Asymmetric bets & flipping high ticket items for profit with Shannon Jean. Part 1 of 2. Ep. #038

If you could take like all of your knowledge today you're 21 years old, you've got a thousand dollars to your name, but you know everything that you know right now. And you wanted to just flip stuff or just make deals, but you only have a thousand bucks. What do you think is the biggest, like, most asymmetric opportunity today to do stuff like that? Welcome to the Kerner office. So today I had a friend named Shannon on and I met him on Twitter and he's a lot like me, plus 15 years. He has done it all, seen it all. He's a man of high integrity. He's done a lot of bigger deals, like buying a truckload full of iPhones and selling them for a profit. He's had some big failures. He's really interesting. And I asked him specifically, how would you do it all over again with knowing everything you know now? How would you do it as a 21 year old? So we talked about location based flipping, we talked about having the mindset of an entrepreneur. And honestly, we couldn't stop talking. So I'm going to make this two episodes. The next one will come out a week from today, next Friday. And in that one we talk about a lot of similar cool stuff, but a little bit different. So enjoy this episode with Shannon, like and subscribe and share with your friends and we'll see you next week. I created these two podcast episodes where it's just me talking about every business I've ever started. And there's going to be like four. I've already done two. They were 35 minutes each and it was kind of interesting because I just have a spreadsheet, but I've never really reflected on them until I started talking about them on the podcast. And I always like to do like an end result. And so many of them, it's just like, yeah, and this one, it was good. I just got bored and moved on to something else. And I say that 20 times and I'm sure people are like, what are you doing?

Yeah, why couldn't you sell it? Why can you? You're like, well, it's kind of complicated and it's not like it would have taken me a lot of time for some of these companies to get them to the point where I could sell them. And I'd already generated a bunch of wealth with them. It was great. I'm driven by energy and those in the beginning. Like right now, I get a ton of energy on X and meeting people like you. So it's giving back a lot of energy. I Put a lot of energy before. I've been grinding since January to really build my account, and I'm close to 10,000 followers, but it's giving me back a lot now. So that becomes the flywheel. And so those businesses that you start, get them going. Like, this is totally cool, and I'm figuring this new thing out, but after a while, it becomes maintenance.

Yeah.

I don't want to be in the maintenance business.

You know, and it's opportunity cost, too, because we always have a zillion ideas on deck. So it's like, I just. I might be wrong about this next one, but I think that this next one, like, it's more expensive for me to not start this next one than to start it.

Yes. And your business, like, bringing in investors and everything, like, that's very foreign to me and scares me. Like, I'm fierce. I know you're very independent. I'm fiercely independent, and that's a different concept. Like, I would have questions for you about how do you keep. Where.

Yeah.

You're just not their horse.

Yeah.

And separate yourself to where I'm sure you're very. Your whole personal being is involved with these businesses. I don't know how to separate it. I'm emotionally connected. When I fail, I feel shame. You know what I mean? I don't know how to separate it out. I bet you're the same. So I would really have. It's just an interesting concept that how do you separate yourself out to where you don't feel so you. You already feel beholden. But anyway, it's interesting.

Not just that, but, like, I'm publicly talking about all these random things I'm doing. So aren't my investors, like, dude, what are you? Can. Can you focus on that part?

Yes.

I try to get ahead of that when I first talked to them. And, like, I have no operational role as a co gp. Like, I help source deals through my audience, and I help raise money, but, like, that's it. And I'm very upfront about that, and I'm sure I could raise a lot more if I were only tweeting about RV parks. That's not fun. And so that's okay. Why don't you just tell us all quickly who you are?

You know, I'm Shannon Jean. I've been patently unemployable pretty much since college in the sense that I always had this idea of right or wrong, that I could do it better than maybe somebody else. Not better, but just. I could just do it. Like, I could figure this out and when I was in college, my first business, I had a landscape construction business and I was doing great. And I was shocked at how much money I could make when it was flowing to me directly and it wasn't that difficult. And I had a great time working with all my friends. We used to work in the summer, everything. But my, my first company that I really built was called Mac Rescue. I fell in love with the Mac. It was life changing for me while I was running this landscape construction business. It made me look so much better. So I could charge 20, 30, 40% more and I felt more confident. Confidence is just crucial in how you present yourself. And so we started that business with a buddy of mine and grew it. We eventually merged with a company in the Midwest business became Rescue Systems. And it was great, you know, did really well, had a huge facility, did massive deals. We rode the Apple wave up and down and you know, sometimes part when Apple had their worst years. We had our best years because we were taking advantage of all the inefficiencies. But it was great until it wasn't. And then I got some partners that I didn't really enjoy doing business with. And so I left and started the new company. And along the way I kept building smaller things, small side hustles, meeting new people. Because the great thing about being an entrepreneur is I feel like now that I've got more gray hair, you're constantly building this big net of over time and all this stuff just gets caught in it. And you get these phone calls about hey, I talked to a guy and they had this or they want to do this deal. And so one of the things I along the way of all my companies is I'm a product guy. I'm always looking for deals and I met tons of people selling stuff at auctioneers. Before the Internet was really got this online auction stuff figured out. Other than ebay, I was chasing auctions all over the country, flying around everywhere, buying stuff, walking into companies that the people were still using their computers and we were bidding on them. The chair I'm sitting in right now is I bought at an auction like 20 some odd years ago.

You know what's the best like auction flip you ever did?

So I went to an auction one time in out in Kansas when Sprint was having. I don't know if people remember what Sprint was, a sailor or phone carrier. They've been gobbled up by some other giant conglomerate. And I got a short notice about hey, we're having this auction Friday. I think it was Wednesday. I Flew out, and there was only six other guys that showed up. So we basically walked and bought five, six, I don't know, six, $700,000 worth of equipment for just. We bought the whole facility. It was like, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of square feet, but we just walked cubicle to cubicle. And they say, okay, this room has 200 of these x things. X that. Who wants that? And it just became. They weren't giving the stuff away because you only need one person to make an auction work or two. One other person besides yourself. But, yeah, I think we spent 3, $400,000, probably flipped it for 4 or 5 million. It was amazing. Wow.

Wow. And how did you sell it?

All kinds of ways. You know, I sold it to other dealers. That was always. We always had a wholesale division because a lot of times these auctions, it's like taking a drink of water from the fire hose. And so you're just like, yeah. One of my phrases is, oh, yeah, we'll take it all. We'll take everything. So I'm immediately. I say that, and I'm like, I don't have the money to buy this all. I firmly believe that you have to find the deal. If the deal is good enough, you'll find the money. So I would start wholesaling it out. I had a guy or a group of employees that were managing ebay. They pushed ebay. We had a parts division. They would bring stuff in and strip it down and start selling just the components, because oftentimes the components were worth more than the whole, but it just took longer to sell. And then we had a repair division, and they needed the parts for stuff. And so they would be like, hey, we want those power supplies or this, or, we want these laser printers. And as you get out there, you start to get a reputation. You get some credibility. And then I'd get a call from somebody that said, hey, we saw or so. And so at auction house, they said, you bought all this stuff. And for a while, we, you know, again, dating myself a bit. But Apple, they built a color laser printer. And it was amazing. It was like. The technology was incredible, but the problem was it had a tray of oil inside that helped adhere the color to the. Or something to the page. So if you moved it without taking that tray out, you contaminated the whole thing. So I got a call from somebody one day. It says, look, we've got hundreds of these laser printers that have come back in an insurance company, and we need. They were replacing them for people at can you help us out? So we were buying these laser printers for like 500 bucks a pop. We had an internship program. They would tear them all down, clean everything out, put them all back together, and we were selling them for $5,000, and they were 10 grand brand new, you know, So I guess the key is the flexibility, looking at opportunities. Like, okay, I could tear this apart, sell the components. I can wholesale some. I'm not going to make as much money, but I'll let other people make money on me. I need, you know, I'm going to sell. We had a consumer division that we sold to, so whatever it take, man. I'm just a hustler.

Yeah, yeah. What I love about you is I feel like I'm looking at myself 10 years in the future and you have like a house in Tahoe, right? Yeah. Which I'm very jealous of. It's my favorite place on earth.

Envious. Jealousy is when you don't want other people to have it. You just want to have it too.

Yeah, I want it. Yes. And so what I love about you and what, what I see in myself and you is the fact that, like, no matter how much, quote, money you've had or how much you've made it, like you're hungry for deals in entrepreneurship and you're not too proud to flip something or chase something. And yeah, that's exactly how I am. Like, I, I live in this area and I'm young for the area. It's an affluent area. And when I was younger, like, I didn't, like, I was self conscious about these little side hustles I was doing. And I think it's, I think the older anyone gets, like, the less they care about what people think. Yeah, right. And I go to church, be like, oh, what's that thing you're doing? Oh, that's cute. And now it's just like, I don't care. Like, I don't care. I love what I'm doing. Like, I'll sell Porta Potties door to door if it's a good opportunity.

Hey, that's right. It's an interesting deal. And as you're right, getting comfortable with it where you're like, well, that's kind of weird. And. But like, I call, you know, civilians regular folks that have jobs and are employees and they're. That's awesome. We need people to work for us, and people need to do stuff that not everybody thinks in their crazy brain, like we do. But I don't know when it was. But I would describe people say what are you working on? I just say, well, I own small businesses and I own some real estate. Yeah, it's just an easy way, but if I'm talking to a person like you, like an entrepreneur, I'm just like, well, how deep do you want to go? Do you want to hear about my $8 million side hustle selling high end watches? Do you want to talk about a $4 million business I started on my phone? And you're right, it's not the money's obviously I call it LMA money. You want to have leave me alone money. And that buys you the freedom to experiment with other businesses and other stuff. And it also buys you the freedom to spend more time with your family. And it's a great rubric. But I'm searching for energy. I love the 0 to 1 part of the business. It's like a romance, you know, you're just, oh, this is an interesting idea. Will it go anywhere? How much energy do I have to put in before it starts giving me energy back? You know, I love it. It's a great system.

If you could take like all of your knowledge today you're 21 years old, you've got a thousand dollars to your name, but you know everything that you know right now. And you wanted to just flip stuff or just make deals, but you only have a thousand bucks, what do you think is the biggest, like most asymmetric opportunity today to do stuff?

Like that location is important. What, Like, I've had a lot of opportunity because I'm in the Bay Area and I knew people that worked at Apple. I know Silicon Valley. I was close to where I was driving to these warehouses to buy Cisco stuff or whatever, you know, those kinds of things so that I would think about what do I have close to me. Am I in Nevada or is there a Tesla plant near me that what happens with their stuff? My introduction to people that I don't know is, hey, sell me your junk. Because that gets their attention. Because you're like, what problem product do you have that you can't sell? Everybody wants the iPhone, the perfect product. Everybody wants the cherry. But the way you get there is you have to swim upstream. So if I only had a thousand bucks, I would look around. If I didn't have anything near me, I'd go online and I'd buy store returns from places like Costco and maybe hot Best Buy. If you. If I don't recommend consumer electronics or technology because the margins are so thin.

And there's a, there's a lot of Players.

Yeah, a lot of players. It's sexy. So it attracts so many people. So you're better off selling shampoo because it's so boring. But there's money, there's more money. So what product niche could you buy? And if I only had a thousand dollars, I would be looking at what do people around me want to buy? What can I sell on Facebook, Marketplace, what's out there and what's exciting. And even the regular Costco, I can remember going, when they had. They were selling those PEZ dispensers that were Star wars. And my wife was in. She's like, we should buy a few of those and sell on ebay. And I was like, well, let's buy the whole pallet. If it's a good deal for two or three boxes, let's buy 400. You know, my first line of credit was a stack of credit cards. You know, I didn't have. No bank would give me any money. You think people think you're flaky. Banks are even worse. So I learned that. Play that game. And yeah, I'm a product guy now. On X. You hear these guys, oh, I started digital agency. Or I do this and I help people. That's awesome. But that's so out of my wheelhouse.

Yeah.

That I would find something I could move quickly and to make, take that thousand, make 1500, then go take 1500 and make three grand and then go make six grand and just keep going up.

I like that you bring up location. Like, I think that was the first word you said. Because most people don't realize that there's. There are these asymmetric supply and demand inefficiencies at play in every little city in America.

Yep.

And I tweeted about this a while ago. This. Do you ever go to govdeals.com?

Oh, yeah, of course.

I love those. Yeah. So you go to govdeals and you can buy stuff to have it shipped. But in my opinion, this is the perfect example of why location is important. Because if you go to gov deals and you find cell phones and the buyer's like, I will ship these. You're not going to make any money.

No.

Right. Because you have everyone in the world or the country competing for something that's very, very sexy. Now, I'm going to take your logic here and take something unsexy, like let's say, well, I'll give you a great furniture.

Give me an.

Yeah.

Well, I'll give you a great example. If you go to the GSA general service Administration is a government agency that spends gazillions of our dollars. And they run an auction site, GSA Auctions.com. and you can buy like right now there's incredible deals on FEMA trailers, RV trailers like late model, 2020, 2021 that sell. I watch these auctions all the time. I posted about it on X. They sell for five or six thousand dollars. And these cow.

I might need to buy these for RV parks.

Yeah, I mean they're all over. And modular housing that you can buy, they're all. A lot of them are in Louisiana, New Orleans, a lot of them. Florida went to use them. And I look at them just like I'm not there. So buying it to ship to California doesn't work. Yeah, but if I was down there, yeah, I'd just be like, okay, what can I buy for five or six grand? A 20, 20 or 20 21, 30 foot trailer. Go to RV. Well, you know the RVshare.com, what can I rent these out for? What could I flip them for? On RV Trader, you just work the deal backwards. If I can go look up that trailer and see that it's that people are selling it for $12,000 and I'm local and I could buy it for $5,000 and yeah, maybe you can have to fix a few things if you don't like to get your hands dirty. Buying this kind of inventory, probably not for you, but you could get people to go and clean them up, do. Excuse me, do some minor repairs and turn around and make four or five thousand dollars a trailer. And there's. We're talking hundreds of these. Hundreds of these. So that's what location. Very important. Very important.

So, yeah, forget furniture. Let's say you find these FEMA trailers and you've got two different aspects at play. One, they're huge, right? So they're not going to be shipped. Two, they're unsexy. So you have two things to your advantage. So if you can get from the Bay Area to Louisiana, where these are, if you're willing to spend $400 for a plane ticket, and then as you said, if you get a good enough deal, the money is there. You could raise the money, friends and family, like here. Uncle Mike, you're a physician. I assume you have money. Here's a $5,000 trailer. I can buy it today. I could buy 10 of them or one of them or 100 of them. And here's the exact same model being rented out for 250 a night or being sold for $13,000. Now I know. This trailer needs a new axle. I've already priced it out. Here's my research. Here's three different results.

That's exactly right.

Like, you think uncle Mike's not going to give you five grand? You know, right.

When I was younger, I was taking a cash advance on my credit card to go buy deals like that. And that was just another column in my or another cell in the spreadsheet. What's it going to cost me to borrow this money? Some crazy amount, right? 28%. You're like, well, I'm only going to.

Borrow it for 30 divided by 12.

Exactly, exactly. And so you just build the model out and see what the profit is at the end. And it's like, I post deals all the time on X. I posted this week, Right. Like right now you can buy exercise equipment for next to nothing because they were oversold during COVID Nobody wants to buy them now. Well, then I noticed, like this leak you'd mentioned, furniture down in Florida. Truckload of furniture. Store returns from Costco, a B grade. So it's. Yeah, you know, decent shape.

And I feel like they're usually very conservative on the grades because they don't want returns. So if it's a B grade, it's probably an A grade. Yeah.

And if there's a problem, the reason I love Costco is because they stand behind everything they sell. So if they ship you something that doesn't match, they're very easy to work with. So what I've noticed the last month or so is furniture has started to drop to next to nothing, too.

Same with COVID Right. Like everyone was in their house, they bought all this crap. Maybe.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe. And so there was a whole truckload of dining room furniture. And I posted, when I posted it had only four hours left in the auction. It was the Highest bid was $250. Truckload. Okay. So my post was, if I was a real estate stager in near Ocala, Florida, I would buy this and just put it in my warehouse so I could use it. And I got a lot of pushback. You can't ever sell it. Don't sell it. Buy it. Use it for something else. And I, I went back a few hours later and I went and posted. I said, this deal sold for 250 bucks a truckload of this furniture. And the Costco value, which is lower than everybody else's, it was like $42,000.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

It's insane.

Imagine if you're that guy with a thousand bucks in Ocala, Florida. Right. Like, you would have to be in Ocala looking.

Yes.

You'd have to have like all your feelers out there, and then you find it. And then like, people aren't buying that. I'm sure the main reason is because they're going to have to spend a few thousand bucks to get it to where they are. Still probably a killer deal, but it's friction. It's a headache. But like, back to your location. If you're in Ocala or if you're willing to get there, then, Geez Louise. And then you just do that over and over and over.

That's right. That's right. And it's research. You know, whoever does the most research wins. Because whenever I post deals on there, I get tons of comments like, that's not a good deal. That's it. I'm like, well, somebody's buying it.

Yeah.

And you can easily talk your way out of every deal. But like, shoes, you know, shoes are like non sexy, non collectible shoes. Well, they sell for next to nothing as well. And everybody says, oh, it's a nightmare. Doesn't. I said, well, maybe this buyer has a source that's buying them in the Philippines and they're paying them X percentage and they're buying it Y percentage. I said, you just got to figure it out what is the Delta? And so my last tech company was Tech Restore. I sold it. It was my iPhone business. And what year did you start that? 2006, something like that.

Maybe 2000. That's early that.

Yeah. But I was focused on laptops at that time. We started. We convinced DHL to put our laptop box in every DHL truck in the United States. And so what would happen is if you called us by 2pm, DHL would come pick up. It was great timing because they had just bought Airborne Express and they wanted to expand into the U.S. so you called by 2pm we picked up your laptop the same day, brought it in overnight, we repaired it the same day, and overnight it back to you. This was before the Apple Store. It was hard to find reliable places to repair. So it grew and we learned a ton about logistics and managing this kind of stuff. So that business grew, was great. I sold in 2017. They moved it from California, which was a terrible place to run this business because it's all the way in the West Coast. They moved it to Kentucky, which is a smart place to run it because everything's shipping in. And after I left that, sold that business. I said, you know what? I don't Want to sell anything with a plug ever again. I've done it so many times, you know, over and over and over. And so I said, let's learn something new, and what do I do? And I'd never really sold on emotion before. And so I take. What's this emotional thing? And I just remember, like, when I got. Somehow I stumbled onto a deal on some designer handbags. Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, all this stuff. And all these ladies at my office and my wife, my daughter, they were like going nuts over these things. And I was like, man, there's an opportunity here. But at the same time, I was having these guys on my podcast on Business Brain, and they were doing this thing called social commerce. And I knew nothing about it. I didn't even know what it meant. And so I just said, well, I'm going to experiment and start. See if I can start a business on my phone, just using apps, all this kind of stuff. And so I started swimming upstream, you know, experimenting. Who is the best in the market selling these places? Where is the best place to? Where do I source them? Where do you sell them? And it took me a year of really digging in. I've started buying from everybody, seeing who's selling what, how they did it. And then I found a marketplace that it was like, I came in and I was like a piranha. And everybody else was goldfish. Right. And I had all this skills from 20 years in business, you know, sales, marketing, packaging, photography, customer service.

Yeah.

And I was competing against people selling stuff out of their house, and they.

Were just fat and happy because they weren't competing with you yet.

That's right. And so I came in after all this research, and I just blew it up. And that. That. That market, that marketplace, was Poshmark. And so I said, okay, man, this is great. And I hit, you know, 500,000 in sales, like my first year, and then pretty good. Awesome margins. Yeah. That business, eventually I got bored with it, but we talked about before the show, you know, but it did about4.4 million in sales, but my net was like $552,000 out of that. And it was just me. I didn't have any employees. I didn't work very much on it. I worked an hour or so a day once I got it up and running and automated a lot of stuff. But the key is that I guess the point I'm trying to make is there's just all these opportunities if you're willing to dig and swim upstream and try to figure it Out. And you, you can do it at night, you can do it as a side hustle, you can do it as a project and see how it works out. And you just don't know where this stuff is going to lead. That's why I love talking about it on X. I know you talk about your stuff too, is it attracts people. And I'm trying to bust open the door on reality to so many folks because reality is flexible. You just don't know where it's going to lead unless you put in the time and effort and just don't talk about it with people because so many people will just say that'll never work.

They'll discourage you. Yeah, yeah.

They'll discourage you.

Like, as, as creative as you and I are, are coming up with the ideas, others are just as creative at coming up with excuses to not try those ideas. Oh, liability. Oh, insurance. Oh, that's not. That would never sell. No one would ever buy that. Like, why don't you try it actually?

How do you know? You don't know. And you. Yes, a lot of times it doesn't work, but you'll never know unless you put it out there. And so that business took off. And like I said, I got their attention. They invited me to their headquarters. I met the CEO, did some consulting for them. They eventually gave me access to their ipo and it was amazing. And I wrote a book about it. And so I was like, well, I've always wanted to write a book. I know how to do this.

What's the name of the book?

Poshmark Unlocked. And so it's sold like crazy up on Amazon. I learned how to self publish and do all this stuff. And then I was like, well, I know how to do ebay too, because I've done it forever. I've spoken at events and all this kind of stuff for them. So I wrote a book called eBay Unlocked and that went to. That was the number one bestseller on Amazon, you know, and it was great.

Are you still selling copies of those today?

I get royalty checks every month.

That's amazing.

It's the greatest roi. It is the true passive income. So these books, they make net for me what somebody renting out a house probably makes every month. You know, it's like a. I kind of consider each book like a rental. And I'm working on a new book called Escaping Employment. That this whole concept of people are taught incorrectly that it's safer to go work for somebody else. And yeah, I just know that's not true because you're at their whim. You're talking to a guy that's had to lay people off, you know, a bunch of times when business slows down or things change, nothing stays constant. And so I'm trying to teach people that you can be in control of your destiny. It's not that risky if you do it the right way.

Yeah. So when you were flipping, if someone were to say, I'm going to flip handbags, that sounds like a no brainer. And is it a completely different opportunity today or is it similar?

It's all about supply. You make your money on the deal side and, or on the buy side. So if I researched and I. It's just, it's a spreadsheet example. It's like, okay, I could buy this, this Prada Safiano Lux handbag and I can buy it for $500. Okay. Go to ebay, search sold listings, not what they're for sale for.

Not just completed, not for sale, but sold.

Yep. Because you want to see what they sold for. And you also need to check velocity. How many of them are selling?

Yeah, if you buy a hundred, how long will it take you to move those?

How long would it take? And so you can do this one at a time or you can do it like during COVID One of my biggest sources was the cruise ships because they didn't want to lose their supplier relationships. And the suppliers were like, you got to keep buying these handbags and the cruise ships. Like, well, we're not, we don't have any cruises. So then they find guys like me. Get a phone call, Shannon, would you buy 500 of these bags? So it's real quick. What do they sell for? The same thing. How long is it going to take me to sell them? Yes, I'll take them all. You know, that kind of thing. So I think there's opportunity in everything. You just have to research it and see, is it value? Is it worth your time and money Now I took me a year to stumble. I didn't stumble, but took me a year to find just an incredible supplier. And I did have a, I would say a exponential boost because I had that supplier. I bought from them before smaller deals. They just knew who I was, being credible. Don't call them or email and say, I want to buy your product or whatever. It's like, what do you have that no one else will buy? Sell that to me. Don't think about making money at the beginning. Think about figuring out the market and making the relationship. Because eventually after you buy that garbage and I donated it. Most of it. You. Eventually you get to. You have a relationship with someone and you say, hey, I'm solving this problem for you. What else can you sell me? What else can you sell me?

Especially once you learn that they're a good vendor. Right? Yeah. I. For eight years, I sold iPhone parts from China. And all the time people would ask me, like, well, why are you so special? Like, why can't. And I'm like, well, first of all, I had to go through 13 bad vendors to find a good one, and I'm not telling you who he is. Okay. Second of all, I flew to China twice to vet my vendors and to negotiate financing terms. Third of all, like, people are. They're hesitant to order from China. Like, I sold iPhone parts to iPhone repair stores. They could literally go to Alibaba and buy those parts for half the price. But it's just. It's friction. It's unknown. I'm going to get scammed. And yes, pro, they're probably not going to get scammed, honestly. But it's just that barrier is what put me and you in business. Right?

Yeah.

Friction.

Yeah. And it only takes one time to buy, especially computer protect parts or iPhone parts from China and get a batch that are not as described, which is very common to realize the power of a vendor. And like, right now, I share on X all the time. Like, I buy hand. Well, I'm not in that business anymore, but I was buying handbags from Japan because there's a massive market there. And that's another. The average person, the consumer, because this was a B2C business, the average consumer is not going to buy a bag from an auction company in Japan. It's not going to happen. But when I come up and put it on Poshmark or Vestier or ebay, and I've got an incredible rating and reviews that are off the charts and I've been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle or Business Insider and all these kind of things that build my. My social credibility. That's the Delta. So, yeah, they could buy it for $300 from this Japanese auction house that they know nothing about, or they could buy from me for $500 or $600. And they. And they definitely do.

Yeah. Are there any third party tools that you use to find, like, hot items other than just going to places like GSA auctions and all that? Like, do you use any tools or. Or are you just curious about something? You start following that curiosity.

I follow the curiosity and dig. I used to say, I'm A damn good Googler, you know, and digging deep and deep page 18, you know, this kind of stuff back in there. But I have been using AI more to help me parse the data. And I've been like, you, you can go to places that like, upwork and buy lists of companies and. But now with AI, I can say, hey, here's this GSA auction site. Go find me 50 sites that are like this. And it's very good at bringing this stuff together. And I got involved with the US treasury auctions based on that because I was like, oh, that's similar. This kind of thing. So you can definitely use the AI, but I think it's still. Are you willing to put the time in it? Are you willing to not watch the next streaming thing on Netflix at night from 9 to 11, but rather sit with your laptop and research for hours and hours until you find that one little thing that you go, what's that? That's weird. How do I tease that a little bit more? And then you call and they don't want to talk to you, and then you email them and they don't want to, and they don't answer you. And then you just keep doing that until finally, oh, okay, I got Best Buy. That way they ignored us forever. And then finally I was just like, hey, I'm going to be. I just flew out to their place where I knew that they were doing this, and I said, hey, I'm in town. Can I just meet you for lunch? And I just said, hey, I had another appointment, but I didn't. I was just there to try to meet this one guy, you know, And I did the same with GameStop. I wanted their business, I wanted their returns. You just have to make yourself known. And sometimes you have to be a pest a little bit. And it works.

It's. It's interesting. I feel like either your brain has to be sick and hardwired like ours are, or, like, you have to somehow learn to find joy in spending three hours researching auction websites instead of watching Netflix with your wife. Because, like, I love it. I'll be doing it when I'm 91 years old. I do it today. Like, it feels like retirement. This research is the funnest part.

Yeah, it is fun. And when you find something, I'm always just like, look, check this out. You know, and some people like, oh, that's cool. But. But if you're a deal person, I'm just like, hey, you could buy this. I'm always sending stuff to my friends. I'm just like, look, you could. Like you mentioned my. Our place in Tahoe. Well, you'd be damn sure I got a good deal on that place.

Yeah, of course.

And I could tell you a story about how I got the deal.

How'd you get the deal? I want to hear it. So keep going.

You know, sometimes I'm a low baller, but we look at all these places and I like, okay, well, yeah, we're going to buy this. I'm going to pay cash for this place and I've got to rent it out because I just have to have some kind of return on my investment. I just go crazy if it just sits. Gets there. And yes, I wanted the depreciation and all that stuff. So I asked the agent, I said, what's the opportunity? How many rentals are there? Oh, she's like, oh, wow, there's three, 4,000 rentals. Well, how many? Three bedroom, two baths. And she's like, oh, there's 2,500 of those. I was like, well, I don't want to buy one of those. And then we just kept going, how many? Four bedrooms, how many? And then we got to how many six bedroom houses there were. And I said, how many of those for rent? And she looks it up. She's like, 50. Yeah. I said, well, let's buy one of those. You know, it's another spreadsheet. And so I was like, okay, can we find places that were sold that fell out of escrow? It's just another way to parse it down. And she's like, yeah. So we found four or five houses and then I went to one and I was like, can we find a place that the people live out of state? Because that's another friction point. They're not there. And they wanted. So I found this house. We currently own it. There's people owned in Texas. And it just turned out that some, you know, kid had fallen out the third story window and landed in the driveway. And it's just like, well, that's got to be nuts. You know, they've got to make you.

Want to get rid of it. That's terrible.

It's terrible. Don't get me wrong, the kid was okay. The kid was okay.

Okay, good, good, good.

But there's your opportunity. So let's go hit. Let's make a. Let's start the floor. So I make a very low offer. This was back when you could. I bought it in, well, about in 2013. So I just offered a low number and I said, I'll pay cash. And we can close in a week. And I thought we would negotiate from there, but it turned out they just said yes. Wow. And then when I wanted a fishing cabin, I love to fish. I wanted a place on a river. I kept looking, looking, looking. I kept looking at this one house. And none of the real estate agents like, oh, you don't want to buy that place. There's a problem. There's a problem.

It's like, well, you're like, that sounds like opportunity.

What's the problem? It's like, well, the government wants to buy that house. I was like, well, why don't I buy it and I can sell it to the government? And I posted about that on X. I bought it. I offered them half what they wanted. They took it. And, you know, I put a little bit of money into it. I owned it for five years, and then I sold it to the US Government for three times what I paid for it. And I got to fish all the time.

So that's amazing.

If you to your point about finding things, if you can fall in love with problem solving, that's the opportunity. What is the problem that we're trying to solve for people? And I know you do it too. I read all your stuff, so it's fun. I really enjoy it.

All right, that's all time we had today for Shannon. Check back in in one week and we will finish up this conversation. Have a great day.