The guy who gets paid $80K/yr to do nothing

0:00All right, Sam, I got to tell you about this. There is a guy in Japan who I read about who is making$80 ,000 a year for doing nothing.

0:16They call him the do nothing man. Have you ever heard of this guy? No. Where'd you read about this? Well, I originally saw it. I don't even know where I saw it somewhere. And I was fascinated because what happened is this guy was at work. And his boss called him a do-nothing man. And he was insulting him as like, dude, you just do nothing. You don't really add anything. You don't provide any value. And he says that he thought to himself and he goes, hmm, is there value in society for a man who does nothing? And he went online and he posted a tweet saying, I'm starting a new service. It's called rental people who do nothing.

0:58and is basically was like, I will be a companion, a friend who will do nothing. So what this guy does is you rent him out and he'll go hang out with you and he says nothing. It's pretty much a silent companion, completely non-physical, non-sexual, basically an introvert for hire. And so what people do is they will, either they have a task they need to go do, like an errand they need to run, or they just feel really lonely and they just want somebody to have some tea with them. And he'll come and he'll sit and he won't really say anything. And if you ask him a question, he'll give you a simple answer.

1:31But it's really just the presence of another human body. And this guy made$80 ,000 in a year renting himself out. And then he wrote a book, a memoir called The Man Who Did Nothing or The Rental People Who Do Nothing. And he's continued to do this now for years. So he did it before COVID. Then COVID hit, so he couldn't do it. And then he started it back up again. And now he doesn't even charge for the Hangout. He used to charge$68 for a session. And now he just says, just cover the food and travel, and then I'll hang out with you for free. And so he travels around and he gets paid for his food and his event tickets and all the things that people want to do with them.

2:11And this is what this guy does. Isn't this fascinating?

2:19I'm reading the comments on his Goodreads account for his book. What were the reasons why people wanted to hang out with him? Well, so this was pretty fascinating. So I was wondering this too. I was like, why is there a need for this? And I guess in Japan, there's a loneliness epidemic. It's kind of crazy. They have words for this that we don't even have words for. So have you ever heard this term like hikikomori? You know, I haven't. I have not heard that term. Has it come up in Connecticut? No, I have not heard that word before. That's a new word for me. So it's a word that they have for severe social withdrawal.

2:54It's total withdrawal from society. So typically, it's kind of like incel in the States. So typically, it's mostly men who are living at home, still in their parents' home, but they are completely recluse. They don't work. They don't socialize. And there are estimated 2 million men in Japan that are in this category. For six months, they basically have not engaged with anybody in society. so that's like kind of one problem is this growing trend of hikikomori and then there's another word i think it's kodokushi which is uh it's basically death without being cared for so it's like older people who are dying and then they find their bodies like five months later because they were so socially isolated that nobody knew that they passed away and this is like a number that the last 10 years has doubled like i think 70 000 people died this way where they're found weeks or months later.

3:47And these trends are all very concerning. So in Japan, single-person households, so no wife, no family members, no friends, just living alone by yourself is now 38 % of the population, which is... That's triple where it was five or seven years ago. They appointed a minister of loneliness in Japan because this has become such a big problem. And so this guy doing this is almost like an art statement in a way about this to bring awareness to this huge problem that people are just really freaking lonely in Japan everywhere. But really, in Japan, it's even more heightened. Dude, let me explain something to you that's very similar to this.

4:25And I want to hear your opinion of this premise that I have. And I also, I think it's a good premise that I think a lot of people can learn from. So I don't live in Austin anymore. I went and visited it again for a wedding. And I realized how lucky I was to have a community there of just the best people on earth. I consider them family. Dude, I saw your Live, Laugh, Love post where you posted a picture with your friends and you said, this is wealth. And I thought, he's not wrong. He's not wrong, but he's also not Zampar. What is going on? This is wealth? What new era have you entered? I've entered a very special era.

5:05Listen, it's weird. Ever since having a kid, the things that I thought I cared about, I don't care about as much. And so I'm kind of going all into this emotional side of caring about others, whatever, all that stupid shit. But listen. We can't even say it. It's like hurts to say the sentence, but we believe it. Yeah. So I basically lived in San Francisco, and I moved from San Francisco to Austin. my best friend at the time Neville Medora he lived there and I had this conversation with him before I moved I go Neville I'm thinking about moving to Austin one of the big reasons I'm moving is because of you I want to be with you I want to be near you would you be willing to I want to be in you I want to be in you you could say I didn't know where you were going with that one yeah

5:53it goes a better way than that one way and so if I do this would you like commit to like us living a life together with our families. And that sounds weird, but I did that. And it worked wonderfully. So there was about four other couples where we had this conversation where we're like, let's live life together. You can count on me, I'll count on you, whatever. And when you think about that, that's strange. But if you really dive deep, it's actually not that weird because that's what you did with your girlfriend, probably. You're like, hey, so should we put a label on this? You know what I mean?

6:24And you do a girlfriend, a boyfriend, and then you make a huge ordeal to where you get engaged. you get down on one knee. And there's a big epic thing where you were boyfriend and girlfriend, now you are officially a fiance. And then you get married where you basically talk about... Take a vow. Yeah, you take a vow in front of people who have flown from around the world to witness this vow. And that's normal. But we don't really do that with friends. And so I've recently moved in order to be closer to family. And so now I'm trying to develop friends in a new town. and I'm starting to go to them and I'm having this formal conversation.

7:00And it really weirds people out right away, by the way, obviously. But after a few minutes, the men in particular, they're like, oh, I kind of get this and it kind of feels nice. It kind of feels nice to talk about how we're going to do life together or how we can counter each other or to define the relationship. What is it that you're saying? Let's make this real. So what are you actually saying? So here's what I'm saying. What I'm saying is what this guy in Japan is experiencing is this lonely thing. And you're talking about people living by themselves 38 % of the time. You're talking about people dying and for weeks not being found.

7:36What I'm saying is, I think a lot of people experience loneliness. And I think one key way to get over it, particularly men, men in particular, once they approach their 50s and 60s, you basically never make a new friend again. Just like you never go to the doctor, you don't go to the dentist, and you don't make new friends. But I think there are ways around this. and it's around having these formal conversations. And in particular, one extreme example is to move places just for the sole reason of this friend being there. Do you know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean. But I guess what I'm saying is, what is the conversation you're having with people, especially new people?

8:10So I get the Neville one because he was already a really close friend from San... He was in San Francisco, right? That's where you guys originally became friends? No, he would spend his summers in San Francisco and we would hang out and then he would go back to Austin because Austin was our very... So you guys were already really close and you're like, hey, I want to move there. And I really like, I'm kind of moving there for you or I want to move right really close to you and like, let's do life together. And I'm a big fan of this. I've said this before. One of the most impactful things that's come out of this podcast was a guy named Mike Brown came on the pod and he said, I was asking about going into business with his brothers and he goes, to me, that's the point of life.

8:45You find the people you love and you do life with them. And that became like a very simple operating philosophy for me. So I'm a definite believer in that. What are you doing now with new people? Because I'm curious how that conversation goes when it's not somebody you've already been friends with for five or 10 years. I've only done it once so far. And I just kind of like... I hope they're listening. Dude, it's weird. Like, it's definitely weird. But I'd be like, hey, so I'm looking to have close friends who I can rely on. And I want to let you know that you are that to me right now where I hope I can rely on you for important things.

9:23And I want you to know that you can rely on me for stuff. And like whatever I have, you can use whatever I have. I got your back no matter what. And I know this sounds weird and everything, but I'm looking to do life with someone. And it seems like you and your wife might be that person for me and my wife. And I make jokes about it. And I realize how silly this sounds. But it was actually really great. It made me feel really good. This is like how swinging starts. so actually I have a sort of related story one time I was doing an angel investment a deal we need a word for this you were saying in Japan they have a word we need a Japanese word for it we need a Japanese word for this because when you don't have words to label these things we need to define this word it's got to be explicitly heterosexual explicitly not involving swinging it's got to be like some type of reciprocity or like I'm willing to give more than 50 % to this relationship Do you know what I mean?

10:19Like this idea of a good relationship, you have to be willing to overgive. So I just went into Google Translate. I wrote male friends that don't have sex. And it says, Sekusu no Otoko Tomodachi. So I think that's the term phrase for it. Tomodachi for short. All right. What were you saying about angel investing? So I was trying to do an angel investment. This was maybe, I don't know, 12 years ago or something. And I had no money. And I wanted to invest in this company. And I finally realized like, oh, I have friends who have money. And I could probably go to them and I could probably pitch them a deal.

10:49And if they do the deal, they'll probably give me a little piece of the upside if it works out. And so I go to a friend, I go to my buddy, Suli, and I say, hey, I want to invest in this company. He's like, all right, great, let's do it. And he's like, cool. So for the economics of this, how do you want to do this? And I was like, I don't really know. What's the norm? He's like, well, the norm is probably this, where you would get 10, 15 % of my carry, but we could do whatever you want. and I was like, well, I just want to make sure it's fair. I was kind of thinking of transaction. I was like, I just want to make sure this is fair.

11:22I don't want this to be one-sided or the other. And he goes, let's make it one-sided in your favor. And he goes, I don't care what happens on this deal. What I care about is us doing deals together for the next 20 years. And first of all, it was not just hollow words because he was giving more action on the deal to me that he did not need to. I wasn't asking for it. He just did that on his own. The second was the way he signaled that like, hey, I'm looking for 20 years of doing stuff together was kind of intentional and new in a way that I hadn't really heard. And then I started doing that with other people.

11:56So when I met up with Ben and I was like, Ben, hey, you want to do this project together? He's like, yeah, we did a project together. It went great. Want to do another project together? We did another project together. It went great. And I was like, hey, let's start a business together. But what I told him was I was like, I think you're awesome. And I think we work really well together. I want to be in business with you for 20 years. So let's basically only make decisions that will increase the likelihood of us doing this together for 20 years. And that really changed the game. So that one little way of being intentional that this, I want this relationship to go beyond this transaction, this moment in time and saying like, I think you're awesome.

12:33And I want to be doing stuff with you for a long time. That has really helped me or changed the way that I viewed things, but also the way that other people receive it. because then they know that I'm putting my foot forward and saying, yes, I think you're awesome and I can see us doing plenty of things together. Let's do this for the long haul, which I think settles everybody down and gets everybody out of a selfish or short-term mindset. Just as much as guys being dudes. You know? That's what it comes down to. It's just as much as us guys, we want to be dudes. Tomodachi, baby. Tomodachi, okay?

13:08Let's just be bros. You want to be bros? I'm celebrating that. Okay, so here's some, I guess, related things to this. So back to this guy, by the way, this Shoji Morimoto. So this guy, 39 years old. Look at his Twitter. His Twitter has 420 ,000 followers. He's gotten very famous off of this. He said that before COVID, he was making$300 a day. So he's doing this$68 a session, whatever. And he was just going to coffee shops and playing video games and doing random stuff with each other. Twitter's harder. These Japanese, I'll tell you what, They got a different word for everything.

13:45Okay. So his service is called Rental People Who Do Nothing. So I started thinking, do we have this here? Because loneliness is not a only in Japan thing. Obviously, it's everywhere. And actually, there are some things like this. So go to rentafriend.com. I don't know if you've ever seen this. No. You know what, Sean? I'm proud to say I haven't actually been on this website yet. Friends Seeking Friends. Okay. So now type in, like just type in San Francisco and click search. And then you're going to see just like a huge list of totally platonic friends who are down to hang out and just have a day together.

14:22It's pretty wild that there's this whole, I didn't even know this existed. It's Craigslist for friends. It's pretty, pretty cool, right? And it actually has a lot of traffic. You know, this is a little sus. There's a lot of pretty women with full body shots on here. Yeah, this might be like I found a laundromat and I'm like, this place is doing a huge amount of business. And it's like, well, it's not just a laundromat, right? They're laundering other things besides clothes here. So I don't know exactly the social norms here, but I'm going to take it at face value that this is rent a friend, that this is truly for friendship.

14:56and I've read some articles of people doing this and what they said was they were like it was actually in some ways kind of nice to have just someone on demand that I could go do this thing with maybe a plus one for an event or to go to a concert together or whatever it is. Didn't want to go by myself but I still wanted to go. But the other side of it was it had this weird dynamic Wait, by the way, does rent a friend mean I pay them money? Yeah, you pay the money to hang out. This is where you get a hooker. There's Valerie on here is in a bikini. And she's 20 and really good looking. It might be, but I read this article on Vox or whatever.

15:32Somebody went and they did this. They rented a friend on this site. What they said was they were like, I paid for this person to come hang out with me. They're like, one of the things... And they talked to him about the other jobs that they've done. They're like, yeah, it's sometimes for older people or it's for somebody who's just sort of been very busy with work, hasn't really developed their social life. And one of the things that they talked about was like, it made me a more rude person because they're like, oh, if I'm paying you, then this is all on my terms. We're going to do what I want.

16:01There were some downsides. There was upsides of, wow, this companionship on demand. On the other side, there were some downsides, which was like the power dynamic was off. I was too aware, at least the journalist was like, I was too aware of the differentiation. That's one business. There's another one that you've probably heard of called Papa. Do you know Papa? No, it's Papa. this is for your grandparents so it's basically a lot of people have you know grandparents who are alone both they're both lonely but also kind of need help like maybe little errands that they can run or somebody to help them when they're going to the store just in case anything happens or to make you know a little easier to move around and this was a silicon valley startup that was basically like you pay for yeah you pay for a basically like a task rabbit specifically to help older people.

16:49And it's something less than kind of like a live-in care, but it's more than me once a month calling my grandparents. And so this company, I remember when this came out, it was sort of this crazy idea. And it was backed by some investors. I remember Alexis Ohanian, the guy who created Reddit, he backed it. He said something like, there's 11 ,000 boomers that are retiring every day or something crazy like that. Some huge number. and he's like, our aging population is growing very fast and we're going to need services that are going to help them and this company is valued over a billion dollars.

17:25Holy shit, I'm looking at their funding. They've raised hundreds of millions, 250 million dollars. At least 250 million, yeah. SoftBank put a bunch of money into it and they were valued at 1.4 billion and it's literally a sort of like on-demand companionship for older people.

17:43Dude, have you ever met a sugar baby? Have I ever met a sugar baby? I think I have, but I don't know if it was official or if it was just like a... There's the website where it's like, this is an official arrangement, and then there's just happening in the wild. I think I just met someone who is happening in the wild. So there's sugardaddy.com, where you go and you meet someone, and it gets a lot of traffic. We've got to go incognito for this one. Let me just make sure I don't get targeted for ads. the rest of my life. I was talking to my wife about this the other day because she somehow knew someone who was a sugar baby and I think there's reality TV shows about it too, which you definitely have seen because you guys have the same TV taste.

18:32But I actually think that this is a fairly fair trade, as long as it's consensual, obviously. But I'm shockingly on board with having a sugar baby. If you're an old guy and you just want to and like a lot of these guys they literally just want a companion they just want someone to be there for them and things like that and it's not always like you know as weird as it sounds it's no different than wanting to rent this Japanese guy to come hang out with you yeah and you know I don't really have any judgments on this like I don't I've never experienced this I don't really know the lifestyle I try not to be you know too judgmental things I don't really understand what I'm fascinated by is just this phenomenon and again like I remember when I first moved to Silicon Valley I met the guy who was the first PM at Twitter.

19:17And I asked him, I was like, man, that's amazing. You picked Twitter really early on. There's only 14 people there or something like that at the time. How'd you know? Like, was it obvious that Twitter was going to be a big deal? He goes, no, everybody thought Twitter was weird, stupid, useless, just like a strange thing to do. And he goes, well, I remember when I joined, somebody asked me, why do you join? He goes, because you can't deny the phenomenon. meaning when you observe people doing a behavior that kind of makes no sense or seems odd seems strange seems weird to you the natural inclination is to push that away and be like oh that's that's stupid that's weird and you sort of resist it and he goes as an investor or somebody you know in where where we worked in the technology space you want to lean into the phenomenon you want to understand wow why is it that people are watching other people play video games twitch right why is it that people are just texting out to a random group of strangers what they're having for lunch?

20:14Twitter. Why is it that people are getting into strangers' cars instead of taxis? Uber, right? Why are people sleeping on other people's couches instead of hotels? Airbnb. All of the biggest winners tended to be these weird behaviors, things that either broke a social norm or sounded a little sketch. And once you sort of wrap that into a more safe and acceptable behavior it unlocked a pretty big market. And so I've always tried to have, I've tried to learn to have a more open mind about this stuff. And so would I be surprised if the way that getting into people's, you know, sleeping on couches or getting into strangers' cars, like would I be surprised if companionship as a service, like totally non-sexual companionship as a service was a big deal?

21:00I would absolutely not be surprised because I think that probably by default, most people are lonelier than they want. Yeah, and I actually think that this is not a new phenomenon i think that it's a phenomenon it's a thing that's always existed now let me get let me get biblical on your ass i was i was uh raised catholic so i went to catholic school my whole life so i had to read the bible all the time did you ever read the the story about jesus and i was like carrying the cross up like the hill or something to like you know to be executed no i didn't read that one well yeah i don't know it's like part of culture a little bit uh but like there's a at one point there's like a line where like these professional women or these women who are professional uh i think they call them whalers but basically these women who are hired to come cry at a funeral to grieve to make you feel like you're not the only uh one there to grieve for this person um and like he like dismisses them and he's like you know don't don't give me get this out of here uh his direct quote was like get that nonsense out of this out of here something like that uh no but i actually think that is a thing at funeral home, by the way, at funeral homes where you have a griever who will come and fill the room.

22:11You know what I'm saying? But these types of things have been around forever. I don't actually think it's particularly a new phenomenon. I think we've always felt this way. Now there's just interesting platforms to help solve the problem. Right, right. There's these marketplaces now online to rent a crowd. It's like, oh, you need a crowd? People who either love you or are protesting you? Push this button. I'll get you 30 people in a crowd today. Politicians use this and brands use this. Technology made it easier to coordinate. By the way, there's a great tweet. Have you seen it? Where he's like, hey, I'm willing to show up looking like a mob boss at anyone's funeral just so your friends and family feel like, man, you really have some shit going on that they didn't know about.

22:55Dude, I bet you the rent-a-friend CEO or company, they're listening to this podcast and they're like, oh that's so cute Sean thought that we were just so you could meet friends and not for prostitutes friends is in air quotes

23:11aww by the way if it's not friends that's just me being me naive old me just sucker for for whatever you tell me okay I believe in humanity there's hundreds of thousands of people right now collectively saying

23:30aww Can I tell you about another thing that I saw that I think you might have seen as well because it happened at a UFC event a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to talk to you about this. Yeah, what? Did you see at the recent, I think it was at the Sphere event, did you see a very interesting advertisement on the post during the UFC? Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? I saw what you were talking about, but I don't know enough to riff on it. I mean, explain it and then maybe I'll remember. I'm watching the UFC pay-per-view and it's their first event at the Sphere in Las Vegas. I heard you bought tickets for it.

24:06Yeah, that's another story. How I actually ended up paying$15 ,000 to not go to the Sphere event, which is a big L for me. Wait, you paid$15 ,000 for tickets? So speaking of friends, I was like, hey, let me buy tickets for the Sphere event. I heard Dana White talking about it and I was like, oh wow, he says this is a one and done. It's going to be something like you've never seen before, or blah, blah, blah. So months ago, I just go online and I buy six tickets to the sphere. I think it was like after the ticket master fee, it was like 25, 27 grand or something like that. Oh my God. All right.