728: $28k Hanging Balloons, $115k/mo Selling Spreadsheets, the 6-Figure AI Monk, and More

Summary

The Side Hustle Show – Episode 728 Summary

Episode Title: $28k Hanging Balloons, $115k/mo Selling Spreadsheets, the 6-Figure AI Monk, and More
Air Date: March 16, 2026
Host: Nick Loper (with AI-generated co-hosts)
Theme:
A rapid-fire “Roundup Digest” featuring five ultra-creative and lucrative side hustles, breaking down their unique business models, strategies, and operational realities. The common thread: targeting niche markets with hyper-calibrated business ideas.

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Episode Overview

This episode explores five diverse and highly profitable side hustles, spanning from luxury event rentals for kids, to viral retro-tech gadgets, to hyper-targeted digital products and completely synthetic AI influencer businesses. With new (AI-generated) co-hosts joining Nick Loper, the episode offers a deep dive into how entrepreneurs turn acute market awareness into major earnings, and challenges listeners to think about what consumers are really buying.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Hyperlocal Luxury: Bay Area Kid's Event Rentals (Tayo and Dolu Lanlehan)

[01:24–05:22]

• Origin Story: Sparked when Tayo struggled to find kid-sized, aesthetic seating for her son's birthday, identifying a hyper-local event rental gap.
  • Quote (Co-host 2, 01:46):
    “The local market just didn’t have what she needed.”
• Action: Invested $2,000 to import 48 kids’ chairs, stored in her basement, quickly validated the market.
• Growth: By 2025, scaled to $295,000 annual revenue on just 8 hours/week.
• Strategy:
  • Targeted affluent Silicon Valley parents, leveraging personal outreach (e.g., DMing NBA WAGs).
  • Eliminated deposit friction, offering all-inclusive premium pricing.
  • Aggressively reinvested profits for luxury inventory (bumper cars, ball pits).
• Memorable Moment:
  Quote (Co-host 2, 03:19):
  “Outside of a mortgage, a child is often a family’s largest financial commitment…parents will readily spend money they haven’t even allocated.”
• Key Insight:
  • Success comes from targeting a very specific high-spend niche and removing friction.

2. Hustle & Grind: K & J Party Rentals (Corinne Capellan)

[05:22–08:27]

• Backstory: JetBlue attendant facing pandemic layoffs, sourced party rental supplies and bootstrapped a business.
  • First attempt at auction failed, pivoted to buying 100 chairs from another local company.
• Growth: Leveraged the COVID micro-events boom, soon adding balloon installations.
  • Memorable Quote (Co-host 1, 06:55):
    “Every job gets you closer to a better artist than you were yesterday.” – Corinne Capellan
• Revenue: $28,000/month; $159,000 in 2025.
• Operational Reality:
  • High physical and time investment: 2,500/month overhead, 85% of weekends, 50–60 hour work weeks.
  • Emotional payoff: becomes part of clients' major life milestones.
• Key Takeaway:
  • Direct service businesses are high-touch and exhausting but can be emotionally and financially rewarding.

3. Analog Revival: Physical Phones (Kat Gozi)

[08:40–11:39]

• Idea:
  • Catering to smartphone fatigue, sells Bluetooth-enabled retro phones connecting to mobiles.
  • Quote (Co-host 1, 09:46):
    “She proved that sometimes the best innovation is looking backward.”
• Journey:
  • Launched early (2023) and flopped; by 2025, with a growing “digital wellness” audience, a re-launch video went viral (8M views, $120k in 3 days).
• Scaling Issue:
  • Viral demand forced her to air-freight $74k worth of product to meet holiday delivery, sacrificing early profits to protect brand trust.
  • Quote (Co-host 2, 11:22):
    “Absorbing a $74,000 hit demonstrates a really sophisticated understanding of customer lifetime value.”
• Lesson:
  • Timeliness and brand trust can override immediate margins.

4. Passive Digital Multipliers: Smart Women’s Society Spreadsheets

[13:57–16:06]

• Model:
  • Sells basic budgeting templates (Google Sheets, Notion) for up to $115k/month.
  • In a crowded, replicable niche, the real product is hyper-specific positioning.
  • Quote (Co-host 1, 14:51):
    “The positioning is the product.”
• Strategy:
  • Targeted only women actively seeking financial independence.
  • Used aggressive, niche-focused paid ads (64 creatives in 5 months).
  • Quote (Co-host 2, 15:30):
    “They aren’t selling rows and columns. They are selling aspiration.”
• Key Insight:
  • In digital products, narrow audience and emotional resonance trump technical complexity.

5. The AI Monk: Yangmen’s Spiritual Digital Persona

[16:12–18:30]

• Phenomenon:
  • “Yangmen” appears as a wise, elderly monk dispensing wisdom on social media, selling $10–$61 digital ebooks.
  • 7,000+ customers; >$400,000 revenue.
• Revelation:
  • “Yangmen” does not exist—he’s a fully synthetic AI persona (detected by watermarks).
  • IP owned by a digital marketer in Israel.
  • Quote (Co-host 2, 17:32):
    “A traditional human influencer is constrained by physical production limits…This synthetic persona operates with zero marginal cost of production.”
• Controversy:
  • Site claims “authentic teachings” and only “voice enhancement,” contrary to AI origins.
  • Consumers value the emotional (not authentic) impact.
• Key Insight:
  • The rise of AI-driven influencer brands may signal a massive shift in what audiences accept—and what drives their purchases.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Ultra-local Niche Targeting (03:19):
  “Parents will readily spend money they haven’t even allocated.”
• On Resilience in Service Businesses (06:55):
  “Every job gets you closer to a better artist than you were yesterday.” – Corinne Capellan
• On Innovation (09:46):
  “She proved that sometimes the best innovation is looking backward.”
• On Positioning in Digital Products (14:51):
  “The positioning is the product.”
• On AI Influencers (17:32):
  “This synthetic persona operates with zero marginal cost of production...can generate real world wealth by mimicking spiritual empathy at a scale human influencers simply cannot match.”

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [01:24–05:22] Bay Area Kids Rentals – Luxury niche event rentals
• [05:22–08:27] K & J Party Rentals – High-grind, physical event service
• [08:40–11:39] Physical Phones – Viral retro-tech product
• [13:57–16:06] Smart Women's Society – $115k/month budgeting template sales
• [16:12–18:30] Yangmen – AI Monk, digital empathy at scale

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Reflection & Closing Thoughts

• Overarching Lesson:
  Any model, whether physical or digital, analog or AI-powered, can become a lucrative side hustle—with acute audience targeting and smart storytelling as common denominators.
• Final Question to Listeners (19:24):
  “Are we actually paying for the functional utility of a product, or are we simply paying a premium for the story it allows us to tell ourselves? Think about it.”

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For Aspiring Entrepreneurs

• Which model fits your strengths? Are you physically energetic, a skilled marketer, or tech-forward?
• Success lies less in the complexity of your offer, and more in emotional resonance with a tightly defined audience.

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Host’s Closing Twist:
Nick Loper reveals both co-hosts were AI-generated, challenging listeners to reflect on the future of content, commerce, and authenticity—just like the AI monk.

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Transcript

[Host]

Arches creating spreadsheets once and selling them over and over again. So today I want to try a little experiment. This is a shorter Roundup Digest style show that highlights five of the most unique businesses that have come across my desk lately. And I've got a couple new co hosts who volunteered to help me out with this, so I'll let them take it from here.

[Co-host 1]

We are doing a Roundup style exploration today of five incredibly creative and highly lucrative style side hustles and businesses.

[Co-host 2]

And these are all pulled straight from today's stack of sources, which is just a fascinating mix.

[Co-host 1]

It really is. We're covering everything from, you know, highly localized physical service models to purely digital commodities that basically operate at infinite scale.

[Co-host 2]

Yeah, and the common thread running through all these is just acute market awareness. We were looking at founders who identified very specific, sometimes totally counterintuitive consumer behaviors.

[Co-host 1]

Right.

[Co-host 2]

And then they built highly targeted mechanisms to monetize them.

[Co-host 1]

Exactly. So look, whether you are scanning the horizon for inspiration to start your own venture, or you're just insanely curious about how people are making massive amounts of money in totally unexpected ways, this deep dive is going to break down the exact mechanics of these successes.

[Co-host 2]

The real operational strategies behind the revenue.

[Co-host 1]

Right. Okay, let's unpack this. Starting with the story that operates as basically a masterclass in finding and exploiting a hyper local luxury niche.

[Co-host 2]

Oh, this is the Bay Area kids rentals case study.

[Co-host 1]

That's the one. Tayo and Dolu Lanlehan. So the origin story here starts in April 2022. Tayo was planning her son's first birthday party.

[Co-host 2]

The first trip around the sun theme, right?

[Co-host 1]

Yes, exactly. Very popular space theme. And she had sourced all the curated decor, the precise balloon arches, the custom 3D planet cake. But she hit a massive logistical wall when it came to the actual seating

[Co-host 2]

because the local market just didn't have what she need.

[Co-host 1]

The only rental options available in Oakland, California, were standard adult sized white plastic folding chairs.

[Co-host 2]

Which totally ruins the aesthetic she was going for completely.

[Co-host 1]

She ultimately compromised by borrowing a picnic table. But that logistical friction highlighted a distinct gap in the local event rental market.

[Co-host 2]

What's fascinating here is how quickly they moved from identifying a personal pain point to validating it as a commercial opportunity.

[Co-host 1]

Yeah. She didn't just complain about it.

[Co-host 2]

No. The very next month, she spent roughly $2,000 to import 48 kids chairs directly from an overseas manufacturer and just stored

[Co-host 1]

the inventory in her own basement.

[Co-host 2]

Right. In the basement. Fast forward to 2025, and that initial $2,000 basement experiment has scaled into a business generating over $295,000 in annual revenue, which is wild.

[Co-host 1]

And they manage this operating strictly on an eight hour a week schedule because

[Co-host 2]

they both still have their demanding primary careers.

[Co-host 1]

Yeah. And instead of pulling an income from the side hustle, they just aggressively reinvest the profits to buy high ticket items.

[Co-host 2]

Bumper cars, commercial ball pits, custom colored

[Co-host 1]

furniture sets, the whole luxury inventory.

[Co-host 2]

The strategic brilliance really lies in the dynamic between the founders. Here you have Tayo approaching the service operationally, thinking empathetically as a parent, trying to curate this flawless experience.

[Host]

Right.

[Co-host 2]

And then Dolu brings his background in consulting. Overlaying this highly analytical framework, he observed a fundamental truth about their target demographic. That outside of a mortgage, a child is often a family's largest financial commitment. He noted that parents, particularly in this affluent demographic they're targeting, demonstrate an almost completely irrational willingness to spend when it comes to their kids.

[Co-host 1]

Oh, absolutely. The sources quoted him saying that because kids are the embodiment of your dreams, parents will readily spend money they haven't even allocated.

[Co-host 2]

It's so true.

[Co-host 1]

But they aren't casting a wide net here. They are aggressively targeting the ultra wealthy Silicon Valley demographic.

[Co-host 2]

And their outreach strategy was incredibly direct.

[Co-host 1]

Yeah, Teo literally sent a direct message to Michael Johnson, that's the partner of NBA player Andrew Wiggins, right before their daughter's birthday. She DMed her showcasing their luxury inventory

[Co-host 2]

and got a response in 25 minutes.

[Co-host 1]

25 minutes. That single DM translated into four separate events for that specific family alone, which

[Co-host 2]

then catalyzed this massive word of mouth network effect among Silicon Valley CEOs and executives. It just spread like fire.

[Co-host 1]

And they protect that premium brand positioning by systematically removing all friction for the client. They offer ultimate flexibility on delivery and

[Co-host 2]

setup times, catering to the erratic schedules of high net worth individuals.

[Co-host 1]

Exactly. And more importantly, they completely eliminate the standard industry practice of requiring a damaged

[Co-host 2]

deposit, which is a masterstroke in consumer psychology. A damaged deposit introduces a secondary transaction and the mental friction of waiting for a refund.

[Co-host 1]

Right, and luxury clients hate friction.

[Co-host 2]

Exactly. A luxury consumer values their time and mental bandwidth far more than the deposit amount. By baking the statistical cost of potential damage directly into the upfront premium price, they deliver this seamless high end experience.

[Co-host 1]

It totally justifies their margins. So we see Taiyo and Doulu succeeding by targeting the ultra wealthy with a low time commitment model.

[Host]

Right.

[Co-host 1]

Here's where it gets really interesting, because our next source proves you can build incredible wealth on the exact opposite end of the spectrum.

[Co-host 2]

A high grind, physically demanding model built on Sheer volume.

[Co-host 1]

Yes. This is the story of Corinne capellan. She's a JetBlue flight attendant of 13 years who built a weekend operation called K and J Party Rentals, and it

[Co-host 2]

is currently generating up to $28,000 a month.

[Co-host 1]

Just incredible. Her trajectory is deeply tied to the economic anxiety of 2020. Facing the collapse of the airline industry and the very real threat of pandemic layoffs, she was desperately seeking a financial safety net.

[Co-host 2]

She attended a liquidation auction with just

[Co-host 1]

$1,000 in capital, intending to buy rental equipment to flip.

[Co-host 2]

But she was outbid on absolutely everything by established operators. She left totally defeated.

[Co-host 1]

But instead of retreating, she pivoted her sourcing strategy. She eventually located a struggling local party rental company and bought 100 shares for just $4.50 each.

[Co-host 2]

A total. She immediately threw them on Facebook Marketplace

[Co-host 1]

to rent them out to clients who were desperately trying to salvage micro weddings and small gatherings during the lockdowns. And that early cash flow allowed her

[Co-host 2]

to expand into balloons, the highly lucrative balloon installation market. Though she admits that expansion involved a really steep learning curve.

[Co-host 1]

Oh yeah. Her first gig was a total disaster. She under pressed an $800 job charging only $300, and spent a day and

[Co-host 2]

a half just struggling to inflate them because she lacked the technique.

[Co-host 1]

But I love her perspective on this. She said, every job gets you closer to a better artist than you were yesterday.

[Co-host 2]

Such a pragmatic view of failure. And by 2025, that relentless iteration drove her annual revenue to $159,000.

[Co-host 1]

But we have to talk about the severe operational realities of running a service business at this scale.

[Co-host 2]

If we connect this to the bigger picture, this story perfectly illustrates the hidden costs of physical side hustles. This is the absolute antithesis of passive income completely.

[Co-host 1]

She carries a monthly overhead of $2,500,

[Co-host 2]

covering commercial storage, specialized insurance, assistant labor,

[Co-host 1]

and crucially, the business consumes 85% of her weekends.

[Co-host 2]

85%. During peak event seasons, she's logging 50 to 60 hours a week on top of her full time aviation career.

[Co-host 1]

She explicitly warns prospective founders about the physical toll. Event breakdowns frequently run past midnight. You have to question at what point a side hustle crosses the line into just a grueling second full time job.

[Co-host 2]

It requires immense physical and social stamina. However, the qualitative return on that investment is significant for her.

[Co-host 1]

How so?

[Co-host 2]

Because the model demands her physical presence during setup and tear down. She's intimately involved in these massive life milestones. Baptisms, graduations, weddings.

[Co-host 1]

Right.

[Co-host 2]

She describes becoming an extended part of her clients Families. The reward isn't just the money. For certain founders, the psychological reward of community connection is just as vital.

[Co-host 1]

So Kiran is building wealth through intense physical face to face connection. Interestingly, our next source proves you can build a massive business by doing the

[Co-host 2]

exact opposite, monetizing our collective desire to disconnect from the digital world.

[Co-host 1]

Yes, this is 29 year old cat Gozi who generated $789,000 in 2025 through her brand Physical Phones.

[Co-host 2]

She really acts as an antenna. Out into the zeitgeist. She identified this growing behavioral trend of smartphone fatigue.

[Co-host 1]

People are exhausted.

[Co-host 2]

They are increasingly desperate to sever that constant tether to their screens without losing essential communication functions.

[Co-host 1]

And she tackled this by designing hardware that perfectly blends retro aesthetics with modern tech. Physical phones offers classic handset wall mount and rotary style devices.

[Co-host 2]

But they connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth.

[Co-host 1]

Exactly. When your cell phone receives a call, the physical landline rings. Users can dial out manually or simply pick up the receiver, press the star key and route the command through Siri.

[Co-host 2]

Because nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore, right?

[Co-host 1]

The units retail between 90 and $110.

[Co-host 2]

It's a highly effective strategy. She didn't invent a new communication protocol. She simply repackaged existing Bluetooth architecture into a nostalgic, comforting form factor.

[Co-host 1]

She actually said she missed the days of prank calling from the school directory and just wanted to reduce screen time. She proved that sometimes the best innovation is looking backward.

[Co-host 2]

But the journey to market validation was anything but linear.

[Co-host 1]

Oh, far from it. She built the initial prototype in 2023 and attempted to launch it on TikTok, and it completely flopped. The market ignored it, which underscores the

[Co-host 2]

brutal reality that being too early to a trend is functionally identical to being wrong.

[Co-host 1]

Right. The societal pain point wasn't quite acute enough in 2023, but by July 2025, the cultural landscape had shifted and she

[Co-host 2]

had strategically built an audience around Digital Wellness under the brand name katgpt.

[Co-host 1]

When she reintroduced the prototype to that primed audience, the response was explosive. The video generated 8 million views and drove $120,000 in direct sales in just three days.

[Co-host 2]

But that hyper growth immediately triggered a massive supply chain crisis. Fulfilling unexpected viral demand is where most physical product businesses fracture.

[Co-host 1]

Absolutely. She had manufactured the units in Asia and guaranteed delivery by Christmas. But Standard Maritime Freight simply couldn't meet the deadline.

[Co-host 2]

So to protect the brand trust she had just established, she made this agonizing decision.

[Co-host 1]

She bypassed the cargo ships entirely and spent nearly $74,000 to air freight the entire production run to California, just an incredible logistics hit, decimated her initial profit margins. But once the inventory touched down, she mobilized her entire local network to physically pack and dispatch 4,000 orders to save Christmas.

[Co-host 2]

Absorbing a $74,000 hit demonstrates a really sophisticated understanding of customer lifetime value. Had she missed the holiday delivery window, the resulting chargebacks and reputational damage would have sunk the brand.

[Co-host 1]

She prioritized long term brand equity over short term margin.

[Co-host 2]

Exactly.

[Host]

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[Co-host 1]

sidehustlez so we just looked at the immense logistical friction of moving physical inventory. Let's pivot to a business model that eliminates inventory, shipping and manufacturing costs entirely.

[Co-host 2]

This is the digital commodity model.

[Co-host 1]

We pulled a fascinating case study from the Reddit community. Our passive income detailing a brand called Smart Women's Society, which currently generates $115,000

[Co-host 2]

a month, and the product they are selling to achieve that volume is frankly boring.

[Co-host 1]

It's incredibly boring. They offer basic functional budgeting templates built on universally accessible platforms like Google Sheets and Notion.

[Co-host 2]

The Reddit analysis pointed out that these templates exist in a hypersaturated market. A reasonably tech savvy consumer could easily replicate the core functionality for free in 20 minutes. Yes, this raises an important question. How do you generate six figures a month selling a free commodity?

[Co-host 1]

The answer is that the positioning is the product. Smart Women's Society completely ignored the broad audience of people who want a budget.

[Co-host 2]

They narrowed their focus to one incredibly

[Co-host 1]

specific consumer avatar women actively seeking financial independence that highly calibrated targeting functions as the primary competitive moat protecting their revenue.

[Co-host 2]

The Reddit breakdown revealed the sheer aggression of their paid acquisition Strategy. They ran 64 distinct ad creatives across a five month testing period, hitting the

[Co-host 1]

exact same pain points for that exact demographic.

[Co-host 2]

Every single piece of copy was engineered for that specific user.

[Co-host 1]

They aren't selling rows and columns, they are selling aspiration. When their target consumer clicks that ad, she isn't conducting a feature comparison of spreadsheet software.

[Co-host 2]

No, she is purchasing the template because the messaging convinced her that this specific tool is the key to unlocking her financial autonomy.

[Co-host 1]

The niche is the moat. It is a textbook demonstration of how hyperspecific marketing can completely override product complexity.

[Co-host 2]

The consumer isn't paying $20 for a Google Sheet. They are paying $20 for the feeling of control. There is selling identity, proving that marketing can completely override the basic utility of

[Co-host 1]

a product, which transitions us perfectly into our final and undeniably most controversial case study.

[Co-host 2]

Today we are moving from digital products to entirely digital Personas.

[Co-host 1]

Let's examine the wellness brand known as Yangmen. For those unfamiliar Yang Mun presents as an elderly East Asian monk typically depicted in vibrant orange robes in these meticulously

[Co-host 2]

curated temple gardens, imparting ancient Buddhist style wisdom to millions of followers across Instagram and Facebook.

[Co-host 1]

The content is highly polished. He looks directly into the camera, delivering aphorisms like you've been carrying more than you show.

[Co-host 2]

And the monetization funnel relies on converting the immense reach of these comforting statements into direct digital sales.

[Co-host 1]

He sells ebooks ranging from 10 to $50, anchored by an instant access bundle priced at $61.45.

[Co-host 2]

Over 7,000 people have bought these ebooks,

[Co-host 1]

establishing a highly efficient revenue stream. But the structural reality the major twist here is that Yangmen does not exist.

[Co-host 2]

The videos are completely fake, 100% synthetic, generated using advanced artificial intelligence.

[Co-host 1]

The source material verified this through the presence of Google's Cynthia D. Watermarks, which flag machine generated content.

[Co-host 2]

The intellectual property appears to be controlled by a digital marketer in Israel named

[Co-host 1]

Shalev Hani who actively boasted on LinkedIn about crafting AI powered video content to scale brands.

[Co-host 2]

Looking impartially at the economics here, this represents a profound structural advantage in the creator economy. A traditional human influencer is constrained by physical production limits and basic human exhaustion. This synthetic Persona operates with zero marginal cost of production. It can generate real world wealth by mimicking spiritual empathy at a scale human influencers simply cannot match.

[Co-host 1]

But the friction occurs when analyzing the brand's public positioning. The Yangman website explicitly claims the teachings are authentic and states they only utilize

[Co-host 2]

voice enhancement tools, which is fundamentally incompatible with the underlying AI watermarks, confirming the entire visual Persona is artificial.

[Co-host 1]

It highlights this emerging, highly debated intersection of AI, mental health and and E commerce.

[Co-host 2]

The consumer data indicates that a significant portion of the audience is willing to exchange real capital for guidance delivered by a synthetic entity as long as the emotional resonance aligns with their needs.

[Co-host 1]

So what does this all mean? We have navigated an incredible spectrum of

[Co-host 2]

entrepreneurship today, from renting out pink chairs

[Co-host 1]

and inflating balloons to air freighting nostalgic landlines, selling hyper targeted spreadsheets and conjuring AI monks.

[Co-host 2]

These five stories prove that massive success doesn't require reinventing the wheel.

[Co-host 1]

It just requires finding the right audience and solving a very specific problem. Or fulfilling a very specific emotional need for them.

[Co-host 2]

Exactly.

[Co-host 1]

So as you process these case studies, think about what you can apply to your own life. Which of these five models fits your personality? Are you structurally positioned for the hands on hustle of physical rentals?

[Co-host 2]

Do you have the marketing acumen to package a digital product for a hyper specific demographic?

[Co-host 1]

Or are you better suited to act as a tech forward media brand? The optimal model depends on where your strengths intersect with market demand.

[Co-host 2]

Spot on.

[Co-host 1]

And as we close out this deep dive, we want to leave you with a lingering question to mull over regarding the future of consumer behavior. If a basic universally available spreadsheet or a completely fabricated AI Monk can generate immense life changing wealth simply through targeted emotional appeal, what does that indicate about what we value as consumers?

[Co-host 2]

It's a fundamental question about commerce.

[Co-host 1]

In the end, are we actually paying for the functional utility of a product or are we simply paying a premium for the story it allows us to tell ourselves? Think about it. Thanks for joining us.

[Host]

Okay, what did you think? Would any of those businesses be viable options for you? Let me know. And let me know what you think of our new co hosts. You're not going to hurt their feelings because just like the AI Monk, they're not real. This was my first attempt in creating content with Google's Notebook lm and I gotta say, pretty impressed. It's not perfect, but I thought they did a pretty good job of sharing these stories. And if you didn't like it, don't worry. I'll be back on Thursday for your regularly scheduled programming. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle Show. Hustle on.