When to Go All In on an Idea & the Crypto Exchange That Could Have Been | My First Million #200

I think this is a good strategy. You say no to most everything. Then when you see the thing that you're like, this is it, you go 100% all in on it.

Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, we're live. You, you didn't know enough about Red Ventures to bring that up?

Uh, I talked to somebody who sold their company to Red Ventures and they were telling me about it and it was like, I was, I just made a note. I was like, fascinating. Gotta go research more. So I put it on here just to be like, I'm gonna go research more. And then you added, I know a lot in all caps. So you already know a lot, which is great.

Maybe we, we, we could talk about it later. Also, another thing that I actually forgot to add this, I was watching the UFC fight and do you remember, uh, about 4 weeks ago, maybe 2 weeks ago, we discussed this business of giving away like cars and you have to Um, I saw an ad at the bottom of the UFC fight, and I think that like one way that I find ideas is anyone who's doing brand advertising. So there's two types of, well, I guess there's many types of advertising, but there's the first type is performance, which is, uh, you click on something and I could, I could see 100% when you purchase and I could see everything about that and I could like attribute it's attribution marketing, marketing, performance marketing is what it's called. The second is brand marketing. So like billboards. Or what's another example? I don't, I don't even know.

Yeah, just TV commercials, right? You do a commercial, you don't know necessarily, and they try to measure it. But in reality, Budweiser, when they run a commercial at the Super Bowl, it's because they're trying to build awareness. They want Budweiser to be top of mind. Maybe they want to talk about their zero calorie beer. They're just trying to build awareness and they're not directly hoping that you watch that, open up your phone, buy Budweiser right that moment. That's not the way that that, that marketing is designed.

They hope that you eventually walk into the store and it influences you. This is what GEICO does. And often early stage companies, particularly tech companies who are like savvy with internet marketing, start with performance. And then when they exhaust that, then they go, all right, now like we need to like just, we just need more people in the world to know about this product. And so what I love doing is I like looking at who's doing brand advertising because not always, but often that means that they're like crushing it. Yeah.

It's like buying art. If you're buying art, you're rich. If you're buying brand ads, your company's rich.

Yes, that's a great example. And I saw, uh, UFC, they have this ad for Watch Gang and I think Watch Gang maybe sponsored an embedded episode, but then also like before one of the fights it said, this episode is brought to you by Watch Gang, getting a Rolex every month. And I was like, what is going on with that? What is that? I've never heard of Watch Gang and I know a little bit about watches, or at least I'm a fan. And so I don't want to, I, even though I am kind of bringing it up, but I don't want to get into it too much. But they were doing— I went to WatchGang.com and they were doing a contest for a Rolex, giving away Rolex.

Yeah, this— so my coworker at Twitch when I was there, he came up to me, he shows me his watch and I'm like, hey man, nice watch. He's like, I got this in this, this watch club that I'm in. So tell me more. And he tells me about Watch Gang and he's like, yeah, I found this website. I had no idea if it's a scam or not. He's like, it's crazy. This watch is like a $250 watch and I'm paying $30 a month. Like, I don't really understand. Every month they send me another watch. And I was like, okay, sounds fishy. Like, he's like, yeah, exactly. So I didn't even know if anything would come, but like, look at this, it's here. And so then I went and played with it and it's like one of these like super optimized websites. It's like you open up the website, bam, let me get your email for this thing. Oh, you don't want the email? Spin the wheel and win some more. Oh, you spun the wheel? Okay, you have 30 seconds to finish your checkout or else you're going to like, your family will be taken ransom. And so it's like, this like, and if you go to it, it's just like one hero image, and then it's like, uh, you know, the tagline basically is, uh, you know, get new watches sent right to your door. Do you keep them? You sure do. Are the watches good? No, sir, they're amazing, right? So it's like well-written copy, huge hero image. I'm like, this site prints money. And so I just made a mental note about Watch Gang at that moment. And it's like a mystery box, like you don't know which watch you're gonna get. You might get one of the like thousands of dollars watches, or you might get the like $100 watch, but you're always getting a watch of good value. And the weird thing is, who needs this many watches? I don't know, nobody needs 12 watches a year as far as I'm concerned, but maybe I'm just not the demo.

Yeah, so when I see this stuff, like, if you're in the internet long enough, which, you know, it's not that you don't need to do it that much in order to see that, when you see something like this, you're like, something is going on to where it's maybe a scam and full of it. But also, like, if you told me this made $200 million, I would be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally buy it. There's arbitrage play.

So it's the same way that, like, um, you know, most of the D2C brands, they're not like truly making the best products, but they're like, look, if we're really good at Facebook marketing, or if we're really good at affiliate marketing, or really good at whatever, influencer marketing, then we could build like MVMT Watches. They built a $100 million plus luxury watch brand in 2 years. They made it sound like an old school brand. They, you know, they partner with all these influencers. They use this It's a marketing company, not a watch company, really. And so that's what this is for sure. This is a marketing company, not a watch company. They could swap this out and do this with golf clubs. They could do this with shoes. They could do this with whatever. You could just— you could take this Watch Gang website and you could do it with sneakers right now, and I think you would do pretty well. I think there's something with— there must be something where they're getting the watches, you know, super discounted somehow. Like, these might be like out-of-style watches or refurbished or something. I don't know what they're doing, but there has to be some way that they're able to give you this watch and still make money in the something. What, I don't know if it's $30 still, or I don't know how much this—

I don't know why I saw the ad. Whenever I see people advertising on the UFC, I think, uh, they're like— there's a lot of new brands, like Manscaped advertises there, and I had heard of Manscaped, and then they advertise in the UFC. I'm like, oh, they must be monsters.

Well, you have to be okay with your logo getting covered in blood, and I think most brands just don't want that. And then the brands that were okay with that, got this big upside of a huge amount of eyeballs for a very low, uh, very low ad cost. And so early on, you know, it looked like NASCAR. Every fighter would come out and they'd have like 50 logos of like from their mom-and-pop like barbershop in their local town to like, you know, some random insurance company or, uh, you know, energy drink or whatever. And they've been trying to get it more and more mainstream, although they just announced $175 million deal with Like crypto.com or mycrypto.com. I saw that.

Is crypto.com scammy or legit? I don't know anything about it.

Well, they offer 8%, uh, return, 8% cash back. So that's how you know it's, uh, it's probably not totally, uh, uh, it's not that it's a scam. It's again, it's like these sort of hand-wavy types of things. It's like, yeah, you get our crypto card. It's a metal card. It's awesome. And then when you spend, you earn 8% in crypto bucks. It's like, wait, what's a crypto buck? That's our own currency we created. It's like, oh God, it's like you got to hold 5,000 crypto bucks and then you earn the 8%. It's like, uh, dude, do I want to go buy $5,000 of your crypto buck in order to earn the 8% here? I don't know. I don't think so.

Yeah, they, they let a lot of stuff like that and advertise with them. But, um, I want to bring up a couple topics. You have a few ideas, but you talked about this house thing. So I want to ask you about that. Uh, so I'm on vacation.

Yeah, first time since COVID we went to Vegas and I'm staying in a house, I'm staying with somebody and their house is unbelievable, dude. I am in this—

like a family member?

This is somebody I'm related to. Yes. So this is, this is a house that's, I think it's worth like probably $15 million and $15 million in San Francisco will give you a fat house. $15 million in Vegas. I'll give you what I'm in. I'm in a resort. I'm in a personal resort. Like I was walking in and I was like trying to not trip into the koi ponds along the way just to the door. Door opens up. There's a fricking, you know, from the hotel, that little, what the bellman has, that cart to take your shit to your room. They have one of those because the room is so far away from the door because they're just so big of a house. And so I use that. I get to my room. My room is like, you know, everything's magical, dude. We were eating dinner, and then all of a sudden, like a convertible, the roof retracted from over our heads. The walls disappeared. They went away. And then we all went swimming in this pool that surrounds the dining room while looking out at downtown Vegas. It's unbelievable. And the reason I say this is because I thought I knew how much money I wanted. I thought I knew what I wanted. And now that I've stayed in this house, I'd like some more money, please. That's my brutally honest feeling. My raw emotion that I have 24 hours into this house is Oh, fuck this. Okay. Yeah, I can be happy without this, but why can't I do this too? This is, this is pretty nice. I've never seen—

how much do you think you need to have to have a $15 million house? What do you think your, your, your like investable asset, like relatively liquid net worth needs to be like 60, 70?

I think 100 to be safe. 70 if you're 60, 70, if you're, uh, like 50, 60, I guess if you're, if you're just kind of like playing it, you're, you're comfortable with it being riskier, I guess. Or like if that 50, 60 that you have is not totally at risk. You could say, oh, okay, you know, I've got that cashed out. I'm going to put it in safe investments and $15 million I'll put into my house. This house was previously owned by somebody who was like kind of what their grandfather started, like Caesars or one of the casinos, two of the casinos downtown. And so it's like a billionaire family. And they sold the house to these guys and then they— and then actually the funny thing is they sold the house and then they regretted it as soon as they sold it to them. The day later they were like, hey, you know, the broker calls, broker says, My client really regrets selling that house.

Oh no.

And it was one person living here. So it was like this, it's this enormous, like, you know, 30-car garage bowling alley type of thing. I don't know if there is, I haven't even explored the whole house yet. I've only seen like one fourth of the house so far. But she called back, said, I'll give you a million dollars extra in cash just to have the house back. One day later and they turned it down.

Dude, I think that's cool. I love visiting that. In my head, I think I actually don't want that. Maybe, maybe it's because if you're wealthy enough to buy that, then you just have people who could take care of it. But when I think of owning something, uh, that expensive and that nice, I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to take care of it. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of work.

Uh, I think that's true for most things. I feel differently about a house for two reasons. One is I think a house like this makes sense when you have what they have, like tons of kids basically. So you have, you have like a full family right? They got 4 kids and it's like, this is your family's compound. It's like, this is your home base, your kids. Like, you kind of, you wouldn't really do this. I don't think if you're a bachelor, if you're a bachelor, you want to be, you know, penthouse in Manhattan or something cool like that. But this is different. This is like, it's a suburban home, right? But it's like a family compound. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is a yacht or like cars. Those are like low use, high maintenance, whereas a house is like tremendously high use, and actually quite low maintenance for most homes because they have a cleaning staff, they have people that can come take care of stuff. And yeah, there's bills. I'm not saying there's no bills. I guess what I'm saying is it's not like a car where you're worried about it getting scratched when it goes out, when you go park it anywhere or you drive it anywhere. And most of the time it's just sitting idle, unused in a garage with a tarp on top. In this case, for a house, you're constantly in it and you're constantly using it, especially if you have a big family. So I would say house is the one area where I would splurge almost every other material possession, like fancy clothes, cars, just doesn't make sense to me.

When I hear about people like this, I always— the same question pops up in my head, which is how much do they spend per month? So if you had to guess this person's total family expenses, including the house, what would you guess? I imagine you get a mortgage on it. Do you get a mortgage on a $15 million house?

Like Randy Moss said, straight cash, baby. They had to— they had to— in order to get the house, they had to like go in.

Oh my gosh. So you don't have a mortgage on the house? Normally a mortgage. I mean, I think what they do is they could finance it afterwards.

So they buy it in cash and then they'll go and they'll refinance it, basically get, they'll cash out, you know, they'll leave 30% down and then they'll take the other 70% and they'll pay, you know, some percentage. But for this, you can't even get a traditional mortgage for this.

Yeah. You get like a rich person's loan.

So they got like a hard money loan basically if they wanted to cash it out or—

Okay. So including that, let's not include that.

That's hard to include. Yeah.

Because that's even hard to calculate. I don't even know what that, I mean, that could be like 100 grand a month. I don't know what it'd be. That's a lot.

What if we just had life expenses?

Life expenses, not including the house, which is a ton.

Yeah, I would not be surprised if it was between $100,000 and $200,000 a month. That'd be my— no, I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised.

That's so much money to spend.

It could be a little less, could be $70,000. It's definitely not less than $50,000 is my guess.

I'll ask today.

I'll find out.

That's always— that's a good question. Um, just like, what's your burn?

Yeah, what's exactly— what's your burn?

That's a good question. So let me tell you really quick. And so this house, this, there's a lot next to my house that, you know, that little crappy shack that was next to my house.

Yeah.

It's for sale. I think I'm going to buy it and I'm going to build a house there and try to sell it or rent it out. And I'm excited to do this. And I'll talk about this on this podcast. I'm excited to do it because I've never done a project like this. I've never done like a physical business really. I've only done, uh, you know, digital stuff. And I think it's going to be exciting. You think it's a stupid idea or a smart idea?

No, I think it's a smart idea because it's going to like kind of change the way you look at the world a little bit. And it's right next to you. If this was like even 2 miles away, I'd be like, nah, dude, it's just a headache. When it's literally right next to you, that takes a lot of the like overhead of managing a project or even thinking about a project or researching whether there's a good or bad buy. It's like, okay, what's the worst case scenario? You're going to have a house next to the house you have. You already like this neighborhood. You already like being there. Your friends are all there. You're going to be able to like Airbnb this with low maintenance because it's right next door. You know, you'll never have to worry about it. And your friends can come crash there when it's not rented out, or you can like expand to it if you build your dream house, right? You can build your dream house right next to you, which is a fun, fun project to do for you and Sarah. And then maybe you leave your house, you go to that house if you like, build it for— it takes a year to build or whatever. So I think it's a great idea. Um, and it's not like, it's not about, it's not a financial idea in my opinion. It's a, it's a life idea. It's a, it's a fun thing to do that will probably break even or be profitable when you do it.

What I'm learning, uh, about finances is that, you know, you and I talk about investing in different stuff. You can just, just your, your average Joe has access to this as well. So this isn't like, there's just, if you just park it into a general fund, like a general index fund, life is so easy and you get almost amazing returns, like, compared to everything else. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's so easy. You don't have to think—

well, you need a big base, right? That's the problem for most people. Yes, that vehicle is available for most people, but let's say you're getting 7% a year, you put $100,000 in. Okay, cool, you made $7,000 pre-tax right now. You have $107,000. You need to let that shit compound for like 15, 20 years. And like Charlie Munger once said, when they asked him, hey, your guys' playbook seems pretty simple, why don't more people do it? He said, No one wants to get rich slow. I think that's the problem is that nobody wants to take a small base and let it compound for 20 years, or very few people do. And that's, that's the issue there.

Yeah, it is. It's boring, but it works. And then I want to bring up one quick topic. I met 3 interesting people this week. So I think people like hearing this. I enjoyed hearing this about this $15 million house. All right. I met this guy named Jason. Have you ever heard of this company called Blockworks?

Blockworks? No. Is this like a construction company?

No, it's right up your alley. It's a media— it's basically like The Hustle, like Morning Brew, like Axios, but for crypto.

Oh, okay. Nice.

I think it's blockworks.io, maybe.co, maybe. Oh, is it.co? Um, so Blockworks, it's— this guy bootstrapped it. He's only 27 years old. I went to his house last night in New York, uh, in Brooklyn. Awesome business. Probably will do 8-figure or Yeah, maybe 10, north of $10 million in revenue this year, completely bootstrapped. Started it because he used to monetize. So he was like 23 years old and he cold emailed Pomp and said, listen to this podcast I'm working on. Come to this event. Just like he was just like constantly emailing him. Pomp, who's this big Bitcoin guy, but who was less of a big Bitcoin guy years ago, said, all right, you've been emailing me too much, whatever. You're persistent. I'm thinking about launching this podcast. I need help launching it and monetizing it. Do you want to help? This kid, uh, he was a kid at the time, said yes. And then eventually launches a crypto media company called Blockworks. He launches it 3 or 4 years ago. It's only an LLC, so he completely owns it. It's not like it didn't raise any money. Really fascinating business, very simple. And he just picked the right category and now they're doing conferences. It's a slick looking website, right?

Yeah. You go to it, it looks like Bloomberg or something, you know, it looks like a proper, you know, it just looks like a template of a good news site in general. And so I think it's like the subscriber base to this, right? So like, is this done through email or is it done through direct site visits?

They make a lot of money through email and then they have podcasts.

So, so there's—

and then they have conferences. And so they have a conference that he—

for what it's worth, showing them close to half a million visits a month.

Yeah. So it's not— it's probably— that's like if you look at our traffic, thehustle.co, maybe we were 2 times that. And I know that we had 800,000 to 1 million a month.

Right. And, um, and we had talked about CoinMarketCap recently, which was, uh, probably the bigger player in this space. So CoinMarketCap sold to, uh, Binance, I think. And how much they sell for? It was like hundreds of millions, right?

Hundreds of millions. If it didn't sell for that, it's worth that.

And the shocking thing was that CoinMarketCap had like a larger, uh, monthly traffic volume than I think the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, I think it was, uh, which just shows you like the level of interest. Like when we talked, we joked about this, we was like, oh, like how do we make this podcast grow? And I was like, pivot to crypto. There's just like this insane appetite for crypto content because people get in, they think they're going to get rich. And every day there's a news cycle of like the world, the world is, you know, we're going to the moon or the world is crashing and like what's going on. And so crypto was a phenomenal, um, place to go. So I like Blockworks. I want to share one thing, but did you have something else on Blockworks you want to share? I have a topic related to Blockworks.

No, he— it's just an interesting business. I just thought it was interesting. It's just not—

how big is the team?

It, uh, look at their about page. It looks like they have 20 people on board. Um, I don't know who's full-time and who's not full-time, but— and then if you click their podcast, they have like 12 podcasts. It's like a type of company where, uh, you— it, it is sexy in that like it's a media company for crypto. I mean, that's definitely sexy, but the guy is— he's 27, but he runs it just like a small business where he just, he just slowly adds and adds and adds. And I think it's really fascinating. I think they're I think if I had a bet, and I don't have, uh, I just got to know him and I don't— we didn't even talk about this. If I had a bet, I would imagine you're going to see this company sell for in the $40 to $50 million range in the next 18 months. And I just wanted to bring it up now to call it out, uh, about like see it before it actually happens.

Right. I would take the over on that. I think it's going to sell for more if the numbers you're saying are what it is.

Just looking at it, I think, um, traditional media companies don't sell for that much if it's only I don't know what the revenue is exactly, but it's in the range of $10 million. If it all— if they only do, let's say, $9 million in revenue, that's probably only worth $25 million.

You're not putting the crypto premium, right? So that— so companies sell based on their story. And I think the story here is going to be that, hey, look, this is where— this is where financial news is going. Financial news being probably the biggest, kind of most valuable segment of the news, not biggest in terms of popularity, but most valuable per, per user, right? So the Wall Street Journal, Um, you know, it's a very valuable publication because every one of their users is interesting and interested in investing somewhere between thousands or millions of dollars. And so I think if you're crypto, if you're the crypto Bloomberg or the crypto Wall Street Journal, um, like we saw that CoinMarketCap sold for several hundreds of millions, not necessarily because their revenue was that much higher, but because a big exchange wanted to grow. And exchanges are worth, like Coinbase is worth $80 to $100 billion. So, uh, Binance similar, like these company, the exchanges are so big, they were like, great, we need a media arm. Right? This trend we've been talking about— HubSpot, oh, we want a media arm. Robinhood, we want a media arm. And so they've been buying up media companies in order to own their own media arm, which is basically cheap user acquisition for them. And so whether it's them or it's a traditional media company that will buy, I don't know. But I do think that a crypto news site is going to get whatever, whatever a normal media site would sell for. I'd put a 2.5x on it for, for crypto right now because it could be—

I wouldn't doubt it. And, and what I told him is what I would tell the audience as well, which is sell to a tech company. Don't sell to a media company. If you want to create a media company, build it in hopes of selling to a tech—

Sam's like, make a list of enterprise SaaS companies, then it's just like, sell to them and take an all-stock deal. All right, now, now you have set yourself up.

No, I'm just saying, like, do you think that a media company is going to 3x in market cap value, like, pretty quickly, or do you think that Coinbase will?

Yeah, I think you would much rather go there, right?

But yeah, I would rather own $50 million of Coinbase stock than I would have of New York Times stock.

Right, right. Another sort of related thing on this. So I was thinking back, I was doing some reflection yesterday, actually, I was thinking about crypto. And I don't know if I've told you this story. But basically, very early on, my crypto story was like this, we were at lunch at the— I was running an idea lab. So that's a good position to be in when new things happen, running an idea lab, you got a bunch of engineers and designers, you already have funding. And you're ready to take a new idea and just chase the market. So Bitcoin, I think at that time had its first kind of pop from like the $7 range to like, I don't know what it was, $20 and then $100. And it was all happening within a period of like 1 or 2 months that that first spike happened. Then it came crashing down after $100 back to like $17 or something like that. Exact numbers are wrong, but ballpark Bitcoin was very cheap back then. And our sysadmin guy Pete, who's kind of like a very early internet guy, would hang out all day at work. He'd be in the IRC channels, not Slack, and he's talking to other sysadmins at other companies and shit like that. And this guy's like, and he was always like a security, like, he was always like, ah, these big companies are tracking us. And he's the kind of guy that would use DuckDuckGo early on type of thing. And so he was in the right community for something like Bitcoin. And so he starts telling us, he's like, oh, Bitcoin. Bitcoin's amazing, dude. We're mining it. He's like mining it on our servers in the office. He's like, yeah, it's great. I love Bitcoin. And we're like, ah, here's Pete, you know, Pete, who's kind of like a, like a more of like a neckbeard archetype, right? It's like, oh, Pete's, you know, really into some something again. Great.

Yeah. So what's he worth now?

Well, I didn't take it too seriously, but I think he was more like a lot of people who were early on, they weren't putting a ton of like cash into it. They were mining it or they were like earning it for doing a job and then spending it because they were like wanted to be a part of this new economy. By the way, have you ever heard that story about Andreas Antonopoulos? Mm-mm. No. Do you know who that guy is?

No. Oh, maybe. Is he the guy who looks like— is he Greek?

He— I think he's Greek. Yeah, based on the name. But he's basically, um, he was like the Bitcoin evangelist. So he was just— when Bitcoin came out, he was going and talking everywhere, just talking.

I know who he is as a person.

Bitcoin's amazing. He wrote this Bitcoin book. It's great. And so anyways, he's given like— he's spread the gospel. He's like what you need when you have a new movement. It's like this guy was out. He was— I don't know much about the Bible, but like, you know, he wasn't Jesus, but he's like, you know, Paul or whoever, you know, taking the gospel and going and spreading it. And so he, um He'd been doing this for years and he had been earning on any money he had. He would only take in Bitcoin and then he would spend it on his rent and he would spend it on his coffee. He wanted to live in crypto and live what he was preaching, that this new financial system with real kind of like hard money, true money, uh, sound money as they say, is, is the, is the way to go. And so anyways, Bitcoin price keeps going up, up and up and people are like, oh, Andreas, you must be like a millionaire 100 times over by now.

Oh no.

And he's like, well, no, like, I was living off Bitcoin. I was spending it. Like, I was, like, I was earning it for talking at some things, but I didn't charge a ton because I just wanted to get the word out. He's like, and then when I had it, I was using it to pay rent and I have a family. And like, no, I actually, I actually didn't have a ton. But he wasn't saying it like, you know, pity me. He was just like, you know, contrary to popular belief, here's the case. And so there's this guy on, um, on Twitter, friend's name, he's like this famous guy who, he forked Bitcoin and like has his own, he owns Bitcoin.com. It's kind of like this He's not very well liked in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Roger Ver or something like that is his name. So he starts making fun of Andreas on Twitter. He's like, oh my God, the biggest Bitcoin, like, you know, like, uh, carnival barker for all these years didn't even make money when Bitcoin shot up in price to thousands of dollars per coin. Like, like, what a joke. Uh, like, like, nice one, schmuck. He starts making fun of him, and then the Bitcoin community rallied and overnight donated anonymously to his wallet and made, made Andreas a millionaire in Bitcoin overnight, um, of people, people donating money because they were like, no, I got into it because of this guy. He's getting made fun of because he didn't profit off of this. Like, fuck that. Uh, so I thought that was like a pretty cool moment, like one of the cool parts, not the like annoying parts. Anyways, back to my story. I'm, uh, I'm in the Idea Lab and basically my CTO catches the bug too. And he starts saying, he's like, yeah, fiat is trash. I'm like, what is fiat? Fiat's a car. Like, what are you talking about? And he's like, fiat currency. That means currency that the government makes up and prints. Like, by their fiat, they create this currency. He's like, it's bad. I'm like, well, okay, why? Like, the dollar seems fine. And he's like, yeah, it's fine till it's not fine. Look at the history. And he starts telling me about this, this, and this. I'm like, yeah, but that's like ancient history. He's like, just yesterday, Japan announced that they're going to double the money supply in the next 10 years. I was like, that can't be good, right? He's like, yeah, that's massive dilution. That's like if you doubled the shares in this company right now, I would be pissed. And he's like, he's like, so he's like, we should do something. I'm like, okay, Paul, like, run with it. What's the idea? Normally Paul was the guy I would give directions to. He's not the idea guy. He's like, tell me what to build, I'll build it. I can build anything. And in this case, he's like mocking up a website and he's basically like, crypto doesn't have any of the basic like financial instruments that, uh, that the normal economy has. So all we got to do is just build either an exchange or a, like, kind of like a, um, maybe like an ACH protocol or like a place to deposit in a savings account. Like, we just need something like that for crypto. So he mocks it up, we start going with it. And, uh, our idea lab was backed by this couple, Michael and Xochitl Birch. It's basically an individual couple who's, you know, independently very wealthy. And so he come, Michael comes by for lunch the next day. He's like, hey, the lawyer, like our lawyer Susan told us that you're, uh, you're doing like a Bitcoin project. And I was like, yeah, kind of exciting. Like, and I don't really know it myself. I wasn't the one with conviction. It was like my team and I was just backing them. And so he's asking me, he's like, isn't that like, like kind of like for the Silk Road? And like, isn't that like kind of scammy? And I was like, no, I think there's merit to it. But I couldn't like make a strong case. He's like, dude, I don't know, man. Like, if we do something wrong here in the financial space, like, look, if we, if we make a social app that fails, whatever, I burned $1 million of funding. If we do something that's illegal, the SEC comes after us, I could lose everything. So let's put the kibosh on our crypto exchange that you guys are trying to launch tomorrow. And I was like, ah, shit. So I go tell the team and blah, blah, blah. And long story short, we do nothing. So we don't launch the thing. I don't buy any Bitcoin at that time when Bitcoin's under $100. And we move on with our life. And then now, years later, I'm just chasing that crypto dream the whole time, buying it at you know, $20,000 a coin instead of when it was at $20. And I was thinking back on it. I was like, what was the right move there? And so I'll kind of lay out my thinking here. I think the right move, and I think many people will come into these situations where a new trend happens and you're, you know, you want to chase it, but there may be risks associated with why you should or shouldn't do it. And, um, here's kind of like my revisionist thinking. You tell me, you tell me, actually I'll pause there. Tell me what you think I should have done in that situation. Did I make the right move or what could I have done differently? Cause I think it's important to kind of learn from our game film as entrepreneurs.

Well, so like objectively you made the wrong move in that you, you didn't, we know what the right move was now, but looking back, knowing what you knew, being who you are, I would say, I wouldn't say you made the right move, but I would say you didn't do anything wrong.

Right. Okay. So fair enough. So let's say, uh, door 1 is do nothing always, right? So do nothing. That's what, that's the door we ended up taking. Door 2 was. Create and launch this like kind of crypto exchange slash money transfer or whatever. That was like where we were headed. What I think was I should have looked at what does door 3, 4, and 5 look like? So the first thing I should have done is I should have bought the currency, right? Um, that, that's kind of an obvious one. If you believe in this thing enough to build a startup around it, you should own some of the underlying asset, um, as, as something you own. So that was like the first part. Second was when I got pushback from somebody richer, smarter, and more experienced than me, and I didn't have the answer, the answer shouldn't have been, okay, no, okay, I'll stop it. It should have been, well, let me put together a case for doing this. Give me a week to put together a case of why we might do this, why this might not be such a bad idea. I agree with your logic. Let me put together a case and let's start with that. And so I could have took a pause breath and I could have said, all right, let me go and actually get to conviction myself. And if I have conviction, I'll convince anybody in the world. Conviction, it's just a matter of, I haven't really thought this through enough. And the third option was, or the next option was, what are the other things you could have done? So what are the no-risk ways to ride this wave? That's what I think Blockworks did. That's what CoinDesk did. That's what CoinMarketCap did. So there was other things you could have done. You could have created a media company that said, all right, I'm not going to like try to be a financial exchange and that has some risks, but why don't we spin up a media side? Well, there's going to be, if this is going to be a thing, people are going to be interested in the content. We could build that and then that gives us options to launch more stuff. Um, so that would have been a smart move that was zero risk, um, financially as far as like the, the sort of regulations and SEC goes, but still would have been riding that wave. I didn't think about that because I didn't have all these other business models in my tool belt of like what else I could do. Another would have been to, instead of just launching like a media company, it could have been an agency. So we have several friends like Andrew from MetaLab, our friend Greg who launched Late Checkout. You can launch agencies that help big companies understand what to do with this thing, and you can actually charge a shit ton of money to do this. Consensus is the big one right now. That's the big kind of consultancy for this. I think they do over $100 million.

Yeah, we talked about them. They're here to multi-billion.

Yeah, right. Just from, just from this, just from consulting with big companies saying, hey, do you know how to spell blockchain? We can tell, we can spell it for you. And so, so basically there was other business models I could have done. So looking back, I would say that that's one learning I had. And I guess like Going forward, that's— I think it's important when these like new waves come out to like dive in on them, learn about them, and then think about, all right, should I try to build the big risky thing? Should I try to build a community? Should I try to build a media site? Should I try to build an agency? Like I have 10 options and depending on my level of conviction, um, I can go in either one of those directions. I can build the audience first. I can build the technology first. I can try to land grab and do something there. We could have created our own currency. There was 10 other ideas that we could have done. Um, but anyways, this is like a—

but to continue talking about that, strategies, it is to continue talking about strategies. My opinion is that you should actually take door number 1 in most cases.

Do nothing.

And yeah. And when you see something that you think is like, this is one life strategy. And I think this is a good strategy. You say no to most everything. Then when you see the thing that you're like, this is it. You go 100% all in on it. Um, and, and so there's a few examples of this. So, uh, and, and when you go all in on it, it's a high risk, but it's high reward type of thing. So examples are you become BuzzFeed and Facebook gets popular. You launch an entire media company, uh, BuzzFeed. Cheddar did this as well. They launched an entire media company off Facebook Live and they sold for $200 million. Now, you have loads of examples of it not working for people, more examples of it not working than it does work. Um, but when you, when you spot these waves, I actually think that, uh, like the, the, the risk versus reward is far in your favor of doing it. And Bitcoin is one of those where of course we know now, you know, you didn't know then.

What are the hallmarks of a wave? All right. What were some recent waves? And then what, how do you know when it's a wave versus just shiny object distraction?

I think engagement for sure. So I think it's, it's not the wave is not how many people are using it, but the few people who are using it, how much are they using it?

Right.

And so I think that—

does this feel like a cult? Do these people seem crazy? Uh, that's actually a very positive signs for waves.

Yes. I think that's the, the biggest one is, uh, are people like, how into it are they? So like, I was just talking to a guy that was selling, um, who did a multi-level marketing scheme where— and he didn't know it at the time, but he was like, he thought it was multi-level, but it was a pyramid scheme. He was like, well, I'm just like a salesperson for this energy drink.

He was a participant in it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was like, but I loved it and I thought it was okay. He goes, and then it took me forever to realize that it was a pyramid scheme. And then I was like scamming people. So I had to bail. But for a long time I was so into it. And like when you see like people who are so into something like Amway, like Herbalife, they actually become huge, huge companies. Even if most people don't get it, you'll— you only need a few people that are passionate about it. So it's all about engagement.

Yeah, I would say that. So I would say, what are you gonna look for with the wave? Second one is complete behavior change. So like Facebook early on was a good example of this, where all of a sudden people were checking something like 30 times a day. There really weren't websites that you would go check 30 times a day, and Facebook was one. And so similarly, like Fortnite or Twitch, something like that. It's like, wait, you're just streaming a webcam of yourself for 8 hours, like playing video games? It's like, yeah, not a lot of people do it, but the people who were doing it were doing this completely weird behavior that made no sense and had no, like, real parallels to what people were— what that same person was doing before. And so if it's been able to consume this person's life and change their whole, like, workflow, then it's going to do that for other people, right? Like, uh, remote work is like that in a small way, but That's, that's another one. A third one is—

go ahead—

a third one is just a technology wave. So a new device comes out that can do something that the other devices couldn't. Like, oh, this is a phone, it has an accelerometer in it and a GPS. So now what, what can you create when you have a GPS in your pocket? Well, you could push a button and someone could come find you and pick you up and take you somewhere else using that same GPS. And so like, you know, rideshare became enabled because this new device was there. Or You have a camera in your pocket at all times. Well then I guess people are gonna take way more photos than they were before. All right, that's when you get Instagram, you get Snapchat. So I think the technology wave is the other one.

Yeah, there's a bunch of these and, and, and it's actually fun to talk about, like we all know what the waves are, but they're, let's talk about some of the waves that we've seen recently that actually turned out not to be waves. Um, or likely won't be waves. Clubhouse is one of them. Um, a lot of people dedicated a lot of stuff to them. I could have seen a startup raise money on top of. A Clubhouse show or something like that, right? Um, and, but, but, but I don't actually hate people taking that shot, and I think that a lot of people do, right?

And I think, I think you have to measure how much do you have to lose. Like, for example, in that scenario I was talking about, I would have launched the crypto thing because I had nothing to lose. Our investor, who's like basically a billionaire, is like, hey, you know what, I don't mind if you fail on these startups, but like, don't have the SEC come after me. Like, that doesn't seem good. Like, let's not hold like a if this works, we're gonna have like $100 million of user deposits that we're like on the hook for. That sounds bad. I don't— you know, I— it wasn't easy to get this billion dollars. I don't want to lose that. So for him, it was the correct decision to say, let's not risk ruin. When you're, you know, and you have nothing, well, you have nothing to lose, and so feel free to go more all in and take more risks faster. And if, hey, if Clubhouse turns out to be a dud, what'd you lose? 6 months of your life? You know, like $2,000? It's okay.

So since we're talking about reflection and stuff, let me tell you a quick story. So I'm gonna send you this guy's LinkedIn. I met this guy this week. I, so I like just hung last week. We were off, I was off. So I, I just went and hung out with people. My friend Joe introduced me to this guy named Val. I don't even know how to say his last name. Um, but Val, I went out to lunch with this guy named Val. So this guy's story is basically he came from, uh, a Soviet Union country. I forget he came from Soviet Union. I forget what it's called now, the area that he was from. Uzbekistan is what it's from. He's a, uh, like a Jewish immigrant from Uzbekistan. He, at the age of 18, listen to this, he started a, uh, cell phone ringtone business. He was the only employee and it did $10 million in revenue in year 3. He started it when he was 18. So this is when he was like 21, $10 million. So $10 million in profit. He said, he goes basically—

selling ringtones to Americans.

Yeah. He goes, I was the only employee.

Oh, a kid from, I don't even know what you said, Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan, I believe selling $10 million worth of ringtones to Stupid Americans. Isn't that beautiful? I love that.

And that Amer— uh, amazing. Um, I believe it's called, uh, you can scroll down, it's called Tone Media. Uh, I believe that's what it is. Um, on his LinkedIn, something like that, or ToneFuse. I don't, I don't even know which one it is. He gets so many of them. And the reason why this guy interests me is, so I'm gonna tell you everything that he has done since, but it's all been bootstrapped, no outside funding and all in different industries. So the first one, um, and he probably has more, but these are the ones he told me about. So, uh, a, a phone business, the ringtone business. He's, he's like the revenue. And he goes, by the way, revenue and profits are pretty much the same thing. Cause I was the only employee. He was like, it went like $2 million, $4 million, like $10 million. And then I sold it. Uh, his second thing was called MobileFuse, which is an ad tech company. Uh, it's, that's boring. That's not that exciting, but it's a big business. Something like, I imagine he didn't tell me, but I imagine like $50, $60 million in revenue. Pretty big. Then, uh, while he was getting that started, he noticed that peer-to-peer lending was popular. So things like, you know, SoFi, stuff like that. So he created a company called Prime Meridian Capital. I've never even heard of it, but I think their URL might be Poise Lending. Basically at this point they've given out billions of peer-to-peer loans. So totally different from ad marketing or ad tech. Then from there he started a, a thing called, I don't even know how to pronounce this, Jicalo, but he was telling me all about this. But basically a company like Zales, have you, you know, Zales or do you know, uh, J, uh, Kay Jewelers, Jared, Ernest Jones, Peoples, there's a bunch of them. So it's all owned by this company called Signet. Signet is a multi-billion dollar diamond business. And what they do is they own all of these brands. And he was telling me, he was like, I was thinking about what makes that company special. And he was like, basically they have this headquarters where they just look at which diamonds are most popular. Which, which brands and which cuts are selling the best and how can we tell all of our brands what we think are going to be the next big thing? How can we help you optimize that brand by selling a little bit more efficiently? How can we buy in bulk? Things like that. So it was basically, it was just a normal mom and pop store, but we just multiplied it by however many. And so we just created these, these, this trends bit and then this economies at scale, you know, buying in bulk stuff, not particularly special, but, but just executed really well. And so he goes, well, you know, I'm going to build software, so I'm going to help all the mom-and-pop jewelers do that same thing. And so he went and started this new company. And if you look at his LinkedIn and go to the website, you can see it looks like really janky, really simple. But they— what they do is a mom-and-pop brand can sign up and they'll— the name of the company, I think it's called— I don't even know how to pronounce it. It's a horrible name. How do you say that?

Jocalio.

Jacalio. It's really bad. So Jacalio will help you get bulk discounts, but then will help you spend your marketing. So it's almost a little bit like a part agency, part buying in bulk, part CRM where you could like look at sales and like help predict which is going to be the most popular and order in bulk. And I believe this company is going to be doing around $80 or so million in revenue.

Wow.

And so this freaking guy will have to like— he's, he's English as a second language and he's real quiet and he's real understated. Very low-key, and he was just telling me all about this. And I had a few learnings. The first is just, it's crazy the story.

I haven't done shit in my life. The second, this guy's a fucking beast. Third.

Yes. And he didn't— he's not flashy. I mean, he had a nice watch on, but he had normal clothes and he didn't brag about himself. I had to pull— I pulled it out of him. And he— a few things. What we tell ourselves about why we can't do something, it's bullshit. It's mostly bullshit. I mean, some people are more talented than others, but you could just get so much done just by, just by working really hard. So what we tell ourselves about why we can't do blank, that's nonsense. Second, there's this, I don't know, like some people call it like the, I think it's called the red pill. I forget what people call it where they like see the world differently. I've hung out with enough people that just crush it. And a lot of people who you don't never even heard of. And I'm in it. And oftentimes I'll like, when I'm looking at this house, I'm like, oh, should I buy this lot? I got to sink this money into it. It's going to fail. but there's so many, there's a few people in this world and I know a lot of these people who just be like, yeah, of course, just let's do it. And they're just so confident. I actually think you have a little bit of that in you. Um, they're just so confident and they default to optimism, optimism, and it works so well. It's like this, this ability, it, in this case it's money, but it could be anything. It could be, um, you know, well, we're just going to fly there and we're just going to figure it out, but this is like default to, yeah, of course it's gonna work. A few people have that, and that attitude gets you so far. And I've been able to experience that just by being around some of these people. But just a really fascinating person.

Wow, I love this. I love that little story. I love this guy. This is extreme. This is really cool. And yeah, I'm impressed. I love meeting these kind of like under the radar, you know, self-made kind of like business badasses that have hopped from industry to industry. It's like, there's zero luck involved when you're going to do that, right? There's— luck is— luck is a, like, kind of a scalar. It's like a multiple of, like, the thing was successful. Whether ringtones were going to be worth $10 million or $20 million or $50 million or $1 million, it was hard to say. But if you're the type of person that's going to make the ringtone business, the mobile ad business, the jewelry, like, independent business, the whatever, uh, the peer-to-peer lending company, um, you have— you know, the track record speaks for itself. You know what you're doing as far as, like, identifying an opportunity and then chasing it properly.

And I just Googled this guy. Uh, I, it looks like he has a Twitter, but like no followers and he has 200 followers on Instagram and he posts pictures of his vacation with his family. Like nothing sexy. I mean, yeah, he's got actually some fancy cars. That's sexy. But I guess this whole point of like, you get caught in this bubble of you have to build an audience. No, you don't.

Yeah, no, you don't.

You don't, you don't, you can, and maybe that could be fun for you. You don't, you could do something that no one has ever heard of you. You could just cold call and you could get done what— likely whatever you want to get done. And another thing that I've learned is just intensity. So this idea of, well, you have this ringtone business, that's kind of silly. It's like, yeah, maybe, but I bet you, I mean, it could make $10 million a year, which is like crazy rich. And just like stepping it up.

On the step it up, on the amp it up format, on the intensity idea. So I was working out this morning with the guy whose house I'm in. And so he was like, hey, like, I don't know if you're up, but like, Trainer's coming at 8 AM if you want to get a workout in. Yeah, fantastic. I'm up. Let's do it. So I go downstairs, home gym, crazy. Go inside, trainer's there. We're doing our thing. And, and I don't particularly work out. I'm not like a super intense workout guy. Like, I'm trying to do well, but like, my default is like, I feel the way most people feel when they work out. Like, I'm getting super tired. I'm like, my muscles are failing. Like, they're not— I don't feel like I could do that anymore. You know, like, I'm trying Oh, like, if she's like, all right, how much you want to squat? I'm like, well, I don't really know. And all right, let's start with like a little bit and then like, let's go up from there. I'm not like trying to like prove something every second of the workout. But he was talking about intensity during the workout. He's a very intense guy. And so he, at the end, we were doing abs just to finish. And so we're doing like a Russian twist thing or whatever. He's facing the other direction. He's doing the other ab workout. And we're just taking turns. I'm doing mine. He's doing his. I'm doing the Russian twist. And he heard me ask the trainer, I go, should I have my legs in the air? She's like, yeah, that makes it a bit harder. And I was like, okay, cool. Let me try it. And so I was just doing it. It was just kind of like an offhand comment. And then when it was his turn to go to that, it was like the second round, second set. He's like, I gotta, I gotta put my legs up now. And she's like, no, no, you don't have to. You can just put it down. He's like, no, if he's going to do it, then I got to do it. And he's like, he's like, that's the best part about working out with somebody is that their intensity picks you up. And if you pick the right partner, then you match their intensity and you just get that little extra that you weren't going to get if you were on your own. He's like, that's the best part. And I think that's what this podcast is for a lot of people, is we are like their workout buddy for their, like, kind of like the brain workout, basically, of just thinking about businesses, being excited about things, learning new shit. And so I think that's the benefit we're giving some people through this podcast. But it's also what What, like when you go meet this guy and you, you know, what's the benefit of meeting this guy? You're not going to do a deal with him. You're not going to invest in his company, but literally just having met him and heard his story, all of a sudden now you, you can, you got red pilled. You're going to see the world differently just because you know that he exists. And when we tell his story now, hundreds of thousands of other people listening to this are going to know that he exists. I think that's really cool. And I think it's something you should be intentional about. Of getting around other people so that you have those red pill moments and you get around other people's intensity. So you raise your game.

So let me give this guy a shout out. I'll spell his name because I don't think I said his last name. His name is Val. V-A-L. Last name, Kataev. K-A-T-A-Y-E-V. I don't know how to— I'm sorry, Val, but anyway, that's his name. Pretty interesting, dude. If you click like contact info, all of his companies are there. His emails are on his LinkedIn. Interesting guy. Um, okay, so we're like 45. Are we going to go to ideas? Are we going to, are we going to, are we going to, you want to keep it to this like little, I don't know. What do you, what do you want to do with?

So I have one that I think is going to be a good segment. We can finish on that. Let's finish strong. People are going to be, by the end of this, people are going to be hyped up. All right.

So somebody, by the way, I think they will. Dan, are they going to be hyped on this? Very hyped. Okay, very hyped. Thanks. You sound great.

Dan is trapped somewhere. Dan is trapped inside my computer right now, it sounds like. All right, so, uh, so I want to finish up with this idea of, uh, teenage side hustles. So somebody emailed me and they said, hey, you know, love the pod. My kid is, I think, 12, 13 years old. They're like, I want to get him into entrepreneurship. My daughter's like 11, my son is 13. I want them both to learn about business. Do you have any ideas for side hustles or little like kind of like mini hustles that a teenager could do? And so it got me thinking. And so I started going down this. I thought this would be a fun brainstorm for us. I do have some ideas that I wrote down for this, but I basically gave it 15 minutes of thought and I was like, okay, cool, I'll do this on the pod live. What do you think?

Great. You, you gotta kick it off though, 'cause you, you spent more time thinking about it and then I will, uh, I'll come up with a few while you're talking.

All right, so here's the teenage side hustles. I break it down into 4 categories. So the first one is called blue collar stuff. Okay, so this is stuff people, teens have been doing for a long time, but with a twist here. So, uh, local, you know, normal blue collar stuff. You go, you mow lawns in the neighborhood, you deliver the paper, you shovel snow depending on where you're at. I think that's all cool. So here's how I would step it up. So I would say, hey, here's one thing we could do, right? We're going to provide a service to our neighbors. But let me teach you in business about leverage, right? We don't want to trade our time for money. I don't want to be the one mowing the lawn. I don't want to be the one shoveling snow. So you could do two things. You could teach them to hire up other kids and basically have the other people in the neighborhood doing the work while you are doing the sales and you're taking in the money and you're paying out from there. So you could teach them labor leverage there. The other way of doing this is you have them, uh, learn two things at once. So you have door-to-door sales in your neighborhood, um, but secondly, you teach them about lead gen. So instead of actually having to do the work, all you need to do is make the sale, um, or, or get the warm lead even. So I was thinking you could go in a neighborhood, you could go door-to-door. So here's my specific idea for them. Go, go around your neighborhood, and you're going to, you're going to knock on the door, and you're going to sell one of two things: either pest control Um, so you're gonna say, hey, we live in the neighborhood, you know, our house and other houses have had issues in the past with pests and infestations, and it's better to catch it early before it becomes like a major problem and you have to gut the whole kitchen because you got this, you know, mice infestation or rats or, or cockroaches or whatever. And so, um, would you be— would you want a free inspection? Uh, would you be interested in an inspection to let you know if your house is in good condition, bad condition, or needs— needs some work? And then basically what you do is you call up the local, you know, pest control service and you say, hey, I have 15 houses in my neighborhood that are interested in getting an inspection. And, um, and, you know, I think that even if 10% of them or 20% of them convert, that you guys will get some good business out of this. So, um, I'm calling up local services, local service providers, and seeing if anybody basically would want to, uh, want these leads. And I, I have all their information for you. I did the, the first, first contact with them. I have their name, their number, and I have the details about what they're interested, what they're about what they're interested in. And basically I would sell those leads to a local pest control company. And I think you can make good money doing that just around your neighborhood and other neighborhoods. And you would learn that, hey, you know, where is the value capture? The value capture is in getting the customer, not in actually going and looking under the floorboards for cockroaches. Okay, so that's the first, first blue-collar one. The other—

hold on, hold on, listen to this. So I'm, I was trying to find— there, here it is. Okay, so I, I know a guy, he spoke at HustleCon, his name's Gabe, Gabriel Una Asaseki. Asta Sexy. So what he did was he, he's a friend of mine. He started this company where basically they did lead gen. So it was called CalFinder. So if you Google California home painting, California pest control, you get brought to their website. They just do a better job of displaying information. You submit a lead, they send it to a paint company, and that paint company pays them $5 for that email address. The way it started is he bought a yellow notepad and he went door to door to find people who would be interested in having their home painted. He collected a hot— a list of 100 names in the first day. And then he sold that for $10,000 to a variety of different, like different paint, paint companies. And he did that a couple more times and then he eventually created a proper company that made $20 million a year in sales. So that's the outcome or potential outcome to that.

Yeah. So the downside of this is your kids might start making more than you do a year. Uh, but the upside is they'll learn a lot about business. All right. So, That's the first one. You could do this with anything. Pool fencing. Hey, I notice you have a pool, but you don't have a fence. You know, it's against California law to have a fence without a pool when you have kids. You know, would you like us to come out and give you an estimate of how much that would cost to keep it safe? And, you know, so you could do pool fencing, pest control, home painting, whatever. It doesn't matter. So my specific idea would be blue collar lead gen. That's number one. Number two, events. So you've hosted conferences and events. I think that you could— if you're a teenager, I think you could host a neighborhood fair. Here's how this works. You go out, you rent the bouncy house, the slip and slide, all the stuff that like for one individual home to do, it's kind of an expensive birthday party. But if you're going to do it and amortize it across the cost of the whole neighborhood, it's actually not a bad idea. And so I would create the neighborhood fair. I would charge for entry. I would have a local sponsor, you know, the local bank could sponsor it because who could turn down your kid's smile and saying, hey, I'm hosting the neighborhood fair. Would you be a sponsor for us for $500 or whatever? And, you know, all the proceeds go to us as kids, you know, to fund my own education. And so I would basically rent a bunch of cool stuff, have cotton candy, have all the stuff, charge tickets, and neighborhood fair. That's my second idea. Events. What do you think of that one?

I think that's okay. I would do the first one over the second one. The second one sounds like a pain in the butt.

I'm just giving them options here. I'm giving them options.

That's all right. Keep swinging.

3, the theme of this one is little kids acting like adults. So we've all had the like kind of fundraiser thing where you, you go door to door, you say, hey, would you like to buy, you know, cookie dough and ice cream and wrapping paper for our like school charity? Great. So here's my twist on that. My twist on that is that you call it the, uh, the Bitcoin Junior Club or something, the Bitcoin Kids Club. And basically you go door to door and say, hey, I'm really interested in Bitcoin. Have you heard about Bitcoin? Yeah, I've heard of Bitcoin. Well, hey, the neighborhood, we want to create, uh, you know, 2 of us, 3 of us kids in the neighborhood, we were creating the first kids Bitcoin club. And what we want is, uh, for every house to invest somewhere between, you know, about $100 and we're going to buy Bitcoin and you're going to own it. And we're going to take a management fee on top of what we, uh, of, of the, of managing the money. Right. So we're going to create a little investment club. We want to learn about finance and money is a great way for us to do it. And for you, you'll be owning Bitcoin, and we're going to help you out. We're going to teach you all about it. We're going to give a presentation at the end. Um, and you know, hey, if your kid wants to be involved in the club, they can too. And so I would create this little— I would create a small little money management fund, and I would try to get houses to give me, you know, $1,000 if they can. Depending on your neighborhood, this is either impossible or it'll be easy. And, um, I would go to the rich neighborhoods and I would say, that's what we're doing. And for them, they actually get to own an asset. So it's not like they're just giving away the money. They're actually going to get the asset. But you're going to charge, you know, your— well, instead of a normal 2% fee, we're going to call it a 10% fee that you're going to take in exchange for managing the money. And then you're going to send out a newsletter of the report about what's going on in Bitcoin.

I think it's awesome. I think that it's just like, yes, this is an easy— yeah, it's just, it's cute enough that it justifies sending your kid to hang out with people.

Exactly. Okay. So those are 3 ideas. The way I was thinking about this, and this is another piece, is like, how do you even brainstorm this? So when I brainstormed, I don't think about what's the idea, right? I'll think about two things. So the first thing I thought of was, what do I remember from my childhood? And then what's the 20% twist I could put on this, right? So that's the fundraising idea, but the twist is now it's for Bitcoin, right? Or, uh, I used to mow lawns, but the twist is actually I'm gonna like sell those leads to a lawn mowing service. That's the first way I think about things. What do I already know that I can just put a 20% twist on to make it fit this situation? The second thing is, I don't look for answers when I brainstorm. I look for questions. So here's the questions I wrote down before I brainstormed this. I said, what's cute when a kid does it, but annoying if an adult did it?

That's a great question.

I started brainstorming ideas, right? The second one is, what's fun for kids, but boring for adults? Like, you know, my daughter, she loves like cleaning. Like if I let her clean, she'll clean a folding. She loves to fold. Kids actually, like I used to have a lot of fun mowing lawns, but like as an adult, I hate to go mow my lawn now. And so if I know something that's fun for a kid, boring for an adult, we can have them do it. The next one is what are kids actually just good at that adults are bad at? So there's just things that kids are just better at. Okay. What are those? And then lastly, what amount of money is a win for a kid, but would not be a win for an adult because then the kid can do it and they would be happy with it, but nope, an adult won't do it because this is not enough money there for, for that to fill the void of what they're looking for, the opportunity cost. And so that's how I brainstorm this. So that's just a little peek under the hood about how to think about stuff like this is don't look for the answer. Look, ask a bunch of questions and then spitball.

If I, for my kid, I would probably have them, I would think of what skill should they learn now that they won't have time to learn in the future. So, uh, for, for them, that will have big impact for them. I think it would be door-to-door selling. And I would sell, I would send them to it like a, uh, an Amco, or I think it's, or sorry, Cutco. Or some type of like door-to-door knife or door-to-door books, some type of cutthroat time where it's like, look, you're going to spend 3 months for 2, 2 different summers in a row. You're going to do this. You're not going to like it at first, but the skill that you learn, you're never going to be able to learn this again like this in your life. And it's going to change your world if you get good at this.

Yeah, exactly. We're not going to baseball camp. We're going to Cutco camp. You're going to learn how to sell knives door-to-door this summer. That's what I want to do.

That, that I think that would be the right move.

Yeah. Anyway, so those are my teenage side hustles to the— I forgot the person who wrote in. To whoever wrote in, that's my answer. Sorry I haven't emailed you.

Dan, what do you think? Did we— we meandered a little bit. Yeah, I really liked the end. I used to sell calendars in high school door-to-door.

Got a free ticket to prom. By the way, another— my brain's still firing on ideas. Here's another one: digitize the neighborhood's home videos. Everybody I know who's like kind of like my parents' age, they have a bunch of photos and albums and videos on like little cassette players.

That's a great business.

They're worried that those are all going to go away. And you just say, hey, I'm going to drop this box off in front of every door and I'm just going to put a sticker on it. And I'm going to say, put your, put your photos and videos here in here. I'm going to give it back to you. You know, sort of, I'm going to send you, uh, it'll, I'll put it in the cloud for you. So you'll have these forever in good quality and never have to worry about these going bad or losing this box or water spilling on it or anything like that. Let's, let's save your memories. I think that's the genius one.

That's the, the G— that's incredibly smart because you don't need to be that good at doing it. You just have to have time.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, we could basically just go drive it to like Costco or whoever does this, but, or you could do it yourself.

Uh, Costco does this.

Uh, I don't know if it's Costco, but like some of these, yeah, one of the retailers, they do this. They'll digitize.

That's a great service to offer, offer because your time's free. Yeah, right. I would— that's a good one. That's what I would do. I would pick that one. Um, All right, I guess that's the episode. We'll see what people think of that. I thought it was actually quite good. I enjoy hearing stories, uh, love people, so we'll see if it's good.

Yeah, let us know. Uh, tweet at Sam, he's @thesamparr on Twitter. Tweet at me, I'm @SeanVP, and, uh, let us know what you think of the episodes. We take that feedback and that's how we adjust. A little less randomness, a little less life advice, a little more ideas, a little more stories about wealthy people, or whatever you guys want. So let us know how you want us to shift it. Uh-huh.

Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Life.