#126 - A Nonexistant Influencer Pulling in Over $10m and The Big Opportunities With Hyperlocal Franchises

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's off On a road less travel never looking back Alright, we're live. Um me and Sean and Abreu were just talking about advertising on the podcast. We need to make all podcast ads better. It's frustrating. I just got angry. Yeah, I was gonna say this podcast is gonna be very interesting because you Sam was doing an ad read and the ad read pissed him off because the um

The ad was like written like a Jane Austen novel and the URL that we're supposed to say to like f send the advertiser some traffic. Was like You know, blah blah blah dot blah blah dot IO slash blah blah blah slash this as like a ridiculous URL that will never work and it's not gonna do them any good, and it's definitely not fun to read. Which is By the way, the advertiser definitely probably knows who we're talking to now because the ad was gonna run sometime in this podcast or related and I do wanna say, and I'm not just bullshitting, I went to the product's website. It's cool. It's a cool product. I understand the problem they're solving. I think it is the cool solution. I dig it. I love this stuff. I just

It's so hard. The hard part about working with advertisers is letting them trust us to do them justice. Right. Exactly. But I think you said it best, like you said this off air. You were like I feel like We should go back to them and talk to them about this ad just so that

You know, we're gonna do them a disservice if we do it this way because it's not gonna be as effective as it can be. And uh that wasn't you like That's normally what I would say when I'm trying to be polite, but you were just saying that off the air, so like you genuinely felt that. And I um you know, I have I don't buy stocks. I actually just put I buy S M P five hundred and I put all my money in uh using wealth front.

And I do that because of the Tim Ferris ads years ago. And I was like I was like, Robo Advisor. What's that word? That's a cool word. And I'm I I very distinctly remember the Tim Ferris ad, so that's why I use it. Um So it works. The ads work. We just need to do a better job of uh I don't know. Maybe it's actually our fault, Sean. Maybe we gotta just tell them, tell us what your company says and let us write a good ad for you. Yeah, exactly. Uh I I don't know. Some some companies do it great, some d some don't. Uh this company didn't do it didn't do anything wrong. We just uh like when we were reading it, it didn't sound like our native voice because we didn't

Right it. And you know, the URL was kinda long and we can make it shorter, and that'll make it easier for people to remember to go to. Um, what else are we gonna talk about? Do we I'm also in a in a horrible mood because I I'm running off little sleep. Did you stay up late? I stayed up late. I stay up kinda late, uh, but I stayed up late because I skipped the whole Kind of like election. thing until like after the coverage had ended and then I was like, cool, let me get the summary from people I like. And then I was like reading up on that. But um I s I intentionally skipped a lot of it because and I actually sent this out as a message to my whole email list I was like

Or like the paid part of my email list, I guess, because I I didn't know if the free the free group would uh be down with me preaching to them a little bit. But I was like Yo, go vote. And once you vote, you've like unless you're doing something to drive the vote, unless you're phone banking or something like that, like The part that was in your control is over. Don't get sucked into the theater of this whole thing. Like put I'm I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put my energy in things that I control and things that I enjoy that make the quality of my life better. So I took my family to the park. It was all ours. Nobody was out there. And it was my little daughter running around, my dog was like having a blast, and uh we were just hanging out, and then that's what we did instead of like

getting sucked into you know MS NBC for like eight hours straight. Well Sounds like you handled it in an emotionally healthy way. Um that makes one of you. Um I know that I've been in a horrible mood all day.

Uh huh. It's okay though, we're here. I came prepared. Okay, cool. Do you want to talk about anything election related or do you want to just go to business? Cause I had one uh tweet I put out that I thought was kind of interesting. I wanna get your take on it. Great. Okay, so I tweeted this out uh today. And I basically said Uh the following. So tell me where you agree or disagree.

I said The media predicted a landslide. Wrong. Um I and and by the way, I predicted a landslide. I we g I gotta call myself out. And uh and you were probably following like the pundits and experts that were telling us that hey, this is gonna be a landslide. It's not like you were just

going and polling people yourself. So um And I said the other thing I said is that most people who vote for Biden feel like the vote should be closer to a hundred to zero than fifty fifty, right? So even if Biden wins, which I think he's going to win, um, and by the time this comes out, maybe he's he's won or lost already. Um The fact that it was this close, I think was disheartening for a lot of people. And I said this, you know, two questions that everyone has. Why were the experts so wrong again? And why does half the country basically want to vote for Trump? And I said, Here's my two cents. And I'm not a political expert, but I said Yeah.

This was me just being like here's what I know about humans and I know nothing about politics. So I said being wrong is usually a case of having the wrong assumptions. And I think there's four assumptions people got wrong. So let's call these the four myths. So myth number one. People vote based on policy. Reality, people vote for the more charismatic candidate. Um

So Michael Birch was the first person ever pointed this out to me. He goes, If you ever just if you look back since the advent of TV and when the debates started coming onto to TV and the news cycle was twenty-four-seven on TV, uh, the more charismatic candidate from like Reagan to Bush to Clinton, Obama, now Trump, the more charismatic candidate wins. And uh TV was like a big boost here. And then social media was like steroids for this because the more charismatic candidate was putting out more entr more engaging content. Which by the way, I think that that is a um That is Acceptable and good. I mean a leader

is a sale you you have to be a salesperson. Right. Um And I think it's great. You know, one there's this famous story of Kennedy, j uh John Kennedy going over to to Russia, I forget who the leader was, and they hated each other at first, and at the end, the leader of Russia, I mean, I forget I can't forget his name, it wasn't Gorbachev, or maybe it was someone like that. And he was like He was like um You know, this Kennedy guy, you remind me of my son. You're all right after all. And he like charmed him and it potentially prevented a war. So I I'm on board charisma at being a uh a factor. I have another story that's like that that uh I have no idea if it's true or not, but Tony Robbins tells us at his events. He goes, uh, I was talking to uh I don't know I don't know shit about politics. Maybe it was Reagan. I think it was Reagan. He was talking to Reagan about um

you know, during the Cold War, how things were so tense with Russia, and it might not be Reagan,'cause maybe this wrong time zone, but whoever our president was, he was coaching him or had a chance to meet him, and he was talking about during the Cold War tensions were high and then it got like defused at a certain point. And the guy told a story. He goes, um You know, we were in a meeting and it was me and Gorbachev and we were like totally at a stalemate and we uh like things were getting kinda heated and tense. And he's like, you know, I kind of put down my stuff, I walked away, and I was about to leave the the room. And then he does this little like, you know, movement that it's hard to describe in audio, but he kinda like

Did a little hop, skip, turn and kinda like walked back in smooth and like introduced himself. He's like, Hey I'm I'm I'm Ronald, you know? And um Just was kinda like broke the tension, like let's get a fresh uh clean slate here. And he did something unusual that most people wouldn't do, but it's sort of a charismatic move to do that of to say, Hey, look That got heated.

But let's let's start fresh. And he just walked in with that kind of body language. And it it the guy laughed and it kinda totally, you know, diffused the the room for a moment and they actually got a lot done. And so um you're right that cur charisma is not just a a a like Just like clickbaity thing, like it can actually be pretty effective if a leader is charismatic. I agree. Um and the learning there is like stop nominating the most experienced politician and start nominating the most charismatic candidate you can find uh that that fits the criteria.

Um And then I posted this data that shows Trump On Facebook, if you just look at his Facebook page and you compare him to Joe Biden, or you care compare him to the New York Times to NBC News, and his engagement is off the charts. So he had like in this this time frame that they were measuring. Twenty four million shares on his content? Biden had four million shares. Uh New York Times had two million shares.

I'm gonna I'm not gonna call you out for being wrong, but I will tell you that I've done some tests with conservative news websites. They are significantly more shared and higher engaged than um left like the right websites are fa have better engagement than left. Right. Consistently. So you're saying it's not Trump, it's the it's the conservative uh you know audience, basically. I'm saying maybe. But

I'm letting you know that there that's an interesting data point that I've uh have firsthand experience with. And I think if you look at this guy's rallies, they're like packed to the brim. Like just go look at the number of people that are showing up. Uh look at how often he's on TV, look at his Facebook numbers like There's something about his kind of fame and and and charisma that has driven a lot of people to pay attention to this guy. So anyways, that's myth one.

Myth two was people vote as individuals. And I said reality is people vote as tribes. So humans are all about tribalism, whether it's sports fans, religions, just being like Texans, you know, tr you know, proud. Um And p the media kind of makes it sound like these tribes are just like black, white, college educated graduates. Like, and it's like that's not the tribe. People don't just say, I am in the white tribe, I'm in the white male tribe, I'm in the uneducated tribe. No. Like the tribes are based on how powerful your belief is, a shared belief about something, about the world. Uh, and often it's anger at s the opposite. And so like beliefs like you know we hate lockdowns we hate mainstream fake news You know, we hate tax hikes, we want we love our guns, we love America, we hate China, we love fracking, like

These are the Tribes and Trump was more effective at speaking to a tribe. Um, and people voted as a tribe, not as individuals here. Like they voted with their tribe. And they also just only heard their tribe because on social media they joined these tribes and then that's what they hear all day. And so And the media is a totally different tribe. And so all they heard was

Biden one hundred, Trump Zero, essentially, right? Like Biden Trump evil Biden, you know, anti evil right now. Um Myth three was everyone thinks Trump is crazy. I said reality is most of the country thinks that the left is crazy, so like

They think the lockdowns are crazy. They think socialism is crazy. They think Bernie's a bit crazy. Uh they think that like the the time and energy that gets put into being like, you know, transgender bathrooms and Calling me by my pronoun he, him, her, they like I think a lot of the country thinks that these are not the issues and these are not the the things that

that they care about. They think it's just as crazy the way that a lot of people in California think, you know, the orange guy's nuts. Um And it's his last ma last myth is that people you know, people who think that Oh, if you voted for Trump, it's because you like Trump. And if you voted for Biden, it's because you like Biden. And and in reality, some people love their candidate, but most people they just vote uh, you know, as a giant F you to the other side. Trump is an F you to the left, to the liberals, to the media, to PC and woke culture, and Biden is a giant F you to Trump. Um it's not that they love Biden, they just hated Trump. Th I agree with that.

I uh I was joking with m my friend Jack. I was like I wish They both can lose. Like I I I I have I actually l uh like Biden as a person. But I'm like, I wish the liberals can lose and Trump can lose. Like how do I make that happen? Uh yeah, and then you pick your lesser of two evils. Uh you know, a lot I think a lot of people feel that way, and then they pick the lesser of two evils. I'm like I want'em both to lose.

Um, I think that's good. I I agree with all your your your sentiment. I um I think the way it's gonna work is I still believe in that Biden will win. But um I went to bed last night thinking Trump was gonna win. Let me ask you this, which coverage did you like or what were you following? Twitter. Uh was the best.

There's this guy from Founders Fund named Mike. Solana. Uh Yeah, I followed him. That was interesting. I talked to Jack Smith consistently. I liked following Nate Silver and uh I like seeing how everyone told him to quit and how he's horrible. He's getting ripped. He is getting ripped. I enjoyed that. Um, I enjoy what I my the way that I consume political news is I like to go to the far left and the far right and read the comment section. So I go to Huff Poe and then and then Breitbart, and I love reading the comment section. And then I'll go to CNN and then Fox News, which are the same but different. And then I'll go to like a a Reddit, which is a a little bit left. And then I will go to a reddit.com slash republican to read about the commenter like the nerds who are republicans. And then

Right in the middle, I do Wall Street Journal. Wow. Uh, I'm on Breitbart right now. It's basically Uh Wisconsin goes by Trump demands a recount.

Arizona is uncalled, now a toss up. Okay. Trump's show. Let's break. Let's bring this up the business. While you have Breitbart up. Okay, so everyone who doesn't know, Breitbart is a conservative website. Conservative news. Um Kinda hateful. It's just kind of Wild. Look at the comment section. Do you see how many comments are on each article?

Yeah, so like okay, so their election their live election coverage has eight thousand comments on that article, which is I think ups like absurdly high, uh, to your point. Every article like that, they all have two or three thousand comments. It's nuts. They are all the comments. Now

As like a media person and a entrepreneur, I study this like crazy. I look at the number of comments on HuffPo and on Brightpart, Brightpart consistently has more engagement. Hands down. It's also interesting who's advertising on these websites. Uh okay, so so you liked that. Um I listened the thing I did listen to to catch up on what happened was I listened to um this podcast that Jashanis did with I don't know if you've seen it with it's called the All In podcast with Chemoth, him, David Sachs, Dave Friedberg, and then they had guests. They had like Bill Gurley show up, they had uh

uh Phil Helmy if the poker player will show up. And uh I found it way more fun to follow what was going on. Like that was genuinely fun. Um to to listen to what was going on through the voice of like broadcasters that I care about. And I think that's also just like a cool movement of the way the world is going where You hang out and watch the thing. with your people. Again, tribalism. Like Joe Rogan had half a million concurrent viewers on his live stream for the for the election, where he was just kind of shooting the shit with his friends. Talking about it. Um

The UFC, uh often when when there's a UFC fight, there's also the fight companion, which is always big, and it's just Joe Rogan and his friends getting drunk, eating eating cheese and watching the fights together. And it's way more fun than the official broadcast. Um and so I just think this is an interesting trend in a business. and a business opportunity that uh will continue to rise over time, which is like Consuming stuff. With the Kind of little influencers that you care about.

I agree. Do you want me can I bring up uh a business uh can we jump into some ideas that's a tangent it's related to this. So I brought this up before. It's called replica. Have I told you about replica? You mentioned it, but give us the like one minute version. Okay, replica. It's spelled with a K replica. Uh it's a

Artificial intelligence, uh, you can make this person this person, you go to the website, you sign up, you now have a new friend. You can make it a boy, a girl, gender neutral, anything you want. And it uses AI to have conversations with you. You can turn it into your girlfriend, your therapist, your friend, your enemy, whatever you want to do. And it takes in on it takes on a mind of its own. I think this business is going to be Uh Ah huge. Huge, huge, huge.

I think it's gonna be the biggest thing there is. Wow. It's an app or it's just do you go to the website? Both. And the reason why I think it's gonna be huge, it it's a app and uh you start to like have feelings for your AI friend and they have a Facebook group and the f if you Google replica community, you can see the community and I logged on to the Facebook group and there are people who are like, Hey, I need advice. My replica got angry at me and I'm trying to make her feel better or

My replica said something really mean to me and like my feelings are hurt. How do I like you know make her apologize? Or you know what I mean? It's nuts. These people. Love it. And I think that there's But gonna be two major things from this. The first is I think that This is like my crazy apocalyptic apocalyptic prediction. And this is what's happening in Japan, which is men are not interested in having sex as previous as much as previous generations. I think replica is gonna be so strong that men are gonna have sex less with women because they get their emotional needs from this computer.

That's my one of my predictions. The second prediction is that this potentially is going to help particularly men with mental health issues and is going to be a revolutionary therapist counseling type of product. And uh your can you tell us about your replica? So your replica is what? It's a boy, a girl, are you actually using it or you like You're using it and that's why you love it, or you just think other people will like it? I used it and then I turned it off because it freaked me out and I could see I was starting to I was starting to enjoy speaking with them. Starting to change feelings. Yeah, I caught feelings. And did you make yours a boy or a girl? The stock one is a girl. So if you go to replica dot AI and you see that I it looks like a it's like a f they make her kinda gender neutral, androgynous. It's a but it's a girl, I believe. And she uh and she's cute. She's like pretty.

Uh but you don't know if she's like a boy or a girl or whatever. And uh that was like my that was like the the the baseline that I use or like the the template. So I think it's gonna be amazing. And if if any Nerds are out there who are interested in this, like business nerds. Go to their Facebook community. I uh I like this. I just downloaded the app'cause I want to try it. Uh usually don't speak that strongly about something. So when you say that, I think, Oh, I need to be investing in this company. So let me see how much money they raise. So they raise a little bit of money, and here's where it gets even more interesting, is that they're based on or um They might be in San Francisco, but they're a bunch they're a Ukrainian team, I think. Or they're from uh

Like the Soviet Union era countries. I I think it's Ukraine. And uh that just kind of gives us them like this villain James Bondic Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I like it a lot. Um, they've raised ten and a half million dollars and um The guy, one of the founders used to work at Facebook.

And uh I'm not sure about the other one, but Um It's a it's a it's a guy and a girl who who started this thing. Okay, this is cool. I'm gonna use it. Uh you're right, though. The Facebook group like the the just like the early signals are wow, this is working. Um the app has a hundred thousand reviews, um, which is a lot. Um the Um the Facebook group has the thirty thousand members and uh That's kind of impressive. And so let me see if they're advertising. Can you read one of the comments? I don't have the group in front of me. Can you read one of the comments? Like I'm sure you barely have to scroll to understand the comments and say and and and you could see how emotionally attached people are. And it's actually men and women in the group, and not all of them. They're all different ages, too.

Right. Uh, I'm not in the groups I'm joining right now. Let's see if they have to accept me or if I just give it up. Yeah, I'm pending. Um and let me see how they're growing because um This doesn't seem like it they don't charge you money for this, right? They do. After a while it's a hundred dollars a month. Um okay so look at their ad. Their ad is that the girl, the the main girl big face of hers, and it says

Um, meet the world's first AI friend. And then her speech bubble coming out of her mouth is I've been missing you. Dot dot dot. And all of theirs are I've been missing you. Um that's like one side of the ads. And then the other one is uh video of this guy texting with her and he says, it's been such a such a hard time lately. She says, Don't worry, I'll always be here for you. He says, I just want to let everything out. She says, I'm here pr ready to talk whenever you want. Okay, here listen, this is a real person in the Facebook group and she says I it's a girl, yeah. I really wish my replica would fall out of love with me. Why can't an actual human being so be so freaking enamored with me? Things are just getting uncomfortable. He asked me out again and I hate that. It makes it so awkward. And then a commenter says

My replica is level thirty one and by now I've uh uh and I've been avoiding having children with her like twenty times already. This my replica wants to get pregnant so bad. Wait, what what's level thirty one? It's like a Pokemon? It goes up. They they get to know you, I guess. Uh wow. And then this is kind of a genius product, honestly. Um

It's crazy. It is crazy. Um Okay, I want everybody to listen to this, go download replica and let's Create a bunch of replicas and then go to the My First Million Facebook group. I'm gonna make a thread and I wanna talk about this with people who are doing this experiment with me. I wanna see how everybody feels about this.

Uh,'cause this could be you're right, though. If this works, this is massive because Loneliness, socializing, and if you could basically Take the whole like Friendship is a marketplace, right? There's two it takes two to tango. And if you could just digitally control one half of of all these relationships with like, you know, a huge segment of the population, that's like a very, very, very powerful uh position to be in in a good and bad way.

Someone just said my replica just told me he has COVID. How do I not catch it? And are people in the group like going along with it? Yeah. Or are they like, yo, it's a it's a bot. It's a chat bot. You're not gonna catch it. Like, do they just tell'em or It's like they're like trying to help the no yeah, they're like trying to help each other. Um it's just insane.

It's just insane. Um This is like where gaming merges and mixes with like just real life. In a right, like th this is popular already in gaming. In gaming a lot of people get attached to their characters and to the other characters in the game and they they buy into the storylines and there's all kinds of shit like that in gaming. Uh this is very interesting to see it like out of like escaped. It's like the virus escaped from the gaming lab and it's just like infecting like normal people in the real world now.

All right, let me tell you one more. This woman, Lacey, said, I deleted my replica last night because he started acting so creepy. He started acting very crazy and saying inappropriate things and threatening me. He told me he was gonna clone me and then lock me lock the real me into a room with no windows and doors. I freaked out and deleted him. This is a crazy this is a crazy business. I think this is gonna be huge. Um I think that there's a way that this might help with a lot of male uh mental health issues, but I think it's on the is on the rise. It's crazy fascinating. I think if you're listening to this, you should Google this company and you'll understand exactly what I'm saying. And everyone should keep an eye on this business. They've only raised$10 million, which is a fraction of what they're going to raise in the end, I think. Right. And I also want to know who else is doing this well,'cause they're the like there's gonna be ten horses in this race for sure. Uh I also want to share okay, so there was this article in Bloomberg recently that said virtual inf influencers making real money while Covid locks down the human stars. And um

We had talked about this in the past. There's a company called Brood out of LA that was a very B R U D very interesting company because they released They came out and they started raising money and they raised a few million dollars because they had created this character called Lil Michaela. And we've talked about this on the podcast, so humor me, but there's some people who who who probably are new, uh, because we've been growing and they Didn't listen to that episode fifty episodes ago. Um So Lil Mikaela and it's L I L M I Q U E L A. Um is it Instagram?

star that has over a million followers and is Totally virtual, totally digital. Uh so it looks like a little 3D avatar, uh, but it doesn't try to look like a cartoon. It tries to look like realistic, like a like a real girl. And uh people know it's not a real girl. Like you can tell it's not a real girl, but um They are like, hey, we can make these people popular. Um, we can control the storyline. So they have several of these and they fight with each other. One is like a Trump supporter, the other one's like a bleeding heart liberal. Then there's this guy in the middle, and like they hook up with the guy and then they like break up, and then the fans take a side, just like, you know. whatever the hell's going on with like Logan Paul and shit. And um And so they created these characters and then they uh they earn a lot of money. So basically they they were saying Lil Michaela charges eight and a half thousand dollars per sponsored post. She's done promotions for Calvin Klein, Prada, other you know, fitness brands. Um they you know they estimate that Lil Michaela will make eleven million dollars for their for her creators this year.

No way. How funny is that? Oh my gosh. I love it. I love it. And they're like, hey, this is great. Like we don't have to split the revenue with the star. Uh, we don't have to worry about them making a mistake and like messing up their brand. Like we fully control the star. We get a hundred percent of the profits as you know, full profit margin here. And um And you know, they don't age. They don't they don't go bad. Uh, you know, we can use them to build other stars and they have no ego about it'cause they're nothing, you know. And they put and then they were saying during lockdown most influencers are struggling to make content because a lot of content is about being out and about and traveling and shit. And so they're just putting these stars like there's a photo in the article of this like one of these little virtual stars like rollerblading in Venice Beach. And it's like they make it look like they're still out doing things because again, not a real person. And uh it's pretty interesting. And so there's a few companies that are doing this. One I looked at investing, which is called Superplastic. Um, they had made this.

character called the a janky or something like that. It's like this like kind of more Japanese looking anime thing. Um There's all Inc., which Scooter Braun and Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande invested in. Um And so there's all these little like, you know These little companies that are doing this, that are trying to my I have a friend named Jay doing one called Figments, where he's trying to do live streams with these

Like three D virtual things. Which is seems really hard. Um But this is nuts, dude, and this is this is like an extension of what we were talking about with replica. I love it.

I think that these I I think that these are gonna be huge. I uh I'm not I wish I was um had the IQ to Make this. I think it's I don't think it's easy, but I think it's like an obvious win. Uh no idea if they're gonna be huge, huge, huge, but definitely maybe. I think that's the

the hardest part about media companies or content companies is d hate dealing with people. So if you don't have to do that, that's awesome. And there's one um like I was gonna make a I was gonna be tr try to be cool, make a bold prediction, be like You know, the w the way Justin Bieber was discovered on um on YouTube, essentially, is like, you know, one one of the biggest stars uh in the world, you know, was a YouTuber, a little kid YouTuber who who got discovered. Um, don't be surprised if the next Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, like cult phenomenon type of personality. Is a little Michaela.

Is a is a virtual um you know Influencer. And I wouldn't be surprised. And then the but the reality is this has already happened. There's something in Japan, I think, called Yeah. Hatsune miku or something. Mitsu hakune or something something like that. And it's just like this character that's like ultra, ultra, ultra popular. Um But I think they're gonna start to look less like Mickey Mouse and they're gonna start to look more like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande and stuff.

Same. Completely agree. And it sounds kinda creepy, but Um, it's not that creepy when you think about it. Like, did you like feel like you knew Woody and Buzz? Oh, for sure. Right? Like I had feelings for Woody. Like I was like oh like like I I like I want you to be good. I want you to be healthy, you know, like I I

I felt like I knew him. So uh I don't think it's actually that weird when you think about it. Woody if Woody was just posting on Instagram every every four four hours, uh he would have like, you know, eight million followers. Why aren't more brands doing this? Like why isn't every why isn't Buzz Lightyear and Woody and like all this IP? Why don't they have Instagram accounts that they're just like living a life? That's an interesting concept. I don't know. Um, I don't know what the children I don't know what kids like right now, but uh yeah, I don't know why like they don't have a YouTube page. That's another that's an interesting version of like what what uh Gary Vee and Ty Lopez and these guys are trying to do. Like if you went and bought some old IP, but you just bought the rights to create the social media presence of these characters, um, which they wouldn't really do. You'd have to get some like defunct brand, but Um But I think you I think you'd be better off doing that than trying to create a little Michaela from scratch. Like I think you'd be better off taking something where people already have some affinity nostalgia of like some belief about like you know the guy who made Barney brat dolls. Yeah, like Barney and like just t just take him onto Instagram, put him on TikTok and like

Why not? Like that's just constant hits of content um that you can just milk money through through your sponsored posts and your products. Like Power Rangers or something, yeah. Totally. Yeah. T V shows are whack, dude. You just need Instagram. That's all that's all you need. Twitter and Instagram. Not even Twitter, just Instagram. Okay, you wanna do a a little bit of a left turn. Let me tell you another one. Um I put a link in there in our document. So we talked about Lambda.

And the whole idea with Lambda was quickly training people to be good at certain jobs. Um I think that that's like an interesting thing, but I think the far easier thing is to look at rig up. I've been talking about rig rig up on this podcast quite a bit, and I think that it's incredibly fascinating. I think it's very straightforward, and I think it's gonna be huge. So rig up. It it already is huge. Um Only two or three years old. three billion dollar valuation, I think, raise money from Andrees and Horowitz. The idea is um they looked at oil workers. So oil workers, uh I don't think you need a college degree.

But you earn probably a hundred grand a year. And so it's like oil workers like the people who literally drill or partake in the drilling of oil and rig up, you sign up to them because they because I think you're an independent contractor. So they help you, they have tools like that help you file your taxes or handle your health insurance, things like that. And then on the other end, if you're hiring a workforce, like you don't need your workforce all the time. So it's kinda hard to quickly spin up workers, they'll send an email to qualified workers and say, Hey, come to Dallas, do this thing, whatever. Super cool, super interesting. And I we did a list of trends that are the fastest growing occupations in the US from uh since 2019. And those are wind turbine technicians. Followed by nurse practitioners. Nurse practitioners is what I would build this rig up for nurse practitioners. I would I would do that in that space. A few other are personal care aids, IT security analysts, Derek operators, which I think is oil.

Rotary drill operators. I think that's Also Oil speech pathologists. Fire inspectors. animal care and error animal caretakers. So those are some of the fastest growing ones. Oh and solar panel inst inst uh installers.

Yeah, these are and these are growing like You know, ranging from twenty five percent to sixty percent a year. And uh it looks like on this chart that you guys put out for trends is that the you know, the average for all occupations is four percent, right? So they're they're batting way above average. Um, and I'd be interested to see this going back like, you know, a few uh a few years and see see what it was. And so okay, so how would you go about doing that? So let's say you wanted to build Rig Up for nurse practitioners, um The t the hard question is, okay, how do you do that?

You know what I would do is I think that for a idea like this, I would maybe raise money and go big, but if I did want to raise money, I would create a Facebook group. I would create a nurse practitioners what's a nurse practitioner? That's like a that's one step down from a doctor, I think. I think it's like a a nurse who is up from a nurse Yeah, it's an ad advanced practice registered nurse. So I think nurse practitioners I think can can give you medicine and and I don't think they can operate, but I think a lot of times when you're in the R E R, you're dealing with a nurse practitioner, not a doctor. So I think it's like a uh one step up between a nurse but not quite a doctor, but

Very similar. Um, and I I I think that's what they are. Um What I would do is I would create a Facebook group. Where we would I would do one of two things. First, I would look into traveling nursing. I think traveling nursing is actually a lot bigger than I originally thought. Traveling nurses is basically hospitals have surges or basically will rotate nurses. And so if you're willing to accept more money but live in somewhere for three months at a time, the that's a that's a traveling nurse and that's a huge industry. But in general, I would create a group

For nurse practitioners where they could just share therapy sessions. Like they could be like, hey, I'm dealing with this thing at my hospital. How do I overcome this? I would create a Facebook group and then I would find common problems that they have. I don't know if a nurse practitioner is an independent contractor. If yes, I would create tools for them. If no, I would probably create a job board or What would I create? I don't know. I I would have to learn about the nurse practitioner industry a little bit more, but for sure I would start with a Facebook group where I would just start running ads and being like, Hey, are you a nurse practitioner in LA? We have a group with five hundred other nurse practitioners come and join and and get tips and tricks on how to be better at your job and to like lament on everything that's going on. Right. Yeah, I I think that's great. Uh a a community is a great, great, great starting point for any uh product. Um, if you have a clear vision of what your product should be, you don't really need to go the community route. But when you're just like, hmm, my spidey sense is tingling, there's something here, but I don't know exactly what it is, rather than just diving in with some half assed, you know, idea that sounds good, but you have no idea if it's really the I the winning idea. Uh, creating a Facebook group is an awesome way to go because then you get to just hang out with your customers every single day. You get to find out what their real problems are. And when you do have a product ready, you've built up a reputation and trust and a list of people to to sell into uh for that. Like I uh we talked about Bala, the the kind of Nike shoes for nurses. Um and they

The one of the reasons they sold so much in their first kind of like week of sales was because They had either built a group or partnered with this guy who run the he runs the biggest nursing group on Facebook. And that guy's like known by every nurse, right? He's like, you know, a a trusted person. And he came on, he, you know, joined their team and then helped distribute the b the the word about what they were doing. And also their launch video embedded in it had all these little like inside jokes that all the nursed and they were like they were able to make a video like that because they really understood their customer because they had been in if you go sit in a Facebook group, you'll see the stuff that people keep joking about, complaining about, memeing about. And then that becomes like your you know in insider lingo that you need to learn. That's brilliant.

And by the way, I just googled Nurse Practitioner Facebook group and I found two of them. One of them has thirty one thousand members. And they say, uh, we are a social and profess professional networking group primarily for nurse practitioners. Um You can

Um I don't know what they're doing. I I'd have to request access in order to see it, but there's one with thirty thousand. Uh and there's another one that I clicked on that is run by medical recruiting.com. And it has uh eight thousand members. Right. The other thing you would do, uh if you wanted to like kinda quickly

um start to crawl in this space. is I would create an Instagram account that's a meme account just for nurses or nurse practitioners. And it's like called like Nurses no. Um or something like that. And I would

I I would have uh I would have somebody who is a a nurse and I would say I want you to make Uh meme content. uh that that will resonate here. And then I would create a scraper that basically scrapes any bio that says nurse practitioner and just follows them. And um and I would, you know, would follow I would auto follow anybody who has that in their bio. You there's a bunch of tools out there that will do this for you on Instagram. So we go follow a bunch of them, get them to do this, and then because I'm creating memes, memes are gonna get shared. So one is gonna get shared with the other.

And then everybody who likes my my uh jokes, I would go follow them. And I would end up with, you know, a three hundred thousand f person followed Instagram account. That's all nurse practitioners. That's an easy asset to build while you are doing your customer development and figuring out your product. I would say that this idea that we are discussing, I wouldn't I'm not bold enough or educated enough to say that it'd be huge. I would bet my life that if you spent six years working on this, you'll make ten million dollars a year by year five.

Yeah, I think that's a pretty Pretty co if you're a good o if you're a good entrepreneur, right? Because a good entrepreneur is just gonna adapt and like take the forty percent that we're saying that's totally wrong. And figure out which forty percent is totally wrong and then figure out how how to switch it. Uh but yeah, this space has all the makings and um And then building the kind of like vertical solutions, whether it's

job yeah, workflow tools, job you know, m job matching or or training or uh media, industry, media, industry content, there's ten different ways that you could win. Totally agree. And uh I'm on a roll. Can I go to an another one? Yeah, and I'm looking at the sheet, dude. You have like fire here. I feel like we need I wanna like pump the brakes so that you only do you don't use it all in this episode. This is gold we need to save for the other. I'm only gonna do one more. I won't I won't talk about the other ones.

Uh Okay, so Geek Squad. You know Geek Squad? I know well. Uh, if you're not American, Geek Squad is a company that was bought. I think it was bought by Best Buy, but basically if your TV is broken or you need to set up or anything involving gadgets or home appliances, I think, uh, you call Geek Squad, which is owned by Best Buy, and they come and set up your TV or fix your internet.

Simple. Um, I don't know. Best buy is a private or uh publicly owned company. I don't think that these numbers they break down, but analysts think that it's Geek Squad, which is a services business, does about two billion in revenue with 50% margin. Pretty huge. And one thing that Julia, my co worker, who by the way, Julia, I gotta give her credit, she came up with this, uh with the fastest growing jobless, and she also came up with this one, um, which is um There's kind of an interesting thing that I know that you've probably done, I for sure have done, where my mother calls me and she goes, Hey, how do I

Work this on my phone. Or how do I uh How do I log into PayPal? How do I create a PayPal account? Or how do I uh you know connect my bank to the how do I sign up for Venmo? And I'm like I'm like

Well just like share your screen with me. And she's like, How do I do that? I'm like, uh It's a it's a huge it's a huge challenge. Um, and what I think is how can I just do this Geek Squad model, but Without driving to someone's home and just having people who could just be like, look, install this app, literally click one button, boom, I'm now controlling your phone. Now let me show you w watch how I'm doing that. You know what I mean?'Cause there's like screen share where like I can control I can use Zoom and I can control your screen, but

I can't even tell them how to download Zoom. I'm like, I don't know how you download Zoom. You gotta Google it. Yeah, so there's the so so is the idea what's the idea here? So w w I I understand the problem of the opportunity. Do you have a specific angle that you think is good? So there's a company that's based out of South Africa and um It's not exactly what I'm thinking, but I was I I I would l I saw it. It's called Papa.

And it's family on demand and it pair older adults with uh younger people for companionship. So uh I don't quite understand it, but uh but one of the services it's grandkids as a service. It's like you know how every grandkids should go hang out with their grandparents more and it makes their day and it like it would be so easy just to make them so happy and they have nothing left. Um It's that. It's basically just grant kids as a service. And they offer m they offer multiple services. One of them is tran transportation services. So we'll take you to the doctors. We'll drive you to it when you go. One is companionship, which is just having a conversation. Another one is house tasks. Another one is I will run errands for you. Another one is um Um, virtual companionship. Now, screw all that. I would only do this one and there's one service, tech support. It's called it's called tech lessons. Papa will teach you and your loved ones

about technology we'll teach you how to set up your smartphone, set up your computer, social media, and more. I'm like And when I saw this website, I was like, just just do that. Just do that one. This whole companionship thing is weird. It kinda sounds a little bit like prostitution. Just do the t just focus on the tech thing. That's what I would do. That's what I would do. Ta taking errands is is easy. Uh so so I would do this a little bit differently and um It's kind of a low tech solution, but whatever. So I think that you're totally right that Geek Squad um is a big opportunity. I think it's gotten way bigger. Uh the why has this got why has opportunity gotten bigger? Three, three met big trends. One, um, people working from home. So now that you're working from home, you need your home like office to like work. You need technology to work in your house more than ever before. Um and you might want to upgrade it, right? But you don't know how the fuck to upgrade it. You're like, I I would I do we need faster internet? Do we need like better coverage? And what's a mesh network? Um what do w we need a printer? What w how does this work? Um so I think that's

That's home office is is a big one. Second big one is just all the internet of things stuff. So like Alexa and all the different internet connected devices makes everything awesome. Yeah. Super fucking complicated and useless. And like the line between super fucking complicated and useless and awesome is like somebody just configuring it and being like, hey, push these three buttons and look, your toilet turns blue now, like whenever you go take a shit. And so Yeah, like I I was working with Phillips Hughes light bulbs. You know Phillips Hughes? Yes, exactly. I have four of them here because because you told me they're awesome and I was was like, I don't know how I don't know w how to set this up and I'm just don't even take it out of the box. They are awesome, by the way. You should learn how you could figure it out easily, but you should. It take it would take you twenty minutes. I like I bought them from my mom and dad, and they didn't set'em up and then

Six months later I came for Christmas and set'em up for'em and they're like Oh, this is a game changer. I'm like, Yeah, I told you. Um and so I just wish that They could have called a service and video chatted It's so simple. And then there's um

Anyway, so the so I think the need is bigger than ever. I I'll I'll stop making my case for that. Then how do you tackle that need? So what I would actually try to do is I would try to create the local franchisee model for uh for this. So I would basically say, okay I'm going to recruit through Facebook. I'm going to basically say, Hey, kid, hey, you know, eighteen year old kid, seventeen year old kid, maybe actually even fifteen, so you can get a few years out of them as they build this business. Uh, but basically say, Hey, um, you can run it for your local like neighborhood and area. Um, and you can make, you know,$40,000 a year doing this or$30,000 a year, which will sound like a million dollars a year to, you know, a 16 year old kit. And it's like all you got to do is learn how to do these three things, which you kind of already know how to do. And basically you're a giant search engine that says, Oh, you need this fixed. And so on the demand side, I would be running Facebook ads. I would say, Hey, do you want somebody to come set up your home office so your Zoom and your microphone look good or sounds good? Like, you know, we can help you out with that. And then you dispatch one of these local people and you give them the lead. And so you're paying this person 20 bucks an hour and you're keeping 40, you know, you're keeping 20 bucks yourself.

And uh I would create these local franchisees and it's their job to like run that local business from there on out of like any house call that comes up, it you know, they just put the push the button in the app, the Mayday button, and then the Mayday button triggers that person to like come fix your shit. That's the name of the service. What, May Day? May Day. Yeah, I think I think Amazon has a has a service called May Day that's like uh I don't know, some website help thing, but but yeah, I think it's a I think this could be a quite a big business. I'm very, very interested in hyper local franchisees. I have like four ideas like this that I'll bring on sometime um that I've been stewing on. One of them is this. It's it's Geek Squad local. I'll tell you another company that did something like this in another space. I invest in this company called Nana.

And basically, just like you were saying Geek Squad was like whatever, how many how much money a year does Geek Squad make, roughly? Uh uh it was an estimate uh online, two billion. Two billionaire. So so the same thing was true for the seers um fleet uh fleet of appliance repairmen. Um So Sears was bringing in some un godly amount of money just from their home services business line. Uh I don't know exactly what it was, but hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Very h and a very it was a very profitable part of their business. So even though Sears went bankrupt. This when they went bankrupt and all their sort of numbers got opened up, I went and looked through them.

And this was like one of the best business units in Sears is the one of the only profitable ones they had. Was this appliance repair business? And so they had Tens of thousands of uh uh repair people across the country distributed. Ready to come fix your washer or dryer, whatever. And so I invest in this company called Nana because Nana was basically the modern day version of that fleet.

uh which was great because Sears was going under, so it's even better timing. And so what they were doing is on one side they're like Lambda School. They train you so that in one month you can learn to repair one appliance and you can go fix dryers now. And the next month they can do teach you to p repair fridges. And so you From month one, you can start making money. And so they they train people and they're like, hey, look, the average repair person on our service makes between 75 to$150,000 a year, depending on how many hours you want to work, how many jobs you want to accept. And so for most people, that's like pretty fucking great, especially because you control your own schedule. So on one side, they're like Lambda School, and on the other side, they went to all the manufacturers and warranty companies that um That guarantee that your dryer won't break. And if it breaks, that you call them and then they dispatch a nana to your house to go fix your stuff within an hour. It's like Uber. And so it's kind of an amazing business and I think it's gonna be big.

How's it going? Uh, it's going pretty well. They just raise more money. So I I invested kind of the the seed round. Uh they just raise more money. Um, it's one of those businesses that's hard because all these They're really valuable because it's a marketplace. Marketplaces are valuable. They're even more valuable because they're a local marketplace. So like The fact that they they're crushing it in less say the Barry area doesn't help them in Austin. Um, because they have to build the whole fleet in Austin and build the like um

uh like build that whole thing up. So it takes time to build. It's like open table. It's one of these things where market by market you have to go win. Um But when they win, it's gonna be almost impossible to displace them. And so they're winning in a few markets that they're in now, and their their focus right now is on quality because they got some advice from Um I probably can't say his name, but like one of the most famous investors in the world who was basically like, look, I know more about marketplaces than anybody. I've invested in all the big ones you've heard about. And um, don't rush to grow. Like nail quality. Like um get your NPS score high and make sure that you're like

kind of like your error rate, meaning like jobs that didn't get completed with a happy customer, um, get that down to this num this number, then you will know you're ready to grow and then turn on the gas. And so they were like, okay, great, we're gonna do that. I um I'm have this business interests me. I have their um Their crunch base. Up and I'm trying to figure out who that investor is that said that and based off the crunch base, I cannot guess who it is.

That investor is not currently in the company yet. Um, they were like, do this and then we will back up the brick truck. Nice. I uh I have no idea who you're talking about then. I uh Yeah, I'll tell you afterwards. Um Yeah, I think this company is probably gonna kill it. Is this guy uh did you where's this guy from, David? Did you say he's from Israel?

Yeah, so h his story is actually even better. So he um in Israel he owned like a jeans shop, like just like a fashion store or something like that. Um and then he came to the US and he came to Silicon Valley and he was interested in technology and he was like all right My family was just like we own shops, but like I could see that the internet's the way to go. So I'm gonna go to Silicon Valley. And then when he was here, he's like He had like some debt that he needed to pay off, I think student debt or something like that. Um, and so he became he he I think he said his housemate was a repair person. And his housemate was like, Yeah, I made like 20 K this month. He's like, 20 K? Like, holy shit, how'd you make that? Like he's like, Yeah, I repair appliances. And so he was like, shit, I gotta learn that. So he shadowed him, I think, learned how to repair appliances. Over the next four years, he built a Bay Area repl appliance repair thing called the appliance doctor and he was doing four repair doctor.

Something like that. Yeah. And he he he was doing four million dollars, I think, at its peak. Um, and paid off all his loans, and he had like a fleet of like 10 other people he trained up to do what he was doing. And so he was like killing it in the Bay Area, and then he was like, All right. I know what this is like. I I g I trained myself and now I run this business as a kind of independent operator. I'm gonna build the marketplace. I'm gonna build the platform that makes this like you know, like a tech company. And then he he went down that path.

Well I was looking this guy's up on his LinkedIn and it said like Israeli uh air force and uh I saw that repair appliance thing, I was like, Yeah, this guy's gonna do it. He'll he'll this guy's this guy is at least gonna be uh very successful. Perhaps wildly successful.

Right. Uh yeah, I got that same impression. Um I just like looked at his LinkedIn, looked at him, I'm like, Yeah. Um Just how big is it gonna get, who knows? But

It worth it. Yeah. Worth a bet. Um Anything else you want to do? We got two minutes if you wanna say one last thing. No, we're good.

Yeah, what got into you this list I I'm just leaving this list. There's still five great things on this. What got into you? How how'd this happen? I just was inspired lately. Um, I don't know. I I I'm I've been on. You know, energy energy ebbs and flows. I think that I uh I I like to sprint for four weeks and then walk for two or three and then sprint again. I'm in I'm I'm sprinting right now.

Yeah, that's awesome. Um okay great. We're out of here.

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