Someone Paying Our Producer $100K for Advice? - Here's the Story

I think you should go hard on this. So you have 100,000 listeners a month. You're making single-digit thousands of dollars. You would make like 6 figures a year for sure doing this. All right, good. So, Sean, what's good? What's going on?

What's up?

What's up?

You got Ben still on the line. What do you got? What do you got for Ben? Normally you're like, man, turn off your video. We need to focus.

I'm going to tell you why. So Ben made a comment to me, maybe to you too. I think you were here like a while ago, a month or two months ago. And I've been thinking a lot about it and he kind of made it not a big deal, but it's kind of a big deal to me. So, uh, Ben, I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm going to only, I haven't told you I'm going to bring about this, bring this up. I'm only going to like kind of mention the thing and then you could, you could kind of explain how you want to, but basically Ben Wilson has this podcast. Has called How to Take Over the World. And you said that a very wealthy person, like a hundreds of millions of dollars person, has you on retainer and basically tells you the strategy that this person's going to do in business. And you tell him stories from history to let him know what you predict will happen. Is that right? What? Yes. Yes. He made— is that crazy? What? He didn't explain it that way, but that's exactly what happened.

It's like a sugar daddy, but it's like a history daddy. You're like a history baby, I guess. Sugar baby.

Okay, that's true. Did I get that act? Did I explain that?

Yeah.

So here's the full story. I get a lot of people who reach out to me at this point, basically any fan who's like, hey, can I talk to you for a little bit? I'm just like, yeah, I'm not that big yet. If you're big enough that you want to— if you think I'm important enough that you want to talk to me, yeah, I'll talk to you. That's starting to change a little bit. A lot of people want my time now, but this was a while ago. Um, and so I said, yes, I'll talk to you.

He's like, I'm thinking of starting something, I want to talk to you about it.

I was like, okay, this guy's probably a joker, but whatever, he reached out to me, I'll talk to him. So we hop on a Zoom, and first thing, like, he's got a glass wall behind him, and you can tell he's in like a very, very, very high, high-rise in New York City. You can see the whole skyline behind him. So immediately I was like, this is not what I thought it was going to be. And, uh, so he was like, yeah, I'm a managing director at XYZ Bank, one of the biggest banks in the world, um, and I lead their X division, very, very big, uh, financial division at this big bank. And he's like, I just randomly found your podcast and you don't know this, but I've been listening to you, you're my guru now, so I want to talk to you about like what I'm thinking of starting and I just want I want to bounce it off you and see, um, what you think about it. And so he gets to call me whenever he wants to.

That sounds more normal. Sam was saying is he specifically wants you to tell him based on history, here's what's gonna happen.

Is that—

that's what—

that's what you, you meant? You go— you said, you said that— yeah, like I said, I explained it differently, but that's what's going on here. Like, he likes you and he wants you to like tell him like, how would Julius Caesar handle this? Or how did Julius Caesar handle this? Tell me like what what to do.

That's, that's basically the angle he's going for. Yeah. Cause he knows me from How to Take Over the World.

So yeah.

Oh my God. That is amazing.

Isn't that awesome?

Well, first of all, hopefully me laughing about it doesn't blow this for you. Uh, but, but wow. That is amazing.

But listen, I want to ask you more questions about this, man, but I had the same reaction, Sean. I was like, what? That sounds like a scam. But I've been thinking a lot about this and I actually think that's a great idea. I think that that is a wonderful idea. What do they say? History may not repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. If you can just tell people what behaviors to avoid or like how other people have had the same move and what happened, I think that's great. How much is he paying you? Zero.

What?

I thought he was paying you. I thought you were like on retainer.

No, no, no, no, no. He's paying me. So he, so he offered to pay me and I said—

How much did he offer? How much did he offer?

Um, well, he didn't offer explicitly, but he, he said, he said He said, people who do what you do, who consult people like me, often make upwards of $5,000 an hour. I don't think he would pay me that because I've never done it before. I'm not like a high-level coach, but I was like, well, that's a pay range I was not considering, I must admit. But he said, I will pay you. But then I ended up telling him, no, don't worry about it. And I just think it's better to have the connection and have him think that he owes me at this point.

Okay, that's fine. I— but I actually think that there's like— is something interesting here, like, because like Alex Friedman or like these like thinker type folks, like, they definitely could get paid 5 or 10 grand an hour.

Yeah, but this to me is more like when you— the way you described it, it's more like, you know, in Billions or whatever, it's like the guy's got a kink and he goes to like get dominated by some chick in a mask with a whip. Uh, to me it's more like that where it's like some rich guy's just like, hey, uh, I need you to, when I call you, I need you to tell me that I'm a, I'm a huge fuckup and I suck. And that's gonna motivate me to go into this meeting and prove myself daily. And I will pay you $2,000 an hour if you are a hot woman who tells me, uh, you know, I suck and you spit on the webcam. To me, that's, that's more where the opportunity is than like telling me about lessons from history.

No, this is good because it's like, let's say that, um, he's like, I'm working on this thing. My opinion of it is this, this, and this. And he, and Ben goes, well, you know, Rothschild, he actually, the reason why they did really well because they just got information just a little bit faster and they did this.

Yeah, but dude, the business is so context dependent. It's not like you actually need the strategies of the Rothschilds or the, or Julius Caesar. I, I don't think, I think it's motivational to hear these stories, right? Like I, I use one story a lot.

Well, why does it matter if it's motivational or if it's like strategically, well, that's actually accurate.

Well, 'cause you gotta know, what am I delivering, right? What am I actually selling this person? Am I selling them strategies from the 19, you know, 1830s? Or am I selling them that, hey, you know, for example, Ben, I use this anecdote you have from, from How to Take Over the World where you talked about, you know, Edison used to go, Edison used to be like, he was amazing. He was like, had done so much by the age of 25. And he's like, you know, but Nikola Tesla had already done XYZ by this age. I'm so behind. And even though he was the greatest inventor of our age, age, he personally felt behind because he was comparing himself to someone. And then he read that Julius Caesar used to go look at a statue of Alexander the Great and be like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? Alexander the Great already ruled, you know, the, the world by now. And to me, that lesson was like, you know, that was actually a pretty important lesson. A lot of people feel like they're behind or feel like they're, they compare themselves to others who are doing better. It's like, dude, there's no end to that. Julius Caesar used to do that and feel that way. So you know that's a trap. You know that there is no amount where you'll stop feeling that way. So might as well just let it all go.

But that's kind of the same thing. You're just talking about life strategy. I'm talking, I mean, it's kind of, yeah, I agree with you.

I'll tell you how it actually went. 'Cause, 'cause what you said, Sean, actually plays into it that he said, I'm thinking about starting this thing. It's a higher possible outcome, but if I stay where I am right now, it's just a more steady. Like, I can go from whatever— I can go from $220 to $500 hopefully in the next 10 years, um, but I'm not gonna become a billionaire essentially. Um, but if I go start my own thing, I could lose a lot of money.

What does $220 mean?

$220 million.

Oh, that's what he's worth?

No, I'm— I am saying number. I'm not going to tell you what he's worth, but he is— but he is in the hundreds of millions.

Sounded pretty specific to me. All right, go on. Sounded like not a made-up number.

All right, go ahead.

And so, and so he was essentially like, should I do this thing? So I tell him, I, I talk about the, I talked about the concept of exactly what you're saying, of like so much pressure on you to say something that's not fucking stupid.

So much pressure.

100%.

I was literally, as he was saying this, I was like, why the hell are you talking to me? Like, like it was so funny to me. But he loved the podcast. He thought I'd have something interesting to say. So I was like literally just grasping in my head. I'm panicking a little bit. I'm like, what am I going to say to this guy? And so I start talking before I even know what I'm going to say. I said, uh, okay, well, have you heard of loss aversion? And I brought up the idea of loss aversion, which I'm sure you heard of that. He hadn't heard of loss aversion, so I explained to him a little bit what loss aversion was.

Explain it for somebody who's listening who doesn't want to go look.

That's why I felt really good about myself.

Yeah, Ben, I, I think that you're doing something that's like so common, which is— and I do it too— You, uh, Sean does not do this. You, uh, you, you are putting too low value on your—

Yeah.

Let me tell you how it ends though. Let me tell you how it ends. So, um, it was like a month later I was in New York City. So I said, let's meet up, let's get lunch. We went to a really nice restaurant and he bought me lunch, which was very nice. And then I was like, so when are you starting the thing? And he's like, well, I'm not actually doing it. And he like gave his reasons why he's not, he's not starting it yet. And I was like, okay, well, It sounded good when it came outta my mouth, but apparently my advice was not that valuable.

You spit in his water, drink it.

Yeah, exactly. That's when you need to go dominatrix, dude. It's a yin and yang, good cop, bad cop sort of thing. I think, by the way, I think that the loss aversion thing, I think the numbers are 2 to 1, meaning you, you'd have to make $2 for to feel the same as losing $1. You'd have to make $2,000 to feel the same level of emotional hit as, as losing $1,000 would be. I don't know if that's bullshit, but I've read that that's the ratio of like how much we value loss more than gain.

Sean, do you get asked to consult and like do this type of stuff?

I'm—

he did do it for free. I'm gonna learn as much from this guy as he's gonna learn from me, if not more. So, you know, I'm happy to to do my— do this with my time. So that's one thing. And then the second part is, dude, you get paid crazy money for doing this type of shit. Like, Sam, you do these GLG calls. Have you done any of these?

I used to. I think I was getting paid $1,000 an hour.

Yeah, exactly. I set my rate at the max that they let me do, which is now $2,000.

$2,000.

That's what it was. And, and dude, I'll get paid $2,000 to just do like a 40-minute call with some rent— like First of all, it's kind of funny cuz they're like, it is this like weird underground dominatrix shit where it's like, I'm a hedge fund manager. I can't tell you the fund. I can't tell you what I'm looking at. I can't tell you my name, but I like, it's like a one, it's a one-way transaction. It's like I'm the masseuse and they're laying face down. I can't see who they are. And, um, and then they're like, okay, say the word metaverse. And I'm like, metaverse. And then they're like, all right, tell me, tell me who's gonna, who, who's, which stock's gonna go up because of the metaverse. I'm like, dude, I don't fucking know. And they're like, what? And I'm like, yeah, but I could tell you, you know, here's some things I think.

Well, whenever I do those things, I talk really slow.

Yeah. Because you just need an hour to pass.

Yeah. You think I always talk really slow and I'm like, wait, hang on, let me get my headphones.

Yeah. The better way— I can't talk slow. It's like I'm too nervous. Like, like I said with Ben, you feel a tremendous amount of pressure. It doesn't really matter how much money you have when somebody is paying you something. I would never pay someone $2,000 for a phone call, even though I'm sure there's an economic case where it makes sense. It's just a big number to me to just pay for somebody to talk to me. Uh, I'm so, I'm so, I'm so not used to it that when I'm on the other side, I'm getting paid, I'm like, I need to deliver this guy like some insane insight that they've— and I put this weird pressure that just is unachievable. But I'll be like, I'll say my point and I really only have one point and I'll be like, another way of thinking about it is, and I'll repackage the same idea with like some metaphor or some analogy just to fill airspace because like, Like, in reality, it's one idea that, that's worth it for them or not. And I don't have like 10 amazing ideas. I have one around one topic, you know.

I don't have— but there's a— there's— that's why Ben's shtick is amazing, because Sean, well, you can only consult on your life experience, and you like, you can't live that interesting of a life all the time. And whereas Ben can just steal— he can just read a book a week and he's gonna have like, you know, 52 new ideas a year.

The thing that this guy was trying to sell me on was that I should come up and speak to his bank. Um, and he's like, you could get paid like easy, like $50 grand a pop to come up and give these speeches.

I did one recently, it was $25,000, but it was in person.

Yeah. Yeah.

How many of those Zooms a month? How many Zooms a month do you do?

Not even one a month. One every two months probably is the current.

That's pretty sick to me though.

Yeah. Oh, it's great. It's just, I mean, it's a, it's great money because there's this other thing, Ben, I don't know what this, what the history or psychology will tell us about this. But, uh, there's extra joy in making money when you can assign what that money gets to go to versus just generally making money and it's gonna go into a general pot of a bank account versus like, oh, 10 grand. All right. If I'm like, oh, I do these 2 speeches this week, this month, I'll go buy that car or I'll go get my wife this gift. And she's like, wow, that's great. That, hey, this, this work you did was awesome. And, uh, I don't know what the name for that metaphor is, but I abuse the shit outta that.

Consumerism. Just consumerism.

So you guys can tell me if there's ever a moment— like, the reason I'm not doing any of this stuff is I just feel fraudulent, like, going up there.

And that's normal.

Yeah, maybe I just need to get over it. I don't know.

100%, you need to get over it. Uh, like, the way you should think about things is most of your life you're basically underpaid. Um, you're, you're underpaid and underappreciated. And, um, you know, the universe has this way of evening itself out where, like, um You know, Sam will make more money off of like some random investment he thought about for 5 minutes than he would have, you know, grinding some business that he— his apartment roommate finder business he did for 2 years or 3 years. And so, like, you know, the inputs don't always match the outputs in life. And once you sort of acknowledge that, you accept that, that's like the first thing you have to acknowledge, which is like the level of difficulty for me is not what dictates the value for somebody else. So that's number one.

Yeah, the effort is not in proportion to the output.

I, I think you should lean into this hardcore because how much money are you making on ads for your— let's just say the numbers. Can you say the number? You want to do it or no?

Um, yeah, I guess I have one sponsor right now.

It's, uh, Cold Plunge.

Shout out Cold Plunge. Go to the coldplunge.com.

Sam is the one carrying that sponsorship.

Use code Ben Wilson for, I don't remember how much off, $150 off, something like that. Um, and so I will say I'm making a 4 digits per month, low 4 digits.

Okay. So $1,000 to $5,000 a month.

Um, by the way, also the hack, when somebody says how many digits, just take the bottom 3 numbers of that range. So if I say I make 7 figures, I'm saying 1 to 3 million. If Sam says we sold for 8 figures, it's 10 to 30 million. If somebody's right, like nobody— if you're over half, you usually say it differently. Once you're— once you cross the— if you cross over 50 million, you would say over 50 million, not 8 figures.

Or like the figures can include the .00. Yeah, there you go. That's a figure. 9-figure exit, bro. Um, so I think you should go and do this, Ben. I think that you should include— I think you should go hard on this. So you have 100,000 listeners a month, you're making single-digit thousands of dollars, you would make like 6 figures a year for sure.

Dude, you got to do this, man. You got to do this.

Okay. Next, next month, uh, we'll do another segment in, uh, Ben's First Million and, uh, and see how it's going.

The other thing, by the way, you need to do like a profile of how to take over the world of like, uh, I think, you know, you've done jobs, but I think if you do like Pixar, uh, right. And you say, you know, here's Pixar's kind of creativity, uh, process, how Pixar consistently has creative hits and, um, you know, storytelling or something like that. That opens the door for you to basically teach the Pixar way to a bunch of companies that want to be better creative, you know, more creative or storytellers or whatever. And replace Pixar with any company that's excellence in X category, and you just tell your story as you always do. And then that becomes part of your slightly more corporate repertoire that, you know, maybe they don't want to hear the Putin, Putin story, but they, they want to hear the Pixar one.

Yes, you select the people by who will listen to this and then pay me money to consult or work backwards from that.

Yeah, I'm gonna go to Apple and give them the, the Putin speech, and then all of a sudden Google employees start mysteriously dying.

I think, um, I think this is good. I think that so right now you're, uh, you're, you're slumming it because you've got a small business that you're just starting and it's going to take time to get going. We this will just supercharge it a little bit, I think.

And by the way, I always, whenever I give advice, the way I explain to people is I'm going to say some things that make you feel uncomfortable, either because you personally would feel nervous saying the thing I just said to a customer or quoting that price to a customer. The second reason is your moral code says, well, that's not what I want to do with my content. I don't want to feature Pixar because I want to give talks about, you know, creativity and storytelling. Uh, okay, cool. I'm just telling you, if you crank the commercialization, like, sellout knob to 12, here's what you could do, and then you could decide to dial that back to 9, uh, or 8, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And, uh, I always say it differently. I say, do you want your future kids to have braces or not? Let's get to fucking work. It's like, you ever been to an orthodontist, my friend? It's expensive. Get to work.

Amazing. That's too good. All right, let's do some other topics. Thank you, Ben. I appreciate the—

Ben, good luck.

I do appreciate the advice. I really do.

Thanks, guys. That's amazing, right? That— I was thinking about that for like about a week.

That's hilarious. I had no idea that was going on.

All right, he mentioned it to us. He didn't make a big deal out of it.

What do you want to talk about?

What do you want to talk— okay, I know what I want to talk about. Well, I don't know if this is interesting to you, but I've noticed that your angel investing is on a tear. Our friend Suli just said, whatever Sean— what did he say?

Whatever Sean— he was like, I got this new brilliant investment strategy. Sean invests in something and then he tells me about it 2 weeks to 2 months later, and then I pay 10x price for the same item, for the same company. It was great. Which is like anecdote, like the— he was joking, obviously. Obviously that's not great. He's like making fun of himself because That's literally what's happened in like, I think, 6 or 8 deals now where I'll, I'll, I'll even tell him about it, but he just delays responding for a couple of weeks or I forget to tell him and I tell him or he tells me about the company a few months later. I'm like, oh yeah, I invested in that. He's like, awesome, can you make an intro? I make the intro and but the price has gone up like dramatically because the company has more traction or more whatever. So that's what he was joking about.

So I put you on like an email list for my friends where I'm sending you everything. Are you getting those?

No, I didn't see anything.

I sent you two of them so far.

Okay, maybe I need to—

I'll forward it to them. One of them I'll send you after this. But anyway, so I'm starting— I'm starting it off where I'm sending them to you. So you gotta— hopefully if you find something that interests me, you'll send back. But how are you getting such good shit?

Motherfucker.

It's this company called Hostfully. You'll love it because it's literally exactly what you're doing. You should get in. I'll enter you. You will get in. But basically what they're doing is if you own a bunch of Airbnbs, which is kind of like a new market, it's basically like you're a property manager, so you're more than just renting out your home or one home. So you have multiple properties, but you're not a traditional property manager who owns a multifamily, you know, like a building of like 32 units. And so this is for people who run multiple Airbnbs and it's just like, it makes your life way easier as the, as the owner of that. And they have like a few million dollars in recurring revenue. The valuation was great. Founder was really impressive. So I was like, oh yeah, great SaaS software. For people who manage multiple vacation rentals. And then you're over here building Sam's Short-Term Rental Club, building this community, doing this thing. And I got the benefit because people thought I was you. That's, that's one answer. The piss you off answer.

That's ridiculous. That is a piss me off answer. Whatever. It is what it is.

Send me that.

I'll send you that. What's the company called?

Can we talk about it? Yeah. Hostfully.

Hostfully. Well, then I can just email her. It's— is it— do they have a bunch of VCs behind it or all angels?

I think this round's a lot of individuals. I'm not sure. It was like I was kind of late to the party. So I was just pretty quick to just be like, okay, this makes a lot of sense. You know, once, once you have revenue in a few million dollars that's recurring and they really haven't even like figured out what their marketing strategy is going to be yet, it's like, okay, that's a pretty good signal that this is going to work and it's a pretty indispensable tool for a property owner. So I like that one. But I would say, okay, here's, here's some of the things that have happened. One is when I share deals with you, you share deals with me. My buddy Julian Shapiro shares like some of the best deals., he's just very, he's very like consistent with it. Meaning like every week he's sending me some good shit. Um, that's, I would say 40 to 50% of the portfolio is relationships with friends who themselves are experts and specifically people who are experts in one niche. So it's like we've been doing a bunch of like salesperson software and it's because we like have a relationship with Craft Ventures who it started by David Sachs. He's kind of like the enterprise SaaS guy. He built Yammer, sold it for $1 billion. His fund specifically just focuses on SaaS companies.

And so what you're— you talk to— so David sends you stuff?

David? Not me particularly. So my partner Romain, who runs my fund, he basically has a good relationship with somebody at Kraft. So for example, when they're seeing something good, they're just trading notes all the time. And so we're getting to get in on a lot of their deals.

So if you are—

they're giving you the deal as being—

but do they— are they giving you the deal because they like Sean or they like Romain?

They're like, oh look, yeah, and they're about to go public.

They're underbanked there. So they started Nubank. A friend of mine was like, led their investment, and now it's a $10 billion company and it has like millions of customers in Brazil. And then the same thing happened in the UK with Revolut and Monzo or whatever. So this idea of neobanking basically of can you make super slick, like slick app for customers, digitally market to go get customers and basically you're building, you're actually not building the banking part. You usually go partner with like some bank like BBVA or something like that. Under the hood it's BBVA, but the customer relationship is with, with a company that's really good at, at taking care of customers and building good user experiences anyway. So that's the, the short answer is like, okay, decide that that's a good idea. Um, and that takes many forms. So like we talked about this before, like Ramp or, uh, Brex. These are like— Brex, I think, was the fastest growing YC company in the last few years. And you look at it, you say, is this a good idea? You say, well, what are they actually doing? They're basically giving credit cards to some group of people that were dissatisfied with current credit card providers. Brex did it for startups, and they get a portion of every time that card swipes. Oh, interesting. So if a million people are spending $1,000 a, a year on it and they're keeping 1.3% of the interchange fee of the debit card or whatever, you can come up with some number. You say, wow, this company's gonna get big pretty fast. So we did that math of neobanks. How much is a neobank customer worth and how much is a credit card customer worth? And then we went and did it in every niche we could think of. So we, we invested in Keep, which is doing this for Canada, and then we invested in, uh, Pluto, which is doing this in the Middle East.

But, but did you holler at them? Yeah.

Then we go search and destroy. Basically, it's like, how do you go hunt for the best companies that are doing this in, in either this geography or with this customer base?

So for example, and you just DM them on Twitter, probably.

Yeah, exactly. We just reach out, cold DM and say, hey, I'm a believer in this for this, this, and this reason. What you're doing looks super interesting. Would love to invest. And sometimes it comes inbound. Sometimes it's, oh, you get 100 things inbound, but you know what you're looking for. So you quickly pounce on the 4 that fit your, your, your thing.

Aren't you out of money at this point from the fund though?

I raised more money because I was like, I was like, before I thought, dude, you know, will I get $1 million worth of deals every quarter that are good deals? I'm not just trying to invest in crap, so I need to invest in good deals. So I was like, I don't know how many high-quality deals I'll have. And now I realize that like whatever I, whatever I had before was too low. So now we're doing almost $2 million a quarter. We raised more money because we just had better deals.

Man, I, because I'm starting, so I started angel investing almost 1 year ago. Well, I did it 5 or 8 companies personally in the last, before that, I forget. And a couple of them have turned out to be like meaningful, like turning $20 grand into like $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. And I'm like, holy shit, this is awesome. And, and like, but like, it, it sucks for a while, right? Because you just invest it and you're like, well, that's money's gone and you don't ever hear about them. And then you're like, oh, Oh, nice. It works. And so I'm like, in some of those cases, those are huge markups. In other cases, I'm just now experiencing like 2x and 3x and 4x markups. And I'm like, that's awesome. What would happen if that was— had I invested in this company at a $10 million valuation instead of a $50 million valuation? That would have been wild. And like, how do I do that?

One of the reasons— so I hated startup investing for a while because I was like, you know, is this the best use of time and money?

Dude, it feels like a, an expensive hobby. I'm just spending money and not getting anything in return.

And so do you think that— well, but do you think you— you told me you're like, man, I think I could 3.5x my fund because that's average. Now it seems like it's going to be significantly more.

Is it gonna— what do you think will earn more, the e-com thing or this angel investing thing?

Uh, probably for me personally, the e-com thing, because I just own the majority of that company. So, you know, if it sells for $50 million or $100 million, you know, I'll own the majority of it. But, uh, whereas with startup investing, you know, it's like my fund invests $100,000, we own 0.8% of this startup, I personally have 20% of the carry, but then I share with Romaine and Ben and Zach. And so I personally own 14-point-something percent of the carry or whatever. Sure, sure. So it's not like, you know, you're owning a slice of a slice of something big versus just owning them. You know how it is, owning the majority of something that sells for a decent chunk is, is just better financially.

Financially. It's so much better. And yeah, I think that whenever people raise money, I'm like, are you sure, man? You might be able to sell this for $50 million and you'll make more money than if you raise money and sell it for $500 million.

Yeah, exactly. Now, you know, but I have to operate that other business, whereas startup investing is like, you know, a joy, right? You just read about cool ideas, you meet, meet awesome founders, and you say yes, you write the check, and then they go do the hard work. So it's, you know, just a different thing.

Can I— you brought up, uh, SDRs, short-term, that's what they're called, short-term rental SDRs. Have you researched that at all?

So I joined your club, but, uh, fucking crazy, right?

Did you just review it?

I was— I'm, I've been looking at some of these posts.

Dude, did you see like, it's, it's like techie guys. It's like people who have like $100 million companies, by the way. I don't know how you—

founder of Facebook. But like every time I open Facebook, whatever you're working on is always the top fucking post on my feed. I don't know if Facebook just knows that I love you, but like —like, if it was trans, trans was always at the top. If it's Sam talking about his cold plunge, it's Sam's video of his cold plunge naked at the top. Like, you know what hits in the Facebook algorithm in a way that, like, I don't understand.

I've always been like that. It's always been that way. For some reason, I mastered Facebook, and that sucks because it's the least valuable. Uh, I figured out what you're talking about.

Wow. You've only— I could only have—

because I can only have 5,000 friends on Facebook. Yeah, there's a map. Your groups are big.

Okay, so, but tell me, but that group is sick, right?

How many people are in it? 1,000?

1,000 people in this group. And people are basically posting, hey guys, here's the properties I own. And they show a bunch of cool photos. My strat, like for example, my family owned 5 big short-term rentals in Kissimmee, Florida, which is 5 miles from Disney World. So his strategy is basically Airbnb is near Disney World. I have a full-time job. I'm a PhD student, blah, blah, blah. And, um, and, uh, and then they're showing like these, uh, Disney-themed rentals that they have and the people go ask questions in the comments and then everybody's got this like, you know, you're doing your, your magic thing where everybody feels comfortable just telling you how much money they're making and, uh, everyone's sharing a bunch of good info. So, so I think that's really cool. I, what I wanted to hear from you is give me the top 2 most interesting stories that you've learned out of this.

And was this person wealthy before this? How do you get to the $35 million worth of real estate?

They were mildly wealthy. They were worth probably $15 million. They had a business that they sold. Wealth. Yes, they were not poor. And they invested a lot of it into, into, into short-term rentals. And now they have a staff of a couple people who are full-time. And his take is like $800 grand a month. And I met another guy who worked at a hedge fund. And he has— his name's Richard. If you Google Richard, he has a story in there. And he eventually quit his hedge fund. Now he owns $50 million worth of short-term rentals. And the themes that I'm seeing are this: one, 1, institutional capital has not come into short-term rentals a significant amount. 2, the numbers might be inflated because the economy is crushing, but I'm not entirely sure if that is totally the case, but definitely could be the case. 3, a couple years ago, it was— people were just buying places without doing much math, and the math, like, worked out when you— they're making 25% returns. And it's crazy. Now it's a little bit more challenging, but it's still a lot of opportunity and it's sick, man. Like, I've been learning all about it.

It's wild. It's wild. The things you've read in here, what, what seemed like the smartest, what I'll call small ball strategy. So throw out the guy who's had $15 million, now has built this big thing, who's done a small ball, start small, grow, grow it, and maybe in some niche that's a cool, cool story out of this. Or you don't say who, but what is the—

what do they do? Is $1 million considered small? So if you buy a property for $1 million Large, you're going to put down $150 grand for some of these guys. There's a guy in there. Yeah. If you go, are you in the group right now? Search the word coconut. There's a guy who bought a plot of land on a, it was a coconut farm in Mexico. And he put 4, I think, tiny homes and he rents them for $150 a day, uh, in Mexico. And he did really nice landscaping, but not complicated stuff. It looks beautiful.

Do you see it? Is it something? Farms? Yes. Can I say the name or no? Safa Farms? Yeah, yeah, Safa Farms. So click it. So 6 cabins, created this like— so it says a tiny eco hotel slash farm, 6 cabins, 1 house, an in-ground fire pit, and a pool in Mexico. And it looks cool. It's basically like a bunch of wooden cabins that look like really small, you know, 1-person, 2-person kind of stays, and then like really cool outdoor area with hammocks and pools and, uh, you know, common areas and places to go do yoga with like chickens running around you.

Is that wild? And he talked about it in the post. I don't think he spent a significant amount of money to set that up, but he just— it's minimalist-ish. It's kind of nice, but it's definitely minimalist, but it's, it's lovely. And so that's a really cool thing. I've seen a guy like that, like, that is really interesting. And what they do is they go and stay there, uh, a couple weeks out of the year.

Dude, how cool is Airbnb? That it created this opportunity for anybody to say, hey, look, if you can create an awesome experience for people, like a great, a great place to stay, a unique place to stay, we will give you money. You will be able to make money just by creating this cool little farm and huts set up in, in, uh, Villa Corona, Mexico. And, uh, how sick is that? And then on the other side, it's like, hey, you wanna travel? Here's the, here's the buffet of like dope experiences that's not just cookie cutter hotel that you can go stay at. Like, how sick is Airbnb? That's just like a— it's respect.

Yeah. Cuz it lets you reimagine, okay, if this home was not for a family of 4 to live every day and go to, go to the grocery store and come home, Well, then maybe this little space instead of a, you know, a living room that's about, you know, just 2 couches and a TV, it's like maybe this is actually where companies are gonna come for their retreats and it's actually gonna be different groups of 25 at a time and they need a big sauna in one area and then they need a, a pool area and a barbecue pit that like I will overinvest on these things and I will, I don't need to have these daily utility functional things that a normal house would need.

Right. And it's just been so fascinating because I didn't realize how many like tech nerds are into this stuff. That group is so cool. It's so interesting. And, uh, anyway, we don't— we can move on. But I thought, I thought that was— I thought it's just an interesting world that I'm falling into. So like, you know, Rohan from Priceonomics, he basically— he didn't tell me this, but it appears as though Priceonomics is on the back burner and all of his time is on short-term rentals. And he owns like like 7 of them. It's badass, man. It's a super interesting market.

Yeah, I just want to give money to this group and just be like, hey, you know, anybody who wants to like trick out their, their place and, you know, whatever, or buy their next property, hey, I'll just finance it with you and share cash flow if you want to, you know, you can have some preferred return, that's fine.

Yeah, that's wild. Um, okay, let's do, let's do one other thing. Uh, uh, let's see, I got a couple. Let me give you, let's do 2 quick ones. Okay. Tailgate Guys. Have you ever heard of this business? No. All right. So this came up at FarmCon. So I go to this dinner with this guy. He listens to the pod and he was telling me, I was like, you know, I was trying to make small talk at this dinner where I was like, okay, I hate normal small talk. Like I'm not just going to, oh yeah, how's the conference going? Good. Yeah, good. How about you? Good. Good. And I also don't know anything about farming, so like it's not relevant to me. So, you know, okay, I can ask them a bunch of questions.

Well, you like corn too? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You know, I don't have much to add there.

So what's your favorite type of corn?

So as a bit of an icebreaker, I was like, um, I was like, first job, like, what was your first, first job? First, first, first. I don't know. I asked, did you have a side hustle in college? And, uh, I went around the table. I was like, did you have a side? Because everybody was doing something different now and they're all established now. But did you, when you were in college, have a side hustle? And everybody had an interesting one. So this, I put that in my question bank of like, ah, interesting. You know, fun little convo when you're in a, in a kind of entrepreneurial group. So one guy tells a story, he goes, yeah, dude, I, I think he went to like Ole Miss or like one of the Alabama or like one of these like southern football colleges. And he's like, I created a like tailgate in a box. It's like, what? He's basically like, yeah, like tailgating is huge before the football game. People go to the parking lot and they want to grill and drink and play beer pong and do all this stuff. And he's like, you know, he's like, my family used to like to do it. So he's like, first my family, it was so competitive. So you had to go wait like kind of overnight to get your spot. He's like, so they would send me, I'd have to go down to the, I forgot what it's called, the Grove or something like that. And I'd have to wait in the parking lot and hold my family spot. And then I started to be like, okay, cool, you got the spot. Well, like, well, you gotta set up the tailgate for us. Like, come on, we need tables for beer pong and we need this and that. So he's like, okay, I'll get the stuff every week and I'll go do it. And he would create a good setup. And then the space next to him was like, hey dude, can we next week, can we just, will you set ours up? And he's like, all right, uh, give me like $200, I'll get you guys some stuff. Now, yeah, sure. And then the price goes up and he's like, oh wait, I can basically charge each little tailgating square, like each little group of friends, $500 to just set up a cool tailgate spot for them. Turnkey tailgating. And so he did this at his college and he's like, dude, I was making thousands and thousands of dollars every semester running this. And I was like, is it—

I Googled Tailgate Guys. Did it get acquired?

So, so that was their competitor. So there was a nationwide version of this. He was doing this at small scale. That was his college side hustle just to make a little bit of money. He's like, yeah, Tailgate Guys tried to come in, but they couldn't break into our market. Like, we owned our market. And I was like, who's Tailgate Guys? He's like, oh, these guys basically took this idea and they started doing it nationwide.

And I was like, that's really smart. He goes, yeah, but how's it work? Do you have like, you just hire college kids and you say, we'll give you $50 an hour for 3 hours on Saturday. We get 50, you get 50. Exactly. And then do they, do the kids go to like Walmart and buy the stuff?

I think either you give them the supplies in bulk or, um, or they have to go grab it and you tell them, hey, you need to get this table and these balls and this beer and this, whatever, whatever.

And you use like a company credit card or something that has. Exactly.

And they link to you and stuff.

And you call it Tar Heel Tailgate. And it's like their thing and you pay them a fee or a revenue share of what's going on. But in exchange, you get a monopoly. You get to be the only provider of this shit. And it's like super viral, right? Because you're just like, everybody sees, wow, that setup looks not bootleg. What is that? Oh, they use Tailgate Guys or whatever. Okay, cool. We should use them next time. And so Tailgate Guys apparently, like, I think they got bought out by private equity or something, but they, they were doing like, I don't know, $30 to $50 million a year doing this. What? And, um, and I thought, what a great co— like example of a college hustle that you then scale up. You say, all right, if this works at my college, it's gonna work at every college and every college that has a football program that has tailgating. And then we have this repeatable sales model of going to the university and we tell 'em, hey, these other 8 universities partner with us. We'd like to partner with you. You get extra income and we will provide a safe, uh, you know, convenient way for your, your fans to do this. I thought that's pretty wild. This is really cool little niche business. And then I started thinking, well, what are the other ones? What are the other businesses that use the same sales tactic of basically partnering with the school and becoming the exclusive provider? So we had a little mini brain— mini, cuz the guy listens to the podcast. So we had like a mini brainstorm session at dinner where he's like, dude, this is happening also with scooters. Uh, when like Bird and Lime came out in cities, companies decided, oh shoot, we should become the exclusive scooter provider on campus. Like, we'll go drop these scooters all everywhere. It'll be branded by the, with the school. The school will get a rev share for every scooter ride that happens, and we get a captive market that nobody can compete with us in. And so this started happening with scooters, and I was like, oh damn, what else could be done? Because scooters is cool cuz it's a new category, right? Tailgating worked cuz it was a new category. So you just have to think about like, what's something today that they don't even really have a, um, like an option for? Like they're not really, there isn't really like a market for it. You're creating the market.

What did he say?

Well, we were kind of brainstorming, you know, he's, he's like, you know, one of the hard things is now schools have gotten slightly wise to it. They won't give the license up super easily. Uh, meaning like they wanna make sure they get a fair shake. So once you come to them with the idea, they're like, great, hold on, 90-day proposal, request for proposal period where we're gonna go like, see who wants to offer this to us. So we're gonna go talk to 5 companies before we just say yes to you. But in the good old days, it used to be like, oh, they used to be like, sure, you know, you came to us, so you get the deal.

Yeah, I think it is. You know, the company who I think has done the best of this is Mystery Science. Have you seen them?

Is that like a TV show? What is that kind of?

Dude, how did they only sell for $150 million? Incredible penetration.

It was absolutely insane. They— I don't know why they sold for $140 million, but I know that they had basically raised very little money and they were super profitable. And so I think, you know, for the guys, they probably made, you know, over $100 million off this deal. And, um, you know, they raised— I think they raised only $4 million, like, lifetime. Got it. Uh, it was a bit old. They started in 2014, so, you know, 7, 7 years or so. Um, and I think, you know, charging money is always, is always hard, but, uh But these guys are super smart. Talked to the guy Keith, and I just really respected what they had built. I thought, wow, what a cool product. Amazing that they've gotten this level of saturation. And it was like the way they sold was it was like, um, you know, like bottoms up in a way, I think, uh, where like teach— it was just so like teachers couldn't help but talk about it to other teachers because they were like, oh, this is amazing. It's like normally when I wheel out the TV, well, yeah, it makes their job way easier. I feel guilty. I'm like copping out. It's like, yeah, we're going to watch a movie today, class. But it's like, this is different. This is like, it's interactive. It's based on questions. It's based on science. And they're like, we're just going to teach science this way.

And, um, yeah, I thought it was amazing. That's so good.

This, um, yeah, they reach 50% of the US elementary school market, which is how much revenue were they making?

Wild.

I don't know. At the time I was talking to them, they were doing like somewhere between $10 and $20 million in revenue profitably. Um, and did they make money through ads or they like sold worksheets? They sell the like subscription, I think, to the— it was a subscription.

So to the software. Dude, how do you reach that many teachers but only have and only sell for 140? That's crazy to me. Yeah.

I don't know. Um, just wild. Anyways, uh, I gotta run, dude. I gotta call with this, uh, crazy crypto thing that I'm trying to get into. So I wanna see if I can do that. All right.

We'll talk soon. Oh, uh, all right, Sean, if you wanna leave, you can leave. I think, Ben, do I gotta read out some names?

Yes.

Um, actually just one name. All right. We did this thing where we gave 60 minutes of Sean and I's time. What did the person have to do to win?

Uh, they had to review, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Great. And the winner is, it's, is it SS? Yes. Spencer Scott, you are the winner. Has Spencer— he follows me on Twitter. He always replies to my stuff. Does he know that he won other than right now? Yeah, I told him. Nice. All right. Spencer Scott's the winner. Last week we gave the winner for the TikTok thing. So we did this TikTok thing where if you made videos on any platform and you used the #MFMclip hashtag, you, you could win $5,000. We gave 3. Did we give 3 or 2? 2. 2. Uh, and then before that we did a contest where if you rate and review us, you won 60 minutes with Sean and I. So we gave you that one to Spencer Scott, and we're gonna keep doing these. We're not doing it yet, but we're gonna keep doing 'em. So that's the episode. That's the winner. Check it out.