Part 1/2 - Riffing on Business Ideas with James Camp⏐Ep. #117

Anyone listening? I'm 100% sure this business would work. If I were a betting man, which I am, I would bet large amounts of money that people would pay for this and you could charge decent money for it. It's easier to sell things to people that have money that makes them money. Saturation is essentially a myth.

I've said the same thing. Nothing is oversaturated.

That million, $2 million a year is just a formula. We all have the same keyboard. Just press the right button. The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive the ticket to the right.

Welcome to the Kerner office. I had my friend James Camp on today. James lives in LA and owns a portfolio of Internet businesses. He's a super interesting guy. He's on the cutting edge of everything happening in AI and he's a marketer at heart, which I love and respect because that's me as well. James is an idea machine, which is why I love him. So we chatted about four to six different ideas, some in AI, some not. I got super hyped by the end of it. You know, I'm hyped about an episode when I end it with a headache, and I did on this episode. James had a couple big exits earlier in his career. For the last little while he's been content just buying and or building these niche sites that are super profitable. This episode will be split into two parts, so come back in a few days or a week or so and we'll air part two. Enjoy. If you were to take your like business slash investing, slash startup philosophy into a quick framework, like what do you look for? What type of businesses do you love? What do you avoid?

Sure. So I think that for me what I love is consumer. Super fun. It's just really hard and like what I would tell. Whenever we talk to people that are like buying little Internet businesses, consumers just like E Comm is really, really, really tough. I think we had a moment in Covid where everyone thought that you could just run a Shopify based brand and it was gonna be so easy. Just.

Yep.

You cut out the middleman direct to consumer. You know, it's just much tougher than people perceive, especially bootstrapping. It's just so many more moving parts. So I, I think consumer is really fun and I. And but I think that probably moving forward for me, I'm going to. Unless someone comes to me with an idea and they show me this consumer brand I love, I probably focus more on like B2B. You know, I think I hate to say it it's sort of a trope at this point, but it's easier to sell things to people that have money that makes them money. I would probably never. I mentored a couple tech accelerators and that's like a great way to be. Have fun and be involved in the startup scene as opposed to selling to startups. Selling to startups and B2B is just a nightmare. Selling people that have no money is a nightmare. So I think that probably. I don't know if that answers your question, but hopefully it does a little bit.

Yeah, it does. So what are you excited about right now? Like, what are you not doing publicly? What are you seeing that you're just. What are you working on right now that really gives you energy? That isn't a portfolio company.

Yeah. So, I mean, I had an idea the other day. Well, I'll tell you, the active thing I'm working on is much more pipeline for PE shops and family offices. Right. So like helping them find businesses to buy and enabling that with AI and packaging that together so that they can get good deal flow and. And then sort of on top of that, layering, what are the other investment banking style practices that bankers are taking $2 million fees on that really enable. AI is really going to enable and really, really change in some really weird ways. So that's actually something I'm actively working on that fits into what we have with off market, which is finding off market deal flow. That will become an upsell for us. You want to buy our database? That's easy. For 100 bucks a month, you can have access to our database. You want to have an advisor in your pocket for a couple thousand bucks a month, you can. If you would like to have us do all the outreach for you and do all the due diligence, we will, for five, six grand a month, you know, get you six businesses to look at that are fully packaged up, ready to buy. And then we take, you know, you know, some 2 or 3% on the closed transactions. Right. That's something I'm actively working on. I'm not a tech dude at all, but I had like a thought. Maybe I was inspired by a tweet. Nothing's original. We're all inspired by other things. But I thought yesterday, the day before, which is like, if I could figure out how, because my first little business win was like an ad network, oddly, when I was 19, 20, sort of little CPA network, not for a lot of money, but if we could figure out how to pixel wallets in crypto, I can't think of a better like new opportunity for the ads for ad tech than me serving ads predicated on transactions that your wallet is taking because it's on a blockchain. It's not a question for me. It's not a question whether you maybe purchase something or you maybe. It's like I'm 100% sure that this wallet has done these transactions.

Yeah, yeah.

And I almost, before we started recording, I am such. Dude, I've been around this business building block my, my whole life and I know execution is almost everything and ideas are so worthless and so normally people are like, oh, I have an idea but I don't want to tell you because it's a secret.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, okay bro, shut up. You know what I mean? Like I'll sign your NDA. Just stupid. This is one of the first things where I've been like, oh, whoa. Like that's.

I actually know that's.

Yeah, yeah, like, and now we're just gonna figure it out to world, it's fine. But the way I guess I'll parlay that is if anyone listens or watches this and thinks that they understand tech side how to accomplish that, but has no idea how to like take that to market and know how to be able to get the capital to do so, feel free to reach out, reach out to me because I from a technical standpoint do not understand how to do that. But I do think that that's going to be like a major opportunity and I think that that's going to be sort of. That's what I would love. That's what I think would be cool to be working on. I just have not a clue how to do it.

Yeah. Because it's like as an advertiser you don't care in this case that it's a 37 year old white male in Dallas, but you know that that guy has this much bitcoin and he frequently sends to his Coinbase wallet and he's frequently buying this and it's almost like it's a pixel inside your credit card account or your bank account.

Yeah, 100%. And so I guess it's sort of like if you think about like social advertising is like, is like psychographic and demographic based ads. Right. So this is much more like this, this is much more like Google. Right? Like, like does someone search a search. You're actually capturing someone at that moment of purchase. Right. That's why like search traffic converts so well. Right. So how. Where to buy Blank. Excellent. Here's an ad for Blank. It's great to convert, right? Yeah. Super high intent. I think that this is pretty high intent as well. I think that probably right now the use case under the crypto, it's early. And again, this is why I think it's a good idea. It's because it's early enough that it couldn't really. It's not at a place where I think that someone with a trillion dollars is like, let's dedicate real money to this. Because there's not enough users that are actually using crypto or bitcoin, whether it's through Lightning Network or USDC or Wallet, you know, like to actually track this and make it super usable to advertisers. But I think what one could build out the infrastructure. If you believe, then I believe that like, I don't know if all of a sudden the dollar disappears, but if you. I'm, I'm pretty long bitcoin and, and definitely a lot of crypto stuff. But my, my point is that if you believe the future is changing from a monetary perspective and a payments perspective, which I do, and I think the writing is on the wall very clearly, then I do think it's thinking four or five years out. I do think that it'll be, it could be a cool opportunity, but. Yeah, exactly. You know, Chris bought this yesterday and he bought this six months ago. I know that for sure, you're right. It's like tracking inside credit card spend and then tying ad dollars to it.

Yeah, that's one of those ideas where on one hand you don't want to share it. On the other hand you're like, I know whoever launches this is going to have to raise a whole lot of money and bang their head against the wall for a long time. And I'm not about to do that. So. Yeah, whatever.

Oh, yeah, yeah. The only way I would do that is like, I think I realized at this point in life, like the next big swing, like this is the type of thing I would take a really big swing at, which with the right partner, I'm just so not that person. Like, I'm, I, I'm, I'm only one half or maybe even a quarter or a third. You're the marketer. Looks like. Yeah, the marketer. And I really understand and I definitely know, I know where to get the capital. I, I think I know the people that would be interested in writing a check and do something like this. But it's such a huge lift to your point that like the person that's going to do this is either really qualified to do this or, you know, they're not going to watch this. And it's not going to be some. Someone has no idea how to do this, or they go, james is a great person. Let me reach out to him, you know, I mean, we'll try and do this together. You know what I mean? This is not a solopreneur mission, you know what I mean?

No, no.

For sure, for sure.

Being in the advisory game, you probably see a lot of books, a lot of PNLs, a lot of opportunities that you're not jumping on for whatever reason. Are you seeing anything out there that's particularly exciting to you that other people are doing or this niche product or service is just crushing it that you saw?

Yeah, I mean, I think if I were building something, I mean, there's a couple brands I'm advising that I have said very clearly to that I would love to buy their business. You know what I mean? Like, because it's just so clear to me. And it's not that I'm so smart or that I'm not creative. I'm actually quite the opposite. Like, I'm. I'm like a think of myself as like a B at everything, you know what I mean? It's just like I've been on this ride long enough to see what works and what doesn't in certain regards. And there's a couple E Com brands I'm looking at right now that I'm advising, actually right now that I'm like, looking at and be like, I would love to buy you, I think. And I think that probably might deter them from raising money, maybe try and introduce them to like a credit fund, you know what I mean? Because I don't think that. I think the way they need capital probably is better in debt and warrants than it is in giving up large chunks of equity. But I'm jealous of everyone building all this AI stuff, man. I don't mean actually building AI. I mean like, using AI as manage.

Yeah, they're rappers.

Yeah. Like, dude, I. If I, you know, part of me wants to go and like, I mean, I forgot who said this, but everything's a rapper, right? Someone. I saw someone tweet that, like, ventures tweet.

Type form.

Was it. Was it okay?

Someone was like, oh, that's just a rapper. It's like, type form is an HTML rapper worth a billion dollars. Like, who cares that it's just a rapper?

And I saw someone go from that and say, venture is just a wrapper on capital. Right. It really is like, like, yeah. A fund is literally a wraparound money. It is someone taking money which is the tool and figuring out how to apply it in a different way. Right?

Yeah.

So that stuff's all interesting to me. I think there's a major opportunity and I've tweeted about this a bit. I would do it in like, I'm just like not good at building this. But like if someone really had the flows of like how to build agents, right. And then go to apply those, I think you could build a nice managed services business on that. Right now on enabling AI inside, sort of boring, you know, SMEs. Like, I don't think that that's rocket science to do. I think pretty much all the old adage of like cold emailing and cold calling and, and you know, I mean you would. I would create content in the back end and run some ads, but I think in general, like you could go easily get 50 businesses to pay you some setup fee and some ongoing fee. And I know people that are trying to do it and I've looked at doing it. I'm sure people are already doing it. And that's enough. And that's one also where there's like enough meat on the bone for everyone to eat. You know, I mean like there's going to be a hundred people doing that, 200 people doing that. It's not going to be like a, like the ad tech one that we were talking about earlier. That's a winner takes all or maybe two or three oligarchy kind of worlds.

You know what I mean?

The managed services of implementation and management of AI is like, there'll be a hundred. Yeah. Thousands of people doing that.

You know, let's dive in on that because I find that really interesting. I've started playing around with replit and agents and I, I kind of see like a managed services agent agency as like the next iteration of a Zapier automation agency.

Right.

Totally step in. You're like, I know how to use Zapier. I can connect to this API. The API, it's 29amonth and you feel like you look like a genius to them. But what you're doing is like stuff that you've just been doing for years, right?

A hundred percent. I think actually the difficulty here is not the business. Anyone listening? I'm 100% sure this business would work. If I were a betting man, which I am, I would bet large amounts of money that what Chris and I are talking about would functionally work as a business. People would Pay for this and you could charge decent money for it.

There's my hook. There's the hook. Thank you.

Good. You're welcome. You're welcome. I'm not bad at. I'm not bad at social. I'm not bad at hooks. I was going to say that. I think the question, the wall I've hit too. You could do it through audience, you could do it through cold outreach. It's hot enough. You could do it through paid ads. There's probably enough margin on it and enough LTV to run paid for it. The difficulty that I've run into and I've thought through a lot is pricing structures. Right. Because how do you price. Do you price per seat? Do you price per ongoing retainer? What do you do you see what I'm saying? Is it set up?

That was my next question to you is how do you, how do you charge for something like this?

I don't know. I mean, the way I thought it sort of thought. I mean, we have, I have clients in the IT management space, you know that you're charging per seat there. Essentially SaaS is charging per seat. Right. It's like, you know, I think that might be a way to do it. I think one of the difficulties you run into is how much tokens cost at scale. It really depends the businesses that you're pitching to, probably the cost tokens come down in the future. I bet you could probably get some grants for tokens as well. That would allow you to run this business like crazy high margin. Yeah, I think you charge a set. I mean, what I've thought about doing. There's someone I spoke to recently. I don't want to say had their setting of doing it because I was consulting them, but I'll talk about how I've thought about doing it, which was that like a setup fee and then with a monthly retainer and then you probably have them pay for upgrades. Right. So like, I think this is all moving so fast that like probably every year you could pay for basically a new setup fee. You know, like the, the retainer is much more management. It's much more like we make sure that your zaps are connected. We make sure that you're, you know, thousand, two thousand bucks a month instead of paying X amount of employees. Like we're just going to watch it and manage, like manage WordPress hosting, you know, I mean, if something happens, it gets fixed and then you probably, every 12 to 24 months can do another real like setup fee. Be my guest. That's, that's My gut on it.

You know, I'm trying to think of how I would do it. Like, I think I would probably start super niche and say, like, I set up email agents for small businesses, right? And here's a, here's a relevant example that I just did for myself. You've heard of Lindy AI?

Sure.

So I just used Lindy for the first time. I have this lead magnet on tkopod.com where people can get my toolkit, bunch of growth hacks, business ideas, yada yada. For whatever reason, this is hosted in Google Drive, the links frequently don't work. They just don't work. I don't know why. And I'm trying to fix it. I'm going to move it to webflow or whatever or for whatever reason, when they subscribe to my Beehive, they don't get the confirmation email. And so every single day I get emails saying I didn't get the email, where's the toolkit? My links don't work and I have my assistant responding to them the same thing over and over and over. So I went to Lindy. I've never used Lindy in my life. I. Five minutes cut. Because it's easier than Zapier even, right? Five minutes. I've got an agent set up that's automatically responding to those in a smart way using AI. And now granted, you could do this with Zapier a year ago because the OpenAI integration has been active on Zapier for that long. And it's kind of the same thing, but you got to cobble it together and there's more moving parts, more to break. This was a game changer. So maybe you could say, I'm going to go into a dental office and I'm going to look at your emails. I'm going to spend an hour observing. That's the setup fee that you, that you're charging for. And I say, okay, you're getting these emails per day. I'm going to charge the setup fee plus like a per email rate or like a, a monthly rate like you said, and that's all you're going to do is emails. And that's your foot in the door. That's your way to earn trust. You come back the next month and you say, let's look at your, your booking system, right? And I'll integrate your calendar, right? And you can set charge another setup fee for that and increase your monthly fee because now you're managing more stuff that's breaking. What do you think about something like that?

I mean, I think that's right. I think the question was really difficult and this is going to sound ridiculous, but you start to ask yourself. And this is actually where I get it. I think that most people should avoid what I'm doing here because I actually get in my own way all the time these days because I built a couple of things that have scaled a bit and not like true scale, I mean, baby scale, eight figures of scale, right? I mean obviously we have multi trillion dollar companies today, but often I think how far can this scale out? So I think that if you ask me like how do I want to go make 10 or 20 grand a month? You know, I think that what you said sounds great and is totally possible. I think that a lot of, a lot of margins change at scale. As you know, OPEX just really does change at scale. And I don't know if that becomes a $50 million business, what you just said. Although I do think it wedges open the door in a niche way. I think that makes a ton of sense. I would go that way too. I would get super specific with who I approached. I would look at some sort of, you know, maybe, you know, what's some automation that gets set up that takes 10 minutes, right, that I could maybe even do on a sales call with them. Like, you know, like what's that I could get them to do there? That was like this free lead magnet, right? Like, you know, obviously you want to have qualified leads come in maybe through a quiz, through a type form, like making sure that whoever you're doing it for is right. But like that you can all of a sudden prove that you're going to save someone an hour or a day with 10 minutes of your time. Right. You know, and I think that, yeah, I do think it opens up the doors to more and more and more you can do. I do like the idea of per email sending, which I've never thought about again, the question comes at like how do you price it? And I think that the pricing of tokens is going to change pretty drastically. But yeah, dude, I think a lot of the way I've been thinking these days is thinking very upmarket and not so upmarket that it's the old boys club I'll never get into because there is, you know, the McKinsey's Accenture. You know, there's a level of business in which you're, you're half paying for accountability, right? You're half hiring these firms and paying so much because you want to make sure that like when you go to Your boss or your shareholders, they know who you hired and you can say this is it, right? But I do think that there's a lot, there's an obscene amount of money in the lower market world, in the small business, local world. But there's also like this lower middle market that I think that a lot of people don't go after these businesses doing like 50 million, 20 million, 30, you know what I mean? Where like there is, you do have a longer sales cycle to sell to. But you could definitely get in there and you could, you know, you could probably still go knock on a door, you, you could probably still go find.

An email and cold email, still find the decision maker, but they still have.

A lot of money, still find the decision makers, you know, and just get em moving and grooving that way. But yeah, I mean that's one of those businesses. If someone said to me like, which is a common like Twitter thing, if I just start from zero and make $10,000, right. Like if I, if I wanted to make $10,000 from nothing, I think that right now I would figure out, I would go find. I've been taking this course actually by this guy Nat.

I saw that.

Yeah, great. I mean it's great learning. Yeah, like building how to build. Learning how to build a productivity tracker and with AI.

All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube and if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform or you can go to tkopod.com also my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads, it's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter.chrisjkerner.com you'll see the link and we' you there.

I would go get really familiar, go spend like 3, 400 bucks on some AI course that showed you how to create what are a agents which are just I think automations through LLMs right now. Right. This will change in the future if AGI comes through with OpenAI. But and then I would go and find, to your point, go find some business where I could walk in and be like give me 30 minutes your time. I'm going to set up one thing for you that's going to save you an hour a day. And if you find that interesting, I'd love to talk to you about A way that we could work in the long run. I think I would go cold email or go knock on, you know, 50 doors, you know, and you would get on five calls and you'd close one of them, you know, and I think you could go get 10, 1,000, $2,000 setup fees done and, you know, into some management contract at 500, a thousand dollars a month, you know, and you could go build a nice little agency that way. I'm very, very, very, very confident in that.

What do you think about this idea? So I brought this up on a recent podcast episode, but I want to hear your take on it. So I just bought the domain name nevercallagain.com and I'm thinking it's kind of like the type of name where it's like, do not pay dot com. Just very clear, this is what we do. And what it is, is it's. I'm just going to use wedding planners or brides as an example. But it could be much broader than that. Let's say you're planning a wedding, your own wedding. You need quotes from caterers, you need quotes from photographers, videographers, all that. You're on the phone a lot. You click this button and we're going to use Air AI or Synthflow or any of the many services that have AI, like verbal calling agents. And they're going to call 20 photographers, 20 caterers, 20 wedding venues. And this is what the, like, the opening prompt is going to be like. Hey, I'm actually. You probably don't say this first. You're going to say, I'm calling on behalf of Mallory Smith. She's getting married on September 13th. She's looking for catering orders for 50 people. She'd prefer a steak and two sides. I will say I am an AI agent. You're going to hear some awkward pauses. But please talk to me like you would a human. And I'm going to report all this back to Mallory. If your quote is competitive, she'll give you call back in person. Do you have any questions for me? Something so you get it, like, all out. And they're like, what, I'm talking to a robot? But it's like you're getting ahead of it, right? I'm an agent. Okay? So that box is checked. You don't have to worry about them dropping the call. And then it's like they're going to be pauses, because that's the big downside with these calls right now. There are pauses, but then it's like, I represent a human being. This is her first and last name. She lives in this city. Name. You've heard of all this. This is real. She wants to spend a lot of money with you. What's your best price? And they do that 20 times and you save them thousands of dollars because more quotes equals more savings. And what do you think?

I love that. I love that. I love that. Because all my ideas are just hyper duh and practical or so esoteric and large that you would need to raise $300 million over the next decade to accomplish it. And that is something that feels like someone could just. You could probably get going for less than ten grand and put in some work and grind at work. I love it. I think that what becomes interesting to me though, is that then do you start. I'm such a capitalist. The first business I sold was. Was a CPA network. I started thinking about just brokering those leads then. Right. I start thinking about how. Where's the more value that I can capture? Right? Because now it starts to come into me where it's like, excellent. Mallory Smith is calling. What does she want? She's getting married. Boom. My God, are there a million people that buy that. Buy that contact info? Which ironically, though, starts to. Then I'm just that monster who's like, oh, we should be selling off their data.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? And now I'm the person you hate, you know? But I do think that opens up an interesting opportunity. How would you charge for that? I love that. Do you charge, though? You know, do you charge per call? Do you charge. You probably charge a flat rate, right? Probably for or like engagement, right? Like my wedding planning, right?

Yeah. I feel like. I feel like you have to buy like a bundle of calls. It's like, you know, okay, I'm going to say 200 bucks for 100 calls.

And.

And maybe you want to call a hundred wedding venues. Maybe you want to call 10 caterers. 10. You know, it's up to you. So it's like per call with a floor, right? You got to spend this much.

Sure. Now you've made me think about apropos talking about layering on top. You made me think about something that I think to take this to another. Another industry this works in. Are you familiar with car brokers? So, like, I think that you could do this as a car broker and reach out to every single. Want to buy a Lexus GX 550. I'm looking for the new Lexus GX 550. You could as a car brokers will get people Better deals on cars because relationships they have and they will basically just call across the whole country to look at inventory, right. You know, basically the same concept with car brokers, right? Going to call every single, I'm going to call every single Lexus dealership in the United States today and tell them that we're looking for X and Y. Because I guess the part that I'm missing for not, not that that business is missing, but where the extra opportunity lies in me is it's like when we talk about building out pipeline deal flow for people buying businesses for pre E shops, right. I can either get a private equity firm 20 calls a month of businesses for sale. They don't want that. They want five packaged up deals every month that look great to them that have actually been vetted and can look at. Right. So my point is for you is with that question says to me that idea. The next question to me is, okay, I'm Mallory, great. I've got this pricing that's cool. But now I've got a bunch of pricing with maybe a bunch of people that are going to tell me they're giving me competitive pricing because they want to get me on the phone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Which one really is the best. I still know nothing about these businesses except for them competing on price which I think in certain scenarios is not necessarily the right way to do it. So then do you have, is there opportunity to have an upsell as like a middleman who does some vetting for you here? Right now I've spoken to, in my scenario, I've spoken to 50 car dealerships. I've gotten 18 quotes right to get us from A to B. Well now as the car broker, do I have conversations with those 18 so then I can bring that to my client and get them the best singular deal. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah it does.

As opposed to presenting the client 18 different deals to then look at themselves still same thing with that are just price based because in the wedding photography what package am I getting right? Am I. There's some negotiating. There's still going to come into it, right. And maybe there's like this, this is where I think we're at with AI we're either all gonna need to get your guns and your and your sticks to create your fire pretty soon. If, if I don't prey on the downfall of anyone. If I could, you know, you know, John Connor style come, you know, Terminator take out Sam Altman as a child, I might, you know, I think that We're, I think that we're looking, I think that we're looking at a scary future. I think that when systems upgrade, things have to break. The old system has to die. I think a lot of people and maybe humanity's in a better place in 100 years. But think of if the things come true that Sam Altman would like to come true over the next five years. We're in a terrifying, terrifying place in a lot of ways. I think more likely more is real scary. And dude, I mean he says AGI in 2025 and then they're going to move all their efforts to go to ASI super intelligence. I mean, plug me into the matrix, I guess, bro. Keep me plugged in because, you know, get what you need out of me. But my point there is that like, I think that it is Sam Altman learned something from Elon Musk which is really how to oversell. He's the one of the greatest marketers of all time. He is the most over promiser of all time. The thing about Elon Musk is he has promised he over promises to the moon, but what he does is he really delivers. He never reaches. He's never once done what he said.

He would do at the time he.

Said he'd do it. Yeah, but he does blow your mind on the way there, right?

Yeah.

And so I think Sam Altman learned that from Elon Musk years ago.

So that's what has Sam Altman been off on timelines?

I think a little bit in terms of some of the AGI stuff. I, maybe I'll eat my words this year because he said that we're really going to reach. Well, he's. I mean, I just think it's a major say. I don't know if you saw what he wrote last week, but he did write that in 2025 we'll be presenting AGI the way that we perceive it. I mean, dude, this whole pot, all of our conversations are worthless if that's true. I mean almost, I mean like really, really, really. And especially if we start going into asi, you know, this, this super intelligence, you know, and then it opens up a much more existential conversation about what's artificial, about this. You know what I mean? Like what makes this artificial versus, you know, genuine. But my point is I think we're going into a much more place where I see AI being the ultimate leverage tool for, for human touch on top. Right. So like in your scenario, I think that you either go very mass to your point and you charge like you know, 50 bucks and you get to use this tool. And that becomes a chaotic world in which, you know, 10,000 people a month are using this tool to each do 150 phone calls, and there's just another 150,000. Robocall, whatever. Maybe it's possible, or it becomes a little bit higher tickets and you have a human. In the same way we do it with customer service today, you let everyone know it's AI if you want to talk to human, they can talk to a human. Right. But you basically have that outreach with a human negotiator on the end, that car broker that sort of then says to you, hey, Chris, here are the three best options. We reached out to 150 vendors. We got the pricing we got was down, was most competitive, and we did some negotiation. And here are your three best options. Here's the one we recommend for what we think you're actually looking for. And I think in some, like a wedding market or a car market, there's money like that and your plumber that you need next immediately. Maybe not, you know, but you do you see what I'm saying? That's where I go with it.

Yeah, I can see this, like, this idea specifically that I brought up is like, let's say you went mass market, which I could see this being. It's $100 a year subscription for a consumer. Anyone. That's just kind of like an insurance policy. Oh, my AC went out. Hey, click call 10H vac companies and get me the best quote.

Sure.

And you just keep that on speed dial at all times. Cool. 2025, we see that. And then 2026, all the H. VAC companies are answering the phone with AI and it's just.

I was going to say everyone answers.

The phone at that point. Right. No one doesn't answer the phone like we see today. Everyone answers the phone. It's all AI they're pulling from a database. They know what the prices are, they know what the availability is. And just computers are talking to computers and humans are ironically off their phones less than ever. I don't know, that might not be so bad.

First of all, I like this. I think you end up in a really interesting conundrum, though, about, with commoditized services, just in a race to the bottom with two negotiating against each other. Right. Like, it's different when we're saying, oh, like, I want this kind of flower for my wedding. I'm just making this up. Right. My florist. Right. But yes, my AC is out. You end up in just a total race to the bottom. I'm calling, you know, I negotiate against AI they all know the margins of their business, right. I think you end up in a world where just the biggest winners win. Right? The conglomerates win because they can. They can compete on price, right? And you end up not being able to have. Does that make sense?

Yeah. But is that any different than, like, an ebay auction where it's, I want to buy a holographic Pokemon Charizard, and everyone has a floor price. One of them is 101's 95 1's and it's just. It's all automated. It's all the same thing. It's all commodity. But they're still winners and losers, right? It's kind of like this H Vac company. They're more efficient with their costs, so they just program the AI like, hey, never quote under $300 for a condenser. The guy down the street, he's like, I need 450 for a condenser. And so they're still negotiating, but there's also, like, floor prices and limits.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I guess it starts to just. The reason that freaks me out, I think you're right, is you pull that thread and we start really getting to this place of. When I talk about, you know, artificial intelligence starts to be like when we have ASI and AGI and it's computers negotiating. It's computers. What are. What are we here for? You mean, like, what is this?

You know, it's like the. The pendulum always swings, right? So, like, smartphones came out, and we were more, quote, connected than ever. We're all connected, but really we're all alone more than ever, right? And then AI comes along, and it's like, now we're less connected than ever because all the computers are just talking to each other and we're still alone. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, dude, I mean, this brings me up to. I've been having this sort of existential crisis about what I want to do next in my life, like, the big swing I want to take. And part of me thinks that, like, I'm so addicted to my phone. Right? And. And I bought this thing called Brick the other day. It's literally like an RFID thing. It makes it so my phone doesn't work. Right. In a different way. And I realized I'm pretty passionate about. I try and start my mornings for hour. No phone or at least no social media, right? Which becomes tough for someone like you and me, whose job gets Sort of intertwined with social media, the line gets very blurred. But if another, like, quick little side hustle that has to do with sort of connecting or being disconnected, I think it was really easy money and a huge wave that's going to come with, like, digital detox retreating. I'm sure it already exists, right? But I'm like. And I've thought about it because I'm kind of passionate about that. Right. Like, could you get, you know, 15 people to pay 10 people, you know, to pay 3,000 bucks for a weekend in which, ironically, your margins were great because instead of trying to make their, you know, you, you. It's about detoxing. It's about this dopamine. Yeah, yeah. Come sit in the woods. You know what I mean? Like, we're gonna go canoeing, we're gonna walk in nature, we're gonna touch grass.

This is called a butterfly. Yeah.

You know what I mean? And, and by the way, I mean, even if I say it out loud, I'm positive the irony is the way I would advertise it would be through the, through the phone and computer. Right. But, like, you know, I think that you could probably. This makes me think of another business idea that I, like, I want to bring up quickly, but I think that you could probably easily. Now, does it scale to be a $100 million business? No. Do I think that you could go make. You could run quarterly retreats and make 30, you know, 30 grand on each one, for sure. I think you can run weekend retreat and every weekend make four or five grand. Ten people, 500 bucks. It's an overnight. You buy a bunch of tents, you pop them up, you know what I mean? Like, for real. For real. They all, all their phones go in a Faraday bag or whatever. You mean that someone gets taken away, you give a rule beforehand to them, which is like, we're going to watch your phones overnight. Someone is going to have them in their hands. If X give us three phone numbers. Do you see what I'm saying? Or names or whatever, or triggers that if they happen, we will bring your phone to you. Right. Like your mother calls you. Do you. I mean, like your sister, you know, you're. You get a work call from your CEO, whatever it is, that's your sort of like, you know, and obviously you can press a button and escape. Right? Like, like in. In.

Yeah.

And that's that.

It's like an escape. It's a digital escape room.

A digital escape room. Right. And you would do. And you put everyone in tents and you do some sort of meditation. It's very low cost. You get 10 people a weekend at 750 for two nights at 500. And I think you could easily do half a million dollars a year on that business. And margin wise, take home a quarter million. You know what I mean? I think the margins are super high and it's probably fun and you're doing.

Good for the world because we're early on in that industry and those things exist today at like a multi thousand dollar price point. And I think that happens in any industry. In the nascent stage industry, it's super niche, it's expensive, it's luxury. It just has to come down market. And I think there's a market for that.

All my friends, and I may do it myself, do this thing called the Hoffman Institute, which is like, it's, there's one in, in, in California, there's one in Canada. It's like 12 grand for 10 days. They take your phone and you learn, you know, and, and they, and they're sold out six months ahead. And by the way, go look on Twitter, people looking at Hoffman Institute, everyone loves it, everyone says it changes their lives and made them the best person, the best entrepreneur that you know, like more present. I mean, you and I were talking about conf prior to being on the, you know, 10k for a conference is nothing to the right audience. Yeah, it's about finding the right audience. I do think to your point, this is about going a little bit lower market, a little bit down market and saying like it's 500 bucks, you know, we're gonna, all your food's gonna be taken care of, you're gonna do meditation, you're gonna do a hike and you're gonna sleep in a tent or you're gonna sleep in a cabinet. Whatever it is, your margins stay pretty high.

All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend. And we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.