0:00:07 The marketer really loves everything you’re saying around because the two things you just said, those were actually like, you know, $20 million ad hooks.
0:00:28 Justin, I’m pumped for here. You’re here because, well, for two reasons. The first reason is that you’ve started like six or seven companies that have collectively done something like $500 million in revenue in the last seven years, which is huge.
0:00:38 And they’re all in the health and wellness space. You’re also here because you’re one of my most reasonable friends when it comes to health and wellness because you are like, you’re into fringe stuff, which is, I think, cool.
0:00:49 But the problem with people who are in fringe stuff is they can’t relate that to like a normal person, you know what I mean? And they’ll be like, you know, this like fringe thing that I’m into, this is only like a 1% needle mover as opposed to like a 50% needle mover.
0:00:59 And so you’re very self-aware, you’re very thoughtful, and you’ve built a lot of big businesses into space and you’re a blogger and you have this amazing blog post called The Great American Poisoning that Sean and I are like obsessed with.
0:01:08 And so I thought you could come on and kind of talk a little bit about the blog post, but also business ideas that you’re into and opportunities related to this space.
0:01:35 I’m super stoked to be here. I mean, as I’ve written in that post, I literally think that what I call The Great American Poisoning, basically the fact that Americans are sick at record levels and are getting sicker, like our children are sick, everyone is overrated and obese, and these problems are getting worse, not better, is both the biggest problem in the US and also, because of that, like a massive opportunity for people that want to start companies or build value in the space.
0:01:38 Sean, what emotion did you feel when you read this blog post?
0:01:42 Dude, you could ask Diego, I went on like a 48 hour bender.
0:01:43 First, here’s what we did.
0:01:44 But the British fear?
0:01:51 No, no, it was like outrage first, and then curiosity, and skepticism.
0:01:53 So here’s the series of events.
0:01:55 Justin writes this post called The Great American Poisoning.
0:01:57 I read it, I’m lit on fire.
0:02:00 Justin, this was my, I did an end of year recap for myself over the weekend.
0:02:05 It was the number one blog, it was my favorite blog post of the year, was this thing you did.
0:02:09 So you read that, and then I told my team, I said, “Hey, let’s break this down,
0:02:12 point by point,” because you made a lot of really interesting points.
0:02:14 If people haven’t read it, we should pull it up on YouTube.
0:02:18 But it’s like, you have this photo of this guy, remember, you go, “This guy was
0:02:22 considered so overweight that he was like a member of the circus.”
0:02:26 And it’s like, if you go to a nearby Costco today, you’ll find, you know,
0:02:27 hundreds of people that are more overweight than this guy.
0:02:31 But that was considered like circus freak fat before.
0:02:35 And you talked about how doctors would go, their whole career, a pediatrician
0:02:37 would go the whole career and never see a kid with, you know,
0:02:39 fatty liver disease or these things like that.
0:02:40 And you’re like, now it’s more and more common.
0:02:43 And it’s just a very compelling case around health.
0:02:45 So you combine three very interesting things.
0:02:51 One, you have a very strong factually based view of health.
0:02:54 You are self-actualized around health.
0:02:57 You’re one of the sort of fittest, most healthy guys that both Sam and I know and look up to.
0:03:01 I’ve messaged you before being like, “Hey, water filters, tell me, what do you like?
0:03:02 What brand do you like?”
0:03:05 Because I trust that you actually walk the walk on it.
0:03:07 And then the third is you’re an entrepreneur.
0:03:11 So you’ve started two brands in the kind of like keto space, each doing,
0:03:14 you know, tens of millions a year in revenue, you know,
0:03:17 get distribution in 10,000 plus retail stores.
0:03:19 You started a non-alcohol, more than that.
0:03:23 Yeah, non-alcoholic beverage brand because you’re like, great.
0:03:25 Drinking is like one of the most unhealthy things we do.
0:03:28 How do we have the social drink that doesn’t sacrifice on health?
0:03:31 And what I liked was you had no CPG experience before that.
0:03:33 You had no D to C experience before starting these.
0:03:38 You went in and you’re kind of like, it seems like you have this great interest
0:03:41 and knowledge and, you know, self-hobby around health and wellness.
0:03:42 But then you’ve also done it as an entrepreneur.
0:03:46 So that’s a great intersection for us on the pod because we’re both interested
0:03:47 in health and like living a good life.
0:03:50 But also, how do we profit from said good life?
0:03:51 And you’ve actually done it.
0:03:56 So I’m excited because not only have you yourself had, you know, three or four
0:03:59 big hits in the health and wellness space, but you then brainstormed and sent
0:04:03 us a doc of like five or six new opportunities that you think other people
0:04:04 could go do in this space.
0:04:09 All right.
0:04:12 So when I ran my company, the hustle, I think we had something like two
0:04:15 million subscribers and we made money through advertising.
0:04:18 We didn’t actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter
0:04:21 because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model.
0:04:25 And so I remember sitting down and I’m like, what are all the different
0:04:28 ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren’t advertising?
0:04:31 And so to make sure that you don’t make this mistake, Sean, me and the
0:04:36 Husbot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your
0:04:40 business and we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it
0:04:44 all out along with our research and we call it very appropriately.
0:04:47 We call it the business monetization playbook.
0:04:50 Go to the description of this episode and you’re going to see a link to
0:04:52 that business monetization playbook.
0:04:53 It’s completely free.
0:04:55 You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode.
0:05:04 You know, I literally think that this space, like solving the great American
0:05:09 poisoning, there’s just almost immeasurable opportunity for people
0:05:10 and entrepreneurs that want to solve this problem.
0:05:14 Like, like I can read some stats off, but it’s just staggering the amount
0:05:16 of chronic disease and the burden that that’s putting on the country.
0:05:21 And so as an entrepreneur, like if you see a big problem like that, you just
0:05:22 want to sprint towards that.
0:05:26 And, you know, not only to say, like, when you solve some of the problems
0:05:30 that are involved in fixing the chronic disease crisis, you’re also like helping
0:05:32 people, you know, people are living longer, they’re living healthier.
0:05:37 It’s a very rewarding space to work in as opposed to maybe like day trading
0:05:38 NFTs or something like that.
0:05:40 And your blog post is basically summarized.
0:05:44 You said the answer to why, so you give all these stats as to how messed up we are,
0:05:47 but you said the answer to all of this is simple.
0:05:50 Our food system is poisoning us and the institution is meant to keep us safe,
0:05:53 which our regulators, healthcare system doctors and researchers are not
0:05:57 incentivized to keep us healthy, which is like the cause of all the problems
0:05:58 that you’re discussing.
0:05:59 Yeah, exactly.
0:06:03 Yeah, I mean, we, we basically, we had, you know, call it a hundred years ago.
0:06:07 Uh, our chronic disease burden was like 95% lower than it is right now.
0:06:10 There were certain acute issues like infectious disease was much more of a
0:06:11 real thing.
0:06:14 There were, there were all of these things that we built our medical system on.
0:06:18 And then life expectancy went up as we got better at solving, you know, women
0:06:21 dying in childbirth, infectious disease, polio, these sorts of things.
0:06:26 Now the, the biggest burden that we see from a health standpoint is chronic
0:06:30 conditions or like cancer, asthma, heart disease, diabetes, things like this,
0:06:33 that have grown 700% in the last, you know, 90 years.
0:06:37 And so I think that we are running the, the code, if you want to call it that,
0:06:42 of an old healthcare system that existed to solve a problem where you took a
0:06:44 default healthy individual, they got sick.
0:06:47 And the job of the medical system was to bring them back to health.
0:06:51 And now we actually have the opposite, which is the average American is
0:06:55 unhealthy and like people have not internalized what that means, which is,
0:06:58 you know, you, you walk around almost anywhere in the US and the average
0:06:59 person is going to be sick.
0:07:03 The average person is going to get cancer, heart disease, you know, any
0:07:05 number of chronic conditions at some point in their life.
0:07:10 And our medical system is not built to service a population where the average
0:07:11 person is sick.
0:07:14 And so because of that, we need new institutions and companies.
0:07:20 And it creates a ton of opportunity for entrepreneurs that want to try and
0:07:23 address the great American poisoning by creating products and services that
0:07:28 help people, you know, stay or move back to a baseline default healthy space.
0:07:31 We should get to the ideas because they’re great, but here’s like another,
0:07:35 like one liner that kind of summarizes this, which is everyone should update
0:07:36 their thinking.
0:07:40 The default outcome of living in the US today is that you will get one or more
0:07:43 chronic conditions and dive cancer or heart disease.
0:07:46 Everything to avoid that is worth considering.
0:07:49 I feel like I’m such a depressing person.
0:07:51 It’s like, I talk about the stuff.
0:07:55 It was just like, well, Justin Debbie Downer mayors over here.
0:07:55 All right.
0:07:58 So let’s do it.
0:07:59 So what are the ideas?
0:08:00 Where do you see the opportunity?
0:08:06 You sniffed out the opportunity in the bone broth, you know, ketone space.
0:08:08 You sniffed out the opportunity in non-alcoholic wines.
0:08:11 Each of those is doing, you know, very, very well.
0:08:14 What opportunities do you see today?
0:08:15 What should, what ideas do you have?
0:08:19 Yeah, so I see, I see a ton, like backing up.
0:08:23 I basically think that, and I wrote about this in my, in my long essay,
0:08:25 Manifesto, but I basically think that.
0:08:28 That’s not what you got to call blogs from now on, by the way.
0:08:28 That’s way better.
0:08:31 It’s a little unibobber-esque, but I’ll take it.
0:08:35 You know, like in Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise writes his manifesto to kick
0:08:35 off the movie.
0:08:36 That’s this to you.
0:08:37 This is your, your Jerry Maguire manifesto.
0:08:38 Exactly.
0:08:38 Yeah.
0:08:40 This thing was still on the court.
0:08:45 Um, and so, so yeah, so to back up, like my view on what has changed in the
0:08:50 last, call it 80 years is that we went and humans mostly existed in an
0:08:53 environment that was not poisoning people, uh, to one that is basically
0:08:56 poisoning them, like your food, water, you know, lights, air, like all these
0:09:00 sorts of things, uh, are filled with plastics, chemicals, toxins, ultra
0:09:03 process, whatever that was making the default person sick.
0:09:07 And so one of the things that I think is really, is a really compelling
0:09:12 opportunity on that is you could build a massive company in my view that helps
0:09:17 people actually look at their environment, their home and or their office and
0:09:22 say, okay, you’re spending, you know, 80% of your time in these like three spaces.
0:09:25 It might literally be like your bedroom, your kitchen, and your office.
0:09:30 How do we make it so that these spaces that you’re spending time in are maximally
0:09:31 healthy and health promoting?
0:09:37 And I, I have a friend actually who just started a company in the home health
0:09:40 testing space that’s doing super well.
0:09:43 They’re testing like water, air, emfs, lights, stuff like that.
0:09:44 What’s it called?
0:09:46 Uh, it’s called Lightwork.
0:09:47 It’s do lightwork.com.
0:09:48 So they’re doing really well.
0:09:53 But I think that there is this whole world of home services, like home
0:09:58 services are a $40 billion, you know, uh, a year in spend where you can make
0:10:01 like HVAC, lights, plumbing, you know, water, electricity, all these sorts
0:10:06 of things where none of these people are looking at how do we actually make
0:10:07 your environment healthy?
0:10:11 None of like the people making your furniture are thinking about all of
0:10:15 like the flame retarded chemicals that are giving like babies cancer, you know,
0:10:18 then as they spray it on your couch or so for whatever, they’re not thinking
0:10:19 about that.
0:10:23 And so I think there’s a huge opportunity to build a company or a series of
0:10:28 companies that looks at what is going on in your built environment, your home and
0:10:32 your furniture and all this and says, how do we make this health promoting?
0:10:36 Like how do we encourage health and try and make this, you know, this sort of
0:10:38 service, one that makes the person healthier.
0:10:42 So it’s like a, an annual checkup for your house.
0:10:43 Yeah, exactly.
0:10:47 I think like that’s the first, that’s like the input, which is do an annual
0:10:50 checkup for your house and out the back end of that, there’s so many long term
0:10:54 services where, you know, someone services your water filtration, make
0:10:57 sure that your shower water is good, make sure like, you know, your tap water is
0:11:00 RO and has muralization and all these sorts of things.
0:11:02 What do you do at your house?
0:11:03 I know you do a bunch of stuff.
0:11:04 I don’t remember everything you do.
0:11:06 I know you do a bunch, but what do you do in your home?
0:11:07 That’s worth it.
0:11:10 That would be included in your home annual checkup.
0:11:14 Yeah, so I think a couple things are very worth it.
0:11:17 One, like water filtration is a huge one.
0:11:21 I basically set up a whole house filtration system there that we had like
0:11:22 these plumbers install.
0:11:24 Actually, they installed it.
0:11:26 There was like this $8,000 system.
0:11:28 They installed it next time they came around to fix it.
0:11:32 They like screwed on a $20 part incorrectly and I like walked into my
0:11:36 kitchen the next morning and I stepped on my floorboards and like water
0:11:37 came up for around them and I was like, “Fuck.”
0:11:40 So there’s a lot of–
0:11:41 Now you’ve got a mold issue.
0:11:42 Yeah, exactly.
0:11:46 So we had to handle that, which was quite annoying, but we have like every
0:11:49 water that is coming in and out of our house gets filtered.
0:11:55 We also recently switched to, got all of our bulbs, we switched to incandescent
0:12:00 actually, like I think that there is a very compelling and pretty early line of
0:12:05 research that shows the impact of blue light emitting lights, which is basically
0:12:08 most light bulbs, on circadian rhythm, sleep.
0:12:13 They even impact, like if you eat under blue light versus eating under
0:12:16 non blue light, it also seems to impact the amount of weight that you’ll gain.
0:12:20 They use this in agriculture where they use different types of lighting when
0:12:22 they’re trying to get chickens to gain more weight or–
0:12:24 What’s an incandescent bulb?
0:12:25 Is that a normal bulb?
0:12:29 Yeah, think of like the Edison bulb that it’s actually burning something as
0:12:33 opposed to an LED bulb, which is what’s in most houses today.
0:12:35 There’s also, there’s a pretty cool thing that you can do.
0:12:40 So LED is also one of the reasons that I think I feel much better
0:12:41 since switching them out of my house.
0:12:45 If you have an LED light in your house and you take your iPhone and you
0:12:50 film it on slow-mo, you can see the LED bulb flickering like thousands
0:12:51 of times per second.
0:12:56 And the reason that LED lights are supposedly more, more efficient than
0:13:00 incandescent bulbs is because they’re turning on and off all the time.
0:13:04 And so they’re actually like on and using less electricity because
0:13:06 they’re, you know, they’re not on the entire time.
0:13:10 So they do this sub perceptually, which, you know, can cause people to
0:13:12 like feel just icky sometimes.
0:13:13 You walk into a room with bad lighting.
0:13:15 You’re like, what’s going on in my system?
0:13:16 I don’t like this.
0:13:20 The marketer of me loves everything you’re saying, Rao, because like the two
0:13:24 things you just said in kind of a throwaway thing, those were actually like,
0:13:26 you know, $20 million ad hooks.
0:13:29 When you’re talking about, do you know how they make chickens fat?
0:13:33 They put them under these blue lights and actually they gain extra weight.
0:13:35 Maybe that’s why you’re fat, right?
0:13:38 Like, have you ever considered that you’re just, you’re being poisoned
0:13:39 by the industry?
0:13:42 So you have the man is out to get you.
0:13:43 The people love that.
0:13:47 You have, maybe the problem is not what I’m putting in my mouth.
0:13:49 It’s the light that’s affected.
0:13:51 And so you, it’s like, oh, can I improve?
0:13:55 Can I buy this thing rather than like kind of change from within as like,
0:13:56 maybe that’s 80, 90 percent of the problem.
0:14:00 But like, and no one talks about it, except for us in this ad right now.
0:14:03 It’s a secret that you know it’s a secret.
0:14:05 They don’t want you to know about the LED thing.
0:14:09 Like watch this magic trick of an ad where you take the phone on Salomon.
0:14:11 You go, it’s actually flickering.
0:14:13 Do you know how that messes with your sleep, with your whatever?
0:14:16 I love all of this from a marketing.
0:14:19 I know you’re a good ethical standup guy.
0:14:23 But when I hear this stuff, I think, what could I use to get this across?
0:14:26 How could I, if I believe that this is good for people,
0:14:30 how can I maximally, you know, get that in the hands of people?
0:14:34 Totally. I mean, and this is why I think this is such a big opportunity
0:14:38 because you have the home services thing, like the check healthy checkup for your home.
0:14:42 But once you understand that the impact that some of these things have on your health,
0:14:46 you basically, for many of these people, they’re just like, yeah, blank check,
0:14:49 like fix my air quality, fix my water quality, fix my lighting,
0:14:52 fix like the EMFs in my house, you know, make sure I don’t embold.
0:14:55 Like all of these things, there’s a tremendous amount of spend
0:14:59 that people want to put into making sure that their home environment is healthy.
0:15:02 Dude, I had a Sam, have you ever had a pest control guy come to your house?
0:15:06 There might not be a better salesman in the world than the pest control guy
0:15:09 because he walks, he’s like, hey, you want, you want me to just do a quick look
0:15:11 around your house, just free.
0:15:14 I’ll just take a quick look, see if I see anything of concern.
0:15:16 Of course. And he walks around the house, hey,
0:15:18 I’d love to show you a couple of things.
0:15:20 And then he takes me around the house and he says, you see this?
0:15:22 And there’s like a tiny screen that’s moved open.
0:15:25 He’s like, that’s, that’s, you know, that’s rats.
0:15:26 And I’m like, what? Rats?
0:15:27 He’s like, yeah, they’re under your floorboards.
0:15:29 I’m like, ew, under my floorboard.
0:15:33 And he shows me all these little things that he’s like, yeah, there’s my.
0:15:36 And look, we just live out in like, you know, a hilly area.
0:15:37 There’s mice everywhere.
0:15:39 And he’s like, would you like me to just come around once a month
0:15:41 that spray and fix some of these things for you?
0:15:44 As if it’s a favor. Please, sir, be my dad.
0:15:45 Yeah, exactly. He’s like, great.
0:15:50 And now I’m paying $270 a month for this guy to come and do nothing to my house.
0:15:51 I have no idea what he’s doing.
0:15:53 A random guy comes and sprays.
0:15:56 But that idea of like, let me diagnose the problem
0:15:59 so I can sell you the solution is generally a good business model.
0:16:02 And of course, you know, like again, he’s not wrong.
0:16:04 Like there actually was, you know, issues.
0:16:06 It’s just, I would not, I would not have been aware of the problem.
0:16:09 So I’m a big fan of this kind of like audit method of sales.
0:16:11 Let me do a free audit for you
0:16:13 to kind of tell you where you might have some problems.
0:16:15 And then if you’d like me to fix them, I’m happy to do so.
0:16:18 Yeah. Are there any other things?
0:16:21 So Waterfall to light bulbs, any other like big needle moving things?
0:16:25 I think that specifically for your bedroom
0:16:27 and places where you’re spending like multiple hours,
0:16:31 it’s kind of early, but I think that the EMF thing
0:16:33 is going to be much more of a thing that people care about.
0:16:34 And it sounds very tinfoil, hatty.
0:16:37 And let me explain like why I think this might be important.
0:16:39 This is why I like your opinion, by the way, you’re great at this.
0:16:41 You’re like, like, this is what the freaks think.
0:16:44 And this is like how it relates to a normal person.
0:16:46 And like, where’s the truth somehow? You know what I mean?
0:16:47 Yeah, exactly.
0:16:51 So so basically like a hundred years ago, we had the we had
0:16:55 we had a certain type of radiation that was I believe called ionizing radiation.
0:16:56 It’s that or non ionizing.
0:16:57 I don’t know this stuff well enough yet.
0:17:01 But basically it was like, think of like what, you know,
0:17:04 you get shot into at a dentist or something like that.
0:17:07 Nuclear isotopes, things like that, things that are definitely bad.
0:17:09 And then there was this longer spectrum of like microwaves
0:17:12 and then things that we would put like cell phones and computers into.
0:17:16 And for many, for many, many years, we basically were like, OK,
0:17:17 microwaves, everything else is fine.
0:17:20 Now we think, OK, microwaves are bad.
0:17:21 They certainly cause some harm.
0:17:23 It’s like causes thermal effects in the body.
0:17:27 Let’s also not expose people to microwaves at a high amount.
0:17:31 But this other spectrum of like cell phones and the like are also definitely fine.
0:17:36 And then you kind of like get to today, which is most of the FTC safety
0:17:40 ratings and levels that have come up or that are used to regulate
0:17:44 cell phones, Wi-Fi, things like this, there basically were tested
0:17:47 in an environment on cell phones from like the early 2000s,
0:17:50 where they were assuming that people would not be exposed to these things
0:17:54 for more than like 20 to 30 minutes a day.
0:17:57 Like the guy who came up with these rules, they interviewed him.
0:18:00 I don’t know, it was like five or six years ago.
0:18:03 And he was like, yeah, all of the assumptions that we had around around
0:18:06 these just assumed that you’d like take a phone call and you put it down.
0:18:10 We never thought that you’d be like walking around with this thing in your pocket.
0:18:16 And there are a fair number of like articles that I think are concerning enough
0:18:20 where people will like change the electromagnetic fields that mice are exposed
0:18:24 to and will raise or lower their blood sugar at a predictive rate.
0:18:26 Seems to have like potential impact on cancer.
0:18:29 There’s there’s enough there that I’m like, probably bad.
0:18:32 It’s also I don’t think as bad as everyone is like, oh, my God,
0:18:34 this is killing everyone and causing every cancer known to man.
0:18:39 But I do think if you can avoid sleeping next to a Wi-Fi router or next to
0:18:43 something that’s like emitting a huge amount of MFs for eight to nine hours a night,
0:18:45 that’s probably well worth doing.
0:18:48 By the way, one thing I think we should say, you’re not one of these guys
0:18:49 that’s like optimize everything.
0:18:51 Like I’ve seen you say multiple times, you’re like, you know,
0:18:54 just get these core four or five things right.
0:18:57 And you’re like, you know, you need to sleep well, don’t need too much
0:19:01 processed foods, especially seed oils, you know, exercise, get some sunlight.
0:19:04 Like you’re very much a basics kind of guy when in terms of like,
0:19:06 what’s the, what should I be focused on?
0:19:10 Which makes me relate and trust you because I think the people that are like,
0:19:13 well, you need to get, you know, nine micrograms of sunlight in your eye
0:19:15 within 10 seconds of waking up.
0:19:18 And it’s like all these, like all these fringe, like the thousand fringe
0:19:22 things you could do to like maybe move the needle when you haven’t done
0:19:26 the core foundational big things, right?
0:19:29 Yes, it seems like you’re more of the get the core right first.
0:19:31 But am I giving you too much credit here?
0:19:32 Well, where do you stand?
0:19:35 Cause you’re currently saying things like Thomas Edison light bulbs and
0:19:37 like the microwave is going to kill you or something.
0:19:38 Where do you stand on this?
0:19:39 Yeah, yeah.
0:19:41 So, so I actually think so one, completely agree.
0:19:45 I think if you get the basics right, that is like 80 to 90% of it.
0:19:49 That said, I also think if you have relatively easy interventions,
0:19:53 like move a Wi-Fi router outside of your bedroom and, you know, swap the bulbs
0:19:58 in the rooms that you’re spending 20 hours a day in, like those are pretty
0:20:02 easy interventions that are like one time relatively low cost to no cost
0:20:04 and could have a big impact on your health.
0:20:06 Like I’m very supportive of those things.
0:20:11 I’m definitely not be like, but whole sunning solves your entire health issues.
0:20:12 You know, type of guy.
0:20:13 And there’s a lot of those guys.
0:20:14 Like, it’d be, it’d be cool if I did.
0:20:16 Yeah, it’d be amazing.
0:20:18 Doesn’t have to try though, right?
0:20:19 Wouldn’t you say?
0:20:28 All right. So a while back, we had Gary Tan.
0:20:31 He’s the president of Y Comedier, which is the most successful incubator of all time.
0:20:36 We had him on the podcast and he said that the future of businesses is creator led.
0:20:41 And that’s why I’m interested in the podcast creators are brands.
0:20:45 Creators are brands explores how storytellers are building brands online.
0:20:47 They’re going to cover the entire creative process.
0:20:49 They’re going to talk about navigating brand partnerships.
0:20:52 They’re going to talk about what you need to know about growing your social
0:20:54 media platforms, everything you need to know on this topic.
0:20:57 Creators are brands is the pod.
0:20:59 So check it out wherever you get your podcast.
0:21:02 Again, it’s called creators are brands with Tom Boyd.
0:21:03 All right, back to the episode.
0:21:10 I actually do think this is one of the problems with the health influencer
0:21:15 space more broadly is it’s just not sexy to be like, avoid ultra processed foods,
0:21:18 get some light in the morning, lift four days a week and, you know,
0:21:19 make sure you’re getting adequate sleep.
0:21:24 And so these people get, they get like attention from going further out on
0:21:26 the, the crazy like claim curve.
0:21:26 Right.
0:21:29 Well, you can’t sell that, right?
0:21:30 You can’t sell that advice.
0:21:31 You can’t even just create content.
0:21:34 You can’t become an influencer because you’d say everything you need to say
0:21:36 in 14 seconds and what are you going to do tomorrow?
0:21:37 What are you going to post the next day?
0:21:38 What are you going to post the next day?
0:21:39 You got to try to do this for years.
0:21:43 And so you have to work backwards from all the people that are trying to sell
0:21:47 me something, have to sell me something that is complex and all the people that
0:21:51 are creating content to try to influence me that are professional content people.
0:21:55 They have to have something that’s interesting novel and like evergreen to
0:21:57 they have to have more and more stuff to talk about.
0:22:03 So nobody’s incentive is to tell you the simple few things that you should focus
0:22:05 on and get right because they’d be done.
0:22:07 You wouldn’t sell me anything and you’d be done talking.
0:22:11 I was trying to find it, but Brian on Brian Johnson’s newsletter and his subject
0:22:13 line for his last newsletter was Wednesday.
0:22:16 It says your boners are killing you.
0:22:17 That was the subject line.
0:22:21 And it was how the lack of getting nighttime erections is somehow
0:22:23 correlated with longevity.
0:22:26 And it was like, you’re saying it’s not sexy to sell.
0:22:28 Just like, well, this brother, they got me.
0:22:29 You’re you’re right.
0:22:31 Can we do a quick sidebar on Brian?
0:22:34 So I like Brian a lot as a guy, really nice guy.
0:22:37 I actually really like what he’s doing in general.
0:22:41 But man, I kind of missed the old Brian Johnson, where it seemed like he was
0:22:44 a missionary nerd trying to do this for science.
0:22:47 And now he’s like, he’s like dressed up like kind of modern Zuck,
0:22:51 where he’s got like the chain and the oversized t-shirt and he looks cool.
0:22:52 And he’s selling products.
0:22:54 So he’s got like cool YouTube content.
0:22:59 He’s got great subject lines for his emails and he’s got a great social media strategy.
0:23:05 And I get why all that’s good, but it does make me trust less in a weird way
0:23:08 because he kind of what he was doing before was so different.
0:23:13 This kind of self funded science experiment on himself with the noble goal
0:23:14 and noble mission.
0:23:16 And I don’t know, I kind of feel like he’s detracting from that.
0:23:20 I think he’s, I don’t know, am I the only one who feels that way?
0:23:21 Sam, what do you think?
0:23:24 I have a lot of trust in him still.
0:23:28 I think that I think that he’s done a good job of like he he sells an olive oil
0:23:30 that’s called snake oil.
0:23:34 And I think anytime someone makes fun of themselves by trusting them goes up.
0:23:35 I don’t think I have the same concerns as you.
0:23:39 I think that I have to acknowledge that he’s just a weirdo.
0:23:40 And that’s just how he lives his life.
0:23:41 And that’s cool.
0:23:42 Justin, what do you think?
0:23:47 I think he’s doing an incredible service to humanity, like how aggressively
0:23:48 he’s publishing everything.
0:23:53 I think that he is where I would say we differ is one, I mean, one,
0:23:57 he’s trying to build a like longevity cult, like new religion, which he openly says.
0:23:59 I’m not trying to do that.
0:24:03 And the second thing is he’s very much a believer in this, like the algorithm
0:24:06 where like if you live by the algorithm and do everything it tells you,
0:24:10 like you’ll live a longer and healthier life, which I think is fair and good.
0:24:12 And I’m all for that.
0:24:17 I’m much more interested in like why are people uniquely getting sick in in today’s,
0:24:20 you know, environment and what our environment is poisoning everyone.
0:24:21 I think Brian Johnson is amazing.
0:24:27 And like I think it’s awesome that someone is willing to try so many risk on gene
0:24:32 therapies, crazy peptides, like all the shit that he’s doing and talk about it publicly.
0:24:36 But I unfortunately like I will be very interested to see what happens
0:24:37 him over the next 20 years.
0:24:41 But I think 20 years of trying very like out on the risk curve therapies,
0:24:44 you know, it’s quite quite possible something like doesn’t go so well.
0:24:49 Yeah, maybe I just have a preference for like the autistic biohacker rather than
0:24:54 like the, you know, content creator influencer with a DTC brand underneath it.
0:24:56 I think I’ve just seen a lot of that.
0:24:58 And the first thing he was doing felt very original.
0:25:02 Yeah, let me ask you, you had this great phrase that I think we should bring up,
0:25:04 which is maybe it was you or it was Callie.
0:25:06 I don’t remember. Maybe it was your co-founder.
0:25:10 But the other thing where you said if you had a fish tank and then all the fish
0:25:15 inside suddenly started getting sick, you wouldn’t drug the fish.
0:25:17 You’d clean the tank, right?
0:25:20 You would assume that there’s something that’s causing the fish to get sick.
0:25:23 And for some reason we have this instinct to just drug the fish.
0:25:24 The fish is, the fish is sick.
0:25:25 Why are all the fish getting sick?
0:25:28 I don’t know, just drug all the fish rather than maybe the tank is dirty.
0:25:30 Maybe there’s something in the tank that’s causing them to get sick.
0:25:32 Maybe it’s what we’re feeding them as their environment.
0:25:36 And I love that metaphor of cleaning the tank.
0:25:37 Yeah, no, you capture it perfectly.
0:25:40 And the only thing I would say is that I don’t actually think we have an instinct
0:25:42 to drug the fish.
0:25:47 I think that we have a $4.3 trillion industry that’s job it is to
0:25:51 propagandize people to think the only way to fix the fish’s health problem is
0:25:52 drugging them.
0:25:55 Like that, that to me is the insane thing that we’re, you know,
0:25:59 the same situation we find ourselves in is everyone is getting sick
0:26:02 or, you know, overweight, everything.
0:26:04 I think I asked ChatDBT recently.
0:26:08 I think it was something like 60% of people have taken pharmaceuticals
0:26:11 in the last 12 months or like you had a prescription, something crazy like that.
0:26:13 It’s crazy.
0:26:14 So let’s do the.
0:26:17 So the first one you had was kind of the cleaning the tank, right?
0:26:20 Check up for the house, find, find ways that you can make your home
0:26:24 environment healthier for you and less interfering with your, with your health.
0:26:27 The second one you have a modern butcher shop.
0:26:29 So this is about feeding the fish.
0:26:30 I love this.
0:26:32 What is the modern butcher shop opportunity you see?
0:26:33 By the way, Sean, do you remember?
0:26:36 I told you actually last two episodes, I said, I think my two predictions
0:26:38 for two of my predictions, whereas people were going to have more plants
0:26:40 in their homes because it’s kind of nasty.
0:26:42 And also I thought I was like, there’s something about the meat
0:26:45 at Whole Foods that I actually think is crap nowadays.
0:26:46 Totally.
0:26:46 Yeah.
0:26:51 I’m not saying you’re right or a genius, but I’m not, I’m not saying it either.
0:26:54 I, you know, I think I’ve hung out with Justin before.
0:26:55 So I’m sure I’ve stole, I stole that.
0:26:57 Yeah.
0:26:59 I mean, so at a very high level, this is one of the things I’m most excited
0:27:03 about, there’s actually one coming in Austin in January, which I’m super stoked
0:27:08 for, but it’s the first one that I’ve seen that goes as far as I would like.
0:27:11 And basically let me like set the table through an analogy.
0:27:16 I think that like in the 80s, coffee was basically like Folgers.
0:27:17 It was like burnt.
0:27:19 There was no differentiation on sourcing.
0:27:22 It wasn’t very good to tell there was no coffee culture.
0:27:23 And Starbucks came along.
0:27:26 There was, and that was like big second wave culture, kind of coffee.
0:27:31 And now there’s like craft, you know, comatier and like small, like cool
0:27:34 roasters and coffee shops in every major city that you go to.
0:27:38 I basically think that meat today is where coffee was in the 80s.
0:27:42 Like you go to the grocery store and you’re buying meat.
0:27:43 You’re buying like steak.
0:27:48 You’re not, no one is differentiating on how is this dry aged?
0:27:48 What is the cut?
0:27:50 What is the genetics of the animal?
0:27:52 You know, how was it raised?
0:27:52 Was it regenerative?
0:27:53 Was it not?
0:27:54 Was it fed, you know, soy?
0:27:59 Was it massaged until it was killed and like did it drink IPAs until its last day?
0:28:04 Like all these sorts of things are actual differentiators in buying meat and buying
0:28:08 steak and people are aware of them, but the market has not caught up yet.
0:28:12 And if you have you ever bought from Snake River Farms or like heard of this company?
0:28:14 Yeah, I bought from Snake River.
0:28:15 What’s their story?
0:28:17 I just kind of had an instinct when I saw it.
0:28:20 I was like, almost because it was the only branded meat that was there.
0:28:24 It’s like all the other meat, the branding was like 80%, 20%.
0:28:25 Right. Like they hit the fat percentage.
0:28:29 And then there was one with like a brand name on it and it sounded like a place.
0:28:31 And I thought, uh, maybe this is the higher quality.
0:28:32 Are they legit?
0:28:33 What do they do?
0:28:34 Yeah, they’re super legit.
0:28:40 So they, they are one of the, a few companies in the US that have an American like Wagyu.
0:28:42 And so they have a Wagyu line.
0:28:45 They imported it, I believe from Japan at some point in the 70s or 80s.
0:28:48 And they’ve been like breeding this Wagyu line.
0:28:53 If you buy Whole Foods Best Rib Eye, you’re probably going to cost you like
0:28:54 20 bucks a pound or something like this.
0:28:59 If you buy it like the best rib eye from, um, you know, from Snake River,
0:29:02 it’s going to be like 60 to 70 dollars per pound.
0:29:07 And so the, the kind of like skew in pricing and the amount that people are willing
0:29:10 to pay for really, really high quality meat is massive.
0:29:14 And I just think it hasn’t made its way into retailers, hasn’t made its way into
0:29:14 butchers.
0:29:18 Um, and so I think there’s this massive opportunity to build like what I’m
0:29:22 calling like the blue bottle of the modern butcher shop that caters to people that
0:29:27 really care about sourcing, flavor, cut, dry age, you know, all of these things
0:29:29 that you’re not going to be able to get at Whole Foods.
0:29:32 So this, there’s actually like, it seems like there’s two opportunities.
0:29:35 One is to create the, like another Snake River Farms, right?
0:29:40 A brand that is, you know, elevated in some, some way that would go sell
0:29:41 through grocery stores.
0:29:46 And so just the way we’ve had, you know, you know, you have Oatly selling oat milk.
0:29:49 You got, you have all these brands that come in, new brands that come into
0:29:53 existing categories and start selling things that are niche in some way,
0:29:56 alternatives in some way, or premium in some way.
0:29:58 What you’re saying is a premium meat brand.
0:30:01 There’s that, that, that’s one idea, which already sounds like a big idea.
0:30:04 And I could imagine, I could totally imagine somebody who takes a like,
0:30:07 um, a content approach to this.
0:30:11 So let’s say you were doing this, if you go on TikTok and Instagram and
0:30:13 you’re at YouTube and you’re telling your story about the unique things you’re
0:30:16 doing with your, the animals there and why it’s premium.
0:30:18 And maybe it’s how you’re raising them.
0:30:18 Maybe it’s how you’re feeding them.
0:30:22 Maybe it’s, maybe it’s like a version where you’re genetically
0:30:26 selecting in some way, the sort of premium or you’re, you’re, you’re
0:30:28 breeding in some way, the more premium.
0:30:29 That seems like one opportunity.
0:30:31 And then the other one you had is the butcher shop, which is like you said,
0:30:36 like blue bottle coffee and blue, blue bottle sold for what?
0:30:39 Like 500 or $700 million, $800, yeah.
0:30:40 Seven or eight hundred million.
0:30:44 And like, I don’t know if anyone, like how popular is blue bottled nationwide
0:30:47 because I had never heard of it till I moved to San Francisco.
0:30:48 This is like 10 plus years ago.
0:30:49 I think it’s like a big city thing.
0:30:52 It’s like, it seems like a rich guy pet project.
0:30:55 Like all the VCs had invested in blue bottle because they liked having
0:30:57 meetings at blue bottle and blue bottle was cooler than Starbucks.
0:30:59 It wasn’t like it was elevated above that.
0:31:01 And it just seemed like a passion project.
0:31:04 And then I see that it sells for $700 or $800 million.
0:31:05 And wow, that thing really worked.
0:31:09 So I’m a, this is like, to me, there’s a 10 out of 10 idea.
0:31:11 This is an amazing idea.
0:31:13 I, I agree.
0:31:14 I mean, I think it’s a super exciting one.
0:31:19 I also think that the reason, the reason I would personally, if I were to start
0:31:24 this, you know, start with like a butcher shop or something like that is that
0:31:29 with a butcher shop, you can actually have a pretty wide range of pricing.
0:31:30 You can tell the story.
0:31:32 You can try it, like do small samplings.
0:31:34 You can talk about the aging and stuff like that.
0:31:39 If you took a $60 stake in the Whole Foods and just plopped it on the shelf next
0:31:44 to like a $20 one or a $15 one and there’s no story ability there.
0:31:47 That thing just like won’t sell, unfortunately.
0:31:52 Are quality meats and cows, I guess, being grown and you just have to
0:31:54 source them or do you have to go and do this yourself?
0:31:58 And no, so, so there are small farmers that are growing really, really
0:31:59 high quality meats.
0:32:01 They’re selling at farmer’s markets.
0:32:02 They’re just hard to buy from.
0:32:05 Like it’s hard to aggregate enough supply that Whole Foods is like, yep, put
0:32:11 it in the 500 stores or whatever, or, you know, it can fill up a meat case in Austin.
0:32:17 And so this really only works where if you’re a butcher, you can buy probably
0:32:24 an entire herd or an entire amount of farmers or ranchers cattle and sell it
0:32:26 through your store over the course of a couple of months.
0:32:31 That is worth your investment from a relationship and like amount that you’re
0:32:32 going to make on that standpoint.
0:32:34 For Whole Foods, it’s like, yeah, we’re never going to work with a small
0:32:39 interesting operator that might just have 50 or 100 head of cattle leather sell.
0:32:45 And can you freeze and store like beef and it’s still be great months later?
0:32:46 Yeah, you can.
0:32:49 I mean, the better thing though is that you can like dry age it.
0:32:53 And this is the other thing that if you’re taking this like hyper premium approach,
0:32:57 you can actually just hang meat in these meat lockers and stuff like that.
0:32:59 And actually cures gets like a richer flavor.
0:33:03 And the like, the more you age it, the reason that they don’t obviously is
0:33:08 like the more that you age it, the less the less amount of like cash that you’re
0:33:10 cycling through because you’re not selling it as quickly.
0:33:13 And so it doesn’t work for the retail model, but if you’re doing a really,
0:33:17 really high end thing like a butcher shop, it could actually work.
0:33:20 How big is this business you think Snake River Farms?
0:33:24 I would imagine it’s in the like two to 300 million in revenue range.
0:33:25 Wow.
0:33:26 I think it’s probably massive.
0:33:29 Are they raising, but they’re raising their own beef though, too.
0:33:31 I mean, they have like photos of cowboys.
0:33:31 So they like.
0:33:33 Yeah, I mean, they’re, they’re vertically integrated.
0:33:36 They’ve been doing this for a long period of time, as far as I understand.
0:33:41 But I think that there’s enough operators like that that don’t have the Snake
0:33:44 River Farms branding that aren’t shipping on dry ice all over the country,
0:33:49 but that could really like, like sell into a butcher shop in Austin, Nashville,
0:33:53 San Francisco, LA, New York, that, that just does really well.
0:33:57 Like I’m frankly shocked that the only butcher shop that I know that is doing
0:34:00 this is start is in Austin and you know, it’s opening in like a month.
0:34:04 And is he trying to just make one or he’s trying to make it like a,
0:34:06 like a nationwide type of thing?
0:34:10 I think there’s like bigger ambitions, but yeah, starting with just one,
0:34:13 like let’s make it work, figure out the economics, figure out this business.
0:34:14 That’s an amazing idea.
0:34:16 It’s, it’s, it is amazing.
0:34:17 It’s so expensive though.
0:34:20 And a lot of this is centered around beef only.
0:34:24 Um, cause like I’ve always wanted to get like healthier chicken because I,
0:34:26 I just don’t love eating lots of beef.
0:34:30 So previous, like again, like 80 years ago, the food system had diversity.
0:34:32 There were multiple types of birds, chickens, things like that.
0:34:37 Today 99.5% I believe of every chicken eaten in the U S is one
0:34:41 genetic breed, which is the Cornish cross, which is bread for how quickly
0:34:45 it puts on weight and the types of grains that it can basically eat.
0:34:47 And so it’s not bread for deliciousness.
0:34:48 It’s not bread for protein content.
0:34:51 It’s not just bread for like any of the stuff that you or I care about.
0:34:55 It’s just how quickly can it pack on mass and then I can like sell it.
0:34:56 Um, you know, and it gets eaten.
0:35:01 I think the average life of these birds, uh, on average, they, they’re like born
0:35:03 to harvest it’s something like six weeks.
0:35:08 And so, yeah, wait, so it comes out of the egg and six weeks later,
0:35:11 it’s big enough to eat and six weeks later it’s harvested and sold.
0:35:12 Yes, exactly.
0:35:17 And so this is why I think this is such an interesting opportunity is many
0:35:18 people are like, I don’t like chicken.
0:35:20 I don’t like, bro, I don’t like, you know, whatever.
0:35:24 And they just haven’t had chickens that are actually like delicious.
0:35:26 Uh, and it’s, it’s funny.
0:35:28 You can read old ads.
0:35:32 Like there was this one, um, this luxury rail line in the twenties and
0:35:35 thirties that made a big deal about how they have, they’ve like cornered the
0:35:39 market on this one chicken genetics and they served it only in their first
0:35:42 class cars and all these people were like, wow, this is the best chicken I’ve
0:35:42 ever had in my life.
0:35:48 Like there’s stories like that where it’s like, what is the wagyu or Kobe version
0:35:49 of chicken?
0:35:50 I’ve never even heard of one.
0:35:51 Yeah, exactly.
0:35:52 No one knows.
0:35:54 I mean, there, there’s no one that is raising these.
0:35:55 Dude, that’s insane.
0:35:59 By the way, absolute sick burn to call someone a Cornish cross.
0:36:00 That’s going to be my new thing.
0:36:04 I tell myself, I see somebody that’s just, you’re just a 99, you’re just like 99%
0:36:04 of the others.
0:36:07 You’re just trying to pack on, just pack on mass.
0:36:10 You’re a quick flip of a chicken that you’re just a Cornish cross.
0:36:13 There’s a famous ad.
0:36:17 There’s a guy named Joseph Sugarman who, um, kind of pioneered direct
0:36:20 marketing, direct response, copywriting in the eighties.
0:36:24 And he, at the time, a quartz movement watch was already popular.
0:36:27 Like watch connoisseurs knew about that, but it wasn’t like impressive.
0:36:30 Like it was just like a normal, like table stakes thing for any watch
0:36:31 worth more than 50 bucks.
0:36:35 But anyway, he was famous for creating these ads for this wine of line of
0:36:40 watches, and he popularized the idea of quartz movement watch as if it was
0:36:41 like some like epic thing.
0:36:45 Like, and then all the watch connoisseurs like, yeah, dude, they all, we all
0:36:49 have this, but that’s sort of like, um, what you’re describing a little bit
0:36:53 with these chickens is like, you can actually like come up.
0:36:57 You can, and if you, you can invent interesting cool stories that are also
0:37:01 true in factual, but like, you know, I’ll take a lot of like the health nuts.
0:37:02 Like they’re always like, yeah, this is standard.
0:37:04 We don’t give our chickens this or that.
0:37:07 And you’re like, yeah, yeah, I know, but like most people don’t know that.
0:37:09 And so we’re going to tell this amazing story about that.
0:37:10 Hey, exactly.
0:37:10 Yeah.
0:37:13 And I think like the mental model is, you know, you’re having a dinner
0:37:16 party and it’s like pulling out a nice bottle of wine, but people aren’t
0:37:21 drinking, and so you’re like, okay, this is this like crazy genetic, really
0:37:24 nice steak cut, and you’ll have the best steak you’ve ever had in your life.
0:37:28 Like, I think that is the underserved market that, that you could
0:37:29 build a real brand around.
0:37:31 What’s your food budget every month?
0:37:32 And where are you buying?
0:37:35 Are you buying like all of your meat from the Snake River Farms?
0:37:37 Uh, no, not all of it.
0:37:40 I mean, their steaks are like super fatty and marbled and everything.
0:37:44 Like you wouldn’t want to actually eat that every day, but I basically buy
0:37:48 my meat and most of my food from local farmers around the Austin area.
0:37:49 What does that mean?
0:37:51 Like you personally have relationships or you go to a farmers market?
0:37:53 No, so yeah, go to a farmers market.
0:37:57 There’s also like a food truck here where it’s sort of this like
0:38:01 refrigerated trailer where they act, they, it’s a combination.
0:38:04 It’s owned by three or four local farms and they just stock it up.
0:38:08 And so I just go every week and that’s where I buy like all of my normal staples.
0:38:11 Are you just like not eating apples in December or whatever?
0:38:13 Like you can’t like, I guess if there’s seasons, particularly in Austin, when
0:38:16 it’s mostly desert, like where does that come from?
0:38:19 Whole Foods then is where I’ll get like the remainder
0:38:21 of like the produce and stuff that’s not seasonal.
0:38:23 Got it. So you do do like some normal stuff.
0:38:28 And then you also like, you know, to go to farmers markets, which is like
0:38:30 not extreme, but like you’re putting a lot of effort into it.
0:38:32 That’s pretty cool. All right, let’s do the next idea.
0:38:33 So annual home checkup.
0:38:39 I’m giving that a B this this blue bottle for for beef.
0:38:41 This blue bottle, the modern day butcher shop.
0:38:42 I’m giving that an A plus.
0:38:46 Is that because you want that to exist or you want to invest or you think it’s good business?
0:38:47 I just see it, dude.
0:38:49 I want it to I would be a customer of it.
0:38:51 I know that I know where the demand is.
0:38:53 I know a lot of people listen to this, be like, I’m not trying to buy a $60 stake.
0:38:54 That’s fine.
0:38:56 There’s a lot of people who are trying to buy stuff like that.
0:38:58 I know a lot of people that are trying to do that.
0:39:02 And I just know that when you go into a category where there is no existing brand,
0:39:06 it is all commodity, simply creating a brand in a commodity space.
0:39:10 It’s like a winning business formula and the coffee analogy you gave, right?
0:39:13 Like I don’t know what a Folger’s cost per cup of coffee,
0:39:15 but I think it’s in like the sense.
0:39:19 So the idea of going to Starbucks and paying $4 for a coffee
0:39:22 that you can make at home for 15 cents or 10 cents or whatever,
0:39:23 you know, sounded outrageous.
0:39:25 But of course, people did it because they do it for the experience.
0:39:27 They do it for a perception of quality.
0:39:28 So I just see the path of that one.
0:39:31 And if somebody has the right founder fit and, you know, it’s
0:39:33 you need to kind of like a one of one entrepreneur.
0:39:37 But that is a to me, that’s a billion dollar opportunity to do that.
0:39:40 Whether you do it that way or you sell into retail.
0:39:43 And like you said, you know, you do need to tell the story of why this thing costs more.
0:39:47 And that’s why you have to tell the story on social media and sell it through retail.
0:39:49 So you’d have to be great at content on TikTok and Instagram.
0:39:52 And then sell into an into retail stores that way.
0:39:56 But to me, that is like a that’s a 12 out of 10 idea.
0:39:59 But you have another one on here. Calibrate for fertility.
0:40:01 What is this? Yeah, well, quick.
0:40:03 If anyone does the butcher shop thing, I want to invest.
0:40:06 I think it’s such an exciting interesting.
0:40:11 But so calibrate for fertility, you all I don’t know how aware you are.
0:40:14 But basically, everyone is having fertility issues right now.
0:40:16 It’s getting worse.
0:40:18 You know, IVF or what’s called ARP
0:40:21 Assisted Reproductive or ART Assisted Reproductive Technologies
0:40:24 are growing like seven to eight percent a year and it’s accelerating.
0:40:27 IVF is the best in class option right now.
0:40:29 And it costs like twenty to thirty thousand dollars.
0:40:31 It injects a bunch of hormones.
0:40:34 It’s super invasive. It’s super hard, you know, on the female.
0:40:37 And it’s just a brutal, brutal thing.
0:40:43 And so I think there is this big opportunity to almost have
0:40:47 like a lifestyle set of interventions that are geared towards helping people
0:40:51 increase their fertility in the key window when they’re trying to actually have kids.
0:40:54 And so you can think about it like a lifestyle
0:40:57 or like a monthly subscription for some three to six months period
0:41:00 where you get a combination of peptides, supplements.
0:41:02 People do like an environmental review.
0:41:05 Make sure that you’re not wearing polyester underwear while you’re trying to have a kid
0:41:08 or, you know, any number of things that actually seem to have a really,
0:41:12 really big impact on how likely you are to conceive during that window.
0:41:16 And pretty much just say, hey, before going the twenty to thirty thousand
0:41:21 dollar very expensive, very invasive, very hard IVF route, do this like,
0:41:25 you know, several hundred dollar a month sort of lifestyle based fertility approach.
0:41:28 And we’re going to try and help you conceive naturally
0:41:29 without having to go through IVF.
0:41:32 I know men can do stuff to increase their sperm count with their sperm
0:41:36 count being down. That’s like a huge issue. Can women do the same thing?
0:41:39 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, women women can improve their fertility for sure.
0:41:44 You know, from people even talk about this all the time, like stress is a big factor.
0:41:47 But they’re not they’re not talking about at the hormonal level.
0:41:51 Like it seems like progesterone helps with increasing odds of conception.
0:41:56 There’s a bunch of interventions that I think are just almost criminally underutilized.
0:42:04 Hey, can I tell you a Steve Jobs story real quick?
0:42:08 So Jobs once said that design is not just how something looks, it’s how it works.
0:42:11 And a great example of that is my new partner, Mercury.
0:42:14 Mercury has made a banking product that just works beautifully.
0:42:17 I use it for not just one, but all six of my companies right now.
0:42:20 It is my default. If I start a company, it’s a no brainer.
0:42:22 I go and I open up a Mercury account.
0:42:23 The design is great.
0:42:24 It’s got all the features that you need.
0:42:28 And you could just tell it was made by a founder like me, not of, you know,
0:42:31 bank or somewhere who hired a consultant in an agency to try to make some tool.
0:42:35 So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders,
0:42:38 head over to mercury.com and open up account in minutes.
0:42:39 And here’s the fine print.
0:42:42 Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
0:42:45 Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust
0:42:47 members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.
0:42:53 Justin, have you ever heard us talk about one chart businesses?
0:42:54 Have you ever heard this thing we say on this pod?
0:42:56 Yeah, this to me is one.
0:42:58 So look at this chart.
0:43:01 So this is search interest for IVF clinic near me.
0:43:03 And just look at it since 2018.
0:43:05 Look at the like relative search volume.
0:43:11 It’s up, you know, to from zero to 75 on this chart all the way to 100 on 100 scale
0:43:17 of IVF clinic near me, which is pretty wild because that’s not a long time.
0:43:20 That’s something you would expect to see like on a 30 year time horizon,
0:43:22 not a not like a six year time horizon.
0:43:27 And what you’re saying is there’s stuff you can because IVF is obviously very hard
0:43:31 on, you know, it’s hard mentally, physically, emotionally, financially,
0:43:34 hey, what if there was a, you know, an intervention step before that?
0:43:35 You mentioned Calibrate.
0:43:36 I’ve never heard of this company.
0:43:37 What does Calibrate do?
0:43:39 Yeah, that’s a crazy stat that you have on them as well.
0:43:40 Say that. Yeah.
0:43:42 So Calibrate was a company.
0:43:46 They got acquired somewhat recently, but they basically started out by being
0:43:50 they paired GLP ones, I/O, Zempik with lifestyle interventions.
0:43:53 And so their whole thing was like, Zempik, people are meant to be on it
0:43:54 for the rest of their lives.
0:43:57 What Calibrate did is said, we’re going to prescribe you Zempik.
0:44:00 We’re also going to introduce coaching, accountability, lifestyle,
0:44:05 interventions, like this whole suite of things where the goal is to get you off
0:44:07 of those Zempik at the end of a six or 12 month period.
0:44:12 Like a, like a Noom meets or kind of, I mean, Weight Watchers is trying to do this.
0:44:14 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
0:44:16 And so they, those companies always scale fast.
0:44:18 Noom did something similar pre-Ozempik.
0:44:20 And they were an advertiser with my old company, The Hustle.
0:44:24 Like within a year of launching, they were spending hundreds of thousands with us.
0:44:27 This is, I don’t know how these guys grow so, so big.
0:44:29 Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of demand for this.
0:44:32 And what Calibrate figured out is how to actually get it covered
0:44:35 by some insure, to some degree by insurers.
0:44:37 And insurers were okay with it because they’re like, great,
0:44:41 we’re not going to have to pay 20 grand a year for Ozempik indefinitely.
0:44:45 We can actually get people off of this, this drug after a six or 12 month period.
0:44:48 And so in the first two years, they got to like over a hundred million dollars
0:44:51 in revenue and just scaled insanely quickly.
0:44:55 It does look like Calibrate kind of went on, went under though or something.
0:44:59 I don’t know. I see, I was looking for their funding stuff,
0:45:02 but it looks like they, they’ve got restructured private equity,
0:45:05 but basically for 20 million, they got 75% of the company now.
0:45:07 So I think it definitely ran into some trouble.
0:45:11 Yeah, but that means they could be bad operators, but the demand still existed.
0:45:15 Yeah. Yeah, that would be my contention, basically, is that they were doing this
0:45:18 and they launched, I think, 2021, something like that.
0:45:22 And I basically think that insurers went from,
0:45:25 they were like early on the Ozempik plus lifestyle thing.
0:45:28 And then there’s been this massive record amount of lobbying spent
0:45:31 to just keep people on Ozempik basically forever,
0:45:33 which I think probably did not do them any favors.
0:45:36 What percentage of people needing IVF?
0:45:39 And you probably don’t know this, but of like the average age
0:45:43 of the first time mother has gone up, I think it’s nearly 30 at this point.
0:45:46 I think it’s 29 or something like that in the seventies.
0:45:48 It was 21. So it’s gone up a lot.
0:45:51 What percentage is it just because of people waiting longer to have families
0:45:54 versus like American food system being poisoned?
0:45:57 It’s a good question. I don’t know, honestly.
0:45:59 But what I do know is from reading stats,
0:46:03 it seems like most of the decline in birth rate,
0:46:06 it’s about 70 percent of it comes from people that previously
0:46:09 would have had three to four kids now having one or two.
0:46:12 And so it’s not like people are deciding not to have kids.
0:46:13 They’re just having fewer.
0:46:19 And I do think that the biological fertility issues are a huge, huge amount
0:46:23 of what is driving down the average number of kids that, you know,
0:46:24 a family or a woman has these days.
0:46:26 Dude, it’s pretty crazy how many of my friends,
0:46:29 my male friends tell me that they’re like, like in Austin,
0:46:32 we used to go to sauna all the time and I would have somebody friends that like,
0:46:33 I’m not going in the sauna this week.
0:46:35 We’re trying to get pregnant and my balls aren’t working.
0:46:37 And so I’m trying to like, like I can’t cook them right now.
0:46:37 You know what I mean?
0:46:42 Like there are so many people that I knew you and I just and our friends.
0:46:44 And they’re like, I can’t do this. I can’t do that.
0:46:47 I need to go do this because we’re struggling and it’s my fault.
0:46:49 It’s pretty wild.
0:46:51 Sean, have you had a bunch of friends that have like complained of similar stuff?
0:46:53 They’re like, it’s by stuff ain’t working.
0:46:55 You lost me. Have you had a bunch of friends?
0:47:01 So no, I think it is this like under the radar thing.
0:47:05 Very few people are talking about, but almost everyone I know that is trying to
0:47:09 have kids right now has some amount of fertility challenges.
0:47:14 And even if that’s six to 12 months and then they get pregnant, even still,
0:47:16 you know, if you do that across like two to three kids,
0:47:20 you’re basically going from you’re now having one or two kids instead of like
0:47:23 three to four, if every time it takes you six or 12 more months to get pregnant.
0:47:30 So you’ve mentioned three kind of health related start-up ideas.
0:47:36 You’ve started, I think, four kind of successful that I know of health
0:47:37 health related companies.
0:47:41 Can you describe this approach because I’m the kind of guy that bounces around
0:47:43 from industry to industry model to model.
0:47:49 I’m like, I’m like a variety seeker and I don’t think that’s good.
0:47:53 Like just when I learn about a space, I get intrigued by something I’m a beginner in
0:47:55 and I go in and I stop the compounding of that.
0:47:56 So I don’t think that’s too smart.
0:48:00 Can you describe your approach to entrepreneurship versus, you know,
0:48:05 somebody like me who’s just bouncing around and trying to solve a hundred
0:48:07 different problems in a hundred different spaces with a hundred different business models?
0:48:08 Totally.
0:48:14 Yeah, I think for me at least what has been very rewarding is basically
0:48:18 choosing one problem, which for me is the chronic disease crisis that I want
0:48:19 to spend the rest of my career on.
0:48:25 Like I think that there is a massive amount of compounding, like relationship
0:48:27 compounding, even personal brand compounding.
0:48:31 Like people think of me as like into health, which pays some dividends.
0:48:34 That’s probably going to be even more so over the next decade.
0:48:36 You understand the space.
0:48:37 You understand the problems.
0:48:38 You understand the players and relationships.
0:48:44 Like I think that if you decide this is the problem that I am the most interested
0:48:47 in the world that I deeply care about, that I read about for fun and just orient
0:48:51 your career around trying to start things or be involved in things that make
0:48:53 that problem better or solve that problem.
0:48:57 Like you get so many shots on goal, even if they may look different.
0:49:01 Like I started Kettle and Fire thinking like the American food system is
0:49:03 poison and there needs to be a bone broth company.
0:49:07 What did you read or consume that made you buy into that?
0:49:10 And then how long were you into it before you’re like, this is my thing?
0:49:11 Yeah.
0:49:15 So I was going to CrossFit in San Francisco in 2015 and a bunch of Crossfitters
0:49:17 were like, you should do bone broth.
0:49:18 I’m a terrible cook.
0:49:19 I’m like almost never cooked for myself.
0:49:21 And so I basically was like, great.
0:49:24 I’m going to go buy some at the store and no one was selling some.
0:49:27 And so after that, I was like, seems like there’s an interesting opportunity here.
0:49:32 And did I think it would grow to like Pia nine figure annual business?
0:49:32 Definitely not.
0:49:36 But it was a big enough opportunity that decided to take the swing.
0:49:39 But did you get into health and wellness because you’re like, that seems
0:49:42 like a cool opportunity or where you’re like, I’m obsessed with this topic.
0:49:44 And this is like a really good way to address it.
0:49:46 Yeah, I was, I was just obsessed with the topic, basically.
0:49:50 Like I’d been reading about paleo and reading about, um, you know,
0:49:52 all these sorts of things since I was basically in college.
0:49:56 Like I was a weird dude in college who my senior year, I went paleo.
0:49:59 And so I like wasn’t drinking beer, wasn’t eating pizza or french fries.
0:50:01 All my friends were like, how’s wrong with you?
0:50:02 Like, what’s going on?
0:50:08 And so I just got very into this idea, this like secret in a sense of like,
0:50:12 why is everyone getting secret record levels and what could be kind of
0:50:13 underpinning that.
0:50:18 Uh, and so it was this deep interest and as I got deeper and deeper understanding
0:50:22 and appreciation of the problem, I just really understood like, this is literally,
0:50:26 I think the biggest problem in the country and I can spend the rest of my career
0:50:31 trying to solve or take stabs at various instances of this problem, whether
0:50:34 that’s starting a brand or trying to fix like the incentives through TrueMed.
0:50:38 Um, you know, I basically was like, I think I’m just going to try and solve
0:50:41 or work on fixing this problem for the rest of my career.
0:50:43 So let’s go back to that Kettle and Fire example.
0:50:46 So you, you’re doing CrossFit, trying to live healthier.
0:50:48 Crossfitters are telling you, you should do bone broth.
0:50:50 You’re like, cool, where do I get some of that?
0:50:54 And you go, you look, there’s not like an easy brand that you could just pull
0:50:55 off the shelf and buy it.
0:50:57 So you think somebody should do that.
0:51:01 Now, at that time, you’ve got no experience doing that.
0:51:03 You’ve never built a DTC product.
0:51:05 You never built like an actual consumer brand.
0:51:10 Can you just describe like the, the three or four bullets that happened
0:51:11 that first year to like make it happen?
0:51:14 That like, because I think, you know, all these ideas are cool, but you
0:51:15 got to be the type of person that can make shit happen.
0:51:18 You made shit happen at that stage.
0:51:20 Can you just describe what, what you made happen for Kettle and Fire?
0:51:22 Yeah, totally.
0:51:26 So we basically, we first tested a landing page, put up a landing page
0:51:29 with no product, started buying ads to see like who would click on it.
0:51:30 What would they pay?
0:51:31 You had the brand name.
0:51:35 At that time, we called it Bone Broth’s Co, which was a horrible idea.
0:51:36 And sent three brands to the Kettle and Fire.
0:51:37 You just made it yourself.
0:51:39 You just mocked up an ugly landing page.
0:51:39 Yeah.
0:51:42 We mocked up an ugly landing page on Unbounce, paid someone on Fiverr,
0:51:48 $10 to make a terrible logo and basically started selling a box at 29.99.
0:51:50 So when you say started selling, what, Facebook ads?
0:51:51 How’d you get the traffic?
0:51:55 Yeah, we did Facebook ads and Facebook and AdWords and then some Bing at
0:51:57 the time, because they were like, there was an ARB there, it’s much cheaper.
0:51:59 Dude, Bing, Bing clicks back then.
0:52:02 I, I, they were so cheap and they converted way higher.
0:52:06 I know, I know, I was always like, I don’t know who people are, but they’re
0:52:09 in the logo, what was that first few weeks or maybe a month like that gave
0:52:11 you the, were you looking for conviction or you already had conviction?
0:52:13 What, what, what happened in that first month for you that?
0:52:16 Yeah, I was, I was looking for a conviction.
0:52:21 And so basically we’d put in a $500, we built this landing page and I think
0:52:24 sold like a little over $2,000 worth of product inside of about a month.
0:52:30 And so I ran the numbers and I was basically like, okay, we can build a business.
0:52:34 And I think just given existing traffic, we can turn this into at least like a
0:52:36 two to 300 grand a year kind of business.
0:52:40 And based on like what I felt the margins would back into, I was like, that
0:52:43 would should be about a hundred grand, 150 grand a year in profit, which
0:52:45 seemed like a worthwhile thing to take on.
0:52:47 And then what, uh, okay.
0:52:49 So you, do you do that?
0:52:51 And where did it get much bigger than that?
0:52:52 What happened to make it much bigger?
0:52:53 So we validated the idea.
0:52:56 Uh, the next thing is we do, we had to figure out how to make it.
0:53:00 And so we emailed and called over 500 different manufacturing partners to
0:53:04 just like, please someone help us figure out how to make this product.
0:53:08 And eventually what ended up working is my brother, who was 19 at the time,
0:53:12 who I co-founded the business with, he emailed Mark Cuban as like, I’m
0:53:13 a 19 year old entrepreneur.
0:53:13 Like please help.
0:53:18 And Mark Cuban introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we ended up
0:53:21 working with and still work with today to make our first like version of the
0:53:22 bone broth product.
0:53:27 And so what did you, what did your brother’s like, Hey, Mark, we’re entrepreneurs,
0:53:28 but we don’t know how to make a product.
0:53:30 Do you know any bone broth manufacturers?
0:53:31 And he said, yes, here’s one.
0:53:36 Yeah, he was like, talk to my food person and then his food person introduced
0:53:36 us to our co-packers.
0:53:39 Like, yeah, you should talk to this, this group over here.
0:53:42 Uh, just to clarify that those first $2,000 were the orders.
0:53:44 Did you just go refund them because you didn’t have a product yet?
0:53:48 I emailed all of them and I said, Hey, we are not going to have a product
0:53:48 for like six to nine months.
0:53:53 I can either refund you in full right now or 50% off and we’ll like eventually
0:53:54 ship it and people that didn’t respond.
0:53:55 I would just refund them.
0:53:56 Yeah.
0:53:56 Okay.
0:53:57 Great.
0:53:59 So Mark Cuban gets you a food person.
0:54:01 So that’s the second thing that now, now you know how to,
0:54:02 now you can get the product made.
0:54:03 Yeah.
0:54:06 And so, and then basically, uh, what I realized is the product is two
0:54:07 years shelf stable.
0:54:10 I put literally every dollar of my life savings at that point.
0:54:13 I was 25, uh, into doing the first run of our product.
0:54:15 They had $30,000 minimum runs.
0:54:18 Uh, it was like 120 K, uh, kind of run budget.
0:54:21 So I was like, either this is going to work great or I’m going to eat bone
0:54:22 broth for two years.
0:54:24 Either way, I’ll, I’ll like feel pretty good.
0:54:29 Uh, and so we bought the first product and year one, we basically did
0:54:30 2.8 million in sales.
0:54:35 Um, and after about six months of being in business, one of the buyers at
0:54:39 Whole Foods saw an influencer talking about our product reached out and was
0:54:40 like, Hey, I want to bring you guys into Whole Foods.
0:54:46 And we basically, we, we did extraordinarily well in Whole Foods and, uh,
0:54:48 got national rotation the following year.
0:54:50 And that just kind of like started our, our journey.
0:54:54 I think I was with you eight or 10 months after you started it in San Francisco.
0:54:55 We went bowling.
0:54:56 I don’t know if we remember that.
0:54:58 And you were telling me about this.
0:55:02 And I was like, Oh, well, I mean, it seems like you got a really good career.
0:55:03 Why are you throwing it away at this?
0:55:08 Like, I just remember thinking of like, what, uh, like, why does he want to
0:55:09 ruin everything?
0:55:10 Yeah.
0:55:14 Starting a bone broth company in SF at the height of like the tech boom was
0:55:16 definitely not a consensus opinion.
0:55:22 My sister, when she moved to San Francisco, she had, uh, she was working in a
0:55:23 corporate career.
0:55:25 She worked for Deloitte, I think.
0:55:26 Uh, so she was like a management consultant.
0:55:30 She had gotten her MBA, she had gotten, got an undergrad in electrical engineering,
0:55:34 got an MBA from a good business school, was a management consultant.
0:55:38 And then she, um, she’s like, I, she’s like, I’m sick of this life.
0:55:42 I want to, I need a business that I can own and not have to go to a job every day.
0:55:46 And she was so tired of like the consulting hours were so bad that she would
0:55:48 come home and her, like her kids would be asleep.
0:55:50 And she would just pick them up from the crib just to hold them for a few minutes.
0:55:54 Cause like she hadn’t been there when they, to like even play with them before,
0:55:58 before bed and like after four nights of that, she’s like, never, no,
0:55:58 I’m not doing this.
0:56:04 And never had started a business before, decides to start a, um, an in-home daycare.
0:56:07 So she kicks me out of the apartment I’m living in and says, I’m going to use
0:56:10 that apartment, which my, my parents owned, uh, apartment.
0:56:12 They’re like, she’s like, kick you out.
0:56:14 I’m going to use that to start this business.
0:56:16 And I’m going to have, she needed six kids.
0:56:19 So six kids to come to this like in-home daycare.
0:56:22 And my dad was like, you have an electrical engineering degree.
0:56:25 You have a job that pays you whatever a hundred and fifty K a year.
0:56:27 You’re a management consultant and you’re going to change diapers.
0:56:32 And she just felt so bad, you know, quote unquote, throwing it away.
0:56:35 And then, you know, fast forward, now she’s got like three or four schools
0:56:38 in San Francisco and she’s been able to like scale this business up.
0:56:41 She works just like a few hours a week and has like this amazing business.
0:56:45 And, um, a lot of them, I say that because a lot of people will hit
0:56:49 that crucible moment where it feels like you’re throwing away this known
0:56:54 and socially accepted thing to do this kind of fringe, weird thing
0:56:56 from scratch on your own with no safety net.
0:57:00 And I’m not saying that it always works out, but every time something works,
0:57:04 it almost always has that story at the beginning of like you, you’re doing what.
0:57:08 And that’s totally normal, even though it feels abnormal in the moment.
0:57:09 It feels bad in the moment.
0:57:11 Totally. And I’d say I might actually love your thoughts.
0:57:17 My experience, frankly, was almost every single person that I knew
0:57:19 who was starting a business or trying to start a business
0:57:24 like between 22 and 25 has made it in some way, shape or form.
0:57:25 Like it’s insane.
0:57:28 Yeah. So Justin and I both started roommate matching companies.
0:57:30 We are both, we are both 20.
0:57:34 And so between the ages of like 20 and 25, we were like in the same industry.
0:57:38 And so all of our SF friends, uh, you know, we’re similar age.
0:57:43 And, um, dude, it is crazy how many I actually just tweeted about this today.
0:57:45 I was like, I grew up in SF from age like 20 to 30.
0:57:48 It’s crazy how many of our six are successful
0:57:50 just because they’re around, you know what I mean?
0:57:51 Yeah, totally.
0:57:55 Naval has a great phrase where he says, yes, you hear the stats about startups.
0:57:57 Oh, 90% of businesses, you know, new businesses fail.
0:58:00 And he goes, yeah, startups fail, but founders don’t.
0:58:02 And I love that phrase.
0:58:05 He said, oh, basically, if you just fast forward 10 years,
0:58:08 any of the founders that stayed in the game,
0:58:11 like the success rate goes from your first business success rate might be 10%.
0:58:15 But the 10 year saga of you trying a bunch of shots on goal
0:58:18 and getting smarter every year, like the odds are now like,
0:58:20 if you just look at our cohort of friends, right, Sam,
0:58:23 we were in a mastermind together back in what was that 2013, something like that.
0:58:26 Like our cohort of friends, which was probably like, you know,
0:58:30 30 to 50 founders that we used to hang out with and know regularly,
0:58:32 the hit rates like 80 or 90% success rate, which, you know,
0:58:34 for the people that actually stuck with it.
0:58:36 I got a couple of friends that packed up their bags and moved to, you know,
0:58:39 Connecticut and just said, you know, if I’m not doing this anymore,
0:58:42 not you, Sam, sorry, literally, I’m just thinking of like a couple of friends
0:58:44 that did that, they were just like, hey, like the San,
0:58:47 they’re burnt out from San Francisco startup culture.
0:58:50 Those people, you know, they didn’t fully make it,
0:58:52 but all the people that stayed in the game made it.
0:58:54 We could like wrap it up with one quick story, which is I remember
0:58:58 Gog and Bionni started this thing called Udemy, and it was like courses.
0:59:00 What? This is like what Tai Lopez does.
0:59:06 And I remember both Justin and I were like, I guess we should get in on this.
0:59:10 Like this seems like a really good way to like make $100 or $300 a month,
0:59:11 which would be like life changing.
0:59:13 And so we both did that stuff.
0:59:16 And I think that, you know, I could say for Justin, for sure,
0:59:18 people look up to you and I mean, I look up to you and I admire you.
0:59:21 It’s crazy how like if you look at like eight or 10 years ago,
0:59:27 which wasn’t that long ago, you were doing many things that like, you know,
0:59:31 people like will poo poo, like maybe course creation or like buying a car
0:59:33 and renting it on Toro or whatever.
0:59:37 And it’s like, man, the people you admire start way scrappier than you think.
0:59:39 I know I for sure did.
0:59:40 Yeah, I mean, I don’t know that anyone
0:59:43 admires me that’s taken my keyboard shortcuts for Mac users.
0:59:47 You to me, of course, but definitely I was hustling back in the day.
0:59:54 I’ve ever read Travis Kalanick, the guy who started Uber, his his old blog.
0:59:57 He had this amazing blog that wasn’t called like awesomeness, bro.
0:59:59 It was called like something silly like that, right?
1:00:01 It was heavily broed out.
1:00:05 But he had this blog post was just like attending CES on the cheap
1:00:07 or is a Southwest on the cheap.
1:00:11 And it was basically like his playbook for how to have a badass time
1:00:13 at a conference when you have no money.
1:00:14 And he’s like, all right, here’s what you’re going to do.
1:00:17 You’re going to get to the airport, but never, never take the taxis.
1:00:18 Here’s what you can do instead.
1:00:20 Here’s what you’re going to do for staying at someone’s house.
1:00:23 You know, here’s how you’re going to skip the event, but still get in to the after
1:00:24 party because that’s what the magic happens when you get there.
1:00:26 Here’s what you’re going to say.
1:00:31 And he had this like really scrappy approach to how to just like, you know,
1:00:34 wedding crash, a major conference on a budget.
1:00:36 And he was 31 years old, by the way.
1:00:38 He was 31 when he wrote that post.
1:00:39 It’s not like he was a college kid.
1:00:43 And he also used to invite people to just stay at his house in San Francisco.
1:00:46 It was part of the magic of a city like San Francisco is like, he used to say,
1:00:49 if you’re in the reverse was if you’re coming to San Francisco and you got no
1:00:53 money and but you’re a founder, he called his house the jam pad.
1:00:57 And he would have like people constantly just coming and crashing on his couch.
1:01:01 And he would host people over late into the night and everyone just jamming
1:01:02 on different ideas.
1:01:06 And he used that to kind of build his momentum, his network, his energy.
1:01:07 It is pretty wild.
1:01:08 Yeah, so cool.
1:01:10 Can we finish with this Zuck story?
1:01:12 Zuck is auctioning off his gold chain for you for your charity.
1:01:13 What is this?
1:01:16 Well, I saw you tweet that, uh, Justin, I was like, is that real?
1:01:17 Yeah, it’s real.
1:01:18 And he totally downplayed it.
1:01:23 You said Zuck’s auctioning my chain and no one like it looked like no one replied to that.
1:01:25 Yeah, I had a bad Twitter day that day.
1:01:27 I saw people were bidding for it.
1:01:28 How much did it end up going for?
1:01:30 It’s his gold chain.
1:01:31 It went for like almost 41 grand.
1:01:31 But.
1:01:32 Oh, wow, who won?
1:01:33 Do you know?
1:01:36 Uh, some anonymous person.
1:01:41 I’m not sure, but we basically, probably a crypto person to be honest.
1:01:42 Um, but yeah.
1:01:46 So a couple of years ago, three years ago, I started something called inflection
1:01:51 grants, which is effectively just giving small, like two to $3,000 grants to people
1:01:54 under the age of 24 that are high potential.
1:01:56 Uh, you know, it’s inflectiongrants.com.
1:01:59 If anyone wants to check it out, but basically someone made it an offer to me
1:02:02 when I was in my twenties, uh, when I was like graduating college where he was
1:02:04 like, Hey, you should keep running with your startup.
1:02:08 If it doesn’t work, I’ll just write you a check and you can use that to cover
1:02:10 your living expenses until you find a job or whatever.
1:02:12 Who did that and why?
1:02:15 It was a mentor that I had built a relationship with in Pittsburgh where I
1:02:19 was going to school and I think he just knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
1:02:23 I also saw that I didn’t come for money and I think knew at this very key time
1:02:26 that that offer would make a big difference in how it might decision
1:02:27 making and he was right.
1:02:32 And so I started inflection grants three years ago since then, um, you know,
1:02:36 we’ve given out like 50 grants and long journey who one of the GPs is Ariel
1:02:39 Zuckerberg has gotten behind it in a big way.
1:02:43 And, uh, so this year, uh, Ariel convinced Mark to auction off one of his
1:02:47 already worn gold chains and then we had to make sure that it was cleaned.
1:02:50 No DNA residue, anything like this, but, uh, and sold, you know,
1:02:56 Did you actually have to like, did you get to talk to him at all?
1:03:01 Uh, no, no, but yeah, he gave it away and we auctioned off for 41 grand,
1:03:02 which goes to charity, which is great.
1:03:06 So that’s 20, 20 people are going to get these $2,000 grants.
1:03:06 Exactly.
1:03:10 You gave us this document before we started and I think we only touched
1:03:11 like a third of it.
1:03:14 There’s so many more cool things that you have to come back and talk about.
1:03:17 Like a lot of people don’t know this, but Sean, did you know that Justin was
1:03:20 like a co-author on the book traction with the duck duck go founder?
1:03:25 Like there’s like, there’s like, there’s like five or 10 other things that you
1:03:27 have really amazing stories behind and are really insightful on.
1:03:30 And so, uh, thanks for coming on and doing this.
1:03:35 Um, I’m like literally sitting here, taking notes on like inclandescent
1:03:37 bulbs and, uh, like farmer’s markets and shit like that.
1:03:40 And, uh, you’re going to be getting a lot of, uh, follow up texts on me.
1:03:42 Where it’s just like, just tell me what to do.
1:03:45 Tell people where to, where to follow, where to get more.
1:03:46 Uh, yeah.
1:03:50 So I’m sub stack, Justin mayors, sub, you know, sub stack.com.
1:03:53 I write a monthly newsletter on health and business stuff.
1:03:57 And then also on Twitter at JW mayors and go read the great American
1:03:58 poisoning.
1:04:02 We didn’t do it justice in this, in this podcast, but go read that blog post.
1:04:04 It is amazing.
1:04:06 We’ll put the link of the show notes to that specific blog post.
1:04:07 All right.
1:04:07 That’s it.
1:04:08 That’s the pot.
1:04:08 Thank you, Justin.
1:04:11 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:04:15 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it.
1:04:17 Like no days off on a road.
1:04:19 Let’s travel never looking back.
1:04:35 Hey, Sean here.
1:04:37 I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvy story.
1:04:38 One of the great ad men.
1:04:41 He said, remember the consumer is not a moron.
1:04:42 She’s your wife.
1:04:43 You wouldn’t lie to your own wife.
1:04:45 So don’t lie to mine.
1:04:47 And I love that you guys, you’re my family.
1:04:49 You’re like my wife and I won’t lie to you either.
1:04:53 So I’ll tell you the truth for every company I own right now, six companies.
1:04:55 I use Mercury for all of them.
1:04:58 So I’m proud to partner with Mercury because I use it for all of my
1:05:01 banking needs across my personal account, my business accounts.
1:05:04 And anytime I start a new company, it’s my first move.
1:05:05 I go open up a Mercury account.
1:05:07 I’m very confident in recommending it because I actually use it.
1:05:08 I’ve used it for years.
1:05:10 It is the best product on the market.
1:05:14 So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders,
1:05:17 go to mercury.com and apply in minutes.
1:05:20 And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
1:05:22 Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group
1:05:24 and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC.
1:05:25 All right, back to the episode.
1:05:28 (upbeat music)

0:00:01 Josh Wolf has this phrase where he says,
0:00:04 “chips on shoulders equals chips in pockets.”
0:00:06 Basically is when you meet an entrepreneur
0:00:11 who’s got an uncurable, unhealable identity wound,
0:00:13 that ends up being somebody who ends up doing really well.
0:00:15 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:18 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:21 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:00:22 ♪ On a road let’s travel ♪
0:00:24 – Let me fill you in on some things that I saw this week
0:00:26 that I just want to get your opinion on.
0:00:28 Sam Lesson, so Sam Lesson,
0:00:31 I think he was like an early Facebook employee
0:00:32 and now he’s an investor.
0:00:34 He says a lot of interesting stuff.
0:00:39 So he did this tweet where he talked about revenge businesses.
0:00:41 People who have started stuff
0:00:42 because they want to get revenge.
0:00:45 And an example of this is this guy named Parker Conrad.
0:00:47 Basically he started this company called Xenophis,
0:00:49 which was fast growing company.
0:00:51 It kicked ass, whatever.
0:00:54 He gets fired because it was like a Broadway culture.
0:00:56 There was like people caught like having sex
0:00:59 and like the stairwells, like people doing drunk dumb shit.
0:01:01 Like there was also like some compliancy issues
0:01:03 of like not everyone was like compliant.
0:01:04 And so he got fired.
0:01:06 And so we start this new company called Rippling,
0:01:08 which has taken off like a rocket.
0:01:10 And Sam Lesson, I guess, invested in it.
0:01:11 Sam with Palmer Lucky.
0:01:13 Guy got fired from Facebook.
0:01:14 He started Oculus.
0:01:16 Now it starts what’s called Andrel.
0:01:18 – Yeah, Andrel, yeah.
0:01:21 – And so anyway, Sam Lesson has this really cool line.
0:01:24 He says, “If you have in your diligence checklist,
0:01:27 is this company a form of deep revenge?”
0:01:29 The answer is yes, cut the check.
0:01:32 And the reason I’m bringing this up is because oftentimes
0:01:34 you’ll talk to someone and they’ll say,
0:01:36 “Hey man, you got a lot of hate in your heart.
0:01:37 You gotta let that out.
0:01:39 You can’t hold that in your heart.
0:01:41 You can’t like live with that.”
0:01:42 I’ve taken the opposite approach
0:01:44 for like the last handful of years.
0:01:47 I actually think that hate, if you have in your heart,
0:01:48 it can be really useful.
0:01:51 Like revenge and rage is like a very useful feeling.
0:01:52 So is shame.
0:01:54 People will be like, “Why are you guilting someone
0:01:55 into like doing this or that?”
0:01:59 I’m like, “Well, guilt is a wonderful emotion to improve.”
0:02:02 And I wanted to get your opinion on his take care.
0:02:05 – I mean, I think it’s honestly kind of genius.
0:02:08 And I think people don’t like to say things like this,
0:02:13 but there are a bunch of heuristics for investing
0:02:17 that sounds so stupid or sound inappropriate,
0:02:20 but are actually true and useful.
0:02:25 So, for example, and you can frame these different ways,
0:02:27 but I have a friend who was like,
0:02:29 you know how Paul Graham talks about,
0:02:32 he wants to invest in fierce nerds and a fierce nerd
0:02:36 is basically it’s a nerd who’s like overly competitive.
0:02:38 – And also like a little bit of a shithead.
0:02:39 – Yeah, exactly.
0:02:42 Is looking to sort of break the system,
0:02:45 beat the system is overly competitive,
0:02:48 maybe unrefined in certain other areas of their life,
0:02:50 but that’s what you want.
0:02:50 And my friend was like,
0:02:53 “Yeah, I look for fierce nerds who love money.”
0:02:55 He’s like specifically the for love who love money
0:02:59 is a multiplier on the fierce nerd concept.
0:03:01 And, you know, we’ve joked on this pod before
0:03:04 about like, you know, if in your pitch deck,
0:03:07 I’m like, okay, went on a Mormon mission
0:03:09 or like, you know, grew up in, you know,
0:03:11 a Slavic country, Eastern Europe.
0:03:13 I’m like, you know, little plus points
0:03:14 are going off in my head.
0:03:16 These are green flags in my head.
0:03:19 It’s not a, for sure, yes, but like, I’m not stupid.
0:03:21 Like eventually you realize,
0:03:23 God damn these people from Utah can sell.
0:03:26 Or, wow, these programmers from this area of the country
0:03:28 are pretty, pretty bad ass.
0:03:30 Or when somebody is, you know,
0:03:32 it’s like getting up, being a Harvard dropout
0:03:35 is a stronger signal than being a Harvard graduate.
0:03:36 There’s all these things that sound silly,
0:03:38 but actually end up being true
0:03:39 because if you’re the type of person
0:03:40 who can get into Harvard,
0:03:42 and that has enough conviction and an idea
0:03:43 to drop out of Harvard
0:03:45 against the social pressures of Harvard,
0:03:46 that actually turns out to be a pretty good filter.
0:03:48 Now, of course, these things can be gamed
0:03:50 if people realize that these are the signals
0:03:51 you’re looking for, right?
0:03:53 Like people showing up to pitch meetings
0:03:55 and like acting a little extra autistic.
0:03:57 It’s like, okay, we kind of know what you’re doing here.
0:03:58 You’re trying to fit some pattern
0:04:01 that this investor is trying to match against.
0:04:02 So all of these things would be gamed,
0:04:07 but it’s great when you can figure out a signal
0:04:09 that is not yet common.
0:04:12 And so this one of, is this person, you know,
0:04:13 is this a revenge company?
0:04:14 It’s a great signal.
0:04:16 It’s a green flag signal.
0:04:20 (upbeat music)
0:04:22 All right, so when I ran my company, The Hustle,
0:04:24 I think we had something like two million subscribers.
0:04:26 And we made money through advertising.
0:04:28 We didn’t actually make that much money per person
0:04:31 reading the newsletter because advertising in general
0:04:33 is kind of a crappy business model.
0:04:35 And so I remember sitting down and I’m like,
0:04:36 what are all the different ways
0:04:38 that I can make money off The Hustle
0:04:39 that aren’t advertising?
0:04:42 And so to make sure that you don’t make this mistake,
0:04:43 Sean, me and the Hustlebot team,
0:04:46 we went and looked at a bunch of different ways
0:04:48 to monetize your business.
0:04:51 And we put it all together in a really cool document
0:04:53 where we lay it all out along with our research
0:04:55 and we call it, very appropriately,
0:04:58 we call it the business monetization playbook.
0:05:00 Go to the description of this episode
0:05:02 and you’re gonna see a link to that
0:05:03 business monetization playbook.
0:05:04 It’s completely free.
0:05:05 You just click the link and you can see it
0:05:06 back to the episode.
0:05:09 (upbeat music)
0:05:13 – Have you seen the Ted Turner documentary
0:05:15 that recently came out on HBO?
0:05:16 – No.
0:05:18 – Everyone should go and watch this.
0:05:20 So Ted Turner has been one of my heroes for decades
0:05:23 because his biography was so good.
0:05:25 And basically his story is that he inherited
0:05:27 a billboard business from his father.
0:05:29 And it was a great billboard company.
0:05:31 Like it was in the South and it was thriving.
0:05:32 He took the money from that
0:05:34 and he started a local TV station.
0:05:36 He eventually bought the Braves for cheap.
0:05:38 He bought the Atlantic Hawks for cheap.
0:05:39 Then he parlayed all of that
0:05:41 and bet all of his money in CNN
0:05:44 and was constantly on the brink of bankruptcy.
0:05:46 Not because his businesses sucked,
0:05:50 but because he was just like pushing it 100% all the time.
0:05:51 And so there was this great line.
0:05:53 It said, this is about one of his employees.
0:05:56 He was, Ted had a great sense of paranoia
0:05:59 within the company, a sense that we were the little guys
0:06:02 fighting for our lives against some big unknown guys.
0:06:05 And the truth is, is that we were one of the biggest
0:06:06 billboard companies in the South,
0:06:08 one of the biggest in the country,
0:06:10 but we wanted to make everything seem more important
0:06:11 than it probably was.
0:06:15 In fact, he insisted on taking his telephone calls
0:06:18 outside on pay phones because he wanted everyone to believe
0:06:20 that his phone was being tapped.
0:06:23 And if you watch his documentary,
0:06:24 he does all these amazing things.
0:06:26 Like for example, he’s like, I have to launch CNN
0:06:28 because Americans at the time,
0:06:30 CNN was the first ever 24 hour news network.
0:06:32 He was like, we owe it to America.
0:06:34 Like Americans need to have an option
0:06:36 to know what’s going on in the world.
0:06:39 Like everything had this grand sense of like,
0:06:40 we have to do this for America.
0:06:42 Or like, they’re trying to crush us.
0:06:44 And it’s like, who’s they, we’re the best.
0:06:47 And that was a big takeaway from Ted that I loved.
0:06:49 And this post kind of reminded me
0:06:51 that same lesson posted about them.
0:06:53 There’s a couple of other things that come to mind on this.
0:06:57 One, Travis Kalanick is kind of like this.
0:07:00 So he had, he had gotten, gotten screwed
0:07:02 in his first startup, literally,
0:07:05 I think by Michael Ovitz and others.
0:07:08 Basically it was like during the Lime Wire.
0:07:10 Well, the background is Travis Kalanick,
0:07:10 the founder of Uber.
0:07:12 Before Uber, he started Red Swoosh,
0:07:14 which was some type of Lime Wire competitor.
0:07:17 File sharing service, peer-to-peer file sharing service.
0:07:19 And he ends up not making a lot of money from it.
0:07:20 By the way, Neval, same thing.
0:07:23 He has Neval’s first hit, Neval’s now like, you know,
0:07:27 this wise sage, you know, billionaire type of dude.
0:07:30 But he was kind of like an angry vengeful dude
0:07:33 when he started Epinions back in the day.
0:07:35 The VCs kicked him out of the company.
0:07:37 I think Epinions ended up going public during the dot com
0:07:38 or had like a kind of a big exit.
0:07:39 He got nothing.
0:07:41 He got screwed by his own VCs.
0:07:42 He didn’t make anything from that?
0:07:44 No, and he ends up suing them.
0:07:47 So he does the thing that normally in Silicon Valley,
0:07:49 the founders are very afraid to fight back against the VCs.
0:07:52 He publicly sues his own investors
0:07:55 and ends up creating Venture Hacks,
0:07:59 which is a blog dedicated to helping founders
0:08:00 not get screwed by VCs.
0:08:03 He’s like, dude, I didn’t know how to read these term sheets.
0:08:04 And I didn’t know what these contracts meant.
0:08:06 And they just kept telling me the dangerous words.
0:08:08 Oh, don’t worry, it’s all standard.
0:08:10 And he goes, there’s nothing more dangerous
0:08:12 than something that when a lawyer or a VC tells you
0:08:14 this is standard, don’t worry about it.
0:08:17 And he goes, what was standard ended up getting me screwed.
0:08:19 So he starts Venture Hacks, a blog,
0:08:21 and that leads to AngelList,
0:08:25 which basically took the power away from, in many ways,
0:08:28 the VCs and gave it to Angel investors,
0:08:30 the founders that created a marketplace.
0:08:33 So it created more transparency, more liquidity,
0:08:35 more competition in that marketplace.
0:08:37 And AngelList becomes a multi-billion dollar company.
0:08:39 Elon is on a revenge tour right now.
0:08:42 Literally the Democrats were attacking him
0:08:47 or demonizing him, suing Tesla and SpaceX
0:08:51 and all of his companies and adding more and more regulation.
0:08:54 And so he just flips the script, goes all in on Trump.
0:08:55 Doe goes on a revenge tour.
0:08:58 Now he’s basically like a de facto president.
0:09:01 And he’s now going, now he’s going in with Doe.
0:09:04 He’s trying to like rip out the guts of the bureaucracy, right?
0:09:07 Like these revenge tours are really, really strong.
0:09:09 Josh Wolf has this phrase where he says,
0:09:12 “chips on shoulders equals chips in pockets.”
0:09:13 Basically is when you meet an entrepreneur
0:09:15 who’s got a deep chip on the shoulder
0:09:20 and it’s sort of an uncurable, unhealable identity wound,
0:09:24 that ends up being somebody who ends up doing really well.
0:09:27 Dude, that’s a 10 out of 10 phrase, by the way.
0:09:28 Chips in shoulders or chips in pockets?
0:09:32 Yeah, that’s a beautiful, he knocked that one out the park.
0:09:32 It’s a good one.
0:09:34 And I’ve actually had trouble with this.
0:09:37 I used to go the other way, we would meet somebody
0:09:40 and they would say something that just sounded like,
0:09:42 oh dude, there’s a party that’s broken inside.
0:09:46 Like you’re really carrying this revenge against somebody.
0:09:50 I used to try to A, convince them that they shouldn’t hold that
0:09:53 or be like, this person, they’re not mature,
0:09:54 they’re not wise to it.
0:09:58 And I immediately missed out on several big opportunities.
0:09:59 And again, in that moment,
0:10:02 my reaction is to either A, judge,
0:10:04 which gets you nowhere,
0:10:06 or distance myself and say, all right,
0:10:09 this person’s not as, they’re not like-minded,
0:10:11 they’re not seeing the world the way I’m seeing it.
0:10:12 And now what I’ve realized is,
0:10:15 no, no, no, I need the exact opposite reaction.
0:10:17 You go really close to that person
0:10:18 and you hand them a check and you say,
0:10:19 can I be a part of what you’re doing?
0:10:22 I’d like for your crazy psychosis
0:10:23 to be to my financial benefit.
0:10:24 (laughing)
0:10:26 And so like, I’ll give you an example.
0:10:28 So I’m very close to this person
0:10:31 and they have basically made something,
0:10:34 they had a bankruptcy back in their 20s,
0:10:35 late 20s, I think.
0:10:37 So they were doing really well,
0:10:39 got to like a $25 million at worth,
0:10:41 but we’re overextended, they’re in the real estate game.
0:10:42 We’re a little bit overextended.
0:10:44 They were doing development on behalf
0:10:46 of this person who was expanding.
0:10:48 There’s like a guy who was expanding
0:10:49 a bunch of locations.
0:10:51 So he’s like, cool, you’re gonna do 15 locations?
0:10:53 Great, I’m in, I’ll go buy these
0:10:54 and I’ll develop them for you.
0:10:55 And then that guy got in trouble,
0:10:56 that guy went to jail.
0:10:58 So now he’s holding the bag on these 15 locations
0:11:01 that could only be used for one type of business.
0:11:03 And so you’re saying like,
0:11:04 it was like some guy,
0:11:06 let’s say it’s like a fast food franchise,
0:11:08 it was like, I’m gonna be creating like 50 locations
0:11:09 or whatever.
0:11:11 Well, you go develop them and I’ll meet you there.
0:11:13 They did deal one, it was great, deal two,
0:11:14 it was great, deal three, it was great.
0:11:15 And so he goes, awesome.
0:11:18 You want to do 18 more of these boxes, right?
0:11:20 And he goes and gets them permitted for this exact thing.
0:11:21 He does exactly what he’s supposed to do
0:11:23 as the real estate developer.
0:11:25 But then that guy got in trouble for tax.
0:11:26 He hadn’t been paying his taxes or whatever.
0:11:28 He can no longer do this.
0:11:30 So now he’s on the hook for like whatever,
0:11:33 18 payments for a business he can’t run
0:11:34 and he can’t use for any other purpose
0:11:36 and he can’t really sell it ’cause it’s distressed
0:11:37 and it’s, and this happened right in ’08
0:11:39 when the bank crisis happens.
0:11:41 And so nobody’s investing in real estate anymore.
0:11:44 So he gets like, basically this series of events
0:11:45 ends up going bankrupt.
0:11:49 Well, he has a traumatic experience
0:11:52 and he goes bankrupt, not only he goes bankrupt,
0:11:55 he was, I think he was engaged or just gotten married.
0:11:58 And all of a sudden he’s back in his childhood bedroom
0:12:00 with his wife.
0:12:01 They’ve had to move back to his parents’ bedroom.
0:12:02 He’s sort of ashamed of that.
0:12:05 And he had a $25 million net worth before that.
0:12:06 Yeah.
0:12:07 That’s crazy.
0:12:08 He’s like buying like a million dollar engagement ring,
0:12:10 like that kind of thing.
0:12:12 And they turn off the lights to go to bed
0:12:13 and he’s like, he’s telling her, he’s like,
0:12:15 “You know, I promise you, I will figure out a way.”
0:12:17 Like, “I don’t care what the hell I have to do.
0:12:18 I will fight back.
0:12:19 I will figure out a way to make this right.”
0:12:20 Give me nine months.
0:12:23 We’re gonna be here for nine months in this room
0:12:23 and like whatever.
0:12:25 And he gives her this inspiring speech,
0:12:27 this like gladiator speech.
0:12:28 And then he turns off the lights.
0:12:29 It’s like, “Oh, shit.”
0:12:30 And like, he had like the stars from,
0:12:32 you know those like sticker stars on the ceiling?
0:12:34 The neon ones that they start glowing
0:12:35 and they just crack up laughing.
0:12:37 He’s like, “Oh my God, where am I?”
0:12:39 And so, and then he starts basically his revenge tour.
0:12:42 And he’s in the 10 years since then
0:12:44 has built up like a billion dollar real estate portfolio
0:12:47 using only his own money, no outside investors.
0:12:48 Probably has, you know,
0:12:49 I don’t know something like four or five million
0:12:52 of his own equity in these deals.
0:12:54 And has, you know, really come back strong.
0:12:57 And so I for years have been looking
0:12:59 for a good way to invest in real estate.
0:13:01 Like I looked at, should I buy my own property?
0:13:02 Should I have some rental properties?
0:13:05 I think, I think I kind of should take this internet money
0:13:06 that I’m making, like I’m all in on the internet.
0:13:07 And I think I should take like, you know,
0:13:10 10, 20% of it, have it in like hard rock,
0:13:12 tangible assets you can go touch and feel.
0:13:13 That seems like a smart thing to do.
0:13:14 But I never knew how.
0:13:16 Should I do it myself?
0:13:18 I’m a beginner and that takes time
0:13:20 and I don’t want to go fix broken toilets.
0:13:22 Should I give it to one of these funds or syndicators?
0:13:24 And then you would like meet them
0:13:26 and you realize these guys are just fee monsters.
0:13:27 They make all their money on the buy.
0:13:28 They don’t make any money.
0:13:30 You can, good luck on the sell.
0:13:31 They make their money on the acquisition fees
0:13:33 and management fees.
0:13:34 So I didn’t like them.
0:13:36 And then when I met, and then when this guy was like,
0:13:40 Hey, you know, like, do you want to do a deal with me?
0:13:43 I was like, I’m all in because the chip on this guy’s shoulder
0:13:45 of proving his dad wrong and like coming back
0:13:47 from that bankruptcy and all of this, like,
0:13:51 even though today he’s super wealthy, he’ll never stop.
0:13:52 – If you know, if you’re a grown man who knows
0:13:55 what it feels like to sleep with your wife in a twin bed,
0:13:57 like, you know, that sticks with you, you know?
0:14:00 Like the feeling of like exposed ankles of blankets
0:14:03 that don’t cover your ankles stays with you.
0:14:04 – If you’ve ever had to call top bunk
0:14:08 with your wife, you’ve experienced a trauma
0:14:09 that I would like to invest in.
0:14:10 – Yeah.
0:14:12 – When we were selling the Milk Road,
0:14:14 I remember talking to, I think I could say this,
0:14:17 I remember talking to some of the potential buyers
0:14:21 and was like, wow, you’ve been really successful.
0:14:23 And I was like, what, and I’d try to get to the root.
0:14:24 What was the motivation?
0:14:26 Like, why did you even go this path?
0:14:28 Was it just, you had an idea
0:14:31 and or you had, you wanted to solve this problem.
0:14:34 And I talked to two people and one was like,
0:14:36 no, this girl rejected me in ninth grade.
0:14:38 And I just remember thinking like, F that,
0:14:40 like I’m gonna become somebody.
0:14:42 I’m gonna be, and he’s like, yeah, I know it sounds stupid.
0:14:44 And like, it was stupid, but it was effective.
0:14:45 And the other one said the same thing.
0:14:50 He’s like, I was trying to live in a house.
0:14:52 We had six friends and we were all like,
0:14:53 hey, let’s live together next year.
0:14:55 And then we found this awesome house,
0:14:57 but it was a five bed house.
0:15:01 And they were like, hey man, it’s only five beds.
0:15:03 He’s like, I realized I was in the bottom of my group.
0:15:04 And I was like, F those guys,
0:15:07 like every night they’re having fun in that house,
0:15:09 I am going to be building an empire.
0:15:11 And I remember just thinking like, really?
0:15:13 First of all, that was like 20 years ago, 15 years ago.
0:15:16 Like that’s still bothered, like that still motivates you.
0:15:18 And they’re like, don’t you feel kind of silly
0:15:20 that that bothers you so much?
0:15:22 Like, you know, and they were like, no,
0:15:25 I feel they were silly forever counting me out.
0:15:26 And I was like, wow, okay.
0:15:28 I am not wired like these people.
0:15:30 I am not fueled by the same rage
0:15:32 and like kind of revenge instincts.
0:15:33 And I’m not saying that’s the only thing
0:15:34 that motivated them.
0:15:37 But the fact that that was there still 15 years later
0:15:38 was very surprising to me.
0:15:40 And I’ve now learned to bet on it.
0:15:44 – I think that I’m not surprised
0:15:46 that you’ve never had issues
0:15:48 ’cause you’re, I’ve said this a bunch of times,
0:15:50 you’re very emotionally healthy.
0:15:52 Dude, I use rage and like guilt.
0:15:54 And like, I want to-
0:15:54 – Nicotine.
0:15:55 – I want to end nicotine, no.
0:15:57 And I want to get back against someone.
0:15:59 Like there’s times that I remember
0:16:02 my big brother like saying something smart alec to me.
0:16:05 And I still feel that like,
0:16:06 oh, I’m going to prove you wrong.
0:16:08 Like I still feel it.
0:16:09 Yeah, that shit runs deep.
0:16:11 But it is pretty helpful.
0:16:15 It makes you pretty miserable at life,
0:16:17 but it makes you like fairly productive.
0:16:20 – I’m not going to lie, I’m kind of jealous about it.
0:16:21 Like, I think it on the whole is probably good.
0:16:25 I don’t have that, but it does seem kind of badass
0:16:26 when I hear it.
0:16:27 – It takes like, it’s crazy.
0:16:30 So you know how I hate flying?
0:16:32 I went through like 10 years of therapy
0:16:34 to figure out why I don’t, like I’m so claustrophobic.
0:16:37 It comes down to when I was like in second grade,
0:16:40 my brother put me in a full Nelson,
0:16:42 you know, like a full Nelson with like a big brother.
0:16:44 And he dipped me underwater in our pool.
0:16:47 And he was like, you know, like teasing me,
0:16:48 but I sucked in a little bit of water
0:16:51 and I legitimately felt like I was drowning.
0:16:53 I distinctly remember like, I’m dying right now.
0:16:54 I’m about to die.
0:16:55 And he kept dunking me and I was like,
0:16:58 you fucking asshole, like I’m dying right now.
0:17:00 And like, it’s crazy how little moments,
0:17:03 like since then, by the way, I cannot stay in elevators.
0:17:04 I don’t like take subways.
0:17:05 – You’ll swim.
0:17:07 You just don’t, you’re like, I won’t fly.
0:17:08 – I’ll swim.
0:17:09 I don’t like anything where I’m constricted
0:17:10 and I can’t escape.
0:17:13 It’s rooted in like, I can’t escape.
0:17:15 So if it’s like a boat that like you’re going to go on
0:17:16 and you can’t see the shore, it’s like, no,
0:17:17 I’m not feeling that shit.
0:17:18 – Is this the hypnotist unlocked in you
0:17:20 or you’re saying you figured this out
0:17:21 through therapy or something else?
0:17:22 – Therapy and hypnotherapy.
0:17:25 Yeah, like I’ve spent so much time and money
0:17:26 to like figure out the root cause
0:17:31 and how to overcome this all from like a 60 second interaction
0:17:33 with my brother where he was a kid too.
0:17:35 He was being innocent and just messing with me.
0:17:36 Isn’t that crazy?
0:17:38 How like the things that happen as a kid
0:17:40 can like impact everything.
0:17:42 – By the way, does it help when you figure out
0:17:45 the root cause or like does it go away a little bit?
0:17:47 – No, a little bit.
0:17:49 Like I guess like there’s this like idea
0:17:50 of like getting over the stuff.
0:17:52 It’s called like walking to the gallow
0:17:54 where like when you get panicky,
0:17:55 it feels like you’re dying.
0:17:56 And in order to overcome that,
0:17:59 you just gotta be like, fuck it, I’m gonna go die.
0:18:02 Like I’m gonna like experience this thing
0:18:05 that I’m fearful of and you just have to do it.
0:18:08 And it’s like, it’s pretty bad.
0:18:09 And like, so you have to tell yourself
0:18:11 all these stories to help get over it.
0:18:13 And one of them is like, I only feel this way
0:18:15 because John did this to me long ago and I was fine.
0:18:16 Okay, I was fine.
0:18:18 I will make it through this.
0:18:19 And so you gotta like walk to the gallow
0:18:21 and you gotta like tell yourself all these stories.
0:18:24 And so that’s like one of the many coping mechanisms,
0:18:25 but it’s just all happens
0:18:26 because of a small thing when you’re a kid.
0:18:28 So it could have been like some girl said this,
0:18:29 some guy said this to you.
0:18:29 – Right.
0:18:30 – And it like, it’s crazy.
0:18:33 It just shapes like 50 years of your life.
0:18:34 – Dude, what a sick phrase, walk to the gallow.
0:18:37 Wow, what a, what is a gallow even?
0:18:38 Is that like–
0:18:39 – Like that’s where you get hung.
0:18:42 It’s it from a, I think it’s where you get hung.
0:18:45 It’s like, so the gallow is like the structure
0:18:46 where you have to get hung.
0:18:48 And so like, by the way, I tried to break this the other day.
0:18:51 I went on the subway for the first time ever in New York.
0:18:54 I was like, deathly afraid to go into the subway.
0:18:55 And I’m like, we’re just gonna go one stop.
0:18:57 And I was like, fuck it, we’re walking to the gallow.
0:19:00 – There’s also this, this isn’t just for business.
0:19:02 This is also like, you know, revenge body is a thing.
0:19:04 And remember that, that medium post we both love
0:19:05 how to lose weight and four easy steps.
0:19:09 And it’s like portion control, you know, avoid beer.
0:19:10 And then it’s like, have your heart broken
0:19:11 into not just broken shattered
0:19:14 into into a million itsy bitsy pieces.
0:19:16 It talks about basically it’s the heartbreak
0:19:18 that’s like the fuel for the gym.
0:19:21 Like in the same way that like, you know
0:19:24 if you want Adele to go triple platinum
0:19:25 she just needs a bad heartbreak, right?
0:19:29 It’s, it fuels artists, it fuels fitness,
0:19:31 it fuels business.
0:19:33 And I think it’s sort of undeniable.
0:19:35 I don’t know if it’s healthy, but it’s definitely effective.
0:19:37 – Taylor Swift wouldn’t write hits
0:19:40 if she had a successful wonderful relationship.
0:19:41 – Well, we’ll see.
0:19:42 Travis Kelsey.
0:19:45 – Well, she hasn’t had any new hits yet.
0:19:48 (all laughing)
0:19:50 You know, she has hits for a reason.
0:19:57 – All right, so a while back we had Gary Tan.
0:19:58 He’s the president of Y Comediar,
0:20:00 which is the most successful incubator of all time.
0:20:02 We had him on the podcast and he said
0:20:05 that the future of businesses is creator led.
0:20:08 And that’s why I’m interested in the podcast.
0:20:10 Creators are brands.
0:20:12 Creators are brands explores how storytellers
0:20:14 are building brands online.
0:20:16 They’re gonna cover the entire creative process.
0:20:18 They’re gonna talk about navigating brand partnerships.
0:20:20 They’re gonna talk about what you need to know
0:20:22 about growing your social media platforms.
0:20:23 Everything you need to know on this topic.
0:20:26 Creators are brands is the pod.
0:20:28 So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
0:20:31 Again, it’s called Creators Are Brands with Tom Boyd.
0:20:33 All right, back to the episode.
0:20:37 – All right, what else you got?
0:20:40 – All right, so something a little bit happier.
0:20:44 I saw this on 60 Minutes, I think two weeks ago.
0:20:46 I could not stop thinking about this.
0:20:48 So let me fill you in on this story.
0:20:50 So there’s a small country called Bhutan.
0:20:54 Bhutan is in between India and China.
0:20:57 So it’s between these behemoth countries.
0:21:00 And because of that, a lot of people don’t know about it.
0:21:03 – And it’s tiny, half the size of Indiana.
0:21:03 – It’s tiny.
0:21:06 I think their stock market is 18 companies
0:21:08 and the total market cap of their stock market
0:21:13 is $800 million, which is 170,000th the size
0:21:14 of the US stock market.
0:21:16 So it’s like this super small country.
0:21:18 In fact, I read that in 1999,
0:21:20 that was the first year they got TV.
0:21:21 So it’s like this tiny country.
0:21:25 Well, in the ’70s, the king of Bhutan
0:21:27 did a diplomatic trip to India.
0:21:30 And according to the story,
0:21:34 this Indian reporter goes, “Hey, King, we’re neighbors,
0:21:36 but I don’t know anything about you.
0:21:37 Like what’s your deal?
0:21:38 What are you about?”
0:21:40 And in fact, what’s your gross national product?
0:21:41 Like tell me, what are you guys known for?
0:21:45 He goes, gross national product?
0:21:45 What?
0:21:46 What are you talking about?
0:21:47 GDP?
0:21:48 What are you saying?
0:21:52 In Bhutan, gross national happiness is more important
0:21:53 than gross national product.
0:21:55 And it was this like off-handed comment
0:21:58 that he made saying their biggest export is happiness.
0:22:00 We care about happiness.
0:22:02 And that totally hit.
0:22:03 It went viral.
0:22:06 Everyone was like, this little country’s,
0:22:07 they must be the happiest place on earth.
0:22:08 But the king says that they care more
0:22:11 about gross national happiness than money.
0:22:16 And the king was like, “Oh, people really resonate with that.
0:22:17 Let’s make that our thing.”
0:22:20 And so over the next five, 10 years,
0:22:24 they actually implement this and make this their thing.
0:22:26 And so in this country, Bhutan, to this day,
0:22:30 every five years, surveyors traveled the country
0:22:33 and they asked the people about education level,
0:22:34 salary, and material possession.
0:22:36 So like a lot of like normal stuff.
0:22:39 And they also say, like, do you have negative thoughts?
0:22:41 Do you have positive thoughts?
0:22:42 How much time do you spend working?
0:22:45 How much time do you spend praying and sleeping?
0:22:49 And the data that they get is factor in
0:22:53 to a lot of the rules and things like that that they make.
0:22:56 And I thought it was like a great story
0:22:59 about how you can care about things
0:23:03 that aren’t seemingly important like happiness.
0:23:05 And I had, well, you know what I mean?
0:23:07 Like, it’s like, you know, we care about like money.
0:23:11 And like, yeah, and there is a few critiques,
0:23:13 which is like, according to the world happiness report,
0:23:15 Bhutan is like average.
0:23:18 Like it’s like not kicking ass.
0:23:20 But like, you know, I don’t know if that’s a matter
0:23:23 of like different ways of measuring things like that.
0:23:24 ‘Cause happiness is like a way,
0:23:26 like it’s kind of hard to measure happiness.
0:23:28 Is it like that fleeting moment that you feel
0:23:30 like the 30 seconds after you’ve eaten a good meal
0:23:32 or is it like, I feel contentment, whatever.
0:23:34 But I thought it was cool for three reasons.
0:23:37 One, the king just said some shit and it hit
0:23:38 and he ran with it.
0:23:41 (laughing)
0:23:45 – It’s been there, bro, I feel that becomes a thing, right?
0:23:49 – Yeah, it’s like wearing a certain outfit in fourth grade.
0:23:50 And you’re like, I guess this is my identity.
0:23:51 – ‘Cause I’m a high stock guy.
0:23:53 – Yeah, like I’m a chain wall, it’s my guy.
0:23:55 Like I’m a chain wall guy.
0:23:56 Like that’s just my thing.
0:23:57 ‘Cause the teacher said that.
0:24:00 The second thing is that I do think it’s like pretty fascinating
0:24:03 that in a culture that you and I are part of
0:24:06 and America’s particularly because we’re such hard workers,
0:24:07 it’s all about work, work, work.
0:24:09 But that’s not really like the point of all this.
0:24:10 It’s like to be happy.
0:24:12 So I thought it was cool that they were measuring that.
0:24:15 But another third and final thing
0:24:16 that this makes us interesting.
0:24:18 Have you ever heard of a pairing metric?
0:24:21 – Yeah, basically like two metrics that let’s say
0:24:22 you have revenue on one side,
0:24:24 but you might have profitability on the other
0:24:26 in order to make sure that like,
0:24:28 if you over-optimize on just revenue,
0:24:30 you might totally nuke your profits.
0:24:34 Or if it’s about growth, you want, you know, NPS score,
0:24:35 make sure your customers are happy.
0:24:35 Is that what you mean?
0:24:38 – Yeah, and so when Tim Ferriss invested in the hustle,
0:24:40 we, I got to hang out with him for an hour or so.
0:24:42 And I was telling him about how many subscribers
0:24:43 that we were growing by.
0:24:45 He’s like, well, you need like a pairing metric.
0:24:48 You need, you know, not just top-line like subscribers,
0:24:50 email subscribers, but like, are they engaging?
0:24:51 Are they opening? Whatever.
0:24:52 You have to have a pairing metric.
0:24:54 Otherwise, it kind of ruins the whole thing.
0:24:56 And that was like kind of fascinating to me.
0:24:58 I never heard that phrase.
0:25:00 And I didn’t think about having a pairing metric
0:25:02 with like government policy or, you know,
0:25:04 like anything other than business.
0:25:08 And this is like a really great example of a pairing metric
0:25:11 where it’s about GDP, traditional metrics,
0:25:14 but also, you know, make sure that your people
0:25:15 are happy along the way.
0:25:17 So I thought it was pretty cool.
0:25:19 – Yeah, I love this story.
0:25:20 I think I was telling you before this.
0:25:23 I think we both somehow, the odds of us both having Bhutan
0:25:26 on our list are so weirdly low.
0:25:27 I think maybe we both saw the same thing.
0:25:30 I saw the 60 Minutes thing a few weeks ago.
0:25:31 – What did you think?
0:25:32 – First of all, it’s so funny.
0:25:35 When you watch 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes looks so old, dude.
0:25:37 It looks, and 60 Minutes is basically
0:25:39 just a YouTube channel.
0:25:41 – It’s great though, right?
0:25:43 – It’s great, but why does it look so old?
0:25:46 Like literally the person on there is old.
0:25:49 The clock they use for the 60 Minutes thing is so old.
0:25:50 All of the editing is so old.
0:25:52 They don’t know like, well, like a jump cut is.
0:25:53 It’s insane.
0:25:54 – I think it’s a fun fact.
0:25:55 I had almost positive.
0:25:58 It’s the only TV show without a theme song.
0:26:02 It’s literally just tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic.
0:26:03 – Yeah, exactly, it’s crazy.
0:26:06 So when you watch 60 Minutes, it’s interesting to just look
0:26:07 at it and be like, what is this, dude?
0:26:10 Anyways, here’s a couple of the things
0:26:12 that stood out to me about this.
0:26:14 So first, why do I, why am I interested in a country?
0:26:16 I’m interested in a country because in the same way
0:26:19 I’m interested in companies that are run in interesting ways,
0:26:21 or if a company had a unique mission or business model
0:26:24 or a unique way of doing things that’d be interesting to me,
0:26:26 countries are just big companies.
0:26:27 And I found this pretty interesting
0:26:29 that if you looked at it like a company,
0:26:31 where it was like, oh, what’s our main metric?
0:26:33 It’s not revenue, it’s happiness.
0:26:35 So it’s like, instead of the GMV,
0:26:37 they’re looking at how much happiness they’re producing
0:26:39 in their own economy.
0:26:42 And I like that they measure their own.
0:26:45 And like, did you look at their happiness index,
0:26:47 kind of zero to one and how that all works?
0:26:49 – Yeah, it’s like a weighted score, right?
0:26:51 What were all the metrics?
0:26:52 – It’s basically, it’s a weighted score.
0:26:55 Then they sort of, they ask people a bunch of questions
0:26:59 about their psychological wellbeing, their health,
0:27:02 their time, their education, all these different things.
0:27:05 And they end up with like, basically,
0:27:09 they’re a 0.781 on their scale, which is pretty good.
0:27:12 And they measure, oh, that’s up 3.3% since last year.
0:27:15 And basically 9.5% of Bhutni’s people are deeply happy,
0:27:19 38% are extensively happy, 45% are narrowly happy,
0:27:22 and 6.4% were unhappy, according to them.
0:27:26 And what I thought was cool was that a couple of things.
0:27:29 Number one, it’s one of the very few cases
0:27:31 where someone in power gives it up.
0:27:34 So they had a king and he voluntarily is like,
0:27:36 “You know what, this could just go to my son,
0:27:38 but we need a democracy.”
0:27:39 And the funny thing is the people there were like,
0:27:42 “No, no, king, stay king.”
0:27:43 And he’s like, “No, no, no, we need a democracy.”
0:27:46 They’re like, “Democracy, you see, India is a democracy,
0:27:47 Pakistan is a democracy, look at those places,
0:27:51 they’re always at war, it’s violent, forget democracy,
0:27:52 we don’t want it, we’re happy.”
0:27:55 And he was like, “Well, if I just keep giving this power
0:27:57 down by birth, this won’t end well.”
0:28:00 So I thought seeing somebody relinquish power
0:28:04 in the crime is so rare that you just overlook it
0:28:05 when you’re on the surface.
0:28:06 But if you actually think about that deeply,
0:28:09 that actually is like a really noble and very cool
0:28:11 and very unique thing.
0:28:13 How few, Biden didn’t want to give up power
0:28:15 and Trump doesn’t want to give up power,
0:28:16 nobody wants to give up power.
0:28:19 Power is one of the most addictive things in the world.
0:28:20 And so I just thought that was really noble
0:28:23 and really cool of him to voluntarily go to democracy
0:28:25 at a time of peace, which is not usually what happens.
0:28:27 Usually, if a democracy happens,
0:28:30 it’s after a time of violence or war, people need change,
0:28:33 or the Western country comes in and helps
0:28:35 and tries to force a democracy on them.
0:28:36 So I thought that was cool.
0:28:38 Did they say that was the only time
0:28:39 that’s ever happened that way?
0:28:42 It’s the only one I know of, they kind of referenced
0:28:44 that that’s never really happened before,
0:28:47 that a democracy happened in a time of peace voluntarily.
0:28:52 Also crazy that just like until the 70s, like in 1974,
0:28:53 there’s people listening to this podcast
0:28:57 that are born before 1974, they didn’t have a currency,
0:29:00 it was barter, even up until 1974.
0:29:01 That’s crazy, right?
0:29:03 And the crazy thing was even though there was barter,
0:29:05 they still had to pay taxes.
0:29:06 And it was like, you could pay your tax
0:29:09 with like giving the government like a cow.
0:29:10 Or it was like, oh, you don’t have livestock,
0:29:12 all right, do labor then.
0:29:15 And so then they built these amazing buildings
0:29:17 because your taxes was basically community service.
0:29:20 It’s like, hey, I’ll go donate like 100 hours of labor
0:29:21 to pay my tax for the year.
0:29:22 And then because of that,
0:29:24 they built these really cool buildings.
0:29:27 Side weird note, our friend, Sheila,
0:29:30 friend of the pod, Sheila went to Potomac.
0:29:31 I think he posted this thread,
0:29:33 it’s a thread of him going there.
0:29:34 He like meets the king.
0:29:36 ‘Cause he’s like, it sounds crazy to meet the king,
0:29:38 but like, he’s like, I was at a bar
0:29:38 and I was talking to this guy
0:29:40 and that guy was the former, like whatever,
0:29:44 he was the former like prime minister or whatever.
0:29:45 He’s like, now he’s a surgeon
0:29:46 and he’s just drinking at this bar.
0:29:47 And he’s like, oh, you want to meet the king?
0:29:49 Yeah, I can introduce you.
0:29:51 And so he meets the king.
0:29:53 And so he’s like, he’s talking about his experience there.
0:29:55 One of the crazy things he points out is like,
0:29:58 a lot of the buildings have penises painted on them
0:29:59 in like artful ways.
0:30:02 So, you know, it’s a little bit of a super bad
0:30:04 mixed in there, I like that.
0:30:06 The other crazy thing is the Bitcoin stuff.
0:30:07 Did you see their Bitcoin stuff?
0:30:10 – I know they have, they own more Bitcoin
0:30:13 than the total market value of their stock market.
0:30:15 It’s like a billion dollars in Bitcoin.
0:30:18 – Yeah, they basically have made themselves wealthy for life.
0:30:21 They use their, like their vast nature.
0:30:24 So like, you know, they use hydroelectric mining
0:30:24 to mine Bitcoin.
0:30:28 And it’s believed that they have a billion dollars of Bitcoin.
0:30:32 – But that was like, I think that was reported
0:30:34 like, you know, eight months ago.
0:30:38 So it’s as if they have double that now.
0:30:39 You know what I mean?
0:30:40 Like it’s been, they’ve had a great run.
0:30:43 – The US has it because they seized the Silk Road, right?
0:30:46 So they have, you know, the US has 20 billion.
0:30:49 China has 20 billion.
0:30:50 UK has 6 billion.
0:30:53 El Salvador, which has been buying and holding Bitcoin
0:30:56 has 6,000.
0:30:58 – And the guy on that 60 minute show,
0:31:01 he did a great job of saying, he was like, we’re human.
0:31:04 We still want to be rich and we want stuff
0:31:05 and we want all this other stuff.
0:31:08 We also want to be happy.
0:31:09 And so, cause people were like, well,
0:31:11 so if you’re just about happiness,
0:31:13 buying Bitcoin and all this is like, wow,
0:31:15 I still want nice shit.
0:31:18 – Yeah, more prosperous we are, the happier we’ll be.
0:31:19 The other thing that I thought was cool, you know,
0:31:21 they do free education, free healthcare,
0:31:22 all that good stuff.
0:31:25 But they also were like, hey, 60% of the land
0:31:27 is going to be like dedicated to nature.
0:31:30 And but there’s no, I think they don’t allow mountain climbing.
0:31:31 They like have these amazing mountains
0:31:33 because they’re in the Himalayas.
0:31:35 But you’re not allowed to, and he said the great line.
0:31:39 He goes, he goes, nature is not meant to be conquered.
0:31:42 He’s like, man, that’s this thirst to just conquer everything.
0:31:43 Oh, there’s a mountain, I got a climate,
0:31:45 put my flag on the top.
0:31:46 And they just had a different attitude.
0:31:48 It’s like, nature is beautiful, it’s meant to be enjoyed,
0:31:49 meant to be, it’s sacred.
0:31:52 It’s meant to be sort of revered and not conquered.
0:31:53 And I just thought, man, these people roll
0:31:57 to a different beat and I respect it.
0:31:59 I’m glad that these little experiments live.
0:32:01 – I had the exact same feeling, which is I saw him talk
0:32:04 and they sort of fit a lot of the stereotypes
0:32:06 that you would have with like a,
0:32:09 Nepal, the Dalai Lama, like this like rise.
0:32:11 ‘Cause, and I think they’re like,
0:32:13 they have like a national outfit or something like that.
0:32:15 And it looks like the, and they are Buddhist,
0:32:18 but it looks like that, like whatever the Dalai Lama,
0:32:19 like the Shah or whatever he wears.
0:32:21 So they like, yeah.
0:32:24 – We love Jacob.
0:32:26 – Yeah, the national sport is grinding.
0:32:33 They had this like cool vibe of like wisdom and shit.
0:32:35 And it was very shocking to see that
0:32:37 because I’m like, just watching this on a Sunday night
0:32:39 as I’m gearing up to talk about money
0:32:42 and gearing up to get after a crush the week.
0:32:45 And then I see this guy who was like,
0:32:46 talk about happiness and shit.
0:32:49 And I was like, this is incredibly refreshing.
0:32:50 It was pretty cool.
0:32:52 It seems like it’s a great country.
0:32:53 I think, by the way, there’s all these like other downsides.
0:32:56 I think she’ll even said, he was like,
0:32:57 it’s a pain in the ass to get there.
0:32:59 Like I don’t even think they have an international airport.
0:33:00 – Like the roads are not very developed.
0:33:02 Like there’s, you know, there’s other things.
0:33:04 When you prioritize happiness above all,
0:33:06 maybe your roads kind of suck.
0:33:08 – Yeah, so like, it was pretty sick, dude.
0:33:09 I thought it was great.
0:33:10 I was very inspired.
0:33:11 So I wanted to bring up Bhutan.
0:33:12 – Well, there is one other piece to it,
0:33:14 which I guess a bunch of young people
0:33:16 are leaving the country.
0:33:17 Did you see that part?
0:33:18 I didn’t fully follow that,
0:33:22 but they were then gonna build a new city in Bhutan,
0:33:24 the mindfulness city.
0:33:25 And it was gonna be like,
0:33:28 they launched like a hundred million dollar bond.
0:33:30 And then they’re basically trying to make it a city
0:33:32 where it’s like walking and cycling
0:33:33 and green spaces for meditation
0:33:36 and mindfulness based education and ecotourism.
0:33:38 Like all the shit biology talks about
0:33:39 is like a network state
0:33:41 or like the practice guys are trying to do.
0:33:43 These got, you know, Bhutan is building a new city
0:33:46 with like its own cultural values,
0:33:48 trying to use that to attract people to the country.
0:33:52 – Well, you wanna hear a funny story is biology is,
0:33:54 and a lot of these crypto guys are in
0:33:56 on this new thing called American classes.
0:34:00 It’s that monument that they are proposing
0:34:01 that they build in the Bay Area.
0:34:04 I don’t know if it’s, it will never get built very likely,
0:34:07 but the same architect who’s on board with that
0:34:10 is doing their, that was the guy in the 60 minutes episode.
0:34:12 He’s the guy who’s building Bhutan’s new city.
0:34:16 And so there is just like weird crossover
0:34:19 of the crypto guys and these people who are like,
0:34:22 what would a new city look like and Bhutan?
0:34:23 – Yeah, it’s pretty inspiring.
0:34:24 Honestly, it makes you think bigger, right?
0:34:26 It makes you think about things
0:34:27 that you just take for granted.
0:34:28 They just seem set in stone.
0:34:29 They seem like they were just,
0:34:31 they were already here, they’ll always be here.
0:34:33 It always was this way, it’ll always be this way.
0:34:35 And then you hear about somebody, you know,
0:34:37 these people who are trying to like shake that
0:34:38 and you realize, oh wow, it’s all,
0:34:41 the whole world is more malleable than you thought.
0:34:43 – Yeah, and they also were approaching it
0:34:47 in an interesting way with their new city.
0:34:50 I forget the quotes, but he said something about how,
0:34:53 he’s like, we know that this is like a 50 year project.
0:34:55 Like we’re going to go slow
0:34:57 because we don’t want to hurt the environment.
0:34:58 And it was, and the guy was like,
0:35:00 but you’re going to be dead when they like do that.
0:35:02 And he was like, isn’t that awesome?
0:35:04 That’s something will like outlive me.
0:35:07 Like they had a very, so if you’re listening to this,
0:35:08 this is on YouTube for free.
0:35:10 So Google Bhutan, 60 minutes.
0:35:12 It was an awesome segment.
0:35:18 – Hey, Sean here.
0:35:20 I want to tell you a little story about Winston Churchill.
0:35:23 So Churchill once said, first we shape our buildings
0:35:25 and thereafter they shape us.
0:35:26 And I think this is true,
0:35:28 not just for the buildings we see in cities,
0:35:30 but also for the building blocks you choose in your company.
0:35:32 For any company that I start,
0:35:34 I use Mercury for all of my banking needs.
0:35:36 Why? Well, it was built by a YC founder.
0:35:38 And you could tell this is built by a founder
0:35:40 who understands the needs of other founders.
0:35:43 Second thing is this modern, it’s clean, easy to use.
0:35:44 The design is really nice.
0:35:46 You never have to drive somewhere, park,
0:35:47 put coins in the meter, get out,
0:35:49 just to do one simple task.
0:35:51 You could do everything in just a couple of clicks.
0:35:53 They got bill pay, checking account, savings account,
0:35:55 wire transfers, everything you need, they got it.
0:35:56 I use it for not one,
0:35:58 but actually six of my companies right now
0:36:00 and actually even have a personal account with them.
0:36:01 It’s kind of amazing.
0:36:02 So if you’re ready to operate in the future,
0:36:05 head over to mercury.com, apply in minutes.
0:36:07 Disclaimer, Mercury is a financial technology company
0:36:10 out of bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group
0:36:12 and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.
0:36:15 Thank you to Winston Churchill for that little ad segment.
0:36:16 All right, back to this episode.
0:36:19 (upbeat music)
0:36:23 All right, now that we talked about Bhutan and happiness
0:36:24 and how there’s more life than money,
0:36:27 can I tell you about one of the most ruthless,
0:36:32 capitalist, bloodthirsty moves that I’ve seen in a while?
0:36:34 You know how the in boxing, they say steal the round
0:36:36 ’cause like in the last 10 seconds,
0:36:37 that’s what judges remember.
0:36:39 They don’t remember the first 100,
0:36:40 they don’t remember the first 120 seconds,
0:36:41 but they remember the last 10 seconds.
0:36:44 Yeah, but whatever you say last
0:36:45 is what I’m gonna be most inspired by.
0:36:49 So let’s, we skipped.
0:36:51 So sit down, Bhutan, you had your moment.
0:36:54 Yeah, now tell me how I can go cut some fuckers.
0:36:55 All right.
0:36:57 Private equity roll up in the education space
0:36:59 that I found pretty interesting.
0:37:00 All right, what does that mean?
0:37:05 So I went to high school in Texas for the first two years
0:37:07 and then my mom and dad came to me one day
0:37:09 and they were like, “Hey, check this out.
0:37:11 “Doesn’t this look like a cool house?”
0:37:12 I’m like, “Yeah, it looks pretty cool.”
0:37:13 And they’re like, “We’re gonna live there.”
0:37:14 And I was like, “Okay.”
0:37:16 And they’re like, “It’s in Beijing.”
0:37:19 And then my family moved me to Beijing in 10th grade.
0:37:19 And so-
0:37:21 They went to?
0:37:23 Yeah, yeah, it wasn’t just me.
0:37:26 That would have been super cool.
0:37:29 They moved me there and they moved themselves.
0:37:32 So they were like, “Hey, all those friends you’ve had,
0:37:33 “you’re not gonna see them anymore.”
0:37:36 And so they also lied to me and said my dog couldn’t come
0:37:39 and told me that China doesn’t allow dogs.
0:37:42 And later in life found out that was a huge lie.
0:37:45 So maybe that’ll be my revenge to her, dude, that’s it.
0:37:46 That’s the thing.
0:37:49 Wait, so they’ve leave the dog?
0:37:52 Yeah, we sold our dog ’cause dogs can’t go to China.
0:37:53 And I was like, “What?”
0:37:54 Oh my God.
0:37:56 They’re stupid, there’s no Google at the time.
0:37:58 They got to, this is pretty Google.
0:38:01 So I finished high school in China
0:38:02 and I went to this school called
0:38:03 the International School of Beijing.
0:38:04 And it was actually an awesome school
0:38:06 and it turned out to be great for me to move
0:38:08 and all these awesome things happened to me there.
0:38:09 But as one of these things again,
0:38:11 I go to the school, I just take it for granted.
0:38:12 There’s a school here.
0:38:14 I don’t know, schools are part of the government.
0:38:15 They’re just like from the land.
0:38:16 I don’t know, God put it here.
0:38:19 I don’t know what puts these international schools here.
0:38:21 And now I’m like in my 30s
0:38:24 and I’m reading up and I realized, oh shit,
0:38:25 these international schools
0:38:28 are an absolute juggernaut of a business.
0:38:31 And so I’d like to tell you about this rollup
0:38:34 that happened called Nord Anglia.
0:38:35 Have you ever heard of this?
0:38:40 Yeah, my friend Anand from CB Insights is obsessed with it.
0:38:41 And so here’s what these guys did.
0:38:45 So the founding story is back in the 70s,
0:38:46 things like 50 years old,
0:38:48 there was one school in the UK,
0:38:49 or there wasn’t even a school.
0:38:52 It was like making materials for other schools
0:38:54 to teach English as a foreign language
0:38:57 to people who are trying to learn English in the UK.
0:39:00 And then they expand that into Eastern Europe or whatever.
0:39:01 And then they start their own school.
0:39:02 They’re like, oh, we’ll do our own school
0:39:05 for teaching international people
0:39:07 and we’ll teach them in a sort of English,
0:39:08 second language kind of way.
0:39:10 And over time, the thing grows.
0:39:13 And it goes from one school to multiple schools.
0:39:16 And they create this like business
0:39:21 that eventually becomes a $14 billion
0:39:26 conglomerate of 80 plus international private schools.
0:39:28 Can you say the name one more time?
0:39:33 Nord Anglia, N-O-R-D, and then Anglia’s A-N-G-L-I-A.
0:39:36 So what do they do?
0:39:39 And by the way, remember when IMG sold IMG,
0:39:40 which is like the sports prep academy
0:39:42 and it sold for a billion dollars?
0:39:44 And we’re like, wow, Nord Anglia bought it.
0:39:46 So this bought IMG.
0:39:47 And the reason they bought IMG,
0:39:50 they’re like, IMG is a really cool sports focused brand,
0:39:51 but it’s all in the US.
0:39:55 We know how to basically create international schools
0:39:59 that the richest, wealthiest or expats living overseas
0:40:01 want their kids to go to,
0:40:05 to be able to get into maybe US colleges.
0:40:07 So they bought it for a billion dollars being like,
0:40:09 cool, we’re just gonna take the IMG brand
0:40:10 and we’re gonna pop it up in China and India
0:40:12 and all these different countries
0:40:15 in order to get those types of students
0:40:16 who are sports focused,
0:40:21 whereas their schools are more teaching the IB curriculum,
0:40:24 which is like the kind of international baccalaureate,
0:40:26 the equivalent of AP in the United States is IB.
0:40:28 So like I took the IB program.
0:40:31 And so, but the cool thing about this business
0:40:33 is actually for the first 10 years,
0:40:35 it was just a slow burn.
0:40:36 And these businesses fascinate me.
0:40:38 Like I don’t even really fully understand
0:40:41 how you can go from kind of like a consultant
0:40:42 selling teaching materials.
0:40:45 At one point they had a daycare, like a nursery built in.
0:40:47 It was like just this slow, sleepy business for like 10 years.
0:40:49 Was it like a family run thing?
0:40:51 Yeah, it was like privately owned.
0:40:53 And then they hired the CEO
0:40:53 and then they start to expand,
0:40:56 they start their own schools, they start expanding.
0:40:59 Then they start buying other school, school like chains.
0:41:01 So they bought like a six school chain
0:41:05 that had like a presence in let’s say France.
0:41:06 And then they buy another one
0:41:07 that has a presence in Latin America.
0:41:09 And they’re just rolling up
0:41:11 as many international schools as they can buy.
0:41:14 They buy five schools in India for $200 million.
0:41:17 And so now they got five international schools in India.
0:41:21 And basically this company ended up going public
0:41:26 and then had to take private offer
0:41:29 and now is valued at $14 billion, which is pretty wild.
0:41:31 And there’s one PE firm,
0:41:33 this Swedish private equity firm
0:41:35 that has just made an absolute killing.
0:41:40 It’s called EQT on this entire like 20 year run of this business.
0:41:43 So, you know, let’s say, here’s the timeline.
0:41:46 1970s, it’s teacher training and language programs, 1990s.
0:41:49 So now this is like, you know, 20 years into the business,
0:41:50 they pivot to owning and operating
0:41:52 their own international schools.
0:41:55 2008, now another 18 years goes by,
0:41:56 the Swedish PE firm comes in
0:41:57 and gives them a bunch of money
0:42:00 to rapidly go expand and acquire schools.
0:42:01 2014, they go public.
0:42:04 2017, they go private again for $4 billion.
0:42:08 2024, it’s acquired $14 and a half billion.
0:42:13 And 2008, when they did the private equity round,
0:42:15 they were at 40 million in EBITDA
0:42:18 and you know, about 200 million in revenue.
0:42:21 And so these things traded like eight and a half X EBITDA
0:42:24 basically and they only own like 10%
0:42:25 of the international school market.
0:42:27 Still 90% of the international school market
0:42:30 is fragmented and not owned by anybody.
0:42:33 – Well, now they do a billion in revenue, it said.
0:42:35 – Yeah, now they do a billion in revenue
0:42:37 with you know, hundreds of millions in EBITDA.
0:42:39 And actually it’s, I think it’s even,
0:42:41 I think it might even be even more than that.
0:42:42 But like, just to give you an example,
0:42:45 here’s a slide, but like this is like one of their schools.
0:42:48 So they show like the profitability of a school.
0:42:49 This is one of their case studies.
0:42:51 So it’s like Dubai.
0:42:53 They opened an international school in Dubai.
0:42:54 They opened it in 2014.
0:42:59 It took $7 and a half million to build it and open it.
0:43:02 And then basically they break even in year two
0:43:03 slash year three.
0:43:07 And then it’s basically making 55% net cash on cash.
0:43:09 Once it’s at that mature level,
0:43:13 once they get the enrollment up to like 1400, 1500 students.
0:43:16 And so you could see like the enrollment basically
0:43:18 by year three, they’re at almost 1400 students.
0:43:19 So almost at capacity.
0:43:22 – How do they convince parents that they’re worth it?
0:43:25 ‘Cause like with school, it’s tradition usually
0:43:28 is what like, you know, gets people to buy in.
0:43:30 – Yeah, so it’s kind of the same thing.
0:43:32 So if you go look at their pitch,
0:43:37 it’s basically that, you know, we have the best run schools,
0:43:40 our kids get into top tier colleges.
0:43:43 And you know, the X% of them, you know,
0:43:46 huge like 90 something percent of them graduate.
0:43:48 They do better than their peers on, you know,
0:43:51 the standardized testing, things like that.
0:43:53 – It’s basically like when Chick-fil-A
0:43:55 started expanding to New York
0:43:57 and all the New Yorkers were like, finally,
0:43:58 you know what I mean?
0:44:00 Like people like know this brand.
0:44:01 It’s amazing the school I went to, right?
0:44:04 Like we probably had like a hundred percent graduation rate.
0:44:06 Like there’s like no dropouts.
0:44:09 Everybody graduates and then like 98% went to college.
0:44:11 So it’s like, compared to like a normal school,
0:44:14 the whole school I was going to in Houston before that
0:44:16 probably was like 75% graduation
0:44:20 and less than 50% would enroll in college the next year.
0:44:22 And so, and then the school I went to, you know,
0:44:25 that’s like a first grade through 12th grade school.
0:44:27 And every year you’re basically paying college tuition.
0:44:29 It was like 40 grand a year to go there.
0:44:31 As a first grader and as a second grader
0:44:33 and as a third grader, as a fourth grader.
0:44:35 But like the way my parents afforded to go there
0:44:37 was the same way that many students did,
0:44:39 which is when companies bring you overseas,
0:44:41 ’cause you know, let’s say, you know,
0:44:42 my dad worked for a company,
0:44:43 they wanted him to relocate,
0:44:46 to like build up their business in China.
0:44:48 Then the company basically pays for your kids’ education
0:44:50 as part of the relocation package.
0:44:51 – And that’s like a really good perk.
0:44:52 That’s the perk.
0:44:54 And so, you know, and so these schools basically,
0:44:56 it’s kind of like US schools,
0:44:58 how they make their monies because the government
0:45:00 will give like student loans to anybody.
0:45:01 Like anybody can get a student loan.
0:45:03 So you get like, you know, $200,000 a debt
0:45:04 to go to the school,
0:45:06 whether you’re gonna be able to pay that off or not,
0:45:07 doesn’t matter.
0:45:08 So the schools are like, great.
0:45:09 That’s why tuition’s keep going up,
0:45:10 because they’re like, awesome.
0:45:12 The government will just keep paying for this.
0:45:13 This is amazing.
0:45:15 International schools work largely the same way,
0:45:17 which is it’s either very wealthy people there
0:45:19 who want their kids to go abroad.
0:45:21 Like if you’re very wealthy in Indonesia or China or India,
0:45:23 you want your kids to study in the United States.
0:45:26 And you’re probably, you know, like very, very rich.
0:45:29 And so you’re happy to pay, you know, 40K a year
0:45:33 for like elite education or the companies are paying for it.
0:45:34 So this is a beautiful business model
0:45:37 where you’re only catering to that top kind of 1%.
0:45:39 And interestingly, I think that there’s actually
0:45:40 a blue zone in America,
0:45:43 because when you think of a for-profit university,
0:45:45 I think of University of Phoenix.
0:45:47 Yeah, I think bad.
0:45:50 I think there are the ones who let everyone in
0:45:53 and they just buy all the Facebook ads and Google ads
0:45:54 and it’s slimy.
0:45:57 But for some reason, when I look at these schools,
0:45:59 I think prestige.
0:46:02 I think like it can be done well.
0:46:04 Do you know what I mean?
0:46:05 You know, the one I want to do
0:46:08 or like I’ve been very like tempted to do
0:46:10 is the modern day film school.
0:46:14 So like film schools exist in the States
0:46:16 and that you can go to USC or UCLA.
0:46:18 These are like the famous ones that you can go to.
0:46:23 But like media and content has changed dramatically
0:46:24 from when those schools were founded, right?
0:46:27 And credentials are less important, I would think.
0:46:29 And credentials are way less important.
0:46:32 And back then, you know, let’s say you were a student
0:46:35 in the 80s and you wanted to work in film someday.
0:46:37 Well, when you were in school, you really had no shot.
0:46:39 You could go be an intern somewhere, maybe hold up,
0:46:41 you know, you’re holding the lamp, you know,
0:46:43 in the back and you’re holding the light.
0:46:45 And that’s like all you would be qualified to do.
0:46:48 Today, let’s say you want to be good at creating films
0:46:49 or content or music or whatever.
0:46:51 You could literally be publishing on YouTube,
0:46:54 on TikTok, on Instagram, on Spotify.
0:46:55 You can be publishing everywhere
0:46:57 and actually like you could be in the market.
0:46:58 You can be a player.
0:46:59 The day you have the idea to do it,
0:47:01 you could be published that night.
0:47:02 You could be 14 years old
0:47:04 and maybe you could be the best in the world
0:47:07 at doing Twitch streams or whatever it is, right?
0:47:11 And so what, and the number one dream of young kids
0:47:12 is to be a content creator.
0:47:14 It’s the number one aspirational profession,
0:47:15 which you could judge and say that’s stupid
0:47:16 or whatever you want.
0:47:17 The dream is the dream.
0:47:18 That means there’s a lot of demand
0:47:20 for people who want to learn this.
0:47:21 Why don’t I go to Mr. Beast?
0:47:23 Why don’t I go to Jimmy and say, hey,
0:47:26 why don’t you create with your brand
0:47:29 a university that is the modern day
0:47:31 like content creation skill stack?
0:47:34 So it’s all the things you need to know, right?
0:47:37 Videography, photography, script writing,
0:47:41 editing, sound production, music production,
0:47:43 all the creative arts basically,
0:47:45 but do them in a way where it’s like a two year program.
0:47:46 It’s like a business school.
0:47:49 So it’s two years and it’s all project based.
0:47:52 So you go there and you have access to all the equipment
0:47:54 which you normally can’t afford as a young person
0:47:56 like the best camera is the best recording studios,
0:47:59 the best editors, terminals, all that stuff,
0:48:00 animators.
0:48:02 And then there’s people who have different disciplines.
0:48:03 One guy wants to be an animator,
0:48:04 one guy wants to be an editor,
0:48:06 the other person wants to be a talent, whatever it is.
0:48:09 And you work together on projects, you create content,
0:48:11 you actually put it out on the networks
0:48:13 and you get judged based on the number of projects
0:48:15 you create, the quality of the projects you create.
0:48:17 You’re getting real feedback along the way.
0:48:19 And then you have mentors or teachers
0:48:21 like a Mr. Beast or like others
0:48:23 who are gonna like drop in and basically teach you
0:48:25 some of the fundamentals of maybe storytelling
0:48:27 or different things that actually you need to do.
0:48:29 And I think if you did this, I mean,
0:48:30 just the math of this stuff is pretty crazy, right?
0:48:35 Like you get 5,000 or 10,000 people coming to your school
0:48:39 and it’s 25K a year for two years.
0:48:46 That one batch of kids, 10,000 people in a class,
0:48:50 if they’re paying 25K a year for two years,
0:48:52 that’s 500 million in revenue.
0:48:53 What stopped you from doing this?
0:48:54 You seem pretty hyped up on it
0:48:56 and it seems like a very logical thing.
0:48:59 Well, I had the idea for like four days ago.
0:49:00 So, you know, that’s probably-
0:49:03 No, you’ve been talking about-
0:49:05 No, specifically the media thing.
0:49:06 Like I’ve always been interested
0:49:07 like what would you do for your new school?
0:49:09 I always thought of it in terms of entrepreneurship,
0:49:12 but I actually think a more like trade school style school
0:49:13 is better. Yeah, for sure, for sure.
0:49:14 Because you can only, you know,
0:49:16 teaching entrepreneurship is hard
0:49:18 because A, there’s not a class for business really.
0:49:20 Business school doesn’t teach you business,
0:49:21 it teaches you management.
0:49:23 Like what you think of as Harvard Business School
0:49:26 is actually a, you know, middle management
0:49:29 to senior management training program, right?
0:49:30 That’s what that is.
0:49:33 So I think when you actually learn a skill
0:49:35 and learn a trade, that’s good.
0:49:37 The skill of business takes a lot of time
0:49:39 and it’s not one skill, it’s like 15,
0:49:40 it’s a bundle of like 15 skills.
0:49:42 You got to know a little bit about strategy
0:49:43 and negotiation and marketing and building
0:49:45 and managing all these things.
0:49:48 So I think this trade school style is much better.
0:49:50 There’s an interesting example of this, by the way.
0:49:51 Do you know what full sale university is?
0:49:54 Yes, so I’m looking up ITT Tech,
0:49:55 but I’m also looking at full sale.
0:49:57 I know a few people that went to full sale
0:49:59 and they had great things to say.
0:50:02 Yeah, so full sale is kind of, it’s at that scale.
0:50:06 So 25,000 undergrads, it’s $26,000 a year.
0:50:07 It’s a private for-profit college.
0:50:09 So you just do the math, by the way.
0:50:11 25,000 undergrads, 26,000 a year.
0:50:14 So that’s like the annual revenue.
0:50:16 Let’s do some public math
0:50:18 because big numbers are an exception.
0:50:20 That’s $600 million, $650 million a year
0:50:23 of revenue that they’re generating
0:50:25 from like a four year cohort.
0:50:30 My friend, Chris, have you heard of the company, Linode?
0:50:32 Yeah, yeah.
0:50:34 He bootstrapped and sold it for, I don’t know,
0:50:35 like $800 million.
0:50:37 He’s from Nashville and I knew him when I was younger
0:50:40 and he went to full sale and he’s,
0:50:41 that’s kind of how I learned about full sale.
0:50:43 But they have like, if you look at-
0:50:45 You know, Jason Citron, the founder of Discord,
0:50:47 he’s one of the alums.
0:50:48 Yeah.
0:50:51 And so I think they do more than just like,
0:50:55 I knew it as, that’s where you’d go to get like a,
0:50:57 if you want to become a music engineer.
0:50:59 Yeah, so it was like, game design was one.
0:51:00 That’s why Jason went there
0:51:03 ’cause he wanted to build video games.
0:51:04 They have music and then they have
0:51:07 the Dan Patrick School of Sports Broadcasting.
0:51:09 So he liked it that much.
0:51:10 A TV broadcaster.
0:51:12 They had their own little program,
0:51:14 a degree, a sportscaster degree program, just like-
0:51:15 But how does it work?
0:51:18 Since it’s not a normal, it’s a for-profit university,
0:51:20 does Dan Patrick actually get paid to use his name
0:51:22 or keyed in donating?
0:51:23 A licensing, a royalty, whatever.
0:51:24 That’s crazy.
0:51:25 That’s great.
0:51:26 That’s what I’m saying for like,
0:51:27 if you’re Jimmy, you’re Mr. Beast,
0:51:29 like why are you selling chocolate?
0:51:30 Like we should do this
0:51:32 and we just need to find like an operator
0:51:33 and do it with a physical campus
0:51:34 and like do the whole thing, right?
0:51:35 Make the whole thing happen.
0:51:39 And there’s like an enormous talent economy
0:51:40 that needs to be made,
0:51:41 not just for people who themselves
0:51:42 want to be a famous YouTuber,
0:51:45 but every single company has to create content.
0:51:47 Content is marketing.
0:51:49 And so any company that needs,
0:51:52 go look at every corporation from like Nestle
0:51:55 down to your nearby eyebrow waxing place.
0:51:56 They’re all got an Instagram.
0:51:58 They all got a TikTok.
0:51:59 They’re all posting content on there.
0:52:04 And so every company needs media creation talents.
0:52:07 And nobody teaches you that.
0:52:10 Today it’s something you learn on your own outside of school
0:52:12 using your own social media as a testing ground.
0:52:13 And I think that’s a little bit crazy
0:52:15 given the value of this thing.
0:52:17 And so I think, it’s the type of thing
0:52:22 that could be built and be a multi-billion dollar business
0:52:26 within three or four years easily,
0:52:29 getting 5,000 or 10,000 people to enroll
0:52:31 is not hard for something like this
0:52:32 ’cause it has tangible value too.
0:52:33 Like when you walk out,
0:52:36 not only will you have these hard skills
0:52:38 on actual content creation,
0:52:40 all the bucket of content creation skills,
0:52:41 but like you’re highly employable.
0:52:44 So whether you become a creator or you go get a job,
0:52:46 like you’re highly employable with a set of skills,
0:52:48 especially if you make it elite,
0:52:50 like don’t make it University of Phoenix,
0:52:51 make it more like Harvard,
0:52:53 where it’s like, oh, where do the talented people go?
0:52:55 Right, what’s it like, Juilliard?
0:52:56 It’s like make it more like Juilliard,
0:52:59 where this is where the most talented people go
0:53:00 and build that reputation.
0:53:02 I think that’s the key to get this right.
0:53:04 – This is an incredibly compelling pitch.
0:53:08 I wanna know what the downsides are,
0:53:10 which I don’t even know if you know at the moment
0:53:14 because you’re 72 hours into this career transition.
0:53:16 – Accreditation can matter.
0:53:18 So if you want accreditation, you can do that.
0:53:18 – Does that matter?
0:53:20 Does accreditation matter?
0:53:22 I guess it does for optics, right?
0:53:25 – No, it matters for funding.
0:53:27 So how do you get funding from the government?
0:53:29 How do your students get loans?
0:53:30 If you’re an unaccredited school,
0:53:31 students can’t get loans.
0:53:33 They gotta pay for it out of pocket.
0:53:34 And so you want accreditation
0:53:37 so that you’re eligible for loans,
0:53:39 which would let students go there,
0:53:40 who don’t already have the money,
0:53:43 plus it’s much easier to spend money
0:53:47 the government gives you when you’re 18, 20 years old.
0:53:48 So you wanna be eligible for that.
0:53:50 But you can get accredited
0:53:52 or you could buy a school with existing accreditation.
0:53:53 So that’s not a blocker.
0:53:56 It’s just like a thing you gotta do.
0:53:57 The hard part is actually running it
0:53:58 and like doing it well
0:53:59 and like actually providing quality education, right?
0:54:01 You don’t wanna be University of Phoenix.
0:54:02 So you gotta have some soul,
0:54:03 you gotta have some energy,
0:54:05 you gotta have the entrepreneurial energy.
0:54:06 So why am I not personally doing this?
0:54:09 Because I personally am not gonna be the guy running this.
0:54:10 I wanna kind of make it happen
0:54:13 and find an operator who wants to create something like this.
0:54:16 And I can connect all the dots of how do we get the capital?
0:54:18 ‘Cause it takes a lot of capital, you know, like,
0:54:21 Joe Lonsdale started a school in Austin.
0:54:22 I don’t know how much he, how much that costs,
0:54:24 but I think it’s like a…
0:54:26 I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s like a 50 million
0:54:28 to a $100 million project of like-
0:54:31 – What does it call the University of Austin?
0:54:33 Austin University?
0:54:34 That’s crazy.
0:54:36 I mean, yeah, that’s pretty wild.
0:54:37 And if you look at like-
0:54:40 – So billionaires have put 200 million into funding
0:54:41 that that’s cool.
0:54:45 So yeah, you know, it’s a big CapEx lift
0:54:47 to do it when you have a physical campus.
0:54:48 And I wouldn’t do it remote.
0:54:49 I would do it legit.
0:54:51 I would do it with a physical campus.
0:54:53 And I would just try to make it like awesome.
0:54:53 And it’s the same thing
0:54:54 like we talked about the bouton thing.
0:54:55 It’s a 50 year play.
0:54:58 Like you wanna build prestige and legacy
0:55:01 like a Harvard or a Stanford where it’s the reputation,
0:55:04 the reputation and the brand is the value.
0:55:06 You want the best people to pay top dollar
0:55:07 to come to this thing and get the best education.
0:55:09 Then you want all the companies who wanna hire
0:55:11 to value the label that you have.
0:55:14 So to do that, you have to assume you’re gonna be,
0:55:16 you wanna do something that peaks, you know,
0:55:19 like 50 years later in terms of brand prestige.
0:55:21 – Yeah, that’s like an interesting thing, by the way.
0:55:23 So there’s like been a lot of times
0:55:27 where people will sign up for a university.
0:55:30 And the goal is that after 10 or 15 years,
0:55:32 the brand name has elevated.
0:55:35 So you bought the price before it was full.
0:55:37 It’s just like investing in a stock.
0:55:40 And then there’s other times when a university will have-
0:55:41 – Or it’s 30 and a 30.
0:55:44 – Yeah, where a university will have a protest
0:55:47 or something will happen and it hurts the brand.
0:55:49 And you’re like, for example,
0:55:52 let’s say you graduated from Columbia,
0:55:56 you’re like, shit, like it’s a controversial place right now.
0:55:58 It’s my, I bought this brand.
0:56:01 Is that now worth less than why I was anticipating?
0:56:02 And so there’s this weird,
0:56:04 that is like an interesting way to look at
0:56:06 building a university brand.
0:56:10 I’m like, I have to increase the value for, you know,
0:56:12 so I can justify that the people buying,
0:56:14 they actually bought it when it was cheaper
0:56:17 as opposed to what it is worth in 20 years.
0:56:19 – Dude, did you see,
0:56:22 Bill Ackman did a presentation about Harvard?
0:56:23 Did you see this?
0:56:24 – No.
0:56:24 – What’d he say? – Oh my God.
0:56:26 All right, well, I know we’re supposed to wrap up,
0:56:27 but this is honestly incredible.
0:56:29 Jim Grant asked me to give a talk on Harvard,
0:56:30 buy, sell, or hold.
0:56:32 And the same way you would do with the stock,
0:56:36 I think the Harvard motto or slogan is veritas,
0:56:38 and the title is veritas, question mark,
0:56:40 ’cause you know he’s on this like anti-Harvard crusade
0:56:42 right now. – What’s veritas mean forever?
0:56:44 – Truth, I think. – Truth.
0:56:46 – And so he breaks it down like it’s a company, you know.
0:56:47 The business of Harvard College
0:56:48 is private education to students,
0:56:49 and then it has like a graph.
0:56:52 It’s like enrollment has been flat over the last 20 years.
0:56:55 Faculty growth has been modest, you know,
0:56:56 growing at half a percent,
0:57:00 but administration growth has grown by 40% in 20 years.
0:57:01 So he’s like, basically like,
0:57:02 oh, you’re not growing students,
0:57:03 but you’re growing your admin,
0:57:05 your op-ex on the backend, right?
0:57:06 And analyzing it like a business.
0:57:07 – This is amazing.
0:57:10 – And the cost has grown, basically the cost has doubled
0:57:10 in 20 years. – Well, he says,
0:57:13 he says you’re growing by increasing prices,
0:57:15 not by increasing the number of customers served.
0:57:16 – Exactly.
0:57:19 And then he breaks down the P&L,
0:57:21 he breaks down where’s the revenue stream,
0:57:24 so how much is coming from donations versus tuition,
0:57:26 how much of your faculty has diverse viewpoints.
0:57:27 I mean, really, obviously his agenda
0:57:29 and this whole thing was to basically be like,
0:57:31 Harvard has gone too woke
0:57:33 and the administration has gone like rogue
0:57:35 and you’re ruining the brand and the mission of Harvard.
0:57:39 – He says the operating margin would be a negative 40%
0:57:41 without distributions from its endowment.
0:57:42 – Yeah.
0:57:45 And he says in 1643, that’s how old Harvard is.
0:57:47 In 1643, Harvard’s first mission was set up
0:57:49 simply as veritas or truth.
0:57:51 And he’s got this old screenshot
0:57:54 of like a hand-drawn logo of the shield.
0:57:58 And then he reads like the laws, liberties
0:57:59 and orders of Harvard college.
0:58:03 And it’s like this handwritten document about,
0:58:06 the goal was to encourage Harvard students to seek wisdom.
0:58:08 And he’s basically saying like,
0:58:09 then he shows how the mission charter has changed.
0:58:13 So in 2020, it was instead of about seeking truth,
0:58:15 it was like, it removed a bunch of references
0:58:17 to the 1650 charter and basically left it
0:58:20 as more of like a DEI style mission.
0:58:22 And he’s like, paying attention to that.
0:58:25 So, he’s like, what happened to new ideas?
0:58:26 What happened to the truth?
0:58:28 And then he goes and he just breaks down like,
0:58:30 also like even in the faculty growth,
0:58:33 he’s like, cool, is it growth in computer science teachers?
0:58:37 Or is it growth in African-American studies?
0:58:38 Which, you know, he basically shows like,
0:58:40 African-American studies grew like crazy
0:58:42 compared to economics or computer science.
0:58:44 But then he’s looking at the number of degrees
0:58:46 that people are getting and that’s not growing.
0:58:47 So he’s like, you’re not meeting,
0:58:49 your supply is not meeting the demand of the consumer.
0:58:52 You’re just, your supply is growing arbitrarily,
0:58:55 not to match demand.
0:58:59 Like, I think there was only like,
0:59:01 there was one degree recipient in 2023
0:59:05 in African-American studies and 57 faculty.
0:59:06 – This is wild.
0:59:08 And do you know, and here,
0:59:10 if you go down all the way to the last slide, his verdict,
0:59:15 he says, is Harvard a buy, sell or hold?
0:59:18 And his verdict as of now is Harvard is a hold.
0:59:20 It still has many positive attributes.
0:59:23 It has a strong brand, 400 year operating history,
0:59:25 $51 billion endowment and huge real estate.
0:59:28 But it has many challenges.
0:59:30 The quality of the education has deteriorated.
0:59:33 There’s so many competitors, many talented people
0:59:35 aren’t going to traditional universities.
0:59:36 They’ve mis-allocated resources
0:59:39 and the endowment has been a chronic under performer.
0:59:41 This is a very interesting way to look at
0:59:43 many, many, many different decisions in life
0:59:45 that are beyond just money.
0:59:46 – How awesome is this?
0:59:50 – This is the greatest, this is a fantastic way to think.
0:59:52 – Yeah, this is so cool.
0:59:54 – Is this, all decisions, I think,
0:59:56 every big decision I have in life,
0:59:58 I need to put together a PowerPoint like this.
0:59:59 We did this with our child’s name, by the way,
1:00:01 we put three names in a PowerPoint
1:00:03 and like Sarah presented them and like,
1:00:05 aren’t you like in her favor,
1:00:06 which name we were going to choose?
1:00:07 – Okay, hold on, hold on, what is that?
1:00:09 What is even in the slide?
1:00:10 What do you say?
1:00:12 – So the way that we make decisions in our house,
1:00:17 oftentimes it’s like one person will present three options
1:00:19 and then the other person can select
1:00:21 the one option that they want.
1:00:23 And so if it’s like-
1:00:26 – Cheese cake factory, Chipotle, or frozen dinner.
1:00:28 – So it’s like, if I’m selecting the three,
1:00:31 I will select three that I’m at least okay with
1:00:33 and then she could select the one
1:00:35 that is of most interest to her.
1:00:38 For baby names, it was like, she was like,
1:00:42 you, I wanna select a three and then you could select the one.
1:00:44 And so she made a PowerPoint and it explained,
1:00:47 here’s the three names, here’s the background of the name.
1:00:50 And I had like parameters.
1:00:52 I was like, I want something somewhat traditional.
1:00:53 I prefer it be in the Bible
1:00:55 because everyone in my family was naming it
1:00:56 for someone in the Bible, whatever.
1:00:59 And she’s like, all right, here’s the three that I like.
1:01:00 I’m cool with all of them.
1:01:02 Here’s the background of each name.
1:01:03 Here’s what it means.
1:01:05 Here’s famous people named that.
1:01:08 Here’s where it ranks on the popularity list.
1:01:11 – Is she trying to persuade you towards one
1:01:15 or it’s a completely neutral like pros and cons of each?
1:01:17 – In that case, it was neutral.
1:01:22 But yeah, oftentimes there is an underlying persuasion bit,
1:01:25 but the, if you’re the person who selects the three,
1:01:28 you should select three things that you like.
1:01:30 You should, ’cause that’s like what you could do
1:01:32 is you could select three things that you like
1:01:34 and then I, as the final decision maker,
1:01:35 will select something and you’re happy no matter what.
1:01:37 It’s a great way to make decisions, I think.
1:01:39 And so she did this big presentation
1:01:42 on three different names and I selected the winner.
1:01:44 And that’s how we got our baby’s name.
1:01:48 – Last podcast you said, every month we sit down
1:01:51 at the end of the month at our table
1:01:54 and we review the month’s budget, financial decisions,
1:01:55 key financial decisions that were made.
1:01:59 We discuss unresolved issues that might be lingering.
1:02:01 I’m kind of into the PAR corporation.
1:02:05 PAR corp is probably one of my favorite corporations
1:02:05 to learn from.
1:02:08 And I think the way you run your marriage,
1:02:12 like a business partnership, is both effective and hilarious.
1:02:15 – We did a great combo.
1:02:17 – Before we got married, we did that by the way.
1:02:18 We said, “This is going great.
1:02:19 “We really love each other.
1:02:20 “We like each other.”
1:02:23 It appears as though marriage is in the cards.
1:02:25 We said it was six months into dating.
1:02:28 Write down where you wanna be in 10 years.
1:02:29 What do you wanna do?
1:02:30 How do you wanna raise a family?
1:02:31 Where do you wanna live?
1:02:33 And we made sure that are once in our interest,
1:02:35 we’re like, “All right, we disagree here,
1:02:38 “but that’s okay, I’m valuable there,
1:02:39 “but here’s like a deal breaker.
1:02:40 “What do you feel about that?”
1:02:41 So for hers, it was like,
1:02:43 “I wanna raise children in the New York area
1:02:44 “so I can be around my family.
1:02:45 “That’s a deal breaker.”
1:02:48 And I was like, “No, that’s cool, I can fuck with that.”
1:02:51 And so yeah, we do this type of stuff.
1:02:51 It feels cold.
1:02:52 I don’t even like talking about it
1:02:55 ’cause people think, ’cause like, it feels cold.
1:02:57 But dude, this shit works.
1:03:00 These type of like discussions where it’s like,
1:03:02 “All right, now’s the period to discuss this.
1:03:03 “You have the floor.”
1:03:06 That stuff is so effective, I think.
1:03:06 – Yeah, yeah.
1:03:08 – Okay, before you guys go to bed,
1:03:09 you just shake hands instead of kiss.
1:03:13 It’s just nice to just keep everything on the up and up
1:03:15 and as calculated as can be.
1:03:16 – That’s why I hate talking about it
1:03:18 ’cause people think that everything’s like systematic.
1:03:21 It’s like, no, like there’s like two hours a month
1:03:22 where like this is set aside
1:03:26 to like have these like relatively formal discussions.
1:03:27 But it’s freaking awesome.
1:03:30 I think if you like have a lot of kids,
1:03:32 don’t people do like family meetings?
1:03:34 I know I saw it in like TV shows growing up,
1:03:35 but it’s not a thing.
1:03:37 – Yeah, I think family meetings are a thing.
1:03:41 I think you guys just really take it to that next level.
1:03:42 You guys are the McKinsey of family meetings, right?
1:03:46 Like vows.pdf before your wedding.
1:03:47 You had it all set up.
1:03:48 It’s good, I like it.
1:03:49 – It works.
1:03:51 I suggest everyone at least try it.
1:03:52 It definitely works, I think.
1:03:59 – All right, I think that’s a killer episode to be honest.
1:04:01 – I feel hyped up.
1:04:01 I have energy.
1:04:03 – To be perfectly honest with a hard age,
1:04:05 that was a great episode.
1:04:07 – All right, that’s it, that’s the part.
1:04:09 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
1:04:12 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
1:04:14 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
1:04:18 ♪ On the road let’s travel never looking back ♪
1:04:34 (upbeat music)
1:04:34 – Hey, Sean here.
1:04:36 A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story.
1:04:38 So he started Twitter and before that,
1:04:40 he sold a company to Google for $100 million.
1:04:41 And somebody asked him, they said,
1:04:42 “Ev, what’s the secret, man?
1:04:44 “How do you create these huge businesses,
1:04:45 “billion-dollar businesses?”
1:04:47 And he says, “Well, I think the answer is
1:04:49 “that you take a human desire,
1:04:51 “preferably one that’s been around for thousands of years,
1:04:53 “and then you just use modern technology
1:04:55 “to take out steps.
1:04:57 “Just remove the friction that exists
1:04:58 “between people getting what they want.
1:05:00 “And that is what my partner, Mercury, does.
1:05:02 “They took one of the most basic needs
1:05:04 “any entrepreneur has, managing your money
1:05:05 “and being able to do your financial operations.
1:05:07 “So they’ve removed all the friction
1:05:08 “that has existed for decades.
1:05:10 “No more clunky interfaces,
1:05:12 “no more 10 tabs to get something done,
1:05:14 “no more having to drive to a bank,
1:05:16 “get out of your car just to send a wire transfer.
1:05:18 “They made it fast, they made it easy.
1:05:19 “You can actually just get back to running your business.
1:05:21 “You don’t have to worry about the rest of it.
1:05:22 “I use it for not one, not two,
1:05:24 “but six of my companies right now.
1:05:27 “And it’s used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders.
1:05:28 “So if you want to be like me,
1:05:31 “head to mercury.com, open them to account in minutes.
1:05:34 “And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company,
1:05:35 “not a bank.
1:05:37 “Banking service is provided by Choice Financial Group
1:05:39 “and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.”
1:05:41 All right, back to the episode.