with D2C or trends or whatever, right? Like that 2 PM guy, right?

Well, that's what we're doing with trends. This is what we're doing with trends. So this is why it interests me. But what space would you do? Hmm.

Okay, and what do you think about having a— I personally, when I started my company, I was like, I don't want this to be a sales organization. I hate salespeople. I, I want to only be around like nerds, not like alpha loud obnoxious. And now you've 180'd.

No, you were having a sales team.

I like the results and the, our salespeople are, our salespeople are in fact the most fun. Like they're just like gregarious, fun to be around. That's like their job is to be likable. But, um, I think if you have a sales-driven organization, it isn't always good.

That's not always the case. So Atlassian claims they have no salespeople.

You could try to be the outlier, but I'm saying like, if you're trying— and all these companies do switch, right? So like Slack and whatnot, I believe now as they're trying to go get multimillion-dollar contracts with companies, most of their revenue comes from— right, it comes from direct sales, um, human salespeople do going out and doing things.

And this is a fact, by the way, this is in their filing, which is most of their revenue is driven by a handful of accounts, right?

And so I think like, you know, depending on what you're your product is and the price point of it that dictates it. If you have such a low price point item, you just can't afford salespeople. And so you got to get creative and be like, okay, I'm going to sell through content marketing. I'm going to sell through, you know, digital ads. I'm going to sell through these other methods, but you're always selling one way or another.

So we were— this podcast is going to be relatively short. You want to talk about, um, oh, well, okay. So last week we were, um, talking about YouTube channels.

Did we bring this up on the podcast or this was on Twitter?

And so let's just say that again, 80 million views translated into 240 grand.

Yes. So to me, the answer is that sucks, and, um, I would not want to do that. And it, it's definitely—

what the person was saying was, hey, you guys had Andrew Wilkinson on, he rolls up internet companies Hey, why don't you roll up YouTube channels that monetize well? You could buy a whole bunch of them, niche ones, and, and own them. And that's fantastic. And I was like, this is a horrible idea. YouTube videos are often very dependent on talent, like a personality. And when you buy them out, you sort of take them out of the game. The second thing is YouTube videos are very dependent on the platform, the algorithm, and the search, the way that the YouTube search works. And that can change on a dime. And when it does, you're thinking— and our friend actually has a YouTube channel that's like this, that it was doing doing, you know, X divided by 5 overnight because the algo changed and there's nothing you could do about it.

Now it is valuable in the case of like you're Nick Bear and you are like a— or you're Sophia, which she doesn't have a YouTube channel, but like her Instagram page is probably the same thing where I bet she could just pocket a quarter of a million dollars a year just off the occasional ad on her Instagram. But the real value is her saying, I am the CEO of whatever company I'm the CEO of. Here's my product, check it out, buy it. Yeah, that, that is valuable.

YouTube channels can be valuable. I'm saying buying other people's YouTube channels, I think, is a poor way to buy your way into cash flow. If you're going to buy your way into cash flow, buy an apartment building that's spinning off cash or buy a business that's not dependent on a personality. It's a piece of software that just runs. That's what I would do if I wanted to buy cash flow.

Now I'm going to make a, I'm going to make a point that disregards everything we just said, which is the company Group Nine Media, which owns Thrillist. Ben Lear is the CEO.— he bought Seeker. And Seeker, I became friends with the guys who run it. It was ran by 5 to 10 guys in the dog patch here in San Francisco, and they would make educational videos on a variety of things. And they bought it, and they bought it for a couple million bucks. So that is an example of a YouTube channel that is not—

so I was gonna bring up a similar one, but which is those people I think are stupid. They still should have bought it.

So I had a friend, unless the price was— unless the price—

I'm definitely a little bit allergic to schemes like that because I don't want to hate on him for doing that because it seems like it worked to him. I personally think I would never tell someone to do that though, because I think that is short-term money that can go away in a heartbeat. Now, some people definitely pull it off, but I'm allergic to that shit where I'd rather not have stress about like—

I'm not disagreeing with the result, it worked out wonderfully for him, or I, I don't know, it seems like it did. But I just personally would not want to do that because I'm like, dude, if you're gonna spend like 10 years of your life doing something, like, make it, make it something kind of cool. Like, uh, it's just, I, I just, it just would be hard for me to like love that, and I don't think a lot of people would love it. Really?

That's crazy to me. I, I I think if I'm 21 years old right now and I was running the sort of, you know, he could push a button and make things trend on the internet all over the place. Right. And so I think that's an awesome thing to do for somebody who's, you know, you don't have capital, you don't have investors, you don't have like any real hard skills, can't code, can't design, can't do any of those things. I thought this was a great sort of entrepreneurial thing to do from age 20 to, I don't know how old he is now, 27 or something like that.

Um, and he's— I'm not hating the player here. I'm not hating the player here. I think the game is stupid. But if you got— he got results. I just think that it's kind of like a soulless, uh, but isn't the same thing as a media company, right?

So like all he was doing was saying, great, I'm going to buy these media properties. This is a brand with an audience that cares about food or fitness or whatever it is. And I'm going to create content that they love. And occasionally I'm going to run sponsorships. How is that different than the hustle?

Um, on paper it's not.

So you own an email list. So hustle is better that way, right? Because you, you instant— like what happened was a lot of their Twitter accounts got shut down.

Yeah, I don't care about that.

Like you can't really get shut down.

I think, um, I can't get shut down. It is a little different though. From my perspective, it's on paper, it is the exact same thing. It's a little bit different because I actually give a shit, which maybe he does give a shit about his people, his audience.

But gotcha. So you love the topic and the audience as well, the community of people. That would be the difference.

Yeah. Like, I love the idea of building a brand that people know and love and trust. So like, which maybe some people do love these brands, but like, let's say, like, let's say, let's go with news. So let's go with CNN, which is on the left, and Fox Vox is on the right. Like, to their audience, they're like a source of truth, which people can debate all day if that's true or not, but they are. Um, now compare that to like fringe, like far left, uh, like news things that are just like clickbait, and far right, that's clickbait. It's like, that's the difference. It's like, well, what's the difference between porn and a, uh, a documentary where there's nudity? Like, you know when you see it. And so this is like one of those things where it's like, well, it's both nudity. Like, it's a little different.

I, I also think that like, you know, the way Buzzfeed BuzzFeed kind of started with the stupidest of the stupid listicles and quizzes and now does like a bunch of investigative journalism and created Tasty and all these other things. I think you can evolve that. Like, they did this with, with their stuff too. They used to buy little meme accounts and post stuff all the time to go viral, and over time they built then, uh, a women's fashion, like, athleisure brand where they were selling products into that community. They built a news channel that's sort of like an ESPN, um, that's focused on sport but in a, in a millennial kind of way. And so they ended up upgrading the, like, I'll say level of quality around their things, but it's because they had this asset that could make any of their pages big. And they, that was like their renewable asset.

I agree with that. I think that's, I think that's possible. I think that's possible. I just personally don't find it to be incredibly exciting, but I buy it.

I understand it. Okay, cool. I like when we disagree. It makes for good, good conversation. All right, let's try to squeeze one more in. I got 2 minutes left. What's one more thing we could talk quickly about?

Do you have something in mind?

Okay, let's do this one.

So why did—

what were you gonna say?

Abreu has some stuff. Elon weird tweets.

And, uh, okay, let's do this one real quick. So I tweeted this thing out. I said, hey, um, uh, you know, give me a book recommendation. Get— what's a book that you read that changed the way you see the world? Um, and I tweeted this out and I got like 500 replies, which was probably like the most, uh, replied to tweet I've ever had. Everybody gave me like 10 books, which is way too much, right? I can't read that in one lifetime. Um, but I ironically, so I ended up with a good book recommendation out of this. So I got a list, bought all the books.

I start—

I started reading one of the books, um, it's a book called Storyworthy, and I fucking love this book. And nobody— I never— there was only one person who recommended this book out of the whole list of 500 replyers. And so Storyworthy is a book by this guy Matthew Dicks. Who's Matthew Dicks? He is a teacher, I think, in Connecticut. He, um, you know how people do like slam poetry at these like open mic nights or whatever? Whatever. So there's a version of that for storytelling called like the Moth storytelling competition. You just go to this little bar or whatever on—

Yeah, I love the Moth. I listen to it all the time.

So he is the like 20-time Moth champion storyteller. He's the Michael Jordan of the Moth. The problem is the Moth is so small that nobody knows about it. But anyways, this guy is just a—

Dude, the Moth's not small. The Moth is big.

If we're polling our audience, I bet less than 1% know the Moth or something.

It's like NPR where it's like it has a large audience, but maybe they're not like 19-year-olds who wear pants.

And you know how to like take advantage and capture people's attention and convince them to do stuff now.

Yeah. It could be used for persuasion, but I don't think that's really, that's definitely not his intent. Cause he's like a, you know, 6th grade teacher or whatever.

I know, but that's the, that's the intent of all stories. There's capture attention and make them feel.

It's to move somebody, you know, emotionally. Right. So it's like, it's to get somebody to feel something. Now you can use that to get them to feel excited about your product, or you can get that to make make them feel like they like you and they want to just hang out with you more or whatever it is. Right. And so I think storytelling is a superpower. This book Storyworthy is fucking legit. You should read it. And, uh, next time I'm going to do an example of like good story versus bad story, but I ran out of time today.

Awesome. This was a short one. Um, give us a review, please. I, we, I, we both Sean and I, um, look at the feedback every single day and, uh, iterate based on your guys' feedback. So leave us a review.

Awesome. Cool. We're out. See ya.