#144 - Shaan's Giving Away A Company, A Mysterious, Anonymous New App and The Most Gimmicky Marketing Thing The Guys Have Done

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back alright well what do you wanna to talk about sam did you see i lined up you have like a little crush on mister beast i think right i do not have a little crush on mister beast but i think he's doing interesting stuff so his manager coming and i think we'd lined did we line up one or two more people yeah his manager is coming next next podcast the podcast that comes out prior and then let deep senate you know those guys they're reach out to me i will i i will hope to set something up with them but no more guests or we don't have a lot of guest plan our friend sue is coming on in a couple weeks oh is he alright that's cool sam seem you seem out of it are you okay i'm tired i just i'm tired that's all do i need to crack open a triple chico coat for you no i'm i'm i'm good i'm good man it it's snowed and austin yesterday i was freezing my ass off when i stayed inside and like slept and didn't exercise that much and i still warm me out so i'll give you i'll do an idea that's based on the way you're feeling right now so are you familiar with smelling salt yeah i mean originally they're meant for like waking someone up after an injury yeah like after a not knockout yeah like bar sports uses them as a joke where they like go and find someone whose eyes their clothes and they put them under their nose to make him throw up yeah so basically i've been looking into smelling salts and i originally wasn't gonna even talk about this idea on here because i i gave it to a friend of mine to execute so nobody copy this idea but if you could help out or you got ideas feel free to to to chime in but i like this idea so smelling salts traditionally i only knew them because okay boxer gets knocked out we wave the smelling salts in front of their nose and they wake up the other option is you are the other people that use them are like weight lifters so before a bun like any weight lifting competition you'll see a lot of weight lifters you know crack is smelling salt open and and basically just you know use it to get kinda amped up before they do their lift and it's a stimulant and so same thing with football players there's a whole bunch of videos of paint manning and a bunch of nfl players before games using spelling salts to sort of get amped up and get ready to go so i thought that's interesting and i'm somebody who i never drink coffee i don't drink any coffee i don't drink any soda so i basically never do like caffeine and stimulants but i'm really into this idea of being able to quickly snap into like i don't know like a peak state of mind alright i treat like i treat my workday like an athlete treats their pre game you know routine like you know i don't just get up and start start working like in the same way an athlete doesn't just kinda roll out of bed and go play a game like they have a warm up and they have the routine they do beforehand to get themselves ready to go to take smelling sauce i don't and i don't because smelling salts is not that good you right selling solids have ammonia it's not terrible for you but over a long term basis it's known to like irritate the lining of the nose and the skin the interior of your your nasal passageway it's not great for you but it's effective and so and it's more effective than most than like coffee or you know like drinking a shitty energy drink and so i thought okay what if i can create a smelling salt that's not bad for you so a smelling salt that doesn't have the same harsh chemical but still has the same stimulating effect and idea would be to sell this to two groups of people potentially one is like the pre workout crowd so pre workout is a big supplement category so like no explode was one but there's a whole bunch of these pre workout powder you take basically just something to get you amped up before you work workout and it's not a protein powder it's a pre workout powder and then there's another group of people that i think would be good for this which is just people who work at a desk who are kinda like productivity nerds and they want to to like optimize themselves to wanna do a little bit of bio hacking slash like productivity nerd to make sense did you look at the have you look at this stuff on amazon yes so i type in smelling salt so there's this the leading company looks like is called atomic rhino and there's another one called it something sport money sport but they all look like that on the cover is like a guy exploding with steroids basically it just looks like a meat head product because it is a meat head product today oh my god this is crazy i'm gonna buy this the reviews are really good they're probably all fake but it's how interesting got with this one asylum smelling sauce right so good you go crazy yeah exactly so that's the all the existing products in the market are branded like this and then you have a whole other batch of like people that that buy products that are you know like essential oils and whatnot they're kind of like a different brand and so what and so i talked to my demo listen to this one is called nose torque the most potent long lasting smelling salt available number one choice of power lifters worldwide exactly i don't want nose torque but i'm down to get like amped up and in the zone so i so here's what i did so i i call my friend one of my best friends from college is a guy to and he's a ear nose and throat surgeon now and he's like you know probably one of the largest guys i know on balance and i asked him i said hey how bad are spelling cells for you and like are there alternatives and he basically said two things he goes well you know a smelling salt is just a really really strong odor in fact it's emo it basically it smells like piss and like a really strong concentrated warm form of piss it's a stimulant yes but it's not like it makes you you know stronger in any way it doesn't like actually do anything to you but like is like it's sort of like a placebo effect because if you do it all the time so if you keep taking it if you have a really strong odor before you do something and your body starts to act a certain way it will anchor that connection and so like if you wanna get into that state of mind that mood faster the smell could just become an anchor for it and so he's like yeah and he gave me a couple of compounds he's like these would be superior alternatives to the ammonia blend that you know the ammonia formula that these guys use use this instead this won't have the damaging effects but we'll still have the strong stimulant and so i think this is a little a fun little d idea i'm gonna do it i have a an operator now who's who's who's doing it for me because i don't have the time and i can't wait to see where this goes because i think nose torque and you know like nasal blaster or not the way to do this yeah i'm looking this up this is something i can't believe this will be interesting to watch i would never bet my money on it but i would love to pay the entry fee just to watch you right so i'm gonna build this one in public so everything from sourcing to whatever so i'm having the guy who's who's working on it basically working on it blog about it i'll announce that a little bit you know when he when he writes his first thing we'll we'll we'll kinda introduce anyone i know yes someone you know someone who in fact has even been on the podcast once in a small way so we'll we'll leave it as a teaser for now but smell like salts are they the same ethnicity as you they're not the same ethnicity as me now so that's one idea let's do it other idea so actually i'll tell you about something pretty thing since you didn't really have twenty many topics i'm just kinda kinda monologue half this podcast you react to these things that are going on alright so i've been what's the right way to introduce this okay so something cool happened to me last week or two weeks ago where i got a dm from somebody can't say who but it's like a very well known person in the kinda like tech world somebody who i kinda like look up to consider like awesome i don't know this person so i was surprised to get a dm from them and they basically said hey join this like kind of private community on apex i never heard of apex don't know what that is so joined this private community in apex a bunch of us are on there i think you'll like it and i just thought this was spam i was like oh someone's account got hacked and they're just trying to like they're just spamming everybody using this person's account to try to grow their thing i guess so i wrote back like kind of actually kinda rude i was like okay like did you get hacked like you know what is this and the person was like no did not get hacked why don't know what you mean i'm inviting you to this and i was you don't even know me and like person's like well actually i've seen you on twitter you know followed you kinda for a little while you know just twitter respect so i thought i did invite you to this and i was like shit this might be real okay so i go and click i was like what's apex so apex is a new app so anybody can create their own apex they can create their own little island right so you can create an island so this person had i created one you can invite whoever you want to it you invite a real person but once they join you can make an anonymous or saddam where where you can kinda pick a random username so it's like a an an idea is like a digital mask grade party so you invite all your friends but everybody comes with a masculine on so nobody knows who's who but everybody knows we're all kind of like we've all been curated here it's not just random of the internet but at the call the app is called apex and it's out it's not a test flight so it's actually in the in the app store yeah i really like this idea i've actually myself wanted to create something like this i wanted to create a version of this that was like a public like i wanted to invite a bunch of badass people let them all be anonymous but everybody in the thing is badass and so they feel free to say whatever they want but it's not just like random anonymous egg accounts on twitter or youtube comments how would i find this private groups apex private groups it's like a two arrows up two arrows up exactly interesting so you know like there's a bunch of apex right like i'm you know i'm in one i just created another and i'm like okay so i created one oh my gosh dude this is so weird the why would they do this the if you go to the apex screen like the the app screen app store like the app store preview in their demo picture the username is called f epstein yeah well i don't know which one you're looking at it i see one that says kill lint and beth bezos those are the ones that have free j scene and then the you know the group is called the illuminati and so they're like leaning they're like leaning too they're leaning into like this is a place where you can say what you want which is like timely right like you know the president just got d platform and banned off of like every social network this has been a ongoing issue like i've gotten in you know hot waters for this you've gotten in hot waters for this where you say something on twitter it's a toast associated with your real name you get kind of like a lot of backlash for it and then the next time you tweet you sort of think twice before you do it because hey i you know i don't wanna ruin my reputation just if if people would disagree with me or if i say something kind of without thinking about it or i have an employees i got a company i don't want i don't want advertisers to pull out if i say something that's just my personal opinion so i like this i think this is the way the world is going which is a retreat away from social media to private media i think people are leaving the town square and they're going to their favorite pub and they're gonna close the door and they're gonna basically people are gonna hang out in private groups more and more and more it's already happening and this is i think an app that is well designed to who made it do to do well there there's just two guys behind it i that i've seen on twitter designer and a developer and it's very cool so i created a new a new little one i'm gonna invite some people to it let the mask go and it's cool because i can invite people and then to like to get in you have like authorize your twitter or your your i can set it where i can say they have to like prove they are who they say they are on the at the door and then they create their account their username and whatever else after that and then you can but who can verify that they are the creator of the group of the wow the host of the party basic so can i tell you my prediction on this yeah gonna get quite popular okay if it raises seed funding early on it's ruined because what if it's stays independent for a while and it's a you huge user base and then raises money then there's a shot oh okay gotcha so it's not not it's not the raising that's gonna that it's not the raising that kills them you're saying it's a signal like if they get a bunch of money before they get hot i think i'm gonna bet that they die is that it it's kinda like a like a whatsapp type of deal where like or something that like it's already successful and it's already big we're just gonna make it bigger and more successful if you do like a a thing where they raise money early on and they get too much of the wrong hype i think it's gonna die okay i can see that i can see like like you know there's three apps that i'm referring of that are the same thing like the secret thing so like okay here's what we'll do i will create one for listeners of this podcast let's let's try it out we'll see what happens so the way to get it is the app is called apex if you search the app or apex private groups and the the symbol is like two little arrows going up and i created a group just now i'm calling at platform nine and three quarters just like harry potter and oh don't to that just called my first million how do my i know you know not how to type in three quarters it's three quarters to the point seven five i did point seven five okay i can rename it so i'll able it to my first mail i'll put the link in the description of this podcast episode that's the private link to join and it's a mask party now i don't know i don't know if that group particularly is gonna be that interesting i think this is interesting when you kind of like curate the set of people but we'll try it and we'll see what so you you can see who they are i can see when they join who they are i don't think once they join i don't think i know what they set their name to and who's who i don't think i that would be you just know i hope that person is in the room and they're one of the five here i just know at the door i can say yes or no to the person and once they're in i don't know who's saying what i don't know who's who i hope that's the way it works if i can just always see everybody that's kinda lame let me see yeah i don't think i could yeah i cannot see once you join i don't know i don't know i can't tie your real identity to your to your username i'm excited to try this i don't have my phone on me but i'll use it and by the way here's the other interesting thing the group i'm in you know you have like what you see on facebook and twitter every day like okay i go check social media everybody says x everybody's up kind of an agreement this is good this is bad these guys are evil these guys are heroes and then i do i'd go into the apex and it's like the not the opposite opinions but you hear people say things there that they're that you just don't hear people saying in public social media and that's why it's quite addictive to keep checking it because it is interesting there's this there's this and they're not idiots because like they were invited it or were curated in it's not just like rand you know there's this firm who you and i know well it started as a two person vc company they were associated with me and they say they have this very public presence and when they talk about stuff i'm like oh okay you feel that way in private one time i've brought a few things up and i'm like well you know you believe this and they've just been like no that's i mean no that's just like that that's way too woke we don't believe like that's no just like we wanna get we we're just here to get rich and like they just well how do you feel about that my opinion is that is the week of the week and i want nothing to do with you for people that are kinda too face to me yeah i or but another perspective on this is fair which is like yeah but they're so like you and i have a couple friends that maybe have this persona being this nice person and in real life they're just cut throat ruthless and they'll just destroy you maybe you could one justification is yeah they're playing the game i mean this is just how it's played and they're just trying to get yours can't be mad at them but on the other side is like no you're a punk you don't have any integrity just like sit caught it like it is and b u twenty four seven what do you come out on that of like people in this app not talking like that i think it two things one is we're all guilty of it so we are all guilty of you know signaling one thing to the public and you know there being a a gap between like reality and what we signal so like but innocent version of this is you know you go post on instagram pictures of yourself you know at a brunch cafe with avocado toast and a mimo and you're saying how great life is and then you know you go home and you're lonely and miserable right like we don't post that part of our lives and so there's a a silent like lie that happens there which is you know you own you lie through o mission right you only say the good things that make you look good and you don't share any of the things that don't make you look good and so there is sort of a false presentation of yourself then alright that's level one level two is what you talked about where it's like or sorry level two is you think something but you decide not to say it because you don't know how other people are gonna feel about it right you let their their opinions of you matter you care what other people think and so you censor yourself that's great you that's level two yep fear and self censorship you know take care out then there's level three which is what you talked about which is just a straight up lie where you say one thing and you actually mean another or believe another and yeah if you're level three i also consider you kinda like a punk and you know you lose some respect points there and i'd you know i i try not to do that ever myself but maybe i've done it at some point in my life i'm definitely guilty of levels one and two where like you know only post the good shit leave out the bad shit and also think something but don't know how other people are gonna react to it's might as well just like not say it don't cause a fuss well that's different that's a little different yeah can we talk about this guy who have listed the best segments that i get from you or the billy of the day yeah which one do you want you want me to do there's only one up there the like guy was such with the k right it's not a guy that's a woman so the woman's name is c c i have this person as billy of the week in reality not a billionaire but just a fucking baller and this story is incredible so do you know who this person is like who did you know them before this never i didn't know them before this either so cattle and cor rico and i hope saying the name right i've never heard it said i've just reddit by the way in one of the most recent reviews someone said that even though i butcher everyone's name they're happy that i try really hard hate for i do alright so this person is kinda the key person for why we have the covid vaccine so little bit of science so normal vaccine is you get inject it with like a dead or weakened version of the virus right so you send in a a version of the virus with its you know legs tied together in handcuffed it's dead it's weak and your body creates a immune response to the virus right those take a long time to develop and you can't always develop them for all different types of viruses the reason we were able to get this vaccine done faster was obviously a the whole world decided this is a big problem but b they used a different technique a technique called mrna vaccines if you just take out all the science jargon in simple terms what it is is mrna is a little messenger the messenger has a little envelope the envelope is like here's the genetic code of the protein that's on top of the virus right like a virus is just like a a little cell that has a protein on top it's kinda like that's its face or it's hat if you wanna recognize the virus look at the protein that'll tell you which one's the virus so the messenger rna goes in what the envelope the envelope says this is what the hat looks like it goes into your cells and cell opens up the envelope and says oh this is what the protein looks like cool let's make some of this protein and your ribosomes make the protein and the protein goes in your bloodstream so you get the protein of the virus so your body can start to recognize it and fight it but it's just the protein it's not the actual virus so you can't get sick from it so that's the breakthrough in in the way this vaccine works and so this woman has been working on this technology for like i don't know thirty years or something like that she's like you know came from i don't know somewhere in eastern europe germany ukraine something like that and she was working on this and then everybody initially was really excited about mrna vaccines it was like like most things it's like there's the initial hype like with vr or crypto or whatever and then there's like the trough of sorrow where people give up on it like this will never happen and so in the nineties everybody in the scientific community came up on mrna vaccines this woman basically like threw away her career because she believed in it she was like alright i know there's no funding for this nobody will hire me to work on mrna vaccines there's there's is no money in this space but i believe and so she just kept working on it and kept persisting all the way through the nineties a decade plus and eventually she published a paper that kinda like showed that like what the power of mrna can be for various use cases and that paper was read by three different groups of people one was this guy at stanford and he he was like a kind of a postgraduate phd person at at stanford he reads this paper that she put out and goes holy shit this is gonna be big and starts working on mrna he ends up inventing a company called modern modern is one of the vaccine creators one of the people who one of the companies that has the vaccine for covid and wow mc mcdonald's is only ten years old exactly so this guy leaves stanford he partners up with two scientists there's a guy there's a bad guy this guy is actually like you know somebody who should be billy of the week he is at like mit or somewhere and this guy got like two hundred the kind patents that he sold to pharmaceutical companies so he's like the man when it comes to commercial this stuff and so these three guys c profound modern and modern is now like i don't know how many ten billion dollar ish company off of this woman's work they like you know these kinda a license her work so another company get started called bio and they also read this paper so imagine how cool this is it's like satoshi with the bitcoin white paper she just publishes the scientific paper and then people all around the world are reading this and the light bulb is going off simultaneously with three different companies at once to say oh my god this is gonna change everything and so bio gets formed they basically bring her on as like they licensed her text so she got paid as a license of the of the technology and then now she's like a the vice president or whatever of their science division so she's kinda like a c cofounder of one of the companies that's also doing very well she looks exactly like i would expect her to look she looks like a hardened person a hardened hungarian bio this is correct she looks like she her daughter is like an olympia like a gold medal she you know like this whole family is probably just bad asset yes this woman says looks like she will solve like she looks like the female version of james bond yeah like she's she's a beta if you just read like kinda what she went through as a immigrant but working on this thing nobody believed in and now she's gonna win the nobel prize for this like twenty years later the payoff happened that to me is like so admirable to to believe in your thing when everybody else stops believing and you just say fuck it and you just keep going for two decades that's like three decades that's that is badass so she's sixty six years old so she's part of one of the companies and then there's another company doing this and now pfizer and others are using the same technique to to cure covid but this is not just gonna cure covid so like this idea of mrna vaccines is actually the most promising path we have to curing cancer also now i'm not saying it's going to because like there's a lot of false hope when it comes to these things but you know the way we we try to cure cancer today is we're like oh you have cancer cells in your body let's just nuke your whole body with radiation let's kill the good cells the bad cells you'll lose your hair you'll throw up like let's just kill you and like right when you're on the brink of death will stop giving you radiation and like hopefully we've killed the cancer cells in that time and what this instead will do is it's gonna allow for what's called like a designer vaccine for cancer which is people are gonna figure out what cancer you have oh here's the cells that you have that are cancer what proteins do they have and then let's create the vaccine just like we did for covid with mrna to get your body to produce those proteins and start to build i defenses for it so it's like immunotherapy when you hear these stories do you think that well i'm just i'm working on this floating company or i'm looking on this video video game platform and then you you read this and you just do you say yourself i'm worthless no i say to myself i'm gonna tell everybody how awesome this person is so that you know the five people that listen to this that are capable of doing this are gonna be inspired by this person they're gonna go do something like this themselves okay that's such an easy out i'm the messenger baby okay that's a that that's a good answer yeah yeah correct fine you could say yep honesty my my true answer is something like that like when i took a step back after we sold and was like what do i do with the next ten twenty years of my life like what do i wanna work on i was lucky that the thing i like to do which is like learn stuff and teach stuff through things like this podcast or whatever i think genuinely that is the highest leverage thing any one person can do well i think that's it's silly to compare but it's undeniably interesting that if you can have a mad a large audience and tell them of cool people who deserve to be well known you're right that does tell them up cool people i'm just saying in general teaching i believe is like a a forced multiplier right i agree with you i go try to do something myself right i'm one operator i can be the greatest operator in the world i'm elon musk or somebody like that that's like the pinnacle of that i agree with you on the other hand you could be a teacher a teacher basically gonna have now have end number of students right so i could reach a million students i could unlock them as operators to be better and now that's leveraged what i have in mind okay but think about it differently we talk on here about boring businesses all the time we talk about it the reason we talk about it is like well we haven't heard about before but also they make a lot of money and it's easy and it's not a lot of work where it's a lot of work but it's simpler and it's a surefire fire away at the end of the day and this isn't an insult at the end of the day that's a very way of viewing life that's very much like i'm gonna i don't care what i'm doing because i'm providing for me and my family which you know supplying for your giving your family good life that's not quite but it's still like if you include your family it's quite selfish and again nothing wrong with that but that's what it is but we go like whenever i go and like get sick and meet a nurse practitioner or who helps me or hear about this woman i'm like there is you know how people say like you know just because your rich doesn't mean you're like more valuable than someone else i agree with that but then i hear this woman she could be poor i have no idea i'm like oh that one is more valuable than me and more valuable than a lot of others yes the people who are like the cat car and the elon musk and the forgot the guy who you know started micro finance or whatever micro lending the people who go and someone who is gonna go and fight climate change let's be honest they don't listen this podcast for the most part and if they do the things they're hearing here are not really gonna help them do that thing right like the great scientists scientists entrepreneurs essentially they are motivated and inspired by different things altogether there's a different teacher for them right there's a different person out there who gives them information and inspiration and it's not me for the most part if i do what i do though there's a like a different argument right there's the hero argument which says the world needs elon musk and cattle and car to like solve the big problems and like make us all better that's what i call the top down hero solution superman flies in saves the day and then there's the bottoms up solution which is like well if every single person got a little bit smarter a little bit happier a little bit healthier a little bit more kind and you know a little bit more you know motivated and inspired every day rather than feeling they're going into the motions if you like solve it at the individual level for the masses you make the world better in a different way right and so that's a bottoms up approach to doing the same to to start having a same same level of impact so if i was gonna like be a little dreamy about what i'm doing or what not feel like a piece of shit i should say it's like well if i can help a whole bunch of people being a little bit healthier a little bit happier and a little bit like more free financially so that they can like spend their time doing what they want and not in some like kind of tedious mono job every day that's a different type of unlock versus these people who are gonna have these big breakthroughs and like solve big problems for humanity people talk about legacy fighters a lot you know of athletes right particularly usc guys they're like it's about legacy and then business people also say that as well they say like i i have money now it's all about legacy and i'm like okay yeah your legacy is making your name known part of it your legacy is definitely leaving the world a better place i think that's cool but then i always try to look at the opposite of everything and the opposite of that is like just live a quiet existence and this is like what i said about being he and selfish live a quiet existence have a ton of fun and take care of your family and just seek pleasure and part of me is like legacy he's cool but why the hell do i care i'm dead screw it i'm having fun now like when i think of like steve jobs he was like yeah but how are you gonna change anything when you're like not working eighty hours a week i'm like i'm not right yeah don't want you yeah i those things bother me because i'm like we're we value these elon musk's the world and i acknowledge they need to exist but then most of the time i'm like i don't wanna do that right fuck that guy yeah well there's a question of like do i need to change the world what how do i wanna live that's fair like okay so i was listening to something interesting i'll tell you about this conversation so i don't know how randomly on youtube i got onto this video that was scott adams who's the creator of gilbert and neville ravi who's like kind of this silicon valley you know i have created angel list and and a bunch of other cool things they're at his house they're at scott scott house and they're just talking they're doing a periscope and they just recorded the thing and they agree about a bunch of things and then one question came up they what do we disagree on naval navarro goes you know i think we disagree on like the importance of having kids and scott was like do you mean i got kids he's like well yeah but like you adopted her or you like you know a biological kids and he's like and scott like like and then they kinda laugh and cycle and was like look look i'm not saying adoption is bad i'm not saying foster cares is bad i'm just saying like for me it was really important to like biologically i have my own biological kids and like reproduce basically like and his core he's a scientist and he's basically like at a evolutionary from an evolutionary point of view you know we are reproducing machines and all that we're doing those of us who made at far is because in our genes there is a desire to replicate to reproduce and that's how we stayed on and other people who didn't care about reproducing didn't reproduce and their genes are are not dead and so scott goes well i would say i'm reproducing but just in a more efficient way he goes i put out ideas into the world through my blog through this you know live streams through my comics it with gilbert if my ideas go live on they'll live on far longer than any child to mine will like they an idea i can live forever an idea i can get into like thousands of people where i'm only gonna able to have a a couple of kids so like for me my replication is what i'll call meme and not genetic and i thought that was interesting i've always found this interesting and i think i've brought this up before but like part of your legacy it doesn't have to be what you did it can be like an idea or philosophy you put in the world that lives on far beyond your kinda like flesh and bones your you know your little meat sack that you live in your and so like do you think about that like forget about legacy like oh the guy who built the railroads but like do you care about your about like your ideas spreading i mean it's to some extent you do otherwise why do this podcast yeah yeah definitely i do but i ask myself why and is that really important like okay so there's like the fun factor of like yeah it's awesome you're you're powerful you're rich you do whatever you want that's cool what's the opposite look like where you're not that is it a significant difference in happiness and fulfillment right maybe not i don't know but i do question this alright so of those three paths that we just talked about and maybe there's more path one the point of your life you're optimizing for enjoyment of your life number two is you're optimizing for legacy or some kind of impact on the world and then three is you're trying to have your kind of ideas spread and your ideas or are your legacy not your accomplishments which one resonates supposed to you or none of them as of now i think i'm a three either a three or a one and then something sure you'd say one i think more of a one of an enjoyment but in the future i think i'll be a number two an impact but as of today right now i have a feeling i don't know this yet i have a feeling when i have children it changes a little mh does it not really i guess it changes but like maybe for different people in different ways when i'm with my daughter like i kinda like i guess i'm in one of two modes either i'm like oh my god i just wanna go and do something else this is so boring i've read this book forty five times in a row like bubbles bubbles everywhere bubbles bubbles in my hair like i'm just tired of this i wanna go do something more fun do you know how fun the internet is i'm tired of like this babysitting sitting that i'm doing right now and then other times with and i'm just like dude who cares about like success like all i need to do is just hang out with her she's awesome and like you know i don't really need to go be like super ambitious like what a waste of energy to go sit in my room on my computer and i'm literally like in one of those two camps at all times i think this is normal but maybe not i think that for the people who are extremely successful they don't waiver right but maybe i'm wrong i don't know i have a i have another idea for you because i think we got philosophical for a bit so which idea do wanna do kind of seem diplomatic when we're talking about like what's the purpose of your life and i'm like oh here's an idea that's okay by the way sean people i've been telling me they like listening to us because it's not always strictly business they listen to us on a regular basis because they need someone was comparing us to all in that podcast and then morning brew thing i don't know what it's called apparently they both talk about politics a lot and someone was like oh i hate that i just wanna like turn my like they say they wanna turn the brain off but at the same time they turn it on with us but we don't ever talk about it's an escape right like we have we yes it's a very good escape yeah and and like i i always wanted to rename the podcast what was it like idea porn or something like that because porn itself is also kind of like an escape a sound pleasure it's not like a long term commitment like i think a lot of people list to these ideas not to go do them all but just because it's like interesting and entertaining and then the the to be done with it embrace the banter embrace the escape oh you're gonna talk about micro biz yeah alright did you see what i did with this is funny no i looked it's i like the sound of that though alright so you actually missed this opportunity i pounce before because you didn't reply so wait how did i not reply okay so this guy andrew runs this company called micro acquire com yeah he's in the trends group yeah and so he emailed you and me and he emailed us both and was just like hey kind of a fun idea there's a bunch of small micro businesses like a five thousand dollar a little business that's you know could buy for five thousand dollars what if we just gave it away to somebody like in the community and then i guess like you didn't reply or whatever and so he dm me he was like you know what do you think you wanna do this and i was like yeah let's and so then like literally i didn't even like really reply to him i just tweeted it out i was like you know people don't really know this but like buying businesses it's like most awesome ways to get as an entrepreneur like instead of building from scratch you could buy and like you know if you wanna just like learn about business don't go to business school like let me save you the time and money i'll just give you one of these micro businesses and go like learn by doing i'll just give you this five thousand dollar business and i said you know andrew what do say we you you in on this you you know you you wanna do this and he was like so i kinda made it public like what he was doing at dm he's like hell yeah like i'm in and i'll i'll provide some coaching and we'll waive the fees of the transaction or whatever and then other people started chi in like dude this is awesome i'll chip in five k too for free and so we ended up with fifty seven thousand dollars in the bank of people who are willing to just let us basically now we have a fifty seven it was a five thousand dollar bank road to go buy a business now it's fifty seven thousand dollar bank to go buy a business because people were just like yeah just pick a cool operator let them like take one of these businesses and run with it and let them like build it in public and like talk about as they go like this is a cool experiment for science so who who what what business are you guys gonna get so then i said alright so then a bunch of people reply as like pick me as the operator because like hey who doesn't wanna just get a get a business gifted to them we found a couple people and i think we're just gonna like do like a thirty minute phone call with the final two or three people and just pick one from there with to henry johnson henry johnson okay i don't know if you were reply to but i'll i'll check my i know who you're talking about he's very active in our community and so then i went through all the businesses i like okay which one is good to buy and you know most of them i would say like bad like to the point where i was like okay if you if i gave someone this business i'm giving them kind of a shitty job to go to so like i wanna avoid that you know this experiment will be fun if the business has a enough potential where like this can actually like grow into something so picking a good operator a good business are are important here so anyways i'm curious of what's gonna happen we're gonna finalize the the whole thing this week and i think what we're doing is gonna finalize we finalize the money we finalize who the operator is this week and then we're gonna take a sixty day window and we're gonna say alright in the next sixty days it's like a little tiny micro spec it's like you have sixty days to find a company to acquire with this blank check and we're gonna publish the whole thing on mondays newsletter about like okay here's what they're doing here's how it's going so on and so forth so i'm excited how do you have time to do all that i'm not doing it i'm just picking it i just tweeted it out and i picked the upper yeah but even like organizing this andrew for micro require is like more of the guy gonna like make it happen because for them this is like the best fucking advertising like he was showing me the stats from the just from the tweet alone i think he got like you know four or five thousand followers on twitter which like don't know probably doubled his twitter following and then he showed me the google analytics of the site and it was like you know a thousand plus concurrent users on the site now at that very second and so you know i'm sure he got he already kinda like made his money back just in terms of people buying the membership or finding out about it but it's you know credit to him of like it was his idea to do something cool like this like give away a business that's a way better marketing push than just saying hey did you know like i my side exists come come visit it right like i think he deserves the additional traffic he's gonna get out it but he's gotta do the work now to like make it all go i'm not gonna do the work yeah i'm looking it all up now this is it's a great site i he's been doing it for a minute and now it's it was okay at first now it's really getting cool i really like the concept of the sites i would say like just in full you know transparency most of the deals on there i think are very bad deals but you know whatever that's any marketplace that has a bunch of junk and it has some really good stuff that's where all the value is so don't be like oh sean said micro car is great i'm gonna go buy some business on here like i would not advise that as just like a like do your homework okay your shoulders are they tired i'm carrying the weight this whole time no dude i just get stronger as the hour goes on okay what let's do one more last one maybe your eureka rica surveys i wanna save that one the guys the guys so we talked about user testing and these guys are doing something dope with in that vein and dm me and he shared the numbers but i think they wanted to like like they're just like they wanna push out of private beta into public beta so he's like wait one week to talk about it i was like alright find a problem we you wanna do all more yeah let's do one more okay here's like okay i'll give you two really dumb simple ideas maybe something like this exists but i gonna into these pain points and maybe somebody could build a simple tool that solves these so the first one is amazon affiliate link so you say on your blog you used to sell amazon affiliate right i used to have this affiliate links yeah i would make about four or five grand a month and to do that you have to become a like official affiliate or something like that correct yeah and i've been banned many times for doing stuff that i didn't think was ban able there's kind of a process you have to go through to do that because like for example a bunch of people were asking me about like you know my setup of like a podcast podcasts or stuff like that i was like okay why don't i just publish this i have a blog but like for example i didn't know that you so there's rules you cannot there's like many rules but one of the rules is you cannot email people a link yeah which have a newsletter so i was do a newsletter and i was like how do you they banned me it's a big pain in the butt or the other day it used to be like four and a half percent commission they just said alright for most all these categories now it's two percent like they just change it whenever okay so this idea might not actually be viable it might not wear work with a term service but basically like a one off like you know like link shorten like bit and shit like that like why not just like a one off way to generate an affiliate link for amazon products because i don't wanna go become a merchant and a long term affiliate and become a blogger like none of that stuff but like why can't i just like f my link once well there's this there's this company called skin links have you heard of skin links no is that what that is it's an e yeah a little bit they they're about twelve years old they in twenty seventeen they did a hundred or they did a billion dollars in gross mark or what's he called gm yeah gm so let's say they took thirty or forty percent cut that's three hundred million dollars which i don't know if it's that high probably way less it's my guess what even two percent of of a billion is not sure not nothing yeah it's actually probably thirty forty million they do but that's what they do and they've been around for a while twelve years it's a pretty reputable company pretty big they've raised tens of millions maybe close to a hundred million in revenue and it is kinda similar and it's quite effective you never heard of skim links i've heard of it once before but i didn't know if it works for does it work for for amazon products or no i don't know exactly how it works but i know that they cole email me on a regular basis to sign up but i guess you're saying something valid yeah so so basically like i just think there should be like a disposable simple way to affiliate my link to whatever product it is and somebody should make like a bit that just does that easily maybe skin links is kind of already this so yeah and it's it's actually owned by another company have you ever studied like ad tech i mean not studied it no but man these ad tech companies like like okay so the company that owns skin links is called complexity the company that owns complexity is called symphony tech group founded in two thousand twelve its total portfolio includes two point five billion dollars in revenue and fifteen thousand employees there's ad tech companies that you unless you're in the in the world of ad tech have no idea exists that are just massive massive massive massive it's amazing oh wait sorry symphony tech group is pe i was wrong but you get the idea like some of these ad tech games or ad tech businesses are freaking nuts right and and i don't really understand how most of ad tech truly works because it's like such a complicated machine of like cookie swaps and data transfer this like there's all kinds of like oh the pixel is hash and then the hash users passed to here it's like what's going on like how do these businesses work and who who the hell thinks of this stuff and you know obviously you know there's a lot of money to be made so so good on them okay here's another kind of idea i think i've kinda said this before but facebook advertising is like one of the like you know big industry you know there's probably like nine to ten million advertisers on facebook let's say even half of them are are are active or you know whatever let's say four million active advertisers on facebook make up some round numbers and the ad manager is just like such a pain in the ass to work with it's a four thing and what are the biggest problems with it is just visual i just going and checking how are my ads doing and you know they present it in this like very like sterile table kind of way and i think that somebody i think that there should be this like somebody who just says alright how do i build a layer on top of facebook ads that is useful to some of the four of ten million advertisers of facebook like what should they look at every morning how do i make this presentation more visual right like how do i take all your ad creative and then like layer on the data on top or how do i show you you and your competitor's ads and how like just layer on top of the facebook ad manager is have you seen ads espresso yeah so i've used espresso before and i found it like okay to use it it like kinda got outdated right like it was like kitty shit the problem i i found that if you get really complex if you learn how to operate ad manager it's quite complex and you need it to be complex right i'm not saying replace that manager i'm saying build things using that as the data source there certainly gonna be some value add thing you can do that just uses that as the data source and people are gonna be willing to pay monthly to get x act extra value or alternative view or you know different different level of insights you wanna hear a crazy story about this so there's this company called contextual or context logic you know what that is you ever heard of that no chris red one of my seed investors and a good friend of mentor of mine he was telling me about this company started ten years ago in his office he had a small font and he had a few extra offices and he let this young guy named pete who formally worked at google and his partner dan i think his name was both worked at google both build up adwords and they started tinkering around and they built a thing called contextual logic i think it was called and it was a new ad network that was doing exactly what you've described but for facebook and they started using it and they're like well we need to test it let's sell some stuff on it and they started selling some stuff on it and they just went to alibaba and just sold crap and they're like wait a minute we can't give this away and so they pivoted and they started selling other people's stuff and then let merchants get on there and they used their advertising prowess to do it and they eventually renamed that company wish that is how wish dot com started it was started because they were creating exactly what you're describing and it was so good they say no this is our competitive advantage and so now they're public this is ten years later i think they're publicly traded with a twelve billion dollar market cap so if you look up wish you'll see that they raise money under context it's either contacts or contextual logic and the founder is jack have you seen this guy mh okay yeah i'm gonna send you foot pete the founder yeah yeah i have i'm i've i've chatted with him via email once or twice he's an odd ball he's he yeah i hear you he's very quirky you can see in his instagram picture here i love tech founders that are jacked by the way i find it hilarious i remember one time there was the facebook f eight like annual conference facebook does facebook has run by some of the smartest people in the world but they're not like the most like athletic or well rounded it or great public speakers that sore right like yeah there's a lot of do there and for for some reason i was sitting there that and i was watching this and i was like i noticed every single exec that got up there was jacked this year i was like what what kind of who is the personal creator what is the program that they all got on you know who's putting cr in the milkshake at you know at men park what is going on because there was one year that literally everybody was jacked i have nothing more to say in the story but probably have like a doctor who lives with him yeah don't they have like in san francisco don't they just like own one of the buildings like where they own all all like all they all the execs have like apartments in the same building in s nsf so that when they do need to come to san francisco they kinda have like an apartment there because their office is not no facebook the office is not san francisco so like share and and a bunch of the other execs i think have like a bunch of penthouse condos in this one tower so the towers like twenty five percent occupied by facebook exams who are not there except for like two days a month when they go to san francisco and then they used this as their and it has like a botox clinic and like a t clinic and like an h hd h clinic did you ever watch the show on netflix called selling selling sunset i think called oh yeah those guys were the worst did you watch the show did you see the botox thing that they did yes the worst i can't stand it i thought that was so funny that is everything i'm against they're people who who haven't seen it they're real estate agents they try to sell these like luxury properties and they're always trying to drive foot traffic to their open houses and they're open house they're they're tactic they're marketing tactic to you know most people it's like oh a open house okay we'll have wine maybe we'll put some cold cut sandwiches out some cheese cheese board and there's one girl's like fuck that i'm gonna make i'm gonna get all the real estate agents to come to this i'm gonna do botox and burgers so she had a doctor there giving botox shots to the agents for free who wanted to get botox at the at the show and i was like well what a different world than i live in that this is even a thing i don't think i know a single person who has botox maybe maybe i didn't i'm oblivious to it but like i've never heard anyone in my social circle effort speak about getting plastic surgery or about they don't talk about it but i don't think they're gonna talk you know other gets my sister had bells pausing where that para your face and so she had to get it i almost not for that i'm saying for like people who do it just for this aesthetic you know just for the the look i don't know they don't tell me about it no i don't know anyone what's the like most gimmicky marketing thing you've done that's like you know you're equivalent of the the burgers and botox marketing stunt well when i ran southern sam's winter as big as a baby's arm if you put your baby's arm and a hot dog bone and put mustard on it and took a picture you got a free winner i love that one i have one that's like that when we were doing the sushi restaurant thing we you know it's all it was a delivery only me so there's no there was no no storefront i was a cloud kitchen so how do you get people to hear about your restaurant if there's no storefront so i was like alright we gotta make it splash so we were based in downtown denver i was like okay and i was just tired i used to go and i go into a skyscraper building oh just kinda sneak past the concierge guy i go in the elevator and hit one i get out and i'd start talking to the front desk lady of every floor of like a eighty floor building or whatever and i got tired that so i was like okay what's a what's a better technique than me going door to door selling sushi essentially and i was like of course i'm a huge idiot like we didn't even try facebook ads this is like facebook was out this is twenty ten twenty eleven like we could've have done facebook ads we just didn't even know and so what i did was there was a nearby beauty school you know like where where you learn to like cut hair and like do stuff like that i guess for forgot what what's called schools and i went in and i said hey dude do you any of your girls like sushi and they're like we love sushi you know it's like bring candy to to a four year old birthday party and i was like i will give you guys free sushi for life if you put these shirts on of ours and you go downtown and you basically like you know the free hugs campaign do the free hugs campaign and then tell like just basically like while you're wearing our stuff it and it worked it was amazing like businessman would come out of the thing and they'd be like free hugs and like they would give these guys a hug the guy would like you know start blushing and be like just cheated on my wife and then i was like no it's just a hug what's the deal and it's like oh we're doing this because we're part of this new sushi restaurant that's in town you guys should totally order from it the further away me and my ugly face got from that campaign the better at worked like these girls were amazing and we had like way more sales from that that's a pretty good one think out at work though alright we're at the hour so a brady you how did we do how did i do because i think i did that episode i know i'm sorry be be honest with be a brave how did i sam did as much as i did this episode fuck for real i feel horrible i'm just not i'm just hadn't i i feel like i'm little drunk so tired sean you were an a overall the episode is like a b ish fuck that means that was a c though you coast to a c sees a passing grade man you you got through alright i'll bring the heat next time then alright sounds good i gotta run alright bye see you