AI transcript
0:00:02 For some reason, he’s saying that one of the best measures
0:00:04 of your aging is like your nighttime erections.
0:00:08 So I’m starting doing this treatment
0:00:10 where it’s like you shockwave your penis, et cetera.
0:00:12 And he’s like, I’m going once a month, et cetera.
0:00:14 I’m like, dude, I have that machine in my house.
0:00:17 (laughing)
0:00:20 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:23 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:25 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:00:28 – Hey, Jack, is this aging stuff, this anti-aging stuff?
0:00:30 Is this legitimate?
0:00:33 – Anti-aging kind of as a, it’s emerging trend, right?
0:00:37 And I kind of feel that it’s hard to know
0:00:38 if this is a scam or not.
0:00:42 And then why do we give Brian Johnson, Dave Asprey,
0:00:43 et cetera, any credibility?
0:00:47 Because how do we know that they’re good at anti-aging?
0:00:49 They’re in their fifties.
0:00:52 Dave Asprey can say he wants to live to 140 and stuff, right?
0:00:57 And I realized like it’s really powerful and dangerous
0:00:59 to criticize someone’s appearance.
0:01:01 Like, I don’t like it either.
0:01:03 But for me, the only measures we have
0:01:05 about if these guys’ stuff is working
0:01:08 is their aging score thing, right?
0:01:10 I was just thinking of an analogy
0:01:12 and I kind of felt it’s like saying
0:01:15 that someone’s a great marathon runner,
0:01:17 but they’re only at the halfway point.
0:01:21 Like maybe these guys are good at avoiding injuries,
0:01:23 so they’re more likely to complete the marathon.
0:01:25 But how do we know if they’re gonna get a good time
0:01:26 in the marathon?
0:01:28 Only know when they’re like 100 or something.
0:01:31 In comparison, so these are the people
0:01:33 we look to as the influencers.
0:01:35 Even like Dr. Rhonda Patrick for women,
0:01:37 she’s in her fifties, I think.
0:01:41 So they’re all middle-aged, Peter Atea, Huberman.
0:01:42 They’re not 100 years old.
0:01:44 So how do we know they’re good at anti-aging?
0:01:46 They’re only halfway there.
0:01:50 I mean, Sam, you had a better anti-aging score.
0:01:51 Like you couldn’t upload your results, right?
0:01:53 But you would be like number one,
0:01:55 I think on there from your thing.
0:01:58 – Yeah, Sean, I did the Rejuvenation Olympics.
0:02:00 Like basically the Rejuvenation Olympics,
0:02:04 it’s this test done by true diagnostics.
0:02:06 It’s like a blood work company.
0:02:08 And Brian Johnson has a partnership with them.
0:02:11 And I think the science is still like iffy,
0:02:15 but the idea is like if the length of a cell that you have,
0:02:17 I forget what the cell is called mitochondria
0:02:18 or something like that.
0:02:20 There’s a theory that like the length of that
0:02:23 is correlated to your biological age.
0:02:27 I did this test, Sean, and I scored a great,
0:02:29 so great that I messaged Brian Johnson
0:02:30 and I was like, this is wrong, right?
0:02:35 And he’s like, well, no, you’re like the number three
0:02:37 on the Rejuvenation Olympics.
0:02:41 And the thing is is like, I’m a 80/20 type of guy.
0:02:42 I do like 80% great.
0:02:44 And then I like fuck off for 20%.
0:02:46 Like I eat poorly sometimes.
0:02:48 But I just think that a lot of this,
0:02:50 the takeaway from when I did that thing
0:02:53 was it’s mostly genetics, I think.
0:02:54 I do mostly good stuff,
0:02:56 but there’s people who do so much better stuff.
0:02:59 And I just think that it’s like largely genetics.
0:03:01 – But because one of the only measures we have
0:03:04 is this score, then it means that that gives,
0:03:07 that’s the only lender of credibility we have
0:03:07 to if you only go like,
0:03:09 you guys are able to present this podcast
0:03:11 because you sold your companies, right?
0:03:13 So you have some legitimacy there,
0:03:16 but the only legitimate litmus test we have here
0:03:17 is your aging score.
0:03:20 But then it’s like, okay, Sam, you have legitimacy.
0:03:22 So you can just say, oh, I have a great score
0:03:25 because I have Coke Zero every day.
0:03:27 And then everyone buys Coke Zero
0:03:30 and thinks that’s anti-aging best supplement, right?
0:03:33 – So why do you spend so much energy on this then?
0:03:36 Because you’re spending money, you’re spending time.
0:03:39 Yet it sounds like what you’re saying is,
0:03:43 look, the science, the measurement is iffy.
0:03:45 The incentives are a little iffy
0:03:46 ’cause there’s a lot of money to be made
0:03:48 by claiming certain things.
0:03:50 It’s not clear the cause and effect.
0:03:52 We don’t know what really works, what really doesn’t work.
0:03:54 You’ve spent $50,000 in supplements
0:03:55 and your submarine was like,
0:03:56 I didn’t really feel anything.
0:03:58 Maybe if you’re deficient, you might feel something.
0:04:00 But you’re a smart guy.
0:04:02 Why still spend the time and energy in this space?
0:04:04 – Because actually I’ve tried out
0:04:06 all these different things, right?
0:04:07 And Tony Robbins actually has a book
0:04:09 about all the emerging health stuff
0:04:11 that he tries out, et cetera.
0:04:14 So 99% of it, I don’t know, just anything.
0:04:19 However, 1%, I do notice big things.
0:04:21 And for me, it’s kind of like, okay,
0:04:24 we don’t know what works, what doesn’t work.
0:04:28 But I’ve only got one life and I’ve only got one body.
0:04:32 And just experimenting, I can find those 1% things
0:04:35 that are very impactful and under the radar and stuff.
0:04:39 – All right, let’s take a quick break
0:04:40 because I want to talk to you about
0:04:41 some new stuff that HubSpot has.
0:04:43 Now, they let me freestyle this ad here.
0:04:44 So I’m going to actually tell you
0:04:46 what I think is interesting.
0:04:48 So they have this thing called the Fall Spotlight,
0:04:49 showing all the new features
0:04:51 that they released in the last few months.
0:04:54 And the ones that stood out to me were Breeze Intelligence.
0:04:55 I don’t know if you’ve seen this,
0:04:57 but if you’re in HubSpot and you have,
0:04:58 let’s say, a customer there,
0:05:01 you can just basically add intelligence to that customer.
0:05:03 They estimate a revenue for that company,
0:05:04 how many employees it has,
0:05:06 maybe their email address or their location,
0:05:08 if they’ve ever visited your page or not.
0:05:11 And so you can enrich all of your data automatically
0:05:14 with one click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence.
0:05:15 They actually acquired a really cool company
0:05:17 called Clearbit and it’s become Breeze,
0:05:18 which is great because now it’s built in.
0:05:21 I always hated using two different tools
0:05:21 to try to do this.
0:05:22 Now it’s all in one place.
0:05:25 And so all the data you had about your customers
0:05:26 now just got smarter.
0:05:27 So check it out.
0:05:29 You can actually see all the stuff they released.
0:05:30 It’s a really cool website.
0:05:33 Go to hubspot.com/spotlight to see them all
0:05:34 and get the demos yourself.
0:05:36 Back to this episode.
0:05:38 – The 1% stuff, if I had to guess,
0:05:40 is just eating mostly plants and animals
0:05:43 and lifting heavy weights and going for walks.
0:05:46 – So actually not for me, but yeah.
0:05:48 – Oh, well, fuck me then, all right.
0:05:51 (all laughing)
0:05:52 What is it?
0:05:56 – So one thing, and this sounds crazy as well, right?
0:05:57 So this is the thing.
0:06:00 All of these things have all the science
0:06:02 and they’re like, and Dave asked someone to be like,
0:06:05 okay, this extract of blueberry,
0:06:08 it reduces your aging because it does this, et cetera.
0:06:11 And then all his 50 medical studies, et cetera.
0:06:14 One thing that actually has been a game changer
0:06:18 for me, my family, the science just doesn’t make any sense.
0:06:19 Like the science isn’t there.
0:06:21 And I don’t spend much money,
0:06:25 but I’ve spent $15,000 on this thing.
0:06:26 And that’s like the low end one.
0:06:29 It’s called energy enhancement system.
0:06:31 And…
0:06:33 (all laughing)
0:06:36 – That’s my car sacks, my friend.
0:06:40 – It’s like, Sarah, is it time for some energy enhancement?
0:06:41 – We got some EES tonight.
0:06:43 (all laughing)
0:06:45 So what is this?
0:06:46 – So basically at the high end,
0:06:50 these machines cost over $100,000, the setup.
0:06:51 Again, the science, when I’m looking at it,
0:06:52 like I’m a tech guy, right?
0:06:55 So I’m going in, I’m in the waiting room
0:06:56 and I’m looking at it and I’m like,
0:06:59 dude, this is just a normal computer monitor.
0:07:01 Like what’s the deal?
0:07:04 And they’re saying like, oh, these are all,
0:07:06 there’s like 16 of these computer monitors
0:07:09 and computers all laser aligned
0:07:12 and it creates an energy vortex in the middle of the room.
0:07:14 – So let me explain, if you Google this,
0:07:16 you’re going to see a photo.
0:07:19 The photo looks like a doctor’s waiting room,
0:07:22 except the chairs are literally lawn chairs.
0:07:24 We’re talking $30 lawn chairs,
0:07:27 the type you would bring to like your kid’s soccer game.
0:07:32 And then the room has eight TVs and the TVs…
0:07:33 – This looks like a sports book.
0:07:36 You ever go to Vegas and where you can bet on sports
0:07:37 and there’s 18 different monitors,
0:07:39 horse racing over here, basketball over here
0:07:41 and you sit in this shitty chair.
0:07:42 That’s what this looks like.
0:07:44 – And like, you know how like when you were a kid
0:07:45 and you in the cable used to go out
0:07:48 and it would be like a bunch of like colors on the screen,
0:07:49 it basically just looks like that.
0:07:50 – That is it, yeah.
0:07:51 – That’s what I’m, I want to let you know,
0:07:52 that’s what I’m looking at.
0:07:55 And I want to let you know the sounds
0:07:57 incredibly ridiculous, what you were saying.
0:07:59 – Jack, I’m open minded, continue.
0:08:02 – There’s also people claiming that this cured their cancer.
0:08:04 Like if you look what this can be used for,
0:08:07 they just say, all right, whatever’s wrong with you,
0:08:07 this will cure it.
0:08:11 This cured cancer, this cured AIDS.
0:08:14 So I, but I go in and I’d actually been suffering
0:08:17 for a year with severe headaches.
0:08:20 I had this thing where it’s called new daily
0:08:21 persistent headaches.
0:08:24 It means basically you wake up one day
0:08:26 and you have a headache every day.
0:08:28 So I’d been struggling with that for a year
0:08:32 and I tried loads of stuff like ozone therapy,
0:08:34 ketamine, like I tried everything.
0:08:38 And I actually think that this EES thing
0:08:40 is the only thing that worked.
0:08:42 I just went in there and I sat in a lawn chair
0:08:44 for an hour, maybe two hours.
0:08:47 And then just came out and in my stomach,
0:08:50 like I can feel my stomach, like reorganizing,
0:08:51 et cetera, churning.
0:08:55 But not only me, yeah, my wife, it cured her migraines.
0:08:58 Her sister came out and then she’d been like
0:08:59 having trouble sleeping.
0:09:01 It like cured her sleeping issues.
0:09:05 And then her mom did it as well with us, like is crazy.
0:09:09 Actually, Tony Robbins has, you can pay like a lot more
0:09:11 and sleep in the room overnight.
0:09:14 So Tony Robbins has spent two days in it.
0:09:17 So I have no idea about the science,
0:09:18 but I’ve tried out so much stuff
0:09:20 and I actually think this was the only thing that worked,
0:09:23 even though the science, nobody can explain it.
0:09:25 It doesn’t make any sense.
0:09:26 – And it also doesn’t help that
0:09:28 when you Google energy enhancement system.
0:09:30 The first listing is their website.
0:09:34 The second listing is paperwork from the state of Nevada
0:09:35 about how they’re being sued.
0:09:40 So like, not a good luck, Jack.
0:09:43 Not explaining the science second listing
0:09:45 is the lawsuit that they’re facing.
0:09:46 This sounds ridiculous.
0:09:50 – Where do we go from here?
0:09:52 I’m just playing.
0:09:55 Jack, I think this is very interesting to be honest.
0:09:58 I also, again, I can’t emphasize this enough.
0:10:00 What’s interesting about you is that
0:10:02 as crazy as you sound right now,
0:10:04 you’re actually a very smart guy.
0:10:05 And the cool thing about you is that
0:10:07 you’re a very independent thinker, meaning,
0:10:09 I think if something, somebody presents something to you,
0:10:11 you’re quite skeptical by default.
0:10:13 Even things that are like consensus,
0:10:15 you kind of question like, wait, why does that work?
0:10:16 How does that work?
0:10:17 Are you sure that that works?
0:10:20 But you’re also extremely open minded and experimental,
0:10:23 which means you’re gonna land on random things.
0:10:24 I don’t know if this is one of them,
0:10:27 but like random things that are kind of non-consensus,
0:10:29 but work, right?
0:10:31 Which is, as an investor,
0:10:32 those are things that you want as an entrepreneur.
0:10:34 Those are things that have served you well.
0:10:38 And now in your post-entrepreneurial career,
0:10:40 you’re doing the same thing, which I find interesting.
0:10:41 – I think I’m kind of just like,
0:10:43 if Brian Johnson drank too much coffee
0:10:46 and just got ADHD and tried out a bunch of stuff,
0:10:48 like what I really admire about him is like,
0:10:50 if he’s testing something, he’s like testing,
0:10:53 like, okay, how does this affect my blood work?
0:10:55 To know, is it working, whatever?
0:10:55 Whereas I’m just like, okay,
0:10:58 let’s just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks,
0:10:59 like just try out everything.
0:11:01 Like some of the stuff that Brian was trying,
0:11:03 like was just messaging him on Twitter.
0:11:06 I’m like, dude, I was trying that like two years ago,
0:11:08 like some of the different emerging stuff.
0:11:12 But I was not actually, I just tried some things
0:11:14 and then see, all right, does that do anything?
0:11:17 Like he had talked recently about, for some reason,
0:11:20 he’s saying that one of the best measures of your aging
0:11:22 is like your nighttime erections.
0:11:23 I don’t know if you’ve seen this.
0:11:26 So he measures his erections.
0:11:27 – Looked him great.
0:11:28 – Yeah.
0:11:31 – I’m starting doing this treatment
0:11:33 where it’s like shockwave therapy,
0:11:35 that you shockwave your penis, et cetera.
0:11:37 And he’s like, I’m going once a month, et cetera.
0:11:40 I’m like, dude, I have that machine in my house.
0:11:42 (laughing)
0:11:47 – I didn’t see that when I visited.
0:11:49 You should’ve let me give it a whirl.
0:11:53 Why don’t you tell your guest that?
0:11:55 – I would’ve loved to give him that thing a try.
0:11:59 – So what’s the word on that, Jack, does it do anything?
0:12:03 – It actually is, yeah, I don’t know how.
0:12:05 (laughing)
0:12:15 – Should we talk about non-health stuff for a bit?
0:12:16 – Yes.
0:12:18 – Well, I was going to tell you if you want,
0:12:20 because that bit is like, yeah, thanks again
0:12:21 for having me back on the pod,
0:12:23 because it meets so many interesting people
0:12:25 and your exposure has grown so much.
0:12:27 And then a number of people even in Portugal
0:12:29 that listened to it.
0:12:30 And so speaking to some listeners and they said,
0:12:32 okay, what we want is like,
0:12:34 they said to me like, okay, Sam and Sean,
0:12:36 sometimes they just tell stories too much.
0:12:38 So we want actionable stuff as well,
0:12:40 and we want business ideas.
0:12:42 So one idea that I can share with you,
0:12:43 is that what you got?
0:12:45 I’ve got one business idea, I was considering it,
0:12:47 but then it doesn’t make any sense for me,
0:12:50 but it seems to make sense, I would think for other people,
0:12:54 is that kind of like doing like the Samois brothers.
0:12:57 – By the way, Sean, did you just,
0:12:58 he just kind of like, you know,
0:13:01 a lot of people are complaining about your podcast
0:13:03 because of this, so I’m going to fix it for you.
0:13:06 – Oh, the complaint was like, yeah, you guys talk too much.
0:13:08 It’s like, the podcast, what are you talking about?
0:13:11 – It’s like, don’t worry, I’ve got the solution.
0:13:13 – There are things that are actionable,
0:13:16 specific, useful, insightful,
0:13:18 and not that other stuff that they usually do.
0:13:20 (laughing)
0:13:24 – The Samois brothers, what is the idea?
0:13:25 – The Samois brothers like, you know,
0:13:27 they cloned Airbnb and brought it to Europe.
0:13:29 – So the Samois brothers, wait, we got to give context.
0:13:32 Samois brothers are these three German brothers
0:13:35 who are famous because starting in like 1999,
0:13:38 they copied eBay, but for Germany.
0:13:40 And within 90 days, they started and sold it
0:13:41 for close to a hundred million dollars.
0:13:43 And then they did that with Airbnb, Amazon.
0:13:46 So they would just find Silicon Valley companies,
0:13:48 and their whole thing, they didn’t use great words
0:13:50 because they’re German, they’re not allowed to use this word,
0:13:51 but they called it blood screaking.
0:13:53 They would blood, blood screak the internet.
0:13:56 So they would find Amazon and do that in Thailand.
0:13:59 They would do Airbnb, but in France, whatever.
0:14:02 And oftentimes they were so hardcore,
0:14:04 they made them massive to the point
0:14:05 where they couldn’t even,
0:14:08 like they tried to build a company to sell to Groupon,
0:14:11 but their Groupon competitor got bigger than Groupon,
0:14:12 and they were like, shit, no one could buy us.
0:14:14 And so they’re famous for doing that.
0:14:15 Anyway, go ahead.
0:14:16 – So I was thinking you can do something similar,
0:14:18 but for just like bootstrapped businesses,
0:14:21 like it doesn’t need to be a tech VC type thing.
0:14:25 And just one dumb example is like in San Francisco,
0:14:27 and they think they have in Austin, et cetera,
0:14:32 like you can get a DEXA scan, D-E-X-A for like $25, $30.
0:14:35 – And body spec, it’s awesome.
0:14:37 – And the test takes like seven minutes,
0:14:39 and they’ve just got the process down amazingly.
0:14:42 They have a van with this DEXA scan machine in it,
0:14:45 and they’re just giving people seven minutes appointments,
0:14:48 like go in, do a scan, and gym people,
0:14:50 many people in general just love it,
0:14:51 because it’s the most,
0:14:53 I think it is the most effective way
0:14:55 of measuring body fat in your body.
0:14:57 There’s different methods you can use.
0:14:59 I believe this is the most accurate,
0:15:01 and it measures like muscle mass.
0:15:03 So if you’re working out at a gym,
0:15:05 it tells you if you’re gaining muscle or not.
0:15:07 And in San Francisco, it’s really accessible,
0:15:10 but then in Portugal, for example,
0:15:13 just one example, like you can only do it at a hospital.
0:15:16 And in Lisbon, like it’s not anywhere else
0:15:19 in the rest of the country, and it costs like $200,
0:15:20 needs to drive there.
0:15:22 Body spec was bootstrapped,
0:15:24 and they built it to like more than two million in revenue,
0:15:27 even with just like 14 vans, I think.
0:15:29 And the rollout strategy is pretty simple.
0:15:32 Like you just partner with like CrossFit gyms,
0:15:34 and you just park in their parking lot, you know?
0:15:35 So you’re like, all right, on Monday,
0:15:37 we’re gonna be at this CrossFit gym,
0:15:39 on Tuesday, we’ll be here, et cetera.
0:15:43 So I felt like just cloning that in Portugal.
0:15:46 You just buy, you can get a used Dexascan machine.
0:15:47 We went to Mr. Beast’s house,
0:15:49 and he has one in his office, actually.
0:15:50 It was just people coming by,
0:15:53 and everyone thinks it’s cool to just do a Dexascan.
0:15:55 Like he asked us, like,
0:15:57 oh, does anyone want a Dexascan?
0:15:59 I’ve got one in the office.
0:16:01 You can buy it for like 50.
0:16:02 – It was great, by the way.
0:16:04 One guy jumped on the Dexascan,
0:16:06 and we all bet his body fat percentage to,
0:16:07 it’s just like the ultimate,
0:16:09 like you can’t do this in society anymore,
0:16:12 but we were like, no, no, no, he’s for sure.
0:16:13 He’s for sure 18.3.
0:16:14 No, no, no, no way.
0:16:15 I’m going under.
0:16:17 And then somebody got it right.
0:16:18 – How much of those machines?
0:16:21 – I knew, I think, like 50,000.
0:16:23 And that was more affordable than I thought,
0:16:25 because a whole body MRI scanner,
0:16:26 which looks kind of similar,
0:16:29 but is doing an MRI scan, that’s a million dollars.
0:16:32 And so this, like 50,000 was reasonable.
0:16:34 And then I saw some used for like 15,000.
0:16:36 And then you just put it in a van.
0:16:38 – Patrick Campbell, our buddy Patrick, just bought one.
0:16:39 – Oh, he did?
0:16:43 – He worked for, he basically, so he lives in Puerto Rico,
0:16:45 and he bought, so he bought a Dexascan machine,
0:16:50 and he put it like, I think in kind of like a community,
0:16:52 like he has like a gym, and it’s like kind of like,
0:16:53 you made it like a community area,
0:16:55 so like anybody in his kind of expat neighborhood
0:16:58 can come there and like, you know, work out and do it.
0:17:01 So he did it as like a, he’s interested in it,
0:17:03 but also it will attract other health people,
0:17:05 like kind of a social thing almost,
0:17:06 by adding this machine.
0:17:08 – Yeah, I used to do that as a kid,
0:17:10 but we did it with breathalyzers.
0:17:12 (laughing)
0:17:15 Well, you’d buy a breathalyzer, go to a party,
0:17:19 we all surround it, and like try to guess.
0:17:22 But doing it with a MRI or whatever would be a lot,
0:17:23 would be a lot more fun.
0:17:26 – So Jack, the idea is to Samoir body spec,
0:17:29 so you basically clone the body spec bootstrapped
0:17:30 business model in Europe.
0:17:31 – Yeah, because you could launch it
0:17:33 for like less than $50,000.
0:17:36 I mean, a van, you can probably buy it on finance as well,
0:17:39 and this medical machine, just like finance, et cetera.
0:17:40 And then you just get one van,
0:17:43 and that could kind of serve all of Portugal even.
0:17:46 You know, you just be like, right, on Monday, I’m in Lisbon,
0:17:48 and then on Tuesday, we’ll be in this region,
0:17:49 on Wednesday, we’ll be here,
0:17:51 and you book people seven minute slots.
0:17:53 When that’s working, just either get another van,
0:17:58 or just get another van in Spain, in Barcelona, in France.
0:18:01 Like, because it’s just not out here, but every,
0:18:04 but like, it has strong appeal, it has wide appeal,
0:18:06 and it’s affordable.
0:18:08 Like, even my wife is not into this kind of thing,
0:18:10 but she’s interested in like, how is my,
0:18:12 I’m working out, so is it working?
0:18:15 Like, I wanna see, am I gaining muscle and stuff?
0:18:17 So, yeah, that was one idea.
0:18:19 – That’s a cool idea, I like that.
0:18:20 – Have you guys seen a pre-novo?
0:18:22 Have you seen pre-novo, Sean?
0:18:24 – Yeah, yeah, I’ve done a pre-novo scan.
0:18:26 – Is, so, I’m gonna go do one as well.
0:18:28 It’s a pretty wild idea.
0:18:30 I don’t know if it’s effective or not,
0:18:32 but basically, getting an MRI,
0:18:34 like, I think we’ve actually talked about this, Sean.
0:18:37 Like, I think in 50 or 100 years, we’re gonna look back,
0:18:40 and we’re gonna be like, can you believe that,
0:18:42 since the beginning of time,
0:18:46 you could have cancer or something bad growing in your body,
0:18:47 and you would just have no idea.
0:18:50 You would have no idea that it’d be like an intruder
0:18:51 in your home, like, I don’t know,
0:18:53 there could be someone down there, we’re not sure.
0:18:57 And oftentimes, or some of the times, they say,
0:19:00 well, had you just found this earlier,
0:19:02 basically had you come through our front doors
0:19:05 and gotten this MRI, we could have solved this.
0:19:07 Like, this was a very solvable thing.
0:19:10 And so they kind of take, they’re taking that idea,
0:19:13 and anyone can pay money.
0:19:18 It’s 3,500 for one, or 1,000 for like a lower-end version.
0:19:19 And you could walk in off the street
0:19:21 and get these MRI full-body scans.
0:19:24 And I don’t know if they’re great or not,
0:19:25 but the idea of that is cool.
0:19:27 Was it cool, Sean?
0:19:27 – I mean, it’s definitely cool.
0:19:31 You go, you lay down, and they basically do a full-body MRI,
0:19:34 which normally either, like, would take a long time,
0:19:36 but it’d be like four hours or something,
0:19:38 but they do this in one hour because of their,
0:19:41 they basically have rejiggered traditional MRI machines.
0:19:42 This is what they tell you, right?
0:19:44 So they say, we’ve rejiggered the MRI machines,
0:19:45 and now we can do it faster,
0:19:47 and we can get higher resolution,
0:19:49 we can get more images,
0:19:51 and then we have special software that can read it,
0:19:53 and all this stuff.
0:19:54 And so I went there, laid down,
0:19:56 watched Top Gun, and came out,
0:19:58 and they were like, “Cool, you don’t have cancer.”
0:20:00 I was like, “All right, guess I’ll just go back
0:20:03 to my day then,” and that was that.
0:20:04 I thought that’s kind of amazing,
0:20:05 and I love the mission of it,
0:20:07 so I love the mission of basically
0:20:08 knowing, understanding what’s going on in your body,
0:20:11 being more proactive versus reactive when it comes to,
0:20:13 like you said, so many things that,
0:20:15 if we had caught this sooner,
0:20:17 that’s one of the great regrets of life, right?
0:20:19 And it’s like the Tesla model.
0:20:21 They’re starting with this really expensive thing
0:20:23 that only rich health nuts can do,
0:20:25 and then, but the goal is, over time,
0:20:29 get the costs down through economies of scale,
0:20:31 as well as like the technology curve going down
0:20:33 so that these become, instead of a few thousand dollars,
0:20:35 like a few hundred dollars to do,
0:20:36 and then more people will do them.
0:20:37 That’s the idea.
0:20:39 Now, I must say the counter argument,
0:20:42 which is, I was pretty pumped about this,
0:20:44 but I’m also a noob, I’m a layman.
0:20:46 I don’t know the science behind this stuff.
0:20:48 I don’t know what’s real and what’s not.
0:20:51 I showed it to a friend of mine who was a surgeon,
0:20:53 and my best buddy’s from college,
0:20:54 and I was like, “Hey, I did this thing.
0:20:54 Have you heard about it?”
0:20:56 He’s like, “No, let me check it out.”
0:20:59 And so he’s like, “Cool, can you send me the scan?”
0:21:00 And I was like, “Oh, you can actually,
0:21:01 yeah, you can get the file, like the folder.
0:21:04 Here’s the zip folder of all my images.”
0:21:05 ‘Cause he was like, “That doesn’t sound right.”
0:21:06 He’s like, “I don’t think you can do
0:21:08 what they’re saying you can do.”
0:21:09 He’s like, “I don’t believe that you can get
0:21:13 that many images at that resolution using this technology,
0:21:17 nor do I think you can see what’s actually a dangerous thing
0:21:19 without doing the, like, you drink the thing,
0:21:20 and then it’s contrast,
0:21:22 it lights up differently in your body.”
0:21:23 He’s like, “I don’t believe that.”
0:21:24 And so he’s like, “Show me the images.”
0:21:26 So I show him the images,
0:21:28 and I’m trying to defend it, but I also don’t know shit.
0:21:31 I’m like, “No, no, no, it’s technology.”
0:21:33 Like the guy, he had the story, his friend died.
0:21:34 So, you know, he was motivated,
0:21:36 and he’s like, “What are you talking about?
0:21:37 Just show me the images.”
0:21:38 I showed him the images.
0:21:40 He’s like, “So these are normal MRI images.
0:21:41 These are not…”
0:21:43 He’s like, “First of all, this is less images
0:21:44 than they say they have.”
0:21:45 He’s like, “Look at this.”
0:21:47 On their website, they say, “We take this many slices,
0:21:49 this many cuts.”
0:21:51 He’s like, “Look, there’s 27 images in here.”
0:21:53 So where’s the images?
0:21:55 He’s like, “Secondly, this looks exactly like an image.”
0:21:57 He’s like, “Thirdly, I can see your penis in this.”
0:21:58 I was like, “Oh, god damn it.”
0:22:02 And he’s like, “Fourth, you know,
0:22:04 the resolution or the ability to see
0:22:05 what’s actually going on,
0:22:06 like this would not be useful enough
0:22:08 to do any kind of diagnosis.”
0:22:09 And then I was at a dinner
0:22:11 with the guy who started Prinovo.
0:22:13 And I was like, “Hey, not to be buzz killed,
0:22:16 but like, I did a scan, talked to my doctor buddy.”
0:22:17 And he starts laughing as soon as I talk
0:22:19 to my doctor friend.
0:22:20 And he’s like, “Oh, I know, I know.”
0:22:23 And I was like, “Okay, well, I’m gonna say it anyways.”
0:22:25 He said that it doesn’t make sense
0:22:26 and it didn’t really work.
0:22:29 And that there was not as many images and the resolution.
0:22:31 He’s like, “No, that’s, doctors always say that.”
0:22:32 They do, you know, blah, blah, blah.
0:22:33 I’m like, “Well, isn’t that a bad thing
0:22:34 if doctors always say that?”
0:22:35 And he’s like, “No, no, no.
0:22:36 I mean, like not all doctors, but, you know,
0:22:37 we hear that a lot.”
0:22:39 I was like, “Cool, so what’s the answer?”
0:22:40 And, you know, what would I tell my friend
0:22:41 that would have him not believe
0:22:43 that I’m, you know, getting their nose here?
0:22:45 And he was like, “You need like our software
0:22:49 to be able to, we have like machine learning.”
0:22:50 And he starts saying some words
0:22:51 that we have special software that reads this.
0:22:52 I was like, “Cool.”
0:22:54 But I felt kind of like he brushed it off.
0:22:57 Now, it might’ve just been because it was a dinner
0:22:59 and he didn’t have time to get to the details.
0:23:00 And maybe he is really sick
0:23:01 of just hearing this over and over again.
0:23:02 I’m not sure.
0:23:06 But I personally didn’t walk away super convinced
0:23:08 that in either direction,
0:23:09 that this is like super useful or not.
0:23:10 And I’m saying the whole thing
0:23:13 because I’ve seen a lot of people promoting this thing.
0:23:15 And just if it’s useful,
0:23:17 here is a personal anecdote counterpoint.
0:23:19 Do your own research and figure it out.
0:23:21 But that’s kind of where I landed with it.
0:23:22 Where I thought, well,
0:23:24 if somebody can’t explain something simply to me
0:23:25 and in a way that’s convincing,
0:23:27 then I’ll just err on the side
0:23:29 of it’s probably not miraculous.
0:23:30 It’s kind of where I landed.
0:23:34 – To say one pro point, Sam and I were at a dinner
0:23:35 and the lady said like,
0:23:39 she just had a feeling that her boyfriend should do this scan.
0:23:41 She wasn’t sure why, just kind of had a feeling.
0:23:44 And then did the scan and they found a lump.
0:23:46 – And he had cancer.
0:23:47 – He had cancer.
0:23:49 – And he got surgery like two months later.
0:23:51 And the surgeon was like, how did you detect
0:23:52 that you had this?
0:23:53 You don’t have any symptoms.
0:23:56 And if you had caught this just like a few months later,
0:23:58 you actually would either be dead
0:24:00 or not be able to speak right now.
0:24:02 And so she’s becoming like,
0:24:04 they are becoming like advocates for this
0:24:05 in their marketing videos and stuff.
0:24:08 So that’s a pro that it did catch ahead of time.
0:24:10 – And I’ve heard that also from other people too.
0:24:13 And when you go in, they say one in 20 scans.
0:24:16 So, you know, 5% of people who come in
0:24:18 have a potentially life-saving diagnosis.
0:24:20 Now it’s again, it’s hard to verify a claim like this.
0:24:21 It’s hard to know.
0:24:24 But I have heard anecdotally other people say,
0:24:25 oh yeah, we did go and we did find something.
0:24:27 So, you know, it’s not nothing.
0:24:30 And but even besides that, as a business,
0:24:31 this thing is gangbusters, right?
0:24:33 They make so much money off of this.
0:24:35 They’ve got, I don’t know how many locations,
0:24:37 but they just raised like $70 million
0:24:40 to expand prenuvo.
0:24:41 And I think they’re in like, I don’t know,
0:24:43 20 cities around the country now.
0:24:44 – So one thing as well to say is like,
0:24:46 I’ve done this thing called Cubio,
0:24:47 which is funded by Google.
0:24:50 And if they’re at least 70 million in funding,
0:24:51 perhaps more than a hundred million,
0:24:53 it’s kind of a competitor, prenuvo, et cetera.
0:24:56 So I’ve done that in America and they similarly say like,
0:24:59 okay, well, I was the chief medical officer at Google
0:25:00 and we have all these Google engineers.
0:25:04 So we do AI and that’s why we can do it in 45 minutes
0:25:06 instead of four hours, et cetera, like you’re saying, Sean,
0:25:08 I did the same thing in India
0:25:10 and got exactly the same results
0:25:12 and I was only doing it for 40 minutes.
0:25:15 Like, I think they’re just Silicon Valley branding.
0:25:16 – They’re also Google engineers in India.
0:25:17 (laughing)
0:25:19 Turns out there’s just a lot of Google engineers out there.
0:25:22 Google engineers, like the Harvard Extension School
0:25:23 graduate, right?
0:25:26 It’s like, there’s a lot of people that have this stamp.
0:25:28 – So one other business idea I did think
0:25:29 after going to this retreat,
0:25:33 because this retreat, as I said, it was $6,000.
0:25:34 But just-
0:25:34 – What was the call?
0:25:38 – It’s called AIWO is the center.
0:25:41 But $6,000 included that MRI
0:25:44 that in America you’re paying more than $3,000 for.
0:25:46 And that was just like a few hours part of it.
0:25:49 This was a whole week and included your hotels, et cetera.
0:25:51 But then speaking to other people,
0:25:52 they were like, you know,
0:25:55 many other countries have amazing medical tech,
0:25:57 Turkey, Korea, et cetera.
0:26:00 The challenges they have is branding
0:26:04 and also like the printouts might be in Korean or Turkish.
0:26:08 So I think what this guy, the AIWO place is doing amazing
0:26:11 is he’s targeting people that are interested in biohacking,
0:26:12 following Brian Johnson,
0:26:14 and then he’s getting the influencers.
0:26:15 So he’s just got the guy
0:26:17 who’s number one, number two, and Brian Johnson’s leaderboard.
0:26:20 He told that guy, hey, you can come for free,
0:26:22 but just refer eight people.
0:26:25 And you also be there to help people interpret
0:26:27 their blood test results or whatever.
0:26:28 So get all these other people to pay $6,000
0:26:30 and I’ll give it to you for free.
0:26:34 I feel you could just brand a biohacking center
0:26:37 in any other country if you have strong links to the country.
0:26:38 Because what they were doing here
0:26:41 is they don’t have their own MRI scanner.
0:26:43 He just took us to all these different labs in India.
0:26:46 He just made connections with them
0:26:47 and they kind of just got us to skip
0:26:49 to the front of the queue, you know?
0:26:53 So a concierge medical for anti-aging,
0:26:55 but you could do that in other countries.
0:26:58 – We had a buddy, Jack, I don’t know if you remember this.
0:26:59 Sean, you might know him too
0:27:01 when we worked out of the founders, Dojo.
0:27:04 They had this crazy business and it didn’t end up working,
0:27:06 but they had a lot of people who were interested,
0:27:07 but they couldn’t get them over the line.
0:27:10 But basically, if you want to get a boob job
0:27:13 or other types of plastic surgery,
0:27:14 you could get it in America,
0:27:17 of which it’s elective and it’s very expensive.
0:27:19 Or you could go to India and get it done,
0:27:21 or Mexico and get it done.
0:27:24 And the claim is that the doctors are as good,
0:27:27 the care is as good, but it’s 5% of the price.
0:27:29 So instead of, I don’t know how much a boob job costs,
0:27:33 but let’s say instead of $20,000, it’s $1,500 or $2,000.
0:27:36 And these people had created this business
0:27:38 called, it was all on medical tourism,
0:27:40 which I didn’t know that was a thing.
0:27:43 And they got a lot of interested customers.
0:27:44 Because they were a startup,
0:27:45 they could convince these people to trust them
0:27:46 and things like that.
0:27:47 But it was actually pretty interesting when they told me
0:27:50 this, I was like, there’s no way people are gonna do that.
0:27:52 But there are a lot of people willing to do that.
0:27:52 – I remember that.
0:27:53 John Howard was doing that, right?
0:27:54 – John Howard, yeah.
0:27:56 I don’t remember why it didn’t work out.
0:27:58 I guess they just couldn’t get people over the line.
0:28:00 We were in this office where,
0:28:03 but like guys were mining Bitcoin and all this shit.
0:28:05 And they were like in this little room,
0:28:07 trying to convince these people to fly to India
0:28:09 to get their team. – Get like a root canal.
0:28:11 – Yeah, get like a root canal in like Mexico.
0:28:13 But like, yeah, you can go on the beach afterwards
0:28:14 and just sit there.
0:28:16 Like, and it was just like a ridiculous.
0:28:17 – I know a lot of people that actually do this.
0:28:19 And, you know, I think all he missed was it was just
0:28:21 a hair transplants in Turkey was all he needed to do.
0:28:24 That like, Jack, you got a beautiful head of hair,
0:28:25 but have you looked into,
0:28:27 can you explain to me what’s going on with the Turkey thing?
0:28:30 Why is this seems incredibly popular?
0:28:32 And also why Turkey?
0:28:34 – I’m not sure why Turkey.
0:28:36 What they were saying in India is they’re just like,
0:28:38 Hey, we’ve just got so many people here in India
0:28:40 that he’s like, if you, in America,
0:28:43 if you’ve got some obscure disease,
0:28:45 then none of the doctors have ever come across it before.
0:28:48 Whereas in India, like, there’s like 10 other,
0:28:51 they’ve had 10 other patients that week with the same issue.
0:28:53 And it is true, a bunch of the doctors in India,
0:28:55 I was speaking to the guy and they had studied
0:28:56 and worked in England.
0:28:59 They’re not like going to someone and play, he’s like,
0:29:01 Oh, I studied at this medical university in England.
0:29:04 So they’re saying it’s quantity of people.
0:29:07 I’m not sure what attributes make Turkey the leading bit
0:29:09 for hair transplants and stuff.
0:29:10 – All right, I’m going to do a deep dive
0:29:12 on the Turkey hair transplant thing.
0:29:12 It’s insane.
0:29:15 Like I have seen so many people do this.
0:29:18 I think it’s like basically 10 times less
0:29:19 or something than in the US.
0:29:22 So, you know, I think there’s obviously a cost component,
0:29:24 but I just don’t know why Turkey.
0:29:26 – There’s this funny photo that this guy shared online
0:29:28 where he was like on his way back from Turkey
0:29:31 on the air, on the, on the airplane.
0:29:34 And he took a picture of all the men sitting on the plane.
0:29:36 And there was literally like 10 heads
0:29:39 that you could tell the hair had just gotten sewn in.
0:29:42 So I was like, Holy shit, this thing is big.
0:29:45 – Yeah, like there’s Instagram influencer,
0:29:49 like transplant daddies that are like the Turkish guys
0:29:51 and they’re just, every day that’s the content
0:29:52 that they’re posting.
0:29:54 And it seems like an incredible business
0:29:55 for whatever reason.
0:29:56 – You have this thing on here.
0:29:58 We asked you in advance what you want to talk about.
0:30:00 You have this thing on here that I thought was interesting.
0:30:02 And I don’t know what exactly what it means,
0:30:03 but it sounds intriguing.
0:30:08 You’re like, there’s a counter to founder beast mode.
0:30:10 What does that mean?
0:30:12 – It was funny because at the Camp MFM,
0:30:13 I was trying to explain to Mr. Beast,
0:30:15 the project that I’m working on now.
0:30:17 So I was saying like, you know, people work in tech
0:30:18 and then they get burned out.
0:30:20 And they, so I’m building a place for them
0:30:23 to detox from technology and recover from burnout.
0:30:26 And it’s like, I literally cannot relate the talk
0:30:29 to this idea because I just don’t get burned out.
0:30:31 But he has an amazing strategy,
0:30:33 but like the thing is 99% of people can’t do this,
0:30:38 which is he said, I’m either on a hundred percent
0:30:40 or I’m off a hundred percent.
0:30:44 So he said, I’ll just work like seven days in a row
0:30:47 until I pass out and sleep.
0:30:49 And I’ll just keep waking up every day, every day,
0:30:51 every day and just keep doing that.
0:30:53 But then when I feel that I’m getting burned out,
0:30:57 I’ll just do zero work and I’ll just watch documentaries
0:31:00 all day and just procrastinate all day.
0:31:02 I’ll feel better again and then I’ll go a hundred.
0:31:04 But it could also be that, you know, he’s in his twenties,
0:31:06 like he’s not super old.
0:31:09 Like I was speaking to this other Portuguese startup here
0:31:12 and they’re like, yeah, I don’t know what burnout is either,
0:31:14 but they’re like 23.
0:31:16 And they’re just like working all these hours.
0:31:19 And I said, one thing, analogy I thought of is like,
0:31:23 I went to this thing like Y Combinator, Angel Pad,
0:31:27 and I’ve never worked that hard or achieved that much
0:31:29 in three months, it’s three, 90 days.
0:31:33 I just worked so intensely and we just got amazing stuff done.
0:31:34 We raised two million in funding.
0:31:36 We got a, we came up with a business idea.
0:31:39 We managed to get a CTO to join our team.
0:31:41 We achieved loads of stuff.
0:31:45 But for me, that was a 90 day sprint.
0:31:48 That’s, if you’re just trying to do that endlessly,
0:31:50 it’s like telling your same bolt, like, okay, great.
0:31:53 You just ran the hundred meters, just keep up that pace.
0:31:56 We’re now doing a marathon, but just keep up that same pace
0:31:57 you ran the hundred meters in.
0:31:58 It doesn’t work.
0:32:01 Like at some point you might feel like it’s going okay,
0:32:04 but at some point I feel like you are gonna burn out.
0:32:06 So for me balance is important
0:32:08 and not having tunnel vision,
0:32:12 just be like, I’m being productive, productive, productive.
0:32:14 I feel procrastination can have benefits as well.
0:32:17 The way we came up with the idea for Vungal
0:32:18 is we were just playing around
0:32:20 with a bunch of different mobile apps
0:32:22 and we wanted to record a meeting
0:32:24 with one of the coaches that we had there.
0:32:25 So we’re like, hey, is it okay
0:32:27 if we just record the meeting to take notes?
0:32:29 And so we opened this voice recording app
0:32:31 and then it was free.
0:32:33 And then it started blaring some video ad
0:32:34 on like full volume.
0:32:38 And then that call for like Coca-Cola or something.
0:32:39 And actually that’s how we got the idea.
0:32:41 Like wait a minute, what if these ads,
0:32:43 instead of being really intrusive
0:32:45 and advertising something not relevant to us,
0:32:49 what if they were advertising based on our user profiles
0:32:51 other apps that we might like?
0:32:55 So it’s that kind of balance I think.
0:32:57 – Yeah, I think what you’re saying makes a ton of sense.
0:32:59 I think about everything in either seasons or gears.
0:33:00 There’s a words I use a lot,
0:33:02 which is, you know, there are seasons of life,
0:33:03 seasons where you’re gonna sprint and focus,
0:33:06 seasons where you’re gonna explore and wander.
0:33:09 I find it very useful for myself to label the seasons,
0:33:11 know what season I’m in and embrace that season.
0:33:13 ‘Cause if you’re in the season of wander,
0:33:15 it’s very easy to feel really anxious
0:33:16 that you’re not being productive.
0:33:17 But you have to remind yourself
0:33:18 that’s not what this season is.
0:33:21 This is a season of sort of exploring, dabbling, whatever.
0:33:23 If you’re in a season of productivity or focus,
0:33:25 you might feel guilty for saying no
0:33:26 to go into your friend’s thing
0:33:28 or to go into this event or whatever.
0:33:29 But you remind yourself that’s what this season is.
0:33:30 And this won’t last forever.
0:33:33 The fact that it’s time boxed as a season,
0:33:35 maybe it’s 30 days, 60 days, 90 days,
0:33:37 a year is very useful.
0:33:39 ‘Cause you know, okay, this is not forever,
0:33:40 but for now, this is what the right thing to do.
0:33:42 The other thing I talk about is gears.
0:33:44 Like I need to have multiple gears like a car
0:33:46 that I can shift into and out of.
0:33:48 Personal life, I do this with like,
0:33:51 I can be in work creator boss mode,
0:33:53 but if I bring that guy to my marriage,
0:33:54 it’s not a great marriage, right?
0:33:57 So I need to be a different guy when it comes to marriage.
0:33:59 When it comes to my kids, I’m silly, playful dad.
0:34:01 And so I like intentionally think, okay,
0:34:02 like I almost visualized in my head,
0:34:05 like I’m shifting gears now, I’m gonna be that other guy.
0:34:06 And I wanna have a few of these characters
0:34:09 that are very useful to me, versions of me
0:34:11 that I can say, all right, you’re driving now.
0:34:12 I’m going to a workout.
0:34:14 So it’s not silly, playful dad.
0:34:16 It’s more of the workout, which is like,
0:34:18 the guy who’s willing to push harder
0:34:20 to be a little more intense.
0:34:22 And so I think you wanna have both.
0:34:25 I think you wanna be able to, when you know what to do,
0:34:27 be able to focus and when something’s not working,
0:34:30 be able to zoom out and go wider, diverge and dabble
0:34:32 and sort of procrastinate and play
0:34:34 until you figure out something worth focusing on.
0:34:36 Not everything is obviously worth focusing on.
0:34:38 So I definitely agree with you there.
0:34:41 I also think that the stage of life matters a lot, right?
0:34:44 When I first met Sam and I met you, Jack,
0:34:45 I was probably 24, 25 years old.
0:34:48 I remember that year I slept in the office,
0:34:51 I think 215 days out of the year.
0:34:52 It was a nice office, but still.
0:34:54 You know, I was just like totally devoted to it.
0:34:56 I don’t think I was particularly productive.
0:34:59 I was just like, willing to throw everything at this.
0:35:00 And when I wasn’t at the office,
0:35:02 I was doing our mastermind dinners.
0:35:03 I was doing other things that I thought
0:35:04 might help me be successful
0:35:05 ’cause it was really the only thing I cared about
0:35:07 at that time was to be successful.
0:35:09 Now I’m 36 years old.
0:35:12 I don’t have that same burning desire to be successful.
0:35:13 I care about other things.
0:35:15 And so, you know, what today makes no sense to me,
0:35:17 made a lot of sense back then and vice versa.
0:35:19 So, you know, I think I kind of,
0:35:21 I agree with pretty much everything you said.
0:35:23 I don’t think it’s at odds with the way
0:35:25 that I operate at least.
0:35:27 Well, one bit I did thought was interesting to think about
0:35:32 is that for me, actually people don’t put enough time
0:35:34 into thinking what they want.
0:35:37 And I think Sean, like us,
0:35:39 you just touched on Sean about all of us.
0:35:43 I think did clearly, we knew our North Star,
0:35:45 why we’re working really hard, right?
0:35:48 And Mr. Beast, I told Sam, I was not joking,
0:35:50 but Sam was like laughing off, but I was serious.
0:35:53 I was like, I think Mr. Beast, if he wanted,
0:35:56 he can be president of the US at some point
0:36:01 because he just since the age of 15 has just had one goal
0:36:04 and it’s not changed for 10, whatever years.
0:36:06 He just said, I want to be the number one on YouTube.
0:36:08 And that has not changed.
0:36:09 He’s not changed that.
0:36:11 And he said no to a bunch of things,
0:36:14 but he just decided on that and went all in on that
0:36:16 and surrounded himself by other people
0:36:18 who were chasing the same goal.
0:36:19 But it was just all in on that.
0:36:22 It kind of struck me a bit that I think actually,
0:36:25 a lot of people don’t put enough time
0:36:27 into thinking what they want.
0:36:29 – Yeah, you brought up something that I get pretty fired up
0:36:31 about, which is figuring out what you want
0:36:32 and taking the time to do it.
0:36:34 I think I’ve been really bad about this.
0:36:36 The reason I get fired up is because I look back
0:36:39 at years of my life, I spent on the wrong things.
0:36:41 And that’s a very expensive thing.
0:36:43 Like years in my 20s are sort of like prime assets.
0:36:45 That’s the beachfront real estate of my life.
0:36:48 And if I spent it on things that I didn’t really think through
0:36:51 or actually in retrospect were sort of obviously
0:36:53 dumb things to work on,
0:36:56 that brought a lot of kind of like lessons learned for me.
0:36:59 And I read this. – What was that lesson?
0:37:01 – Project selection is the most important thing
0:37:04 that amongst talented people,
0:37:06 the biggest sort of variable that actually happens.
0:37:08 Assume you’re gonna do the table stakes, right?
0:37:11 Which is you’re not gonna do the thing Jack’s talking about.
0:37:13 Like you’re not gonna just not like take no action
0:37:14 on something.
0:37:15 Like I was already past that.
0:37:16 I was gonna take action.
0:37:18 I was gonna work like hard enough.
0:37:20 Maybe I wasn’t gonna be the hardest worker on earth,
0:37:21 but I was willing to work hard enough
0:37:22 to make the thing happen.
0:37:24 And again, I’m also like intelligent enough.
0:37:25 I’m not the smartest guy,
0:37:28 but that’s not the reason I’m gonna fail
0:37:31 is because I just can’t figure something out.
0:37:33 Okay, so there’s me and like, I don’t know,
0:37:35 everybody I knew, all of my friends.
0:37:36 We’re all in that same boat.
0:37:37 We were all, we all wanted it.
0:37:38 We’re willing to take action,
0:37:39 willing to work hard enough.
0:37:42 And we’re all about smart enough to figure things out.
0:37:44 So what was the biggest difference in like
0:37:47 where everybody landed and how their life went?
0:37:48 And it was project selection.
0:37:50 It was, you know, the people like at the time
0:37:51 when I sort of started to think about this,
0:37:53 I was trying to build a sushi restaurant.
0:37:56 And it’s like, okay, building a restaurant is probably,
0:37:58 you know, on the low end of like
0:38:00 poor project selection decisions,
0:38:01 especially for somebody like me
0:38:03 who didn’t have a passion for food,
0:38:06 nor was like, you know, that was not my dream.
0:38:08 Like I did not get joy out of making food every day
0:38:11 or, you know, bringing to life, you know, a menu or whatever.
0:38:14 So it’s absolutely the wrong project for me.
0:38:16 And then I just sort of made similar mistakes along the way.
0:38:19 When I, even when I had a golden opportunity
0:38:21 where, you know, the Birch family believed in me,
0:38:23 they hired me, they named me CEO,
0:38:25 they give me a blank check and a team full of engineers.
0:38:28 And basically they funded like $15 million
0:38:31 and a bunch of engineers to running this idea lab
0:38:33 where I could think of any idea I wanted.
0:38:36 But the one boundary box was it had to be kind of consumer.
0:38:38 And then he liked social and I liked social,
0:38:39 whatever he liked social,
0:38:41 the idea that we could create the next Twitter
0:38:44 and next Facebook, that was so sexy.
0:38:47 But it was again, like pretty terrible project selection
0:38:50 where, you know, the odds of success,
0:38:52 even amongst the most brilliant people,
0:38:53 you know, are sort of like point,
0:38:56 oh, like there’s like six people have done it, you know,
0:38:59 in the last 30 years, period, six human beings on earth
0:39:02 that have made like a Snapchat, a Twitter or whatever.
0:39:03 And so again, poor project selection,
0:39:05 like at a time where what I really cared about
0:39:08 was being successful, I was choosing a project
0:39:10 that had like almost no chance of being successful.
0:39:12 And I really wasn’t smart enough to see the opportunities
0:39:16 around me that were much, much better for me at the time.
0:39:18 But I want to read you this thing.
0:39:19 I was reading this essay by Paul Graham,
0:39:21 it’s called, “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas.”
0:39:23 He talks about this exact thing.
0:39:25 You know, before he started Y Combinator, he did V-O-Web.
0:39:26 But before he did V-O-Web,
0:39:28 have you guys heard of the startup he did before that?
0:39:30 – No, not that can remember.
0:39:31 – It’s something called Artix.
0:39:35 And so basically it was like 1995
0:39:37 and they have this idea called Artix.
0:39:39 And it’s basically to put web galleries online.
0:39:41 And he’s like, “Oh, it’s great because I love painting.
0:39:42 I love art.
0:39:44 I’m kind of like a programmer.
0:39:45 I understand like this internet thing is here.
0:39:47 And that seems important.
0:39:48 So like, what’s the internet idea?
0:39:51 I should, oh, I should marry my two hobbies,
0:39:52 art on the internet.”
0:39:53 And he’s like, “Cool.”
0:39:55 And so he says, “In retrospect,
0:39:58 I wonder how we could have wasted our time
0:39:59 on something so stupid.
0:40:01 Galleries were not excited about being on the web,
0:40:03 even now, you know, decades later,
0:40:06 let alone back in 1995.
0:40:08 They don’t want to have all their stock visible
0:40:11 to some random online anonymous visitor.
0:40:13 Like that’s not how the art world works.”
0:40:16 And he’s like, “Basically, we couldn’t sell the thing.
0:40:17 Like we couldn’t get any customers.”
0:40:19 And he’s like, “By the way, we’re not alone here.
0:40:21 Like Paul Allen and Bill Gates,
0:40:23 before they started Microsoft, they started, you know,
0:40:24 Traffo data.”
0:40:25 And he’s like, “It was not anywhere near
0:40:26 as successful as Microsoft.
0:40:29 Like same talent, but working on the wrong project.”
0:40:31 Alex Ramosy had a great way of saying this.
0:40:33 He said, “When he was doing his gym business,
0:40:35 he went to like a mastermind.
0:40:36 And at the mastermind, the guy was like,
0:40:38 “Cool, I heard everything you just said
0:40:40 about how you’ve made your five gyms successful.”
0:40:44 He’s like, “You’re like a nine out of 10 execution
0:40:46 on a two out of 10 opportunity.”
0:40:48 And you’re asking us how to execute better
0:40:49 when actually you should be saying,
0:40:51 you should be realizing that you’re only working
0:40:52 on a two out of 10 opportunity.”
0:40:53 For me, that was sushi restaurants.
0:40:56 For him, that was running brick and mortar gyms.
0:40:58 And once he changed what he was doing,
0:40:59 like he didn’t have to work 10 times harder,
0:41:03 but he could get literally 100 times the level of success.
0:41:04 So Paul Graham says this thing.
0:41:06 He goes, “So why does this happen?
0:41:08 Why do hackers have bad business ideas?
0:41:09 Let’s look at our case.”
0:41:09 We had such a lame idea
0:41:11 because it was the first thing we thought of.
0:41:13 I was in New York trying to be a starving artist
0:41:15 at the time, the starving part was easy.
0:41:17 And he’s like, “I was looking at art galleries anyways,
0:41:18 and when I learned to make websites,
0:41:20 it seemed natural to mix the two together.”
0:41:23 He goes, “If you’re gonna spend years working on something,
0:41:25 it might be wise to at least spend a few days
0:41:27 considering different ideas instead of just going
0:41:28 with the first idea that comes in your head.”
0:41:30 You would think, but people don’t.
0:41:31 In fact, this is a constant problem,
0:41:33 even in just the world of painting.
0:41:35 If you wanna go be a still life painter,
0:41:37 you would sit down in front of your table
0:41:39 with all your materials.
0:41:41 And you might spend five minutes thinking
0:41:42 about what you’re gonna paint,
0:41:44 but it’s hard to spend more time
0:41:46 than that looking at the blank canvas.
0:41:49 We get so impatient that we just start painting anything.
0:41:51 But the problem is painting takes time.
0:41:54 It could take days, weeks, months to finish a painting.
0:41:56 You’re gonna go back and wish halfway through
0:41:57 that maybe you had thought about
0:41:59 what you actually wanted to paint, but it’s too late.
0:42:00 You’ve already kicked it off
0:42:03 just because you couldn’t sit there for an hour
0:42:05 thinking about what to work on.
0:42:06 And basically says that this is the same thing
0:42:08 they see in YC2.
0:42:10 That basically founders will pick an idea
0:42:14 because it’s too uncomfortable to sit in the not knowing
0:42:16 and think about what you actually wanna do
0:42:17 and what actually might be interesting for you,
0:42:19 what might actually might be a good idea.
0:42:20 And so we just start.
0:42:21 And this is what I was guilty of at the beginning.
0:42:22 It was just starting.
0:42:24 And it seems like, cool, cool, I’ll change it later.
0:42:26 But once you start, you get wed to it.
0:42:28 Like I remember when we thought about pivoting,
0:42:30 we only thought about pivoting to other restaurant ideas
0:42:32 or other online delivery things.
0:42:35 It was like, we could only think inside this box
0:42:38 because anything else felt like admitting failure,
0:42:40 giving up, starting from scratch,
0:42:41 going back to the bottom of the mountain,
0:42:44 even though that might’ve been the right way to do it,
0:42:46 it mentally was far too hard to do that.
0:42:49 – I think maybe, I might have mentioned this
0:42:50 on a previous episode, I can’t remember,
0:42:53 but actually Mark Andreessen has something he says,
0:42:57 like the most important factor in determining
0:43:00 if a startup will be successful, like a billion dollar company.
0:43:03 He said, most investors think like it’s the team
0:43:05 or the actual product or idea.
0:43:07 Like, oh, wow, that’s amazing team.
0:43:09 And he said, he thinks it’s none of those.
0:43:12 He thinks the most important factor is the market,
0:43:14 size of the market and growth rate.
0:43:16 He’s saying, if you just have a crappy market,
0:43:19 you can have amazing execution, the best team ever,
0:43:21 but they’re inhibited by,
0:43:23 into how big a company they can build,
0:43:24 by the size of the market.
0:43:29 – So here’s the deal.
0:43:32 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:43:34 It was called The Hustle.
0:43:35 And it was a daily newsletter at scale
0:43:37 to millions of subscribers.
0:43:39 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:43:42 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees
0:43:45 and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
0:43:48 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:43:50 building out the tech for the platform and selling ads.
0:43:53 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
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0:44:11 That’s B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:44:18 – Yeah, there’s a funny business school like anecdote
0:44:20 where a guy comes in and he’s giving this talk
0:44:22 and he says, all right, business school,
0:44:25 you wanna create like a successful like hot dog stand?
0:44:29 What’s the number one factor of success for a hot dog stand?
0:44:32 And you know, hand goes up, location.
0:44:33 Says not location.
0:44:35 I say, you know, ingredients,
0:44:36 having the highest quality product.
0:44:38 Do you wanna have the best product on the market?
0:44:39 He says, nope.
0:44:41 They say, marketing, you gotta be able to
0:44:44 take the word out there and spread your story.
0:44:45 Nope, he says the number one thing
0:44:49 to make a successful hot dog stand is a starving crowd.
0:44:50 And he said, just in general,
0:44:52 as a lesson of entrepreneurship,
0:44:54 like you should be hunting for starving crowds.
0:44:55 ‘Cause if you go to a starving crowd,
0:44:57 even without the best marketing,
0:44:59 without the best, you know, product,
0:45:02 without the best team or execution,
0:45:03 you will still succeed.
0:45:05 And I, you know, I forgot the phrase here,
0:45:06 but it’s like, you know,
0:45:09 when a great entrepreneur meets a bad market,
0:45:11 you know, only one of them keeps their reputation,
0:45:12 the bad market keeps their reputation.
0:45:15 Whereas if it’s a great market
0:45:16 and you’re even an okay entrepreneur,
0:45:18 you’ll still be successful.
0:45:21 It’s a very hard lesson to internalize,
0:45:24 but it’s proven very, you know, true in my life at least.
0:45:26 – It’s really hard to pick a great market.
0:45:28 We were lucky that we did
0:45:30 and many other companies in the same industry
0:45:33 as us also became really big companies,
0:45:35 but luck, the big factor there.
0:45:38 – Yeah, I remember you were telling a story about Vungal.
0:45:41 So Vungal made like video ads for iPhone apps
0:45:44 and one of Sean’s buddies helped start this thing
0:45:47 called App Lovin’, which became this huge thing.
0:45:50 And it’s the same type of company.
0:45:51 And I don’t know what it was where Sean,
0:45:54 like 30 or 40 billion, like a huge sum.
0:45:55 And I remember Jack, I think you,
0:45:57 I forget exactly how you phrased this,
0:46:00 but you’re like, we only did okay.
0:46:04 And we had a $750 million exit, you know,
0:46:05 we could have been like as big as these other ones
0:46:08 because the market just pulled this out of us.
0:46:11 Like people were just begging for this product
0:46:13 and like you weren’t technical at the time
0:46:15 or you weren’t very technical.
0:46:17 Your partner wasn’t technical, I don’t think at all.
0:46:20 And I was like, how on earth you do this?
0:46:22 ‘Cause I think when you had sold,
0:46:24 there was some article that said Vungal
0:46:26 was making a million dollars a day.
0:46:28 So you guys were gonna do $360 million
0:46:31 the year you sold and revenue.
0:46:32 And you were just saying, you’re like,
0:46:34 do people just beg it for this thing?
0:46:37 And we just got so lucky that we just picked it
0:46:39 right when the iPhone came out.
0:46:41 And we got, it was just like,
0:46:43 it just got, we got really lucky with that
0:46:45 because we didn’t do that good.
0:46:47 Our competitors, App Lovin’,
0:46:49 they were 30 times bigger
0:46:51 or whatever the App Lovin’ market happens.
0:46:53 – Yeah, they’re a $28 billion company right now.
0:46:54 – Yeah.
0:46:57 And they were like, they were literally 30 times bigger.
0:46:59 And we only did okay, but we still, you know,
0:47:02 made $800 million or whatever.
0:47:04 And that kind of like, I learned that lesson from you
0:47:06 about picking the right market.
0:47:09 – So when Furcon, who’s my co-founder at Bebo,
0:47:13 he was previously the CTO and co-founder of App Lovin.
0:47:16 And so when he joined, App Lovin was doing really well
0:47:17 back then, but it wasn’t,
0:47:19 it didn’t look like a $30 billion company,
0:47:20 it looked like a $1 billion company.
0:47:22 But I was like, wow, this guy built a billion dollar company.
0:47:24 Now he’s sitting here next to me
0:47:26 and we’re working on the next thing from scratch.
0:47:27 It’s like, what can I learn from this guy?
0:47:30 So I was like, how did you guys get that idea?
0:47:32 And basically what he told me was kind of interesting story,
0:47:35 Jack, to your point about procrastination.
0:47:36 He was like, two things happened.
0:47:38 He’s like, the first was when I joined,
0:47:40 I wasn’t the co-founder or the CTO,
0:47:43 I joined as like an engineer and he’s really good.
0:47:45 He’s like, obviously amazing.
0:47:46 And so right away they were like,
0:47:48 hey, we think we have the wrong team.
0:47:50 Like we have too many people here.
0:47:51 It’s gonna, we don’t have product market fit.
0:47:52 We just have too many people,
0:47:54 which is a great like CEO move.
0:47:59 Sean, was the we even app-loving or was it some other idea?
0:48:00 They were doing a clothing business.
0:48:01 It was like style page.
0:48:04 They’re trying to make a Pinterest competitor at the time.
0:48:05 That was like one of the many ideas.
0:48:06 So basically they were,
0:48:08 I think they were a dating thing first and then whatever.
0:48:13 So there was like, they had like 10 or 12 people he joined.
0:48:17 And the CEO, Adam, who’s proven to be like a pretty like killer guy,
0:48:19 was like, hey, like we don’t know what we’re doing,
0:48:21 but we do know that this is probably not the right team.
0:48:24 Can you just basically like restart this?
0:48:25 He’s like, so just anybody who you don’t think
0:48:28 is like the like hardcore just down to figure this out.
0:48:30 Let’s get rid of them and let’s go leaner
0:48:31 and let’s figure this out.
0:48:32 So first thing they do, they fire everybody, right?
0:48:34 It’s like not what you would consider
0:48:38 to be like the origin story of a $30 billion company.
0:48:41 Then now they have like four or five people.
0:48:43 So three co-founders plus for con as the fourth co-founder
0:48:45 and I think maybe one other guy.
0:48:48 And they are like cycling through ideas.
0:48:50 And so the founders previously had made
0:48:53 like 40 or 50 million bucks doing a,
0:48:56 I think like a dating, it was an ad network,
0:48:57 but I think for dating sites.
0:48:58 And so that’s what they knew.
0:49:01 They knew ad networks, but it was like for,
0:49:03 you know, generation one of the web.
0:49:04 And they had money to fund this.
0:49:07 I think he put $4 million into fund the thing.
0:49:09 And then they were like, we’re gonna create the next Pinterest.
0:49:09 They saw Pinterest getting hot.
0:49:11 So they tried to create a Pinterest competitor.
0:49:12 Then they were like, dude, we’re just like
0:49:14 four like non-stylish dudes trying to do this.
0:49:15 This is not working.
0:49:18 Then they created like this life 360 type of app.
0:49:21 And then they created like eight or nine ideas.
0:49:22 And I was like, so what was it like?
0:49:24 You were going in there, you’re brainstorming every day.
0:49:25 You’re doing research.
0:49:25 Like what was it?
0:49:26 No, not really.
0:49:29 Like basically one person would come in with some inspiration.
0:49:30 Like, hey, I saw this, this is crushing it.
0:49:33 Or you ever noticed this problem?
0:49:35 And then we would quickly try to build a prototype,
0:49:36 take it to market and see what happens.
0:49:37 See if it’s stuck, see if we like got momentum.
0:49:39 He’s like, but more often than not, he’s like, honestly,
0:49:42 like, I don’t know, like 20 to 30% of the days
0:49:44 we would just come in, we just weren’t inspired.
0:49:45 And we weren’t gonna work on something
0:49:46 that we didn’t feel inspired by.
0:49:48 So we would just play FIFA for like five hours.
0:49:50 And then we would all go home.
0:49:51 I was like, what?
0:49:52 He’s like, yeah, we were literally,
0:49:55 if we just didn’t feel it, like if the idea wasn’t solid,
0:49:57 that we didn’t feel like there was something there,
0:49:58 we didn’t want to busy ourselves
0:50:01 and like occupy ourselves with a not good idea.
0:50:03 Cause then that would at least,
0:50:04 it’s like dating somebody bad.
0:50:07 And you don’t have the door open to meet somebody amazing.
0:50:08 And so he’s like, we would just play FIFA.
0:50:10 And he’s like, while we’re playing FIFA,
0:50:11 we would just talk, then we would order food,
0:50:12 then we would talk some more.
0:50:14 And we’re just giving ourselves like,
0:50:16 relax the brain to try to come up with ideas.
0:50:19 He’s like, then Adam went to a conference
0:50:23 and this was like right when iPhone had taken off.
0:50:26 And he’s like, came home and he’s like, forget it.
0:50:28 We’re doing an ad network, but for mobile phones.
0:50:30 He’s like, mobile phones are gonna be big.
0:50:32 They don’t really have good ad networks.
0:50:33 I know how to do an ad network.
0:50:34 That’s what we’re doing.
0:50:36 And he’s like, because they knew that business,
0:50:39 he’s like, he told me exactly what to build.
0:50:41 It was like, this is a dashboard that I need.
0:50:43 This is how this product is gonna work.
0:50:45 This is the speed that you need to serve the ad in.
0:50:46 And if you can’t get it under that speed,
0:50:48 we gotta like figure something else out.
0:50:51 And they just executed like crazy at that point.
0:50:53 And it just took off.
0:50:54 And they were doing hundreds of millions of dollars
0:50:57 at that time very profitably.
0:50:59 And it was amazing.
0:51:01 I’ll tell you one other story that kind of shifted my thinking.
0:51:04 So that was one about not occupying yourself,
0:51:08 not busying yourself in order to create some space
0:51:10 for maybe a good idea to land.
0:51:12 The other thing that stood out was somewhere along the way,
0:51:15 Furkan likes to take these young engineers under his wing.
0:51:17 So like, he met these guys, they were kind of interesting.
0:51:18 He’s like, you need to move to Silicon Valley,
0:51:20 come live on my couch.
0:51:22 And he convinced them, like just come sleep on my couch.
0:51:23 Don’t worry too much.
0:51:24 Just come out here for a few months.
0:51:26 And of course that turned into,
0:51:29 they just lived there permanently in San Francisco.
0:51:30 They ended up getting into YC.
0:51:32 And we let them work out of our office.
0:51:34 And you can learn something from anybody.
0:51:36 These were 20 year old kids
0:51:38 who had never built a business before.
0:51:38 But I was talking to them
0:51:40 and I learned something really important.
0:51:41 They were working on this idea
0:51:43 that had started off really strong.
0:51:46 What they were doing was they took Bitcoin miners.
0:51:49 So anybody who had a bunch of GPU space
0:51:50 and they were like,
0:51:52 hey, this machine learning AI thing is gonna be big.
0:51:54 This was back in like 2016, maybe 2017.
0:51:56 They’re like, machine learning is gonna be big.
0:51:57 And these GPUs are really good
0:51:59 at running machine learning jobs.
0:52:02 So there’s Bitcoin miners who have excess capacity
0:52:04 ’cause maybe Bitcoin price would go down
0:52:06 and then they didn’t, it wasn’t profitable to mine
0:52:07 or they just bought out extra
0:52:09 and they were like, wanted something more steady.
0:52:11 And he was like, he post on Reddit.
0:52:13 He was like, hey, if you have excess GPUs,
0:52:15 if you’re a miner, you have excess GPUs
0:52:16 listed on our network
0:52:18 and we will get machine learning customers for you
0:52:21 to run jobs, almost like an AWS competitor.
0:52:22 – Crazy.
0:52:26 – And overnight, like they got like so much supply of GPUs.
0:52:27 It was insane.
0:52:29 Like there was like thousands of submissions.
0:52:31 And one day people were super excited.
0:52:33 The Reddit comments were like, oh, this is amazing.
0:52:35 Let me know how I can help, like calling him,
0:52:38 finding his phone number and calling him.
0:52:40 And I was like, wow, this is kind of incredible.
0:52:42 And then what happened was a few months later,
0:52:43 it was kind of down on the idea.
0:52:44 And I was like, what happened?
0:52:47 Well, the supply side was amazing.
0:52:49 It was like I stepped on a landmine.
0:52:50 It just blew up.
0:52:52 And he’s like, but the demand side
0:52:53 doesn’t have that same effect.
0:52:56 He’s like, but because I felt it over here,
0:52:59 I kind of realized like what true demand looks like.
0:53:01 And I remember thinking like, damn,
0:53:03 I have never felt that landmine effect.
0:53:05 At that time, I had just never felt it.
0:53:07 I didn’t feel that market poll that you were talking about.
0:53:11 If you don’t know it, you kind of talk yourself into like,
0:53:12 oh, maybe I have it.
0:53:15 Maybe this is, there are signals of demand.
0:53:16 And there’s the difference between like,
0:53:20 maybe it’s there versus holy shit, we found something.
0:53:22 And I wouldn’t say you have to have a holy shit.
0:53:24 You found something right away.
0:53:27 But just seeing that in those guys kind of taught me,
0:53:31 oh, what I thought was level 10 of what demand looks like
0:53:34 for a business, for a new startup.
0:53:35 It was actually level six.
0:53:37 And level 10 is what these guys experienced,
0:53:40 where you have like a half baked Google form.
0:53:41 And still people are like,
0:53:44 prepaying you for the service type of thing.
0:53:45 Oh, okay, that’s what 10 looks like.
0:53:48 Now, at least I know what that looks like.
0:53:49 That’s what a great market looks like.
0:53:51 And what I have right now is a lukewarm market,
0:53:54 which is why I ended up having like a lukewarm,
0:53:56 you know, success out of that business.
0:53:59 – Really hard to find that 10 out of 10 market.
0:54:01 But yeah, that is what we had.
0:54:03 And I think is Mark Andreessen says,
0:54:06 if you find that 10 out of 10 market,
0:54:08 which kind of a unicorn, right?
0:54:13 That the amazing market will pull the right product
0:54:14 out of the company.
0:54:18 Like, so for us, we just identified mobile apps
0:54:20 as the market that was amazing.
0:54:24 But we actually tried out six different business ideas.
0:54:26 Like we created landing pages for each
0:54:28 in the space of something like two, three weeks.
0:54:32 We iterated on six different ideas and the right idea,
0:54:33 the market pulled it out with us.
0:54:34 – Dude, that’s so good.
0:54:36 I love hearing these stories.
0:54:39 Jack, I love seeing you.
0:54:40 – Yeah, great to see you as well.
0:54:40 – You look good.
0:54:41 – Thank you.
0:54:42 – Wait, before we go, Jack,
0:54:43 do you have a book recommendation for me?
0:54:45 Last time you came on here,
0:54:47 you talked about the guy who unschooled himself
0:54:48 or was unschooled as a kid.
0:54:49 I thought that was a really cool book.
0:54:52 Do you have any new book recommendations for me?
0:54:55 – Yeah, one I read that actually we did in like an hour
0:54:58 or so, and then you guys might find interesting
0:55:00 because we just talked about coming out
0:55:02 of the business idea, right?
0:55:05 And this I think actually is more helpful
0:55:08 at our stage of life where you maybe have one success
0:55:10 and many founders who’ve sold their company
0:55:11 have a midlife crisis.
0:55:13 They don’t know what to work on next.
0:55:15 And this book is by Deepak Chopra
0:55:19 and it’s called The Seven Spiritual Rules of Success.
0:55:21 And I thought it was really interesting.
0:55:25 So it’s basically saying that his theory,
0:55:29 if you like, he’s saying everyone is put on earth
0:55:32 for to fulfill some purpose.
0:55:35 And everyone has like a unique skill
0:55:40 or skills and attributes that they can uniquely use
0:55:42 to kind of serve the rest of society.
0:55:45 And he’s like, you have found your goal
0:55:49 when you blend your talent with service to others.
0:55:49 And I thought what’s really interesting
0:55:51 and actually maybe just, you know,
0:55:54 if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
0:55:58 I had just read Tony Robbins book
0:55:59 but I did actually feel like Tony Robbins
0:56:02 is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of that.
0:56:05 ‘Cause I didn’t know this but Tony then found
0:56:08 he had like a tumor on his brain
0:56:09 that has made his body release
0:56:11 like loads of human growth hormone.
0:56:14 And so basically that’s why he’s six foot seven.
0:56:17 He has, he’s just a massive giant growth spur
0:56:20 but he also feels like he has abundant energy.
0:56:23 And he’s kind of using that unique attribute
0:56:26 that it’s very rare to have this tumor on the brain.
0:56:27 Like the doctor told him, dude,
0:56:30 you should act on this and get rid of it
0:56:33 but there’s a risk you might then get lower energy.
0:56:35 It’s like, dude, I’m not having surgery then
0:56:39 because this is my unique thing, the abundant energy.
0:56:42 And he uses that to do these 15 hour whatever sentiment is.
0:56:44 So that’s his thing that’s unique to the world.
0:56:47 And in his kind of serving humanity in his own way,
0:56:49 it seems that he’s just really passionate
0:56:51 about this meals for America.
0:56:53 So I don’t know if he’s hit the goal
0:56:57 but he was on track to hit donating a billion meals
0:56:58 for this feed America thing.
0:57:01 And during COVID, he donated like $10 million
0:57:03 to help it get through that point.
0:57:07 So kind of felt like he was the unique embodiment of that.
0:57:09 And then even with you guys then as well,
0:57:13 like I think like when I was talking to like Ben Levy,
0:57:15 you know, Sean, you’re thinking about
0:57:17 what attributes are unique to you
0:57:20 that you can kind of uniquely serve the world.
0:57:22 And so that book I found was interesting in a quick read.
0:57:26 – What do you think that is for you?
0:57:30 – Well, for me, I think it is where I’ve naturally ended up
0:57:34 doing this digital detox, whatever center place
0:57:38 because I have the capital to do it.
0:57:40 Like I’m meeting a lot of people
0:57:41 trying to do physical projects
0:57:43 and then they just fail because of fundraising
0:57:45 and capital and stuff.
0:57:46 So I think I have the capital
0:57:49 and I have the experience of experiencing burnout.
0:57:51 And I’m just uniquely passionate.
0:57:54 I’ve been to this place in Bali like 10,
0:57:56 they basically like do this is your second home.
0:57:57 Like you come here so much.
0:57:59 So I just, you have that unique insight
0:58:01 about how this can help humanity.
0:58:04 And that’s maybe why I’m driving the project
0:58:07 and I’m doing it for kind of helping humanity,
0:58:08 not profit as number one.
0:58:11 So I feel that I kind of just naturally have
0:58:17 through reflection and et cetera arrived at this place.
0:58:20 Deepak Chopra said the way to find your unique purpose
0:58:22 if you’re struggling,
0:58:26 he said it comes to you in the space between your thoughts.
0:58:30 And he said like, which is maybe not a hard to action,
0:58:33 but he’s like, if you’re really struggling
0:58:34 to find your purpose, et cetera,
0:58:36 you should spend more time in nature
0:58:39 and just in a quiet environment
0:58:41 and just feel and it will come to you.
0:58:43 But I kind of feel that, yeah, for me,
0:58:45 it’s kind of organically,
0:58:46 I’ve been thinking about this for many years
0:58:48 and arrived at this place.
0:58:50 – That’s cool, man, I’ll check that book out.
0:58:51 – Thank you, dude.
0:58:52 – Oh, we appreciate you doing this.
0:58:53 – Absolutely. – You’re the best.
0:58:55 And that’s it, that’s the pod.
0:58:57 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:59:00 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:59:02 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:59:05 ♪ On a road let’s travel never looking back ♪
0:59:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:04 of your aging is like your nighttime erections.
0:00:08 So I’m starting doing this treatment
0:00:10 where it’s like you shockwave your penis, et cetera.
0:00:12 And he’s like, I’m going once a month, et cetera.
0:00:14 I’m like, dude, I have that machine in my house.
0:00:17 (laughing)
0:00:20 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:23 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:25 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:00:28 – Hey, Jack, is this aging stuff, this anti-aging stuff?
0:00:30 Is this legitimate?
0:00:33 – Anti-aging kind of as a, it’s emerging trend, right?
0:00:37 And I kind of feel that it’s hard to know
0:00:38 if this is a scam or not.
0:00:42 And then why do we give Brian Johnson, Dave Asprey,
0:00:43 et cetera, any credibility?
0:00:47 Because how do we know that they’re good at anti-aging?
0:00:49 They’re in their fifties.
0:00:52 Dave Asprey can say he wants to live to 140 and stuff, right?
0:00:57 And I realized like it’s really powerful and dangerous
0:00:59 to criticize someone’s appearance.
0:01:01 Like, I don’t like it either.
0:01:03 But for me, the only measures we have
0:01:05 about if these guys’ stuff is working
0:01:08 is their aging score thing, right?
0:01:10 I was just thinking of an analogy
0:01:12 and I kind of felt it’s like saying
0:01:15 that someone’s a great marathon runner,
0:01:17 but they’re only at the halfway point.
0:01:21 Like maybe these guys are good at avoiding injuries,
0:01:23 so they’re more likely to complete the marathon.
0:01:25 But how do we know if they’re gonna get a good time
0:01:26 in the marathon?
0:01:28 Only know when they’re like 100 or something.
0:01:31 In comparison, so these are the people
0:01:33 we look to as the influencers.
0:01:35 Even like Dr. Rhonda Patrick for women,
0:01:37 she’s in her fifties, I think.
0:01:41 So they’re all middle-aged, Peter Atea, Huberman.
0:01:42 They’re not 100 years old.
0:01:44 So how do we know they’re good at anti-aging?
0:01:46 They’re only halfway there.
0:01:50 I mean, Sam, you had a better anti-aging score.
0:01:51 Like you couldn’t upload your results, right?
0:01:53 But you would be like number one,
0:01:55 I think on there from your thing.
0:01:58 – Yeah, Sean, I did the Rejuvenation Olympics.
0:02:00 Like basically the Rejuvenation Olympics,
0:02:04 it’s this test done by true diagnostics.
0:02:06 It’s like a blood work company.
0:02:08 And Brian Johnson has a partnership with them.
0:02:11 And I think the science is still like iffy,
0:02:15 but the idea is like if the length of a cell that you have,
0:02:17 I forget what the cell is called mitochondria
0:02:18 or something like that.
0:02:20 There’s a theory that like the length of that
0:02:23 is correlated to your biological age.
0:02:27 I did this test, Sean, and I scored a great,
0:02:29 so great that I messaged Brian Johnson
0:02:30 and I was like, this is wrong, right?
0:02:35 And he’s like, well, no, you’re like the number three
0:02:37 on the Rejuvenation Olympics.
0:02:41 And the thing is is like, I’m a 80/20 type of guy.
0:02:42 I do like 80% great.
0:02:44 And then I like fuck off for 20%.
0:02:46 Like I eat poorly sometimes.
0:02:48 But I just think that a lot of this,
0:02:50 the takeaway from when I did that thing
0:02:53 was it’s mostly genetics, I think.
0:02:54 I do mostly good stuff,
0:02:56 but there’s people who do so much better stuff.
0:02:59 And I just think that it’s like largely genetics.
0:03:01 – But because one of the only measures we have
0:03:04 is this score, then it means that that gives,
0:03:07 that’s the only lender of credibility we have
0:03:07 to if you only go like,
0:03:09 you guys are able to present this podcast
0:03:11 because you sold your companies, right?
0:03:13 So you have some legitimacy there,
0:03:16 but the only legitimate litmus test we have here
0:03:17 is your aging score.
0:03:20 But then it’s like, okay, Sam, you have legitimacy.
0:03:22 So you can just say, oh, I have a great score
0:03:25 because I have Coke Zero every day.
0:03:27 And then everyone buys Coke Zero
0:03:30 and thinks that’s anti-aging best supplement, right?
0:03:33 – So why do you spend so much energy on this then?
0:03:36 Because you’re spending money, you’re spending time.
0:03:39 Yet it sounds like what you’re saying is,
0:03:43 look, the science, the measurement is iffy.
0:03:45 The incentives are a little iffy
0:03:46 ’cause there’s a lot of money to be made
0:03:48 by claiming certain things.
0:03:50 It’s not clear the cause and effect.
0:03:52 We don’t know what really works, what really doesn’t work.
0:03:54 You’ve spent $50,000 in supplements
0:03:55 and your submarine was like,
0:03:56 I didn’t really feel anything.
0:03:58 Maybe if you’re deficient, you might feel something.
0:04:00 But you’re a smart guy.
0:04:02 Why still spend the time and energy in this space?
0:04:04 – Because actually I’ve tried out
0:04:06 all these different things, right?
0:04:07 And Tony Robbins actually has a book
0:04:09 about all the emerging health stuff
0:04:11 that he tries out, et cetera.
0:04:14 So 99% of it, I don’t know, just anything.
0:04:19 However, 1%, I do notice big things.
0:04:21 And for me, it’s kind of like, okay,
0:04:24 we don’t know what works, what doesn’t work.
0:04:28 But I’ve only got one life and I’ve only got one body.
0:04:32 And just experimenting, I can find those 1% things
0:04:35 that are very impactful and under the radar and stuff.
0:04:39 – All right, let’s take a quick break
0:04:40 because I want to talk to you about
0:04:41 some new stuff that HubSpot has.
0:04:43 Now, they let me freestyle this ad here.
0:04:44 So I’m going to actually tell you
0:04:46 what I think is interesting.
0:04:48 So they have this thing called the Fall Spotlight,
0:04:49 showing all the new features
0:04:51 that they released in the last few months.
0:04:54 And the ones that stood out to me were Breeze Intelligence.
0:04:55 I don’t know if you’ve seen this,
0:04:57 but if you’re in HubSpot and you have,
0:04:58 let’s say, a customer there,
0:05:01 you can just basically add intelligence to that customer.
0:05:03 They estimate a revenue for that company,
0:05:04 how many employees it has,
0:05:06 maybe their email address or their location,
0:05:08 if they’ve ever visited your page or not.
0:05:11 And so you can enrich all of your data automatically
0:05:14 with one click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence.
0:05:15 They actually acquired a really cool company
0:05:17 called Clearbit and it’s become Breeze,
0:05:18 which is great because now it’s built in.
0:05:21 I always hated using two different tools
0:05:21 to try to do this.
0:05:22 Now it’s all in one place.
0:05:25 And so all the data you had about your customers
0:05:26 now just got smarter.
0:05:27 So check it out.
0:05:29 You can actually see all the stuff they released.
0:05:30 It’s a really cool website.
0:05:33 Go to hubspot.com/spotlight to see them all
0:05:34 and get the demos yourself.
0:05:36 Back to this episode.
0:05:38 – The 1% stuff, if I had to guess,
0:05:40 is just eating mostly plants and animals
0:05:43 and lifting heavy weights and going for walks.
0:05:46 – So actually not for me, but yeah.
0:05:48 – Oh, well, fuck me then, all right.
0:05:51 (all laughing)
0:05:52 What is it?
0:05:56 – So one thing, and this sounds crazy as well, right?
0:05:57 So this is the thing.
0:06:00 All of these things have all the science
0:06:02 and they’re like, and Dave asked someone to be like,
0:06:05 okay, this extract of blueberry,
0:06:08 it reduces your aging because it does this, et cetera.
0:06:11 And then all his 50 medical studies, et cetera.
0:06:14 One thing that actually has been a game changer
0:06:18 for me, my family, the science just doesn’t make any sense.
0:06:19 Like the science isn’t there.
0:06:21 And I don’t spend much money,
0:06:25 but I’ve spent $15,000 on this thing.
0:06:26 And that’s like the low end one.
0:06:29 It’s called energy enhancement system.
0:06:31 And…
0:06:33 (all laughing)
0:06:36 – That’s my car sacks, my friend.
0:06:40 – It’s like, Sarah, is it time for some energy enhancement?
0:06:41 – We got some EES tonight.
0:06:43 (all laughing)
0:06:45 So what is this?
0:06:46 – So basically at the high end,
0:06:50 these machines cost over $100,000, the setup.
0:06:51 Again, the science, when I’m looking at it,
0:06:52 like I’m a tech guy, right?
0:06:55 So I’m going in, I’m in the waiting room
0:06:56 and I’m looking at it and I’m like,
0:06:59 dude, this is just a normal computer monitor.
0:07:01 Like what’s the deal?
0:07:04 And they’re saying like, oh, these are all,
0:07:06 there’s like 16 of these computer monitors
0:07:09 and computers all laser aligned
0:07:12 and it creates an energy vortex in the middle of the room.
0:07:14 – So let me explain, if you Google this,
0:07:16 you’re going to see a photo.
0:07:19 The photo looks like a doctor’s waiting room,
0:07:22 except the chairs are literally lawn chairs.
0:07:24 We’re talking $30 lawn chairs,
0:07:27 the type you would bring to like your kid’s soccer game.
0:07:32 And then the room has eight TVs and the TVs…
0:07:33 – This looks like a sports book.
0:07:36 You ever go to Vegas and where you can bet on sports
0:07:37 and there’s 18 different monitors,
0:07:39 horse racing over here, basketball over here
0:07:41 and you sit in this shitty chair.
0:07:42 That’s what this looks like.
0:07:44 – And like, you know how like when you were a kid
0:07:45 and you in the cable used to go out
0:07:48 and it would be like a bunch of like colors on the screen,
0:07:49 it basically just looks like that.
0:07:50 – That is it, yeah.
0:07:51 – That’s what I’m, I want to let you know,
0:07:52 that’s what I’m looking at.
0:07:55 And I want to let you know the sounds
0:07:57 incredibly ridiculous, what you were saying.
0:07:59 – Jack, I’m open minded, continue.
0:08:02 – There’s also people claiming that this cured their cancer.
0:08:04 Like if you look what this can be used for,
0:08:07 they just say, all right, whatever’s wrong with you,
0:08:07 this will cure it.
0:08:11 This cured cancer, this cured AIDS.
0:08:14 So I, but I go in and I’d actually been suffering
0:08:17 for a year with severe headaches.
0:08:20 I had this thing where it’s called new daily
0:08:21 persistent headaches.
0:08:24 It means basically you wake up one day
0:08:26 and you have a headache every day.
0:08:28 So I’d been struggling with that for a year
0:08:32 and I tried loads of stuff like ozone therapy,
0:08:34 ketamine, like I tried everything.
0:08:38 And I actually think that this EES thing
0:08:40 is the only thing that worked.
0:08:42 I just went in there and I sat in a lawn chair
0:08:44 for an hour, maybe two hours.
0:08:47 And then just came out and in my stomach,
0:08:50 like I can feel my stomach, like reorganizing,
0:08:51 et cetera, churning.
0:08:55 But not only me, yeah, my wife, it cured her migraines.
0:08:58 Her sister came out and then she’d been like
0:08:59 having trouble sleeping.
0:09:01 It like cured her sleeping issues.
0:09:05 And then her mom did it as well with us, like is crazy.
0:09:09 Actually, Tony Robbins has, you can pay like a lot more
0:09:11 and sleep in the room overnight.
0:09:14 So Tony Robbins has spent two days in it.
0:09:17 So I have no idea about the science,
0:09:18 but I’ve tried out so much stuff
0:09:20 and I actually think this was the only thing that worked,
0:09:23 even though the science, nobody can explain it.
0:09:25 It doesn’t make any sense.
0:09:26 – And it also doesn’t help that
0:09:28 when you Google energy enhancement system.
0:09:30 The first listing is their website.
0:09:34 The second listing is paperwork from the state of Nevada
0:09:35 about how they’re being sued.
0:09:40 So like, not a good luck, Jack.
0:09:43 Not explaining the science second listing
0:09:45 is the lawsuit that they’re facing.
0:09:46 This sounds ridiculous.
0:09:50 – Where do we go from here?
0:09:52 I’m just playing.
0:09:55 Jack, I think this is very interesting to be honest.
0:09:58 I also, again, I can’t emphasize this enough.
0:10:00 What’s interesting about you is that
0:10:02 as crazy as you sound right now,
0:10:04 you’re actually a very smart guy.
0:10:05 And the cool thing about you is that
0:10:07 you’re a very independent thinker, meaning,
0:10:09 I think if something, somebody presents something to you,
0:10:11 you’re quite skeptical by default.
0:10:13 Even things that are like consensus,
0:10:15 you kind of question like, wait, why does that work?
0:10:16 How does that work?
0:10:17 Are you sure that that works?
0:10:20 But you’re also extremely open minded and experimental,
0:10:23 which means you’re gonna land on random things.
0:10:24 I don’t know if this is one of them,
0:10:27 but like random things that are kind of non-consensus,
0:10:29 but work, right?
0:10:31 Which is, as an investor,
0:10:32 those are things that you want as an entrepreneur.
0:10:34 Those are things that have served you well.
0:10:38 And now in your post-entrepreneurial career,
0:10:40 you’re doing the same thing, which I find interesting.
0:10:41 – I think I’m kind of just like,
0:10:43 if Brian Johnson drank too much coffee
0:10:46 and just got ADHD and tried out a bunch of stuff,
0:10:48 like what I really admire about him is like,
0:10:50 if he’s testing something, he’s like testing,
0:10:53 like, okay, how does this affect my blood work?
0:10:55 To know, is it working, whatever?
0:10:55 Whereas I’m just like, okay,
0:10:58 let’s just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks,
0:10:59 like just try out everything.
0:11:01 Like some of the stuff that Brian was trying,
0:11:03 like was just messaging him on Twitter.
0:11:06 I’m like, dude, I was trying that like two years ago,
0:11:08 like some of the different emerging stuff.
0:11:12 But I was not actually, I just tried some things
0:11:14 and then see, all right, does that do anything?
0:11:17 Like he had talked recently about, for some reason,
0:11:20 he’s saying that one of the best measures of your aging
0:11:22 is like your nighttime erections.
0:11:23 I don’t know if you’ve seen this.
0:11:26 So he measures his erections.
0:11:27 – Looked him great.
0:11:28 – Yeah.
0:11:31 – I’m starting doing this treatment
0:11:33 where it’s like shockwave therapy,
0:11:35 that you shockwave your penis, et cetera.
0:11:37 And he’s like, I’m going once a month, et cetera.
0:11:40 I’m like, dude, I have that machine in my house.
0:11:42 (laughing)
0:11:47 – I didn’t see that when I visited.
0:11:49 You should’ve let me give it a whirl.
0:11:53 Why don’t you tell your guest that?
0:11:55 – I would’ve loved to give him that thing a try.
0:11:59 – So what’s the word on that, Jack, does it do anything?
0:12:03 – It actually is, yeah, I don’t know how.
0:12:05 (laughing)
0:12:15 – Should we talk about non-health stuff for a bit?
0:12:16 – Yes.
0:12:18 – Well, I was going to tell you if you want,
0:12:20 because that bit is like, yeah, thanks again
0:12:21 for having me back on the pod,
0:12:23 because it meets so many interesting people
0:12:25 and your exposure has grown so much.
0:12:27 And then a number of people even in Portugal
0:12:29 that listened to it.
0:12:30 And so speaking to some listeners and they said,
0:12:32 okay, what we want is like,
0:12:34 they said to me like, okay, Sam and Sean,
0:12:36 sometimes they just tell stories too much.
0:12:38 So we want actionable stuff as well,
0:12:40 and we want business ideas.
0:12:42 So one idea that I can share with you,
0:12:43 is that what you got?
0:12:45 I’ve got one business idea, I was considering it,
0:12:47 but then it doesn’t make any sense for me,
0:12:50 but it seems to make sense, I would think for other people,
0:12:54 is that kind of like doing like the Samois brothers.
0:12:57 – By the way, Sean, did you just,
0:12:58 he just kind of like, you know,
0:13:01 a lot of people are complaining about your podcast
0:13:03 because of this, so I’m going to fix it for you.
0:13:06 – Oh, the complaint was like, yeah, you guys talk too much.
0:13:08 It’s like, the podcast, what are you talking about?
0:13:11 – It’s like, don’t worry, I’ve got the solution.
0:13:13 – There are things that are actionable,
0:13:16 specific, useful, insightful,
0:13:18 and not that other stuff that they usually do.
0:13:20 (laughing)
0:13:24 – The Samois brothers, what is the idea?
0:13:25 – The Samois brothers like, you know,
0:13:27 they cloned Airbnb and brought it to Europe.
0:13:29 – So the Samois brothers, wait, we got to give context.
0:13:32 Samois brothers are these three German brothers
0:13:35 who are famous because starting in like 1999,
0:13:38 they copied eBay, but for Germany.
0:13:40 And within 90 days, they started and sold it
0:13:41 for close to a hundred million dollars.
0:13:43 And then they did that with Airbnb, Amazon.
0:13:46 So they would just find Silicon Valley companies,
0:13:48 and their whole thing, they didn’t use great words
0:13:50 because they’re German, they’re not allowed to use this word,
0:13:51 but they called it blood screaking.
0:13:53 They would blood, blood screak the internet.
0:13:56 So they would find Amazon and do that in Thailand.
0:13:59 They would do Airbnb, but in France, whatever.
0:14:02 And oftentimes they were so hardcore,
0:14:04 they made them massive to the point
0:14:05 where they couldn’t even,
0:14:08 like they tried to build a company to sell to Groupon,
0:14:11 but their Groupon competitor got bigger than Groupon,
0:14:12 and they were like, shit, no one could buy us.
0:14:14 And so they’re famous for doing that.
0:14:15 Anyway, go ahead.
0:14:16 – So I was thinking you can do something similar,
0:14:18 but for just like bootstrapped businesses,
0:14:21 like it doesn’t need to be a tech VC type thing.
0:14:25 And just one dumb example is like in San Francisco,
0:14:27 and they think they have in Austin, et cetera,
0:14:32 like you can get a DEXA scan, D-E-X-A for like $25, $30.
0:14:35 – And body spec, it’s awesome.
0:14:37 – And the test takes like seven minutes,
0:14:39 and they’ve just got the process down amazingly.
0:14:42 They have a van with this DEXA scan machine in it,
0:14:45 and they’re just giving people seven minutes appointments,
0:14:48 like go in, do a scan, and gym people,
0:14:50 many people in general just love it,
0:14:51 because it’s the most,
0:14:53 I think it is the most effective way
0:14:55 of measuring body fat in your body.
0:14:57 There’s different methods you can use.
0:14:59 I believe this is the most accurate,
0:15:01 and it measures like muscle mass.
0:15:03 So if you’re working out at a gym,
0:15:05 it tells you if you’re gaining muscle or not.
0:15:07 And in San Francisco, it’s really accessible,
0:15:10 but then in Portugal, for example,
0:15:13 just one example, like you can only do it at a hospital.
0:15:16 And in Lisbon, like it’s not anywhere else
0:15:19 in the rest of the country, and it costs like $200,
0:15:20 needs to drive there.
0:15:22 Body spec was bootstrapped,
0:15:24 and they built it to like more than two million in revenue,
0:15:27 even with just like 14 vans, I think.
0:15:29 And the rollout strategy is pretty simple.
0:15:32 Like you just partner with like CrossFit gyms,
0:15:34 and you just park in their parking lot, you know?
0:15:35 So you’re like, all right, on Monday,
0:15:37 we’re gonna be at this CrossFit gym,
0:15:39 on Tuesday, we’ll be here, et cetera.
0:15:43 So I felt like just cloning that in Portugal.
0:15:46 You just buy, you can get a used Dexascan machine.
0:15:47 We went to Mr. Beast’s house,
0:15:49 and he has one in his office, actually.
0:15:50 It was just people coming by,
0:15:53 and everyone thinks it’s cool to just do a Dexascan.
0:15:55 Like he asked us, like,
0:15:57 oh, does anyone want a Dexascan?
0:15:59 I’ve got one in the office.
0:16:01 You can buy it for like 50.
0:16:02 – It was great, by the way.
0:16:04 One guy jumped on the Dexascan,
0:16:06 and we all bet his body fat percentage to,
0:16:07 it’s just like the ultimate,
0:16:09 like you can’t do this in society anymore,
0:16:12 but we were like, no, no, no, he’s for sure.
0:16:13 He’s for sure 18.3.
0:16:14 No, no, no, no way.
0:16:15 I’m going under.
0:16:17 And then somebody got it right.
0:16:18 – How much of those machines?
0:16:21 – I knew, I think, like 50,000.
0:16:23 And that was more affordable than I thought,
0:16:25 because a whole body MRI scanner,
0:16:26 which looks kind of similar,
0:16:29 but is doing an MRI scan, that’s a million dollars.
0:16:32 And so this, like 50,000 was reasonable.
0:16:34 And then I saw some used for like 15,000.
0:16:36 And then you just put it in a van.
0:16:38 – Patrick Campbell, our buddy Patrick, just bought one.
0:16:39 – Oh, he did?
0:16:43 – He worked for, he basically, so he lives in Puerto Rico,
0:16:45 and he bought, so he bought a Dexascan machine,
0:16:50 and he put it like, I think in kind of like a community,
0:16:52 like he has like a gym, and it’s like kind of like,
0:16:53 you made it like a community area,
0:16:55 so like anybody in his kind of expat neighborhood
0:16:58 can come there and like, you know, work out and do it.
0:17:01 So he did it as like a, he’s interested in it,
0:17:03 but also it will attract other health people,
0:17:05 like kind of a social thing almost,
0:17:06 by adding this machine.
0:17:08 – Yeah, I used to do that as a kid,
0:17:10 but we did it with breathalyzers.
0:17:12 (laughing)
0:17:15 Well, you’d buy a breathalyzer, go to a party,
0:17:19 we all surround it, and like try to guess.
0:17:22 But doing it with a MRI or whatever would be a lot,
0:17:23 would be a lot more fun.
0:17:26 – So Jack, the idea is to Samoir body spec,
0:17:29 so you basically clone the body spec bootstrapped
0:17:30 business model in Europe.
0:17:31 – Yeah, because you could launch it
0:17:33 for like less than $50,000.
0:17:36 I mean, a van, you can probably buy it on finance as well,
0:17:39 and this medical machine, just like finance, et cetera.
0:17:40 And then you just get one van,
0:17:43 and that could kind of serve all of Portugal even.
0:17:46 You know, you just be like, right, on Monday, I’m in Lisbon,
0:17:48 and then on Tuesday, we’ll be in this region,
0:17:49 on Wednesday, we’ll be here,
0:17:51 and you book people seven minute slots.
0:17:53 When that’s working, just either get another van,
0:17:58 or just get another van in Spain, in Barcelona, in France.
0:18:01 Like, because it’s just not out here, but every,
0:18:04 but like, it has strong appeal, it has wide appeal,
0:18:06 and it’s affordable.
0:18:08 Like, even my wife is not into this kind of thing,
0:18:10 but she’s interested in like, how is my,
0:18:12 I’m working out, so is it working?
0:18:15 Like, I wanna see, am I gaining muscle and stuff?
0:18:17 So, yeah, that was one idea.
0:18:19 – That’s a cool idea, I like that.
0:18:20 – Have you guys seen a pre-novo?
0:18:22 Have you seen pre-novo, Sean?
0:18:24 – Yeah, yeah, I’ve done a pre-novo scan.
0:18:26 – Is, so, I’m gonna go do one as well.
0:18:28 It’s a pretty wild idea.
0:18:30 I don’t know if it’s effective or not,
0:18:32 but basically, getting an MRI,
0:18:34 like, I think we’ve actually talked about this, Sean.
0:18:37 Like, I think in 50 or 100 years, we’re gonna look back,
0:18:40 and we’re gonna be like, can you believe that,
0:18:42 since the beginning of time,
0:18:46 you could have cancer or something bad growing in your body,
0:18:47 and you would just have no idea.
0:18:50 You would have no idea that it’d be like an intruder
0:18:51 in your home, like, I don’t know,
0:18:53 there could be someone down there, we’re not sure.
0:18:57 And oftentimes, or some of the times, they say,
0:19:00 well, had you just found this earlier,
0:19:02 basically had you come through our front doors
0:19:05 and gotten this MRI, we could have solved this.
0:19:07 Like, this was a very solvable thing.
0:19:10 And so they kind of take, they’re taking that idea,
0:19:13 and anyone can pay money.
0:19:18 It’s 3,500 for one, or 1,000 for like a lower-end version.
0:19:19 And you could walk in off the street
0:19:21 and get these MRI full-body scans.
0:19:24 And I don’t know if they’re great or not,
0:19:25 but the idea of that is cool.
0:19:27 Was it cool, Sean?
0:19:27 – I mean, it’s definitely cool.
0:19:31 You go, you lay down, and they basically do a full-body MRI,
0:19:34 which normally either, like, would take a long time,
0:19:36 but it’d be like four hours or something,
0:19:38 but they do this in one hour because of their,
0:19:41 they basically have rejiggered traditional MRI machines.
0:19:42 This is what they tell you, right?
0:19:44 So they say, we’ve rejiggered the MRI machines,
0:19:45 and now we can do it faster,
0:19:47 and we can get higher resolution,
0:19:49 we can get more images,
0:19:51 and then we have special software that can read it,
0:19:53 and all this stuff.
0:19:54 And so I went there, laid down,
0:19:56 watched Top Gun, and came out,
0:19:58 and they were like, “Cool, you don’t have cancer.”
0:20:00 I was like, “All right, guess I’ll just go back
0:20:03 to my day then,” and that was that.
0:20:04 I thought that’s kind of amazing,
0:20:05 and I love the mission of it,
0:20:07 so I love the mission of basically
0:20:08 knowing, understanding what’s going on in your body,
0:20:11 being more proactive versus reactive when it comes to,
0:20:13 like you said, so many things that,
0:20:15 if we had caught this sooner,
0:20:17 that’s one of the great regrets of life, right?
0:20:19 And it’s like the Tesla model.
0:20:21 They’re starting with this really expensive thing
0:20:23 that only rich health nuts can do,
0:20:25 and then, but the goal is, over time,
0:20:29 get the costs down through economies of scale,
0:20:31 as well as like the technology curve going down
0:20:33 so that these become, instead of a few thousand dollars,
0:20:35 like a few hundred dollars to do,
0:20:36 and then more people will do them.
0:20:37 That’s the idea.
0:20:39 Now, I must say the counter argument,
0:20:42 which is, I was pretty pumped about this,
0:20:44 but I’m also a noob, I’m a layman.
0:20:46 I don’t know the science behind this stuff.
0:20:48 I don’t know what’s real and what’s not.
0:20:51 I showed it to a friend of mine who was a surgeon,
0:20:53 and my best buddy’s from college,
0:20:54 and I was like, “Hey, I did this thing.
0:20:54 Have you heard about it?”
0:20:56 He’s like, “No, let me check it out.”
0:20:59 And so he’s like, “Cool, can you send me the scan?”
0:21:00 And I was like, “Oh, you can actually,
0:21:01 yeah, you can get the file, like the folder.
0:21:04 Here’s the zip folder of all my images.”
0:21:05 ‘Cause he was like, “That doesn’t sound right.”
0:21:06 He’s like, “I don’t think you can do
0:21:08 what they’re saying you can do.”
0:21:09 He’s like, “I don’t believe that you can get
0:21:13 that many images at that resolution using this technology,
0:21:17 nor do I think you can see what’s actually a dangerous thing
0:21:19 without doing the, like, you drink the thing,
0:21:20 and then it’s contrast,
0:21:22 it lights up differently in your body.”
0:21:23 He’s like, “I don’t believe that.”
0:21:24 And so he’s like, “Show me the images.”
0:21:26 So I show him the images,
0:21:28 and I’m trying to defend it, but I also don’t know shit.
0:21:31 I’m like, “No, no, no, it’s technology.”
0:21:33 Like the guy, he had the story, his friend died.
0:21:34 So, you know, he was motivated,
0:21:36 and he’s like, “What are you talking about?
0:21:37 Just show me the images.”
0:21:38 I showed him the images.
0:21:40 He’s like, “So these are normal MRI images.
0:21:41 These are not…”
0:21:43 He’s like, “First of all, this is less images
0:21:44 than they say they have.”
0:21:45 He’s like, “Look at this.”
0:21:47 On their website, they say, “We take this many slices,
0:21:49 this many cuts.”
0:21:51 He’s like, “Look, there’s 27 images in here.”
0:21:53 So where’s the images?
0:21:55 He’s like, “Secondly, this looks exactly like an image.”
0:21:57 He’s like, “Thirdly, I can see your penis in this.”
0:21:58 I was like, “Oh, god damn it.”
0:22:02 And he’s like, “Fourth, you know,
0:22:04 the resolution or the ability to see
0:22:05 what’s actually going on,
0:22:06 like this would not be useful enough
0:22:08 to do any kind of diagnosis.”
0:22:09 And then I was at a dinner
0:22:11 with the guy who started Prinovo.
0:22:13 And I was like, “Hey, not to be buzz killed,
0:22:16 but like, I did a scan, talked to my doctor buddy.”
0:22:17 And he starts laughing as soon as I talk
0:22:19 to my doctor friend.
0:22:20 And he’s like, “Oh, I know, I know.”
0:22:23 And I was like, “Okay, well, I’m gonna say it anyways.”
0:22:25 He said that it doesn’t make sense
0:22:26 and it didn’t really work.
0:22:29 And that there was not as many images and the resolution.
0:22:31 He’s like, “No, that’s, doctors always say that.”
0:22:32 They do, you know, blah, blah, blah.
0:22:33 I’m like, “Well, isn’t that a bad thing
0:22:34 if doctors always say that?”
0:22:35 And he’s like, “No, no, no.
0:22:36 I mean, like not all doctors, but, you know,
0:22:37 we hear that a lot.”
0:22:39 I was like, “Cool, so what’s the answer?”
0:22:40 And, you know, what would I tell my friend
0:22:41 that would have him not believe
0:22:43 that I’m, you know, getting their nose here?
0:22:45 And he was like, “You need like our software
0:22:49 to be able to, we have like machine learning.”
0:22:50 And he starts saying some words
0:22:51 that we have special software that reads this.
0:22:52 I was like, “Cool.”
0:22:54 But I felt kind of like he brushed it off.
0:22:57 Now, it might’ve just been because it was a dinner
0:22:59 and he didn’t have time to get to the details.
0:23:00 And maybe he is really sick
0:23:01 of just hearing this over and over again.
0:23:02 I’m not sure.
0:23:06 But I personally didn’t walk away super convinced
0:23:08 that in either direction,
0:23:09 that this is like super useful or not.
0:23:10 And I’m saying the whole thing
0:23:13 because I’ve seen a lot of people promoting this thing.
0:23:15 And just if it’s useful,
0:23:17 here is a personal anecdote counterpoint.
0:23:19 Do your own research and figure it out.
0:23:21 But that’s kind of where I landed with it.
0:23:22 Where I thought, well,
0:23:24 if somebody can’t explain something simply to me
0:23:25 and in a way that’s convincing,
0:23:27 then I’ll just err on the side
0:23:29 of it’s probably not miraculous.
0:23:30 It’s kind of where I landed.
0:23:34 – To say one pro point, Sam and I were at a dinner
0:23:35 and the lady said like,
0:23:39 she just had a feeling that her boyfriend should do this scan.
0:23:41 She wasn’t sure why, just kind of had a feeling.
0:23:44 And then did the scan and they found a lump.
0:23:46 – And he had cancer.
0:23:47 – He had cancer.
0:23:49 – And he got surgery like two months later.
0:23:51 And the surgeon was like, how did you detect
0:23:52 that you had this?
0:23:53 You don’t have any symptoms.
0:23:56 And if you had caught this just like a few months later,
0:23:58 you actually would either be dead
0:24:00 or not be able to speak right now.
0:24:02 And so she’s becoming like,
0:24:04 they are becoming like advocates for this
0:24:05 in their marketing videos and stuff.
0:24:08 So that’s a pro that it did catch ahead of time.
0:24:10 – And I’ve heard that also from other people too.
0:24:13 And when you go in, they say one in 20 scans.
0:24:16 So, you know, 5% of people who come in
0:24:18 have a potentially life-saving diagnosis.
0:24:20 Now it’s again, it’s hard to verify a claim like this.
0:24:21 It’s hard to know.
0:24:24 But I have heard anecdotally other people say,
0:24:25 oh yeah, we did go and we did find something.
0:24:27 So, you know, it’s not nothing.
0:24:30 And but even besides that, as a business,
0:24:31 this thing is gangbusters, right?
0:24:33 They make so much money off of this.
0:24:35 They’ve got, I don’t know how many locations,
0:24:37 but they just raised like $70 million
0:24:40 to expand prenuvo.
0:24:41 And I think they’re in like, I don’t know,
0:24:43 20 cities around the country now.
0:24:44 – So one thing as well to say is like,
0:24:46 I’ve done this thing called Cubio,
0:24:47 which is funded by Google.
0:24:50 And if they’re at least 70 million in funding,
0:24:51 perhaps more than a hundred million,
0:24:53 it’s kind of a competitor, prenuvo, et cetera.
0:24:56 So I’ve done that in America and they similarly say like,
0:24:59 okay, well, I was the chief medical officer at Google
0:25:00 and we have all these Google engineers.
0:25:04 So we do AI and that’s why we can do it in 45 minutes
0:25:06 instead of four hours, et cetera, like you’re saying, Sean,
0:25:08 I did the same thing in India
0:25:10 and got exactly the same results
0:25:12 and I was only doing it for 40 minutes.
0:25:15 Like, I think they’re just Silicon Valley branding.
0:25:16 – They’re also Google engineers in India.
0:25:17 (laughing)
0:25:19 Turns out there’s just a lot of Google engineers out there.
0:25:22 Google engineers, like the Harvard Extension School
0:25:23 graduate, right?
0:25:26 It’s like, there’s a lot of people that have this stamp.
0:25:28 – So one other business idea I did think
0:25:29 after going to this retreat,
0:25:33 because this retreat, as I said, it was $6,000.
0:25:34 But just-
0:25:34 – What was the call?
0:25:38 – It’s called AIWO is the center.
0:25:41 But $6,000 included that MRI
0:25:44 that in America you’re paying more than $3,000 for.
0:25:46 And that was just like a few hours part of it.
0:25:49 This was a whole week and included your hotels, et cetera.
0:25:51 But then speaking to other people,
0:25:52 they were like, you know,
0:25:55 many other countries have amazing medical tech,
0:25:57 Turkey, Korea, et cetera.
0:26:00 The challenges they have is branding
0:26:04 and also like the printouts might be in Korean or Turkish.
0:26:08 So I think what this guy, the AIWO place is doing amazing
0:26:11 is he’s targeting people that are interested in biohacking,
0:26:12 following Brian Johnson,
0:26:14 and then he’s getting the influencers.
0:26:15 So he’s just got the guy
0:26:17 who’s number one, number two, and Brian Johnson’s leaderboard.
0:26:20 He told that guy, hey, you can come for free,
0:26:22 but just refer eight people.
0:26:25 And you also be there to help people interpret
0:26:27 their blood test results or whatever.
0:26:28 So get all these other people to pay $6,000
0:26:30 and I’ll give it to you for free.
0:26:34 I feel you could just brand a biohacking center
0:26:37 in any other country if you have strong links to the country.
0:26:38 Because what they were doing here
0:26:41 is they don’t have their own MRI scanner.
0:26:43 He just took us to all these different labs in India.
0:26:46 He just made connections with them
0:26:47 and they kind of just got us to skip
0:26:49 to the front of the queue, you know?
0:26:53 So a concierge medical for anti-aging,
0:26:55 but you could do that in other countries.
0:26:58 – We had a buddy, Jack, I don’t know if you remember this.
0:26:59 Sean, you might know him too
0:27:01 when we worked out of the founders, Dojo.
0:27:04 They had this crazy business and it didn’t end up working,
0:27:06 but they had a lot of people who were interested,
0:27:07 but they couldn’t get them over the line.
0:27:10 But basically, if you want to get a boob job
0:27:13 or other types of plastic surgery,
0:27:14 you could get it in America,
0:27:17 of which it’s elective and it’s very expensive.
0:27:19 Or you could go to India and get it done,
0:27:21 or Mexico and get it done.
0:27:24 And the claim is that the doctors are as good,
0:27:27 the care is as good, but it’s 5% of the price.
0:27:29 So instead of, I don’t know how much a boob job costs,
0:27:33 but let’s say instead of $20,000, it’s $1,500 or $2,000.
0:27:36 And these people had created this business
0:27:38 called, it was all on medical tourism,
0:27:40 which I didn’t know that was a thing.
0:27:43 And they got a lot of interested customers.
0:27:44 Because they were a startup,
0:27:45 they could convince these people to trust them
0:27:46 and things like that.
0:27:47 But it was actually pretty interesting when they told me
0:27:50 this, I was like, there’s no way people are gonna do that.
0:27:52 But there are a lot of people willing to do that.
0:27:52 – I remember that.
0:27:53 John Howard was doing that, right?
0:27:54 – John Howard, yeah.
0:27:56 I don’t remember why it didn’t work out.
0:27:58 I guess they just couldn’t get people over the line.
0:28:00 We were in this office where,
0:28:03 but like guys were mining Bitcoin and all this shit.
0:28:05 And they were like in this little room,
0:28:07 trying to convince these people to fly to India
0:28:09 to get their team. – Get like a root canal.
0:28:11 – Yeah, get like a root canal in like Mexico.
0:28:13 But like, yeah, you can go on the beach afterwards
0:28:14 and just sit there.
0:28:16 Like, and it was just like a ridiculous.
0:28:17 – I know a lot of people that actually do this.
0:28:19 And, you know, I think all he missed was it was just
0:28:21 a hair transplants in Turkey was all he needed to do.
0:28:24 That like, Jack, you got a beautiful head of hair,
0:28:25 but have you looked into,
0:28:27 can you explain to me what’s going on with the Turkey thing?
0:28:30 Why is this seems incredibly popular?
0:28:32 And also why Turkey?
0:28:34 – I’m not sure why Turkey.
0:28:36 What they were saying in India is they’re just like,
0:28:38 Hey, we’ve just got so many people here in India
0:28:40 that he’s like, if you, in America,
0:28:43 if you’ve got some obscure disease,
0:28:45 then none of the doctors have ever come across it before.
0:28:48 Whereas in India, like, there’s like 10 other,
0:28:51 they’ve had 10 other patients that week with the same issue.
0:28:53 And it is true, a bunch of the doctors in India,
0:28:55 I was speaking to the guy and they had studied
0:28:56 and worked in England.
0:28:59 They’re not like going to someone and play, he’s like,
0:29:01 Oh, I studied at this medical university in England.
0:29:04 So they’re saying it’s quantity of people.
0:29:07 I’m not sure what attributes make Turkey the leading bit
0:29:09 for hair transplants and stuff.
0:29:10 – All right, I’m going to do a deep dive
0:29:12 on the Turkey hair transplant thing.
0:29:12 It’s insane.
0:29:15 Like I have seen so many people do this.
0:29:18 I think it’s like basically 10 times less
0:29:19 or something than in the US.
0:29:22 So, you know, I think there’s obviously a cost component,
0:29:24 but I just don’t know why Turkey.
0:29:26 – There’s this funny photo that this guy shared online
0:29:28 where he was like on his way back from Turkey
0:29:31 on the air, on the, on the airplane.
0:29:34 And he took a picture of all the men sitting on the plane.
0:29:36 And there was literally like 10 heads
0:29:39 that you could tell the hair had just gotten sewn in.
0:29:42 So I was like, Holy shit, this thing is big.
0:29:45 – Yeah, like there’s Instagram influencer,
0:29:49 like transplant daddies that are like the Turkish guys
0:29:51 and they’re just, every day that’s the content
0:29:52 that they’re posting.
0:29:54 And it seems like an incredible business
0:29:55 for whatever reason.
0:29:56 – You have this thing on here.
0:29:58 We asked you in advance what you want to talk about.
0:30:00 You have this thing on here that I thought was interesting.
0:30:02 And I don’t know what exactly what it means,
0:30:03 but it sounds intriguing.
0:30:08 You’re like, there’s a counter to founder beast mode.
0:30:10 What does that mean?
0:30:12 – It was funny because at the Camp MFM,
0:30:13 I was trying to explain to Mr. Beast,
0:30:15 the project that I’m working on now.
0:30:17 So I was saying like, you know, people work in tech
0:30:18 and then they get burned out.
0:30:20 And they, so I’m building a place for them
0:30:23 to detox from technology and recover from burnout.
0:30:26 And it’s like, I literally cannot relate the talk
0:30:29 to this idea because I just don’t get burned out.
0:30:31 But he has an amazing strategy,
0:30:33 but like the thing is 99% of people can’t do this,
0:30:38 which is he said, I’m either on a hundred percent
0:30:40 or I’m off a hundred percent.
0:30:44 So he said, I’ll just work like seven days in a row
0:30:47 until I pass out and sleep.
0:30:49 And I’ll just keep waking up every day, every day,
0:30:51 every day and just keep doing that.
0:30:53 But then when I feel that I’m getting burned out,
0:30:57 I’ll just do zero work and I’ll just watch documentaries
0:31:00 all day and just procrastinate all day.
0:31:02 I’ll feel better again and then I’ll go a hundred.
0:31:04 But it could also be that, you know, he’s in his twenties,
0:31:06 like he’s not super old.
0:31:09 Like I was speaking to this other Portuguese startup here
0:31:12 and they’re like, yeah, I don’t know what burnout is either,
0:31:14 but they’re like 23.
0:31:16 And they’re just like working all these hours.
0:31:19 And I said, one thing, analogy I thought of is like,
0:31:23 I went to this thing like Y Combinator, Angel Pad,
0:31:27 and I’ve never worked that hard or achieved that much
0:31:29 in three months, it’s three, 90 days.
0:31:33 I just worked so intensely and we just got amazing stuff done.
0:31:34 We raised two million in funding.
0:31:36 We got a, we came up with a business idea.
0:31:39 We managed to get a CTO to join our team.
0:31:41 We achieved loads of stuff.
0:31:45 But for me, that was a 90 day sprint.
0:31:48 That’s, if you’re just trying to do that endlessly,
0:31:50 it’s like telling your same bolt, like, okay, great.
0:31:53 You just ran the hundred meters, just keep up that pace.
0:31:56 We’re now doing a marathon, but just keep up that same pace
0:31:57 you ran the hundred meters in.
0:31:58 It doesn’t work.
0:32:01 Like at some point you might feel like it’s going okay,
0:32:04 but at some point I feel like you are gonna burn out.
0:32:06 So for me balance is important
0:32:08 and not having tunnel vision,
0:32:12 just be like, I’m being productive, productive, productive.
0:32:14 I feel procrastination can have benefits as well.
0:32:17 The way we came up with the idea for Vungal
0:32:18 is we were just playing around
0:32:20 with a bunch of different mobile apps
0:32:22 and we wanted to record a meeting
0:32:24 with one of the coaches that we had there.
0:32:25 So we’re like, hey, is it okay
0:32:27 if we just record the meeting to take notes?
0:32:29 And so we opened this voice recording app
0:32:31 and then it was free.
0:32:33 And then it started blaring some video ad
0:32:34 on like full volume.
0:32:38 And then that call for like Coca-Cola or something.
0:32:39 And actually that’s how we got the idea.
0:32:41 Like wait a minute, what if these ads,
0:32:43 instead of being really intrusive
0:32:45 and advertising something not relevant to us,
0:32:49 what if they were advertising based on our user profiles
0:32:51 other apps that we might like?
0:32:55 So it’s that kind of balance I think.
0:32:57 – Yeah, I think what you’re saying makes a ton of sense.
0:32:59 I think about everything in either seasons or gears.
0:33:00 There’s a words I use a lot,
0:33:02 which is, you know, there are seasons of life,
0:33:03 seasons where you’re gonna sprint and focus,
0:33:06 seasons where you’re gonna explore and wander.
0:33:09 I find it very useful for myself to label the seasons,
0:33:11 know what season I’m in and embrace that season.
0:33:13 ‘Cause if you’re in the season of wander,
0:33:15 it’s very easy to feel really anxious
0:33:16 that you’re not being productive.
0:33:17 But you have to remind yourself
0:33:18 that’s not what this season is.
0:33:21 This is a season of sort of exploring, dabbling, whatever.
0:33:23 If you’re in a season of productivity or focus,
0:33:25 you might feel guilty for saying no
0:33:26 to go into your friend’s thing
0:33:28 or to go into this event or whatever.
0:33:29 But you remind yourself that’s what this season is.
0:33:30 And this won’t last forever.
0:33:33 The fact that it’s time boxed as a season,
0:33:35 maybe it’s 30 days, 60 days, 90 days,
0:33:37 a year is very useful.
0:33:39 ‘Cause you know, okay, this is not forever,
0:33:40 but for now, this is what the right thing to do.
0:33:42 The other thing I talk about is gears.
0:33:44 Like I need to have multiple gears like a car
0:33:46 that I can shift into and out of.
0:33:48 Personal life, I do this with like,
0:33:51 I can be in work creator boss mode,
0:33:53 but if I bring that guy to my marriage,
0:33:54 it’s not a great marriage, right?
0:33:57 So I need to be a different guy when it comes to marriage.
0:33:59 When it comes to my kids, I’m silly, playful dad.
0:34:01 And so I like intentionally think, okay,
0:34:02 like I almost visualized in my head,
0:34:05 like I’m shifting gears now, I’m gonna be that other guy.
0:34:06 And I wanna have a few of these characters
0:34:09 that are very useful to me, versions of me
0:34:11 that I can say, all right, you’re driving now.
0:34:12 I’m going to a workout.
0:34:14 So it’s not silly, playful dad.
0:34:16 It’s more of the workout, which is like,
0:34:18 the guy who’s willing to push harder
0:34:20 to be a little more intense.
0:34:22 And so I think you wanna have both.
0:34:25 I think you wanna be able to, when you know what to do,
0:34:27 be able to focus and when something’s not working,
0:34:30 be able to zoom out and go wider, diverge and dabble
0:34:32 and sort of procrastinate and play
0:34:34 until you figure out something worth focusing on.
0:34:36 Not everything is obviously worth focusing on.
0:34:38 So I definitely agree with you there.
0:34:41 I also think that the stage of life matters a lot, right?
0:34:44 When I first met Sam and I met you, Jack,
0:34:45 I was probably 24, 25 years old.
0:34:48 I remember that year I slept in the office,
0:34:51 I think 215 days out of the year.
0:34:52 It was a nice office, but still.
0:34:54 You know, I was just like totally devoted to it.
0:34:56 I don’t think I was particularly productive.
0:34:59 I was just like, willing to throw everything at this.
0:35:00 And when I wasn’t at the office,
0:35:02 I was doing our mastermind dinners.
0:35:03 I was doing other things that I thought
0:35:04 might help me be successful
0:35:05 ’cause it was really the only thing I cared about
0:35:07 at that time was to be successful.
0:35:09 Now I’m 36 years old.
0:35:12 I don’t have that same burning desire to be successful.
0:35:13 I care about other things.
0:35:15 And so, you know, what today makes no sense to me,
0:35:17 made a lot of sense back then and vice versa.
0:35:19 So, you know, I think I kind of,
0:35:21 I agree with pretty much everything you said.
0:35:23 I don’t think it’s at odds with the way
0:35:25 that I operate at least.
0:35:27 Well, one bit I did thought was interesting to think about
0:35:32 is that for me, actually people don’t put enough time
0:35:34 into thinking what they want.
0:35:37 And I think Sean, like us,
0:35:39 you just touched on Sean about all of us.
0:35:43 I think did clearly, we knew our North Star,
0:35:45 why we’re working really hard, right?
0:35:48 And Mr. Beast, I told Sam, I was not joking,
0:35:50 but Sam was like laughing off, but I was serious.
0:35:53 I was like, I think Mr. Beast, if he wanted,
0:35:56 he can be president of the US at some point
0:36:01 because he just since the age of 15 has just had one goal
0:36:04 and it’s not changed for 10, whatever years.
0:36:06 He just said, I want to be the number one on YouTube.
0:36:08 And that has not changed.
0:36:09 He’s not changed that.
0:36:11 And he said no to a bunch of things,
0:36:14 but he just decided on that and went all in on that
0:36:16 and surrounded himself by other people
0:36:18 who were chasing the same goal.
0:36:19 But it was just all in on that.
0:36:22 It kind of struck me a bit that I think actually,
0:36:25 a lot of people don’t put enough time
0:36:27 into thinking what they want.
0:36:29 – Yeah, you brought up something that I get pretty fired up
0:36:31 about, which is figuring out what you want
0:36:32 and taking the time to do it.
0:36:34 I think I’ve been really bad about this.
0:36:36 The reason I get fired up is because I look back
0:36:39 at years of my life, I spent on the wrong things.
0:36:41 And that’s a very expensive thing.
0:36:43 Like years in my 20s are sort of like prime assets.
0:36:45 That’s the beachfront real estate of my life.
0:36:48 And if I spent it on things that I didn’t really think through
0:36:51 or actually in retrospect were sort of obviously
0:36:53 dumb things to work on,
0:36:56 that brought a lot of kind of like lessons learned for me.
0:36:59 And I read this. – What was that lesson?
0:37:01 – Project selection is the most important thing
0:37:04 that amongst talented people,
0:37:06 the biggest sort of variable that actually happens.
0:37:08 Assume you’re gonna do the table stakes, right?
0:37:11 Which is you’re not gonna do the thing Jack’s talking about.
0:37:13 Like you’re not gonna just not like take no action
0:37:14 on something.
0:37:15 Like I was already past that.
0:37:16 I was gonna take action.
0:37:18 I was gonna work like hard enough.
0:37:20 Maybe I wasn’t gonna be the hardest worker on earth,
0:37:21 but I was willing to work hard enough
0:37:22 to make the thing happen.
0:37:24 And again, I’m also like intelligent enough.
0:37:25 I’m not the smartest guy,
0:37:28 but that’s not the reason I’m gonna fail
0:37:31 is because I just can’t figure something out.
0:37:33 Okay, so there’s me and like, I don’t know,
0:37:35 everybody I knew, all of my friends.
0:37:36 We’re all in that same boat.
0:37:37 We were all, we all wanted it.
0:37:38 We’re willing to take action,
0:37:39 willing to work hard enough.
0:37:42 And we’re all about smart enough to figure things out.
0:37:44 So what was the biggest difference in like
0:37:47 where everybody landed and how their life went?
0:37:48 And it was project selection.
0:37:50 It was, you know, the people like at the time
0:37:51 when I sort of started to think about this,
0:37:53 I was trying to build a sushi restaurant.
0:37:56 And it’s like, okay, building a restaurant is probably,
0:37:58 you know, on the low end of like
0:38:00 poor project selection decisions,
0:38:01 especially for somebody like me
0:38:03 who didn’t have a passion for food,
0:38:06 nor was like, you know, that was not my dream.
0:38:08 Like I did not get joy out of making food every day
0:38:11 or, you know, bringing to life, you know, a menu or whatever.
0:38:14 So it’s absolutely the wrong project for me.
0:38:16 And then I just sort of made similar mistakes along the way.
0:38:19 When I, even when I had a golden opportunity
0:38:21 where, you know, the Birch family believed in me,
0:38:23 they hired me, they named me CEO,
0:38:25 they give me a blank check and a team full of engineers.
0:38:28 And basically they funded like $15 million
0:38:31 and a bunch of engineers to running this idea lab
0:38:33 where I could think of any idea I wanted.
0:38:36 But the one boundary box was it had to be kind of consumer.
0:38:38 And then he liked social and I liked social,
0:38:39 whatever he liked social,
0:38:41 the idea that we could create the next Twitter
0:38:44 and next Facebook, that was so sexy.
0:38:47 But it was again, like pretty terrible project selection
0:38:50 where, you know, the odds of success,
0:38:52 even amongst the most brilliant people,
0:38:53 you know, are sort of like point,
0:38:56 oh, like there’s like six people have done it, you know,
0:38:59 in the last 30 years, period, six human beings on earth
0:39:02 that have made like a Snapchat, a Twitter or whatever.
0:39:03 And so again, poor project selection,
0:39:05 like at a time where what I really cared about
0:39:08 was being successful, I was choosing a project
0:39:10 that had like almost no chance of being successful.
0:39:12 And I really wasn’t smart enough to see the opportunities
0:39:16 around me that were much, much better for me at the time.
0:39:18 But I want to read you this thing.
0:39:19 I was reading this essay by Paul Graham,
0:39:21 it’s called, “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas.”
0:39:23 He talks about this exact thing.
0:39:25 You know, before he started Y Combinator, he did V-O-Web.
0:39:26 But before he did V-O-Web,
0:39:28 have you guys heard of the startup he did before that?
0:39:30 – No, not that can remember.
0:39:31 – It’s something called Artix.
0:39:35 And so basically it was like 1995
0:39:37 and they have this idea called Artix.
0:39:39 And it’s basically to put web galleries online.
0:39:41 And he’s like, “Oh, it’s great because I love painting.
0:39:42 I love art.
0:39:44 I’m kind of like a programmer.
0:39:45 I understand like this internet thing is here.
0:39:47 And that seems important.
0:39:48 So like, what’s the internet idea?
0:39:51 I should, oh, I should marry my two hobbies,
0:39:52 art on the internet.”
0:39:53 And he’s like, “Cool.”
0:39:55 And so he says, “In retrospect,
0:39:58 I wonder how we could have wasted our time
0:39:59 on something so stupid.
0:40:01 Galleries were not excited about being on the web,
0:40:03 even now, you know, decades later,
0:40:06 let alone back in 1995.
0:40:08 They don’t want to have all their stock visible
0:40:11 to some random online anonymous visitor.
0:40:13 Like that’s not how the art world works.”
0:40:16 And he’s like, “Basically, we couldn’t sell the thing.
0:40:17 Like we couldn’t get any customers.”
0:40:19 And he’s like, “By the way, we’re not alone here.
0:40:21 Like Paul Allen and Bill Gates,
0:40:23 before they started Microsoft, they started, you know,
0:40:24 Traffo data.”
0:40:25 And he’s like, “It was not anywhere near
0:40:26 as successful as Microsoft.
0:40:29 Like same talent, but working on the wrong project.”
0:40:31 Alex Ramosy had a great way of saying this.
0:40:33 He said, “When he was doing his gym business,
0:40:35 he went to like a mastermind.
0:40:36 And at the mastermind, the guy was like,
0:40:38 “Cool, I heard everything you just said
0:40:40 about how you’ve made your five gyms successful.”
0:40:44 He’s like, “You’re like a nine out of 10 execution
0:40:46 on a two out of 10 opportunity.”
0:40:48 And you’re asking us how to execute better
0:40:49 when actually you should be saying,
0:40:51 you should be realizing that you’re only working
0:40:52 on a two out of 10 opportunity.”
0:40:53 For me, that was sushi restaurants.
0:40:56 For him, that was running brick and mortar gyms.
0:40:58 And once he changed what he was doing,
0:40:59 like he didn’t have to work 10 times harder,
0:41:03 but he could get literally 100 times the level of success.
0:41:04 So Paul Graham says this thing.
0:41:06 He goes, “So why does this happen?
0:41:08 Why do hackers have bad business ideas?
0:41:09 Let’s look at our case.”
0:41:09 We had such a lame idea
0:41:11 because it was the first thing we thought of.
0:41:13 I was in New York trying to be a starving artist
0:41:15 at the time, the starving part was easy.
0:41:17 And he’s like, “I was looking at art galleries anyways,
0:41:18 and when I learned to make websites,
0:41:20 it seemed natural to mix the two together.”
0:41:23 He goes, “If you’re gonna spend years working on something,
0:41:25 it might be wise to at least spend a few days
0:41:27 considering different ideas instead of just going
0:41:28 with the first idea that comes in your head.”
0:41:30 You would think, but people don’t.
0:41:31 In fact, this is a constant problem,
0:41:33 even in just the world of painting.
0:41:35 If you wanna go be a still life painter,
0:41:37 you would sit down in front of your table
0:41:39 with all your materials.
0:41:41 And you might spend five minutes thinking
0:41:42 about what you’re gonna paint,
0:41:44 but it’s hard to spend more time
0:41:46 than that looking at the blank canvas.
0:41:49 We get so impatient that we just start painting anything.
0:41:51 But the problem is painting takes time.
0:41:54 It could take days, weeks, months to finish a painting.
0:41:56 You’re gonna go back and wish halfway through
0:41:57 that maybe you had thought about
0:41:59 what you actually wanted to paint, but it’s too late.
0:42:00 You’ve already kicked it off
0:42:03 just because you couldn’t sit there for an hour
0:42:05 thinking about what to work on.
0:42:06 And basically says that this is the same thing
0:42:08 they see in YC2.
0:42:10 That basically founders will pick an idea
0:42:14 because it’s too uncomfortable to sit in the not knowing
0:42:16 and think about what you actually wanna do
0:42:17 and what actually might be interesting for you,
0:42:19 what might actually might be a good idea.
0:42:20 And so we just start.
0:42:21 And this is what I was guilty of at the beginning.
0:42:22 It was just starting.
0:42:24 And it seems like, cool, cool, I’ll change it later.
0:42:26 But once you start, you get wed to it.
0:42:28 Like I remember when we thought about pivoting,
0:42:30 we only thought about pivoting to other restaurant ideas
0:42:32 or other online delivery things.
0:42:35 It was like, we could only think inside this box
0:42:38 because anything else felt like admitting failure,
0:42:40 giving up, starting from scratch,
0:42:41 going back to the bottom of the mountain,
0:42:44 even though that might’ve been the right way to do it,
0:42:46 it mentally was far too hard to do that.
0:42:49 – I think maybe, I might have mentioned this
0:42:50 on a previous episode, I can’t remember,
0:42:53 but actually Mark Andreessen has something he says,
0:42:57 like the most important factor in determining
0:43:00 if a startup will be successful, like a billion dollar company.
0:43:03 He said, most investors think like it’s the team
0:43:05 or the actual product or idea.
0:43:07 Like, oh, wow, that’s amazing team.
0:43:09 And he said, he thinks it’s none of those.
0:43:12 He thinks the most important factor is the market,
0:43:14 size of the market and growth rate.
0:43:16 He’s saying, if you just have a crappy market,
0:43:19 you can have amazing execution, the best team ever,
0:43:21 but they’re inhibited by,
0:43:23 into how big a company they can build,
0:43:24 by the size of the market.
0:43:29 – So here’s the deal.
0:43:32 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:43:34 It was called The Hustle.
0:43:35 And it was a daily newsletter at scale
0:43:37 to millions of subscribers.
0:43:39 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:43:42 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees
0:43:45 and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
0:43:48 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:43:50 building out the tech for the platform and selling ads.
0:43:53 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
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0:44:00 If you wanna grow your newsletter,
0:44:02 if you wanna monetize a newsletter,
0:44:03 they do all of the stuff
0:44:06 that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
0:44:08 So check it out, behive.com.
0:44:11 That’s B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:44:18 – Yeah, there’s a funny business school like anecdote
0:44:20 where a guy comes in and he’s giving this talk
0:44:22 and he says, all right, business school,
0:44:25 you wanna create like a successful like hot dog stand?
0:44:29 What’s the number one factor of success for a hot dog stand?
0:44:32 And you know, hand goes up, location.
0:44:33 Says not location.
0:44:35 I say, you know, ingredients,
0:44:36 having the highest quality product.
0:44:38 Do you wanna have the best product on the market?
0:44:39 He says, nope.
0:44:41 They say, marketing, you gotta be able to
0:44:44 take the word out there and spread your story.
0:44:45 Nope, he says the number one thing
0:44:49 to make a successful hot dog stand is a starving crowd.
0:44:50 And he said, just in general,
0:44:52 as a lesson of entrepreneurship,
0:44:54 like you should be hunting for starving crowds.
0:44:55 ‘Cause if you go to a starving crowd,
0:44:57 even without the best marketing,
0:44:59 without the best, you know, product,
0:45:02 without the best team or execution,
0:45:03 you will still succeed.
0:45:05 And I, you know, I forgot the phrase here,
0:45:06 but it’s like, you know,
0:45:09 when a great entrepreneur meets a bad market,
0:45:11 you know, only one of them keeps their reputation,
0:45:12 the bad market keeps their reputation.
0:45:15 Whereas if it’s a great market
0:45:16 and you’re even an okay entrepreneur,
0:45:18 you’ll still be successful.
0:45:21 It’s a very hard lesson to internalize,
0:45:24 but it’s proven very, you know, true in my life at least.
0:45:26 – It’s really hard to pick a great market.
0:45:28 We were lucky that we did
0:45:30 and many other companies in the same industry
0:45:33 as us also became really big companies,
0:45:35 but luck, the big factor there.
0:45:38 – Yeah, I remember you were telling a story about Vungal.
0:45:41 So Vungal made like video ads for iPhone apps
0:45:44 and one of Sean’s buddies helped start this thing
0:45:47 called App Lovin’, which became this huge thing.
0:45:50 And it’s the same type of company.
0:45:51 And I don’t know what it was where Sean,
0:45:54 like 30 or 40 billion, like a huge sum.
0:45:55 And I remember Jack, I think you,
0:45:57 I forget exactly how you phrased this,
0:46:00 but you’re like, we only did okay.
0:46:04 And we had a $750 million exit, you know,
0:46:05 we could have been like as big as these other ones
0:46:08 because the market just pulled this out of us.
0:46:11 Like people were just begging for this product
0:46:13 and like you weren’t technical at the time
0:46:15 or you weren’t very technical.
0:46:17 Your partner wasn’t technical, I don’t think at all.
0:46:20 And I was like, how on earth you do this?
0:46:22 ‘Cause I think when you had sold,
0:46:24 there was some article that said Vungal
0:46:26 was making a million dollars a day.
0:46:28 So you guys were gonna do $360 million
0:46:31 the year you sold and revenue.
0:46:32 And you were just saying, you’re like,
0:46:34 do people just beg it for this thing?
0:46:37 And we just got so lucky that we just picked it
0:46:39 right when the iPhone came out.
0:46:41 And we got, it was just like,
0:46:43 it just got, we got really lucky with that
0:46:45 because we didn’t do that good.
0:46:47 Our competitors, App Lovin’,
0:46:49 they were 30 times bigger
0:46:51 or whatever the App Lovin’ market happens.
0:46:53 – Yeah, they’re a $28 billion company right now.
0:46:54 – Yeah.
0:46:57 And they were like, they were literally 30 times bigger.
0:46:59 And we only did okay, but we still, you know,
0:47:02 made $800 million or whatever.
0:47:04 And that kind of like, I learned that lesson from you
0:47:06 about picking the right market.
0:47:09 – So when Furcon, who’s my co-founder at Bebo,
0:47:13 he was previously the CTO and co-founder of App Lovin.
0:47:16 And so when he joined, App Lovin was doing really well
0:47:17 back then, but it wasn’t,
0:47:19 it didn’t look like a $30 billion company,
0:47:20 it looked like a $1 billion company.
0:47:22 But I was like, wow, this guy built a billion dollar company.
0:47:24 Now he’s sitting here next to me
0:47:26 and we’re working on the next thing from scratch.
0:47:27 It’s like, what can I learn from this guy?
0:47:30 So I was like, how did you guys get that idea?
0:47:32 And basically what he told me was kind of interesting story,
0:47:35 Jack, to your point about procrastination.
0:47:36 He was like, two things happened.
0:47:38 He’s like, the first was when I joined,
0:47:40 I wasn’t the co-founder or the CTO,
0:47:43 I joined as like an engineer and he’s really good.
0:47:45 He’s like, obviously amazing.
0:47:46 And so right away they were like,
0:47:48 hey, we think we have the wrong team.
0:47:50 Like we have too many people here.
0:47:51 It’s gonna, we don’t have product market fit.
0:47:52 We just have too many people,
0:47:54 which is a great like CEO move.
0:47:59 Sean, was the we even app-loving or was it some other idea?
0:48:00 They were doing a clothing business.
0:48:01 It was like style page.
0:48:04 They’re trying to make a Pinterest competitor at the time.
0:48:05 That was like one of the many ideas.
0:48:06 So basically they were,
0:48:08 I think they were a dating thing first and then whatever.
0:48:13 So there was like, they had like 10 or 12 people he joined.
0:48:17 And the CEO, Adam, who’s proven to be like a pretty like killer guy,
0:48:19 was like, hey, like we don’t know what we’re doing,
0:48:21 but we do know that this is probably not the right team.
0:48:24 Can you just basically like restart this?
0:48:25 He’s like, so just anybody who you don’t think
0:48:28 is like the like hardcore just down to figure this out.
0:48:30 Let’s get rid of them and let’s go leaner
0:48:31 and let’s figure this out.
0:48:32 So first thing they do, they fire everybody, right?
0:48:34 It’s like not what you would consider
0:48:38 to be like the origin story of a $30 billion company.
0:48:41 Then now they have like four or five people.
0:48:43 So three co-founders plus for con as the fourth co-founder
0:48:45 and I think maybe one other guy.
0:48:48 And they are like cycling through ideas.
0:48:50 And so the founders previously had made
0:48:53 like 40 or 50 million bucks doing a,
0:48:56 I think like a dating, it was an ad network,
0:48:57 but I think for dating sites.
0:48:58 And so that’s what they knew.
0:49:01 They knew ad networks, but it was like for,
0:49:03 you know, generation one of the web.
0:49:04 And they had money to fund this.
0:49:07 I think he put $4 million into fund the thing.
0:49:09 And then they were like, we’re gonna create the next Pinterest.
0:49:09 They saw Pinterest getting hot.
0:49:11 So they tried to create a Pinterest competitor.
0:49:12 Then they were like, dude, we’re just like
0:49:14 four like non-stylish dudes trying to do this.
0:49:15 This is not working.
0:49:18 Then they created like this life 360 type of app.
0:49:21 And then they created like eight or nine ideas.
0:49:22 And I was like, so what was it like?
0:49:24 You were going in there, you’re brainstorming every day.
0:49:25 You’re doing research.
0:49:25 Like what was it?
0:49:26 No, not really.
0:49:29 Like basically one person would come in with some inspiration.
0:49:30 Like, hey, I saw this, this is crushing it.
0:49:33 Or you ever noticed this problem?
0:49:35 And then we would quickly try to build a prototype,
0:49:36 take it to market and see what happens.
0:49:37 See if it’s stuck, see if we like got momentum.
0:49:39 He’s like, but more often than not, he’s like, honestly,
0:49:42 like, I don’t know, like 20 to 30% of the days
0:49:44 we would just come in, we just weren’t inspired.
0:49:45 And we weren’t gonna work on something
0:49:46 that we didn’t feel inspired by.
0:49:48 So we would just play FIFA for like five hours.
0:49:50 And then we would all go home.
0:49:51 I was like, what?
0:49:52 He’s like, yeah, we were literally,
0:49:55 if we just didn’t feel it, like if the idea wasn’t solid,
0:49:57 that we didn’t feel like there was something there,
0:49:58 we didn’t want to busy ourselves
0:50:01 and like occupy ourselves with a not good idea.
0:50:03 Cause then that would at least,
0:50:04 it’s like dating somebody bad.
0:50:07 And you don’t have the door open to meet somebody amazing.
0:50:08 And so he’s like, we would just play FIFA.
0:50:10 And he’s like, while we’re playing FIFA,
0:50:11 we would just talk, then we would order food,
0:50:12 then we would talk some more.
0:50:14 And we’re just giving ourselves like,
0:50:16 relax the brain to try to come up with ideas.
0:50:19 He’s like, then Adam went to a conference
0:50:23 and this was like right when iPhone had taken off.
0:50:26 And he’s like, came home and he’s like, forget it.
0:50:28 We’re doing an ad network, but for mobile phones.
0:50:30 He’s like, mobile phones are gonna be big.
0:50:32 They don’t really have good ad networks.
0:50:33 I know how to do an ad network.
0:50:34 That’s what we’re doing.
0:50:36 And he’s like, because they knew that business,
0:50:39 he’s like, he told me exactly what to build.
0:50:41 It was like, this is a dashboard that I need.
0:50:43 This is how this product is gonna work.
0:50:45 This is the speed that you need to serve the ad in.
0:50:46 And if you can’t get it under that speed,
0:50:48 we gotta like figure something else out.
0:50:51 And they just executed like crazy at that point.
0:50:53 And it just took off.
0:50:54 And they were doing hundreds of millions of dollars
0:50:57 at that time very profitably.
0:50:59 And it was amazing.
0:51:01 I’ll tell you one other story that kind of shifted my thinking.
0:51:04 So that was one about not occupying yourself,
0:51:08 not busying yourself in order to create some space
0:51:10 for maybe a good idea to land.
0:51:12 The other thing that stood out was somewhere along the way,
0:51:15 Furkan likes to take these young engineers under his wing.
0:51:17 So like, he met these guys, they were kind of interesting.
0:51:18 He’s like, you need to move to Silicon Valley,
0:51:20 come live on my couch.
0:51:22 And he convinced them, like just come sleep on my couch.
0:51:23 Don’t worry too much.
0:51:24 Just come out here for a few months.
0:51:26 And of course that turned into,
0:51:29 they just lived there permanently in San Francisco.
0:51:30 They ended up getting into YC.
0:51:32 And we let them work out of our office.
0:51:34 And you can learn something from anybody.
0:51:36 These were 20 year old kids
0:51:38 who had never built a business before.
0:51:38 But I was talking to them
0:51:40 and I learned something really important.
0:51:41 They were working on this idea
0:51:43 that had started off really strong.
0:51:46 What they were doing was they took Bitcoin miners.
0:51:49 So anybody who had a bunch of GPU space
0:51:50 and they were like,
0:51:52 hey, this machine learning AI thing is gonna be big.
0:51:54 This was back in like 2016, maybe 2017.
0:51:56 They’re like, machine learning is gonna be big.
0:51:57 And these GPUs are really good
0:51:59 at running machine learning jobs.
0:52:02 So there’s Bitcoin miners who have excess capacity
0:52:04 ’cause maybe Bitcoin price would go down
0:52:06 and then they didn’t, it wasn’t profitable to mine
0:52:07 or they just bought out extra
0:52:09 and they were like, wanted something more steady.
0:52:11 And he was like, he post on Reddit.
0:52:13 He was like, hey, if you have excess GPUs,
0:52:15 if you’re a miner, you have excess GPUs
0:52:16 listed on our network
0:52:18 and we will get machine learning customers for you
0:52:21 to run jobs, almost like an AWS competitor.
0:52:22 – Crazy.
0:52:26 – And overnight, like they got like so much supply of GPUs.
0:52:27 It was insane.
0:52:29 Like there was like thousands of submissions.
0:52:31 And one day people were super excited.
0:52:33 The Reddit comments were like, oh, this is amazing.
0:52:35 Let me know how I can help, like calling him,
0:52:38 finding his phone number and calling him.
0:52:40 And I was like, wow, this is kind of incredible.
0:52:42 And then what happened was a few months later,
0:52:43 it was kind of down on the idea.
0:52:44 And I was like, what happened?
0:52:47 Well, the supply side was amazing.
0:52:49 It was like I stepped on a landmine.
0:52:50 It just blew up.
0:52:52 And he’s like, but the demand side
0:52:53 doesn’t have that same effect.
0:52:56 He’s like, but because I felt it over here,
0:52:59 I kind of realized like what true demand looks like.
0:53:01 And I remember thinking like, damn,
0:53:03 I have never felt that landmine effect.
0:53:05 At that time, I had just never felt it.
0:53:07 I didn’t feel that market poll that you were talking about.
0:53:11 If you don’t know it, you kind of talk yourself into like,
0:53:12 oh, maybe I have it.
0:53:15 Maybe this is, there are signals of demand.
0:53:16 And there’s the difference between like,
0:53:20 maybe it’s there versus holy shit, we found something.
0:53:22 And I wouldn’t say you have to have a holy shit.
0:53:24 You found something right away.
0:53:27 But just seeing that in those guys kind of taught me,
0:53:31 oh, what I thought was level 10 of what demand looks like
0:53:34 for a business, for a new startup.
0:53:35 It was actually level six.
0:53:37 And level 10 is what these guys experienced,
0:53:40 where you have like a half baked Google form.
0:53:41 And still people are like,
0:53:44 prepaying you for the service type of thing.
0:53:45 Oh, okay, that’s what 10 looks like.
0:53:48 Now, at least I know what that looks like.
0:53:49 That’s what a great market looks like.
0:53:51 And what I have right now is a lukewarm market,
0:53:54 which is why I ended up having like a lukewarm,
0:53:56 you know, success out of that business.
0:53:59 – Really hard to find that 10 out of 10 market.
0:54:01 But yeah, that is what we had.
0:54:03 And I think is Mark Andreessen says,
0:54:06 if you find that 10 out of 10 market,
0:54:08 which kind of a unicorn, right?
0:54:13 That the amazing market will pull the right product
0:54:14 out of the company.
0:54:18 Like, so for us, we just identified mobile apps
0:54:20 as the market that was amazing.
0:54:24 But we actually tried out six different business ideas.
0:54:26 Like we created landing pages for each
0:54:28 in the space of something like two, three weeks.
0:54:32 We iterated on six different ideas and the right idea,
0:54:33 the market pulled it out with us.
0:54:34 – Dude, that’s so good.
0:54:36 I love hearing these stories.
0:54:39 Jack, I love seeing you.
0:54:40 – Yeah, great to see you as well.
0:54:40 – You look good.
0:54:41 – Thank you.
0:54:42 – Wait, before we go, Jack,
0:54:43 do you have a book recommendation for me?
0:54:45 Last time you came on here,
0:54:47 you talked about the guy who unschooled himself
0:54:48 or was unschooled as a kid.
0:54:49 I thought that was a really cool book.
0:54:52 Do you have any new book recommendations for me?
0:54:55 – Yeah, one I read that actually we did in like an hour
0:54:58 or so, and then you guys might find interesting
0:55:00 because we just talked about coming out
0:55:02 of the business idea, right?
0:55:05 And this I think actually is more helpful
0:55:08 at our stage of life where you maybe have one success
0:55:10 and many founders who’ve sold their company
0:55:11 have a midlife crisis.
0:55:13 They don’t know what to work on next.
0:55:15 And this book is by Deepak Chopra
0:55:19 and it’s called The Seven Spiritual Rules of Success.
0:55:21 And I thought it was really interesting.
0:55:25 So it’s basically saying that his theory,
0:55:29 if you like, he’s saying everyone is put on earth
0:55:32 for to fulfill some purpose.
0:55:35 And everyone has like a unique skill
0:55:40 or skills and attributes that they can uniquely use
0:55:42 to kind of serve the rest of society.
0:55:45 And he’s like, you have found your goal
0:55:49 when you blend your talent with service to others.
0:55:49 And I thought what’s really interesting
0:55:51 and actually maybe just, you know,
0:55:54 if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
0:55:58 I had just read Tony Robbins book
0:55:59 but I did actually feel like Tony Robbins
0:56:02 is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of that.
0:56:05 ‘Cause I didn’t know this but Tony then found
0:56:08 he had like a tumor on his brain
0:56:09 that has made his body release
0:56:11 like loads of human growth hormone.
0:56:14 And so basically that’s why he’s six foot seven.
0:56:17 He has, he’s just a massive giant growth spur
0:56:20 but he also feels like he has abundant energy.
0:56:23 And he’s kind of using that unique attribute
0:56:26 that it’s very rare to have this tumor on the brain.
0:56:27 Like the doctor told him, dude,
0:56:30 you should act on this and get rid of it
0:56:33 but there’s a risk you might then get lower energy.
0:56:35 It’s like, dude, I’m not having surgery then
0:56:39 because this is my unique thing, the abundant energy.
0:56:42 And he uses that to do these 15 hour whatever sentiment is.
0:56:44 So that’s his thing that’s unique to the world.
0:56:47 And in his kind of serving humanity in his own way,
0:56:49 it seems that he’s just really passionate
0:56:51 about this meals for America.
0:56:53 So I don’t know if he’s hit the goal
0:56:57 but he was on track to hit donating a billion meals
0:56:58 for this feed America thing.
0:57:01 And during COVID, he donated like $10 million
0:57:03 to help it get through that point.
0:57:07 So kind of felt like he was the unique embodiment of that.
0:57:09 And then even with you guys then as well,
0:57:13 like I think like when I was talking to like Ben Levy,
0:57:15 you know, Sean, you’re thinking about
0:57:17 what attributes are unique to you
0:57:20 that you can kind of uniquely serve the world.
0:57:22 And so that book I found was interesting in a quick read.
0:57:26 – What do you think that is for you?
0:57:30 – Well, for me, I think it is where I’ve naturally ended up
0:57:34 doing this digital detox, whatever center place
0:57:38 because I have the capital to do it.
0:57:40 Like I’m meeting a lot of people
0:57:41 trying to do physical projects
0:57:43 and then they just fail because of fundraising
0:57:45 and capital and stuff.
0:57:46 So I think I have the capital
0:57:49 and I have the experience of experiencing burnout.
0:57:51 And I’m just uniquely passionate.
0:57:54 I’ve been to this place in Bali like 10,
0:57:56 they basically like do this is your second home.
0:57:57 Like you come here so much.
0:57:59 So I just, you have that unique insight
0:58:01 about how this can help humanity.
0:58:04 And that’s maybe why I’m driving the project
0:58:07 and I’m doing it for kind of helping humanity,
0:58:08 not profit as number one.
0:58:11 So I feel that I kind of just naturally have
0:58:17 through reflection and et cetera arrived at this place.
0:58:20 Deepak Chopra said the way to find your unique purpose
0:58:22 if you’re struggling,
0:58:26 he said it comes to you in the space between your thoughts.
0:58:30 And he said like, which is maybe not a hard to action,
0:58:33 but he’s like, if you’re really struggling
0:58:34 to find your purpose, et cetera,
0:58:36 you should spend more time in nature
0:58:39 and just in a quiet environment
0:58:41 and just feel and it will come to you.
0:58:43 But I kind of feel that, yeah, for me,
0:58:45 it’s kind of organically,
0:58:46 I’ve been thinking about this for many years
0:58:48 and arrived at this place.
0:58:50 – That’s cool, man, I’ll check that book out.
0:58:51 – Thank you, dude.
0:58:52 – Oh, we appreciate you doing this.
0:58:53 – Absolutely. – You’re the best.
0:58:55 And that’s it, that’s the pod.
0:58:57 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:59:00 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:59:02 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:59:05 ♪ On a road let’s travel never looking back ♪
0:59:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Episode 621: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Jack Smith ( https://x.com/_jacksmith ) about his under-the-radar biohacking experiments plus 2 $1M dollar business ideas.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Is reverse-aging a scam
(3:23) The 1% of biohacking
(12:28) Business idea: Mobile Dexa Scan
(25:30) Business idea: Medical tourism brokers
(32:06) Anti-beast mode
(39:10) Why smart people have bad ideas
(45:40) Hunt for the starving crowd
(49:27) AppLovin origin story
(54:20) Finding demand that feels like a landmine
(56:03) Jack’s book recommendation
—
Links:
• Get our business idea database here https://clickhubspot.com/mfm
• BodySpec – https://www.bodyspec.com/
• Prenuvo – https://www.prenuvo.com/
• Q Bio – https://www.q.bio/
• Aiwo – https://aiwo.com/
• “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” – https://paulgraham.com/bronze.html
• Vungle – https://vungle.com/privacy/
• The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success – https://tinyurl.com/mwyf6spw
• Jack on MFM – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVwLEocqK0E
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano