Five +$10M Ideas (from a guy who's done it 3 times)

25:17But there's so many other affinities out there that should have their own retirement community. And, you know, people are living longer than they did. So like people are still retiring in 65. but they have like, not only are they living longer, they're living longer, healthier lives. So like my parents are still like relatively healthy. I expect them to live another 20, 30 years and you can build these communities where people like do whatever their affinity is. And so I think there's an opportunity here in building a roadmap for an affinity and then like stamping it for other affinities over time.

25:54Sean, don't you know someone in this? Yeah, yeah. So I've looked at this because I found it fascinating for the same reasons that she was saying. Well, first, they're good businesses, right? Because you're basically taking raw land. And then you're like, you just do the math. You're like, okay, cool. We're going to sell, let's call it 50 plots or 75 plots or 100 plots. And the numbers get pretty big pretty fast when you're buying these at a raw state and you're able to sell them. But they also, one of the things that some of them are doing is they blend together the different health spans. So, for example, you can start there when you're just retired, but then you need some assistance.

26:30And then there's like an assisted area. And then there's like you need a lot of assistance. And then you're at the kind of like the full service model. But you don't have to move. You don't have to like move very far, right? You're just like. And your community is still there. Yeah, you're still in the same community. You don't have to like, you know, do this like big cross country move. It's not the scary thing. You just sort of, as your body goes down that gradient, you just sort of move down a different level of service in the community. And so that's super profitable when you do that. And the LTV of the customers, I mean, imagine, right, you're 20, 30 years in one of these communities.

27:04It's really high. And I know it because my parents kind of had the same reaction that Shields parents had, which is, yeah, I mean, that'd be great. I don't play golf. But if there was a place that had the food we like, with people that we get along with that speak the language, you know, that we have the same cultural values, And I was like, well, that's going to exist for every race, but also not just race. What are other things that people bond over or is the central pillar of their life? And how do you build communities around that? That just seems very lucrative to me. Totally. For the one my parents did, there was a waiting list.

27:38So my parents prepaid. They put 100 % of the money down and didn't get the home for five years. and on these things when I think of an old home I think of like like a hospital looking center where but these are like a plot of land where you buy a house yeah they bought a townhouse got it and you pay like a monthly fee yeah you pay monthly fee you get food which is you know for Indian people especially I think a really big deal and then they have like they have a bunch of community events like they play like cards there's a community center they play They have movies, Indian movies going on. They have concerts.

28:14Actually, I talked about our weddings. My parents, one of the events that they had was a showcase of all of our wedding videos. And then like, I called in, like we called in and did cute. That's hilarious. Yeah, because I feel like, you know, this is like the country club model, but it's just for, what else is there besides a bougie country club? Like what are the other ways that people could get together in a clubhouse and have, you know, that would add a lot to their lives because it's pretty lonely. If you're older, you're living somewhere, you don't know other people and the effort it would take to go make new friends or drive to places just for certain events versus having it almost like resort style for you, it just makes a lot of sense.

28:57And we have a friend who came on the pod, Craig Fuller, who did this with airline or flying enthusiasts. So basically he bought a plot of land, he developed homes on it, he pre-sold a bunch of them and basically the center of the property is instead of a golf course, it's an airplane hanger. So if you own like a Cessna or something like that, you could keep it there and you could live there. So, you know, it's like, I want to go fly this morning. I'm just going to walk out. There's like a runway in the middle of the neighborhood, basically. That's so cool. Yeah, so I think you could do this for a bunch of different affinities.

29:27Like I've talked to my Chinese friends and like their parents play a lot of mahjong and like there's stuff like that that I think you could just build this around every affinity over time. So I think there's something there. And I like these businesses that are high dollar value, meaning you're not going to become a billionaire, but you can make tens of millions of dollars doing this. Definitely. And very high likelihood of success. Like you don't need, like, she'll told you the idea. You don't need a stroke of genius now. And like 50 people could go do this and they would all, you know, it's just a matter of execution at this point.

29:57Like if you just do the basic things. Like with all these retire, like the, what do they call it? The silver tsunami. Like, is there a shortage of space? I think so. I think like the reason my parents pre-bought it was they like the other Indian communities, they couldn't get in. Like the prices had increased so much or they're just there weren't availability. So like they pre-bought into a new one. So I think it has to be a doctor. It's actually a status symbol. You can't get into the community or you're just barred if your kid's not a doctor. Dude, how much is a nursing home, by the way? Should I be budgeting?

30:33Sam starts worrying about two years now. No, I'm worried about it for my parents. Dude, listen to this. Are you going to put your parents in a nursing home? I don't know. Indians can never do that. Sometimes I think they like that, don't they? I don't know. I thought it was enjoyable. I don't fucking know. I was being with a financial advisor three years ago, and it was like 20 years in the future, I was like, what's that$250 ,000 a year spend? And he was like, oh, you're going to have kids, right? I was like, yeah, but I'm not going to have triplets. He was like, well, you're going to have one kid.

31:07And I assume that they're going to go to a school that's in the 85 percentile of cost. And so in 20 years, if you have kids in two years, it's going to be$250 ,000 a year. And I was like, dude, don't make up this bullshit. He goes, I didn't make it up. I just took the trailing 20 years of growth for a Harvard or whatever 90 percentile cost school is. And I just applied that for the next 20 years. And that's just how I came up with it. And I was like, baffled that it's going to be, I think it was maybe 150 ,000 a year. It was six figures. And now that I'm realizing with old people homes or nursing homes, I'm pretty sure that some of them are 10 and$20 ,000 a month today.

31:45Yeah, that's right. That's how much it costs. Which is insane, I guess. So what am I going to have to pay if my parents eventually want to do this. You know, are we talking like half a million dollars a year? It's not that high. But, you know, you can, like, there's a range. So you can do a$3 ,000 a month bed. You could do an$8 ,000 a month bed. You could do$15 ,000, $20 ,000, depending on if you want to go basically the risk crawl. Is$20 ,000 the fanciest? I don't know. There's no upper end to anything in life, right? You can spend an infinite amount of money if you decide to. But I would say, like, nice places can be, $10 ,000,$15 ,000 a month.

32:24But also some of these are covered by insurance. Some of these are not. Some of this is out of pocket, right? There's a whole bunch of different factors. I know that in also different cultures, like I said, shame on you, just kind of joking, but in Indian culture, it kind of is like that. Like there's an expectation culturally that either the parents move in with you or they're going to have their own house and you're going to have in-home care for them. So there's all these different ways that you could do care for elders. It could be that they're in a, you know, a nursing home or a senior facility, or it could be that you're paying for somebody to come to their house every day and help them manage day-to-day life at their house, which is obviously going to be a different cost.

32:58You know, my grandparents, for example, they have their own house and they have basically round the clock somebody, like a kind of a nurse that basically lives in their house that just helps them with everyday things to just function in their own home because that's what was comfortable for them. That's cool. I think for all those, any of those different types of things, like being in the same place with the community makes sense because like your grandparents may not need that one person full-time. They might, but like other people might want a fractional one. And it's so much easier if that person like lives in the community or comes to the community and can serve many people at once.

33:33And a bunch of people tried this for like young 20-somethings after college. It's like an after-college community, blah, blah, blah. But this is way better because people are going to be in these for like 30 plus years. Exactly. And they have money actually versus that 20-something. Yeah, they might spend one or two years after college doing this in a big city, but then they're going to kind of graduate out of it. So you're going to have this crazy churn all the time. I like your model better. All right, what's another opportunity? What's another idea you got? Go to this Yelp one. Okay, so the idea is Yelp for professional services.

34:04So, and then I originally had this idea, I think before Sam put out Sam's list, but the idea is why is it so hard to know like which insurance brokers are good, which lawyers, which financial planners, which accountants? how do I know who's good and is going to serve my needs? There should be a site for that and it's easily monetizable. I can give you guys an update. Sean, 10 or 8 months ago, I created this thing called Sam's List, samslist.co and it was like Yelp for accountants. I just did it because I needed an accountant. I found an accountant, by the way, on the website, so it worked. It hasn't taken off.

34:47This year it did$99 ,000 in revenue and a little bit of profit. And we have someone who's working on it. But what we're changing over is making it, we're adding a financial advisor category. But I completely agree with you of having these review sites for professional services is necessary. Everyone is begging us, by the way. If anyone wants to go do it, let's go for it. Everyone's begging us for Sam's List, but for agencies. I don't know anything about agencies, so I don't know anything about that space. that is one thing that people have been begging us for is to have an agency category. But I think that's just because I have a lot of agency owners who follow me on Twitter.

35:25No, but I think if you look on Twitter, people are constantly posting like, hey, I need help with this. Can anyone recommend an agency? I feel like we have a website designer that I really like. And I feel like once every couple weeks I'm recommending him to somebody. And there should be a place where you could just search and find like I'm looking for an agency I'm willing to spend X to Y and you know it should be a site that does everything and maybe Sam's list is that it's fucking hard to pull these off by the way it's hard here's why they're hard like what we found was like we had a lot of like mom and pop accountants on the website and like you're basically imagine like so what Sean did with Milk Road and what I did with the hustle was we'd have advertisers But the ideal situation is you have advertisers who are spending tens or hundreds of thousands or once the hustle got to a certain size, sometimes they're spending millions of dollars a year.

36:21But when you're working with a mom-and-pop accountant, I'm basically selling packages for like$500. And you're like the mob, like knocking on the door, like, hey, you got my money? You know what I mean? And it's like, yeah, you know, like the client hasn't paid yet, so I don't have the money yet, but I promise I'll get it to you next week. Like it becomes a little bit of a game like that. And so if you're going to do it, the ideal situation is that you're doing it. Accountants are basically, a lot of them are like mop and pop organizations. It's a pretty bad group to sell to. But whatever organization or industry you want to do this for, it has to be where they're already spending a lot of money.

36:57And it's bigger companies who can write bigger checks. Otherwise, you're just going to end up like Yelp. Have you guys ever known? The joke in San Francisco when we lived there was, Yelp is where you go to learn how to do sales because it's such a hard sales job. And they would hire anyone with a pulse and they would be like, all right, here's 40 grand a year and then you get commission. But if you hit your on target earnings, you're going to make 200 grand a year. You'd be so rich. And they find out that they're having to go like get an ice cream shop to give them like$900. And wasn't it more like threats than sales even?

37:26It was like, oh, this review is really hurting you. Wouldn't you? Don't you just wish that would go away? Yeah. I might be able to make that go away. I never found any evidence of that actually happening though. Like, people have been like, provide me evidence. And I don't think, I don't think there's actual evidence of that happening. There is with the Better Business Bureau, by the way, but not with Yelp, from what I can tell. Where did that come from? It came from business owners complaining about it. Who else would put that story out there? Well, so people have said like, okay, if there's any proof of Yelp saying, pay me money and you'll get a better review or that review will get knocked off, send it to me.

38:05And then nobody has ever sent it. Fair enough, fair enough. All right, what's this pearly whites one? You got my attention. Okay, so this is my wife's idea. There's something called the dry bar where you can just go get a blow dry of your hair. It's like kind of like an in and out thing, 20 minutes and you get your blow dry. My wife feels like she would like to get her teeth cleaned more than the twice a year that you're able to with a dentist on insurance. And so the idea is you go to a place, and all they do is clean your teeth. They don't do x-rays. They don't do anything else. You're in and out 20 minutes, 100 bucks, 120 bucks, something like that.

38:47And she would do that like every couple months. And that's the idea. So she likes getting her teeth cleaned. She likes getting teeth cleaned. I think it's weird. Like I don't, but she does. And I could see people doing it like, oh, I'm going to an event. Like I'm going to get my hair done. I'm going to get my teeth done, teeth cleaned. Well, I like the unbundling of like the dental checkup, right? It's like, what's the, what is the one part that people kind of would want the most or need the most often that if you separate it out of your normal dental kind of cycles, there might be just like a market for people who just want this.

39:22I kind of buy that, but I thought it would be teeth whitening, not cleaning. That's part of it also. And, and actually like you probably make more money in the whitening side, but what you could do is actually like you standardize and like have a really nice looking space and dentists would franchise this and they'd be like oh i'm a dentist i can open one of these you need to have dental hygienists and in a dent in some states you need to have a dentist there um but it doesn't have to be like they don't have to be doing the work they just have to be there right dude i went to my dentist and he had this sign but like it stood out because everything in the dentist office looked like a dentist office.

39:58It just looked like mom and poppy. And then there was one sign that looked really nice. And this one sign was basically advertising kind of what you're describing. It was like a 20 minute teeth whitening for like 85 bucks or whatever it was, some dollar amount. And I was like, what is this? Is this yours? And he's like, oh, actually, yeah, there's like this company that made this service that then we can then sell to our customers. And they provide like the marketing and the name of this, and they're trying to popularize this, but we just get incremental revenue because we're able to upsell this essentially.

40:31And I was like, oh, that's smart. It's basically like the Hunt Brothers pizza model, what they did for gas stations. They're like, hey, here's a pizza shop inside your gas station. Somebody's doing this for dental offices where they're putting in this like teeth whitening upsell program. And I was like, it's kind of work. I get it. It works because otherwise, you know, The dentist offers like 1 ,500 services if you really wanted to. You could go and ask them about them. What's it called? I don't remember the name of this one, but I don't think it was – I don't know how popular this is. But I remember just thinking, oh, this makes sense.

41:04I could see why it's a win for the dentist. It's a win for this company. And I could see why consumers would be – when you're just sitting there trapped in the chair, literally strapped in the chair. It's the first thing you see in front of you. You stare at that thing for 15 minutes, and you're looking at this before and after photo. And you're like, yeah, cool. Add that on. I'll take that. I'll take the whites. Yeah.

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42:30Speaking of Hunt Brothers, another idea, and this is one of my best friends is doing this, and I invested, but it's called Pizzeria Luna. And the idea is when people go to hotels, they most often order pizza. Like mid-range hotels, people order pizza. Constantly Domino's coming in. so the idea was what if we gave you the ability to sell a high quality pizza and originally it was like we'll give you the oven and the pizza that's like hand tossed made in italy actually shipped over from italy tastes amazing and uh and so a lot of hotels use pizzeria lena and then we have the table tents and all that other stuff dude this is a great idea it's just hunt brothers but for hotels and Italian.

43:18Is it working? It's working, yeah. It's been pretty successful. It's still fairly early, but it's doing really well. And what's the hard part about this? Because like, you know, the Hunt Brothers thing, I think they started out doing wholesale ingredients. So they already had like a ton of infrastructure in place where they were already selling, you know, does and all that stuff to, you know, pizza shops all around the place. And that's why they were able to like just take the next logical step and create their own brand and then provide those same ingredients to the gas station owners. Is this really hard to spin up or was this actually pretty doable?

43:54I mean, it's complicated. My friend is on a plane to Italy all the time. He wanted to make sure it was super high quality, something the hotels felt really proud to offer. Wait, but why? I don't think I could tell if this pizza's from Italy. Would my taste buds know the difference between a Kentucky and an Italian? Once he says it, you're like, yeah, this is not cheap pizza. It's not cheap pizza. Like Italy, like is that, you know how like, you know how like Florida has like Hollywood, Florida? Like it's a small town. Yeah. Can we call it like, you know, is there like an Italy, Kentucky? Italy, Wisconsin.

44:26Yeah. No, it turns out like the ingredients, like it just does taste better. Like they know how to do it there. It's actually, so what you're probably thinking is like, isn't it expensive to bring it over here? It's actually not. It's kind of worth it. And they have the experience and know how. it's actually made like near Naples which is where pizza comes from dude my dad I remember when we were a kid he saw this pizza place and the sign just said hand toss pizza and there was like a guy in the window tossing and my dad wouldn't shut up about the hand toss pizza for like you know a year and these things just work I don't know why there's something to it if it says world's greatest cup of coffee I buy it every single time oh totally that shit always works on me do you guys know the Grey Goose story yeah the taller bottles the taller bottles but also So the guy who started Grey Goose started it, by the way, when he was in his 70s.

45:14He was like 70 years old and decided to start a startup. Was he successful? So before that, he had created Jägermeister. Not created, but he had brought Jägermeister to the US and made it popular. So the Jägermeister story was he's out one night. He was part of the family alcohol business. It was his wife's parents' business. And then they get in a fight. They kick him out. And he's like, all right, fuck this. I got to do something. And he's out one night. He sees people. He sees a German group of friends sipping this weird cough syrup looking thing. And it was Jägermeister. And it was like an after dinner type of thing.

45:52And he's like, what is that? He inquires about it. He figures it out. And he decides, I'm going to become the US importer of this thing called Jägermeister. But to make it popular, what he did was he created the Jägerbomb and got Jägerettes, the girls who would go around bars pouring the stuff down college kids' throats. and he made it the party drink. So Jaeger becomes this like big drink. He's successful. Now he's in his 70s and he's like, all right, I'm going to start a new one. I want to start a vodka company. And he basically says, I'm going to do two things differently. First, he goes, we need to source the vodka.

46:24And they go, great. We're on our next flight out to Moscow. And he goes, no, no, no. We're not doing Russian vodka. They go, what do you mean? We're all like, that's where vodka comes from. He goes, go to France and find me vodka. They go, there's no vodka in France. He goes, go to France and find me vodka. because if I told you this is French vodka, it just makes that dirty Russian vodka look like crap. And so they're like, but what if it's not better? He goes, I said, it's French vodka. That means it's better. And so he sends one group there and he tells the other group, he goes, go to the bar right now and buy the most expensive vodka that there is.

46:58Bring all the bottles here. And they bring all the bottles and he's basically like, he lines them all up and he goes, cool. Whatever the, what's the most expensive vodka? It was like absolute at the time. He's like, cool, we're going to be 30 % more expensive than whatever the most expensive one is. And that's their bottle. Okay, it's this fat bottle. We're going to be a tall bottle. And then he commissioned somebody to make it and they did the frosted glass. And he's like, that's it. That looks expensive as hell. And he created Grey Goose off of this very simple concept. It was like either Italian or French vodka put in this expensive, tall frosted glass bottle.

47:33It's so tall, it wouldn't even fit on the shelves. so you had to put it on the top shelf because if you put it on the middle shelf, it wouldn't fit. It was too tall. So it had to become top shelf like vodka by default because it was so tall. Isn't that amazing? That's so funny. It's interesting because it's basically like a commodity. It's all pretty much the same. It's hard for people to distinguish. I have a friend who started a vodka brand and the bottle cost more than the vodka. Yeah, exactly. And it was like a premium brand. Dude, it seems like a horrible business to be in. It seems like really challenging.

48:15Alcohol in particular is tough because of the regulatory environment. It's different state by state, what you can sell and you have to get licensed and all this stuff. It is challenging. Nice. Do you want to do another one? Yeah, what else? What else are you excited about, Shield, that you think somebody could go do? I think something I want in my life is like a school for AI tools. so like maybe you could franchise it um but for me like right now i would pay a few hundred bucks to go to a class like half a day just to become a better photographer iphone photographer and like show me how to edit things and like make fun funny things on the internet memes or whatever same thing for video and i think the same is true for many other products that you can use like ai or software for so it's like a software school um in person come on but just for you like just other tools that are useful in your life.

49:05Exactly, yeah. It's for adults or for kids? It could be for adults. I think start with adults and then also kids. Sean, he was telling me before this, he was like, I'm trying to hire this person to teach me how to do video editing and use AI. And I was like, two things. One, Sean actually hired an AI tutor, which is actually pretty amazing. And then also, you went on this big rant a month ago. It's probably the greatest. Just in terms of like Ikigai, of like what the world wants, what Sean's good at, what he's passionate about, and like what the world's willing to pay for, like him creating like, you know, another full sale university.

49:43It's quite aligned. Oh, yeah. I had this idea. Well, first I did an AI tutor, mostly just because I've realized that coaches are just an absolute life hack. Once you get some money, it's like a luxury that doesn't actually cost that much, but adds a lot of value to your life. and so now anytime I want to do something, my first stop is who's a coach I can hire that will speed up my learning curve, be a forcing function because they're going to show up and it's going to force me to actually stick to this hobby and yeah, get better faster. How do you find them? With this, I just tweeted it out and I was like, hey, who could, I'm willing to pay$500 an hour for somebody who's going to, you learn all the new stuff that's going on in AI and then I want to sit with you for 90 minutes It's every Wednesday.

50:31And I want you to tell me what's going on, but also like teach, like I'm hands on keyboard, struggling trying to do the thing because that way I'll like actually learn how to do it. And it's been kind of amazing to be honest. You're still doing it? We're still doing it. It kind of shifted a little bit. Like other friends wanted to join. So I invited a couple other friends and so it's kind of a group thing now. And yeah, it's pretty amazing. So that's been great on the AI side, but just in general, I'm a big, like, I'm, it's like, it's like comical now how, how my first answer to everything is to get a coach.

51:08And, um, but whatever, I'm going to keep doing it till it doesn't work. And it's, it's worked at everything. We hired a, we hired an organizational coach to come and teach us how to like organize a closet. Like I'm so on board with Oh my God. We pay so much to our organizer. We don't have a coach. We just have an organizer comes in and she is doing so well. She reached, she, last time she was here, which was like two weeks ago, which is because she's here all the time organizing something. Um, she was like, oh, my client from San Francisco is flying me. I'm going to go organize their new place in Switzerland.

51:42So she's like, this thing going, we're like, it's an incredible business. I mean, it's not like a huge business, but she's, she's got people under her and stuff now. Is it just like magic? Like, is your house just like incredible now? I think it's fine. And my wife loves it. Wow. I have a friend that just bought a home. They moved in. It's a huge house, like 8 ,000 square feet. They paid this service$25 ,000 to be there before, like to map out where everything, like it was like starting from scratch, to like be there to map it all out, to buy the storage supplies, and then to put the labels and to come up with a strategy.

52:15It was 25 grand. That's a lot. It's a lot. I think we paid, I don't remember, I don't know how much we paid total because I don't see it. because if I saw it, it would drive me crazy. But I do remember the kitchen was a couple thousand dollars. Do you have the Indian frugality gene? Oh, big time. Okay, you're not a good spender. I'm not a good spender. And it's like my lifestyle hasn't changed. My net worth has increased quite dramatically over the past decade. And my lifestyle hasn't changed. I'm always looking for a deal. Like anything I buy, I'm going to slick deals first. I've like got the credit card points thing down like all this stuff that Shouldn't I shouldn't be doing is like stupid optimization, but for me, it's kind of a game and I love it What are the give us a quick credit card tip?

53:06What do you what's your credit card stack? Because I don't want to do the research, but I might just piggyback off you. Yeah, yeah for sure. Okay, so um I use the us bank smartly card. It's four percent on everything And if you just want a single card, that's the card to go off of you need to have smartly. That's what it is Yeah, yeah. It's 4 % on everything. By the way, I use it on my taxes. So - Wait, what? I pay 1.82 % to the government to use my credit card. And then I get 4 % back from US Bank. It's just like, I'm getting 2 % back on my taxes. I could use that for like Facebook ad spend. I could use it for anything.

53:41You can use a Facebook ad spend. Yeah, exactly. Is there like a limit or is it unlimited? Just your credit limit. Wow. What's this called? It's called US Bank Smartly. and you have to have$100 ,000 with U.S. Bank. But what I did is I just have a brokerage account with a single stock, and that's my$100 ,000 at U.S. Bank. It's a great deal. They're losing money on me for sure. Dude, on one hand, I'm like, this is sick. I got to do this. On the other hand, I'm like, I don't know. Setting it up. Dude, 4 % is pretty legit. I went through a lot of hoops to get 2.6 from Bank of America. Bank of America, yeah.

54:19and so now you're just shitting on that this is way better you also tweet all types of stuff like the other day you're like does Robinhood give like 4 % interest Robinhood has a card that gives 3 % cash back on everything and then right now they have a promo where it's like 4 % or 5 % it was 5 % if you put $25 ,000 into a Robinhood brokerage dude it's kind of actually interesting because if you are a really big company or you're spending a lot couldn't the difference between 0 % and 4 % have a meaningful impact on your margin? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, if you're buying Facebook ads, it could be really massive for you.

54:58But for me, even just my taxes, getting 2 % back on my taxes is many thousands of dollars. It's pretty sweet. That's crazy. It's like free money. I know a guy who, well, I could say it actually. His name's David Hauser. He did a podcast, so it's public. But he sold his company Grasshopper for I think$125 million. And he's famously, he's a friend of mine. He's famously frugal and whatever. And he was convinced American Express to let him pay his tax bill, which on a$100 million sale, I don't know what that would be, $36,$40 million or something. And he was like, I now have unlimited, basically unlimited flying.

55:39He's like, for the next 30 years, I ball out on flying and I don't have to pay for a thing. And he paid with his$40 million tax bill on Amex. The one thing, so speaking of miles, so like one thing I don't want to do is accumulate a lot of miles. I already have more miles than I need. And like people are like, oh, well, you're getting 4%, but I'm actually getting 5 % because I get miles and miles are worth 2.3 cents to me because, but then I look into it and they're like, how is it worth that much to you? And you're like flying on some random time of the day on a business class flight, but that's not the flight I want to take.

56:17Just give me cash back and I'll buy my own shit. Right. Also, don't miles inflate at some like insane inflation rate? Plus, you don't actually use all your miles. So even if in theory, every point is worth X, you're never going to use 100 % of your points. So you have to discount back off that. Exactly. So for me, cash back is king. Dude, I know a guy in Hampton, by the way, who is a two-person company and he spends 10 million a year on Facebook ads or something. And he's like, I get all these miles. And so I just, I was like, book a flight for me and I'll just send you the money. And I bought four first class tickets to Europe and I got probably a 30 % discount because of it.

56:52It was a significant savings for me. Do you have any other good financial wins or hacks? So you got the 4 % cashback card. Is there anything else that is a needle mover? Actually, I've started using Robinhood for a lot of stuff. So Robinhood had this thing where, and they continue to have it, where That's dangerous. I don't think it's dangerous. Robin's a big company. They're making lots of money. I'm a Robin Hood bull. And they had this thing where you could move your assets over and they would match 1%. So it's pretty amazing if you have, let's say,$10 million of assets in stocks somewhere, you move it over, you get$100 ,000 free money.

57:36How long does it have to stay there? I think it's two years but I've been very happy with the service and I just did the transfer ACAST transfer from Schwab Schwab called me like red alert and they were like we'll give you$15 ,000 right now in your account you don't have to do anything you just we're just going to give you$15 ,000 you just don't move your money and I was like yeah but I'm getting a lot more from Robinhood so I moved it and I've been very happy and then I have a lot of other I now use other products on them and they have a great margin rate it's like 5 % it's great. Are you like a stock picker?

58:11What do you do with your personal portfolio? Are you just boring index funds? Do you do anything interesting? I want to not be a stock picker. I want to be boring index funds but inevitably I get excited about an idea and I invest in it and it's been very good for me. I've been fortunate to outperform the market pretty significantly. What was your best pick? My biggest position was NVIDIA in 2017. No shit. And what was that based on? What was the idea there? I did a lot of research, got excited, and I thought there were two theses. It was more based on crypto than it was AI. And I was wrong. We moved away from GPUs and moved into ASICs for crypto.

58:53But it ended up being right anyway. And it's been awesome. So that was in 2017, the stock was ranked. It's about 30-something X from that. Yeah, it looks like it's a 30X. 150 today back then it was five bucks. 30X is wild. Did you keep it in the whole time? Yeah, I've kept it the whole time. I haven't actually bought anymore or sold any. So yeah, I have. And it was like my biggest position in 2017. And you're basically like a fintech expert, right? Your fund is fintech. You've invested in a bunch of fintech things. What's your position on crypto? Are you like, are you a big Bitcoin bull? Do you believe in all the altcoins?

59:32Like what's your, where do you stand? Because I haven't heard you talk about it much. Yeah, I don't talk about that much. Bitcoin is so... Actually, looking at my assets, it's probably Bitcoin number one, NVIDIA number two, and then the house that I live in number three. No way, really? Yeah. And so, say more. What got you into Bitcoin or crypto at the beginning? And is it just Bitcoin, or do you also believe in ETH and Solana and other things? I only have Bitcoin and ETH. I have some of the others, but not a meaningful amount. I actually have a tweet where I was anti-Bitcoin, and Bitcoin was like 60 cents or something.

1:00:14I was like, this is never going to work. Here's why. Governments are never going to allow it, blah, blah, blah. And then I finally bought in around$300. And the idea was, I still, what people believed then, what people told me was like, it's going to be a fast and efficient way to move money. And that isn't what happened at all. And so in some ways I was right. It doesn't matter that I was right. I lost a lot of money by not doing it earlier. And I think as a store of value, the more successful it gets, the more successful it's going to get. And so that's it. And more and more people are putting money in.

1:00:44So I've put money in. Now, for me personally, that makes sense. For my fund, I want to invest in things that actual people are going to be able to use and have real impact on the world. And I haven't found that many use cases. we have made a couple of investments in stablecoins. I think there's something there. Yeah, I was going to ask you, nerdy question. There's a lot of people are paying attention to stablecoins right now. Is that what fartcoin is? That's an unstablecoin for sure. Fartcoin, butthole. People who don't know, a stablecoin is basically, it's a digital token. So it has the benefits of being able to be transferred online easily and programmable, things like that.

1:01:27But it's just pegged to the dollar. So you put a dollar in a bank account and then one digital dollar is created. And that's the idea is that in order for the digital dollar to be created, an actual U.S. dollar has to be put in a bank account somewhere. And so there's companies like Circle and others, Tether, who are supposedly doing this. And I guess it's kind of like a lot of people believe it's like stablecoins is taking off now. There's some charts. I think the All-In podcast has been talking about this recently. a stablecoin. Didn't the stablecoin business get bought or a tech business? Yeah, it got bought for over a billion by Stripe.

1:02:02A billion dollars by Stripe. So is there anything actually going on here or is this just all a lot of hot air? I think there's something real here. I think transferring money internationally is challenging. And there's something called SWIFT, which is how banks do it. It's basically like a messaging protocol. I think stablecoins can make things easier. I think still at the end of the day, I think people are overhiding stablecoins because at the end of the day, in on-ramp and in off-ramp to get money. And they aren't that. Like, I had this issue. I had a wedding in India and I needed to pay a lot of vendors in cash.

1:02:38There was a lot of cash. And I was like, hey, I tweeted it. Can somebody help me get a lot of cash in Mexico? And the reality is there's a reason why it was so difficult. And the reason is like money laundering. And actually, also, even what I was doing was illegal because, or what my vendors were doing. They wanted cash because they don't want to pay taxes. And so the reason it's hard is because the government doesn't want you to, do you want to skirt taxes? And I had this convoluted thing, actually, you guys might appreciate. I convinced my bank to let me, normally you can withdraw a certain amount of money per day.

1:03:11I convinced my bank, Schwab, to let me do$4 ,000 per account per day. and I opened six bank accounts at Schwab and I was able to go to an ATM and withdraw$4 ,000 of cash per account per day. And I was there for the week prior. That basically paid for a lot of my wedding. Dude, do you know what the takeaway from this, by the way, is that's the second time that you've said something where you've went to a major institution. And negotiated. Yeah, when I hear about you went to Schwab, I'm like, is Schwab a person that you can go to? I don't understand. You know what I mean? It's like getting Google AdWords help.

1:03:46It's like if I had a Gmail issue, it's like, hey, Google, yeah, I need you to fix this. I didn't even realize that you could call Schwab or call Bank of America. Yeah, I know you guys don't offer this, but you got to. Yeah, I think if you explain your situation to them, actually, one thing I do is I know pretty quickly if I've got a good agent or a bad agent. And then if I have a bad agent, I hang up and call a guy. like you know somebody who's like going like i just told them my story like told them what i needed and and then like somebody walked me through the process and i got it done and so i think you could do that all the time and speaking of negotiation or like talking through something i think something a lot of people should do is realize like you can negotiate at macy's like i i did this with my wife my wife um she bought a wedding dress a post wedding dress dress at Macy's.

1:04:39It was for one of our weddings. And we were at Macy's and I was like, I want to teach you to negotiate. I want you to get a better deal on this dress. It was like, I don't know, $400 dress or something. And I was like, can you get a better deal? And she did. She got like 20 % off just by asking at Macy's for like a person at Macy's. And she saved like a hundred bucks or something. Do you ever do that? Yeah. I mean, I'll do things like, like, I'll be like, hey, like, I don't I won't know if they had a sale recently. But I'll be like, I think you had a sale recently. Like, can you? Like you had like a, you know, like, for example, like I went and got something at Brooks Brothers the other day.

1:05:17And I know that one time a year, they do like a 40 % off sale. And I went like three months after that sale. But I was just like, hey, can you can Can you match that? I always prefer to go to women. The workers who are women, I have way more success because they're just easier to get along with. You do a little fake flirt. But that works way better for me with retail. It's just like talking to a woman and being like, hey, how are you doing today? Look, I know this is a little obnoxious, but can I get that sale discount or what? Yeah. My buddy Dan. And always they have a bunch of QR codes or barcodes.

1:05:54and they just scan a QR code or barcode. And it's like, oh, he was 20 % off. And like, all you need to do is ask. My buddy, Dan, his mom was like the master at this. If like when we were in college, we would go try to like, you know, buy stuff for our dorm rooms or our apartment. And she would just, while we're checking out, she'd be like, and give the boys a discount. Give these college boys, give these boys a discount. And then they would be like, what? For what? And then she's like, give them a discount. Yeah, she would just be like, come on, give the boys a discount. They need it. And then she would just tell them like, give the boys a discount.

1:06:23and sure enough, 20, 30, 40 % off would just happen like that. And I would never even think to do it, but she would just say it like, like it's a done deal. Like, oh, it's happening. Not like, do you think it'd be possible? Is there any way we would really appreciate it? She was just like, oh, and then throw that in. Put the discount on top of it. Whatever you got, like give the boys a discount. It's just like alphas, like every clerk. Yeah, exactly. I think it's a good, I think it's something like I want my kids to learn. Like if I have kids in the future, hopefully I will. I want them to learn these sort of things.

1:06:56And it's also like somebody posted, what job do you wish you had? I wish I had a sales job growing up. And the people that are selling you Dead Sea cosmetics or something, they're just coming up to you. Or cell phone accessories. They're like, hey, what phone do you have? And then they try to sell you something. I feel like those are really useful things that I wish I knew. Dude, the Dead Sea guy at the mall. Oh my God. Unbelievable skill set. Just an incredible skill set. Is that a scent or a lotion? I think it's like a body scrub. Yeah. Got it. And it's got to be like a 98 % profit margin sort of business.

1:07:36Yeah. Didn't your dad sell like door-to-door or something? Yeah. My dad sold him encyclopedias door-to-door when he just moved here from India. It's actually a great story. He was very poor in India. To come to the United States, he studied at IIT in India, great university. And then to come to America, he needed to raise money. So he raised money from the community to pay for his flight over. And you had to have$300 to stay in America. On your passport, they stamped that he had$300. He came with exactly$300 in his pocket. And so he raised a bunch of money and he had to pay them back. And he had this stipend as a master's student and then a PhD student.

1:08:13And he decided to work as an encyclopedia salesman. Indian guy, thick Indian accent at that time. he was in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama door-to-door selling encyclopedias and he became the best encyclopedia salesman in the country. Did he really? Yeah, he really did. Have you asked him about it? Like what was the secret? What was the pitch? I think it was just like working day and night I think was the pitch. And crazy enough, so he made enough money to buy an apartment in like a condo in India, like a one-bedroom condo in India. and that's still the condo that like my uncle lived in and still like we still go and stay in that condo that my dad bought with his earnings from working as an encyclopedia salesman.

1:08:59Dude, do you actually have a bunch of good tweets about your dad? Like I feel like I kind of know about him like apparently. Did that video? Did you see the video recently? First of all, he quoted Robert Mugabe who's like a dictator in Africa. Like the dad like at Shield's wedding, he like gave a speech and he quoted Robert Mugabe who I think was like the dictator of Zimbabwe. What was the quote? It was about treating everyone well. It was a good quote. It was a good quote. Like he was clearly on like brainy quotes and he typed in like a quote on love. It was by like a killer dictator. And my dad was like, Robert Mugabe, very famous for his quips.

1:09:38And I'm like, I think Robert Mugabe was famous for something else, but okay. And then he's got this other video of his dad on a cruise. Like he's like, we lost my dad, but we found him dancing or something like that. He's like dancing with this other couple. And then, so we went on a cruise, family cruise a couple of weeks ago. It was awesome. I was very skeptical of going on a cruise. We went with eight family members. It was super awesome. But anyway, we go to this tasting menu restaurant and my dad shows up with a pizza to the tasting menu restaurant. And I filmed him like, the people were like pretty mad at him.

1:10:14Yeah, I saw that. I loved it. he like covered it with a napkin. He's like, oh yeah, no problem. No problem. And they're like, no sir, we can see it. It's still there. He's treating it like a, like a baby. You like put something in front of their eyes and it doesn't, it just doesn't appear anymore. That's hilarious. Dude, thank you for doing this. Well, this was fun hanging with you as it always is. And I recommend, if you want to hear Sheil's story, go back and listen to the episode. I think it's episode 18. I think it's called like the, you know, the guy who, who made millions on selling wacky domains because you told your story kind of like in order there.

1:10:51And it's a great episode. I went, you know, for me to go back and re-listen to my voice, like anybody knows, if you're listening to your own voice on a recording, that's painful. And so for the fact that I went through an hour episode this morning, that means the episode's pretty good. And that was before you guys made it so big. Yeah, you were there. You were the cause. And you got to give Sheila a follow on Twitter. You are a great follow. Like you just do the, like, it's just the small things in life. You just tweeted out, apparently, do you have a couch that's like a square? Yeah. It's a nine foot by nine foot couch.

1:11:21I love this thing. My wife hates it, by the way. But I love it. You just tweeted out a photo of your couch and I was just like, who on earth would buy this? And then I'm somehow convinced that it's the right decision. Dude, I've always been curious. You go to the furniture stores and they have the pit. It looks like a pizza because it's like a nine square thing. You have to hop on like a small child and just like crawl around the couch because your feet aren't going to touch the ground. And you did. You bought it. I love it. It's so fun when you have people over here. But it's also modular, so you can turn it into other things.

1:11:53Thanks for doing this, man. You're the best. We appreciate you. All right. That's odd.

1:12:24Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:12:54If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.