You could turn off Wi-Fi and do this idea. I like that. What if I told you that in San Francisco, I discovered a business that does $31 million in revenue locally here in San Francisco? On that $31 million in revenue, it does about $11 million in profit. It's brick and mortar. Brick and mortar? Wow. It has $100 million of assets on the balance sheet. Do you want to take a guess on what kind of business this is? Well, it's one of the things you've had listed, but does it involve religion?
It does not. No. Oh, what is it? It is a. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my law in it like no days. All right. We're live. Happy Labor Day. We are celebrating by laboring. Yes. Right. Join me in this labor, Sam. Let's do a labor of love because it is a day of labor. Today's episode is all.
about ideas, business ideas, and opportunities. Did you like preparing for this? I love preparing for this. I bet you did not. This is not my favorite thing to prepare for. It feels like a book report, whereas my favorite episodes are when I just find cool shit throughout the week, and I go, have you seen this? This is cool. Versus this one, I was like, oh, I got to go and find things that I got to seek them out a little bit more. To me, this is like, you know, in a relationship where
You, it's like, oh, our relationship is just us doing things together, right? Like, I got to go to the grocery store. Come with me to the grocery store. That's, that's our date. But you forget that you got to do a date night once in a while. You got to, you got to break out the rose petals. You got to figure out a way to, to keep it spicy. To me, that's what these, these episodes are where when we started this podcast, it was very much like,
What are ideas, business opportunities for people? And that's how we got that initial momentum, because no one else was doing that. And then over time, it's like, well, listen, we're doing two episodes a week. We can't be having like 20 good ideas a week. That's not really how it works. So we started blending in just cool businesses we discovered, interesting things that are going on in our companies, whatever.
That's like the Costco pizza date night. You know what I'm saying? Like, oh, let's go to Costco. It gets a toilet paper and we'll get a pizza. Right. That counts, right? Which is great. So this is a throwback. We sprayed some cologne. We got a little hair gel.
and putting on pants for the first time in a while. And here we go. This is date night for MFM. Where do you want to start? So I'm actually very happy that we have one overlapping thing that makes me pumped. And also a bunch of our things are big, which also makes me pumped. I do not like the small-time stuff.
Yeah, we're going to have a range though. There's going to be a couple that are like simple, what I'll call like more like simple side hustle. It's like, here's a way that you could replace a job. And I'm really going to get rich doing it per se, but you could definitely get to, I don't know, 10K a month, 20K a month doing this.
and then we have a bunch of big ideas. So I tried to stay away from like complete moonshot ideas in this one. I have a few big ones. Can we actually start with it? I think one that interests you and I, that is a big one. You want to talk about that one or do you want to start small first? All right. Yeah, let's go. Last episode, we gave a preview. There was one company. I don't know if you've ever talked about it, but I could just read your mind and know that you thought this was cool.
All right, let's take a quick break because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot has. Now, they let me freestyle this ad here. So I'm going to actually tell you what I think is interesting. So they have this thing called the fall spotlight showing all the new features that they released in the last few months. And the ones that stood out to me were Breeze Intelligence. I don't know if you've seen this, but if you're in HubSpot and you have, let's say, a customer there,
You can just basically add intelligence to that customer. That's to make a revenue for that company. How many employees it has, maybe their email address or their location, if they've ever visited your page or not. And so you can enrich all of your data automatically with one click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence. They actually acquired a really cool company called Clearbit and it's become Breeze, which is great because now it's built in. I always hated using two different tools to try to do this. Now it's all in one place. And so all the data you had about your customers now just got smarter.
So check it out. You can actually see all the stuff they released through the cool website. Go to HubSpot.com slash spotlight to see them all and get the demos yourself. Back to this episode. But in about 2012 or so, I think it started in 2008, but it got popular in like 2012. There was a company called Clout. It was Clout with a K, K-L-O-U-T. And I remember I was just getting started like on the internet and I only had like, I had like 4,000 Facebook friends and that was like considered big.
I mean, this company called Clout came out. And basically what you could do is log in with your Facebook, your LinkedIn, your Twitter, and I don't even know if Instagram existed in that way back then. Or I guess it maybe did whenever it switched to Facebook. But it was really fascinating because what they would do is they would give you a cloud score. And with that cloud score, what you would do is it would range between one and a hundred. I think there was a time when I had like a 75 or something. Obama was like a 92 to give you perspective.
And what would happen is it was a platform for companies like McDonald's. Well, at least that's what I got. I got like $5 McDonald gift cards, so like their new promotions. They would basically find out like information about your background, so what you're interested in, what you're posting, and then how popular you are. And they would give you free stuff in hopes that you would go out and like the experience and share it.
That company was acquired. They raised like $40 million. They were acquired in 2014 for $200 million. But I don't think that was a very successful exit. I think that they probably just sold for the amount of money that they raised that. However, I've been thinking about this idea constantly.
And I think it's really, really, really cool. So the way he got started was in 2017, the guy who started his name was Joe Fernandez. He had some surgery on his jaw. Something was wrong with his jaw. So his jaw was wired shut for three months. And so he was like, in this hospital bed laying around and he didn't have anything to do. And so he said he just got obsessed with can word of mouth be measurable. And so he created this API, or he created this program where you could pull from Twitter's API and give a score out of 100 based off of how influential the person was.
And he got obsessed with this and he started going around deeper and deeper and deeper on this and eventually it turned into a company where by like 2011 it was pretty popular. And this one person said something amazing where they were trying to hate on cloud and they said something like they took the cloud took the entire spectrum of human interaction.
and condensed it into a two-digit number that you could use to bludgeon anyone who failed to adhere to its score. It basically just said it's tacky, it's basic, it's cheap. And they're like, you can't just give someone a score and that'd be their self-worth. And in my head, I'm like, well, that's actually awesome. That's a really cool service. And so the company got quite popular. It was bought in whatever I said, 2014 by Lithium, which I don't even know what that is. And it doesn't exist anymore.
And I was curious about it. And I said, Joe, we DMed him. I go, do you think that this could still exist today? He goes, this is something I'll never get over. In so many ways, we were just way too early. The world still needs something like this, like cloud more than ever. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it's possible to pull it off and get all the data. However,
The idea of clout for anyone in our era, like just getting started in the 2010, 2014 range, this was awesome. And I think a business like this 100% should still exist because when I'm worth sponsoring influencers and stuff for different companies, it's really hard to know what's legit and what isn't.
So what do you think about cloud? What did you remember? I remember back then, I thought it was such a smart idea. I was like, oh, this is great. Yeah. Like everybody, you know, across all social, you have followers, but we all kind of know followers ain't exactly it. And to layer on on just another number that even if you thought it was stupid,
you didn't want to be at the bottom. And I was like, ooh, that's a powerful draw, right? It's just like any other ratings or reviews, but I was like, this is great because it doesn't require people to have ratings and reviews. It could just
basically crawl the data or just take the connected data and give you a score based off of it. So I really liked that. On the other side, it was unclear to me exactly how this was going to be used. For example, you're saying, when we're figuring out whether to pay, which influence the sponsor or how to pay them, something like this is useful. I think that's the problem with this, that it was more compelling
to the cloud user who wanted their score to know their score and for it to go up, then it was for the brands who needed to find influencers. And so I think it really had half of the problem. I think the second half.
Like, it wasn't a must-have. Because, for example, you can, you know, you kind of, like, if you're a brand, you kind of know who influencers are. Even if you don't know, you can look at the followers, you can look at their rough engagement and say, okay, how many likes to followers? You get a very quick proxy for this. You could use cloud, but I'm not going to pay cloud like 30 grand a year for that type of information.
So the question is, what type of information, what would be the right way to use that cloud score? What could they do with that cloud score? And I don't know what that answer is, but I think that's where you would have to start if you wanted to restart this idea. What do you think people could do with this? Or do you agree with me that it's hard to charge a brand a lot of money for what's somewhat obvious, which is, you know, which influencers have pull.
I think you're thinking like a small, medium-sized business owner and not McDonald's and not like a huge company. I think it's like a $50 million your business, not a billion. A really funny story. So I did an interview with Emmet, or I did a pilot with Emmet the other day. So Emmet was the CEO, founder of Twitch, and Twitch had bought my company. And so anyways, it went well overall. It's going to come out in a couple of days.
There was one really funny part where he just burned me so bad. And I was just so shook by it. It took me like five minutes mentally to recover from this. I was so embarrassed by it. Well, you texted me. You said he said something to me that stuck in my head and it almost ruined. So like I was trying to set him up for like.
Dude, I learned so much from you. I was like, I learned so much from you. And one of the things you taught me was this cool little model during our first one on one. You were like, Oh, hey, here's a, here's a good way to use like, here's a good way to like format these conversations. Here's like a way to plug in like, here's a, here's a way to use me. If I was a piece of machinery, here's a manual on how to use it. And he's like, you can come in and you can say one of three things. You can be like, Hey, I'm doing this FYI.
Here's my decision. Here's my second one is, here's what I think we should do. Do I have your approval? Maybe it's very risky. It takes a lot of money to do it. Third one, I don't know what to do. Could you help me? And fourth one is, last time we talked about this, and here's where I'm at now. And that's the update. And I was like, I was really useful. Is that something that you figured out? Where'd you learn that? I was trying to get a sense for it. And he was like,
He's like, yeah, that's really good for like mid-level managers. And I was like, oh, man. He's like, he's like a super seasoned exec. I guess I would do it differently. But that's really good for your not junior, but you're not like a super seasoned exec. And I was like, it's absolutely true. I'm not a super seasoned corporate executive. I've never.
I think that's where the word mid has come from. Yeah, but I was like, I don't want to be mid-level than anything. Like, you could be like, hey, what floor are you staying on? I'm like, I'm on the 19th floor. They're like, I thought he'll tell Keith at ninth. I was like, no, no, no, I don't stay in the middle level of nothing. I'm not, don't ever put me there. And so he burned me and I was like, he didn't even, he wasn't trying to burn me. He was trying to be totally nice. Put it in my head. I was like, oh my God, I just got burned. And then for the next five minutes, I don't even know what he said. And then I came back to the interview after that.
Well, you should have brought that up. You're like, look, I can't get this out of my head. I should have. Did you just, you know, when you have that like compounding social awkwardness where it's like the thing happy, you know, I'm checking into my flight. They say, have a nice flight. And I say, you too. Yeah. And then I'm like, Oh, he does. And then you're like, what I should just do is laugh it off right now. Like a smooth guy. And instead.
You just pause, you eat it, and now it's like, oh, now it's been too long. And then kind of you're in your own hand about it. So that's what I did, at least. You accidentally called them at mom. You had one of those moments. When I said it, it was like 55 minutes later, but just circling back to that mid-level thing, I know you didn't mean that, right? Can you say that differently in a way that feels better to me?
Is he like genius? Is he like one of those guys? Yeah, he definitely is. That's the other problem too. You can't even be like, ah, this idiot doesn't know what he's talking about. It's like, no, this genius knows exactly what he's talking about. Is he working at Twitch still? No, he retired. That's sick. All right. Well, maybe Emmett will be the new CEO of Twitch or a cloud or something like that. I don't know. What's going to do now? Like go to Mars? I mean, he's like pretty wealthy now. Yeah, I think he's going to do like, you know, other stuff in life. We talked about a little bit on the pot, but I think he's going to like
He wants to write a lot like essays and stuff like that. He was in the first YC batch. I think he looks up to Paul Graham, who was sort of a mentor for him. And then he really likes other people who have kind of like really contributed to like the intellectual discourse of the world. And I think that's what he wants to do for the next little period of his life, not go back and operate another company. He did that for 17 years, which is pretty intense.
And Paul Graham lives, I think, as ideal, life is one can. I think he lives in England now with his family, and he just writes an essay once a month, and everyone just does what he says. You know what I mean? The YC Illuminati. Yes, sir. So it works out well. All right. So, Cloud, I think, is a cool idea. But what do you got? So restarting Cloud, OK, I think that's good. I think I got a different version of an idea that
that was similar like similar sort of professional services. Okay. So we've had Andrew Wilkinson on the podcast of a bunch. And Andrew is a fan favorite. And people I think, like us really respect what he's done with Tiny. It's like, how tiny we buy businesses, we buy wonderful businesses, beautiful businesses, right? It's a great little stick. And he's got a portfolio of, I don't know, 30 companies now at this point. And the whole thing is worth, I don't know, what's the stock worth today? Maybe $700 million or something like that.
six to 800 on any day on getting given week. Amazing. So amazing sort of bootstrapped venture. And he bootstrapped it because two of the businesses out of the 30 are the real crown jewels. Metalab, which is his design agency. And the other one is dribble. And dribble is a business that's very, very simple, which is based on the simple insight. Every career
needs its online resume, right? Every job that you're going to do needs a way for you to show what you're all about and get more jobs. And so for most jobs, we have like the catch all the generic, which is LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is going to say, Hey, just put a put a resume up here, just say what you've done. And hopefully that's good enough.
But for some jobs, you need something more special. So for example, if you're a designer, LinkedIn doesn't really help you stand out that much, but now dribble would let you go and post designs, so design shots. So like just like screenshots or images of what you're designing as your portfolio, and it became a portfolio site. And so dribble itself is probably worth $250 million, I want to say.
That's fine. I'm trying to find the financials. I'm trying to find the financials, but it looks like in 2022, Dribble did eight million in profit, but I'm pretty sure that it's like eight. Here it is. It did 60. So in 2022, it did 62 million in revenue with eight million in earnings. And because it's a network, that could definitely sell for four or five times revenue, depending on its growth rate. Yeah, exactly. So it's pretty valuable.
So I think $250 million, probably what dribble is worth. Now, another friend of the pod, Scott Belsky, did the same thing with Behance. He created Behance, which is a place for designers to post their work, to is a sort of a community for those designers to comment on each other's work. But the business model was, if you want to go hire a creative, come to Behance. And so dribble and Behance both did the same thing. I think he sold Behance for what, 100 million, something like that. No, I think it was 175 of which he owned 60 or 70% of it. Amazing.
So what does that take me now? Okay, so where can you apply this dribbler Behance model that needs it today? So Zuck, I think seven years ago said something. He goes, video is a mega trend.
And he goes like, what's a mega trend? He's not like Zuckerberg is not the type to just say like flowery words. Like when he says something, he's part of the words mean things team. And so what's a mega trend? He's like a mobile is a mega trend. The internet was a mega trend. And now video is a mega trend. And he's like, basically video, everything else is on that team. Who's also I still don't know that words be things. And it calls it words mean things. And I saw him in many, many meetings, derail the entire meeting.
Because he was stuck like you said this word what do like what does that word mean and they're like us I don't know we all know kind of right he said I don't know does it mean this or this and then he's like paint them and he's like no because words mean things to me and so if we're going to use words.
They're going to mean things and we're going to all agree on those words means so that we can have a productive conversation. And I was like, wow, well, it's the words means words mean things teams, otherwise known as serious people. You know, like, oh, he's, he's a serious, he's serious people. Like when they say a handful of words, you're like, I know he or she specifically chose that word. I love those types of people.
He calls it words mean things versus team alliances. And I don't know what team alliances is. There's a longer, there's a longer explanation to that. But he's like, you know, the sort of like two, the way people think is in two teams. And one is like, oh, let's not get lost in semantics. And the other is like semantics is everything. That's how we're, that's how we are going to communicate. Let's, let's not be weak about that. Let's words mean things. Let's agree on that. Anyways, so.
Zuck said this mega trend thing. And if you look at it, everything has shifted to video. So entertainment, Netflix, streaming, all that, obviously gone to video. News is highly video. Education has become driven a lot by video. E-commerce is driven by, let's say, video ads and how you're going to display your product. Communication. It's stupid podcast. With Zoom. Audio has become video.
We now have to go to YouTube and I have to wear like a nice shirt sometimes. Yeah, I did. I wet my hair like, you know, I used to do school in the water fountain. I wet my hair for the fods. It was a quick little spruce up. So videos is mega trend, but where do you hire people that specialize in working in video? So where do you hire people that are video editors or, um, or even like the auxiliary things like thumbnail artists or, uh, video strategists? Where is their beance? Where is their dribble? Where can I go see?
portfolios or like a newsfeed of people who did really cool animations or cool edits to a video and then be able to hire those people. As somebody who's hiring a lot of video people, I don't find this site. I think if somebody created Behance for video, I think that that is a big idea, dribble for video. I think that is a good idea. I completely agree.
I 100% agree, and I'll explain why. So I actually had a very similar topic that I was going to break up. I was going to call it LinkedIn for X. And the reason being is, I think you told me about this. It's called doxy... Is it doxyminity? Doxyminity. Doxyminity. So basically it's LinkedIn for doctors. You told me about it. So I didn't realize it. It's publicly traded. It has a $4 or $5 billion valuation. It's a great business. So it's basically... Which, by the way, let's put that in context.
It has, I think, 2 million doctors. LinkedIn probably has, I don't know, 300 million people or something like that. Hundreds of millions of users. Yeah, fractions. And LinkedIn sold for 20 billion. Doximity, you said, is that 4 billion? So it's... No, 5, 4.8. Okay, so it's only four times less valuable than LinkedIn with 100x less customers, right? Because the value for customers is so much higher.
Yeah. And so I was reading about it. And they had this term that I loved. They go, we launched this because we are always looking for digitally, digitally under-indexed industries. And I thought that was a beautiful word. What's that? Digitally under-indexed. And so what that means is basically communities of professionals who just aren't being catered to in a digital format. So you could say lawyers, you could say,
I actually don't even know what else. I mean, there's a lot of them. There's one, there's one for blue collar workers called job case. And the reason why this interests me is at Hampton, what I'm noticing is that even though we didn't mean to do this, we're sort of becoming a little bit of a network, not quite a social network. But I'm seeing I'm like, if we wanted to, which I don't really want to, we could make this like a, have you heard of Raya? You know what Raya is? Yeah, the baby got for hot people.
Yeah, it's like, well, I think they call it like elites or something, but it's like a paid dating app for like elites like the for the facially elite. Yeah, or the the the the bank elite, you know, like, you have to start saying instead of socioeconomic underprivileged, I'm facially underprivileged. And I've been able to overcome this adversity. Yeah.
Well, this shit has got me really interesting because I think that what you can do, which basically what, how do you call it? Docksity? Docksity. Docksity. What does that mean? See, you have to know how to say the word nor even get in. Sounds like a drug. Forgive words mean things. Sounds don't even mean things.
But this company, dude, so they're growing quickly. They're doing like 400 million in revenue, 150 million in income. So they've been profitable for years and they've built this LinkedIn for doctors. And I think it's a really good business. And what I've been really fascinated in, fascinated about is what type of niches can you build professional networks that are somewhat ignored? Because do go on, do go on to LinkedIn. Yeah, I use LinkedIn. What is your inbox on LinkedIn look like right now?
Oh, I just ignore the inbox, mostly. Exactly. Why do you do that? It's mostly, mostly junk and spam. Yeah. So it's like crap. It's crap. The inbox of LinkedIn is horrible. No networking is happening there. And like people mostly use it for resume tracking and things like that. But there's a bunch of jobs out there like lawyers, like doctors, where it's a relatively small community.
2 million people, 3 million people. I think there's 2.5 million lawyers in America. There's 2.1 million doctors in America. These are relatively small where you could have small circles that know 80% of the population on the network, because I'm a friend with you, who starts with you, and then now I'm connected to you. And it's small enough. And so I've been really fascinating, very similar to the dribble thing. Dribble is a little bit more resume and showing off portfolio work.
This is a little bit more networking, but it's also resume. I've been very fascinated by these businesses that do this in the hard part, I think, with any social network.
is it's like, what's the chicken and the egg problem, which is like, you know, it's not good unless we have users, but we don't have any users and we need users. But what I've noticed is that there's so many people on youngish people on TikTok who are professionals that are crushing it. So there's like a bunch of dentists or the dentist people, tons and tons of chiropractors, like there's lots of like professional services that are going viral on TikTok. And if I'm in this position,
Which I guess I kind of man am where I'm thinking like what else can we do Hampton for? I was like, man, I could totally partner with some of these like and create a Hampton for doctors. But to do a social network, that's not my skillset. So I'm not good enough to do that. But I bet if I could like convince some crazy person like Nikita Beer, someone who knows about networking or networks, network effects, I think you could actually build a substantial size business for niche professional communities, whether they're paying a small fee to be part of it, or you build an ad network on it.
But I'm very fascinated by these niche communities for professional services that are more than communities, but like LinkedIn style. Yeah, I think these are super hard. And when you do them, they're obviously very, very valuable. Any network is really, really valuable once you create it. But I think these are very, very difficult. It's really hard to have one idea, which is why I don't think there's 10 ideas like this. I think right now there might be one or two ideas of this that might work, which is why for the video one, I got excited because
I think that it's going to take all. Well, it's clear that there's an industry where you need this and that showing how good I am as a video editor through my paper resume is bad. So you need like, you need a paper resume to not tell the story.
then you need for there to be a lot of people in that industry and a lot of people hiring for that industry. That's the combo you need. And that's why I think that this sort of dribble for video editors is a multi-hundred million dollar idea if somebody would pull it off. All right. We kind of tag teamed up with a little bit. You want to go next? Here's a different kind of idea. So here's an idea that I think would be it's not, doesn't require the internet. You could turn off Wi-Fi and do this idea. I like that. It's not easy.
but it's also not really impossible either. So it's somewhere in the middle. And also on the upside, I think it's also like on the low end, you make millions of dollars a year, on the high end, you make tens of millions of dollars a year. So what if I told you that in San Francisco, I discovered a business that does $31 million in revenue locally here in San Francisco? No revenue outside of San Francisco.
On the 31 million in revenue, it does about 11 million in profit. And it's brick and mortar brick and mortar. Wow. And it has a hundred million dollars of assets on the balance sheet. You want to take a guess of what kind of businesses is? Well, it's one of the things you've had listed, but does it revolve religion? It does not know. Oh, what is it? It is a private elementary school.
So no way. There are private elementary schools in San Francisco. So I looked at a bunch of them. The one I think that does the best, or the one that I found that does the best, is one called the Hamlin School. And it's based in San Francisco. It's a nonprofit, so you can see all the financials online. But you can see this for many of them. And it's just for girls. It's a girls-only school K through 8, I think.
only 450 kids. So 450 girls go to the school. You pay basically a college level tuition. So parents pay $40,000 a year to send their kid to kindergarten or first grade. God damn 40 grand. Are you going to do that? I'm not going to do that. I'm out of the city now. But.
There's a lot of people that do because they have a waitlist and a hardcore admissions process. If you want your kindergartner to get into school, you have to dress up, go to the interview, prep them, be like, hey, don't make a fool out of us. We've been preparing you for four years for this. Come on, perform, do the thing. And you send them in and they do an interview with them. You're a four-year-old, doesn't interview with them. Oh, I know this school. I used to play basketball. And they have a sick basketball hoop overlooking the city. Yeah, yeah. It's at the top of Pac Heights.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's a wait list of parents dying to get in. And they own the buildings. They own the real estate that they operate out of, which is why they have so much value and assets on the balance sheet, because they own huge properties in the prime spots of San Francisco.
So, and I looked at a bunch of these, there's another one, Birx and another one, there's a whole bunch of these that exist. And they range from like, you could see, okay, 2020, 2021, how much revenue do they do? Okay, they did 15 million or 20 million in revenue, some are more profitable than others. So, Hamlin is particularly profitable, but the other ones would be like 15 to 20 million in revenue and 2 million in profit.
Um, still not bad, not bad at all. And they, and they would have 25 million in assets on the, on the books. And you can see who goes there because they have to list who donates. So you can see the donations from different families. Oh, that's the Facebook executive and this person is a famous author and famous movie producer and whatever. Right. So there's a whole, how much do they donate? Like what's a big donation? The top donations are like low seven figures right now. Oh my God.
They did like a, we're going to renovate the school and they raised $50 million to renovate the school. And that's donations outside of the tuition. So that's just, just please give us money so we can have a better building. And you get to, we'll name the library after you type of thing. Pretty insane. So there's a huge number of people, because the public school system in San Francisco is not very good or considered to be not very good. I have no idea what it actually is, but that's the reputation it has.
So I think there's an opportunity to do the following. So the good for them, now what's the opportunity? The opportunity is, if you were ambitious enough, you could
Look at if you cared about this topic, if you cared about this topic, you really got to care about this shit because this is going to be I don't know, debatable. I think you have to care enough. I don't think you have to like be born to educate. I don't think you have to be, whatever, missed out fire here. I think you have to be a smart person who is going to hold a standard just like you would for any other business.
a man dressed as an elderly woman. You definitely don't have to be in that. That's not required. In fact, you can't be that probably. But I think about what the most ideal teacher is. It's been stepfire. So 40 year old.
Can you still be divorced, man? And she'll take care of you both at the same time. So there's all these commercial real estate is that like an all time low in San Francisco. There's empty buildings everywhere. Why? Because remote work, it was too expensive. And now these companies are basically just trying to get out of their leases. So on one hand, you have huge office buildings that are going vacant.
And on the other side, is it totally dead down there right now? No, it's not totally dead, but it's the lowest it's ever been. So, you know, by low, if that's your strategy, this is a good time to do it. So I think you could buy one of these commercial or industrial buildings and convert it into a private elementary school. Now, we're going to need a couple of things. We're going to need a name and a differentiator on the name side.
I got a few to throw at you. You tell me which one you like. Well, let's just go look at a bunch of old shipwrecks. That's the ugiest names I found. Here we go. Yeah. Would you like your child to attend Windsor Oaks? Yeah. Would you like your child to attend the prestigious Carrington School? That one's nice. And the other one is, oh, yeah, yeah, our daughter got into Thatcher Derby.
And if your daughter gets into Thatcher Derby, you feel pretty good right now. So are these famous streets in England? I just looked up expensive ass last name. So I was my Google search and then I found a list of 100. And then I started pairing two together, like Windsor Oakley and Thatcher Derby together. So I think I got some solid leads there. The other thing is we need a different year. And when I talk, so I have some friends who have kids that go to these schools.
And I asked them, I said, what would you wish was different? And they're like, because I was like, you're paying a crazy price. I thought they would say something like price or teacher, student ratios. And they were like, no, no, no, look, these are all going to be expensive. And in fact, I'm fortunate. I did well. The number one thing I want to spend on is my kid's education. If I, you know, if there was a cheaper school, I don't think we would switch because we would feel like, well, are we really going to try to go for like a lesser education? I don't know. This was a wait list. Price is not the problem.
And I said, teacher, student ratio, they said, now it's six teachers for every one kid. So on the 450 kids, they have 75 teachers to run this school that does $30 million. You did it the wrong way. Six students per one teacher. Correct. Correct. Got it. Yeah. Six teachers for one student would be insane. I mean, we're weird. So I said, what's the biggest pain by the go? You know what? I hate to say this. I consider myself a liberal person, live and let live.
But there's like an agenda in these schools and the agenda is like very woke. So, you know, like our kids in elementary school have like they're being taught, you know,
that there are like, you know, what is gender? You could be a boy, but you're a girl. They're like, I just don't want my like first grader to be thinking, oh, I could, I'm a girl, but I could be a boy like that. And this is at public schools, right? This is at private schools. Oh, and so they're like, you know, and, you know, there's just such a heavy influence. They said, you know, it's crazy. In our elementary school, there is, um,
there are like clubs that are, you know, it sounds like what you would have at like maybe a very liberal college, but it's like, yeah, I don't feel like that has a place in elementary school, just like kids be kids. So the differentiator is gonna be, hey, what happened to schools teaching math and science? Let's do that, right? That's what we're gonna teach. We're not gonna teach political stuff. We're not gonna teach all these social issues, like they're kids, let them be kids. We're gonna be a hardcore math science STEM education school. We're the best.
No, no, that's what that's what your Derby is going to be. I love it. Hardcore math science. And we don't subscribe to all we keep the the politics out of the school. That's that's our only promise. You're here to learn and we're going to learn these topics. And we're not trying to shape your kids socially or politically in any way.
You and I have a friend who's got a, well, he's just turned, he just became a teenager, 13. And I said, Hey, Brian, how's school going? You know, it's about that age. You're you're liking girls, I bet. You anyone you have a crush on? No, it's not really working out. Why not? He goes, they're all non-binary. And I was like, what? He goes,
Yeah, there's only one that's heterosexual and assists or something like that. But the rest are non-binary. And the girl I like is non-binary. So she said she can't be with me. And I was like, all right, well, that is a pain in the ass. I don't know what to say to that. No advice. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah. So what do you want to have for lunch? It sounds really challenging, honestly. Most of the time, generations will say, oh, you have it so easy. I had it so much harder when I was your age.
Not true here. I do not envy a 12 or 15 year old at that age. It was just a different, right? And I don't know if it's better or worse than I'm really saying that, but I do think there should be options in the market for what you want. Some people really do want their kid to be
exposed to a whole bunch of different issues and be a well-rounded human being and well-versed in a bunch of different issues. And other people are like, you know, I don't really want my kid thinking about that. I just really want them to have a good education, learning about math, science, you know, reading, writing, those things. And I'd like the school to do that. And I will handle the kind of like the outside of those, that curriculum type of education. So I'm not saying one's better. Well, what's your phrase that it be like to be different?
where well-roadedness goes to die or something like that. It's hard for science machines. What we create. We don't like standardized testing. We love it. So, yeah, you've got something here. Diversity here is JavaScript.
Something like that. All right, that's cool. But that's crazy that school makes that much money. Yeah, who would have thought? I didn't really think about like ever like, oh, you could create a school. That school, if it's doing, you know, any of those schools, those are basically like somewhere between 50 and $200 million assets if you were to sell them. Maybe more if they, one of them has $100 million of assets on this balance sheet. Like these are very big businesses that are just one location.
brick and mortar schools with 400 customers. That's kind of amazing. Did I ever tell you about the time I was a telemarketer? No. So at my high school, if you needed some money, the best job was to be a telemarketer. And what were we selling for what?
Yeah. What were we selling? You asked, we were begging for money. And so what they would do is you'd get paid $10 an hour, but you'd get a commission and you'd get pizza. And I worked that job for a year, three nights a week. And what they would do is every time you'd sit down at your desk in the evening,
But they pay commission salary and pizza. Dear diary. Yeah. That was the thing. It was like 16. That was the thing. We had dinner. They had soda and pizza, and you'd sit down at your desk. I'd work there from like 3 p.m. to like 8 p.m. You sit down at your desk and you have a phone, and then you just have a box of note cards. And on the note cards, it says, how much the person donated previously?
what their resume is, so where they worked, and what their age is. And what you would do after this is a little trick of the trade, you find the oldest person there who's got the best career, or who has previously donated the most amount of money, and you line those up, and you just start calling them, and you say, hey, Mr. Smith, this is a Sam at SLU, your alma mater. I know you graduated here in 1956.
Um, but look, things are going great here, but we need some money in order to build this thing or that thing. Can I count you down for a $5,000 donation? You did $3,000 two years ago, but times have changed my friend. We got to step it up. Like you want to be a man for others or not. Now is the time. And like we would like, we had these scripts that we had to like sell these guys are giving us money to build something.
And I would bring in, I don't remember the exact numbers, but like tens of thousands of dollars a month in donations from these alumni. And that was my job, which is to call these guys constantly. And we would do, I don't know, maybe a hundred calls or something like that at night, just trying to get this money. And you would get like, if you brought in five grand, boom, you got a hundred dollars. Like that's what we did. And it was the greatest racket on it.
I don't remember exact. No, we weren't making because the money had to go to the school. Was this legal or was like, you know, was there a janitor overseeing you? What was going on here? Who was running this program? I can't believe the history teacher That was that was like his side job his side hustle was running the boiler room
You know, he was the Jordan Belford and I was like the little, the little scrum or the little scrub just like, you know, smiling and dialing. He's like, you guys want some crackers? Yeah, crackers are for closers. Just on the phone par. Yeah, you're like, walk behind you like Sam's out of work call. Can you please, can you please take that up?
Your fingers broken, why aren't you dialing bar? But that's what I did. It was awesome. I mean, don't you have that doesn't do people call you. And usually what they do is now what they do is once you get old enough, they hire your friends to be the person. So like if we went to do it together, I'm going to call Sean and be like, Hey, Sean, do they do that?
Yeah, so like my high school now I'll get texts from people who I was acquainted with and I'm friends with and here's the kicker They'll say shit like hey, I know you I follow you on social I know you're doing real well
So it's like, do I flex right now? Like, because I'm entirely driven by making my high school friends or my high school classmates, like, I want to be a big shot to them. That's right. Because, you know, I got made fun of it. That's all I care about is bringing it back to them.
But I got to give five grand to this school. They get me all the time. It's been working so effectively. But that's how these telemarketing things work. You don't get calls from Duke asking to give money. Hey, it's Duke. Lose my number. Barking up the wrong tree. Never happening. Can't believe I gave you the first place.
Yeah, man. It's like a pretty funny thing. I mean, if you have a multi-billion dollar endowment, you got to lose my number. You're not calling me for money. That's not going to happen. If my high school or something called me, all right, maybe, I hope they don't. But, you know, I wouldn't really feel as aggressively upset as I do if Duke calls. If your number could also be a country's GDP,
You're if you're in down it could be confused with like a Caribbean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're out like you should not call me. Yeah That's all right. You want to do a couple more. What do you got? Yeah, I got some I got some good ones. All right. Let me give you a quick. What what what by the way? What is Duke's endowment? It's in the bill. I don't know. It's multi billions to get down in size. Oh
12 billion. Is it really 12 billion? And Duke's not even like a top-minded level. That's a mid-major. It's definitely a mid-major. It's not even a good school. I mean, is Duke top 20? It's top 20, for sure, right? Yeah, it is, yeah. But is it top 20, you think, in terms of endowment? Yeah, I think so.
That is insane. Billions of dollars endowment. They could basically just run the school off the investment income. Oh, yeah, totally. I'm surprised that more people. I'm surprised that anyone gives to these schools. I don't understand at all. All right, so the top, yeah, it's in the top 20. So Harvard number one is 40 billion Yale 2 at 30, Texas 30, Stanford 27, and then
at the bottom of the top 20 is Cornell with 7 million. That's insane. That is insane. That's that's that's ridiculous. Yeah, I don't know why those guys would be calling you, but I bet they do. They need your $50. Well, I tell you about one of the really smart ideas was this thing called
Got the name of the parent company. Ben, see if you can find it. They made this thing called Tower View Venture. So one of the big streets at Duke campus is Tower View. And it's like the name of some magazine there or something like that. It's like a reference to something we remember from school. And it's basically Tower View Venture, who raised money for a venture fund to invest in alumni from Duke. It's like, oh yeah, Duke has really smart people.
So, you know, we are going to invest those companies. They've had these winners before, Cameo and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they basically do this, they spin this up for every single top school. It's called, I think alumni ventures. And they just spin up small funds for every single school. And, um, and then they just run ads and call you, try to get you to donate, uh, try to get you to invest in their fun. And they're like, cool. We're just going to have like, like, like, ton of adventures. They have, uh, like it started in 2019.
there's uh you know it's on fund five now for for the duke one and like i don't know how big these funds are but like even if they're like 10 million 10 million dollar funds or 20 million dollar funds you take two percent every year of management fees and 20 percent of carry across this times 50 other schools it's like a pretty genius way to like pull a large straight of so it's a real business school
But does the school give them permission to use their name? Well, they don't use the name. They say we're Tower of Adventures and we're investing in Duke alumni. So they're not saying we're Duke's venture fund, but they very much make it. Dude, that's shady, though. I want the colors match. It's like, here's all your school colors. Everything is like, you know, based off that.
That's a scheme. That's a, that's a hardcore scheme, right? You could do that for Belmont. Well, I mean, like a $50,000 fun ain't going to go far. Do you think your Belmont's most successful alumni from your year? Yeah. Yeah. No, I got beat. You know who it was? Florida, Georgia line. What? You know that Florida, Georgia line, that ban?
You've never heard of Florida, Georgia line? I was like a territory, that was annexed. Dude, Florida, Florida, Georgia line is like, if you go to your Spotify right now and like you look in the top 100 songs, I bet most years they have one or two songs in the top 20. Yeah, you know, it's on cruise, like even Nelly made an appearance. I mean, you're just, dude, do you know who Nelly is? Would you like to pants me right now? And for everybody? No, I don't know who any of these people are. I know Nelly, but.
Yeah, it's like Mike Posner was in my year. And, uh, you know, what do you know, Morgan Wallen? Do you know who that is? He's the shit. Love that guy. They're more famous than Morgan Wallen. Oh, wow. So I'm not, not, not to you, but they put, they helped put Morgan Wallen on the map because Morgan Wallen appeared on one of their songs. Anyway, they're like a Morgan Wallen famous band. So they might be number one. I think I might be number two.
But you know what? They never fucking call me. I got mad at them because here's, let me explain why I got mad at them. My mom was going to come and watch me graduate, but I didn't finish school on time and I asked like the teachers or whatever. I was like, can you guys just give me like a fake diploma and just let me come on stage and not tell her and I'll finish it at another point.
And they're like, no, it's a tradition. We have to literally hand you to the plumber there. I'm like, just give me an empty folder. I literally just want to be there on stage. Just let me have that empty folder. And they wouldn't let me do it. And so forever, I hate Belmont because they wouldn't let me just walk in the stage and just let me shake that guy's hand and turn the fucking stupid beret thing to the side. And they wouldn't do it. So I will always be mad at Belmont for that reason. Wow. What an L for them. All right. I got a couple more.
Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about another podcast that you should check out. It is called The Next Wave. It's hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan lands as part of the HubSpot podcast network, which of course is your audio destination for business professionals like you. You can catch the next wave with Matt Wolf and he's talking about where the puck is going with AI creators, AI technology and how you can apply it to your growing business. So check it out. Listen to the next wave, wherever you get your podcast.
Let me see where I want to go. Okay. Can I, can I just rapid fire for you some ideas? Go. We don't even have to discuss them. Okay. Uh, exporting, you know, my import export framework. My import framework and expert framework is, uh, if you're at a company and you wish something, you're like, dude, we would totally pay for this. That's a business idea. You would want to import your better off going and starting that business. Cause there's probably a hundred other businesses like you that would pay for that. Or export is we built this for ourselves and it's so useful.
You're better off leaving the company and then rebuilding that on the outside of the walls and selling it to other companies. So here's what Slack did. Yeah, exactly Slack is a good example of this.
Uh, so Paul Graham tweeted this out the other day that like YC has its own directory internally about investors where any startup founder can go look up any investor and read their reviews or kind of like, what's the scoop on this person? Have they done anything effed up? Are they really helpful? What's their, you know, what do we, what do we know about this person? And he's like, there's one of the best products that YC has.
And I'm like, why is that a product only YC has? This should be a product that anybody has. So I think somebody should export this out. And it's like Yelp for investors where investors have a reputation on this in this app. And it's all you can only write about them if you had, you know, like, let's say a verified interaction with them or something like that.
Dude, that's great. I wish I could have that for a variety of vendors. The things that people ask for most at Hampton is like, hey, who's a good lawyer? Who's a good accountant? Who's this? Who's that? It's incredibly challenging to find reviews on vendors, including investors. It's super hard to start these types of businesses, but I think the
startup community is so insulated that you could actually overcome the chicken and egg problem through brute force because there's not that many investors. And you could find, you can quickly see who's worked with them just by looking at their portfolio. And you could cold email them and be like, give me the scoop. And I think you could manually collect the data to get this going. All right, here's another one.
Teacher's pet is what I'm calling this. So this is my first AI idea for a year. So you're aware of teacher's paid teachers, which is a marketplace. It's like Etsy. But instead of buying and selling handcrafted goods, you buy and sell.
lesson plans, quizzes, things that teachers need, teachers pay teachers. Have you ever heard of this? We talked about it a while ago, right? It's a big business. So it was doing like $80 million a year in revenue. That's like their take, not the GMV. That's their take. And it gets like 20 million visits a month during school years. 300 teachers on this network have made a million dollars or more.
By selling lessons or selling quizzes or selling classroom materials to other teachers. So I like their new profile pictures like fuck them kids. I'm a creator. So like these marketplaces are big and marketplaces for the most part are pretty unassailable. It's very hard to go compete with something that has a network effect.
But I think AI is one of these things that might be able to crack some network effects. And I think AI could crack this one. So I think you could train AI to crawl and learn from all of the materials on this network. You can just go buy all the materials on this for probably like less than $500,000.
And then you could use that as your training data and you could train AI to basically become chat GPT for teachers So you so any teacher should be able to come to this and instead of going through and finding what's a good Geography lesson plan and then going and buying it for $14 you just go ask this thing. Hey, I need a geography lesson plan for fourth grade Make it fun and interesting and they should just create one for you So I think if you created this you can have a $20 a month subscription just for teachers to
create lesson plans using AI or quizzes or teaching materials or whatever. Teachers pet. It's a good name too. Yeah. You want to do one more? I'm big on providing a name with some of these ideas. I think that really turns it from like a, I don't know, to like, where's the application for? That's your thought. But how do I get in? What's this? You just have this funny phrase that's for some reason funny to me. You call it an ozepic on ramp.
And then an ozempic offering. Yeah. So these aren't fully baked ideas, but I'll just spit ball it with you. So when I was thinking about this, you know, you want to surf on waves if you're starting a business. So what's a wave you could surf right now? Ozempic. I think Ozempic is like a video as a mega trend. Guess what?
fat loss is a major. Have you tried it yet? No, I haven't tried it, but I know a lot of people that want to be on it or get off of it or are on. I got a guy. I got a guy. I could refer him. No, no. It's expensive though. It's expensive. Yeah, I'm not interested, but I know a lot of people are. So I guess the question is, what could you build around this ozemic mega trend?
My brain goes to on ramps and hot frames. How do you sell something to people that makes it easier to get it? Or help people get off of it. So for, for getting it, uh, if you go Google, just like, um, I don't know, like, how do I take a Zen pick or like getting a Zen pick near me, you get a bunch of like,
kind of like sponsored links for like telehealth services that are gonna try to like, you know, sign up for this. Here's the pills basically. Well, what I think somebody should do is I think somebody should go old school with it. I think somebody needs to create a ozempic hotline. And what's the ozempic hotline? So the ozempic hotline is old school infomercial shit. So you're gonna run ads on linear TV, on Fox news, you're gonna be the my pillow guy. You're just gonna be everywhere that like people who are like, you know, 40 to 60 are clicking.
and or watching. And you're just going to show people's transformations and ozemic and be like, call in now to, you know, get a free consultation. Are you eligible? What are the upsides? What are the downsides? How much does it cost? Where can you find it? So confusing. We're going to make it easy. We're going to give you a free consult.
And you basically just become a lead gen provider for people who are trying to buy a zipping. But I think you had to do like 1-800- like Godabs or something like that, right? Like 1-800s, you know. But that goes against all your principles since you hate which principles.
As I like to say, what a value. Well, we could find them somewhere deep in that closet, but I believe one or two of those principles besides, which is coming out of left field, the fact that you said that you don't want to kill animals to eat that, that's such a curve ball coming from you. But I think the other one was, I think you hate pharmaceuticals, no? No, I don't hate pharmaceuticals. I don't personally take, I don't personally try to take a lot of stuff. I try not to be dependent on anything.
as a general rule, like caffeine, I don't drink coffee, I don't do a lot of stuff like that.
People take like, you know, you love stuff. You're like, oh, I need nicotine and I need this. I love carbonated waters and Diet Coke. Yeah. So I try not to be on any of that stuff, but people are. There's a business opportunity. I'm not doing this. I'm saying somebody could create a phone-based way to educate people and help onboard people or
On the other side, you can figure out an off-ramp. So a lot of people want to stop this. Either it's too expensive or they're having side effects or they just feel like they got the weight loss they had. They don't want to keep taking this forever. How do you off-ramp? And I don't know the answer to that, but that's a place to go. Look, what's the answer?
You just don't take it. Not bad happens. You just don't take it. Yeah, but I don't a lot of people regain a bunch of weight right away or have like any sort of like, I don't know, nothing. And nothing that's this effective has no cost when you stop. I don't believe that. Yeah. So basically the, the, the, the study that they did was
They took two or 3,000 people. They had them do it for six months. And then after six months, they had half the people quit taking it. And what they found was at the end of the 12 month study, the people who took it the whole time lost something like a third of their body weight. So like a 300 pound person was 200 pounds.
And then the people who quit taking it, they went from 200 pounds back up to like 230 or something like that. So they gained weight back, but they weren't nearly as fat as they were when they started. So they, but they did gain weight. But so yeah, an off ramp is fine. But I don't think you have like withdrawals. Like that's not going to kill you. You're just going to like be like,
Oh, I'm hungry. Like, I want to eat again. Yeah, maybe it's just like peer groups or something. I don't know. Is there something you could provide to this large group of people that all have now like one, they're going through this one new experience? I don't know. There's got to be auxiliary things around it. That's a place I would look for business ideas. All right, I got to know the one for you. I heard something the other day and they just really caught my attention. I think it's a cool idea, but it's being done in the wrong way. So let's listen to some podcasts.
Um, and the guy who was talking in it was like, yeah, I did mind sport and blah, blah, blah. And he started talking about mind sport. I was like, what a great name. What is that? And he was a really smart guy and he was talking about game theory and blah, blah, blah. And I looked it up and mind sport is essentially the nerd Olympics. So mind sport is a place that you go. If you're uber smart.
And you compete with people in those games. And so those games can range from chess, to poker, to sellers of Catan, or Go, or whatever. Or like Rubik's Cube? Yeah. Let's just put it this way. Sam, if I was to tell you that I could solve this cube in the next 90 seconds,
You might not think I'm a genius, but you probably don't think I'm an idiot. Would that be fair? Are you going to solve that right now? Is that going to be part of the show? Because that would be great.
I wish I could solve this. I don't know what the hell you're supposed to do with this thing. I treat it like a fidget spinner. Move it. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. I got two blues and three yellows. That's awesome. So there's the mind sports Olympiad. You're in the special mind sports Olympiad.
I'm in the mind jog. The mind's not moving that fast. So basically you go to this thing and you compete in all these games. Or you can be in your game, but you can also compete in the penta mind championship, which is where you're going to play five of these games. I'm like, oh my God. Like the mega nerd. I'm a pet of my means. You know, Coachella for nerds. And I was like, this is amazing. And I just, I cannot tell you, Sam Parr, how all in I am on the Mindsport Olympiad.
I want to go. I want to watch it live like I watched the spelling bee live on ESPN. I want to watch the hard knocks documentary about like, you know, following five of these people behind the scenes and watching them stress out about this. I want to adopt one of the kids in this and just have them be like, you know, my 17 year old child. And most of all, I want to hire all these kids.
This is so awesome. You're grooming them. I think they have. It's a groomer. A wrong business model. This is not a tournament with prize money. And thanks to our sponsors, Wendy's, no, no, no, no, no. You've got this all wrong. This is a recruiting event for the elite minds under 25 years old. And I was like, this is bait to bring together the smartest nerds.
In five years, these kids are not going to be playing professional settlers of katana. They're going to be starting companies or working side companies and guess where I want them to work. My companies. And so I think that you should take this idea, create a version of this, but it needs to be a elite recruiting service slash job fair slash demo day for nerds. And you need to basically
When they attend, they need to basically somehow like sign over the rights for you to like send them job offers for the next five years or like, you know, get to invest in them or something like that. Because I can't think of a more valuable talent pool than the Minesport Olympics. And I think you could do this for gamers in general. I love investing. One of my secrets of investing is I invest in former competitive gamers.
you know, people who were elite level at, you know, Starcraft or things like that, those people just tend to do really, really well at whatever next game you throw in front of them. And once you throw the money game in front of them, guess what? They solve it. They figure it out. And so there's this. Listen, there's this thing called the world of memory championships. Have you heard of this? No.
Sign me up. Yeah, so they've been doing this since 1991, and there's a different game. So basically, we're just going to give you thousands of numbers, and you have five minutes, and you have to tell us in order the numbers. And the record for that is 600 numbers, and they only had five minutes to do it. The one-hour number is the same thing, except you have one hour to do it. And the guy who won that did 4,600 numbers in a row. You remember that. And so they do these 10 different games,
And in the same way that the UFC used to be like this like a bunch of thugs fighting like it was like barbarians, but now it's like it's like half WWE and WWF where it's like, you know, you slept with my wife, now I'm going to beat you up and it's other half like your movement. Yeah, your movement is magical. Look at this movement. So smooth. This is P physical performance.
We need, uh, we need data white, you know, or a visit man to buy the world memory championships. And we got to make that great because I'm looking up the guy who won it. Alex Mullen, he's a, he's a kid or no, he's, or I guess when he won it, he was 28. You know what he does for work now? He's an x-ray person at a hospital.
X-ray tech. X-ray tech. Why is this guy not working? This guy's brain is HIPAA compliant. What are we talking about? Yeah. Why is this guy not working for like, you know, black rock or black stone, just like rain man in his way to like, you know, corporate buyouts. I'm saying maybe undervalued assets. These are, these are hidden gems. Uh, I'm not all in on memory. Cause I think memory is like the plug version of the, the Olympia ad. Like these other guys are like strategists, but like memory is, you know,
Any rube can do memory really I can't even remember seven numbers little and 600 I can remember two thirds of any phone number Yeah, so that's that's one idea Okay, I got a couple other for you Let me hit you with with one more maybe but we were at a time here But I'm gonna I'm gonna go into overtime here and give you one more
Um, let's do one around churches. Okay. So something you know a lot about another area that I'm completely unversed, but I know that other people do it. Um,
Michael Gurdley tweeted this out there the day. He said, uh, 3,500 churches are closing every year. I said, huh, well, what's, what's that about? What is that? It's a big number. And, um, it's not exactly right. Actually, like what happens is 4,000 churches closed last year, but like another 3,000 open or something like that. It's like a net change of 1,500 churches. Uh, but, but towards the negative and there is a bunch of, there are a bunch of stats about this. So.
in traditional churches, so Christian churches, attendance is down 65% in the last 20 years, 65%. And what happens is when the pews are empty, there's less donations, so then these churches end up having to close down.
There's a trend basically. They call them like, are you Christian? Are you Jewish? Are you Muslim? What are you? And there's a group called the nuns. They're just none. I don't know why they're calling them nuns instead of like sort of like atheists or whatever like. Wait, nuns like N-U-N or N-O-N-E. Yeah. That's also confusing. When you said nuns, that's like a bunch of ladies in like habits. Honestly, big slip up on their part.
Yeah, they could be the zeros. They did survey them. And for Gen Z, I guess 45% would count as none of the above, essentially, for religion. And this guy who study churches or whatever said that of the 350,000 Christian congregations in the United States, one third are like vulnerable on the brink of collapse, basically. Like one third are like in the red zone and over the next 10 years will likely close. That's a huge number.
One of the opportunities. So I think that there's, I think you could approach this from multiple angles. So again, not a specific idea, but I do think you could look at this. When you hear a stat like that, that's just one that gets your attention. Like when Jeff Bezos heard the stat that like, you know, the internet is growing at 12,000 percent a year. He's like, Oh, I better go start Amazon. And basically I think you could do that around, around stats like this. So how are these churches going to close down?
That in itself, the sort of the vulture business or the clean up of the funeral business for churches, I think is kind of interesting. How are they? Forget saving them. Help them. Help them die with grace. In my neighborhood, one block from my house in St. Louis, they turned a church into a condo. Right. Yeah. Exactly. So then I found there's this group called Niagara Consulting Group and they're basically like, we help you restructure your church. What do they mean by that? It's basically,
Look, there's a lot of developers that are chomping at the bit to turn this into luxury condos. Like we help you try to succeed, but if you don't, we'll get you an offer from one of these developers to turn this into luxury condos. And I was like, oh, interesting. But in a lot of places, they can't even do that because it's like low income areas that they just sit there empty. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to figure out how to deal with this. I think there's opportunity, if I'm a company like Calm,
Could I take $50 million and just buy physical locations across the country in one year through these searches and just have a weekly service for meditation and whatever?
like, you know, just local chapters, basically, franchisees that are going to run them. So I think there's something to be done here, whether it's trying to save them, trying to help them fail gracefully, figuring out what's a pivot you could do for a lot of these. I saw you just put a little link in here, what you got. So that's 10 doors down from my childhood home where my mom and dad still live. Beautiful church. It's a church that they turned into a 7, 8000 square foot house.
And as a house, it doesn't look that cool. But as like a meditation area, like it does look cool. As an Airbnb, fantastic, you know. Yeah. But look, it's $1.2 million and it's an 8,000 square foot. I mean, St. Louis Missouri, where I'm from, which isn't that nice. But this company renovated this church into like a livable house. And then I met these other guys who turned one into a skate park. They turned an old church into a skate park.
And so it's like, it is pretty fascinating because a lot of these buildings are kind of cool. But to have like the Church of Calm, that's kind of dope. And then if you're going to help them, I think this is going to be a side hustle. So like the church near us, they actually have like awesome events all the time. And I love to take our kids to it because it's like they just put on great events, wholesome, fun events for families and kids.
but it's so hard to even know what the hell, like literally the only way I know is if I drive by, they have a little sign they put like in the front, like a for sale sign, but it'll be like, we're doing something this Saturday, it's gonna have popcorn and bouncy house. I'm like, oh, I mean, but I only catch it driving by. I'm like, these guys just don't know social media. And I had to call them to be like, hey, if I'm like an Indian dude, there's not a member of the church, can I still come get the free popcorn? Like, you know, what's the deal around this? Are you like,
your doors. Yeah. And they're going to have like a color swatch. Yeah. Like you come in, like, you're not white enough. Exactly. Like, do you need to have recognized me? You know, like, oh, how does this work? And so I couldn't even get ahold of them because I was like, they just have, they have like one old Facebook page with like, you know, an event from 2014.
And I'm like, dude, churches need better social media. And I was like, I think you could just create like done for you social media services for churches. If you wanted to get like a 10 to $20,000 a month side hustle, I think you could just do that just by going to every single church, just walk in.
and be like, hey, your social media is not very good. I can make it look like this. And then you basically go on Sheppard and you hire somebody for $800 a month. And that person is going to manage 20 churches social media as for you. Because all the churches do, hey, it's the same schedule. It's every Sunday. Same templates. You just need their color, their name, and you need to know what's going on for them. Manage all of their Instagram and social media accounts for them.
I think that's one that like, it's not that nobody's doing that, but there's plenty of churches that are not on board that. And if you just wanted to go sign up a bunch of clients for $300 to $400 a month, you could do that. Did you do remember this? So have you heard of a Hillsong? Like when I is like Hillsong church. Yeah. When I was living in Tennessee, I've been an atheist forever, but I was like,
A lot of cute girls are going to this, I guess. I guess that's the price to be, that's the price I got to pay. So I'll go to this thing. So I went to this thing to like meet some people. And that's how I kind of learned about it. But for in the later 2000s, there was this guy who somehow infiltrated Justin Bieber's camp and he like became Justin Bieber's mentor Carl Lance. And there's a new Netflix show about him. But basically he's like, he's like,
He's like a smoking hot guy. Like, you know, he looks basically like Justin Bieber in his 40s. Like, he looked great. I don't describe most men as babes, but he's a babe. Well, he's a babe. I mean, like, objectively, like, you know, like you're either seven foot tall or you're not. Like he's seven feet tall. I think I messaged you once about him and you were like, dude, he's got the thing. Like, you know, like the diagonal lines that just point to your crotch. It's like an ab line that you only have if you're super rib. He's got those. What kind of pastor has those?
Yeah, if you're a pastor and you have that V, it's bad news. And as one could just look at his V and guess, he did some, I don't know if he didn't eat illegal things. I didn't, I didn't, frankly, I didn't watch the documentary. I don't know. I don't think it was rape. I think he just cheated on his wife. And yeah, they just had sex with just everyone.
So as one with all the power and the V might do. He's also super charismatic, super good looking, has a huge following from being on stage in front of 10,000 people every week or whatever. He's a mega celebrity. He was. Yeah, he's a mega celebrity, but he made Hillsong cool. I even went to one of those things because this girl I was trying to date was like, come to this thing. I love the music. Their music is great.
Yeah, so I went to that thing just to be with this girl and one more thing, I didn't work out. But that's how I learned about some of this religion stuff. Dude, where I'm from in St. Louis, all the Catholic churches are dying, man. All the Catholic schools are going by the wayside. One of the more useful things that I learned when I moved to Silicon Valley was a new way of looking at businesses that I hadn't really ever heard before outside of Silicon Valley, which is
Most products are actually a bundle, not a product. Most things are a bundle. Once you can identify what's in the bundle, you can figure out how to unbundle that service and make something better. For example, Peter Thiel went on a spree where he was talking about how universities are a bubble, how the university system is overrated. He was going to launch the Thiel Fellowship, which would pay you
$200,000 to drop out of school and do something useful with your life. And that's where Figma came from. And that's where oil rooms came from. That's where, you know, Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum was it. He was a teal fellow. I think there's been 10 billion dollar companies so far have come from it. Actually, a very impressive track record. And so one of the things he said was that they're like, how can you, you know, it was sort of like taboo to say like, you know, who says like,
anything against school, right? Like everybody's message is basically stay in school, kids. And he's saying, drop out of school, kids. And so they're like, how dare you? And he's like, well, the university is a bundle. He's like, it's partially education. So there are, there is education, partially socialization. So, you know, you go there to learn how to like party and be with other kids and date and get drunk and all that stuff.
It's partly babysitting. So it's basically my kids not old enough. They're not mature enough to get to the real world yet. So like four years over here, let them simmer a little bit, then they'll be ready.
He's like, it's partly insurance, which is like a societal insurance. Like, look, I don't care what you do, just get a degree, get a college degree, because that label, that stamp is going to be whatever. He's like, it's partly accreditation. So like, I don't care if you're the top student at Harvard, but if you got into Harvard, that's a signal, the strong enough for me as an employer to know that you're smart, right? Like, if I know you went to Harvard, it's a signaling thing. So he's like, you're actually buying all of these things when you buy into university, when you pay the crazy cost of university.
And we have to ask ourselves what part of that bundle is actually important and what part of the bundle is failing is actually a weak part of the bundle that could be unbundled. And so what he did was he switched the accreditation one. He's like, cool.
What if I created something? I have a brand, Peter Thiel, I invest in Facebook, I created PayPal. What if I handpicked 40 of the most promising college kids and paid them 200 grand to leave school? Now, instead of having just some normal school badge, which is good, you get the teal handpicked badge, which is even more elite. So I'm going to unbundle the university, give you a more elite badge.
And then I'm going to get rid of all the rest. I don't care about the socialization. I don't care about the rest. I'm going to be 10x better at this badge. And you know, like YC is 10x better at university in certain things than in others. And so that's brilliant. Yeah. So the question is, what is the church bundle? The church bundle is a combination of lecture for learning.
community, a place to gather and congregate every week. It's just a peaceful place. I like to go into church. I used to go to church not for like, I kind of like the sermon, but I just love the feeling of being inside of a church. The aura of inside of a church was just very peaceful and grounding to me.
So it's a peaceful place. It's also therapy slash confession. So a place to get things off your chest. And kind of with that is like being absolved of your sins, like just getting a clean slate. I was like, oh, OK, I feel less guilty. You know, there's music. So some people go for the music vibes. Some people go for the food. Like Indian temples all have like free food. I don't know if churches have that or not. But like Indian temples, like a lot of people I know go because they actually like love the meal. But it's plus a good thing.
You show your loyalty to God. And so if you take this bundle of a bunch of things, also dating, I put this on there, like I know a bunch of people that like, they kind of want to meet someone who has maybe their values or is like, you know, like, yeah, it's like matches in some way. And they're like, oh, this is better than going and trying to approach someone in a bar where it's noisy and I'm getting rejected. Like, oh, what if I, like, this is a new sort of like social scene where I can go approach somebody. All right.
So I think one big, so the small version of this idea is like social media for churches. The medium version of this is like restructured these churches into condos or figure out some lead gen where you maybe you help them as they wind down to sell off assets or something. The big version of this idea is figure out how you're going to replace the value that churches gave people but get do it in a new way. And so like, for example, could you create a new
brand in the same venues that's around, I don't know, like manifestation, or some shit like that, or meditation, or yoga. Like, could you create a yoga franchise that only operates out of churches and some blend of like religion and churches, right? Sorry, religion and yoga. And like, I think those are the big ideas, which is replace the function
10x better on one of those bundles, like 10x better on food or music or the sermon or absolving you of your sins. Do try to be better at 10x better for those and then use the physical locations of churches to build that new franchise.
That was a good speech. You did good on that one. Thank you. We're going to have a bunch of soul cycles on the altar, which is a lot cooler than how it is now. But that was a very compelling argument. Thank you. I sort of ventured into drunk ideas territory there, but I feel like we had a little bit.
Yeah, that was a good one. That was a good one. I'll let you that's that's the winner or dribble the dribble shit is the is the winner. All right, there we go. That's it. That's the idea episode. You know what to do. Do they just get all these ideas for free Sam?
Well, they don't have to pay money, but it's not for free. So they don't support their wallet, but what do they have to do? Well, I think what they got to do is go to YouTube, go to your podcast app, search my first million and you got to click subscribe. You got to click that button for us because we're out here churning out million dollar ideas, billion dollar ideas, side hustle ideas for you. On a Labor Day, no less. I mean,
There's only one right move. There's only one way to pay us back if that's what it is. Go subscribe to the channel. That is called the gentleman's agreement. We're not gonna go check. We're not gonna verify this, all right? It's honor code. This is a gentleman's agreement. We did it. We did our part that you do yours. That's all. All right. Thank you. That's the five.
I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to Put my law in it like no day's off On a road, let's travel never looking back
