Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the exit podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett joined here by Robert B, a exit member.
Speaker: He's a white collar professional who's done a lot of side hustles.
Speaker: I want to talk to him about one that he's been particularly successful at and brought some innovation to, which is third-party book sales, Amazon book sales.
Speaker: Welcome Robert.
Speaker: Hi, yeah, it's fun to be here.
Speaker: And I've listened to all the episodes so far.
Speaker: They've all been really good.
Speaker: Actually, I listened to the one with Indian Bronson last night, and I was thinking like, oh, no, now I, this guy, he goes up there and he talks about like finding inspiration from Sanskrit texts and
Speaker: you know, Hindu mythology.
Speaker: And I'm going to now tell you about taking textbooks out of dumpsters and selling them.
Speaker: Well, I am, I am similarly in awe of guys like that.
Speaker: I am, I am shockingly what's the opposite of well-read.
Speaker: I don't, I don't have those, that great corpus of books that I can point to.
Speaker: Um, but I wanted to talk to you about, you were one of our, our, uh, sort of founding members, earliest people to jump on, uh, which I, which I really appreciated.
Speaker: And I wanted to know sort of what your dream for exit is like, what's, uh, if you could structure your exit from the corporate world, any way that you wanted to and end up anywhere you wanted to, what would you do?
Speaker: And I, I don't have,
Speaker: I'm pretty easy to please, I would say.
Speaker: I mean, for me, it really just comes down to like the sense of control of, you know, I want to make my own money in my own ways and make enough of it that I can live comfortably.
Speaker: I don't have to be super rich or anything.
Speaker: But I've always found personally that I feel more satisfied, more fulfilled doing maybe even something mundane, but that as long as it's my thing.
Speaker: Not everyone is like that.
Speaker: Some people would rather work for the man, I guess, but doing something interesting.
Speaker: For the most part, I'd rather...
Speaker: not, you know, just, just want to avoid the man.
Speaker: And yeah, that's all, that's all it really is for me.
Speaker: I mean, I want to, yeah, I definitely want to have financial independence.
Speaker: I want to be able to create like a good upbringing for my kids and I want to do, you know, maybe businesses where kids can be involved or not to the extent that like they're capable or, or interested in
Speaker: Um, and then, you know, and leave, maybe leave things that are still operating for them.
Speaker: And that's, that's what it kind of comes down to for me.
Speaker: There's a lot of trade-offs I'm, I'd be happy to make to have that, just to have that sense of ownership and control.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So are you thinking of finding, finding sort of one thing that you commit to, or it sounds like you're interested in like sort of a lot of different hustles.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a lot of things, I think.
Speaker: And that comes back, I think, to not caring too much about what it is.
Speaker: I guess I'd rather have like five things that make some amount of money than one thing that makes all the money.
Speaker: Because in part, it's just, you know, it's always, they tell you to diversify.
Speaker: That's part of it, you know, have different things.
Speaker: So maybe macro conditions or in the economy,
Speaker: affect one of your five businesses, but not the other four, that sort of thing.
Speaker: Or, or maybe some of them, some of my businesses would be, some of them might not be canceled proof or whatever, but some, but the rest of them would be that sort of thing, just to have multiple, like, so you can kind of, kind of play different, different parts of it.
Speaker: And there's maybe some intellectual stimulation too, of just doing different things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And as far as like your, your family situation, would you want to be out in the country or,
Speaker: Are we trying to make this work in the suburbs or in the city?
Speaker: I think for the near term, it's going to have to be suburb.
Speaker: My personal preference would be to be a little more remote.
Speaker: Maybe that'll happen someday, but right now I think it's going to have to be just given a certain family things, certain relative things.
Speaker: It's going to have to be suburban, I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just to be close to people.
Speaker: One of the things that I really,
Speaker: was fascinated by from, from the interview with, with Indian Bronson is his vision of, of this is not like a compound in the woods at all, which has never been what I felt like is, is what it has to be.
Speaker: But he's got this very like urban vision of exit and, and sort of hiding in plain sight and being pseudonymous and getting paid in crypto and, and, um,
Speaker: And being free because if they change the laws in a way you don't like, you can just hop a plane.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I don't know if that works necessarily for us because we're trying to build these extended kin groups and communities.
Speaker: And it's hard to see how that functions.
Speaker: But I also think about like in the church, we already sort of do that where like the institution exists everywhere you go and it's the same institution and you just plug into it.
Speaker: which enables us to have this sort of stability in mobility, which I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know of any other, any other group that has that where it's that easy to,
Speaker: that level of uh yeah like and and i think as well they used to um i mean we we won't talk too much about like church stuff but um church leaders used to talk more a little more about contributing in your local ward or you know congregation yeah um i haven't noticed it as much recently but it felt like in like the 70s or something you read these old talks and they were talking a lot about contributing locally and they would warn about you know like rvs like you're gonna get an rv and just disappear every weekend like ah yeah
Speaker: So, so that is something I think about too, though.
Speaker: It's like really important to like have a long stand, ideally a long standing congregation that you're going to for a long time, which is actually one of my, one of my sort of suburban issues right now is that like, I'm, I'm pretty flexible, but my family's pretty, pretty happy with the ward.
Speaker: So with the congregation, they want to stay there and they want to keep going and seeing those people and,
Speaker: So, so that's one of those things though.
Speaker: So, well, and that seems like it doesn't have like a technological solution.
Speaker: He's all about these technological solutions, which is like, you know, he's a genius and the stuff that he comes up with is brilliant.
Speaker: But like, I'm thinking about how do you, I don't know that there's like a fix to the problem of other than, other than like everybody goes together.
Speaker: Like, and that's, if you've talked to Jesse Lucas about this, he has this vision of sort of returning to tribal relationships.
Speaker: pastoralism almost where we're big sort of gypsy camps that move around, which, you know, is a little fanciful, but it's a fun idea.
Speaker: Well, that's actually, that's, that's kind of a side interest of my, this concept I've had for a long time, which I can't be, you know, like the person who thought of this first or whatever, but you see like these gentrification cycles, you know, and maybe a bad part of a city or even a small town or something.
Speaker: If you had a small amount of people who were committed, it would only take a handful of families, but it would probably have to be families.
Speaker: Go choose a spot and just say, we're going to get really cheap real estate in this area and we're going to be good neighbors.
Speaker: We're not going to come in and be like some cult that is really bad to our host.
Speaker: But you could very quickly improve a bunch of cheap property and make the place hip and cool or whatever.
Speaker: normally gentrification happens in a very different way like you know artists and less maybe less wholesome people yeah move in and start gentrifying but I think I think you could do some intentional gentrification like with groups but that's a sort of a side thing that's something I've thought about quite a bit yeah the fellas have have often coveted
Speaker: those like $10,000 houses in Detroit where it's like, we could go by like several blocks of that with our not really remarkable middle-class incomes.
Speaker: We could go by an enormous amount of, of land out there.
Speaker: And of course you'd have to, you'd have to, you know, replace all the copper pipes that have been stripped and, and, and basically bulldoze those houses.
Speaker: I mean, it'd be,
Speaker: They'd be uninhabitable, but, and then you get into sort of like, well, you're dealing with the local politics and how much would that be a problem?
Speaker: But I, I'm fascinated by that idea of sort of, we all go together and then how do you coordinate that?
Speaker: Like, you know,
Speaker: when does the group decide that it's time to leave and, and boy, it'd just be logistically.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It'd be tough.
Speaker: It'd be prohibitively.
Speaker: So at least in right now, in my case, but someone, some group of people who have the right mix of personalities is going to, is going to do this, I think.
Speaker: And they're going to, it's going to be, and a big component of it is that they'll make it look very cool.
Speaker: And, and that will very rapidly increase like property values.
Speaker: And then they'll all sell out and leave once, once everyone else comes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I want to talk about this, too, because like going back to the church, I've never got the sense from the brethren that they're like Luddites or reactionaries.
Speaker: Like as much as we get accused of sort of being 1950s throwbacks, every time they're talking about technology, they're talking about what a miracle it is.
Speaker: and how exciting it is.
Speaker: And part of that is I'm sure just their perspective of, because they were all born in like the 1920s, 1930s.
Speaker: That's less true today.
Speaker: But the Gordon B Hinckley generation sort of was, they got to see refrigeration and air conditioning and popularized flight and computers and all this stuff.
Speaker: And, you know, they, they, they, you know, they were, they were open-eyed about the challenges of that, especially with like pornography and media and, and, and, uh, sort of technology addiction, but they always framed it as like, this is something that you need to embrace and find the right way to use.
Speaker: Yeah, we all joke about return.
Speaker: And it's, yeah, it's not going to... I don't think we're going to get to return.
Speaker: We're going to get to make, but not return.
Speaker: And yeah, these tools are...
Speaker: Yeah, we joke around a lot about the bad side of technology, but they do allow you to organize information so quick.
Speaker: And if you have good intentions and good people doing that organizing, that's a really powerful thing.
Speaker: Now, of course, yeah, we see that it's a lot of really bad people are also using those tools.
Speaker: But yeah, we can use them too and we can build awesome things.
Speaker: I mean, just in terms of this group, like I imagine what it would be like to
Speaker: if we were in a similar state of sort of cultural and national decline and my social group was restricted to the people that I work with, that would be unbelievably isolating.
Speaker: And so the fact that I get to find like-minded people all over the country and network with them and, you know, find, you know, they, they find me jobs.
Speaker: I find them jobs.
Speaker: We sort of move around.
Speaker: the mobility of our time is, is a, is a gift as well as a challenge.
Speaker: And like, you know, the missionaries right now, I don't, I don't even know how it works at this point, but it seems like it's mostly like Facebook and Instagram and like their sort of social media.
Speaker: They're not knocking doors, which is probably a good thing, but like, it doesn't seem like we found the, the,
Speaker: the right application of that technology yet, but like, they're clearly trying.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Every, um, you know, I do have some of those like legacy social media accounts and sometimes I get, uh, yeah.
Speaker: Followed by, by missionaries.
Speaker: And, uh, and then that's even before I realized they're in my actual local congregation and I'm like, who is this?
Speaker: I'm like, why am I being followed?
Speaker: Why did four, uh, 20 year old girls just follow me at the same time?
Speaker: This is weird.
Speaker: Which is funny because that would be, I would be either missionaries or like a Slovakian porn site or something.
Speaker: So yeah, it's a, yeah, I guess that's a, I mean, yeah, I guess that's how they have to do it right now.
Speaker: But, but yeah, I mean, I, I,
Speaker: In general, I mean, I'm not a, what would the term be, technophobe or whatever.
Speaker: I'm a tech optimist or whatever.
Speaker: I used to actually work around some like tech investing.
Speaker: And I was really pretty into that.
Speaker: And I'm pretty positive about it.
Speaker: I mean, I saw a lot in real time, I was seeing a lot of things I didn't like or seeing the writing on the wall.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: that certain products I was, you know, reviewing for investment would maybe not make it or not, not that they wouldn't make it, that they wouldn't, they wouldn't be a good thing for society.
Speaker: And then some of them have gone on to not be a good thing for society, but, but yeah, in, in total, I'm actually a tech optimist.
Speaker: I like to use tech to meet cool people and to organize aspects of my own life or to, you know, automate some things, not that we should automate away every day,
Speaker: mundane thing we have to do, but I do use it to my advantage.
Speaker: The brethren seem to like celebrate labor saving in a big way.
Speaker: And more time for prayer.
Speaker: I mean, that sounds like a joke, but it's like, if you're doing the big challenge, I think economically and personally for so many people is that we've had these things that have made it so we could free up our time.
Speaker: We just didn't do better things with that time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And just one more point on this sort of larger topic.
Speaker: I was reading Elder Holland's address about BYU.
Speaker: He talks about the idea of a celestial college town and sort of the school being integral to the holy city.
Speaker: And that got me thinking about
Speaker: just the idea of a holy city period is so hard for us to understand, like in our context, because the cities are just so ideologically like tagged as hostile, tagged as enemy territory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And like, what would that even look like?
Speaker: What would a holy city even be?
Speaker: And, you know, I think Bronson's general ideas like Singapore, but Singapore definitely is not,
Speaker: It's a very secular, very sort of brass tacks place.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Productivity fetish sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But, but it got me thinking, yeah, what would a holy city look like to you?
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker: And I'm actually racking my brain for like, have I been to a place that's like city scale that had a holiness about it?
Speaker: And I mean, I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, you're going to see a lot of people talking online about the architecture and that's important.
Speaker: I would think a holy city would have beautiful architecture.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that would be, that's obviously secondary to the actual like hearts and minds of the people.
Speaker: This may be a little cheesy, but there are,
Speaker: There were at least there were, it's been a while since I've actually spent meaningful time in, in Salt Lake.
Speaker: There were times when you could be around like the temple square area and it was like extremely clean.
Speaker: Uh, people were, um, like very, you know, polite, uh, and there was some of that vibe back then, but there's been a long time since I really like lived there.
Speaker: You know, I imagine living in an apartment building,
Speaker: in some city and having, cause like an apartment building, if you think about it, it's probably roughly like ward scale, roughly like Dunbar number, number of people in it.
Speaker: And I guess to me, the vision of, of like a holy city would be a place where, you know, you're not going to make many more connections than that, just because of the limitations of time and your brain to hold that many people in it.
Speaker: And so you are going to be surrounded by strangers, but you're also going to have your community within that sort of mass of humanity.
Speaker: And I guess that the difference would be the depth of connection with that local community and then sort of how much threat there is or how much uncertainty there is about the mass of humanity that surrounds that community.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it'd be interesting to be in a place where you could reasonably anticipate that most everyone you would interact with has not just the same values, because I mean, I think you can kind of do that now, but the same like high level values, like kind of a more at a more holy level, I guess.
Speaker: But yeah, being confident that
Speaker: that all your interactions are going to be sort of on that plane that I don't, I'm unfamiliar with this really.
Speaker: I mean, you know, there's small gatherings where I can anticipate that, but, but I, I, I don't know.
Speaker: I'm having a hard time even conceptualizing a really big place where that would be the case.
Speaker: And the closest, I mean, actually the closest analog that I can think of is that word structure where I go to, I go to any number of words.
Speaker: Like if you're, if you're traveling or you're, you're on assignment or something,
Speaker: you go to any number of words and you sort of know what you're getting.
Speaker: That would be the closest thing of like, you know, no, I'm not friends with these people, but I know that we're, we have the same orientation.
Speaker: For me, psychologically at this point, I'm capable of conceiving of like a holy village, but like, yeah.
Speaker: Um, but the, but to think of it at a big enough scale, maybe I, maybe I lack vision, but that's, or just the psychological capacity, but that's sort of where I'm at.
Speaker: Like I could see that, you know, you know, some of the people we're hanging out with online, I could imagine that, um, yeah, smaller scale, but.
Speaker: And even that, you know, the people we hang out with online are so schismatic that maybe that's hard to picture.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's a, it's a strange dream.
Speaker: Anyway, so I want to talk about the book sales and how that went for you, to what scale you built that business and why you didn't go further with it, what you would sort of counsel someone who was contemplating the same thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, we'll come down from the heavenly and talk about something that's very, very pedestrian.
Speaker: So yeah, I was doing grad school.
Speaker: So I was on a university campus and I just wanted some sort of like side hustle or something because like school was not that demanding.
Speaker: So I needed something else to kind of like do for fun and it's nice to make money.
Speaker: So I don't know where I initially got the idea, but I started just flipping old books.
Speaker: And I just realized on Amazon, it was very easy to just look up a book and see if it sells for enough money that it's worth listing.
Speaker: And so I just started checking every book I had.
Speaker: Anything I wanted to get rid of, I would just see, okay, maybe I can sell this.
Speaker: And there's a lot.
Speaker: Most of them don't have any value, but a lot of them do.
Speaker: And then the thing about being on a campus was there's books everywhere.
Speaker: And so I was like, people would give me their books.
Speaker: They're like, they're like, I'm not going to go to the hassle of going to the library and sending in a line and returning these for cash.
Speaker: Cause there was those places that would do that.
Speaker: But a lot of people aren't even going to do that or people just leave on places or I'd go to like the dorms on the day where everyone gets like evicted or whatever.
Speaker: I mean, not evicted, but move out day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there would just be like furniture and books all over the place.
Speaker: So I just take them and sell them.
Speaker: And these are textbooks.
Speaker: So they're pretty valuable.
Speaker: It's I mean, if you are going to get into to book selling, you know, textbooks are like the Holy Grail and you're not going to find a lot of textbooks unless you're just getting lucky or like or you're on a campus.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: Furniture.
Speaker: So there's like textbooks and furniture.
Speaker: I wasn't doing furniture because I didn't have like a big van or a truck or anything.
Speaker: But furniture is a great category to flip as well.
Speaker: Like you can often get furniture free and then sell it for 75 bucks or something like that.
Speaker: Like it's not huge money, but it's pretty easy money.
Speaker: Or you can buy something for, you know, 50 bucks and easily sell for 150.
Speaker: That's really common.
Speaker: If you go on YouTube, you'll find a lot of like couch flippers and stuff like that.
Speaker: And it is pretty easy.
Speaker: I've done a little bit of it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I guess the limiting factor on that is just how much can you fit in the back of a truck and drive around?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like your space.
Speaker: And so it becomes a logistics business and a storage business pretty fast, but it's just, I guess, kind of the broader point, and I'll hit on this a few times, I think, is just like always be looking out for that stuff if you need money and if you have the time and if you... But it's probably like the easiest way to convert...
Speaker: free time without a lot of like skill or investment into some money.
Speaker: Yeah, totally.
Speaker: So then with books, after I was done with school, I would, I would then, you know, there's a lot of people who go to like these big book sales and you can find them all over.
Speaker: There's like websites devoted to knowing where they are.
Speaker: And when they're going to be, I mean, the pandemic stuff has probably messed that up, but there's these big book sales and you go.
Speaker: And if you've ever been to one, you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker: You see a bunch of people and I will call them weirdos.
Speaker: They have these like barcode scanners and they're scanning every single book in this place.
Speaker: And they're trying to find the valuable ones and they're going to buy them and take them.
Speaker: And these people are,
Speaker: They tend to be very rude and they're very awful.
Speaker: Like as a, as a veteran of the book selling industry, I don't think these people should even be allowed inside of these book sales.
Speaker: Picture this is sort of like scavenger, like Java type people.
Speaker: It's exactly that.
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: You can probably hear the contempt I have.
Speaker: These are some of the most annoying people.
Speaker: I've seen them knock over children and take books out of people's hands.
Speaker: They're just very annoying.
Speaker: And so you don't want to be them for two reasons, because they're bad people and also because what they're doing is pretty low return on their time.
Speaker: Some of them do make a ton of money, but yeah, it's a real big grind what they're doing.
Speaker: So what I decided to do instead is like, and I would also go to like thrift stores and thrift stores are okay.
Speaker: But the big problem with thrift stores for finding books that have value is that most thrift stores, especially at the big chains like Goodwill, they have an in-house team that goes through the books first and puts them online.
Speaker: So they take all the good ones out.
Speaker: and sell them on Amazon.
Speaker: If you go on Amazon right now and find Google any book that you are interested in buying, look at the used listings, you're going to see like Goodwill of Michigan or Goodwill of Arizona, Goodwill of Southeastern US.
Speaker: They will be selling that book because yeah, they took it out of circulation.
Speaker: So when you donate like to Goodwill,
Speaker: you think, oh, I'm going to be donating this thing so someone can get it for cheap.
Speaker: It's like, that's not the case.
Speaker: They're going to take the good stuff first and they're going to sell it at market value to just some normal consumer.
Speaker: That's not like, I mean, you're helping Goodwill raise money and I don't know if they do good things with that money, but you're not necessarily helping the poor.
Speaker: So what I figured is, okay, well, Goodwill is my competitor.
Speaker: Like these other, these people with their scanners, they are not my competitor because
Speaker: I don't want to do what they're doing.
Speaker: Goodwill has all the books.
Speaker: So I, so where are the good books?
Speaker: Like they're in, they're on the, they're on the shelves of like old people's houses or at your house, like you have good books.
Speaker: So what I started doing is like going Craigslist maybe and find people who are like off like an estate sale or something and offer to buy like the whole library, you know, for like 10 cents a book, 20 cents a book, something like that.
Speaker: And then you go through them.
Speaker: Most of them are junk.
Speaker: If you're operating at a big enough scale, which I was not, but if you are, you can start to get deals with like paper recyclers.
Speaker: They'll buy your old junk books or something from you.
Speaker: So like, it's kind of like every part of the Buffalo thing.
Speaker: Like there's like, always look for that, whatever you're doing, like any sort of business you're doing.
Speaker: Like I know electricians who don't, you don't save like copper wiring.
Speaker: And that to me is like very funny.
Speaker: It's like you, the stuff that,
Speaker: goes up in value all the time, they'll cut off like pounds and pounds of a day.
Speaker: They don't save it.
Speaker: They throw it away.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: People will break into buildings to steal that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, so just think about that.
Speaker: Like, you know, if you're, I don't know if this is the case, but I was thinking about like that landscaping episode you did.
Speaker: And I've been watching like some landscaping YouTube videos just because I watch a lot of YouTube videos.
Speaker: And like some of the guys were complaining about disposal fees, like they have to pay to dump their grass somewhere or whatever.
Speaker: Right now, I don't know that much about landscaping.
Speaker: So like if it's possible,
Speaker: Find someone who needs it so you can dump it for free or find someone who might even buy it or something.
Speaker: I don't know if glass clippings have any value to anyone.
Speaker: Well, yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, because I mean, that was one of the reasons why I was sort of contemplating the yard waste.
Speaker: side of that business because one of the biggest problems is that a dump run is like a hundred, 150 bucks in some places, but I have 10 acres of land and I could dump basically as many leaves as I can gather.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Like they're not going to, not going to make a problem.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's kind of like, that's part of my thing is like, just always be looking for that, that other way to like, to improve your operation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now, I totally get that a lot of people are just like, I don't want to be doing, I want to be financially free, but I don't want to be doing some dumb business.
Speaker: And that's fine.
Speaker: But personally, I find that when I'm like bringing my brain to it, I'm like, actually, like it can be the dumbest thing ever.
Speaker: Like it could be, you know, maybe you're like doing like sanitation, you're picking up porta potties or something, but finding just ways to do it differently and better that like your competitors aren't doing or something.
Speaker: There's like a lot of satisfaction, at least for me in doing that.
Speaker: Back to the book stuff, though, you want to think of Goodwill as your competitor.
Speaker: So you want to get those books from old people who have a big library before they die and it just gets donated to Goodwill.
Speaker: In sort of general terms, if there's some big institution that is sort of aggregating the treasure pile for you to look through,
Speaker: they've probably already picked it through.
Speaker: I mean, that's true of like Amazon and, you know, all of these third parties.
Speaker: So the farther up that process, you can go to sort of the raw like pay dirt,
Speaker: it's got to be the better you do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like a personal library that's never been, that no one's ever looked through.
Speaker: And it was really bad of me, but I would notice when I'd go to other people's houses, I'd just like start eyeing their bookshelves and stuff.
Speaker: Cause I had a really good sense for what was valuable.
Speaker: And I would just sit there and be like, Oh my goodness, they have, there's gotta be like,
Speaker: thousand dollars of books on that shelf.
Speaker: Like there's so many books.
Speaker: There's some of them are so good.
Speaker: I know those ones would sell, but you get to know, I mean, that's another thing too, is you, anything you, you get to know your industry.
Speaker: And I think if you're, if you're doing your own thing and it's for you and it's for your family, you just, you get into it, I think in a different way.
Speaker: At least I do.
Speaker: And fine.
Speaker: There's like a lot more,
Speaker: to it than you ever maybe thought possible.
Speaker: So yeah, so I started going on Craigslist, getting people's collections.
Speaker: Now here's where I got off the boat.
Speaker: I was running into storage space in my own home.
Speaker: And it was like that crossroads where I'm like, do I want to keep growing this?
Speaker: Or I could maintain and just stay how I'm doing, but I want to make more money.
Speaker: Or I could get commercial space and grow.
Speaker: And I decided against that.
Speaker: And actually, it's kind of a...
Speaker: kind of a funny story, but where I, where I really knew it was kind of over was where I realized it was time to end.
Speaker: I'd found this, this real treasure trove on Craigslist.
Speaker: Someone, someone, I think had died.
Speaker: I wasn't sure, but I think someone had died and there was like 5,000 books in their house.
Speaker: And I was, they posted a bunch of pictures and you can just go through the pictures and like read titles.
Speaker: And if you, once, you know, you kind of like know what's good.
Speaker: And a lot of this stuff was like old history texts.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: There was a ton of like religious, particularly like Jewish esoterica.
Speaker: Like I just knew this stuff.
Speaker: There was easily, there was numerous like 100, 200, $500 books in there.
Speaker: And there was 5,000 of them.
Speaker: So I'm like, this is at least, this is at least like 20 grand worth of books or something.
Speaker: Like the average value of these books is going to be a couple bucks each because they're just, they're all so good.
Speaker: And there's a few real high ticket ones in there.
Speaker: And so I'm like, okay.
Speaker: And that's when I decided I'm like, all right, I'm going to scale up because I'm going to go get all 5,000 of these books and I'm going to need a storage locker and I'm going to need to rent a van to pick them up.
Speaker: So I go and rent the van and I contact the guy who's getting rid of them.
Speaker: Who's just like, I think he was a real estate guy or something.
Speaker: Cause it's like, he was trying to sell off this house where someone had died.
Speaker: And he's like, yeah, man, you can come get the books.
Speaker: And then I get there and he's like, oh, sorry, I gave them away.
Speaker: Someone else came.
Speaker: And I was just like, what are you talking about?
Speaker: Like, I talked to him like three times, like talked to him the day before I talked to him that morning.
Speaker: And then I confirmed him my way over.
Speaker: And then like in the 30th, I got there, some other guy came and got him.
Speaker: So that's a challenge with like vision, right?
Speaker: Is if they don't see the value of what they have, which is a good thing in a certain sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, then they also don't get that.
Speaker: It's fricking important that you don't just hand it off to somebody else.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's, that's where I'm like, okay, it's like probably time to like, so, and then I wanted to reclaim the space in my house and stuff.
Speaker: I'm like, all right, that's, that's, that's it.
Speaker: I'll, I'll, I'll exit the business for now.
Speaker: That'd be brutally demoralizing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm like a very, I guess to use like a modern term, I'm very chill, but that was like super, super mad.
Speaker: I don't get that mad very often.
Speaker: But the, so that's when I got out of it, but I guess the broader point for anyone who's like curious about this stuff is that I was doing like easily less than 10 hours a week.
Speaker: Probably, I mean, probably more like four, probably like four hours a week.
Speaker: I would like stop at certain thrift stores that I knew that I knew weren't filtering first.
Speaker: They were like kind of lower, lower end thrift stores.
Speaker: They weren't big chains.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: they just put whatever they had on the shelf.
Speaker: And, and I even, you know, this is one of those things where you just, you be scrappy and you, you know, you talk to the manager, you tell them, you can sometimes tell them what you're doing and they don't really care.
Speaker: And they'll like be like, Oh, fine.
Speaker: Just, you can go in the back room.
Speaker: You can look at the stuff before anyone sees it.
Speaker: But like, if you're going to come in here every, every Tuesday and buy like a hundred books, we don't, we don't, we're happy to let you, you know, go in the back room sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I would stop at this like thrift, a couple of different thrift stores after work.
Speaker: And I can't, when I was driving places and that was pretty much all I was doing.
Speaker: And I was probably making a bad month, like 1200 bucks and on a good month, like 2,500 bucks.
Speaker: Four hours a week.
Speaker: That's not bad.
Speaker: Yeah, it was really good.
Speaker: I knew, and then I just knew, like I had the model scale or like fine tuned enough.
Speaker: I knew that if I just started scaling up, it would keep returning at a similar rate.
Speaker: Maybe the rate of return would go down a little, but I knew it would still be good.
Speaker: But then, I mean, I had a real job.
Speaker: I was trying to do a good job at that job and I was trying to focus on that and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, so tell me a little bit about like, because if it's four hours a week, but you're making these trips,
Speaker: you're picking up these books.
Speaker: So are you, are you at the thrift store, are you buying like big piles of books or are you just picking the winners?
Speaker: I'm picking winners and also making some guesses.
Speaker: So you can tell what the winners are.
Speaker: There's little, there's little tools you can get that are like, that are just like a Bluetooth peripherals for your smartphone.
Speaker: You can get like these little barcode scanners or something, the same ones that the weirdos at the book fair are using.
Speaker: you can get those and just like scan a book and you, and there's like third party software you can buy that will tell you that you can like set some limits and stay just like if a book meets the following criteria, just, just, just make the screen go green and I'll buy out and get it.
Speaker: And so I was doing that a bit at the thrift stores and stuff.
Speaker: And then the, you know, you just develop an eye for it.
Speaker: So there's stuff I would, some, some things that databases just don't have, they just don't know if it'll be valuable or not, but you get a sense for it and you get it anyway.
Speaker: And then you... So you take your big box home and then you...
Speaker: You list them on Amazon?
Speaker: Yeah, you got to list them.
Speaker: That's a somewhat manual process.
Speaker: There's like software and tools you can get to automate it.
Speaker: Some people that I know of in like the third party book world, they'll get like some housewife, find someone who will do it for them and they'll pay them, you know, like 10 cents a book or five cents a book or something like that.
Speaker: And I think that's pretty easy to do to find someone to help you do it.
Speaker: Yeah, the way I was doing it, I was doing it by myself.
Speaker: But yeah, I was just on the verge of outsourcing.
Speaker: And I mean, at that level of return, being able to do it by yourself and still pulling that kind of return with that kind of time investment is pretty impressive.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think it's the only reason it was that good.
Speaker: It's not that good if you just...
Speaker: go to like a book fair or Goodwill or whatever.
Speaker: The only reason it was that good is because I was going like upstream before books got into the system where like anyone could find them, which is like kind of my bigger point here, I think is like,
Speaker: Just understand your business and understand the value chain and then go play in the part of the value chain that really makes sense for what you're doing.
Speaker: Don't just like see how everyone else does it and do it the same way.
Speaker: There's some benefit in doing that sometimes because they've laid the path out.
Speaker: Maybe start that way, but then... And that is if you're hesitant or you're sort of risk averse or like you're worried if it's going to be worth the time.
Speaker: Maybe having that laid out for you.
Speaker: I'm the type of guy, I just, just in order to overcome my sort of innate laziness, I need to see a path so that I can do it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that I can muster up the will to do it.
Speaker: And so, yeah, maybe you start there, but then, yeah, you got to quickly be thinking like all of the smart things to be done with this business can't have already been done.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And even if they are, there's at least when I was doing books, it still felt like there was enough meat on the bone, like just in the whole, in the broader market.
Speaker: And disclaimer, I don't know how the pandemic stuff has altered that.
Speaker: I've heard, I have not done it like a deep dive.
Speaker: I've heard that books like used book values have gone up just like used cars have gone up because people,
Speaker: people are maybe reading more, they have more time, they're just sitting around, but then, but then maybe, I don't know if Amazon has changed any of their rules, but there's other marketplaces too, but Amazon's obviously the main one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, I don't know if, I don't know if conditions in the market have changed very much.
Speaker: I guess that's, that's all I'm saying.
Speaker: Well, and books, books are such an interesting commodity.
Speaker: And I mean, this is why Amazon got started as a bookseller, right?
Speaker: Is because they were each instance of a particular book is just so uniform and so regular.
Speaker: Like there's
Speaker: they have the quality sort of level of like, is it in bad shape?
Speaker: Is it in good shape?
Speaker: But like, you know, the exact weight, you know, the exact content, like it's, it's a very, it's a very uniform product.
Speaker: And so it's really amenable to like archiving in a database and, and providing to people because like, well, like if you're, if one of the biggest challenges with getting people to start doing e-commerce is,
Speaker: was like, I'm going to order this from a site that I don't necessarily trust.
Speaker: And they've got some third-party seller who I definitely don't trust.
Speaker: And they're going to send it to me.
Speaker: And then maybe I don't like it.
Speaker: Maybe I paid shipping.
Speaker: Maybe I got to send it back.
Speaker: And like, there's just all kinds of, there's a big trust problem there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And books,
Speaker: were like, I don't really have to trust anybody.
Speaker: Like as long as they actually send it and don't send me like a box with a live Bobcat in it, like I will get what I'm asking for.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that sort of obviated that problem.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's the other part of this is books are books are like the best, just, just like what Bezos himself realized books are like the best first product.
Speaker: And then you scale out into other things.
Speaker: So like if, if someone is trying to get, and I did, I did the fulfilled by Amazon program, FBA, you, you, you may come across that online.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I shipped my own books and I did FBA.
Speaker: I did both.
Speaker: It just kind of depends on like the, the value profile of a given book, but.
Speaker: Which one makes sense to which value profile?
Speaker: Something that'll sell fast, you want to, it's probably good to send into Amazon because they have like storage fees and stuff.
Speaker: But if you have like a, if you're using your house, like I was in my storage fee, my own storage fee in a sense was zero.
Speaker: It's like, I guess I can keep long-term stuff in my house and stuff that'll sell quick.
Speaker: I'll send to them and they'll handle, they'll handle the transaction and stuff.
Speaker: And when you do the, some, some products as well, some books, um,
Speaker: It's very bizarre.
Speaker: And you figure these things out as you go along.
Speaker: But some books will sell for like $25 prime.
Speaker: Like there's a big prime premium.
Speaker: But a used copy from a seller, if the seller is in Indiana and they're going to send from their house in Indiana, people will only pay like $7.
Speaker: And it's not logical really because it's like the guy from Indiana is going to get it there almost as fast, maybe a couple days slower.
Speaker: But people just have a lot of faith in that prime premium.
Speaker: that prime load.
Speaker: Oh man.
Speaker: No, totally.
Speaker: And just, um, I've noticed it myself, just the impulse of like, I don't want to wait four days.
Speaker: I want to wait two days or maybe one day.
Speaker: And like, yeah, if he were to, if he were to put a dollar amount on that, if Bezos were to say like, well, you can get it for one day, but it's $3 more.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, everyone would balk.
Speaker: But if he just says, this is the price and I'll give it to you for one, I'll give it to you in one day.
Speaker: It's in fact, I, from what I understand, there's been,
Speaker: some jurisdictions that have tried to ban free shipping because of the fact that it obscures the true cost of the service.
Speaker: Yeah, it doesn't surprise me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you figure out and you learn these weird things.
Speaker: I mean, like if it's a highly technical manual that sells for a lot of money or something, the kind of person who's going to buy it is probably a good consumer, too.
Speaker: And so they are going to notice because Amazon's a little tricky.
Speaker: They'll make it look like the only option is the prime option or something.
Speaker: But like a more savvy consumer, especially if they're spending a little more, they're going to like notice that there's used versions too.
Speaker: So like those, those sorts of things, if it's like a hundred dollar geology book from the sixties and there's you, you'd be amazed like the weird stuff that has staying power.
Speaker: But like if it's some, something like that, that I know it's going to take me probably a year to sell it, but when it sells, it'll be for a hundred bucks.
Speaker: So I'm not going to send it into Amazon.
Speaker: I'll just hold onto it.
Speaker: And the buyer, people who buy that, they have no qualms about buying from,
Speaker: the weird guy in Indiana.
Speaker: So, so you learn little things like that and that's, that's how you decide sort of what goes into FBA and what doesn't.
Speaker: And they have a lot of rules that you learn, especially when you get into other categories like electronics and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's why you start with books or something comparable, you know, maybe clothing or something where it's just pretty durable goods that aren't going to, that don't require special shipping or something.
Speaker: There's not a lot of dimensionality to it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What would you, if you were to do, if you were to expand into a different sort of third-party sales industry?
Speaker: I had done on Amazon.
Speaker: I had done a couple other things.
Speaker: Like I would just occasionally come across a certain thing that I knew would sell or that people had told me would sell.
Speaker: Oddly enough, like VCRs were really big for a while.
Speaker: Maybe they still are.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, like you go to, and that's one that like Goodwill doesn't have the expertise to like,
Speaker: They're not going to take those out of the system.
Speaker: So I'd go to Goodwill and I would find the right kind of VCRs and they'd be like 10 bucks and then to sell for 150 or 200.
Speaker: I don't know why there's like specific VCRs that like hobbyists like or something like that.
Speaker: Weird.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, yeah.
Speaker: It's not going to be like, it's not, it's like, it's not going to be like vinyl.
Speaker: Like these sound better.
Speaker: Like VHS was like a format.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I actually don't know, but I'm guessing they might disagree.
Speaker: They'd probably be like, no, you know, the 1997 Panasonic can't be beef.
Speaker: Like that might be their take.
Speaker: I don't remember.
Speaker: The fuzz is so charming.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: So I got, I mean, I've done some electronics, a small amount.
Speaker: I never did.
Speaker: And I think some of your other group members have done this, but I never did like order things off of Alibaba and, you know, put my own brand on them or something.
Speaker: Stop shipping.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or even just, just, I guess like maybe they call it wholesaling or something like, you know, you buy like a thousand yoga mats and then get a bunch of fake reviews to say they're the best yoga mats ever.
Speaker: And then sell them for $19.
Speaker: Like that's a pretty, that's a popular business.
Speaker: Like, and it's like the same exact yoga mat that like 50 other people are selling.
Speaker: You just have to, uh,
Speaker: maybe have a better brand name and a more, a better writeup or something.
Speaker: And I wonder why the Chinese do that because it seems like they could, and maybe it's just like, is it literally just like, you're the, you're the white guy, you know, like they have, they have the white guy that sort of represents the company and he's just there to be like eye candy.
Speaker: Maybe that's you in that situation.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: Cause I mean, Amazon is so like anonymizing anyway, like a lot of people,
Speaker: even when they'd buy straight from me, like when it was obvious it'd be shipped from me, I think you can tell some people didn't realize it wouldn't be coming from Amazon.
Speaker: Some people, most people understand that, but, but Amazon does tend to be pretty anonymizing.
Speaker: I guess as long as the product description is written in like, in a nice English, they, maybe they think it's a better product or something, but.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's, that's something I wanted to explore with, with some of our members is because we have guys that have writing skills.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it seems like there are a lot of industries, especially like, like real estate is a big one where I'll see a property that's being sold for $400,000.
Speaker: And the, you know, so the, the,
Speaker: The agent is getting like a five figure commission on this, on this sale.
Speaker: And it's literally incoherent.
Speaker: The description.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like, it's like somebody you it's worse than if you paid like one of those mechanical Turk type sites to write it up for you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or an AI.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and it's, that just seems,
Speaker: Well, real estate in general seems like it's got to be disrupted.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This comes back to like a, maybe it's not a thesis, but an idea I keep having, which is that a lot of industries that are maybe dominated, maybe they don't qualify as blue collar, but they're kind of like a- Non-elite.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, they're not email jobs.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're not just sitting and emailing people.
Speaker: Things like maybe a real estate agent or a car salesman or even in some of the trades too, like general contractor stuff.
Speaker: My thesis is that there's like room for...
Speaker: There's room for like really smart people who don't, who would normally self-select out of that career, but there's like a lot of opportunity for those people.
Speaker: Someone, I mean, I would like for people to prove me right.
Speaker: I don't know one way or the other, but that's kind of what I'm thinking is that like, I've gone around shopping for cars lately and it's like, all the salesmen are really bad, like, but selling cars can be lucrative.
Speaker: So like, why aren't they trying?
Speaker: Like, isn't there someone who's good at this?
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: And could I do this?
Speaker: I mean, that sort of stuff.
Speaker: Like maybe it's, maybe it's, I think that like really bright conscientious people, maybe it's like a Dunning Kruger thing where they're, they're sort of afraid they won't be good enough.
Speaker: And so they like, because, because it's so variable, right?
Speaker: Any, any, any sales job, really the outcomes are technically really variable, but it's not really variable to you as an individual.
Speaker: Like if you're smart and handsome and charming, like,
Speaker: you're going to do well.
Speaker: And like, you can almost like, I know people that have effectively cashed out being just sort of tall and handsome into like huge amounts of money in pharma sales or real estate.
Speaker: And I think, I think some of these people and they have this sort of credentialist mindset or this, this, this, I can't even articulate exactly what it is, but it's like, because there's high variability in this industry and I don't like high variability, I'm not going to look into that.
Speaker: but you would almost certainly do well because you are not the typical or the median or the modal participant.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, I mean, where I work, I think for a lot of grad guys, like particularly coming out of undergrad, I've like mentored a lot of these guys, they come into the company and I think, I think for them, it's like thought of as a pretty good job out of college, like a company that looks good on their resume and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they, but they, but they struggle.
Speaker: And for many of the same reasons I struggle, like, cause they're just not into it.
Speaker: They just, they, once they get there, they're like, okay, it's nice to have the name on the resume, but this work is really dumb.
Speaker: It's really boring.
Speaker: And I don't even get what we do here and that sort of stuff.
Speaker: So it's like,
Speaker: And a lot of these guys, I'm like, you're very smart.
Speaker: You have good people skills.
Speaker: You took this job because you thought it was like what people like you do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But you'd make more money selling cars or you'd have more and you'd make more money and have more fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, just go do that.
Speaker: And then, but they, I mean, obviously for the same, you know, psychological hangups, they can't allow themselves to do that because they think they're supposed to work in a company.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're going to have to just smash that whole mentality because they're so...
Speaker: So many just cognitive resources are just wildly misallocated.
Speaker: Yeah, that's my sense of it.
Speaker: There's so many people just sitting, just sitting.
Speaker: It's so brutal.
Speaker: Yeah, well, that's a fascinating business.
Speaker: Yeah, I have one quick final rant.
Speaker: I don't hesitate to say that if you're organized and motivated, the first onboarding phase is probably a decent time commitment.
Speaker: If you're organized and motivated, you put in the time up front, but then it becomes pretty passive.
Speaker: I don't have much doubt that...
Speaker: the kind of guys that we're talking to could easily be making like 10 grand a month or something, just selling books and they're working maybe 20 hours a month or something like 40 hours a month instead of 40 hours a week sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I haven't, I don't have many doubts about that.
Speaker: Like if you're willing to just operationalize and do it, it's pretty realistic.
Speaker: And if, and if that's not the right category for you, you know,
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, maybe you do furniture, maybe you do... One last thing that's kind of funny.
Speaker: There's this brand of baby stroller that has a lot of interchangeable parts.
Speaker: Maybe they're all like this, but this particular one I like.
Speaker: I think it's called City Select.
Speaker: And my wife was noticing tons for sale on the Facebook groups and Craigslist and stuff.
Speaker: for pretty cheap.
Speaker: I think they retail for like 600 bucks, but you can get one that's been used for like two years by one kid for like 50 bucks or a hundred bucks.
Speaker: And they're, the parts are like modular.
Speaker: So if you buy one for like 50 and it has one broken part, you just buy another one for 50 and then you have a perfect one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we bought like,
Speaker: I think we bought like five or six of them over time, not a ton, but we've done this a couple of times where we just buy the ones we see or people even give them away for free.
Speaker: And then just put the parts together so you have one good one and then we'd go and sell it for like 250 or 300.
Speaker: And that's a bit of a hustle, right?
Speaker: And it's not like glamorous, but there's these little opportunities all over the place.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, this, I, I feel like an indication of the success of, of sort of the conversation is that I now am like going to go do a trip to a thrift store like this weekend.
Speaker: I'm going to go, I'm going to go do that.
Speaker: Cause this, it seems like a really good, yeah.
Speaker: Like, you know, like the Sam Hyde still does his podcast thing.
Speaker: I don't, I only see it sometimes on YouTube because it's free and I don't know, whatever, but he was talking to his old, his like co co-writer, co-writer,
Speaker: actor guy, Nick, he does a antique store now.
Speaker: And his advice was just like, pick a category, just pick one.
Speaker: And he he's picked rugs.
Speaker: So if you follow him on like Instagram, you'll see he's always selling rugs.
Speaker: That's perfect.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Pick one category and get to know it really well.
Speaker: And you become, you get, you develop a sixth sense for like what's valuable and like where the value is going to be and like how fast something will sell.
Speaker: Like it's, it's like, it's, it's very much a sixth sense.
Speaker: Like you just,
Speaker: I trust when he says like this rug will sell within five days for a thousand dollars.
Speaker: He's probably right within like 10% of that.
Speaker: Yeah, man.
Speaker: Well, this is, this is, uh, this is a great idea.
Speaker: I'm excited to go check it out.
Speaker: Thanks so much, Robert, for being on the show, talking about the business and check us out at patreon.com slash exit underscore org.
Speaker: If you're interested in getting involved with what we're doing, the mission again is to help people get out from under sort of the corporate boot.
Speaker: Thanks a lot.
