Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en when we think of entrepreneurship and we think of starting stuff we think how can i be innovative how can i be new in reality in order to make a lot of money it’s how do i get locked into this to to the point to where like it’s gonna be a pain in the ass to go anywhere else i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back all right everyone we’ve got a good episode we’re going to talk about class ring the class ring business shockingly brings in close to a billion dollars a year for a company that you might have heard of but we’re going to do a breakdown of them um what else is it we’re going to talk about stretching gyms i’m a huge fan of paying 100 and going to the stretch lab we’re going to break that business down what else we gonna talk about we talk about the business of ephemeral tattoos so tattoos that only last year this is a trend that i’m watching and uh and we talked about some some of the pod stuff how we’re looking at youtube how uh how we’re thinking about content right now and then last but not least we talk about a couple businesses that are interesting kind of google google based businesses i call them couch cushion businesses because it’s like these little things in the cracks that you that you don’t really you don’t really once you go look in the couch cushion you you find some money but um you don’t really think about these and some of them are scam some of them are not we talk about those at the end yeah in my opinion most of them are scams and we actually do a breakdown of them around the 50th minute of this podcast so wait till the end and we’ll get to it you’ll love it talk soon did you see did you listen to the episode that i released today or today’s monday uh it’s uh did you listen to that no what is it so i consumed like eight or nine like pretty interesting pieces of content last week or and i talked about four or five of them did you see this guy named ben moula who i talked about no who’s that okay so ben moolah i put it in the doc if you’ve heard the monday episode today this is a little bit of a repeat but i cannot stop watching this guy he’s this big old fat guy like 400 pounds fat because he’s probably like 6’3 and he’s disgusting he’s like smoked cigarette and he like looks like he smells and he like always hits people like on the back real hard he’s just gregarious and in your face and on the surface he appears like incredibly dislikable and cocky and i love him he turns out to be he seems pretty quite charming and he’s a real estate tycoon down in south florida and all he does yeah should i google this guy ben moolah yeah all the photos of him like it’s just it’s an immediate turn off but then you like get into the videos and he’s been he’s basically he’s like a successful guy who’s now just starting to do youtube he’s probably in his mid-50s and so he’s not like a youtuber who you know he’s he’s does it the right way where he’s successful and now he’s doing youtube very fascinating i can’t stop watching this guy you see what he looks yeah so he’s a ben mala is his name so uh he looks like um what’s joe rogan’s friend’s name joey joey diaz he looks like joey diaz does real estate joey diaz moves to uh florida and does real estate and he he wears like gaudy clothes and he’s sitting there smoking marlboros outside of like a ramada inn or like a holiday inn that he’s about to buy for 20 million dollars but then he gets into like a 500 000 bentley and so it’s like a really funny juxtaposition really interesting guy great advice on real estate in business nice very fun youtube you’ll have to start watching this guy he’s brilliant i’m gonna subscribe he’s beautiful and that’s actually what we need to do with our podcast our podcast actually i’m gonna i gotta figure out how to do this we need to become a youtube channel that happens to have a pod do you know what i mean yes i know what you mean uh explain why you say that though so for one i’m just i’ve been a youtube fan for five years i’ve been a paying subscriber and it’s my life if it’s not on you like i don’t i only watch youtube um including youtube tv though which is basically which is tv but so that’s a little cheating but the discover ability is so good and i’ve been watching gary tan’s video you know gary tan yeah yeah i he’s wonderful i don’t think his content is any better than us but i think it’s packaged better than us for sure and there’s a lot to learn from that and i think that whenever i see a video he he does i’m like oh man i totally could have done that he just packaged it in such a wonderful way and the discovery of discoverability on youtube is significantly better than podcasts for sure and um it’s just more fun it’s more fun to watch a youtube video and like i don’t know if we have it kind of skewed because we’re able to um we have youtube red or whatever the premium thing is called so we were able to go in the background and basically make it a podcast whenever we want i think for a lot of people they don’t pay for that thing uh so that’s probably the main difference but once you pay for that youtube is just amazing it’s so good yeah we need to make that shift i’m gonna work on that this week actually and then one last quick update one thing that i’m trying to do that i’ve actually done for the last tell me what you think about this i’ve done that for the last five or six days and i didn’t mean to do it at first but now i don’t want to break it i’ve walked around twenty thousand steps a day for the last about five six days what are you using to track it well just my iphone so i was using the health app then i downloaded like a uh what’s it called the peta what’s the uh anyway i downloaded an app for it gotcha and it’s awesome a pit pedometer that’s what it is a pedometer it’s awesome have you ever walked have you ever tried to do like 10 to 15 000 a day bro walking that is walking is the new running no uh i don’t know i’ve i’ve never really liked step counters i always found them to be like kind of underwhelming so for example i was like you know like i’ve got like a fitbit or whatever the first one of the early ones of those were and i hit 10 000 steps on what i felt like was a very lazy day and immediately in my head i was like oh this is for like old sedentary people and uh i can’t use this as like a barometer of success for me but you’re really fit and you seem to care that you hit 20 000 steps who cares right isn’t like an hour of intense exercise really what you want and not 20 000 steps yes and no so there’s pros and cons so the con is that for walking the amount that i’m walking it takes forever like three hours just three hours of straight walking uh some regards that’s a pro because it’s fun to be out there and seeing stuff i’m in a new place exploring so it’s fun but the pro is also uh so basically if you run 10 miles that will like if you run 10 miles really fast that will take you 60 minutes right if you walk 10 miles that’s gonna take you three four hours but you can actually burn the same amount of calories doing it which is kind of interesting right it takes the same amount of energy to move your body that distance but when you walk that much you don’t get that hungry the problem whenever i run a lot or whenever i workout a lot i get really hungry and i out eat the calories that i consumed with walking i haven’t done that i don’t i don’t i’ll eat the calories um like i don’t get starving so it’s been like a really easy way to slim down anyway i just thought i thought i’d bring that up you want to get into it uh yeah let’s do it all right which one you want to go with first jostens right actually you just on your random life updates so two things on uh one i don’t know where this came from but over the weekend i guess you were talking about step counting and i was just remembering there’s this little clip i watched on youtube from the office about when dwight gets a standing desk i don’t know if you watch the office but you’ve never seen this do you i don’t know if you remember this probably not it’s pretty obscure but a deaf dude i mean i’m like i’m a normal 30 year old that i’ve i could quote every single option right so so dwight gets a standing desk and like everybody who gets a standing desk like it’s like awesome for 15 minutes and then you start doing the thing where like you’re on one foot while you’re like kind of letting the other foot like chill for a second you’re like stretching out your ankle and then you’re doing the other side and you’re kind of like squatting a little bit because you’re tired of standing and um and they’re basically like oh wow dwight at first he’s like [ ] on everybody like oh you’re sitting you know this is here he goes i feel like i’m working in a suicide cult like because you guys are all deciding to sit and um and so then they like turn the tables on when they know he’s getting tired and they’re like dwight um wow i can’t believe you you’ve made such a great decision you’re for sure gonna just do this forever right like there’s no way you go back on this right and he’s like of course not but he’s like secretly like fatiguing really hard from the standing desk and uh anyway so they sort of like guilt shame them and he like ends up with this um little like like hidden stool in his pants so that he can like stand uh he can like sit while he’s like pretending to stand um and so that reminds me of the step counting thing which are these like little phases that everybody goes through and where you’re just like you know what i need st i need to i need to hit my ten thousand steps like i feel like everybody has this phase of their life where they like get into that they buy the device they do the thing for a bit then they like get off of it most people do at least but anyways the reason i say this is over the weekend i was supposed to be working because i got back from this trip and i supposed to be working and instead i was just watching a bunch of content i was watching um you know you know aaron sorkin so i was like yeah i mean the famous director yeah writer uh you know kind of like i don’t know if he’s producer director or writer but all three maybe he he created west wing newsroom uh the social network movie and he’s like amazing he’s brilliant he’s known for his dialogue so i was just kind of like trying to branch out trying to learn about what is how do you even write dialogue what is that what makes it great why is this guy so much better than everybody else so i was watching a bunch of his videos where he talks about how he does it and it really made me want to write a tv show and not to like make a tv show or make a career out of it but i just want to write one episode and so i decided i’m going to write an episode of the office and i’m going to release it so that’s my challenge for this next 30 days in the next 30 days i’m gonna write an episode and it’s just gonna be text and it’s gonna be i’m just gonna steal all the characters from the office and uh i’m gonna see what i can do and i think this is gonna be a lot of fun and i’m gonna release it to uh anybody who i guess follows me on twitter on my newsletter or something like that my prediction is that it will at worst be mildly good i think you’re good i think you’re good at it i i think it’ll be good right so like that’s the beginner part of it but i think i could be i’m also like i think you could i think i’m like cocky about it i feel like i can do a good job did you ever read uh this guy ross wrote an episode of silicon valley so this guy he used to he was an early facebook employee he’s the creator of mozilla the browser uh yeah or firefox or whatever uh oh no his name’s blake i think blake ross yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so he went he he just like for fun wrote an episode of uh silicon of the silicon valley hbo show and it’s amazing if if if you’ve never read this you should definitely google and read it it’s and you if you watch the show when you read it it’s like as good as a normal episode of the show it’s crazy and so i was very inspired by that i was like man what a what a polymath right like the guy can create a browser early facebook employee and is just able to like write a screenplay basically on his first try which was i thought incredible i think you’re i think at worst it’s going to be pretty mildly good i think at best you could actually have a home run that’s my prediction for how how this is gonna be and uh so today’s july 19th you now have now you’re on the ball well well no let’s do august the end of august august what is there twenty day how many days are there 31 days all right you have to august 31 and then uh now you’re on the hook and in general i’m thinking about content like okay content strategy because i’m kind of like i haven’t been posting much on twitter or anything like that and i feel like once i started getting really into twitter i just noticed all the other kind of like twitter thread want to be people like me out there who were just like doing the same thing it was really a turn off like i enjoyed doing it and i enjoyed the results of it that’s what i told you i hated that everybody else was doing it made me feel like such a schmuck uh i felt like you know going to a club in order and then being like you need to get a table if you want into this club it’s like oh okay here’s my credit card i guess i’ll pay a thousand times what the bottle costs like that that was the i felt like a big chump the first time i did bottle service and the second time i felt like a chump in life was when i was doing twitter threads of you know generic business advice like everybody else and so now i think i’m gonna go i’m gonna zig and zag the opposite direction where i’m just gonna go with like i’m gonna do a few like what i think are pretty badass pieces of content that are extremely challenging for me and if they flop they flop but i’m gonna like go ham on them like i’m gonna you know like i’m gonna write a rap song or i’m gonna write a screenplay i’m gonna like like try to create something that’s like much more uh intense and possibly awesome i i think you’re right and i’m gonna take credit because i wrote about this and i talked on this podcast about this about six or seven months ago i was like these threads are killing me i think longer form blog posts are going to be coming because everyone’s like i want to start a newsletter i want to get popular on twitter i’m like all right great do that i actually think that there could be a bigger opportunity to create a more in-depth blog post i i have i had a i have a feeling that this is kind of what humans are craving at the mo or like this is like uh i don’t know what people are craving i mean i think every type of content will always release one tenth as much content but have it be ten times as good and because of that stand out from the crowd and have more fun like because i’m not like constantly just doing quick hits i’m like trying to do great work each time which i think is harder but more fun maybe something that i’ve been thinking about is related to content because i i ask myself all the time about how you can i like repackaging content there’s a few things that i’ve always been interested in content so there’s this thing with email so a lot of people think of email as like 2 300 words that you can fit in there or whatever i forget what the space is it’s a certain megabyte space but you should actually think of it like i’m just going to make these numbers up these aren’t right it’s 150 megabytes and it just so happens that 250 200 2 500 words is 150 megabytes but what else can you tell that story and there’s some interesting technology that i’ve tinkered with and we’ve never gotten to it the hustle but i think we should so you can actually host a gif on your own server and this might change with apple’s new update but you can make it so when you send someone an email you can have like a 30 second gif on there and a gif is basically a video with text which is the same thing as instagram without sound right it’s the same thing and what about what i’ve always wanted to do was to put that on there and then have a part one and then you tell at the end of the part one at the end of the 20-second thing you said all right now hit refresh and you actually hit refresh and part two shows up on your interesting and i’ve always wanted to do things like that like i think that’s an interesting medium i think that could like be hacked and be and you could have a really really cool storytelling yeah i think so i i would suggest someone try that on email it is possible like it’s technically possible to do that and i think that could be really cool another thing is i’ve always asked if you were using twitter for a longer form blog post what would it look like if you had a blog post on twitter that was something like 500 tweets long right um i’ve been thinking about like what would like how do you hack the how do you hack the rules yeah that’s kind of interesting to me um anyway all right let’s look at it okay so that’s my content uh i’m putting my stake in the ground i’m announcing it publicly so now i’m committed to having to do it do you want to talk about let’s talk about stretching labs or stretching gyms can we talk about that yeah let’s do it because you were talking about walking this is actually where i was going to transition to which is kind of like the slow exercise movement so i was working out with somebody who’s i think they’re 41 and i was like they’re your former bodybuilder and i was like so um you know so like what’s it yeah what’s what are you working on nowadays you’re trying to get like shredded or build muscle what’s the he’s like bro just function i was like what and you’ve been talking about the super mobility training he’s like i have a personal trainer he’s like he’s like he pointed at the bench press and pointed at the like kind of like the stretching table and it was like i want to spend more time there not there um and i was like interesting and and by the way i woke up with like massive shoulder pain today so i’m all about it right now but um i noticed there’s a trend so i have this this is my segment called trend watching i got two trends today so trend watching the first one is stretching labs i never really heard of this but there’s gyms that dedicated to stretching i don’t know if you’ve ever been to one one is called yeah one is called stretch lab it’s a franchise i think they have 1000 locations in just like five years or something crazy like that so definitely like franchising pretty hardcore nationwide and then there’s another one um i like the name of this one stretch relief which is kind of like stress relief and it’s based in new york and uh it was like a physical place where then with covered now they do like online whatever but i’m kind of into this you so place you go and you’re not it’s not yoga it’s not pilates it’s like it’s not cycling it’s not spin class it’s not uh you know high intensity training it’s another one stretching and like i just think there’s a market for all of these what do you think about this you’ve definitely thought about mobility and stretching a lot i am obsessed with stretching i stretch a ton i download all types of different apps because i enjoy trying them all but i stretch on a consistent basis you’re like trying to do the splits and stuff right yeah yeah like i work really hard at it and i like study different types of stretching the only type or one of the very few types of stretching that’s proven to work i forget exactly what it’s called but basically it’s this idea where if you want to stretch your hamstring um like in a split let’s say you’re doing the front switch and you want to stretch your hamstring you actually need to push down for 10 seconds really hard so you’re you’re you want your hamstring to flex for 10 seconds and then you release and that allows you to stretch even further i don’t it does something with the brain i don’t entirely understand how it works but i’ve read a lot of studies and it’s one of the few proven ways and so i’ve been obsessed with that i’ve gone to stretch lab it’s a hundred dollars i’ve did it in san francisco and in austin totally totally fun totally worth it i loved it i’ve been trying to go in brooklyn where i’m staying now i can’t find a place that does this i’m completely on board with this i’ve also tried to buy different stretching machines stretching machines have always fascinated me because stretching is one of the few exercises where you don’t actually have to put that much effort into it and to get results like someone can kind of do it to you it’s not like with running where it’s just like i gotta put all the effort like i can just kind of be numb and someone can do it and so there’s split machines where you can do side splits and you like sit in this thing and you crank this wheel and your legs open up that’s okay that’s that’s fine but what i’ve been looking for is front machines and different types of stretching machines i have found close to nothing and so at my gym in my house i was thinking about buying a set of wenches like a winch like it goes on the be on the on a jeep to like pull a cord i was gonna put some on each side of my wall and create a stretching machine it’s probably gonna look like a sex machine yeah i was gonna say i think you could just buy something else and just use it for a different purpose i guess you could just buy a sex machine or like a a reformer but anyway i’m totally on board with this i think stretching is good actually a trend that’s going to continue to grow we’ve talked about it now for a year now we’ve talked about ram ramwad which is called range of motion workout of the day right which is an app that’s killing it we’ve talked about kelly’s star we’ve talked about a lot of this i’m totally on board with stretching yeah stretch tech um so i’m keeping an eye on that trend i have another trend if you’re ready to move on to my my second trend really quick what another thing you could do with stretching so it’s stretching in order to have one of these franchises you really just need a table right like nice tables with some bands another two other things that are really interesting to me in this space this the first is um chanting and breathing work so i i went to breath work i went to this one class where i paid 30 dollars and we just sat there with 30 other people doing breathing and then eventually you like chant i don’t understand the science behind it but i know that i felt great it was fun it was a good experience for 30 dollars absolute high i so before not in a fitness context but one time i was when i started the sushi restaurant i was staying in l.a with the sushi chef his his mandate was if i’m going to start this business with you guys you’re going to each come i had three co-founders there’s three of us he said you’re each gonna come you’re gonna live with me you’re gonna work every day at my restaurant for three weeks each and only one at a time so you don’t have each other as your little safety net um and i said okay so you know one guy went out there a second coming out there then i went out there and with me he goes uh it was like you know kind of a life altering experience a very wise guy like kind of like a mr biagi sort of character for me and one of the things he did he’s like are you religious and i said no i i don’t believe he said um he said i’m buddhist i said okay cool do you know anything about buddhism no and he goes um all right tomorrow morning 7 a.m like meet me in the living room and i was like oh [ ] here we go and uh we went there and so i i didn’t know anything about buddhism and i still know very little about buddhism but buddhists have this chant um that they do as like at least his practice or his maybe his sect or whatever it was they have this one chant it’s called namyo harenge kyo so it’d be and you repeat that for like one hour straight you’re chanting just one hour straight and so we start and i’m just trying to be nice and i’m like okay i guess i’ll just kind of sit here and like uh what are these five words what are they what do i need to know what they mean no oh they i don’t need to know what do you mean he was just like just just the sound is therapeutic and i was like oh that’s interesting because like in hinduism oh you hear that in yoga a lot too and there’s something about the vibration of making this sound audibly making the sound that by the end of it you feel different than you did at the beginning and so by the end of this hour i had this like i don’t know what it was it’s like a rush of euphoria basically uh from chanting and he was like i do that every morning it’s like a med it’s like an audio i forgot it’s called transcendental meditation or something it’s a form of meditation where you’re not trying to it’s like a way to quiet the mind by chanting the same thing on loop and when you quiet the mind you know you finally you know you get a sense of peace that’s very hard to achieve otherwise and after i did that i was like a big believer in chanting so i’ve continued to i’m not buddhist but i’ve continued to do this chanting thing on and off for like the last 10 years of my life well and you feel like an idiot doing it so if i told you to do it without your guy there you would feel like a fool and i went and i felt like a fool too so i went to one of these classes and you do breath work which but it felt awesome it felt like i was it felt like a very mild uh drug yeah yeah and and you part of it is chanting and it felt great and it when i talked the guy was like yeah this is like our mvp like i found it on event right he’s like we’re thinking about scaling this and doing it it was all startuping guy and i was like dude this greatest business ever you just need like a space for like 50 people and nothing else yeah the floor yeah you don’t need anything like i’m in if you ever like it so so anyway i think that’s interesting i also think ice baths are interesting i know i’ve been noticing on instagram loads and loads and ice baths we talked about this company what was the ice bath company called the barrel company ice barrel ice barrel so ice barrel dot co or something it’s um i know the guy who started it and they’re selling an ice barrel for like twelve or thirteen hundred dollars i’m seeing them everywhere i think ice baths particularly places that you can go just to take an ice bath i think are going to get quite popular i think an ice bath also has a slightly meditative purpose to it so the i would add that i would add those two things to stretching to look out yeah same uh i just yesterday i sent this tick tock this guy is like hey guys just want to take you through my morning routine he’s like a 60 year old dude who’s just like absolutely chiseled somehow it’s like okay i don’t know i don’t know how your body looks like that a little unnatural but okay was it mark sisson no i don’t he wasn’t like a famous guy he’s just like a guy he’s like first things first i get in the cold plunge and he’s like i get in and i don’t do a lot of like he’s like i just get in that’s it and then he’s like and then at three minutes i get out i go in the jacuzzi he like hops over his pool to get to his jacuzzi he’s like and then we’re gonna go to the sauna and like all the comments are like sir i don’t have these amenities at my house like i don’t have all these things and i think that’s the opportunity which is that when people have these things they sort of swear by them like our friend ramone swears by it tony robbins always talked about this is how he starts his day goes straight into the ice plunge then go straight to heat um and so there’s definitely some like anti-inflammatory and like sort of uh neurological effects waking the body up like this with something a drastic physiological change a stimulus and you don’t need caffeine you don’t need drugs to be able to to get your body to respond and um but i think there’s a problem which is that they’re so inaccessible so one we talked about ice barrel and then somebody reached out a guy who’s in my club ltv like uh the the e-commerce group i have for people who have an e-commerce store of a million dollars are up and he said oh yeah i have this one uh brand now but i’m starting a new brand and um his first brand is pretty successful i think probably 20 30 million his new brand is gonna do ice baths but it’s just a device you put into any tub like your normal bathtub and it makes your bathtub water really cold and i was like oh that’s way better because i don’t want to do like icing i don’t want to buy ice all the time that’s a huge pain in the ass um and this like iceberg thing like it’s a 2 dollar barrel yeah and you can only you can’t use it if you have an apartment right and so i’m like well if i already have a tub and you just let me fill it up with normal water and i put this thing in for 10 minutes and it gets cold like that’s awesome actually like now you just built like a 150 dollar device that does this without the headache is it like electronic like you plug it into yeah i don’t know how you put electric things in water like i’m a little bit suspicious well it’s like it’s like the opposite of a heating pad yeah exactly and so it cools water so i’m very excited about this but if anybody has like either ice or sauna technology send it to me so show me show it to me i really want to try these i’m very big on this stuff great uh same so the second for trend spotting is uh tattoos yeah ephemeral tattoos specifically so if you go to ephemeral which is kind of hard to spell e-p-h-e-r-e-m-a-l ephemeral dot tattoo check that out so this is a trend i’ve been noticing first there was a company called inkbox that just made temporary you know temporary tattoos kind of like essentially it’s a body sticker and uh and they started doing pretty well they came out a while ago and they you know they do kind of like 20 30 million dollars plus in revenue uh last i had heard which was a few years ago and uh so inkbox had done pretty well and this new one emerald tattoo just raised 20 million dollars it got my attention i said what’s going on here so what these guys have is a biodegradable ink that you um that can go into even like a normal tattoo gun so you got to go to a place so inkbox is sort of like a sticker you just put on your skin and then it just fades away this is like actually a legit tattoo but it’s a one-year commitment instead of a you know a 50-year commitment or whatever like a normal tattoo is so you go you actually get it and you know tattooed onto your body and it degrades after 12 to 15 months it and um and so they have like one studio open in like la one in like new york and they raised 20 million dollars to do two things one is to release like colored tattoos because right now it’s just black and white and the other is like to open more studios because the way it works is you put down it’s like tesla you put down a 20 deposit and that lets you basically book a reservation at this thing and they have like a million dollars worth of like pre-booked reservations at their studios that they just are backlogged on and need to need to do and what i thought was interesting about i was like okay cool it’s like some kind of material innovation on the material science of the ink but i like that this can go into a normal tattoo because i think what i think the best i think it’s sort of stupid to open up their own uh you know tattoo parlors maybe you’ll do a few of those but there’s 21 000 tattoo parlors in the united states that’s like the same number of like high schools or in the united states so there’s one one tattoo parlor for every high school essentially is that is that a real stat yeah there’s estimated twenty one thousand tattoo parlors and there’s about twenty four only twenty twenty five percent i think you’re wrong by the way them having this studio is awesome it doesn’t matter if it makes money or not i guess what i’m saying is i think what they should do is they should sell this to every tattoo parlor as the hey you want diet coke right you want the diet tattoo you don’t you want the not lifelong tattoo commitment hey we sell this thing it plugs right into our normal thing and we’re we have the staff we have the brick and mortar locations so i think they could roll out to 10 000 locations like this rather than opening up their own store brick after brick so anyways i’m pretty excited about this i think it’s kind of a cool idea i uh i’m gonna sign up i’ll go to it they have a brooklyn one i was about to get some more tattoos i would totally do that right you have a few uh a few interesting tattoos on your body that you could talk about i’ve got a few bad ones so i have one two three i’ve got four homemade ones and the way that you you do you the way that you do homemade ones is you use a sewing needle and an ink and you just make a ton of dots i did that when i was like 21 and like partying i was highly intoxicated i don’t entirely regret them but they look silly it says like what do you have on your you have like something on your foot tattoos no it says wow or mom it depends and then i have a feet tattoos that say act now which are kind of cool they’re kind of cool but yeah like self-administered tattoos not every day you see one of those which is actually uh quite popular is homemade tattoos it’s called stick and poke when i did it i didn’t think that they were that popular but i think they actually are quite popular but anyway this had two business i i’ll 100 sign up for that it looks sign up for them it it it looks pretty sick they are black and white so like they do amazing yeah yeah they look pretty like like i would get it but if you’re like a cute girl and you probably don’t it’s not just that they’re black and white it looks like they’re not like colored in so they’re just like an outline of a shape or at least that’s what i see on the website it’s like a cat but like the cat it’s just like the outline of a cat yeah i’m into those ephemeral tattoo i i think you’re on board there it just opens up the market right like there’s if there’s if there’s like a circle that says this is this is a circle that represents the number of people who are willing to get tattoos for life you say and now there’s an option that you can have a tattoo but it’s only going to last a year and it’ll fade away okay that circle just got like three times bigger four times bigger you’re just increasing the size of the adjustable market for tattoos which is smart so i think that’s cool because you get to try something for a year that you could potentially impact the rest of your life you know it’s always freaked me out like and and we don’t discuss it too much but or like as a society we accept that that’s normal buying a home you basically go into it for like 10 minutes and you’re willing to spend all of your money like every dollar that you have in 30 years of your life after like a 15-minute walk-through is that crazy is that you actually give you 100-page disclosure that you can’t understand and then you read some scary stuff in there and then you’re just like i guess i guess i just live with that termite issue i always just thought it was mind-boggling that you can you you have to spend 15 minutes for making a decision that emote for most people it’s all their money and also it’s for 30 plus years of their life right off of off a 15 minute walk through that’s always that’s always been crazy to me so this is that that’s well this is good for tattoos that they get that moment you want to talk about these uh these top two things i think yeah so so i was thinking about class rings uh or i think um somebody ben shared a tweet with me that was just like a meme it was like uh the the if people want to know how we get ideas for this so me and ben just sent his other [ ] off twitter all day and then some of it you know it’s just like a memes but but i thought started thinking about he goes some guy coleman oates he goes y’all remember when a company would come to your high school and gaslight you into buying a 400 class ring and you know there’s just like whatever like 100 likes on this tweet and i just thought it was so funny and i remember that happening i remember buying a class ring and i lost it i don’t know where it is it was like a waste of money it’s so ugly i was never gonna wear it uh but i bought it because i was like i guess this is like the moment i’m supposed to commemorate these four years and you know it’s now or never basically to buy this ring so i like kind of got pressured into buying it and uh so i started thinking about this classroom business so let me tell you some things i discovered all right so this guy’s kind of like my billy of the week i got two very boring business people that i’m going to feature here so the first guy is called otto josten and otto josten is the founder of jostens which is the number one clash ring maker and otto johnson he invents the clash ring basically so he started this thing in 1897 in ottawa right this is like you know over 100 years old and um and so he invents this thing and basically says okay great we’re gonna have these rings that commemorate the occasion and um and so he he creates the classroom so what how does this work so basically high school or college you go to the school um at the end of your senior year you get up-sold into all this stuff you get up sold into like um you know shirts yearbooks but the clash ring is like kind of like one of the more expensive items 400 500 600 for a class ring sometimes and um and so i was looking into the history of this company so basically the company uh you know existed for a long time goes public uh in like 1965 or whatever stays public for a while ends up getting acquired by private equity so it gets acquired by uh by by something called newell brands and this is an interesting company to look into they own rubbermaid crockpot oster like all these like home home appliance companies then they old like elmer’s glue sharpie yankee candles like all these brands that we know about they have 10 billion in revenue across their portfolio brands and so they had they bought jostens and they were like look this company makes about 700 million dollars a year but it’s been flat uh or declining like the yearbook and clash ring industry is sort of like declining five percent a year and so it’s like ah you know maybe there’s room to turn around so they buy it for one 1.5 billion i think yeah and then they try it for a few years can’t do anything with it they sell it to another company platinum equity for 1.3 billion so they take a 200 million loss on it sell the company so still owned by platinum equity and it’s just this thing that exists so it started getting me interested like how does this whole business model work and what i couldn’t find is what’s in it for the schools because the schools definitely give these people like real estate uh on campus or on on premises to sell this stuff so i wonder if there’s a rev share i couldn’t find that that detail but it got me thinking how would i compete with this if i was going to compete with this so i thought this would be a fun brainstorm so all right boring business how would you compete with this well let let’s walk through how seniors come into this you know i use did you use josh johnson’s in high school i think i think we bought jostens yeah uh so basically if i remember correctly you’re a senior and you get a magazine do you get a magazine like do they hand do they hand like a pamphlet to all seniors i remember buying it from a table there was like a table set up with a little like tablecloth and on it was a bunch of rings i think they did have a brochure of like here’s all the different models you can order try them on and then like you place your order and you pay the thing and then it arrives you know months later and your school knows who’s ordering i think because i didn’t order one i was like i don’t this is nonsense i don’t i don’t like high school this much like i i don’t want to ring and my school came to me and they were like are you having trouble at home and i was like no they’re like do you need money to buy the ring we’ll buy it for you and i was like no that’s lovely i i appreciate you guys but i just think it’s stupid i don’t want i don’t want a ring and then they had a ring ceremony and they just handed me a plain box and it had like i went to a catholic school and it had like a a cross or something in it so that they just high school you’re talking about yeah so they like had some type of thing to give me and i was like i appreciate you guys but i don’t want any of this stuff but anyway they the school knows who orders as well right and so so okay i was thinking about okay i think there’s two models there’s distribution and then there’s product so on the distribution side i would definitely try to figure out how do i partner with either the school themselves or a sub entity in the school and so um uh did you invest in that company copper that i sent you we passed we passed okay so one of the clever things that they do i won’t go into their whole playbook but they have an awesome playbook on how to there they make it like a debit card essentially for high school students and um they grow really well and the people who were behind it they created a different product uh for high schoolers and they had a playbook basically how do you get high schoolers on board for your thing and one of the things that they do one of the pieces of the playbook is that they go they partner with one of the like organizations in the school so they can’t partner with the school itself too complicated but they’ll go to like the baseball team or like the volleyball team and they’ll say hey you guys need like 500 bucks for your like uniforms this year great we’ll sponsor it in exchange you guys help us promote our thing you guys become an affiliate for every additional student you bring on board you get more money for your org and so it ends up being like you know a direct ad affiliate deal with with with the groups and they’re obviously highly motivated because they need to pay for their stuff so similarly i guess what i would do is i would try to for the distribution side i would partner with either the school or partner with like you know the band or like you know some group in the school and say hey uh if you guys help us sell this you get a rev share with this thing so that’s how i would get my foot in the door then the question is what product because i think class rings are incredibly ugly and i think there’s sometimes a good thing about ugly things because they stand out and they seem special or unique or different versus like they’re not ugly they just all look alike like every class ring since you know this this thing has been invented at like 1890 like it’s the exact same thing if you see someone wearing a class ring it’s like all right al bundy like you’re living in the past here right like well yeah i’m like you’re a [ ] like you’re a dork you peaked it’s a dork move right so how do you so first if you can make it unless you were like one of the early classes of harvard like all right i get it right yeah like unless you won like you know the ncaa championship then you wear your championship ring yeah and even then you should probably just keep that on a shelf in the house but like i think it’s okay it’s not meant to be worn necessarily so here’s the opportunities i see so my my best idea that i came up with and this was like an hour before we started recording this my best idea is class sneakers so i think sneakers are like hot real and i don’t know if you’ve ever seen people who make custom sneakers like either for celebrities or for like brands they’re awesome they have like a paint gun or like it’s like a tattoo gun yeah they can like create it’s like a graffiti mural on a pair of air force ones so that’s the first thing i would try to do is class sneakers i would try to basically say great how do i come up with a base model maybe it’s like converses or air force ones or something like that plain plated white shoe and then okay everybody’s graduating right now they’re all let’s say class of 21 so i’m gonna have class of 21 and then i’m just gonna make different color schemes for the different schools and uh and then if you pay extra like you can get your name sort of like embroidered on the thing or like whatever your phrase or whatever you want on the back of it um and i would basically sell commemorative class sneakers that can either be worn or they’re just put on you know put on the wall put it and put in the in the house somewhere as a piece which which shoe which brand and model i think uh maybe i’m out of touch here but i like kind of just like uh like the old school plain white air force ones i think those are like yeah that’s right one of the best canvases to to use for something like this but simple i don’t think it really matters i think you basically you need some shoe in reality if i was doing this i probably would like find something that’s shaped like that but it’s not already like a hundred dollars right because i need to get the shoe for like twelve dollars and then i need to do the custom you know the paint work on it for like another eight dollars and then i need to sell that shoe for like 180 or 200 or something like that i think that’s the model here and i think you could do this with instagram ads facebook ads and partnering with school organizations to do like kind of ref shares um and i think it could be cool i think it’s like a status symbol so that’s how i would attack jostens right if they’re making 700 800 million dollars a year on their ugly ass class rings i would start with class sneakers as my first idea yeah i think that’s good or so i’m looking at i’m looking at it dude they sell some ugly ass [ ] i cannot believe this business is in place and here’s the take here’s the takeaway here is that once you get locked into some to a certain contract yeah i would actually phrase it like it’s hard to [ ] up or default if you’re the boring default it’s so good such a good position to be in and a lot of times when i think of like when we think of entrepreneurship and we i be innovative how can i be new in reality in order to make a lot of money it’s how do i get locked into this go anywhere else and that’s the takeaway here i’m looking at johnson’s they they started you said in in in 1897. yeah okay so if you started something 124 years ago and you are still in cahoots with these high schools this is significantly better than any enterprise sas company this is significantly better than a newsletter do this when i think of this is idiot proof jostens is idiot proof i used to say that uh real estate has the highest uh number of low iq millionaires jostens is is the the best example of that i’ve ever seen i love this company and i think that when i start stuff that’s that’s what i should think of uh how can i just create something that people buy forever and i have to innovate on the product zero that’s exactly what they’ve done the best example of this that we came up with that we had on the podcast was the uh the workplace compliance poster that you have to have for like the hr or safety or whatever work the poster every office has in the break room um that poster you just have to buy every year it’s like 100 or something and you just have to get it every year otherwise you’re out of you’re like out of compliance you’re like out of code and uh you know zero employees just sort of like an auto renew where i send you this like one cent poster for a hundred dollars is like such a beautiful beautiful business and in fact i almost want to just come up with like another compliance poster actually this is my next idea here live on the podcast what’s another like [ ] ass compliance poster that i could make that i could sell to every company like maybe it’s like something with like the modern day woke stuff like it’s about you know anti her openness and her anti-harassment and like pronouns and like everything it’s just like a reminders of like how to not be canceled so so it’s basically there’s like a reminders poster that gets updated every year with the latest cancellation policy and uh you just need to make it seem like a totally boring company uh thing and you just sell this to every age you said send it to them once and then you like get them on file to like have this in their you know restrooms every year or if you work for a company like this like one like what you’re describing or jason’s so it looks like on glassdoor they’ve got three thousand employees dude if you’re working [ ] dude you’re asleep you’ve been able to sleep for 65 straight years what do you make up there in hibernation what are you like why do they even need employees that’s what like i’m looking through this like what’s the point of having a person do like you could fire most ev all your people and just build stuff that it automates it and you simply have sales people that just try to like sell stuff but like you don’t need anything i i i’m looking at their class door i’m like what on they have a thousand to five thousand people i thought it said three thousand another place i don’t even know what you do like what what do you if you’re the ceo of this company what do you do every day are you like hey this week we’re gonna try this it’s like no you’re just keeping the lights on the whole time and i’m okay with that it sounds like i’m criticizing it i’m not what the [ ] do you mean if you work for this company has the little mini pudding green in their office you know that little putting green of a one-hole putt-putt golf you could put in your office michael burris yes michael burr he has one of those in office he’s probably listening to this right now looking at the putting green and being like god damn it uh those guys are wrong about everything but they’re right about the damn putting green i gotta get rid of this thing this is what i i want to start something like this where you just have to do no ever i mean i just just undercut them right so i think i think you could advertise on facebook and instagram and be like hey seniors don’t get ripped off by jostens same ring half the price yeah this amazes me i have none of the employees and i’m going to drop ship this out of china so hey don’t get ripped off by josten’s that’s that’s my ad creative again somebody wants to do this just keep me up i just want to hear how this plays out if you end up doing this just advertise against this all right so this is crazy right so i want to talk about the second one this paint one this is interesting by the way i sent you an instagram there’s another person who’s trying to compete with them and they’re just making a classroom that doesn’t look tacky uh so that was also like one model which is like these rings look cool it’s someone called j hannah or something like that that’s her instagram jay.hanna and it looks like they got meaning meaningful traction yeah these are clinic clash these are clash rings there’s only four it’s like they just stand for like kind of like earth wind fire and ice or something like that but they’re just kind of clash rings with the year and uh they just look better they look cool when you wear them so that’s another way you can go about this all right um here’s you wanna know about here’s another company that you’re gonna be mind blown about do you know what the pantone color chart is the pantone matching system i googled it googled it and i see things that i recognize like a like a color wheel yeah okay so here’s here’s the story here’s the story you need to know okay um there’s a guy frank who sent this to me on twitter so shout out to frank uh he’s got like an egg profile on twitter but he listens upon he just goes hey pantone this has got to be a huge business these guys sell this freaking color book for 500 and so i said wait i have one of those color books on my desk what the what’s there’s a business behind this and sure enough okay so here’s the back story uh there’s this guy okay so otto josten was our first you know billy of the week lawrence herbert is my second uh lawrence herbert basically they oh these guys they owned a print company uh print a printing company and they got tired of the fact that like they had all these inconsistencies in colors right so you would try to just describe a color or it’s blue color but like which shade of blue and then all these different inks they were trying to keep track of a name or whatever and they said screw it we’re going to create the global standard for colors so all they did was they took every single shade of color and they put a number on it and they gave this to every like manufacturer fashion house architecture firm like you’re picking the colors for your curtains what pantone color you’re gonna use uh you’re picking you know the color of your fabric for your clothing brand what color you’re going to use you’re you know uh crazy like ben jerry’s uses the color chart for they have a quality assurance uh group that basically looks at the brownies that are going to go in the brownie fudge bites or whatever and if the brownie color is between you know brown 690 and brown 669 then it’s good it’s properly baked and if it’s under or over it’s like too baked or it’s under baked so they just hold this up and they look at the brownie and they say does this match this color or not and so this thing is used ubiquitously so they created this pantone color system the matching system it’s like 2 500 colors they make over 100 million dollars a year just sending out this little brochure this little pamphlet there’s a booklet with all the colors in it and everybody buys these things we have one here because when we need to communicate with our manufacturer for our brand we have to tell them hey use pantone color 506c or whatever it is so they know that we want that specific shade of blue how did this uh product start so so the guy owns the printing company decides to create the pantone matching system and the number one way they got the word out was this marketing stunt like we we talked about um michelin star and we talked about like that that that system so they started coming out with color of the year so they just they would make they put a ton of money and effort effort behind color of the year so 2016 rose quartz 2015 marsala you know 2012 tangerine tango is the color of the year 2011 classic honeysuckle color of the year so they they they do this big marketing blitz around what is the color of the and in order to come up with it they have this hush-hush process where they invite 12 like trend spotters to their office and then they each give presentations and kind of like debate around like culture and where the where society is moving and then they come out and they’re like honeysuckle is it and then they immediately blitz the market with that they send that to all the like fashion houses ad agencies and then they start using that in their campaigns and they start you’ll start getting emails which is like oh buy our thing it’s got the color of the year this is honeysuckle the color of the year for this dress and so brands start using that for their own marketing and so it started spreading that way and so they sell these booklets for like you know eighty-five dollars up to five hundred dollars these booklets and then every year they launch like a hundred new colors so you gotta get a new booklet with all the new colors in it it’s like the dictionary and uh i just thought this was amazing i didn’t know there was even a company behind us and it makes over a hundred million dollars a year all right i’m gonna blow your mind all right we’re gonna we’re gonna build office go to wgsn.com so wgsn.com do you see that yeah i think you’ve told me about this one these are the trend trend makers right they have like a ascent of the year or something like that no colors it’s colors as well exactly what you described um they do almost exactly that except except it’s a it’s really like one or two reports a year but it’s a subscription service and they sell to businesses and they’re a public company so i can look up their revenue so their revenue last year was 90 uh 90 million euros i think this is a euro so 100 yeah 100 million dollars and it’s been doing a hundred million dollars or it’s been doing around that forever so it’s currently researching reports basically but it it it’s we could dumb it down we had the founder of david’s tease on here and he was talking about how he uses a brand he he used to pay for stuff like this and i remember asking him like is it just [ ] or is this like why are you buying this like i don’t know how much this report is like thousands of dollars for this thousands and thousands he was like oh totally worth it like that’s how we got the new like flavors and fragrances for the news teas every year i was like wow okay interesting so it’s called wgsn wgsn.com and to dumb it down starbucks who will buy a hundred thousand uniforms or a hundred or [ ] 10 million coffee sleeves they want to know which color for christmas what shade of red is going to be interesting enough or um if we’re buying these uniforms uh for this one this promotion which color is the right color by the way the starbucks red thing my wife loves starbucks she goes starbucks anytime she can and she literally looks forward to the red cup moment where they switched the cups and like it’s like it’s like an emotional thing almost it’s like um it’s basically like oh [ ] like like the season has changed christmas time is here i get these warm fuzzy feelings and part of that i associate with is the red cups which i just found to be like crazy that anyone cares well yeah it just means that it’s winter time um and so this company called wgsn companies pay i think it’s 18 grand a and they also have someone you could talk to so you can ask them a question it’s called the that’s what they call their advisory service they just like you you ask people questions but then they also so i believe the way the business works is they they do two things they look at loads of different data on which what’s what type of color is selling well and i imagine it’s just someone else’s data the second thing is they survey people and so they’ll survey like people who they deem as experts and they ask them questions and then they create survey response of like all right here’s according to all the experts this color these colors for this type of niches are going to be the colors that you’re going to use in the future and if you know if you have a company that’s not like growing that much but it’s worth 90 million euro a year in subscription revenue i mean that’s like a three four five hundred million dollar a year company or a company that i think makes like 30 million dollars a year in profit only off colors and this is the second one in a few minutes that we’ve named colors are very interesting and by the way these guys the pantone guys they then partner with some of the firm to come out with the so the pantone became has become the universal like language of color how do you describe color to somebody you describe it the pantone chart uh and by the way the reason why there’s like a science there’s a bit of a mechanical reason why so like a normal printer if you use a printer i think a normal like household printer will has this thing called cmyk if you’ve ever seen that like capital cmyk what does that mean it’s like cyan magenta magento yellow and black or something and basically you can mix those four colors and you can make a whole bunch of combinations of colors just using those four it’s like rgb for tvs and um but pantone if you have a pantone machine then the pantone machine basically has like 18 base colors and so you can mix and you can mix because it’s 18 specific base colors you can create all these really specific shades so when you give somebody the color it’s not just so that their eye knows what it is except they can punch it into the machine and create that specific pigment or that specific ink or that specific printed color on top of whatever it is so there’s like you know they needed something like that which is pretty cool um but anyways these guys partnered with somebody to come out with like the pantone of taste and the pantone of smell also right how do you describe a fragrance well how how do you do this and so they partnered with some company they they also tried to own that space and which i just think is awesome to be like kind of the global authority i agree naming of a color and somehow a private company owns that which is insane it’s like owning you know the periodic table or something and we were talking about you called it boring i think this is fun i think this is actually kind of fun this i don’t know if i would want to do it all the time but this is like a fun thing because you can kind of shape culture i mean we were talking about that red that starbucks like you you or like the coca-cola red or the fact that um do you know that coca-cola invented santa claus pretty much or like the way that we the way that we envision santa claus i don’t want to go too much off the cuff because i didn’t actually research this but i’m a i like old stuff like and i like american history um and so i’ve read stories about this but like the modern day santa with like that red suit fat guy who’s got a white beard that’s a coca-cola invented that oh [ ] we need to go deep on that one we should go back okay uh all right so i’m gonna call this business i discovered this business the hard way so we were traveling we left something at you know the tsa security checkpoint where you’re like putting all your stuff in the bins or whatever and uh we left something in there and so we get on the plane my wife’s like no where’s that thing oh don’t worry i’m sure we can just sort of call them or you know file and file a report and are you trying not to say what it is uh what the item yeah oh it was i mean it’s just like a baby stroller bag thing uh you know it’s like 150 item but like not you know whatever nobody it doesn’t matter what it is left an item there um we so i’m like okay let me google like just hey item left tsa las vegas airport and um and the first thing that comes up is thing called insta file get you follow follow your claim you get your thing back i click it and it’s like oh just tell us what your item is and we’ll get it back to you don’t worry about it and then you go through the flow and then it tries to charge you 29 dollars at the end i’m like okay whatever oh and as i’m doing this oh so i go through i follow this i’m starting to follow this thing and i start to get my spidey spin sensors tingling i scroll down and i see you know is the file is not associated with any airport tsa or anything like that i’m like oh what is this pretty interesting business so so first i think it’s clever a clever move right i call these couch cushion businesses it’s like finding change in the couch cushion it’s like these little cracks in the system where you can just like slip right in and create a business so of course people are gonna be losing you know one out of a thousand people are gonna lose something in tsa what are they gonna do they’re gonna google it and these guys are the top ranking result for that uh for every airport i think and so um they just all they do is filing a claim is actually free what they do is they just rank at the top they get you to pay for it and then they go file the claim on your behalf and this forwards your they just forward your report to them and then they forward you their response and it’s like i mean a scam it’s not a scam it’s it’s like a kind of a managed service the part it’s very misrepresentative and so you go read the reviews people are very angry at them i don’t get angry about this sort of thing i actually i’m like oh clever clever you’ve found a way to like you know capitalize on this um and you know there is some value added service because again there is like an agent in the middle i don’t know how much that’s what i’m saying it’s my it’s it’s very technically it’s not a scam it’s just misleading it depends if they’re actually better at if they actually save you time or money uh or like you know increase your odds of getting your thing back if they’re really just forwarding your report and then forwarding their email back to you then there’s like zero value add but if they are actually like you know filing it right following up for you calling and getting the answer then great uh you know that’s dude i can’t find anyone online who works at this company yeah you can’t find the owner you can’t find the about page and that’s why i’m like okay yeah and you know probably more towards scam but anyways i just thought this is fascinating how many different businesses are there like this there’s probably a ton of different business like this that are just like these really hyper-specific scenario searches that um that you can rank number one for and then when you do i bet you kind of print money i bet you this business is you know profitable seven figures business just off this one this one thing like mugshots.com or mugshot website what is that to look up mug shots yeah you’ve never tried to look at someone’s mug shot oh my god it’s littered with scams so google like uh find mugshot california or like you know like imagine like what imagine a friend gets arrested and you’re trying to find a mug shot google whatever you’re going to google uh all right so i’m seeing a bunch of ads four ads at the top right let me find mug shots for free it looks like a search bar i can search their name and it goes finds the public records and i’m guessing it’s going to charge me something at some point crazy right yeah it’s pretty wild so a lot of these mug shots that they get they’re just public so if you know where someone gets arrested you can just go not all counties are that way but you can just go to like um uh san francisco or so that would be like alameda county uh mugshots and you can actually go to the website and they just like and they just aggregate it but they have super super slick onboarding ways to like uh get you to give them money and the website’s super optimized right like right next to the search bar it says norton security and mcafee secure the why do i what does that have that’s a virus scanning protocol what does it have to do with me typing in someone’s name to search for them like but it’s just like these random ass trust building badges right next to the search bar just to get me to do this for free yeah so it’s not actually gonna be free it’s incredibly scammy and anyway it’s very similar to what you’re describing we can actually do a i’ll actually do a breakdown about this uh very soon um maybe next week i’ll do a breakdown on this business historically incredibly scammy probably you could own the person who who can own one of these businesses and make like 10 15 million dollars a year profit although you got to like you know live this shitty life where like you’re just kind of a piece of [ ] scamming someone but it’s like it’s crazy fascinating um that these mugshot businesses i think they crush yeah so do you know who naveen jane is yes so he’s like a billionaire guy now but he the way that he became a billionaire he’s kind of done a good job of rebranding himself as this like inspirational tony robbins guy yeah but he owned a bunch of scammy businesses and i believe some of them were ponzi schemes that he took public so what was it a ponzi scheme i don’t think exactly but basically during the dot-com boom uh there was a company called infospace and he was the ceo of infospace and i don’t know the full story i should look it up but i remember reading it because i met his son his son uh this guy ankur jane a really interesting guy and you know like he’s he was kind of like i was sort of like why is this kid so like polished why do i feel like when he’s talking to me he’s talking like on cnbc or something like that like this i got this like politician vibe from him and so i was looking him up like oh he’s the son of this billionaire and they you know grew up you know in the same neighborhood as like you know whatever bill gates and other guys and then somebody had told me somebody was like yeah his dad’s kind of controversial so why is that and he said he started info space took it for space public and then before infospace crashed in the dot-com crash he had like i know sold a bunch of his stock he ended up doing great all of his employees you know lost their kind of the company went under but he ended up doing very well that’s the like long and short of it now i don’t know if it was like you know some kind of like underhanded stuff i’m not sure but definitely there’s like a long kind of like report that it’s pretty hard to google for it because i think he’s like scrubbed it but you can find it from the old like seattle times or something like that uh but then he started another company that also had controversy called intellius and intellius is the one you’re thinking about and um intellius i think it sold uh like for over a hundred million dollars but what it was is sort of like in the it was a so it’s a way for people to peruse criminal records and conduct background searches online but the way the way it worked if you look if you google like intellius scam or intellius shady you’ll see that like it basically looked like one of those like free credit report like kind of services or it’s like oh you just type your name you’ll get your your data your report and there’s like this tiny checkbox that’s like you know you know you agree to pay 19.99 for the rest of your life if you do this and like and so that’s how they were making a bunch of their money was they were just taking aggregating public records making them a little more searchable and they had this sort of like hard to see subscription that you were paying for at the end of it uh maybe i i don’t know exactly you must have entered your credit card so it can’t be that hard to see but there was a bunch of controversy around intellius i remember yeah yeah yeah now he’s got like this company moon express that’s like sending rockets to the moon and like and now he’s got something called volume it’s like imagine a world where illness optional and it’s like you know trying to save the world save the planet type of guy and if you hear him talk he’s extremely charismatic um as people who who tend to you know run schemes tend to be and so he’s um i don’t know i i don’t know i don’t really have an opinion myself i just know that there is some controversy around this guy but i find him to be a pretty fascinating character i find him very interesting to hear when he talks very inspirational type of speaker and now is doing these kind of like big picture elon musk type of things but got his start doing something much less savory we should have someone come on and talk about some of the stuff i didn’t realize i i knew what atelieus was but whenever i do these background checks i like doing background check stuff it’s fun have you ever like like don’t you ever do it to like see like have my parents ever been arrested let’s find out um no i had never do anything like that but i’m also not like ancestry.com or 23 of me i think there’s a lot of people who are just like big into like self-exploration kind of like my past other people’s past things like that and i i just haven’t done that a ton well so that’s me so i understand a lot of people i think most people like answers.com is a huge business so i think um anyway i think this yeah i i i didn’t realize i i thought that someone could make 10 or 20 million dollars a year from this but now that i remember intellius i think was doing hundreds of millions from this yeah i ran into some another business like this that was looking for people’s addresses so when we had that like i i came on the pod i talked about somebody was stealing from us and we knew who they were we’re gonna find them and send the cops to their house and stuff like that well i needed to find somebody’s address and so i started basically if you have like a couple pieces of information a name a phone number stuff like that there’s these like websites that will come up they’ll say hey yeah we’ll give you this we have a huge database of everyone’s address just put in their info and then you get like three steps down the funnel it’s like oh to unblur the address you gotta pay 9.99 in a month it’s like why do i need this monthly i’m not doing this every month but okay sure i really want this address and like they’re just like i bet you’ll forget to cancel this and it’s like a slogan a lot of times with those services you can do a good enough job of if you actually cross-reference a ton of them you can actually find the name on blurred because they’ll show you three pieces i’ll show you like three possible options and like the third one which is likely it is is blurred but then you could like do some weird like triangulation and figure out which one it is it’s kind of interesting i’ve done it before as well yeah this is like sort of the dark parts of the internet and all they’re doing like you said is they basically take stuff that’s public record or they take guesses and then they um they aggregate it and put a fancy kind of search bar and they just do a good job of ranking and google are paying for for google adwords and that’s their business model but uh you know i don’t know too much about these i’ve never thought about doing a business like this but when i run into them as a customer i’m like hmm what’s underneath this how the heck does this thing work me too fascinating me too and my mug shots is a classic i’m gonna do some interest in a mug shot i’m gonna tell jake to do to look at mug shot stuff that’s a great one um all right i think that’s the episode right yeah let’s wrap it i feel like i can rule the world travel never looking back