#205 - How to Stop Your Tech Addiction

There's some kid who's the next Ari Gold that's sitting on Kentucky's campus or Alabama's campus, that's gonna end up being like worth fifty, hundred million dollars and they're gonna get their start by selling name image like this like local deals to it for the for the local players. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I'm put my all in it like my day song On the road less travel never looking back All right. This was a jammed pack episode. We talked about a lot. So we talked about buying lottery tickets online and how that might become a big business. We talked about what else we talked about? We talked about Um Athline we talked about a company called F Lions about um

Creating QuickBooks for N CAA athletes. What else did we talk about? The business of mugshots Mug shots, yes. Mug shots. The business uh how these websites make money, why they are posting mugshots online. And uh And how we feel about that. Is that scummy or is that uh is that legit? We also talk about

A couple ideas for Um Chrome extensions. There's Chrome extensions that keep you focused. We talked about porn addiction fighting and if that's a big market or not. So get to the episode. Uh Can you guys do us a favor?

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Sam, what is it called? Just go to YouTube and type in my first mill and you'll see it. Right now it's called the hustle, but they'll see it. And then hit the subscribe button. All right, I have a ton of stuff to cover. Thanks for wearing a shirt, by the way. Dude, you get all all hot and bothered when I just don't have sleeves, man. This is this is a shirt.

Well. I guess so. Bouncers uh at a Miami strip club, so I do look like that. I look like uh Yeah, like a little special ad today. Um Do you wanna um what do you got going on? I have a lot of interesting stuff.

All right, let's start. Let's do it. Um, all right, w w did you see everything that I put on here? Uh well it changed. You had a whole bunch of stuff about greeting cards and now it's something else. Buying lottery tickets. All right, go for it. Okay.

I got a lot of stuff. I got lottery tickets. I got mugshots. I got um Yeah. Oh. The athletic stuff. I actually let's do let's do lottery tickets first, and then I want to do athletic stuff because you actually talked about that. So I just talked to this guy. I don't think I'm gonna do anything with it. I don't know yet. But I just talked to this guy and I thought it was really amazing.

Now This company that I'm gonna tell you about, it has to deal with with the Power and Lotter. Which I actually think that my uh stance on it is I'm uh personally not in favor of it. I I uh I'm not I'm not on board. But I thought it was fascinating. So there's these companies that are there's two of them in the space. So basically the way it works is.

There's two major lotteries. There's the Powerball and Mega Millions, and then each state has a state run lottery. Okay. Yep. And The way it works is you go to the seven eleven, you go wherever and you buy a ticket. So there's this company that I just started talking to. They're they're called Spins. Um And what they do is

Sorry, slips. Spins. Slips. So you don't have you heard of this or you see did I write it down? I talked to them a bunch of months ago and I talked about them on the pottery. But you did mobile but I did talk about it. But we can do it again. That's okay. I don't remember you telling me about them. That's okay. Most people probably don't. Um But

How did you hear about slips? I thought they just launched like a mont like this month. It's been on test flight for a long time. So I used it on test flight. It's I thought it was really clever. So explain why it's clever. Dude, I feel the wind was blown out of my sails just now. I'm I'm sorry, okay, I'll give you a minute to recover. No, it's you to explain now because you're a good actor. I'll tr I'll try to remember. So basically

Um A lot of people play the lottery. Typically you go to a seven eleven or a gas station or something, you buy it. What these guys did was they let you play the lottery from your phone legally. How do they do that? Well, basically wherever you are

You'll say, I'd like to buy a lottery ticket. And then they will physically go send somebody to a gas station. They'll buy the lottery ticket. Uh so it's sort of like there's a task grabbit essentially that'll go buy the lottery ticket in person for you, because you can't actually buy them online. They'll buy it, they'll take a photo of it, they'll sort of custody it online.

And and give it to you. And um and so that's how they kind of bypass the rules around buying lottery like running an online lottery. You can't run an online lottery, but you can pay somebody to go buy the ticket. And then they can give you the ticket. Um, and that's like their two step process. Did I I think that's brilliant. You got it brilliant.

Or you got it right. And I think that's brilliant. I think it's brilliant because I never would have thought about that. And it's the easiest possible solution. And by the way, I I think they simplified it even further where they just paid the guy at the gas station to be the task rabbit. So now they don't even dispatch somebody. They're just like, Hey, when this thing rings. That's uh that's somebody paying you to buy a lottery ticket. Uh, and you pay like a little premium on top of what the lottery ticket is, and that's the kind of like service.

surcharge, which might be like twenty five cents or a dollar or something. It's not like Percentage wise it's pretty significant. But It's not a huge amount of money, so people don't care. It's like ah it's more convenient. Cause they can I can get a push notification and it says the lottery. is two hundred million dollars today.

Would you like a ticket? And you just say kinda like yes, and that's that's Low friction. Uh, I was saying they have subscription, they have a bunch of stuff, but when I was talking to this guy, I was thinking there's a few I was thinking of the pros and cons. So

Prose of this business. It's gonna get big fast. Yeah, I can see it getting big fast. That's the only pro.

That's a big pro. In the world of business, that's that's the main pro. That's the main pro. There are so many things about why it won't work. Are are you like why it won't work? Are you saying basically like ethically I have a problem with this? Or are you Well, no, that's just one of the many things. So I I wouldn't say ethically I have a problem, but I would have to ask myself how I feel about that. S like I would have to think about it. So in one regard, it's like I don't buy the lottery and and I don't want like if you don't have a a lot of money, I don't think you should buy the lottery. That said. Who am I to tell you what to buy? And also if you want to spend I go to the casino and I like to spend fifty dollars and that's fun.

So like who am I to say what's like who am I to judge? But the second thing. I would imagine a app like this would have very similar economics uh not similar economics, but similar growth tactics as like a mobile game, which means you have to be super aggressive about Uh customer acquisition. And if Facebook, Google

Well that pretty much that that's it. If they ban you, you're fucked. Yes, that's that's a legit problem for this. And That might be the The big the two biggest. What's the also I think had some social feature that was like if you and your fri you and your friends can kind of like share it, you could split tickets or something like that. Like did they they brought all the offline things where like you know an office pools together and buys a hundred tickets and then they agree to split the money.

I think they brought brought that into it. So it it's a nice app. I I liked the idea. I like the idea a lot, um but I just you know, whatever. There's a whole bunch of reasons why I decided not to invest, but I I just thought it was uh I think it's a clever idea and I've been looking at this for years. So to your question of how do I find this? It's because for years I've been thinking about how do you how would you bring the lottery online? And I've l talked to many people who claim they could do it legally and it wasn't actually legal or

It was only legal in one state to do it that way and they were hoping all the other states caught on. And so I've just been keeping an eye out for rule changes. And that's kind of a theme. Like we talked about the name and uh the N I L thing for the for college athletes, name, image, and likeness. Rule change equals opportunity. I have another rule change I'm gonna do today. Um, that's another opportunity, but this is this is uh an example of one of those types of businesses.

You wanna talk about the N I N I N I L stuff? Yeah, what do you got for it? And the reason so you brought this up. And I had known about it, but I just saw this other article. Did you see this article that went viral about This Alabama kid.

Hasn't even Like Throwing the game, yeah. Then he had a million bucks in revenue booked for the year or something crazy like that. Well, the funny thing is the coach, uh, Nick Saban came out and he's the one who kind of said it. So he's like, Oh yeah, you know, it creates a

Weird situation like Our freshman quarterback Uh, he's made seven figures, you know, he's making all this money, his teammates aren't making that money. It creates an awkward dynamic. Um, but and so some people uh there's really three reactions to this. One is like, okay, maybe there's some truth to that. The second is oh is this like

For years there've been all kinds of people who make millions of dollars, like Nick Saban does. Nick Saban makes tens of millions of dollars as the coach. And all the players played for free. And it's like, dude, you're trying to keep the players down. Now that they're making a buck, you got a problem with it. And then there's the third one, which is the super mega evil version of this, which was He added this line at the end where he goes

He's like, he's making all this money and that's because of our brand. That's because he's a quarterback at Alabama. And it became a recruiting pitch at the same time. So he was fake. Being outraged. But really was you know, what what they call dog whistling. Dog whilst whistling to all the other, you know, high school athletes right now.

You come to Alabama, that check is pretty big. Uh this guy hasn't even played yet, and he's getting this type of money. Imagine what you what you'll get when you come if you come here. And so all the other college coaches, the players were mad at him, the coaches were mad at him, and the media was mad at him. I loved it. It was a master, a master stroke. What I actually did was we contacted I I went and contacted some folks in the compliance industry schools, and they made a comment that said they're explicitly banned from finding or facilitating any type of deals. For athletes. The school is, yes. Yeah. So like Nick Saban can't like you know, they can't be the middleman at all. But

Um What they're able to do is act and so the reason I'm bringing this up is you had this idea where it it I mean, I guess it's a fairly obvious thing, but you said it well, uh, of like you have to have this software or some type of compliance software in order to manage these relationships and manage this deals, these deals. And I have a an example as to why that's kind of important, but So the school can't can't be the middleman, but they have to be in the loop about what you're doing.

The school will definitely pay, which is why I was saying you should build a a a tool like this with transparency, visibility, reporting, payments infrastructure. because the schools will have to pay. And once they pay, they're locked in because you're gonna be the system of record of how the athletes are making money. And I wanna give an example. Let me give you an example of a very, very, very specific example about why this is gonna get really complicated. So do you know American Top Team? I bet you do. It's that it's a Yeah, so it's a uh a mixed martial art gym in Florida.

They offered five hundred dollars a month to Miami's entire ninety scholarship football players to advertise their gyms on social media. So that's five hundred and forty thousand dollars, but every player has to do it. Now There's like these crazy There's these crazy rules and so Here's an example. Um

An example of the gym deal for the money players we mentioned, the contract states that they must advertise for the gym over social media, but if they lose track and not And and all ninety athletes do not post. Technically that's a pay for play and not an N A N I L deal. And it's a major N C D N C double A minor. Okay. It doesn't matter if you understand that. What matters is that it's incredibly complicated and that this is gonna get like really complicated. I I wonder if somebody can also just build the other side. Just build the uh build the IRS. So it's like build the little police, the independent police uh group task force that's gonna be monitoring all this stuff and finding potential violations and then selling this service. back to the schools, which is like, hey, we found some athletes that are out of code here.

uh that this is actually against the thing. We will sell you this type of visibility. So that you guys don't fall out of compliance. That's another way to do it is you um you diagnose the problem and then you sell them the the prescription. That line is gonna lead me into my next point. Well, that's a totally different topic, but W when we talked about that, uh when we talked about this N C double A thing, did a lot of companies reach out to you? Yeah, there was a butt th no they didn't reach out, they go.

Bro, we're already doing this. We've been doing this. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. Good good good for good for you. Great. I I I I agree. It's a good opportunity. I don't know why you gotta get all defensive about it. Any any inter any anything interesting? Uh, you know, I didn't really look into them because I didn't have time, but Uh, I think like open doors was one of the ones that a bunch of people mentioned. I don't know if that's like the number one. Uh I I kind of think that it's not really gonna be some player that's been around for a while. I think it's gonna be somebody I I view it as in these markets, it's whoever builds this first simple useful thing. get a ton of adoption. And then it's uh then it's a race between the people who tried to build the big valuable thing.

And the group that got a bunch of adoption to go from small and simple. Two more thorough and whoever where where do those lines cross? Which which group gets there first. And I like to bet on the horse Where the founders identified, hey, this is a simple thing that we can get in the hands of every athlete right now or every school right now, and we can even give it away for free. As long as we get them hooked into our s our our system, we have a relationship with them.

I think those are gonna be the interesting one. So I'm kinda looking for who's new. Um But I'm open minded about it. I haven't I haven't seen anybody make a make a very compelling case that they've got something good going. But I do have an idea around this, if you're ready for it. So Are you familiar with how um

sports agents make their money. Like if I'm a agent for an NBA basketball player, do you know roughly like how that money shakes out? No. So so basically um If I'm an agent for an NBA player. I'm gonna take

Let's call it two to three percent on average. Um, and I'm not an expert this, there may be more nuance to it, but this is what I have a couple friends who do this, and this is what they told me. So um They make about two to three percent of the contract value. So let's say in the NBA, like a max guy might make 40 million a year. So let's say you have two guys. You got a max player and you have his his buddy on the team who's kind of a bit of a mid-level player. And you have fifty million they fifty million a year from the team.

You're gonna make two percent. So you're gonna make a million dollars year as an agent. So you can stack some pretty good money. Now it is a absolutely cutthroat and ruthless business where they're all trying to backstab each other and steal each other's clients. Um, and it is like a A s slightly dirty industry where there's a lot of sort of like bribery, whine you know, some on the good end, whining and dining, and on the bad end, sort of like bribery and and shit talking that goes on in order for agents to get clients. But I have a few

Uh uh uh Ben was tell me about uh a few friends of his that have An agency. as three people and their athletes under contract will br will bring in about three million total a year. And so basically the the main guy, the main agent's probably banking two point six million, two point five million himself. And then the other five hundred K goes into like operations of paying the other two people their kind of like salaries. So how much is the total So the contract value will be I think he takes three percent. So the contract value was something like seventy five million, uh just were rough numbers for the year. It's like four four players, right? And so and it's like, yeah, it's really hard to get your foot in the door, but when you have this guy like Typically the players will stick with you unless they have a problem with you, you mess up. And so you get there like 10 to 15 year career sometimes.

And then as long as that player has a name, you can use them and their introductions to get like a couple other guys on the team that they're buddies with that they trust when they're looking for agents. And then they keep going down market. So they keep trying to get guys like, right before the draft or you know, in college they're, you know, showing up on campus and just talking to the guy, trying to not create an N C A violation, but Build those relationships. So what I was thinking was So that's a gener general business. I don't think it's a great business to be in.

But uh Yeah, whatever. It's kind of there's a few people that win big and then most people get nothing. The Opportunity I saw was, well, with this name image likeness, I think this is gonna breed a whole new set. of college hustlers that become sports agents. Why is that?

Because I'm a player at a school. If I'm just some kid in the same dorm, like I remember When I was on Duke Campus, I bumped into you know Gerald Henderson on the first day of orientation. And um and he yeah actually kind of a funny story. He was like we kinda were hitting it off, which is great because Normally

These guys, you know, everyone's mobbing them. They don't care about you. They're looking for like the hottest girl around. They they don't really care about this brown Indian dude. What why am I talking to him? But we hit it off. We're joking around and he goes, Oh man, like what are you doing tonight? I was like, Oh, I think we're going to West Campus. I didn't even know what that was at the time. It was my first day on campus, but I just said something I thought sounded cool. He's like, He's like oh sweck like Hit me up when you go, like here, take my number.

And um I had finished in China, and so I actually didn't even have a cell phone the first day of college. I was like getting my plan set up, and so I was like, Oh, you know, I I don't have a phone. But he he just looked at me like oh bro, you don't have a phone? And he just like walked away. That was the last I talked to him. But The opportunity is.

I know, I know. I I blew it. I blew it many, many times after that too, with other players. Um But basically, let's say I'm friends with that guy. I could just go hustle. I could go to the local car dealership. And I could be like, Hey Uh, how much would you pay Gerald to be on this billboard? Right. He's a big name in in this college town. So you'll give him fifteen hundred bucks. And I could go to Gerald and say, Hey, dude, I got you a fifteen hundred dollar deal.

All you gotta do is like say yes and and take this photo. And then he would be like, Oh sick, man. And if I did that three more times, I'm pretty sure I could be this guy's like business manager within like two months of being in college. And If you just plant those seeds at that stage, because you're on campus, you're one of them, you could work the scene locally. Uh, I'm pretty sure that that's one way to like hit your wagon to someone who's a future NBA player and actually become an agent. So I think.

You're gonna find some super agents that come out of this like This one rule change. There's some kid who's the next Ari Gold that's sitting on Kentucky's campus or Alabama's campus, that's gonna end up being like worth fifty, hundred million dollars. And they're gonna get their start by selling name image like this, like local deals to for the for the local players. Yeah, I mean that's what a lot of people have done with music. You know, Scooter Braun started that way.

Um what was his origin story? So I know he didn't break it, so he did a break. If you don't know who Scooter Bron is, he um owned this company called Ithaca Holdings, which I think just sold to uh a Korean music label for three or four billion dollars. Scooter Bronze most famous for Yeah. Ethical holdings just sold. Is he like a billionaire?

Uh yeah, probably. Well. Did it tell you a billy you didn't even know about? How do you feel, bro? I just want to do it. There you go. I feel great. I love it. How much stuff to sell for? All right, so he sold it to Hybe, which is the Korean entertainment conglomerate that owns, I think they they they have the rights to BTS, which is like the biggest band in the world or something.

Um, let's see, what's the sale price? I'll look it up. You keep talking. Um, anyway, so he sold this company. He was most famous for being Justin Bieber's manager, but he also managed uh Ariana Garde and a few other people. He's only thirty five, thirty-six, thirty seven, very young. You'll see him in some of the music videos. He's got was also famous because he bought uh Big Machine Records based out of Nashville, which owned Taylor Swift's rights, and he bought that for only like eighty million dollars, even though it made forty million dollars a year, something crazy like that.

And He got a start at Emory University, I believe, and when he was a sophomore. somehow he started throwing parties and in doing so uh met Jamaine Dupree's mom, who owned a record label in Atlanta where Emory is. Mrs. Dupree, it's is that you? Well Mrs. Dupree is like the head honcho of a of a of a meaningful like production and music company. And

He goes starts working for him and he and and the doing this music thing and he's like bringing people all the he's bringing all the kids to college parties as a club promoter and making a cut to like a Germain Dupree party. Then eventually when he's twenty two, he has a little bit of money saved, but not a lot, like less than a hundred grand. He finds this guy on YouTube. Who is a little kid. He's like seven, eight, nine, ten years old. And he's playing the guitar. And he's playing a guitar and he's singing and

Scooter goes. This kid's gonna be a home run. He's gonna be a winner. So he flies his kid and his mom down to uh Atlanta and he goes, I want to manage you. And the kids like, I don't what do you mean, manage me? I don't have a career. He goes, You're gonna be a superstar one day. And that was Justin Bieber.

And he uh so he discovered the beeps and he made tens of millions of dollars off that and then recently made a billion from selling his company. What did he sell it for? One one billion. So it was one point oh five billion. So so just two quick numbers. So they sold for one point oh five billion and he had acquired that big machine. Like label thing with Taylor Swift Rides for three hundred million back then. Oh, okay. So my numbers are off. Um Rich, whatever.

Um and so and so let's just go through some some more numbers. Braun now holds a one percent stake in Hybe, which is worth 123 million itself. The BTS members each have eighteen million in h in hide, so there's seven of them. Um And then Bieber and Ariana Grande have fourteen point three million dollars worth of worth of a stake in Hybe. Uh, high went public at one point five billion and it's doubled in the last few months. I would've

bought this if I knew that the company behind BTS had gone public. Uh, but I was not I was not awake uh at the wheel here. So kind of interesting. I don't even know how we got on it, but that but he got started in in college promoting Bieber. And he also you know who his second act was? Uh Asher Roth, the guy who sung and he and at the time he was like this Asher Roth guy is gonna be the biggest. He's gonna be the biggest that there is. Yeah. Yeah. But Asher Roth came to him after doing I Love College and he's like, you know, I kinda like don't really want to be famous. Like I don't wanna like be in the limelight. I just wanna be quiet. And so he bailed on him.

Respect. Uh okay. We should do we should do more on scooter and I'm gonna also the there's a billionaire behind BTS, this guy like he's amazing. What his name is. I'm I'm gonna do a deep dive on this guy. Uh Bang Si Hook. Uh so we'll we'll we'll go on to this guy. Let me tell you another story. One thing, by the way, just one regret I have is that I did not hustle in college. I I had like very small, small like tiny schemes. Like I was a schemer. I've always been a schemer. But I was such a goldfish guppy schemer back then. I was trying to like find a way to win the Monopoly game on McDonald's. And I was trying to like, you know, get into the easiest classes. I was thinking small and with my buddies and we started like a sushi restaurant thing, but like

Had I now that I think about it. College, this four year playground. with a whole bunch of potential co-founders all around you, with a whole bunch of potential customers all around you. With nothing but free time and nothing but energy and no mortgage, no nothing. It's all paid for. It's a giant summer camp. Damn, that's that was the time to to take some shots, take some experiments. So if you're listening to this or you know someone in code.

Son of this quick. It's also the time to get drunk, hook up with girls, hook up with dudes. For sure, for sure. Try on different hats and explore yourself. You don't have to have the pressure to like make money. I'm not saying become successful. I'm saying Take some shots, hustle a little bit, and that doesn't mean don't party. That means Um

W the way I prioritize things was was just dumb, which was like I don't know, sleep number one, class number two, friends number three. You know, it's like I thought I thought college was about the classes and college is is obviously not almost almost not about the classes in any any shape or form. But it but the illusion is that it's about classes. And a little bit I want to talk about the fat fire thing that I mentioned the other day. And you kinda said something to me, but right now Or do you want to about that now or do you want to about some mugshot shit? I got one other little quick quick college hustle. Uh idea.

There's another rule change to be aware of. This rule change came from Angelist. Angelist made it where it's now very easy for anybody who does any professional investors, anybody like me or you who invest Millions of dollars a year into startups. We can now make it it's very trivially easy.

to create a scout program to have anybody become a scout for our program, which all that means is You bring a great deal to me. If I invest, you get a piece of the upside. So you get to free r free roll into investments and you get to network with Real investors and you get to be

Basically hunting startups for fun. Um, I was doing this, but back back when I was I think I've talked about this before, the first angel investment I ever did, I did as a scout. I found a deal, I diligenced it, I thought it was a great deal, I ex pitched that deal to somebody who had money. And they were like great, I'll give you a piece of the upside. And um and there was no like, you know, it's like we have to figure out our own paperwork for that. Well, you know, it wasn't like a f easy one click button like Angelus has now made it. Well they've had this. I've I've used this for my thing. On the back end.

But splitting d uh deal by deal carry wasn't easy for funds or rolling funds before. I think for SP V it might have been. But now it's easy for everybody. So n I uh so if you're interested in investing. The the game has changed. Here's what I would do. My quick thirty seconds of what I would do if I w if I was somebody who didn't have the money to invest in startups, but I love the idea of startup investing. I would contact my four favorite investors. Maybe it's You know, me and the three other people.

It's me. Me, me, and me. So your four favorite investors. The top four investors. Sean, Sean, and Sean. I got four email addresses. So here's what you do. You you send an email and you say you don't say, Hey, can I work for you? You say Hey, every week, uh hey, I love startups. I am a junkie. Um, I'm always looking for for interesting startups that are on the come up. Uh, you know, I'm good I'm a developer, so I know about that. Or

I'm into music, so I'm watching the music scene or whatever, right? You figure out what your what your angle is, and then you just say, I'm gonna send you three interesting startups a week. You don't ha you don't have to reply, but if anything catches your eye or you think it's either really stupid or really awesome. I love a one line reply. And you just start sending that for three weeks straight. And if I don't reply after three weeks, you ditch me and you f figure out somebody else. But if you do this

You'll walk you'll do two things. It'll be fun because it's fun to just check out startups and play that game, a fantasy investor. But B, you'll actually walk away within a year, you'll have a portfolio of startups that you have equity in that you sourced that due diligence and that you pitched. And that's like a great way to break into this industry. So I think Angelus just made it way easier to break in. I just wanted to put that out as a PSA for people. Yeah. And go ahead, drop your email. Yeah, Sean at shadpur.com. Um

A minute ago, you said something that was actually really brilliant. And it was about the N CAA stuff. And what you would do is you would find the violations and go to N C double A. And or go to uh like you know University of Alabama and be like, hey, this your quarterback is actually breaking the rules here, the the fines are X, Y, and Z. uh a buy our software for why Yeah.

It's Hey. You have a problem. Here it is. If you if you don't want to have this problem in the future, we obviously we do it. Look, I did it for you already. So there's this you remember earlier month a month ago, I mentioned the business of mugshots, correct? That's right. You told me about mugshots.com, I think it was. Yeah.

And so I went and did a bunch of research on these businesses. There's a whole ecosystem of this. So I'm gonna name um a bunch of them. So Um it's let's see, where are they? Okay. So um Mug shots dot com gets at least six hundred thousand visitors a month.

Busted mugshots.com, six hundred sixty six thousand visitors a month. Five find mugshots.com, seventy two thousand visitors a month. Busted mugshots. That's just ugly people. Ugly mugshots. Is that what that is? I don't know. Or the same thing. I think it's the same. It's busted, like in jail, not like your butt your face is busted. Arrest.org, 4.35 million. Truthfinder.com nine point one million And then be ver been verified twenty three million visits. And so these are all centered around

mugshots and criminal records. Now you want to hear how these guys make money. So what they do is and and and here's a a story. So There's this guy, Matt Creed, in Kansas City, and he started this company called Blabbermouth in 2013. And what he would do is he would post names and addresses and mugshots of local people who had already been arrested. Then he would mail them all letters and say, We have already been blabbing to the world about your release from jail and we want to make you aware of our services as we kinda have a big mouth. And for two hundred dollars, we will remove all the information from our website. And

They would send that to people. And that is exactly what mugshots.com does. That's what Arrest.com does. That's what bustedorg.com. So it's it's free search. Pay to be removed from the database, scrubbed from the from from their search. Not only that.

There's a whole bunch of removal services. So there's removesland.com, remove arrest.org, erase mugshot.com, who charge one thousand to five thousand dollars to actually just do this. to all the to all the companies. I imagine what they do. Is they just charge you five grand and then they go and pay all the websites each like fifty bucks. Like they just have some affiliate deal and they just take a little bit of profit. There's there's probably some rule. There's probably some DMCA type rule where if I request to be taken out, you have to take me down. That's probably what it is. That's my guess. I I don't know if that's right, but I feel like they may they may not have to pay anything. It's just going and filing the claim.

So in in in vast in the vast majority of states, posting photos online Uh uh these mugshots is totally legal. Okay. So you you can't it you you really can't get a it's not a big deal to post them. It's public record. Where the gray area is, is that the websites uh that populate them, they

put the mugshots on there and then they turn around like and charge individuals money to remove them. Um then now a lot of these guys who run these websites like mugshots.com they the authorities are trying to look for anything little that they do wrong. Or anything that it doesn't matter how small, but they wanted to do something wrong, like, for example, like embezzle a little bit of money, which I I think that there's like a uh try figuring out if someone em is m embezzles, like it's you could probably catch that mistake. It's like if they don't file their taxes cor correctly, you know what I mean? And so the founders have actually been mocked up for like Three, four, five months at a time. And a lot of these websites, if you go and try and find we I went and researched them, you try to find out who Owns them. It's different.

domains in Panama, Belize, things like that. It's like this huge web, but it's incredibly fascinating. There's this entire ecosystem around mugshots and then mugshots removal. And it's a very fascinating, very interesting. I think it's horrible, but it's interesting nonetheless. T tell me you're shady without telling me you're shady. And then you point you post your your uh Cayman Islands uh incorporation documents or your Belize, you know, headquarters address. Dan, Dan, come on, come on microphone real quick. You're a good human being. I would say Dan is a uh extremely straight edged human being from what I could tell. And um

Dan, tell me this. When I hear Sam explain these businesses. My literal my first reaction is Awesome. That was wow, so smart how they thought of that. And I think you probably are like many people have a different reaction, which is sort of like Jeez, these guys like whoever does this is a kind of a scumbag. Tell me, Dan, what is your reaction to this?

Yeah, I I just chatted to you. I I said the owners of all these companies are human garbage. And so is that your reaction when Sam describes these as like uh Gross or is it like Like my reaction was awesome. I mean there's lots of ways to make money in this world that just sounds like a horrible one.

That's a good point. Okay, fair enough. So I I I'm not like the I do not like this. I would never do this. I think these guys are pieces of shit. And also I think it's amazing. Like Like I think that like Do so doing what this guy Matt did of like setting the letter, that's like table stakes. Any schemer who has ever wanted to do that, like or any schemer out there who's been like nineteen, like

That's such the this is the most this is some basic bitch shit, I think. This is like the most basic like scam I would imagine. But uh No, I would never in a million years do it and I wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who does it. And yeah, I still think it's fascinating and interesting. Right. So there's like

Uh Would I do it? No. Uh, do I think other people should be allowed to do it? Maybe yes or no? If somebody does it.

Do I consider them a piece of shit? Or do I consider them like, you know, it's fair game. It's just not one. It's not for me, right? Like uh I think those are the kind of To me, that's like the moral question bar question box I I I I get into with with stuff like this, but Uh I don't know. I think these are very clever Very smart. I think they to me, I'm always like Wow.

Mm-hmm. It okay, yeah, I wouldn't do it. But Huh, that's interesting. What like if you just piece it together, there's a bunch of layers. One layer is, oh man, you can create businesses just taking public data that's not really formalized for for kind of like consumers. to like use and you could like aggregate it, create a search engine on top of it, you create a product there. Yeah. People do that with.

People do that with Zillow, people do that with many things. So it's just one generic business model type. So then you say, Oh, cool. If I ever find other public th things that are public record. But I don't know that there's a main consumer consumer website for it. I could build that. Then there's like Huh, there's some psychology. Why are so many people, why are millions of people going to these websites? What is there like is it just like um a gossip thing? Is it that they are trying to solve some problem, like they had some theft and they they wrote down some guy's license plate and they're trying to figure out who it is? Oh, maybe there's a maybe there's a consumer problem to be solved here.

And then there's like the business model innovation or the business model tactic, which is the s the same thing I was saying earlier about NCAA violations, which is You don't sell the the search. You sell the removal. Right. You you sell the solution once they search. And uh okay, that's interesting too. So I I look I look at it as a bunch of different layers, and then when I put the whole thing together, I'm like, Yeah, that's kind of crappy. But like as individual layers, it's pretty fascinating to me.

It's fascinating. You want to talk about porn? Yeah, let's do it. You saw this thing I wrote down? Yeah. All right, so I saw this company that's in Y C right now. And

I don't know how you should have a good idea. Wait, first of all, how do you see all this interesting stuff? That's like saying, you know, how how do you pull off that shirt, man? I don't know. You just do it. You don't even think about it. Uh, this case, this was on Hacker News. It was uh it was posted as a show H N. So I check out Hacker News. When I go to Hacker News, I typically will go to the show tab because I find that to be more interesting than the news. And um

And then I think in this case, Ben sent this to me yesterday when we were talking about something that we were just bullshit about something else related. And then he's like, Oh yeah, there's another company like this. That's kind of interest. He was laughing at it. And I was like, No, I actually think that's like a legit idea. He's like, What do you mean? And I was like, Well

I think these taboo ideas in this case. This is a company. That helps people who are addicted to porn. Fight their addiction. So it's treatment. So it's like Alcoholics Anonymous for people who are are uh compulsive with porn.

Just get you addicted to this app. So he sent it to me as a joke, like um Dude, look at this. And I was sort of like I bet that's actually a big problem. I bet there's a lot of people who have this problem, and I bet there's kind of nothing There's no real legit company that's

Occupying that space. Why not? Why why wouldn't there be something that occupies a space that helps a lot of people? And so I started looking into it. So they have about a hundred thousand. members of their community they say, I don't know if that means registered people explain the product I'm I'm explaining the product so the it's an overall company that's supposed to help you overcome a digital addiction so it wasn't just for porn But they started out with a few different products. So they had the first one they had was called detox.

And all it was was basically it was an app that would just like get you off your phone for a period of time. It would kinda like lock you off your phone and just tell you Don't use your phone for the next four hours, you're detoxing. Okay, cool. Uh and by the way, I've I've wanted to do this myself. I I kinda made a rule for myself. One hour a day I'm just gonna

lose my phone. I I I I don't need my phone every hour of the day. Um the next one they created was Social X. That's your personal role. That's my personal d yeah, I didn't know about the sap, but I just I just put my phone in one different room and I just leave it for an hour. Um Then there's social.

Yeah, that's a lot for me. I was constant on my phone, dude. Me too. And so what I do is I just uh I don't I yeah, I only use it from nine AM to Six p work hours and then I just leave it. Oh my God. What do you do for fun?

Um Well so I'm trying So I mean I I I'm serial killer in your night times, what do you do? I guess technically I mean, I do have it on me sometimes. I just use airplane mode all the time. So you just can't contact me. Like I just won't see any messages. What you just use it as a clock? Or uh like if I'm w for working out, I'll use headphones or music.

Right, okay. But that's it. Wow. So after six PM If I text you, you're just not gonna get it.

Or like you get an Instagram comment or something, you just don't look at it. No, I don't look at Instagram comment no, no, of course not. No. Uh if you called me. If you called me, I would probably see your number and pickup, but if it's anyone else, I'm not p like if it's if you're outside the circle, uh yeah, I'm not gonna talk to you. Well good for you, man. That's r that's really good. I think

That's I think you're saying it like it's a normal thing and it and when you say it out loud, it sounds perfectly reasonable. I think like less than one percent of people doing that. this quick story. I heard about an Earl Nightingale. You know what Earl Nightingale is? No, what's that? So he's this uh he was around in the sixties, probab probably the forties and fifties actually, and he was a radio host and he would tell interesting stories, but he was also kind of business minded. So a lot of like he was like the Tony Robbins of the day. And he told the story about how he um went to a farmer's house one time. And this was right when phones just got

Created and He was at this farmer's house. I forget what he was talking to him about, but the farmer's phone was ringing and it was going off and going off and Earl was just kind of looking at the farmer. And uh the farmer just kept looking at him and having a normal conversation and then the phone away and then it started ringing again. It kept going, and Earl finally goes, Hey, you know, Mr. Like Your phone's been going off. Ar aren't you gonna answer that? And he goes Why would I answer that? He goes, Well, someone's calling you.

But he goes. Sir. I installed this phone in it in here for my convenience, not their convenience. And I don't feel like answering it. Right. And that's now how I ch uh my opinion now to where my phone is is like no, this is here for me, not for anyone else. I uh

I similarly I pick up a a phrase like that that I'll share that I've been I've been like kind of playing with. I don't know if I'm like fully adopting this because I feel like a dick. When I use it. But my brother in law I was talking I was talking to him the other day. And he's a he's he's a successful guy in business and he was like

He was talking about um I was asking about like a tax accountant and I was like, Yeah, my tax accountants saying this and I'm saying this. He goes and I was like, How do you do it? He was telling me how he how he runs his relationship with his tax account. I was like, Oh wow, that's Kind of strange. Uh like

why do you do it that way? Or like don't don't they ask or don't they don't they like w want you to do X, Y, Z? And he's like Are they paying me or am I paying them? And I was like You're paying them. He goes, Okay, so then we're gonna like if I'm paying you

Then we're gonna do this a certain way. And if you're paying me, we're gonna do it a certain way. He goes So many times you see people who pay someone for a service. And then cater to the other person. As if they're being paid by them. And I started to see this. I first you said I just kind of laughed it off. I used to do it. I do my cleaning lady. I I clean my house before the cleaning lady. Yeah, for like I change my plans for her. I'm like, Sarah, we are not like I'm not fixing this. I'm paying this woman to do it. Right. I think I even said this to Dan the other day. I was like

Uh, Dan was talking something about like uh the schedule of this of this of like our recordings or whatever. He's like, Oh, it's getting real late, you know, because you guys are always like kind of last minute on your deadlines. And I I just had to kinda say it. And I was like, I feel like a dick saying this, but I Honestly, like it's this is again, this is the situation. Dan, are you paying me to record this or am I paying you to edit this thing, right? Like Which way does it go? Cause right now you're telling me how I need to do it, but I pay you

To put this podcast out, right? So like And I it again, it feels like a total asshole. But man, it's like been very effective. I've used this like 10 or 15 times the last two months of just reminding myself what is the arrangement here. Oh. person from the bank is calling me.

Hold on. Wait a minute. Do you Do you uh do I work for you or you work for me? Hold on, which way does this go? Okay, yeah, yeah. All right, uh now I remember. Let's do it this way instead. Uh and like fights my kind of like just Nice guy get pushed over instincts. Uh all right, anyways, back to this uh app real quick. So they have uh a a th the main app, the one I think that's blowing up for them.

is called blocker X. And basically you just You go on your phone and you basically set it to disable your ability to go to adult sites, maybe on some timer or maybe just like permanently. I don't know. Less like a self blocking thing and blocking these sites is actually not that easy. Um

And so you wanna be able to block this without blocking other sites accidentally. And without letting you get through. And so you and so they basically have this combination of things between like a community of people, like peers, like Alcoholics Anonymous, like here's a bunch of other people also trying to improve themselves this way. Here's a tool, a blocker. Here's like gamification, a streak or uh like points you're getting for continuing on.

And I just thought this kinda interesting. Like, is there a modern day AA? Like If people are right that social media Is the new smoking. Right.

that um that that all this like kind of like overload of technology, overload of digital news and information and social media. is making us unhappy and lonely. Then isn't somebody gonna build the like AA for that? Like that kinda makes sense to me, even though on the surface it sounds like a weird idea. What do you so I'm try I'm trying to yeah, I I think this is great, but let me put some stuff in perspective. So I actually use a site like this. I don't use it for porn, but I use it for uh sure face Facebook and Twitter and things like that. And so I wish I could share my screen right now, but if I go to Twitter right now, it says shouldn't you be busy working? And I use this thing called stay focused. Stay focused is a Google.

Yeah, it's a Google Chrome extension. I love it. And I just sent it to you. According to Stay Focused, uh the cool thing about doing research on Chrome extensions is they tell you roughly how many users they have. So they have rough roughly six hundred thousand users, but the biggest person in this space who haven't done a significant amount of research is uh research for, they have uh it's called um It's called a block site. The thing I sent you read out how many users that has. Block site it says a million plus ha users of the company. Right. So that's pretty good.

That shows there's l there is a lot of demand.'Cause Chrome extensors are not Like mainstream or like that easy to like find and yeah, so so if if a Chrome system has a million users That is a strong validation of demand.

It's huge. And so when I look at what these guys are doing, it's kind of interesting. So what what's it called again? I gotta pull it up. Uh how do you pronounce it? Altmana? Uh their name is not the best. Not a good name. So I'm looking at what they're doing. It's basically It starts with a a a chrome esque extension business and then offers more features to get you Well I think theirs is a mobile app. I think that's it's I think it's the same as what you're talking about, but with the mobile app as far as like the their go to market.

And you can get Android. I actually think that's a brilliant way to spin. A uh thing that's already been around. Yeah. And to spin it a little bit differently.

And I'm on board with this. I think this is great. So the way the way we were talking about um Chrome extensions, if you go to the Chrome extension store, you can see how many downloads it has. So Google Google Play does the same thing. So if you click their Google Play button, you scroll down to the bottom of any Google any Goo any app on Android. You'll see installs and this says it'll say Yeah, either like Less than ten thousand, a hundred thousand. If in this case five hundred thousand and then it'll say a million. This one's at one million plus. So you know it's between one and I think ten million is the next cutoff. So it's somewhere between one and ten million installs on Android, which again.

That's no fucking joke. I should invest in this. This is a good idea. And I actually just researched them. So they used to be called this thing called fun switch technologies. And when I s heard that name fun switch, I was like, I have a feeling that they started exactly how I thought. And I went to the fun switches uh One switches uh LinkedIn and it said Uh mobile first solution aimed at the uh uh uh getting people sorry.

Helping millennials overcome digital addictions and helping mental health. Uh sorry, I'm just reading this as a go. Are aimed at using the latest techniques and mental help to assist people suffering from those digital addictions. Basically, it was a Chrome esque plug in and they just spun it. To be this porn thing because they saw that's the big market to be in. So I think it's really cool. I have a feeling that's what happened. I'm just doing all this research like as we're talking. But Kind of interesting.

Okay, let's do Chrome. All right. So I had this idea while I was laying in bed this morning. So my my trainer has me do this exercise. You go uh what is it called? It goes um Teagueal exercise. It's a keegle for my brain. Uh, basically, it's a quick like two minute thing you do you do in the morning, which is called the events of the day go my way.

You just sort of imagine that your day going the way you want. And um And and it's very simple. And and uh and and we do the same thing at night as a revision, which is you reimagine something, some part of your day that didn't go the way you want. And you just re you don't even try to correct it and self-help and ask why you what's wrong with you. Why am I such an idiot? You just reimagine it going good and then you go to sleep. Um and this is like such a lightweight mental hack. But anyways, the um I was doing it this morning and I was imagining this podcast going great. I'm imagining you saying

That is a great idea. Uh, and this is what came to my mind. So then the idea came, which is how crazy is that? I imagine you saying this is a great idea. And then a great idea came to my brain within like twenty seconds. So here's the idea. A Chrome extension that pays you for the sites you go to. Okay.

Let's start there. Why would a Chrome extension pay you to go to a website? Well, websites want traffic, right? That's what most ads are. So a website, I like say I have an e-commerce store. I know that a visitor on average, the right visitor is worth, you know, somewhere between three and five dollars, let's say. Um, just based on the conversion rate and the the average order value. And so I would be willing to pay A dollar f for you to come visit my site.

So here's what I'm imagining. You install the Chrome extension. The Chrome extension tells you, hey, Sean. Um ESPN will pay you thirty cents right now to go to their website. Um You know, Reddit will pay you twenty cents. Uh that you know, that pets store that you buy from, they'll pay you a dollar to come to the site.

Um, just click the button, go there, and you just have to be there for for thirty, sixty seconds or whatever, and then you'll unlock the bounty. And it'll just go into a little piggy bank right here in the browser. It's a little piggy bank icon. Oh, okay. So so I believe that on one side You could get Brands.

to basically buy traffic through a Chrome extension. And the the money goes to the user. Um uh either split with the with the Chrome extension or just all to the user in this case. And the user goes there and the user says, Oh, easy. I just have to go to the site. I don't have to buy anything. No problem. But you go to the site, you basically have bought their attention, you've bought their impression, and you know, they may see something new, they may convert, they may check out some new product that you have because that's where you drove them to. Now

How does this uh how does this end up paying off? Well, two two things, two interesting things happen here. The first. Let's say my wife is a big shopper. Okay. Her traffic is going to be worth a lot more than my traffic because I'm a shitty I barely shop. I just go look at information, I steal it, I run away. So I might get low, low bids, she might get high bids. How does it know how what to bid? Well, it's a Chrome extension. It sits in my browser, it sees how much I spend, it sees what sites I go to, it creates a value score for me. Um, and so it knows what I'm worth.

The second thing is When I go to let's say now, let's so that's the first part. Uh it's like page rank, but for users. Users are worth some some different amount based on the sites they go to, how much they spend. Um It's d it's like unbundling the Facebook ad system. So now the second thing is Let's say now I'm a news website and news websites always want to do this like micro payment thing. Like they want me to subscribe 1099 a month or whatever, but I don't want to do that.

But I would pay like four cents for an article. I would pay two cents. And this idea of like Ultra micro payments has been around for a while. People want to do this with crypto, people want to do this with different things. But if you first did the piggy bank thing by letting users get paid. Then you could go to publishers and say, Hey, pay well this for like two cents using that same plugin. We have six million members.

Who um Who get paid daily using our thing. Their piggy bank has money in it. All they don't have to put in a credit card ever. They can just do like tiny micropayments on their favorite sites when they go there. So I think you could build a pretty I think you would change the way the internet works if you if you did this. All right. Tell me about my idea.

Okay, so this is not I don't think new, right? Like The idea of like making a little bit of income from the ad arbitrage. And And incentivizing you to go to a

Uh I mean the this is maybe I'm like well what would I use today if I wanted to get paid If I wanted to open up my browser and see some offers to make money to go to some of some websites that want me to go there. Um, you know the penny hoarder? The the kind of like m blog website. Yeah, they made eighty million a year doing something like that. And so Uh w kinda like that.

So they would uh they would show all the latest deals and all the latest like free stuff that you can get. And they would make a little bit of money by sending people there and making that affiliate. But you have to go to the penny hoarder, right? Yeah, so d different but same. Um similar, but different.

Correct. Um, so there's this guy named Dan that one of our friends invested in and told me all about it and he he's like uh This is This is a scam, not That's my friend's words.

Sorry, Dad, don't hold me to this. But I sent you a link to it. It's called currentmobile.us. Um And that's a similar promise to what this guy made. was basically You're gonna get paid for browsing the internet passively. And I and I imagine that it was something like

We uh will pay you that that ad arbitrage. Right. I'm almost positive that it was like the number one app in the uh iTun store for like a very short amount of time, but number one nonetheless. Um

And I don't know what happened to this. But I remember he laughed. doing gangbusters anymore. He raised I think he raised forty million dollars through uh uh what's it called an ICO and the offering okay gotcha. Yeah, so he's got current token. Yeah. So there's like a bunch of like

Right. Stuff around here that it doesn't make sense to me. So Brave Brave Browser also has like a similar idea. The Brave Browser has bat, which is the basic attention token. So you earn it. By going to sites or whatever, and then you Pay you know, you're basically like advertisers can buy the token. To get your attention.

Uh you can you can basically like pay the token to like see websites or whatever, but you gotta be using a Brave Browser. Which is the Brave Browser doing well. Yeah, Bray Browser has like ten million Users or something like Access. You're just suggesting. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful idea.

Yes. Right. All right. My my my imagination has has my imaginal act has turned into fact, as they say. I think that's as you tell me right. I think it's a great idea. That's why I said it. I thought I was excited about it. I think that I think that somebody could do this. It's like honey, right? Like honey is the Chrome extension that basically says, cool, you just go around shopping on the internet. We'll tell you when we could save you money because there's like a discount or a coupon. And then they started shoving in like kinda some ad slots. I was like, Hey

This person's not even necessarily looking at this product, but you could make him an offer here. Um, and so I think that's I think that it's honey, but it's for your foot traffic. Basically, what is your foot traffic worth? It's worth something. That's a great way to that's a great way to phrase it. Facebook catches all the value, Google catches all the value of your foot traffic. You get none of that value. And so what I think is that if you could opt in and say I'll get paid for my foot traffic. I'd like to see what my foot traffic is worth.

You put the Chrome extension in. You start getting offers, you start earning a piggy bank, and then that can be used to just either you take the money out or you can pay for things on the websites you go to. And I know that websites will pay for the right foot traffic. If it performs, and I see no reason why this wouldn't perform. All right, let's wrap it up. Dan, tell us how we did. How was this episode? Episode was good. I liked all the ideas. Give you a a nine out of ten.

Alright, solid. Uh-huh. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my doll in it like my days off On the road less travel never looking back

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