Weirdly Brilliant Businesses You Can Copy in 2026

I want to show you the perfect landing page, the best landing page I have ever seen, the greatest marketing landing page of all time. I want you to go to www.suckmyguttersclean.com. Sam, today I have 3 businesses that I would say are so simple, you're kind of going to be mad at yourself you didn't think of them.

Okay.

You're going to be upset. You're like, it just, that's it. And it's like, yes, that's it. Uh, these are all blue collar. Uh, in fact, I'm bringing back some of our old favorite segments, the blue collar side hustle of the week. I want to show you the perfect landing page, the perfect landing page, the best landing page I have ever seen, the greatest marketing landing page of all time. I want you to go to www.suckmyguttersclean.com.

We suck gutters clean. 1,569 reviews averaging 4.9 stars. Suck my gutters. This is just ridiculous. Okay.

By the way, I'm not joking. This is actually the best landing page I've ever seen. So a guy was driving, shout out to Cody on Twitter. Cody DMs me, he goes, hey, I saw this truck driving by, uh, and it was like, it was a great truck and they had this domain. I went there and I'm blown away by this landing page. I just kinda wanna show you some of the things. So, Here's some things that this, this landing page gets right. I'm just gonna take you on a, a tour, a deconstruction of this landing page. So you land and it tells you exactly what they do. They suck gutters clean. Then it provides the most important thing in any sales pitch, the proof. So they say 1,500 reviews averaging 4.9 stars. Then they give you the call to action so you can click to call, you can click to email. Now you scroll down, you get Wednesday's coupon.

What?

It's every single day. They change the coupon. It's linked to the day, and they basically say, hey, this is Wednesday's coupon. By the way, it's always $20 off, but they make it feel like this is a today-only special. Then there's— then it just says, gutter sucking pictures. Our guys are out there sucking gutters every day. For us, it's normal to vacuum gutters 10 feet, 20 feet, even 40 feet high. Here's some pictures of us sucking gutters, and there's a bunch of pictures from the field. Then it says, here's the two Wednesday coupons. You just click them, and you know, the first one is if you call before 6 PM, The second one is if you do it over the phone, you get a free quote. We'd love to suck your gutters clean. And then it basically says, so it says it's a painless process. It's— we have bookings available within 24 hours. It's quick, it's easy. We've done— we do this a lot, over 6,000 times a year. Then it says, so who will you talk to when you call? And it's a photo of this guy and it just says, Robert answers 90% of our calls. He's been with us for 7 years. It's awesome. You know, he'll give you, uh, answers, results, and customer satisfaction. And then it basically talks about how experienced they are and their promise, how it's risk-free, it's damage-free, it's death-free, et cetera. It's more pictures from the field. There's reviews. If you go to the about page, it just continues. Every single part of this landing page is perfect. There's a little video playing in the bottom left that says meet the owner. And it's kind of like a little TikTok video where you can see like, you know, the service in action. It makes it feel real. If you want to get in touch with these guys, they're like, here's a phone number. You can email us. You could also just text us. Well, however you want to get your gutters sucked clean, we got you. And then it just continues on. There's a, there's a section about price and it's like, look, we're not the lowest price. If you pick somebody who's going to give you the lowest price, here's what comes with that service. Here's a couple of those problems, but we will suck your gutters clean. If you don't remember, that's what we do. And, uh, you know, here's why you should choose us. And these guys, I just calculated just some rough numbers on their, their website. They basically say they do about 6,000 of these a year. They're in North Carolina, they're in Georgia. And, uh, if you just do the math on kind of the average job, which is let's say $250, $300 for a home in, in Georgia, this would be like $1.5 million, $2 million a year business. And it's just this guy who runs it. Dude, it's kind of amazing.

This is the, the greatest. I think if you click the about page, they list their, their staff and they're, they say, they're like, uh, Matt F, a Georgia native, a loving husband, hardworking guy. Tall, great at basketball, looks a lot like Jim from The Office.

Exactly. This guy's like a copywriting whiz, like a marketing whiz who just happens to be doing gutter cleaning. You know, the guy Garrett, who's the owner— shout out to Garrett for making the best marketing website I've ever seen.

Did I call this? He's from Utah.

He's, he's from Utah. Exactly, you knew it. Uh, then he's like, I married a Georgia peach, moved out there, I like warm weather, blah blah blah. Um, every single Pixel on this page, I love, just love.

Oh my gosh. This is awesome. How'd you find this?

Uh, Cody DM'd it to me on Twitter. He's like, hey, check this website out. It's great.

Who's Cody?

Uh, some guy on Twitter that I don't know.

Is this what happens? This is how you get your ideas.

Some guy like, my next idea also came from a random person DMing it to me.

Who? All right. So Sean Hendricks, shout out to him.

We know Sean from, uh, from Hoop Group. DM me this thing about— this is the hillbilly of the week. We have our Billy of the Week, which is about a billionaire doing world-conquering things. And then there's the hillbilly of the week who just takes kind of the dumbest idea you can imagine and makes it successful. Sam, you may have heard of this. I don't know why. Have you ever heard of Billy Bob's Teeth?

Oh, of course I know this. The fake teeth. Everyone knows this.

Basically, this guy who has got— he's got such a crazy backstory that it's either a lie and he's playing a character like Borat, or this guy genuinely had one of the craziest lives you'll ever hear. And, uh, I, I almost feel embarrassed to say what he said because I think there's like a greater than 50% chance he's just making this up for effect. But, uh, you know, according to him, he grew up like with no— not just no money, no like power, no electricity. They, you know, they lived on a school bus with 30 sheep. They used to eat roadkill off the road. That was their only meat. Like, just crazy things. He lived in a cave at one point as an adult and brainstormed the idea for Billy Bob's Teeth when he was in a cave and was like, what's a product I can sell? Low price thing I can sell it over the, in the mail that would, uh, you know, just be fun. And then he came up with this idea and he sold 20 million sets of these teeth.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

Is this— what's the guy's name?

Billy Bob? I don't know.

Jonah White.

Yeah, Jonah White. There's like a Bloomberg feature on him. There's a bunch of articles about this.

Dude, this is so funny. I Googled, uh, founder.

The redneck tycoon.

I Googled the founder and the first article came up from my hometown, a St. Louis magazine. The story of how Jonah White made millions of dollars selling novelty fake teeth. It says the story is nearly as bizarre as the product.

Exactly. The story is crazy.

This article that I sent you, it's a Q&A, and the first question: so your mom's Jewish and your dad was a Native American named Five Bears, and they met in jail after a political protest. Is that true? And his— it is. Like, isn't that awesome?

Exactly. Every answer in that— in that interview, every single answer is more ridiculous than the one before it. So again, either this is the most interesting man in the world or he's lying. And like religion, I choose to believe here.

he looks great. All right. There's a photo of him, like, giving the teeth to Miley Cyrus. All right. That's cool.

So I'm just going to read you a little bit about this product. So the very first thing that stood out is he goes, you know, you know how great marketers reframe what they're doing? Like, they can be doing something that seems totally silly and meaningless, but they find, like, a deeper meaning in the thing. He did that with his teeth. They're like, so you just sell these, like, fake plastic teeth and, you know, you make a bunch of money off this? Like, is that what you're doing? He goes, No, I'm giving people permission. He goes, my teeth are a permission slip. People want to be silly, they want to be playful, they want to be fun. They don't know how to do that just normal day to day. But as soon as you pop in the teeth, you kind of have to be silly. You kind of have to be playful. You kind of have to be fun. I give you permission to be that version of yourself. And I was like, honestly, I can't deny the logic. The logic's there. And suddenly this, like, stupid gag gift, this cheap plastic stuff from China that he's like, you know, marking up and selling. Suddenly is like about making the world a better place. And I totally buy it. I'm with you. I'm with you, Billy Bob.

When I hear stories like that, I almost always buy into them. Like, they always work.

They always work on me. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. I think that's, you know, we had Jesse Cole from Savannah Bananas on the pod the other day, and his whole life is that story. And I left that podcast thinking, I'm going to quit doing what I'm doing and intern for you.

Yeah, he, he was that reality distortion field. Like, oh my God, he makes you think there's nothing more important than doing what he's doing right now, than playing banana ball out on the field, you know what I mean? Or popping in ugly teeth. Not even, not even good-looking teeth, right? That's like the irony of this whole thing is like the logic would tell you it's about making people look better. And then if you just, well, what's the opposite? What if I made them look absolutely ridiculous? What if I made them look silly? And it turns out there's obviously a market for the opposite.

That's great. All right. So a lot of people watch and listen to this show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. And really a lot of people who are listening, they have a full-time job and they want to start something on the side, a side hustle. Now, a lot of people message Sean and I and they say, all right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea? And again, what they're really just saying is just give me the ideas. Well, my friends, You're in luck. So my old company, The Hustle, they put together 100 different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through 'em. They're awesome. And it gives you how to start 'em, how to grow 'em, things like that. Gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's in the description below. You'll see the link, click it, check it out. Let me know in the comments what you think.

Okay, my third one. Check out this guy on Twitter. So Ben told me about this guy. Ben went to an event last year called Capital Camp, and he goes, I met this guy named Cole, and Cole is doing a roofing company. He's a— he franchised like a roofing company, but he's doing something interesting. So I guess when he met him, he was like, you know what, I'm going to go all in on video content. And he kind of is trying to do the MrBeast for roofing. And so if you look at his like YouTube channel, he just posted a video that has, uh, 400,000 views on it. And that video is basically of this guy who lost, you know, his roof got damaged and he couldn't afford a new roof. And so these guys go and they gave him a free roof. And so the video is just telling this like feel-good story of surprising a guy with a free roof. And he's like, no, no, get down there. I don't have money to pay for this. I can't pay for this. And they're like, it's on us, man. Don't worry. Your neighbor said great things about you. Like, we just wanted to do this for you. So he stole the page, you know, two things you would never really like think together, right? Like this kind of MrBeast-style content with local house roofing. And he put the two together and it's kind of interesting, right? And he's basically like, I'm going to make content, um, that will grow, you know, top of funnel awareness of my brand. Again, like sort of a very like blue-collar marketing hustle here. And at first I thought it was a little crazy because I was like, man, going viral on the internet is so hard. And you're only local. So like, is this really the best use of time and energy? And then Ben goes, I think he's just doing it to make it more fun and interesting for himself. And I go, oh, okay, this totally makes sense. Like, how do you get yourself excited about what you're doing? And sometimes, like, again, doing the irrational can be the most rational thing you do. And in this case, he's actually pulling it off where he's generating a lot of interest around one format. This mom was struggling to buy groceries, so we gave her a free roof. Free roof. She paid for the roof, but then we surprised her and made it free. He had no idea, but we gave him a free roof and fixed his car. Right? Just going to these kind of rundown areas where people are struggling and then helping them out with a feel-good video and using that to grow his roofing business. And I thought that was kind of, kind of cool.

Is it working? Uh, like, is it growing his business?

I don't know. I haven't messaged him. Uh, but I, I mean, I imagine it is. I think it has to. Yeah, it has to, right? Like, the irony is I think most roofers actually like kind of have their hands full with demand and actually the supply that, that can be, you know, it becomes quickly a supply-constrained business, not a demand-constrained business. I think if he was building a national brand, I would be all in on this. I'd be like, this is genius. And maybe he has a national roofing brand. If he's a local franchisee of somebody else's brand, I think it's a little more challenging. And so I really hope that what he's going to do— the bet, the bet that he could and should make is to try to create a national brand. I think we had somebody on here talking about Pink's Cleaners and like this kind of renaissance of cool blue-collar franchises. So like cool branding, cool merch. It looks almost like a fashion brand. It's like appealing to, you know, the sort of the Gen Z, millennial audience. And you basically use social media in a way that all the mom-and-pop, uh, or even the old-school national vendors just don't know how to do. And you can create a really powerful franchise brand. If he did that, I would be like, this is genius. I mean, that's a, that's a multi-hundred million dollar play.

Okay. If I'm looking at this guy, he looks like he's in his 30s. So he grew up with the internet. It looks like, you know, he's probably hip enough to sort of understand how YouTube works, but that's, there's still a gap between like being an internet native and understanding actually how things go viral. Do you think that he figured this out on him, by himself? And what type of team do you think he has?

You're asking me questions I do not know the answer to, but I could speculate. You know, just if you look at his Twitter, it says, just had our second long-form video break 100,000 views. And this was, this was, you know, a few days ago, right? This is November.

But he has shorts. I looked it up. It looks like he's been doing shorts for a while. Then he went long. Like, I think the move is you start shorts and you like get momentum and then you go to long because You like with our podcast, there's been times, well, we'll say something in minute 40 or 50 or 60 and people on the street will come up to me and they'll like reference that. And I'm like, I can't believe you listen to that like as much as you have. And then if we had to like measure the value that you and I can capture for our own companies versus the audience size, I have to imagine that it's the ratio is really good of listenership to value you can capture because you spend so much time listening to us. The trust. Yeah. Yeah. If someone, and usually trust is equal to like time spent listening, which is like quantity of content times length.

Yeah. And you can't fake it, right? This podcast is not scripted. It's, you know, this is actually us improvised talking unedited, and we've been doing it for years. And so at this point you either think we're an idiot, you know, we think, you think we're bad guys and we're dumb. You think we're smart, you think we're somewhere in between. You have a very, you, you have all the information you need to. To come to an opinion about us, right? Uh, you know, outside of actually like meeting us and being our friend, like this is the closest approximation you can get. And so I think trust builds really fast in a medium like podcasting or especially video podcasting.

Long or, or, or long videos.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you need length. The problem is, is that that's hard to do. Like you, you kind of got to feel it out a little bit and it takes forever to make these things. In this case with this podcast, we've done 700 episodes and so we're kind of good at it. But, uh, with this guy, it looks like he started with short, and I think that's the move, because that's what we're doing with Hanta a little bit. I'm trying to— I'm like relearning content. And you start short, you see what works, you see what hits, you go to long. But the second thing that I think this guy's doing that really helps is when you have a team, a staff, um, you know, you want to like create a culture of excellence or whatever values you have. A lot of times it's easier to create content for your audience, and a byproduct of that is that your company starts, A, you recruit people who like know your content and they know what you're about. And B, your current staff gets influenced by it and they really start buying into it. And so I think that like creating content like this, it's gonna blow up his business, but it's a, it's a huge net positive for helping his company's culture.

Totally. And it's also helping his business grow, right? Like, uh, I, um, there's this barber who, uh, I go to to get, get my haircut sometimes. He's, you know, nearby where I live, and he listens to the podcast. And so he was like, hey, man, like, you know, he's basically got me captive in a chair. He's got my hair for an hour, right? So he's like, can I ask you some questions?

I'm like, all right, shoot, go for it.

So he's like, you know, this haircut becomes like a 3-hour haircut, right? Like, we're just like talking. And he's a great dude. He's got this amazing story. This guy, Siwa. So he, I think he like started cutting hair, like, just on the side, you know, basically couldn't afford a haircut, taught himself how to cut hair for himself, maybe friends, siblings. COVID happened, that sort of thing. So he's like 16, 17 years old. He starts learning how to cut hair. Okay. So then he goes and he ends up getting a job.

It's a barbershop.

And the guy who owns the shop, I don't know if you know how barbershops work, but basically it's a, it's a mini landlord model. So they, the barbershop owner just has chairs. That's their, those are their units for rent. And then barbers basically rent the chair for the day and they pay, you know, sometimes a cut of the revenue or profits and sometimes just a flat fixed fee and they keep whatever they make on top of it. And so the guy kind of noticed like, hey, this kid's hustling. And he was like, you know, I want to open a second location. I want to open it with you. So, so this guy, I don't know how old he is exactly. He's like something like 19, 20 years old now. And he's part owner of this barbershop. And he's like, dude, I feel like I got this really great opportunity because I'm like a part owner of this thing. But I'm, I mean, I'm just new to business. Like, I don't know what to do. And so I told him, I was like, look, what you really want to do is two things. One, you want to learn like one core money-making skill that will serve you whether you're in this, in this barbershop or any barbershop after this. I was like, so instead of spending— right now you probably spend 100% of your time just fulfilling the service, the thing you know how to do, like just doing the haircuts. And that could keep you busy. But here's what you're going to do. You're going to like basically reduce your income on the— as a barber by 20%. So you need to like cancel your last 2 appointments of the day or your first 2 appointments of the day. You need to give yourself like a 90-minute to 120-minute block and you need to go figure out how this owner drives customers to the store. What is the digital marketing he's doing, whether it's Yelp, Google Ads, whatever else it is. And you need to spend 2 hours a day just understanding and studying digital marketing specifically for local businesses. Whether— and then whether that just helps grow this business, whether you open up a second location and you know how to do that now, you can own it by yourself, or you decide to do something else altogether besides haircutting. Like, you've now built like a core money-making skill, which is like online advertising. That's the first thing you're gonna do. I go, the second thing you do is there's gonna— all these areas you're green to, right? You never owned a business before. You don't know how to read a P&L. You don't know how to do the digital marketing. There's all these things you don't know how to do, and it's pretty easy to like just kind of get in a pit of despair about like how much you don't know, but what is it that you know that most barbers don't know? And he's like, well, I'm good at like, like, I don't know, like, I don't really know what that would be. And we started brainstorming. It's like, well, you're on Instagram, you grew up with Instagram basically, and you get, you get it and you're actually good at making content. And he's like, yeah, actually I have these videos that kind of go viral. That's where I get most of my personal clients from is just these videos I post. I was like, all right, beautiful. You are going to become the best at content. For this? And I said, you know, study these other guys. Like, there's these guys who are doing these, this content format where they're like, we're two college students who graduated, turned down job offers, and we're building, you know, a bar or something. We're building a bar. We're taking this bowling alley and we're rehabbing the bowling alley. We bought this abandoned Blockbuster and we're turning it into a barber shop. Um, you know, I— there's the guys who, who, uh, friends of the pods, they, they, they're doing this one with the luxury Airbnb in Virginia. They're like, we're building the, we're trying to build the best Airbnb in Virginia and we just bought a piece of land and we're going to bring you with us every step of the way over the next 2 years as we build this thing. And they already are like pre-booked out because their videos get hundreds of thousands of views and people support them and they want them to succeed. And so they're like, they've solved their demand problem through content. So I told him, I was like, dude, you got to do that with this barbershop. And like, you need to carve out time to do this because this is, this is like how you can escape the treadmill that normally exists with working your way up, right? You can take an elevator if you just go look for it, you push the button. And an elevator, what this guy's doing is like, get good at content. Because if you get good at content, you break out of what was otherwise your constraints, your limits.

Give him a shout out. What's his handle?

His handle on Instagram is Siua, which is S-I-U-A. Cuts, C-U-T-Z. Uh, we'll put it in the description here. See what cuts— go get this guy a follow and let's— and just encourage this guy to get some content. I mean, he's got a kind of amazing story, like just personal life-wise. I didn't go into it, but like where this guy came from and like kind of hustling and trying to make stuff happen. Like he did not have any advantages, you know, people are like, oh, you got to check your privilege. It's like this guy, this guy needed to go, go to the library and get some privilege. He needed some more privilege. Like he was in a— he, he basically is like really grinding his way up. And you know, I really want to—

He's got a great head of hair too. Great head of hair. Did you hear this interview with Ari Emanuel from Invest Like the Best?

I didn't actually watch it yet. No, I saw some clips.

Let me give you guys a little background. So Patrick O'Shaughnessy, I've met him a couple of times. He's an amazing guy. He's got this awesome podcast called Invest Like the Best. It's been blowing up. He's been doing it for years, but lately his guests have been amazing. The guest he had recently was Ari Emanuel. So for those of you who don't know, we've talked about him a bunch, but I'll try to give a background. The easiest way I can describe it is Ari Gold from Entourage. That was based off of Ari Emanuel. If you don't watch Entourage, he's a power player. He started out as an agent in Hollywood. He worked his way up to starting his own agency. And at this point he owns— is it called Endeavor or IMG? They're two of the same companies. It's called Endeavor, but they own everything. So at this point they own UFC, they own the bull riding PBR, they own WWE, they own movies, they just everything. The guy's a, the guy's a player. And he recently took the company private at like a $40 billion valuation. Now, the thing that makes him special is a few things. One, his brother is Rahm Emanuel. I think it's Rahm or Rahm. He was the mayor of Chicago and he hinted that in the podcast that he's going to be running for president. And then his other brother is Zeke, who's like one of the most famous cardiologists on earth who like did like helped invent like the artificial heart replacement or something like, you know, like crazy like that. So just like crazy family. Now the podcast is great because Ari is a 10 outta 10 energy when it comes to business. But he had like 1 or 2 lines that I wanted to read to you. Listen to this quote. He was talking about buying live event businesses. He said, Ari said, I don't know how to build a data center. I'm not in the chip business. I just know how to create really great live events, how to monetize them, and I know how to make a great user experience. He goes, I'm taking the opposite of an AI bet. He goes, the opposite of an AI bet, it's not building business center. The opposite of an AI bet is building live events. Live is gonna last forever. It's not gonna go outta style. And so he talked about, uh, the ingredients that go into a great live event. And he talked about all the businesses that he's recently bought. And what I didn't realize was that Endeavor, which is this massive conglomerate, They own dozens of event businesses, and I want to talk about like 2 or 3 that they own that I had no idea about. So the first one, have you heard of Frieze? You've definitely never heard of this. I don't even know why I asked that. Okay. Frieze. Uh, F-R-I-E-Z-E. Yeah. Frieze. So Frieze started in 1991, I believe, and it was a monthly magazine on art. Like, I guess I'm not into art, so it's kind of like the blind leading the blind on this one. But I guess like cool paintings that people like and like the latest happenings in the buying and selling of art. Well, they eventually launched two art festivals where you can go and like look at art and like buy, buy a bunch of it. And Ari was like, we bought that business for $200 million. And Patrick O'Shaughnessy was like, well, why did you do that? He's like, because they only had an LA event and a New York event. And Patrick's like, what do you mean? He's like, well, we're just going to do the same thing, but in Dubai, in Miami, here. Like, he's like, all we, all we're going to do is do the exact same thing but more. And he goes, we know how to monetize them. And when I ran, um, my first event, it was called HustleCon. I think we had 1,500 people come, let's say in year 3 or 2, and I only made $30,000 in sponsorship. I hired a good sales team. The sponsorship 10x'd. It went from $30,000 to $300,000. Nothing changed. Same amount of people, the same people, the same venue. Nothing changed. Just, just better operations. And Ari was like, look, I know how to make money off events. We do this, we do this, we do this. And what he said was, he was like, we have, lectures go happening around the event. The events, we know how to monetize. We know how to get Dubai to pay us 10 years worth of, uh, cash in order to host an event there. And we're gonna do that with 20 different cities. And he broke it down. It was very, very, very fascinating.

This positioning is pretty genius, right? Because you basically either wanna say we are an AI-enabled company, like the AI, AI's gonna help us explode. Or if you just, if you're just not AI, that's not that interesting, right? Or you say we also win with AI because AI is going to destroy all this other stuff and it's going to make live even more valuable, right? And so he's somehow using the AI tailwind as a narrative for his own business. And by the way, I don't— I'm not saying narrative as if it's false. I just think like it's smart narrative to be true. It's smart to position it that way, to investors, right? So I think that's, that's one thing. This rollup that they've done with Endeavor is pretty wild. I think this was my, uh, we did an episode a year ago called Stockapalooza where both me and Sam, we played pretend Warren Buffett and we both picked a stock. My pick was TKO, which is the public part of Endeavor.

It's really complicated how they, how they have it all set up.

Yeah, it's very complicated because Endeavor is private, I think, but TKO is public, which is their, just their fighting and entertainment side of that. And if I look, let's see what it is. So one-year stock chart, TKO, it's up 40%. So that's performed like, you know, really well. You know, that was sort of— that bet was correct in that sense. And I think it's because the same thing, like what's scarce, what's scarce is what's valuable. And in an AI world, what will become really, really scarce is live human entertainment, right? A place for humans to go to have a human experience with other human beings. That thrills them, that is away from, away from the keyboard, but still generates content that does really well on social media and, and benefits from social media at the same time. And I think, you know, uh, their brands have done a very good job of doing that.

I was listening to, um, Tom Haverford from Parks and Rec. Uh, what was it? What's the, uh, really great, uh, Aziz Ansari. He was on Theo Von's podcast and he was talking about how he was like, I went quiet for a minute while I was writing and then I went back on tour, but it was like a 6 or 7 year, uh, difference. He's like, now it's so much harder to find venues because everyone's on tour. He was like, podcasters go on tour, authors go on tours, just like an interesting professor, like talks are like, there's all different types of experiences. You know, your buddy Hasan Minhaj, he's a comedian, but his show is not really a comedy show. If I, if I understand correctly, it's like performance. It's far greater than that. Right. And so like, he was like, there's just so many shows now and people can't get enough of it. All right, so the second business, um, have you heard of Barrett-Jackson?

Barrett-Jackson sounds like a kid I went to college with. All right, good old Duke, dude.

If you are in the Midwest and you have a dad who's 65 years old, this is actually the time of year where you're going to experience it. You're at home. My dad would do this all the time, 24 hours a day during this time of year. Barrett-Jackson was on the TV. Barrett-Jackson is a car auction that happens, I think, in Arizona. It was owned by, I think, two guys. One was Barrett, one was Jackson. and they auction off cool cars, mostly old stuff, um, from the '60s, uh, and '70s. Um, but they turned it into a TV show and it's basically running, I'm not joking, if you look at the programming, it's gotta be 24 hours a day, like on a handful of channels. And this company, for one, it's awesome. Like if you read about the guy who owns it, I think his name's Tom Barrett. He's kind of a badass. He's, you'd have to be pretty cool to start a car auction website. And he sold the company to Endeavor for $300 million. And Ari was like talking about how this has been exploding and more and more people are coming to the auctions.

So what are you watching? You're watching the actual auction take place. So a car is revealed and then people are paddles up bidding. Is that what's going on?

Yeah, but they have like 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 people. They're just thousands and thousands of people and they have different warehouses at any point and there's going to be a theme. So like this one's going to be like famous cars from old TV shows or it's going to be like American hot rods or it's going to be like European 1930s. And the programming switches from warehouse to warehouse to warehouse. And you're like, oh cool, the, uh, old motorcycles are coming up. Like, that's gonna be awesome. Let's watch that one. And you're watching it and each bid is probably 5, maybe 5 minutes long. And you're like, oh my gosh, this one might sell for $60,000. Oh my God, it's gonna be $80,000. This is gonna sell for $80,000. And they show the person bidding and you're like, I wonder what he does. Like, what's his name? Let's Google him. Like, and so it becomes like an event where you're like guessing what it's gonna sell for. And then the announcers on TV are telling you the background of the thing. Like, this car was built here. It's special for this reason. This one is in particularly good Because it was stored in Florida and Florida's the best for storing cool cars because, you know, like it like tells you the cool story. So Ari bought this business. I didn't know he bought it, but he bought it for $250 million. Pretty cool, right?

This is great. Do they, um, I feel like something like this could explode. You know how some sports are basically producing like the journey of content? Like F1 famously did this. It's like, how do we get more people interested in F1? It's like kind of hard to like, just get into as a new fan. But they created the F1 show, and that like made it feel accessible to get into it. And, you know, we're both UFC fans. One of the reasons I'm a UFC fan is because they used to have this show, um, that was like a reality show basically about these fighters leading up, you know, Tough is the name of it. And it's basically these amateur guys coming from, you know, just like one guy's a mechanic right now and the other guy's homeless, but he's they both have this dream of being a fighter, and then they go through this reality competition, and one of them gets a contract. And there's this big— and then, but they fight the last— the finale is part of the actual UFC card. And so that was the first time I ever watched a UFC card, was for the finale of this reality show. And so I feel like something like this, you know, it's these closed-off worlds that have high passion. And if they just build an on-ramp, which is like, find the right kind of like human interest show that would get me, get me to, you know, start going down the rabbit hole with this stuff. I feel like these things could explode if they get that right. And I mean, by the way, I think you see this now with, um, any company too, right? Like companies used to do content marketing just saying like, let me tell you about our product and the case studies and here's what's going well with it. Then it got to like, here's, um, kind of some work in public type stuff. We're going to post our numbers or blog about what's going on. And now basically, like, it feels like a lot of these B2B businesses are basically just building reality TV channels along the way. They're like, oh, we're going to have a YouTube channel that's showing you— hey, Barstool did this amazingly well, right? Like, Barstool's content was just as much about what was going on inside Barstool as it was what's going on in the games.

And I think that's just table stakes.

This is table stakes from now on, which is crazy because that's so hard to do. It's crazy that that's table stakes. I don't, I don't, I don't even think it's table stakes, but I do think those who pull it off get handsomely rewarded. And I just, but it's so hard to do that well.

And I just think it's sort of like, who was the second person to walk on the moon? Do you know?

Was Buzz Aldrin?

I don't know. Fuck. I don't know. No one knows. Who's the second person who broke 4 in the mile? You know what I mean? Like who, who, who was after Columbus? It just doesn't matter. The difference between first and second place is the difference between who got second place when Usain Bolt won the gold medal. Uh, like the difference between who does this well and who doesn't do it well is like, yeah, you're still like, you ran really fast and you got second place and you broke 4 in the mile. But like, come on. Like Roger Bannister is Roger Bannister. Like number one's number one for a reason. And so I think the difference between first place and second place when, when it comes to doing content well, it's not one place, it's like 1,000x in the results.

I did a, so every morning I write, I do like a 2-hour writing block for my book. And, um, I could write about whatever I feel like. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be on topic. I just have to write. And so I wrote one today that's called, um, Nobody Wants to Be Samsung. And I wrote, um, everybody knows Apple. Everybody knows Steve Jobs. We all love Apple. We all love Steve Jobs. We admire him. And, uh, Sam, who, who's the founder of Samsung? Is it Samsung? Who is it? Right? Who's the CEO?

Samsung. Yeah, I don't know.

It's like, here's a company that's got, I don't know, 22% market share of the global cell phone market, makes billions of dollars, successful. But there's a difference between successful and loved and admired, right? And it's like, we all want love and admiration. And it's like, nobody wants to be Samsung in this situation. And same thing, I use the Usain Bolt example. It's like, I think some crazy, like 500 million people watched Usain Bolt and the Beijing Olympics, like, break that record. It's like 500 million humans were tuned in with 10 seconds where you did not look away, and nobody could tell you who got second.

And the difference between first place and second place was 0.2, I believe.

Exactly.

I remember that race.

It's actually, it's infinite fame and, like, respect and complete obscurity and working at Wendy's. Like, that's, that's the result gap of that 0.2, right? And so, like, there's those disproportionate rewards for being insanely great. That you just don't get for merely being good or even great.

And I think that's content is one of the reasons. I mean, and I don't know if content's the right word or if story is the right word. I mean, Steve Jobs had stories. I mean, he was magnetic. He had charisma. Have you ever looked at old photos of him when he was like in his 30s, when he was dressed in like tuxedos and shit? Like, he just looked awesome. He was so—

the handkerchief and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

He just looked great.

Naval has a great quote on this, by the way. He says, the internet democratizes consumption and consolidates production. Meaning, um, the internet gives everybody access, like a, you know, a 5-year-old that's got a little, like, you know, half on the internet iPad has access to more information than, you know, kings of prior times, right? So like, everybody's got the same access to the same information now. So that democratized the information side, but it consolidated the production. Like, I don't know how old your kids are, if you let them watch screen time or if you're a good parent, but like, if you know who the— if you know who Miss Rachel is, she's basically like the world's preschool teacher. It's like, oh, she's the best at doing kind of preschool-ish stuff. So all of our kids go to her, right? And then there's like, you know, all of the, you know, the winners of whether it's music or TV or art, it's like all the rewards get consolidated into the best producers. but then they get distributed to everybody else. And that's kind of like the internet created that dynamic, which is pretty cool.

Dude, my kid goes to like in Central Park, this like singing class with this lady that's like a Miss Rachel knockoff. Like she wears the suspenders and for some reason she went down to my little girl and was like, you're so cute. And then she said like a, you know, isn't it crazy? You never know who you're gonna meet. Like I have Miss Rachel's phone number in my cell phone. Isn't that nuts?

She told you that?

No, my kid, that I was like, does your kid even speak? No, I was like, did I name dropping to a toddler? Yeah. I was like looking at my daddy. I'm like, did you just hear her name drop that she has a Miss Rachel? And she even said she talked to her. She goes, I have her cell phone number. Unprompted. And then, and then further she was singing and she was like, well, if I knew how to copyright my music like Miss Rachel, then I'd be rich too. Like, like she was like, I was like, I was like, Miss Katie, are you, are you like angry at Miss Rachel? What's going on? Are you working through something still?

Like the next season of You, like, hey, am I allowed to file a restraining order on behalf of somebody else?

Yeah, it was nuts. It was very, very crazy. My point bringing up with all this Endeavor stuff, I made a mistake. So I used to own an events company and I hated it. I was like, this is stupid. Boy, I was really, I was really dumb. Uh, because I think that if I, okay, so if you're like a 28-year-old, like operator type, meaning you're like type A, you're incredibly well organized, you are perfectionist, but you're not creative. What I would do is I would go out and find a niche that I like. So for example, if it was clothing, you would find fashion influencers. If it was, um, like fitness, you would go find like a runner. And then I would build events. So a running event or a flea market or something like that for some of these people. And I think that the demand is greater than it's ever been. I think you could just absolutely knock it out the park. It was going to be hard, but I think it could be very rewarding because when I hear Ari talk about these events— so we just had Jesse Cole from Savannah Bananas. He's running an events business. I think it's just so much greater than I ever realized.

Yeah. Do you remember when all those emails leaked? I think speaking of— was it Samsung? I don't know who— somebody got hacked.

I think it was Sony.

It was Sony. Sony. It was the Sony hack.

Exactly.

Somebody was on a flight and they just go, hey, hey, Amy, a couple of random thoughts from 35,000 feet going from LAX to JFK. Such a, such a LA way to start an email. A rising trend we're seeing with millennials is really extreme forms of experiential exercise like Tough Mudder. It's sort of a filthy triathlon or the Color Run. Even things like hot power yoga, veganism. Millennials want something to post with a sort of no big, no big deal vibe on their social media, as in no big deal. Humble brag. I'm wondering—

I'm—

and they were talking about promoting Spider-Man. They're like, I wonder if we could do something with the new Spider-Man movie to promote some sort of weird extreme, uh, thing. And then it was talking about— he's like, he's like, also, uh, EDM is growing really fast. It's the defining music for millennials. I wonder if there's an EDM angle.

Dude, this is like a— like one of those viral things where it's like when your boss who makes a whole lot more money than you asks you how like X, Y, and Z works, where it's like this person earns $3 million a year, she's like Just, uh, do it EDM.

Yeah. Uh, but, but there was another one I forgot, but it was basically like they were explaining like out-of-home entertainment is going to explode and here's why. And basically it was the combination of people, um, are spending so much time online, it's going to create a craving for offline. So that's number one, like the offline craving will grow. And two, offline is just a scenery. It's just a landscape. To create humblebrag content that they want to post back online. And so if you can create something like a Tough Mudder, like a music festival, like, uh, like a Savannah Bananas, like, how do you, how does the 22-year-old say they're cool, hot, and have friends? How does the 34-year-old mom show that she's a good mom? How does this person show that they're a good ex? And you can almost work backwards from that and create something. Like, we've talked about Museum of Ice Cream as an example. All right. These are all like, they all sound different. Like, what does Museum of Ice Cream have to do with Savannah Bananas? What does that have to do with the music festival? Like, they're all the same thing. It's basically a place you go where you have, you have an out-of-home, you know, offline experience that creates incredible social media content for you that says something about you that you want to portray to the rest of the world, that you're tough, that you're cool, that you're fun, that you're hot, that you're whatever.

All right. Let me tell you one more thing. All right. I want to tell you. Okay, so we've talked about on this podcast the importance of marketing and like you'll see one or two lines and you can use those lines to start a movement or to make it really easy to sell an idea. And just so happens that your product is related to that idea.

Okay.

I saw one of those the other day. So listen to this. So I have 6 bullet points. I read the study, but I just want to like bullet point for this show. So a Barcelona study looked at 2,700 kids and found that noise at school slows down their cognitive development. Have you heard of this study?

No.

Okay, so they studied 2,700 kids. They basically put the kids in two identical environments. So they looked at the public school system who were teaching the same curriculum. They looked at the same grades, and they noticed that the difference between the decibels of a school, so the quiet or noisiness of the school made a drastic difference.

And so was this the one where there's a train outside on one of the classrooms?

Yes.

Yeah, I think I did hear this. Yeah.

So listen to this. For every 5 decibel increase in traffic noise made the children's work, uh, working memory 11% slower and their complex memory, which is what you use for solving problems, one's recall, one's problem solving. So it made their complex working memory 23% slower. Then scientists looked at a meta study. So other people who looked at, uh, who did 21 other studies like this, they found a -0.46 effect size on attention, memory, and reading, meaning this is a medium to large hit on, um, a person's memory based off of noise exposure. And so the real problem they found, it wasn't like if your room has like a hum, uh, like a light humming, it was, uh, trains going by, honking outside, things like that. And it made a significant difference. We're talking a 23% difference in a child's development. And so I was thinking, I was like, huh, I should be careful with my kid. And then I was like, I should be careful with me in my office. People are interrupting me all the time. Like what? Like should I wear earplugs? Should I have earplugs? Should I have noise-canceling headphones? Is that enough? Should I pay money and insulate my office so people can't disturb me? Like, would that make me, my memory 23% better is not having like noise. And I think that this is a really cool study that you could use as the backbone, sort of like Claude Hopkins, who we talk about here, one of the best one of the greatest copywriters of all time. He made— he single-handedly made toothpaste popular in America because he like used this one quote where he says, rub your tongue over the front of your teeth. You feel that film that shouldn't be there? You need toothpaste in order to get rid of it. I think this study, it can be the basis of like launching some type of sound business.

It's great. It's a great insight. 2 hours ago, Hormozy tweeted this out. I just saw this right before the pod. Uh, he said, the best $5,000 you'll ever spend: soundproof your entire office. Make it so quiet you can hear your heartbeat. If kids next to noise pollution achieve consistently lower grades than those in quiet areas, no one is immune. Noise destroys. It sounds like he read the same study.

Yeah, I think it's going viral. So I think we all like saw the same stuff at the same time. But yeah, it was great. Yeah, we all have the same— it was, it was a very clear takeaway.

Yeah. And so I, uh, it's interesting you thought about this for, for yourself and for business. Um, I thought about this like for, uh, for study, like literally for students. So. I wonder if you could basically rebrand just headphones, but like, you know, what if you had headphones that didn't have to play any sound, right? You could make them a lot cheaper. You can make the, the, uh, the form of them totally different. And if you basically created like study ears and it's like, hey, just doing this one thing is going to make you smarter and you use TikTok to distribute these. Like, I think that's a— if you could change the form factor and then you change the positioning, which is this is not for sleeping. It's not for loud concerts. It's not for listening to music. These are things you put on your ears to make you have better memory and study better, right? Like, your 1 hour of focus is going to be, you know, whatever, twice as productive as the— as somebody who doesn't have these in. Um, as a hack, as an advantage, I think you can sell a lot of a product that already exists as a commodity. You can sort of rebrand.

Brother, studyears.com. It's available on GoDaddy for $5 right now.

Not anymore.

I think I, I comp— I like, this is one of those things that sounds ridiculous. It makes total sense to me when I think about my own behavior. I use my AirPods and I just put noise canceling on. I, a lot of times I play nothing or just white noise when I'm working and I'm in my office right now. So I have an, I'm filming this in a small office in my big office and I have a sign over here that I keep up that says don't disturb the animals because I cannot stand when I'm like trying to write and people are like coming to my door, hey Sam, can I ask you about that? I'm like, no, don't ask me about anything. Right. I got, I have, when you see these headphones in, don't talk to me.

Yeah.

Because the noise, it does bother me terribly. I think that that's a really cool idea.

I love it. All right, is that it?

I think that's it. I think that's the pod.

You didn't say that's the pod last time. And I saw that. YouTube comments were a little upset at you about that. So can you do your job?

That's my, that's the one thing I do here. That's it. That's the pod.