James Camp, Founder of Nanoflips.com - Solopreneurs and Scale - The Michael Girdley Show Episode 50

Hey, Michael here. Welcome back to another episode of The Michael Girdley Show. I had a great guest today chatting with me for a little less than an hour, James Camp, who I've gotten to know through social media. He is a professional, a lot of different things, one of which is flipping websites, has gotten into educational stuff, was a, was a club promoter at one point. So lots of cool stuff we were able to dig into in his, his long and storied career so far. So talked about how he got scammed out of $100,000 when he tried to buy a business once as well. As the dark side of some of the financial, um, touts and stock buying kind of things that are out there, uh, as well that he's run across in his days. So, uh, really enjoyed this episode. I think you will too, um, and we'll get right into it after a quick word from our sponsor. Hey, Michael here. Uh, sponsor for today's show is actually, uh, a product that I'm a part of called DM Bridge. Uh, and what DM Bridge is, uh, is a service that we built to solve the problem that Twitter's direct messaging functionality is a total mess. So we built DMBridge to help you fix that. A lot of the other solutions do things like requiring you to install a whole nother inbox. We didn't want another inbox, so we created DMBridge. And what it does is it takes all of your Twitter DMs and has them appear inside of your email inbox. So you can reply to them just like it's a regular email. You see them just like it's a regular email. You can search them later, like it's one of your regular emails, all just by using DMBridge. So we're currently live with the product. Would love for you to sign up and become a customer and check it out. So you can find that at dmbridge.app and go on there, put in your name, and be either part of the beta or join us as part of the live use of the product. And again, check it out, dmbridge.app. James, thanks for being here and thanks for being part of the highlight of my day, which, you know, I talked about in the pre-show is when we click I click record, there's like a countdown, like the space shuttle gets ready to start going. And like, that's the high— it's all downhill from there. But it's like, I get so excited just watching it get down.

This is the first time we met. It might be all uphill from here. And I don't know whether that's a good or bad thing to say. All uphill sounds way worse than all downhill actually. Yeah. Proverbially.

So whatever it is, we're gonna be good. Um, so I know, I know you from Twitter. Um, but I'd love to give you a chance to introduce yourself and kind of your background and what you do and what you've done, um, to people that maybe don't know you. As well as I do.

I am James Camp. I am just like a serial— like everyone else in 2022. I'm a jack of all trades serial entrepreneur who has a hard time focusing on one thing. No, I grew up in New York City. Very much the black sheep of my family, sort of decided to go on my own entrepreneurial journey pretty early on and got into affiliate marketing as a teenager and built a small ad network that I sold in my early 20s. And then decided that I wanted to go spend all that money in nightclubs and spent the next 6 years of my life running around nightclubs and becoming a nightclub promoter, which taught me a lot about like human interactions and sales and stuff like that. And I was doing a lot of digital strategy on the side and didn't tell people because I thought that wasn't cool. And when people that I did strategy work for, I never told them that I worked in nightclubs because I thought that they would think that wasn't cool. So I was like trying to live this dual life. At 26, 27, I hated it. I was over all of it. Sold everything I owned, got a remote contract with McKinsey and moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and said, "I'm going to reinvent myself and do a little Eat, Pray, Love, discover me." Came back and started a company with a friend I'd met in a nightclub who had been a prop trader. He traded oil derivatives and he had just started this little blog. That was on Wix that was about investing in cannabis equities and pot stocks. And he was like, you were working with Google and McKinsey, right? You know this internet marketing stuff, right? And I was like, yeah, I do. He's like, why don't you come on board and do this with me? So we built what became a pretty large financial news website. And from that, built a portfolio of websites and a holdco because we often took blocks of stock instead of cash for equity, yada yada yada, sold that 2020. And then I said, you know what, I can roll up stuff, I can do things on my own. And tried real estate, totally fell flat on my face, bought a house. That was the toughest thing I've ever done, renovating a home. And then, yeah, ended up buying a hearing aid brand in 2020. Sold that— sorry, 2021. Sold that a couple months ago. And yeah, doing my best to be prolific on Twitter and just write on the internet for a living somehow. I don't know how. I hated writing and I somehow write for a living now. It's the weirdest thing. So that's me.

I have, I did sign myself up for my first online course. I'm taking Sean Perry's Power Writing course. So, oh, he's probably great. I mean, I'll do that next week.

You either, you either like die hero or live long enough to find yourself selling courses online. And I have lived long enough to find myself selling courses online. So it's only a matter of time, Girdley. We're gonna, we're gonna rub, we're gonna rub you in.

I think Mirko's been talking, talking to me, you know, Mirko produces these podcasts about the world needs a Holdco. Like course.

Sure.

And I think, I think I'm sold on it. I just have to figure out how to set it up without doing a ton of work.

That's the goal. Don't worry. I mean, I think you can, you can probably make it pretty asynchronous. Most of it, just you talking, someone else writes it out, edits it, puts it together.

Yeah.

Not even talking directly to them.

Well, I had Dave, Dave Klein and I recorded a podcast that we haven't published yet, but he's, you know, he does these cohort-based courses and, you know, I asked him like, If you're doing the cohort-based courses, that's great because you're getting like instant feedback live from the students to understand where you're teaching, you know, methodology and all that stuff is breaking down or what concepts you're maybe glossing over or going too boring on. But it's the downside of that, which is you're the, you know, the toy monkey with the cymbals, you know, like you gotta get up there to do it. So there's the other side, which is the totally asynchronous thing, but you don't get that feedback loop. So, um, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm curious as to how to solve for those two things without creating like a yet another job.

I have what we in the industry refer to as a CBC, a cohort-based course as well. And what I find, which really, and it's fantastic, what I found was really tough though is in a course you have the difficulties of things don't, people assume, when people read a textbook, for example, people don't realize there's obscene amounts of nuance and gray, right? And so I think that the sort of like actual groups together and the calls allow you to show that things are not necessarily always so cut and dry and so simple. I think that would be definitely a thing in terms of you having a holdco course, because I mean, that's an incredibly vague concept, a holdco, right? It could be a myriad of different things, right? Like we just had a couple different LLCs that did different things in it. Right. And tried to have like some shared services. Um, but it's, yeah, it's, it's tough. Learning to teach is really tough. That's the hardest part about this. Um, and for me, I had like, I don't know, I think I'd sold like 14 or 15 sites over my life when I started mine. And then, you know, what it became though was that I'm just, I don't know, I'm like a holistic digital marketer. I, you know, I'm not like an SEO guru, which is what most of, I think, that industry is, which is like, you know, so people bucket you into this idea of what they think it should be. I'm sure people that took a Holdco course from you would say, oh, Girdley's Holdco course is gonna be about, you know, rolling in fireworks stores with coffee shops, right? And then eating dinner at Chili's because that sounds like a sick day to me. But I will, I will tell you right now that obviously there's an absurd nuance to it. It's not that simple. That's my rant.

So what I mean, what would you recommend? You do cohort-based?

Yeah.

And you think that helps with—

with efficaciousness? For sure. I think what I'm learning is learning how to teach. I hated school so much, man. I was like really, really the black sheep of my family. First time I got kicked out of school was fourth grade. I went to five high schools. I dropped out of college second semester senior year. What's up, Hunter College? I still have 8 credits left to this day. And so, you know, education was never something I bought into, although I loved learning. And so now I'm going through this process of figuring out how to teach, right? Because the way that I learned to teach was someone standing in a room and talking at me and saying, here's a textbook, go read it. And that wasn't— that didn't work for me. And so what's kind of cool is the opportunity to try and figure out yourself how to make that happen. But I do think that cohorts, I think that groups of people, I think the way I comp it out is that the course itself is like a textbook. Okay? You go spend $600 on a textbook at school, have fun reading through it unless you're Good Will Hunting, you're probably not going to get through, you're not going to learn much from it, right? But having a facilitator and having a group of people to do this with and ask questions and network, I think is really the magic. Of what makes it make sense, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. Well, doing this cohort-based one, maybe it'll change my mind on it, 'cause I was always the kid in college that I was just like, why are we talking about this? Just give me the book. Like, I'll go read it for an hour and like come back, you know? 'Cause like, at least then the stuff I understand, you can just gloss over it, whereas you have to sit there for 50 minutes while the professor explains stuff that maybe you feel like you already know.

Well, anyway, I won't know. I think what's interesting about that is because you were probably going, taking these classes to pass these classes, right? Versus these cohort-based courses where like I'm trying to teach people how to go underwrite and buy a small online business. And so I think that like, yeah, if you were asking them to take a test and say, get an A on this test, I don't need to hear all your mumbo jumbo about the nuance and different, like I want to know exactly what I need to know to answer these questions for you. Alternatively, I think that, uh, Also in online edu— in non-traditional online education, I think you find that it's a wide breadth of people that take that program. So like you have to sort of pander to people that don't know everything. So, you know, you end up inevitably saying things that I think are broader that people don't wanna listen to, but you just have to sort of speak to those individuals as well anyway.

Yeah. And so what platform are you guys using or are using for the course you're teaching?

So we host the course on Kajabi. And then we are trying— we did this our third cohort. We were using Facebook groups before. Facebook feels relatively antiquated. I actually felt at the time that it was probably just the path of least resistance for onboarding because everyone has a Facebook. In retrospect, if you're willing to put your credit card in for over $1,000 or something, I think that you probably are also opening to use a different program than Facebook for it to be inside the group. Like the friction has already been overcome. The friction is getting that purchase. And so now we're switching to Circle cuz I think Circle is where we just started using it for this program. I think it's much better. It's like built for teaching cohorts and communities and community management. So that's, we're trying Circle now. Fingers crossed. We'll see how it goes.

Yeah. And did you look at Maven as an option? Was that a—

Yeah, I actually had some conversations with Maven. What, what becomes difficult for me, um, and Maven looks great. I, I had some conversations with Wes. And Gagan and everyone over there. It seems fantastic. I think what's tough for me is that candidly, the revenue model Maven would be difficult for me. I would end up paying them an obscene amount of money for them to be an LMS, essentially a learning management system, right? So they take a percentage of sales and we're actually talking about trying to put together a newsletter program course and talking with them about launching it on Maven. But for me now, I just know how to do all the marketing. I know how to do the hosting. I know how to make it all happen myself. And so that's— Maven does a fantastic job of removing that for experts, but it's sort of something I think I can handle on my own. We'll see though. We'll see how it goes.

When they talked to me, I think their split was 90/10.

Yeah, 90. I mean, I think candidly, for me, I've got one course now. I'd like to— I'm building another program. I'd like to sort of become like the millennial Ryan Deiss, right? DigitalMarketer.com. Like, I'd like to build a bunch of B2B sort of courses on things that you can never learn in school, media buying, newsletters, you know, SEO, like a publishing company and find other experts to bring in and give them equity and let them build the programs and we can market them. You know, with that said, if we're going to do top line, I generally believe that this online education edtech business could do in 3 years, top line $10 million plus, and to give Maven 10% of that for the, for the housing of said content becomes like a pretty aggressive massive split, right? If I could pay Kajabi, you know, $300 a month to host all these, or Circle, $500 a month for enterprise platform, there's a big difference between $60K a year and $1 million a year, right, for the hosting of that content. So we'll see though, we will see.

Yeah, well, and I think, you know, Mirko and I have been talking about it. For me, like, I almost want like a, like whatever the ghostwriter equivalent is for it to just like sit down with me in sessions and like hold my hand through it, right? The same thing as like the book in a box guys do for people writing books.

Scribe and stuff like that. Yeah. Tucker Max has that. Yeah. I'm with it. I'm— you, Girdley, when you find that team, put me in touch because I can literally yap my mouth off for hours straight. If someone can organize that into like useful information, amazing.

All right. First startup idea of the podcast. I'm writing this one down.

If someone builds this, Girdley and I will pay you. We will pay you to make this happen. For sure. Yeah, basically, the— yeah, it's ghostwriting for books. But just, you know, let's— let me brain vomit on to you for 5 hours, and you can turn it into content, you know, into a course.

Super interesting. Okay, well, I'll get to work on that with all the other 4,700 ideas I got. So one thing you said in your bio, which I think was really interesting, was what you— you know, you had this experience being a nightclub promoter. So I'm curious, like, what do you think being a nightclub promoter teaches you about business? Like, as you look at what you're able to do now, like, what did you learn from that process of doing that as part of your career?

I think it sounds so cheesy, but, you know, I think on Twitter, and I think that in the Venn diagram of Twitter, I play in different circles of it, right? But I think that you hear people throw around the term like high ticket a lot. And so high ticket sales, right? And I think that there's two, two pieces of my life where I've seen what real high ticket sales are. And one of them was dabbling in the management consulting world, like where an engagement could be $20 million, right? Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's complex. There is, it's not like closing somebody on the phone asking for their credit card. And the other side of that is like bottle sales, right? The most I've ever sold on my table, like my specific table at nightclub was $88,000. You know, I had one guy spent $88K on champagne at my table. Had one drink and he left me with $88,000 of champagne. I've seen, you know, $2 million go off in a night. So my point is, I think you learn about the psychology of sales in a really interesting way, and how that's really just about a trust-building process over everything. You can have techniques. But it's really just about trust-building. And then, I mean, I'm sort of broken. I think of everything as a sales funnel. And so I think about like, what's the top of funnel? How am I, am I showing you that this place exists? How am I then building trust with you later on, bring you inside of it? And then how at the bottom of the funnel, how are we going to convert? How are we getting to spend money? I think you also become what's really important for a lot of people. It sounds kind of crappy, but I think it's really important to become desensitized to like pretty large numbers, right? Like when you recognize that someone can go spend $100,000 in 10 minutes on champagne and leave, you start to recognize that like in the right scenario, getting that person to pay $50,000 for services, for sure, not an issue, right? That's not a complex thing to do for someone that can throw around money like that. The last thing I'll say is that I realized it's so much of life is positioning. Like, I think it's like, if you could give me one superpower, it'd be like to be in whatever positioning I wanted with someone, because I watched a lot in nightlife as people transitioned out of that world, as they sort of grew out of it for a lot of men and women. Was they would pivot into real estate. And it was because the barrier of entry in real estate, at least in New York, is pretty low. It's a 70-hour exam, and all of a sudden you're a real estate agent. And what they would assume is that that person who went and spent $88,000, right, on that table, or $50,000, or $20,000, was also being interested in buying a house from you. And what, you know, because they said, oh, I know lots of people with lots of money. And what you learn is that, like, you've pigeonholed yourself into this one point of view from this individual. And this individual is only interested in buying things from you inside a nightclub, right? Because they perceive you as being in this one position in life. And it's very different than the person— if I were to go buy a $3 or $4 million house, I would want the guy who sells $3 and $4 million houses all day, every day. That's the only person I want. I don't want the person who stood on a banquette with me chugging a bottle of whiskey at 4 o'clock in the morning last night, right? It's a different positioning. So those are the things I thought were pretty important to take away.

That's awesome. That was awesome. I mean, I guess the real danger of that job also, I mean, I've known people that have gotten into that element of stuff and like that could be a lifestyle that can be pretty self-destructive. Like, oh, for sure. At the least.

I mean, at the least, I mean, I was really hit a really low, I mean, I had like minimal success as a late teen, you know, with this little ad network called Liquid Offers that like, it was more a feather in the cap and in retrospect, there's not real money and But whatever, I sold it and I felt like a king. And then I just immediately went and like spent the next 7 years like digging myself into a deep hole. Like I ended up with an eviction notice, you know, like sitting in housing court with a 450 or 550 credit score and like being in my mid to late 20s. And candidly, I felt like I had grown up— I grew up, you know, very middle class, but I grew up in a good family, right? My mom went to Harvard, my dad went to Yale. Both my sisters have multiple degrees, partners at consulting firms, and cardiothoracic nurses, and all this stuff. And I just like threw it all away, right? I was just like, screw that, I'm gonna drink every night and party every night. And so I think that like by 25, 26, I looked at a lot of my friends, you know, who were, you know, all of a sudden going for AP roles and VP roles and investment bank, you know, all these different sort of paths, and I felt incredibly behind. And so that's really— I definitely dug myself— that industry was some of the greatest times in my life, but also some of the darkest. Times in my life, you know, and you eat, sleep, and breathe it. You have to, you know, like you have to, because when you come home at 5 AM, you can't date someone that has a normal job. You know what I mean? How do you fall in love with someone where they're like, hey, you know, I'll see you for 10 minutes, you know, once a week, you know? So anyway.

No, I dig it. Totally dig it. Yeah. And it's, I'm curious as you look back to being a younger person, like at you had that inflection point kind of when you dropped out of school, you had 8 hours left and you clearly were in this environment where the rest of your family was doing kind of more serious, had done a lot of very serious conventional kind of approaches to life and being a professional. But you decided not to do that.

Sure.

And I'm just curious, like, if you look back on that, that younger James, like, why, why, why did you decide to go like a different path?

I think it was lucky, like, without getting into a long discussion about like neuroplasticity, like I was— my father was an entrepreneur and so I was very lucky to see entrepreneurism sort of work. And I think for a lot of people, they have a hard time conceptualizing it because they just never knew anyone that was an entrepreneur. And then candidly, like I said, I grew up very middle class. I didn't have no money, but I definitely didn't have lots of money. And I came from the most educated family on the planet. My grandfather was a trustee at Columbia. He ran for mayor of New York. Both my parents had Ivy League degrees. I didn't grow up rich. And so, I think I learned pretty quickly. I think it clicked for me that like, that going and finishing school was 100% not necessarily going to be the way that I sort of accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, right? It was like, this is a waste of time. Everyone I know that has money had nothing to do with their education, unless you went and got an MBA and you like climbed the ranks at like BCG to be a senior partner or McKinsey, and all of a sudden you're getting an equity split out of, you know, out of your partnership in the end, you know. But anyway, so I think I answered the question, but I don't know what I left because I just hated school. To be just completely fair, I hated authority and I hated school, but I just also knew it was not the path for me. And I think for a lot of my life, you know, I look back on it, everyone's like, why don't you go finish school? In fact, I had a date last night and fantastic woman. And she said, oh, like, you know, Do you ever think that you worry about it for your resume? And I said, I promise you at this point in my life, no one is asking me for my resume. And the only time they did was in 2020, I sold this little holdco and I was tired of the entrepreneurial ride and had a senior partner at McKinsey ask me if I wanted to take an AP role at McKinsey inside Leap, which is one of their practices where they build startups inside bigger companies. And he was like, the base is like $380,000. And I was like, I was like, say no more. Let's, you know, and I know that world, right? I know where that can go too. I was like, say no more, let's do this. So I went through, I didn't have to run any cases, none of that sort of stuff. I just like talked to senior partners and I thought it was a shoe-in. And after like my 4th round of interviews, they said, sorry, they said, for GDPR compliance, we do have to do some background check stuff. We just have to know. And I said, okay, that's cool. So I fill out this questionnaire and one of the questions was, what is the highest level of education that you have? And there is no option. I went to college for 4 years, but dropped out second semester, senior year. But I promise you, I know what I'm doing. The only option is high school or college. So I think I put college, that I'd finished college, but I immediately emailed the recruiter and I said, hey, I just wanna flag this for you. Like real consultant speak stuff. I wanna flag this for you. You know, like I'm, uh, You know, I actually never graduated. My resume does say that I went to school for 4 years.

I did.

It just does not say that I ever received a degree for going to school for 4 years. So I just want to be clear. And she's like, oh, don't worry, it won't be a problem. And then I got a call the next day and they said, hey, really sorry to say, some of the other senior partners are pretty uncomfortable with an associate partner role for someone that doesn't have a college, an undergraduate degree. Are you interested in applying for an analyst position? And I said, no, thank you. It's very sweet. I'm pretty sure that if Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg wanted to be an AP at McKinsey, you guys would open the doors pretty wide for them. So let's not pretend that this is about like the hard, fast rule that I have to have an undergraduate degree, right? This is more that you've decided not to take that risk on James. So, uh, anyway, I don't know how I got into that rant, but yeah, that's perfect.

Well, I was curious, how did your family, you know, feel about kind of your path? When you were younger and how do they feel about it now kind of in retrospect?

I was very, very, very lucky to have an obscenely supportive family. And I think that oddly it hobbled me in other ways. People, and this sounds so shitty, excuse my language to say, but people always were like, "You're so smart. You can do whatever you want." And I think that I spent a lot of my life thinking, "I'm so smart. I can do whatever I want." and like not getting my cage rattled, which is really important, and to be sort of humbled. So my family was pretty supportive of it. You know, my first contract with McKinsey, my sister got me. I mean, that was straight nepotism, you know, for sure. And my father, you know, that's a whole different story. But we weren't particularly close when I was growing up. But they were always really, really supportive and always believed in me. And I think that, you know, when I was getting in trouble growing up, all the other parents would tell my mom that she was raising me wrong and that James should go do this and go do that. And she was like, no, he'll figure it out, you know. And I don't know, I'm not where I want to be, but I think I kind of figured it out a little bit. I feel pretty good. So I was very lucky to have people that were very, very supportive of that. I think normally the story you hear is like, everyone told me to go, you know, everyone told me to get a job and in the face of them, I went against them and I did. Everyone was like, no, James, you can do whatever you want, go do your best. And so that's— although I'm sure behind the scenes, people are like, I wish James would just go get a job. Like, you know, I'm sure that's how they felt.

Yeah. Well, I guess they would want that more if you were coming to them asking for money on the regular.

So totally, totally. In fact, you know, one of the biggest lessons of my life, my sister— I had, when I had an eviction notice, I didn't pay rent in 6 months. And I went to housing court. And I sat there in Brooklyn, downtown Brooklyn, and I sat there and I cried to a judge. And my sister came with me and she let me cry to that judge and she let me go and sit there. And then she looked at me and she goes, I'm going to give you the $10,000 for your rent. And I was like, what? You are? Why did we— could have avoided this entire day. We could have like, this has been the most horrific experience in my life. And she's like, no, I just wanted you to know what this feels like. And I want you to— she was like, and if you're ever in trouble again, I'll look out for you. But the last thing I want to do is get a phone call from you saying, can you come to housing court with me? I want to know that things are falling apart for you way ahead of time. And so I think that it was like a really, like I was, it was a very blessed way, so to speak, to like learn a really hard lesson that I think other people don't have some guardian angel come in, you know, and fix for them.

So yeah, totally dig it. Super cool. What is one of the other things you talked about in your bio was around kind of this financial news website stuff. And, you know, I have, I have friends that are involved in doing those kind of newsletters, especially like some of them work for Agora. Um, which for those of you who don't know is like a really big, like financial newsletter provider. Um, and then you start to hear about stuff like, I forgot what the name of the company that people were talking about a couple weeks ago that does $20 million in revenue and like $14 million, you know, it's a subscription financial news site online. So I was just curious, like, what is your impression of that market? Like, you know, How do you think about that industry?

Um, so I think that if I had— so I actually, when I sold that site, and we sold a couple of sites, but interestingly, like, the buyers let it fully die. Ironically, they sort of ripped apart everything we sold them. And like, I'm sort of hoping to win it back in an auction later this year and sort of just like inception the game, just like sell something for a bunch of money. Buy it back and sell it all over again. We'll see. But we had— so I'd had in that company— actually, yesterday I got a text from my old business partner. I think it was like 7 years ago to the day we got our first check. And so I— we got our first investment check. It was $100,000 from an investment bank. And I'll never forget, I used to carry around a photocopy of that check in my pocket because I was like, this is the sickest thing that the world has ever known. By the way, for $100,000, we give them 30% of the company. And it was venture debt that I PG'd. And then the first company fell apart. We did an asset sale to a new co. Pro rata gave everyone the equity in the new co. And then I, because the debt was on the old company that I personally guaranteed, I had to then pay off the debt personally. So it was like this really ridiculous, weird transaction. But point is, um, the Financial Newsletter stuff was I had had our first investors were an investment bank, Gelbenkamp Company. And so it was an M&A license for M&A, basically only in Midtown Manhattan. And my partner had been a commodities trader at Axiom Capital Markets, which was like a human unit inside Virtu, which is like the largest, you know, market making firm on the planet. Anyway, my point is they came, everyone in there was like very interested in giving real financial news and like being a, like, actual legitimate source of information. And so for me, I remember, let me just say that if I'd want to be a stock promoter, I would have made a lot more money than I did. And what you learn is that an Agora doesn't really do that either, because it's just wrought with regulatory complexities. And it gets really scary. Because once you start having tens of thousands of subscribers on a newsletter about stocks, I promise you, you're going to get a bunch of really interesting people that have OTC listed securities calling you up and asking you if you would like to make $500,000 and for sending a couple emails. So that industry can get sketchy and weird. And then Agora, I actually had Mike Pizzo, who was the MD of Agora Financial, and I were speaking at one point, and we were talking about them renting our list from us. And I went to my partner, and he was like, what's Agora? And so I started showing him some of the stuff. And he was like, absolutely not. There's not a way on the planet that we are ever partnering with these people. Because they mostly are selling info products on the backend and really aggressively. And I'm a big fan of Agora, not knocking them, but a lot of their info products will have like 30% refund rate, which is really, really, really high. So when we sold the company, one of the first things I did was go and call Agora. And I said, hey, I can't sell you this list anymore. But I'd be pretty happy to work with you. And we could do something. And so I did a JV with Agora Financial after that. And like, and sort of help them build a potstock newsletter. Um, but so that industry, what do I think of it? I think it's— I love that industry. I think it's fun, but I think you have to be very careful because there's a lot of really sketchy actors, uh, or the SEC would say bad actors, uh, in, in, in, in those worlds. So yeah.

Yeah. And so, I mean, as you've waded into it, like, how do you avoid them? What's like— is there a strategy there?

The, the avoidance is that you just— for me, we had like a one hard and fast rule, and that was like we would never put price targets or like buy signals on equities. Like that was one rule we would sort of refuse. Like if you had a press release that you would like sort of like put out as material information, like in the right channels, like I was very happy to get as many eyeballs on that as you wanted.

Right.

But I was sort of against sort of putting price targets or that's really paid research is really where the world gets a little sketchier. And so that's what we avoided. Sort of at all costs. And we've been very lucky because the blog was started in, in, in during the 2016 election. And it was like such a nascent industry at the time that like we had, you know, like Vivian Azer at Cowen, who's like the lead, you know, like tobacco analyst at Cowen was on our newsletter, like one of our first 100 subscribers, like partners at Lauterbrück, Dalman, like, you know, I had like really serious people on this list. And I knew that the moment that I— that's, by the way, we ended up doing a roadshow with Cowen years later, right? So like, the only way to keep it going was to be, yeah, was to sort of be above board, right? And I thought that would have a higher value for us in the long run. And I think it did. And maybe a little less cash flow on the business, but more opportunity post that business.

I can remember being like 24, 25, and I think that was like peak Girdley. Like I had a full head of hair, like big white teeth, big blue eyes, 6'5". I'm shorter than that now. It's all, it's all been down. I still had swimmer bod from college. It's all been downhill since then.

It's all right, no one knows, dude. No one even knows. This is the internet, baby. You can do whatever, you can be whoever you want to be. You can be whoever you want to be, literally.

Uh, as I usually say on Twitter, this, this is a parody account. That's what I tell people. They're like, they're like, you know, like a real person, like, girl, like, I don't know what you talk about. This is a parody account.

You know Charlie? Do you know Charlie Light? Like he runs like all— Yeah, exactly. Like all Charlie's accounts, just like full on John C. Rich, like, you know, all the parody accounts. Exactly.

Full on that. So one thing I wanted to ask you about is, you know, like this whole solopreneur kind of movement has become— I think you were early to that, right? Everything you've described has been James the Solopreneur. But like, that stuff is like when I double-click on like the things that most people end up doing for the solopreneur stuff. Well, there's two buckets. There's one which is like, I'm going to sell you some courses on how to sell courses. It's like, oh man, like Inception. But then there are people that are doing a lot of one-man kind of show or one-woman show stuff like, like you're doing. Like, how do you think about like, do you— when you start to go down that path, do you box yourself into a life where you're always going to be a solo entrepreneur? Or like, do you see paths where those things turn into actual businesses for people that have some scale to them?

Sure. I mean, I think, no, I don't box myself into that. So the company we sold in 2020, you know, I think that at our highest, there was 8 of us, 5 FTEs, right? But like, and that was, we were, didn't need that. Like, that was me thinking that that's what adults did. And that's how companies ran, right? Like, I like, I literally had an office space on, you know, like 90 Broad. Like, and then 85 Broad, which is like 300 feet from the NYSE. And I literally did it because I was like, we got to be next to the NYSE. Like, we're doing financial news, I got to be next to New York Stock Exchange is what adults do. Clients are going to come in, you know. So I think that like, I remember hiring, I told someone this on a podcast yesterday, but I'll never forget hiring. We had Rachel, Michael McKenna. And I remember McKenna, we put in our office with us. And I'm so bad at hiring and so bad at managing. And she was like, what should I do? I was like, I come here every day and I figured out how to make money. You should too, you know, and she was like, okay, I guess. But that one started as just me and a friend. I think I'm running into that wall again. Now, almost everything else I've done has been, you know, in— we had the hearing aid brand, like there was 8 or 9 people, but I really was not working like in that business at all. It was all remote. Everything I'm doing now is like, now there's probably 4 or 5, they're all contractors. What I'm realizing is that you run into this like weird, like, what do you want out of life, right? Like, I could run a very high margin, like low 7-figure business, I think, as a solopreneur, I think, which is like a misnomer. I think we probably have, you know, 4 or 5 contractors who are getting paid, but no FTEs and sort of like no real culture, like the solopreneur concept. But I think that when I think about scaling this business to 8 figures, which I believe is totally possible, that we're going to need sort of this to cease to be a solopreneur business. Right. And so I think that's something I'm really struggling with as we grow, because it's sort of grown in a way that never had had any business grown my entire life, you know what I mean? The, the online education business just sort of happened. I've started as an idea, and now it's just blowing up. And so like, I don't try and do the solopreneur stuff I did when I was younger. And then I sort of thought like, I'm going to grow up and hire people. And that like really went weirdly and poorly. And we had to sort of get rid of everyone and start from scratch all over again, essentially. And I think I mentioned that pre-show about sort of something failing and then forming a new co and giving all the investors pro rata equity in the new co. But I think that people really need to— I've learned, like, I'm not— I never want to run a $500 million company. I would love to be a founder of one. That sounds sick. You know what I mean? Like, I'd love to take it somewhere and somebody else can— the adults can come into the room, you know, and sort of probably low 8 figures and take over or run that. But in terms of like actually, like running, like, to my best friends, you know, Colin and Oren, you know, we were talking about this yesterday, you know, 400 employees is a very— and that's not even a really big company in the scheme of orgs, right? Like, my sister's got clients with 50,000 employees, you know, like Citibank and stuff is, you know, the orgs can be massive. But my point is, I think that sort of I want to be able to be in businesses where I sort of know everyone, and I sort of know what's happening. And I think that for me, that falls into the solopreneur concept, but it grows outside of it a little bit. But I definitely don't ever want to be the guy who like only knows my EA and the C-suite, you know, like, I feel like that's just not the business for me. I don't think it'd be fun for me. I don't think I'm great at managing stuff like that. Like, you know, we call our podcast Builders Build because like, I just love building stuff, right. And I think that the moment that I get fully You know, we all love building stuff. The moment that I'm fully removed from the actual building of something, it just feels like I just have a job, you know? And like, that sounds like not fun to me, like at all, at all. Jobs suck. I have no interest in having a job, you know, in a weird way. I don't know.

Yeah. Well, and so, I mean, how do you think about not, you know, finding that balance, right? Where it's like, you don't want it to be your job to just be building things, but, and, but you wanna scale the business like you're doing with the educational stuff. Like, how do you find the balance between that and like not getting stuck in the C-suite?

Yeah, I mean, I mean, candidly, I think the only opportunity I've really had, and this is not to throw myself under the bus, but the biggest thing I ever built, someone, I was literally sitting on the floor crying 3 months before we sold it. I was like, I hate this. I never want to do this again. Like, I hate this so much. And someone was like, actually, we sort of designed it. But anyway, we got, we sold this business. And I was like, so I've never even really had candidly, like, maybe I would love it. But I've never even really had the opportunity to run a $100 million a year business or an org with more than 8 people underneath me in it, right. And so I think that like my gut visceral reaction is that I would hate it. But I don't know if it's so much by design. I mean, maybe it is subconscious design, right. But like, no one's ever let me get, you know, apropos to that conversation about McKinsey, no one ever let me get to a point where they were like, okay, now you run these massive teams with all these people. So I'm not sure it's something that I like consciously think about doing as much as like, it's just never It's never been in me. It's never what I've strived for. I never found myself in that scenario.

Yeah, I think it's a testament to the idea that if you want to do that kind of stuff, you actually have to make an effort to get there. You know, everybody who does become a CEO someday, like, it's not like it was just because they, you know, happened to fall into it when they were driving down the road. Yeah, pulled into Starbucks and then like, oh, I'll take a right here and I'm now the CEO. Like, it doesn't work that way. Like, you actually have to have a multi-year plan and execute on it. And it sounds like you just— that, that's not what— that's not the life you want to live. Like, I totally—

yeah, it's not. Actually, you know what's interesting? Some of the— I mean, I used to think I was driven by money. I'm not. I'm driven by winning. Money just seemed to be the scorecard when I was younger. That's what I thought winning meant, right, in, in business. Um, I'm not rich, but I've made enough money to recognize money is not what's going to make me really happy here. But I will say that I had some friends whose families everyone I know had real money growing up. Like, they weren't— yeah, I have one friend whose father for a while was like chairman and CEO of Hyatt. They also owned Hyatt, you know what I mean? Like, they, you know, like, they also own Experian and Hyatt. And my point is, like, it was the ownership equity structure. It was not like the being a CEO job that sort of built people the wealth, right? And since that was what I chased for so much of my life, I don't think I ever wanted that, you know, I don't, you know, like, I actually, I'll never forget, shout out Jimmy. God, Jimmy was a long story, sort of old mentor, the guy I worked with. And he was the CEO and chairman of his company that I owned a very small piece of. And they, we had like a failed triangular reverse merger onto the NASDAQ. That's a whole nother long story. But that was like an old, like, doesn't matter. But Jimmy was like, I don't want to be the CEO of a public $600 million company. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, no, no, I want to be the chairman of that company. Company. He's like, I don't want to be the CEO. I want to be able to show up and tell people that this is what's going to happen and decide, but I don't want to go work in that company all day, every day. You know, like, that's just a different job. You know, like, there's, there's different also, like, fiduciary obligations that sit on your shoulders from the shareholder perspective, I think, being the CEO versus being on a board. And sort of that, like, always really resonated with me, because I've thought about sort of go-public transactions and had been involved in one or two before and thought about like, man, I would really hate to be C-suite of a pubco. Sounds like a nightmare. You know, like, sounds like a total nightmare.

Yeah, totally dig it.

All right.

Well, one of the things I was reading some of your tweets and one tweet definitely stood out and I wanted to double-click on it because I want to hear the story. But you said, I once got scammed out of $100,000 putting a deposit on a small business. So I think my question is, how do you get scammed out of $100,000 when you're buying a business?

Totally. This is actually funny because this shows you how much time heals all wounds. I had literally forgotten about this until I tweeted that. Like, I'm not even— like, it had come up like 30 minutes earlier and I called my old partner, like, dude, remember when we got scammed out of $100K? So this is esoteric and complex, so I'll keep it short. We Put a hundred— that we want to buy a shell, a public shell, and we wanted to, uh, buy the control block of that. I even— for everyone that doesn't know it, but like, basically when you own the control block of a company, you can do whatever you want with it. You can issue shares in whatever way you want. You can change dilution. You can restructure it, right? And so when you buy a shell, whoever controls the control block, i.e., whether it's like a share, share class X, which has supermajority voting over all their share classes, or it's just the most commons, whatever. So we were working with like a sort of definitely not top-tier hedge fund and ex-investment bankers who are like sort of weird. And long story short, we instead of— because you don't want to own the control block, even though you want the control block, doesn't matter. Point is, we sent $100,000 to a lawyer that cleans up shells. But instead of doing it as an actual deposit on the business, we structured it as debt, as a note. And long story short, these guys decided to screw us and just defaulted on the debt. Defaulted on the debt. And I think they paid it. And then we sold, I sold the company that had lent that debt. So I don't like the people bought the holdco in 2020 that I sold, had that note, like had been the company that was trying to buy the shell. We were trying to take some of our assets and shove them inside a public shell. And we were going to control that anyway. But those guys just defaulted on it. And so it wasn't like actually, you know, I think that the misnomer was that I said that I got, you know, I got scammed with a deposit because for all intents and purposes, it was supposed to be a deposit on buying the control block of this shell. We went and raised a little more money to go buy the rest of it. Long story short, they ended up using it for something else and then just defaulted on the note and never paid us back. And so the people that own DMO Holdings, my old company. I don't know if they've ever even went to go collect on that debt. What you learn about debt and suing people, or I learned at least, is everyone talks a really big game about suing people. You know, suing is like a one of those like bark worse than you bite things in most scenarios, uh, because the amount of time and effort it takes to go collect on— I think they end up paying like $8K back, but the time, not time and effort, takes to go collect on $92,000 is astronomical, uh. And so most of the time I think people just write it off as bad debt more often than not, at least for smaller numbers from what I've seen at least.

Yeah. Well, sometimes people talk about situations like this as the highest ROI education they ever got. It's like, oh, it may have cost me $92,000 now, but it's going to save me $9 million when this potentially happens again on a larger scale. So that's one way to look at it.

I mean, to be honest with you, like, it was in— we were like, I was like 28, my partner was like 24. We were like wiring up $100,000 to like sketchy lawyers that clean up shells to go try and buy a control block of a public company. I mean, kudos to our ambition, you know, but I'm— but, but like, in retrospect, like, if I met a bunch of— I met a couple kids in their mid-20s now who are like two college dropouts. One had been a prop trader and the other had been a nightclub promoter. And they told me they wanted to wire off some money to go buy a public company, I would've been like, you guys are out of your mind. You should probably go figure out what you're doing before you do this. So we all learn lessons. I learned an expensive lesson for sure.

Yeah, totally dig it. Well, and then, so one of the things you mentioned in our prep was people should know that James does more than just buy and sell content websites. So what else should they know about you?

Well, ironically, it's sort of leaning into now, but I don't know, like, I'm again, I'm much more of like a holistic digital marketer, right? Like, I would be like, like, I would be— I'm a bad specialist. I mean, thank God at this point in my life, like, if I don't think anyone would make me a CEO, I'm the CEO of my company, but that's most of the janitor of my company, right? Like, that's a joke, right? Like, but I think if someone were to hire me, I would have like an SVP or CMO level role because you would never hire me as a specialist role. I'm just not particularly I'm not a great media buyer or great SEO. I'm pretty good at them. But I would just hire someone who's sick at those things specifically. But I don't know, like I do, you know, the last thing we sold was a DTC hearing aid brand, a direct-to-consumer hearing aid brand, right? And like, that was all run through paid traffic. And, and so that's pretty different from a content site that, you know, that, that I talked about very often. I just think that content sites are like the lowest hanging fruit with the lowest level of risk for the average Joe. And as we're looking at an online education platform and teaching people how to do things, I think it'd be pretty difficult for me to teach someone how to buy a minority stake, but a majority control block of a hearing aid company. You know what I mean? It just was a weird and complex transaction that I know because I'm an M&A junkie with no actual formal education in M&A. So I don't feel comfortable trying to teach people how to do that. You know, like, I, you know, I try and keep people away from talking about debt and leverage, and because it's just not something that I'm a master of immensely. But no, I'm a mentor at Techstars. You know, I used to mentor at Google Launchpad. I enjoy the gym, I enjoy running, you know, I'm just— what I find fascinating about— I've got a podcast called Builders Build, you know, like, And we're building a content site around that podcast as well. But I think that what happens for me, and we were talking about this in the pre-show a bit, but like, I've been really pigeonholed as the website flipping guy, and that's fine. Okay, that's fine. That's what people want. They'll get it, right? I've flipped like 14 or 15 websites. I've now advised on 50+ M&A transactions, mostly buy-side in terms of what I would call lower, lower, lower, lower, lower, lower, lower market, i.e., like content websites, you know, these sub-million-dollar content sites. So like, I'm definitely an expert in that space. But it's not, you know, I'm thinking about like, I want to dive into SaaS this year. I just want to always do new things that I find challenging and exciting. And like, I've never really built a software company, despite sort of advising on some. I own a piece of a cannabis company called Palms, and we had Justin Bieber invested last year. And if you look up Justin Bieber Peaches, like he has a song called Peaches. The line that we had from Justin was called Peaches. You know, like it was, I get the lyrics are like, I get my peaches down in Georgia, I get my weed from California. And so like, I don't know, I just think that I just feel more dynamic than just like talking about buying and selling content sites. That's an awesome lane. And if people want to do just that, that's fantastic. But like, you know, I will continue to buy and sell content sites as long as I am trying to teach people how to buy and sell content sites. Because I think that's just like important to have my hand dirty in the mix. But I want to build like an edtech company and like that is the front end is education. But the back end is software. I think there's like a major opportunity to do that. And so I'm just a little bit— I'm like a mille-feuille. I've got layers, you know, it's a little more complex. I'm like a blooming onion.

There you go.

Yeah. Okay.

I understand that one. I understand that one. The French part, I didn't get that. But fine. Well, cool, man. So the podcast is Builders Build and you guys do that. Is that the weekly? Podcast? Are you doing it twice a week?

Yeah, we're doing it weekly. What's— it's been interesting. It's me and Oren and Colin. Those guys are just so smart. And they're like my— I hate to say this. I was told not to say this. It's not PC. And I don't mean to be offensive, but I would call them my tribe. Like, I felt like I found my tribe. And I get that I shouldn't say that. So I apologize if that's offensive. I don't mean it to be in any regard. But Colin and Oren became two of my best friends on the face of this planet. And it was just, you know, we're all in our mid-30s. I think we're all serial entrepreneurs. With a lot of failures. The difference is those, you know, Colin and Oren managed to build a company that does $100 million a year and is public. So it's a little bit different than me. But yeah, we have our podcast, we just sort of, I think it's for them, they also have wives and children. So I remember at one point when we first started and we couldn't get any traction, we have some traction now. And we just, you know, Oren said, listen, even if no one ever listens to this, I need an hour a week to just hang out with my friends. You know, it was, you know, like, this is, this is the, like, we were doing it on Sunday nights, which for them was the only free time they had. For me was the least enjoyable time ever. Like my one moment of downtime is like Sunday at 9 PM. They're like, all right, well, now my kids are asleep and this is what we're doing. And so we started off, we actually initially was called Tab Talk, which I love the concept. And we were just taking open browser tabs that we found fascinating and sort of trying to do deep dives into them. It worked, but it was just sheer chaos. Because if you're not watching us go through 15 browser tabs, it's just you're listening to 3 bros just talk about anything. And so Builders Build is more trying to do deep dives and be a little bit like smart about like looking at sort of search terms that we find, think that people are looking for online and sort of pumpkin hack, so to speak, how we gather that traffic. But yeah, I love it. It is, we were talking about this, but it is one of the least rewarding things I do on the face of the planet. I mean, from a fiscal standpoint, it's the least rewarding thing I've ever done. On the face of this planet. But I enjoy it. And I think that maybe qualitatively it makes a difference to me, to my life and career, but definitely not quantitatively. That is for sure. For sure.

Yeah, it is amazing how bad of a business podcasting is. People don't understand how terrible the business is because I think maybe they're jaded by the Joe Rogan, Bill Simmons paydays those guys got. Sure. But like you're neglecting that, like, like Joe Rogan and Bill Simmons by and large produce podcasts for like 7 or 8 years apiece to then, you know, after 500 episodes to become an overnight success. And it's like, you know, that's one of the things we talk about on Acquisitions Anonymous is just kind of joke, like we're on our never-ending quest to break even. Like we're just excited, excited if we can cover our costs.

Yeah, no, we're far— we're, to be candid, uh, You know, ButcherBox did send me a free box of meat. I am a meatfluencer now. And so I'm pretty hyped about that. They have not paid us anything. But hypothetically, you know, I'd be very open for ButcherBox to sponsor the pod, be open for anyone to sponsor the pod, Men's Warehouse, you know, Chili's, any of the above, you know, Bravo, I'm just looking at things on my desk, I'd be very open to it. Because in the meantime, it is just a, it is a, it is a money hole. But it's a fun one. And it's cool. And it's like a hobby, you know, and like, and I actually for sure, like, this is, you know, we're talking about the podcast now, I think it's opened up doors for me, I think that if we can grow it a bit more, it'll reach the point where I can sort of like be superpower to talk to the same way Twitter has become a superpower. Like, I'm pretty confident that I could get anyone, talk to most people on Twitter that I really wanted to. I think the podcast can open those, those doors for you as well, if you can, if you can finagle it correctly. But what I did notice about about the podcast, and I mentioned this earlier, was that I assumed that the pipeline from Twitter followers to podcast listeners was going to be a pretty easy transition. I was like, man, 60,000 people on Twitter, we're going to get 60,000 listens an episode. This is going to be sick. It's far, far from it. Far, far from it.

I think you learn very quickly Twitter is totally your friend while you're producing content inside of their walled garden. But the moment you're like, hey, check out this thing over here that's not controlled by Twitter, and they don't get to see the data and all that kind of stuff and the metadata, Twitter stops becoming your best friend very quickly. And I think people— the thing that's been surprising to me doing a podcast is just how bad the discoverability is, like the amount of time we're spending hacking, trying to just get people to know we exist without spending a bunch of money. Like, it's, it's a lot. I mean, we're going to talk about a lot.

I mean, we do. So Colin Oren and I have a combined 150,000 followers or so on Twitter. Yeah, my newsletter NanoFlips is like 11,000 subscribers. They both have like a 4,000 or 5,000 follower newsletter or subscriber newsletter. They both have like 5,000 people on LinkedIn. My point is we put it out on all of our channels. Like, oh, like I am, I'm posting on LinkedIn, on Twitter, my newsletter, and we garner, I don't know, 1,200 listeners an episode or something. You know what I mean? Like, you know, like, And don't get me wrong, like in the scheme of stuff, like I'm impressed that I can get 1,200 people to listen to it for an hour about me just ramble about anything. With that said, I mean, in terms of impressions, I mean, that content is reaching definitely mid-six figures people of people, right? If not more. So it's really hard for that transition. I also think that from like a sales funnel perspective, it's a big ask. Like Twitter is so like quips, it's off the cuff, you know, it's like very quick, it's scrolling, it's a like, is a big jump to ask you to go while you're in a moment on Twitter, which is I'm picking up my phone quickly saying I'm gonna look on Twitter, to all of a sudden clicking on a link. And then from that link deciding now I'm going to commit an hour of my time to listening to a podcast. That is a huge— like, I think it's easier for me to get you to pull your credit card out of your wallet, right, and make it and make it and make a purchasing decision. Because you can do that instantaneously with Apple Pay, you know, like, or one-click checkout versus like, okay, now listen to me for an hour. God, that's what a huge ask that really, really, really is.

So yeah, it totally is. Well, that's why I'm kind of coming around to the mindset that like having a podcast is actually just like an hour of improvisation for creating TikTok and YouTube clips. That's what I think this whole thing is.

Yeah. I mean, to be honest with you, we do it, you know, that's not a bad point. You know, this is something I need to work on too, is like, I need to have— I'm so busy. I'm sure you are too, if not more, and everyone is, right? But it's like, if I could just have one person, like, where I just for one hour a day, I could just do my rant on like some— Alex Hormozi does it, I'm pretty sure, because I see Alex Hormozi, like, he just literally is always in the same room. And he must just sit down for an hour every day, and just, you know what I mean? Like all his— and he's fantastic. He's like, amazing at it, right? And then someone just sits there and edits it into 40 Instagram Reels and 30 TikToks and a YouTube. So that's definitely the answer.

So he says he— Alex Formosi, I listened to one of his things and he says all he did, all he figured out how to win on TikTok and Instagram was sitting down and reading his old tweets and then clicking upload. That's what he did.

I'm ready for that now because I got like 60,000 of those tweets, like ready to go. I'm ready to try it.

Before I end this all, like the whole thing, you know, everything, the whole social media thing, I'll go through my unsent drafts folder and read all of those and upload them to TikTok. Just click delete on my account and just peace out. See you guys. I'm going to Ibiza.

I had to do a math. So my Twitter has been around since I was a dumb nightclub promoter, right? And so when I, I mean, I had 800 followers in 2020. And when I sold the, when I sold DMO, the holdco. I was like, what am I going to do now? I was like sitting— my girlfriend at the time worked for this developer called Related. And she was like, they just built Hudson Yards. And I can tell you, after you just built the largest construction project in the United States, you don't get to not go to the office. This was like the peak of COVID And right there, the CEO, Jeff, was like, everyone's in the office, we just built a $30 billion office setup. So everyone's coming. So she was in the office all day, I had nothing to do. And I was like, Twitter's cool. Let me check out Twitter. Let me get on here. But I had this epiphany. And I had to go back a couple months ago, and you will not— there are no tweets available from James before 2019 anymore. Because the type of stuff now that my Twitter has become this like online persona, and like in which I have like actual connections with other professional people, and, you know, really serious people that follow me, and I can speak to you and stuff. I had to delete some of the chaos that was drunk 22-year-old James, you know, just like, like, yeah, we poppin' bottles tonight. It's so sick. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I don't even know what horrific stuff I said, but I didn't even go through it. But I just was like, you know what, I'm gonna make the assumption that anything I said before 2019 probably shouldn't be out on the internet. We're just gonna mass delete everything. And I probably lost some great stuff in there. But for everyone's sake, it was probably the right thing to do.

Well, on that note of call to action, people should definitely go back to the Wayback Machine and check out old James. But thanks again for doing this, man.

Yeah, great. Actually, Wayback Machine is one of my favorite things in the world. I love archive.org, baby. I love Wayback Machine. I really hope that stuff is not indexed. I really, really hope that stuff is not indexed.

Awesome, man. Well, thanks for doing this.

Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. It's been fun.

Cool.

Talk to you.

Cool.