We Bet This App Idea Could Be Bigger Than Reddit

AI transcript
0:00:06 Sam I want to start with an idea today. I have an idea that I genuinely believe is going to be big
0:00:12 if somebody does it. I’ve tried to convince one of my smartest friends to do this, but they’re
0:00:16 already a little too rich and too happy to go try something new. So I’m putting this out there to
0:00:29 the universe. If anybody does this, more power to you. The funny thing about this idea is that it
0:00:34 started off on one of our drunk idea episodes, which we do from time to time where we take like,
0:00:38 I don’t know, half-baked ideas, kind of bad ideas, but maybe there’s a nugget in there that’s
0:00:43 interesting. And we call it drunk ideas where we both get a little tipsy, we pretend to be at least,
0:00:48 and we pitch each other ideas. What was the drunk idea? So the drunk idea was called
0:00:53 Better Than Google. Do you remember this one? Is that the Facebook group? It’s the Facebook group.
0:00:59 I joined it. I love it. Are you in it? Yes, I love it. They didn’t accept my request. Oh, man,
0:01:05 I’m sitting here pending still. So here’s an example. Yesterday, there was this woman who
0:01:11 wasn’t that pretty, and she was 23 years old, and she was like, “Can I or should I get Botox now?
0:01:16 Will I look prettier?” And she posted her face. And there was all these very positive,
0:01:21 not necessarily positive, like you do or do not need it, but we’re not going to make fun of you,
0:01:25 but here’s the pros and cons. The premise of this, there was a backup a second. There was a
0:01:30 Instagram influencer. I think her name is Amber Lancaster. And Amber Lancaster is a
0:01:37 Instagram mom. She’s got million followers or whatever. And she had created this group. And I
0:01:41 think she kind of created it, but she’s very hands off with it. It’s not like a very calculated thing
0:01:46 that she did. And so the group is called Better Than Google. And the premise is inside this group
0:01:52 is like 17,000 kind of like millennial moms, like moms, like her audience, people who, you know,
0:01:55 because that’s my wife. I was like, what is the group? And she’s like, well, it’s just a bunch
0:02:01 of moms who are like, we’re all kind of like in our 30s. We all want to have a good life, be a good
0:02:06 mom, be a good spouse, watch good TV shows, be healthy. We just have like a certain set of things.
0:02:11 We’re just trying to have a certain quality of life. And in doing so, if you put a bunch of
0:02:14 those moms together, then they can really help each other out. It’s better than Google. If you
0:02:17 ask a question here, you’re going to get better than Google type of answers.
0:02:23 All right, let’s take a quick break because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot
0:02:26 has. Now they let me freestyle this ad here. So I’m going to actually tell you what I think is
0:02:30 interesting. So they have this thing called the false spotlight showing all the new features that
0:02:35 they released in the last few months. And the ones that stood out to me were Breeze Intelligence.
0:02:39 I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but if you’re in HubSpot and you have, let’s say, a customer
0:02:43 there, you can just basically add intelligence to that customer. They estimate a revenue for that
0:02:48 company. How many employees it has, maybe their email address or their location, if they’ve
0:02:53 ever visited your page or not. And so you can enrich all of your data automatically with one
0:02:57 click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence. They actually acquired a really cool company called
0:03:01 Clearbit and it’s become Breeze, which is great because now it’s built in. I always hated using
0:03:05 two different tools to try to do this. Now it’s all in one place. And so all the data you had
0:03:10 about your customers now just got smarter. So check it out. You can actually see all the stuff they
0:03:15 released. It’s a really cool website. Go to HubSpot.com/Spotlight to see them all and get the
0:03:20 demos yourself. Back to this episode. Here’s an example question. Has anyone found an effective
0:03:24 way to get rid of cellulite? I’m pretty petite and I work out daily, but my legs still have cellulite.
0:03:28 And it has 30 comments of people discussing how they did or didn’t get rid of cellulite.
0:03:33 100%. It’s like a media company. It’s got juicy content, just like clickbait,
0:03:36 playing a click worthy content. But there’s no editors. There’s no writers. This is just
0:03:42 people’s real lives. So a woman went on there and she was saying, my husband was cheating on me.
0:03:48 I found out, I confronted him about it. He got really defensive and I want to file for a divorce.
0:03:54 But then over the last few days, I noticed he knew, he referenced things that were in my private
0:03:59 messages, like my messages to other people. Like how is he reading my iMessage? And then
0:04:03 the world’s greatest tech support was in the thread where it was like, all right,
0:04:06 you need to log out of your iCloud. You need to do this. You need to do this. He might have
0:04:09 a second iPad that’s connected to your thing and that’s how he’s been able to read this.
0:04:13 And they really helped her out. She’s like, oh, thank you. I figured it out. There was this iPad
0:04:17 and whatever. That’s how he was reading my messages. And so now I can do whatever.
0:04:20 That’s a better answer than you would get if you just googled the sort of same thing.
0:04:24 And it’s more trusted and trust is the key word here. So when I originally came on this
0:04:30 drunk ideas thing, I was just laughing better than Google. What a funny way to create a Google
0:04:35 competitor. It’s like, what’s better than Google machine learning artificial intelligence?
0:04:40 It’s like 10,000 moms who are bored and scrolling on their phone. And it’s kind of
0:04:44 true though. The wisdom of the crowds is actually, you know, a very strong force.
0:04:47 And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this is actually
0:04:52 a really good potential business idea. Here’s why. So I’ve long since had this theory that
0:04:57 whenever one thing gets really popular, it creates a craving for the opposite.
0:05:03 So we see this in many ways. A classic example of this was Facebook became the biggest social
0:05:09 network in the world. And Facebook was basically photos, but it was permanent and public, right?
0:05:13 You would post your albums there. Everybody could see them and they stayed there forever.
0:05:18 Well, as Facebook got more popular, it created the need for something like Snapchat,
0:05:22 where you would have photos that are in permanent and not public private, right?
0:05:26 And so Snapchat succeeded, but it wouldn’t have succeeded unless Facebook had already
0:05:32 shifted the way that culture was working. And it almost created a craving in people for the opposite.
0:05:37 And I think you see that today where the more the world got woke and, you know,
0:05:41 you can’t say this and you can’t say that and you have to use these pronouns, do this, do that.
0:05:46 And then it creates a craving for a character like an Andrew Tate or even a Donald Trump or somebody
0:05:50 who’s, oh, he’s a straight shooter. He’s just going to call it like it is. And those people
0:05:56 become very popular because they’re a counterpunch to the way that things are going or the other
0:06:00 strong opposition. So similarly, I started to think about this. I said, man, in an AI world,
0:06:05 a lot of shit’s going to change. And if you’re going to just type into a box and it’s just going
0:06:09 to give you the answer and it’s going to scrape the internet, it’s just going to give you some generic
0:06:15 answer, that’s going to be big for sure. There’s definitely a market for that. But what’s the
0:06:19 opposite of that? What craving does that create? And what I realized is it’s going to create the
0:06:26 craving for almost like the old village wisdom, right? How you can get answers from a bunch of
0:06:29 humans who you can see their name and face and they can tell you things that are their personal
0:06:35 experience rather than generically the right answer. And I think that if somebody made an app
0:06:41 that was the same premise, the better than Google premise, and it was a community of,
0:06:45 you know, 10,000, 20,000 moms who were going to answer questions, that would be a really
0:06:49 powerful app. I think it would be really addictive because you would get the type of content like
0:06:54 the Botox question. By the way, one key thing is you can share anonymously in the groups. You go
0:06:59 anonymous and then you post about the infidelity in the marriage and that’s that part of why it
0:07:02 works. So I think you would need those features. But think about how valuable that would be for a
0:07:08 second. Like if I could pick any one customer segment to have like a rabid community of,
0:07:13 it would be moms. Like it would be people that control the household budget in America. That
0:07:17 would be the most valuable audience segment that you could have. And I think this is the way to
0:07:23 get it. Do you remember Chacha? Chacha. Was that like the old search engine that was kind of like
0:07:27 this? Like Yahoo Answers type of thing? Yeah. So I’m just pulling this up right now. But basically,
0:07:33 I remember it when I was in high school. And so that was about 2008. So it was launched in 2006.
0:07:40 It went bankrupt in 2016. And so basically it was a service. And I didn’t actually realize any of
0:07:47 this, but it raised $6 million, including from Jeff Bezos. And they had 5,000 freelance guides,
0:07:52 meaning people who they hired. And I would send a text message to Chacha. I remember this was
0:07:56 during the World Cup. And I was like testing it out. And I was like, what’s the tallest and what’s
0:08:01 the shortest player on this particular soccer team? Because I was just testing it out. And I think I
0:08:07 paid them two or three cents or something like that. And they would message me back in like three
0:08:12 minutes with an answer. And at the time, it was amazing. And I’m just reading their page now. It
0:08:19 looks like they actually had raised up to $60 million. And they had something like 1.7 billion
0:08:25 questions a month of people that people were asking. And it was like magic back then because
0:08:29 we didn’t have Google on our phone. I didn’t have a smartphone. And I remember this being
0:08:35 amazing. And eventually it went out of business because Google is just better. But I just don’t
0:08:39 know if it could ever make any money. I think I paid like two cents or something like that.
0:08:43 A text message or something like that. Well, that’s the beauty of it. You don’t need to actually pay
0:08:49 for an expert answer. So like here’s some different analogs to this. So you have Cora,
0:08:56 which is a bunch of more, I would call it tech nerd type of community. And then you have GLG,
0:09:01 which is highly paid intellectual information. And there’s a different customer for that. For
0:09:05 the customer for that, it’s going to be a hedge fund or some sort of investment maker or something
0:09:10 like that. And then you have Google, which is the general search. And Google’s market cap today is
0:09:16 I think 2.3 trillion. And if you think about like search on the internet, so the big, the general
0:09:22 search on the internet, Google was 2.3 trillion. And then you can like silo that into different
0:09:26 things like searching for restaurants. It’s like Yelp. And I don’t know what Yelp’s market cap is.
0:09:30 I mean, it’s billions, but it just hasn’t grown in years. Two billion, right? So,
0:09:35 you know, the search for restaurants and handymen in your area became two billion out of the two
0:09:41 trillion. And then Glassdoor, which was like search for, you know, good places to work. And then you
0:09:45 have search for jobs. And then you have search for whatever. And there’s a thousand tiny search
0:09:50 engines. And these are all like single digit billions companies, for the most part, that got
0:09:55 created. And so I think, and then we have DuckDuckGo, which is kind of like the, for the, you know,
0:10:00 tech savvy person who cares about privacy and likes to not be doing the mainstream thing,
0:10:04 here’s DuckDuckGo. And we’ve talked about them before about how much insane amount of traffic
0:10:09 that they have. So I think that while search and this kind of question answer thing feels like a
0:10:15 solved problem. And even the community questions and answers, like you would think, well, why not
0:10:19 Quora? Why not Reddit? Dude, my wife is not getting on Quora and Reddit. Reddit is just like,
0:10:27 it repels women. Like, dude, isn’t it funny how Reddit works? So Reddit is, I don’t remember
0:10:32 what they are now, but two years ago, they were like the sixth or seventh most popular website.
0:10:37 And yet, if you asked people, do they use Reddit? A very common answer was like, what’s Reddit?
0:10:43 It’s a very strange thing. I love Reddit, by the way. I use like, it’s made for dorks like us,
0:10:49 right? Yeah, guys with body odor, right? It’s not made for the millennial mom who wants to go in a
0:10:54 high trust place and not get trolled and not get spammed and not get like, you know, made fun of
0:10:58 and not like she doesn’t get all the weird memes. And they kind of like, it’s just different. It’s
0:11:04 a different culture. And so I think that this kind of Reddit for moms angle, which you couldn’t
0:11:08 really, if you had pitched me that generically, I wouldn’t believe it. As soon as I saw better than
0:11:13 Google, I thought, man, if somebody really created an app that’s supposed to do this,
0:11:18 and they seeded it correctly, the beauty of this was it was seeded with only followers of a certain
0:11:26 type of Instagram influencer, which created a like minded community of members. And it excluded
0:11:30 the general trolls of the internet. If you could find a way to do that again,
0:11:34 I think that thing would scale. And I think that thing would be really, really valuable. The value
0:11:39 per user would be really, really high. Let me play the pessimistic person right now.
0:11:43 Are you going to devil’s avocado me? Yeah, I’m a devil’s avocado you. I’ve
0:11:48 built a handful of things. And one of the hardest things that I’ve tried to do that I’ve not been
0:11:54 able to pull off is getting people. So like, I own a variety of Facebook groups, some of them
0:12:00 have 80,000. There’s one or two that most of them have like two or three or 5,001 has like 80,000.
0:12:05 Get and when we started them, I wanted to do Facebook group because Facebook is where the
0:12:12 person already was when I started a lot of these, it was like 2014, 15. And my reasoning was that
0:12:18 getting someone to go specifically to a website, like, for example, let’s just say that you had
0:12:24 like a food recipe website. And then they’re like, well, let’s just create a community for our readers
0:12:32 to talk. So getting people to go to myrecipes.com/forum and to actively participate is one of the
0:12:37 hardest things I’ve ever had to do. And I’ve never actually pulled it off. And so I think there are
0:12:43 people who do know how to pull it off. I think they’re those people are rare getting getting
0:12:47 people to come to a destination to type new content and to register for something. That is
0:12:52 one of the hardest things to figure out. I think when it comes to mostly internet based companies.
0:12:58 I agree. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying I think there’s a billion dollar idea here. But
0:13:04 like most billion dollar ideas, it requires threading the needle. I’ll give you one other analog
0:13:09 to this. So in terms of shopping, you have the big retailers, I could go to, you know,
0:13:14 target.com, I could go to macy’s.com, whatever. And then Amazon came out and Amazon was like,
0:13:18 cool, we’ll just aggregate all the products. And Amazon’s the Google of that space, right? It’s
0:13:26 the general shopping search. Then there’s Etsy. And Etsy is like a complete counter to Amazon.
0:13:29 It’s never going to be bigger than Amazon. It’s always going to be some tiny fraction of Amazon.
0:13:35 But a tiny fraction of a giant number is still a pretty damn big number. And what Etsy did was
0:13:39 they were like, cool, we will do basically mom buying from other moms. So how do we do
0:13:43 handcrafted goods? How do we do things that are personalized? Kind of the non scalable,
0:13:49 non generic products only. And you could see the maker. Here she is. You could trust her. She’s
0:13:53 got a, you know, her little shop. And so let anybody create a little shop and sell to other
0:14:01 people who like to shop kind of that same like, you know, flea market type of vibe. And Etsy’s
0:14:06 totally succeeded because it was so different. And I think in a world that’s going in a hyper
0:14:13 fast speed towards AI just tells you the answer. It’s hyper intelligent. This is generically the
0:14:18 answer for things. I think it’s going to create more than ever the desire for more of the Etsy
0:14:23 feel where it’s like, yeah, cool. But what if I just wanted 100 other people like me who might
0:14:27 have been through something like this to tell me their recommendations? So another thing that’s
0:14:31 really popular in this group will be like, Hey, I got like an Amazon gift card. What are your best
0:14:36 finds on Amazon? For me, here’s my waist size. Here’s my chest size. Here’s whatever like, what
0:14:42 will fit me well? And they’ll just be like, Oh, here’s really good Amazon finds that are like
0:14:46 clothes that are actually like pretty good fitting and actually last long, but are still good on a
0:14:51 budget. How are you seeing this stuff? Are you like, Hey, wife, give me your phone. And like you scroll
0:14:55 on hers or is she like saying like, Oh, Hey, show me things. Right. So first it was her showing me
0:14:59 and me being like swatting away the phone. Like, I don’t care who cares about this. Like, and she’s
0:15:02 like, no, like this lady was looking for somebody. And then she asked the group and then the group
0:15:05 found that person that she had bumped into at the bus stop. It was crazy. They knew it because of
0:15:09 the description of the shirt that he wears and somebody said, wait, I think I know that guy.
0:15:12 I’m like, all right, whatever, who cares about this story? And then the fourth or fifth time,
0:15:19 I was like, okay, every time I’ve paid attention to what my wife is really into, I’m like early to
0:15:23 something that’s actually like a very valuable investment. What’s another example of that?
0:15:28 I mean, the Ecom brand that I started was very much in this, this vein. But in general, there’s
0:15:34 like, this is not new, like Stanley mugs, right? Stanley mugs now are like all the rage. And like
0:15:39 two years ago, she just kept talking about this and like kept being so excited and wanting to show
0:15:45 me about this like jumbo oversized, over expensive mug that she bought. But this is like one of like
0:15:49 a thousand examples of these types of things. And so yeah, anyways, this, this type of stuff,
0:15:55 I’ve learned that I should not ignore because she is really high signal when it comes to,
0:16:00 she’s a consumer and she’s a specific type of consumer that is the opposite of me, right?
0:16:06 I am like an internet native person. I am the early adopter of products. She’s the opposite.
0:16:09 But the things that do kind of pass her filter, there’s something there.
0:16:14 Are you still your wife the same way, by the way? Like, is that a signal for you?
0:16:16 No, no, it’s not.
0:16:18 And why is that?
0:16:29 I mean, my wife is a young millennial or an old Gen Z. I guess she’s 31. And so typically,
0:16:34 it’s with like tick tock trends. So like, for example, remember the hawk toey thing?
0:16:38 Like, I had to be like, dude, what the hell is this about? Like, what is this thing?
0:16:40 She’s like your urban dictionary.
0:16:45 Yeah, if it’s like, there’s some new like singer named like Charlie X. She’s like,
0:16:49 so this woman’s going to be like a huge deal. And I’m like, why? She’s like,
0:16:52 just all my friends are talking about it and it’s popular and tick tock. And so
0:16:57 we do it like that. So no, but not like business stuff.
0:17:01 You know, like those golden goose shoes, do you know those shoes?
0:17:02 Those are so stupid.
0:17:04 It was like like fucking dirty shoes that are $700.
0:17:05 No, they’re so dumb.
0:17:08 She was like really early on that too, on that train.
0:17:12 And then no, because she’s vegan. So that was like another thing that she was vegan,
0:17:16 like a lot, like a lot earlier than before the plant base became like a bigger deal.
0:17:21 And so I used to be like, okay, you know, great, high maintenance. Where do we find
0:17:24 like milk or butter or like any of the things that you need to do stuff?
0:17:27 And she would find these niche brands. She’d be like, oh, I really love Oatly.
0:17:30 Oatly is really great. This was before Oatly was like in coffee shops and all that stuff.
0:17:33 And Oatly was this, it’s this brand that’s like, I don’t know,
0:17:36 it was like a Swedish brand or something, something in Europe.
0:17:38 And nobody ever heard of it. It’s got this funky bottle.
0:17:40 And I remember, you know, whatever, like seven years ago,
0:17:43 and she was showing me all these plant-based products.
0:17:45 And then these creators who were really small as the time,
0:17:50 but they’re plant-based creators that are now all huge because plant-based recipes became very popular.
0:17:54 Another version of this was Kayla Itzins, who we talked about on here.
0:17:55 I don’t even know how you say her last name,
0:17:57 but she’s like the fitness influencer.
0:17:57 Yeah.
0:17:59 So when I was like, hey, do you want to like do like, I don’t know, like,
0:18:02 should we get a trainer? Let’s work out together.
0:18:04 My wife was doing that shit too. Did she buy the PDF?
0:18:07 First, she bought the PDF. I’m like, you’re using a PDF to work out?
0:18:11 She’s like, yeah, it’s great. And I’m like, a PDF, you paid for a PDF?
0:18:13 You don’t pay for anything. And she’s like, I just really trust her.
0:18:16 I’m like, who is this random woman in Australia? Like, who is this person?
0:18:19 And then sure enough, she then creates the sweat app.
0:18:22 Sweat app then becomes like a multi-hundred million dollar app.
0:18:26 And again, I was kind of like, dude, why are you paying this as random Instagram influencer?
0:18:30 Like she’s not even like a real trainer. Like, why don’t you watch these videos?
0:18:34 Or why don’t you go to this, this official certified thing?
0:18:36 But no, her trust was in a certain type of person.
0:18:39 And I kind of wrote that off. But then later I learned like, actually,
0:18:40 that’s just the way the world is going.
0:18:42 That’s where people are going to get their information.
0:18:43 That’s where people are going to get their trust from.
0:18:45 You know, kind of noisier and noisier world.
0:18:48 Sarah was like that with me with Emma Chamberlain.
0:18:50 Do you watch Emma Chamberlain?
0:18:51 I don’t, but I know about her.
0:18:56 Dude, this woman is the best. I’m like, she’s like Casey Neistat for chicks.
0:18:59 And I’m like going back and like watching all of her old stuff.
0:19:01 She’s so darling. Like I’m all about it.
0:19:06 By the way, are you still using OpenAI every day as a search engine?
0:19:09 Yeah, not just as a search engine.
0:19:11 Can I tell you about a crazy thing that I did with OpenAI?
0:19:12 A chat GPC, basically?
0:19:14 Yeah, I was.
0:19:15 Nobody else is going to care about this.
0:19:16 But I think, whatever, I give a shit.
0:19:18 And I think you will find this interesting too.
0:19:21 So I’ve been playing around with the idea of writing a movie.
0:19:24 And so I was, but I’ve never done, I’ve never made a movie before.
0:19:25 Not a filmmaker.
0:19:28 Do a play, do a play, never in a script, never in a screenplay.
0:19:31 I thought about play, but I had a specific idea for a movie.
0:19:34 There’s a movie that, there’s a book that I wanted to buy the rights to,
0:19:35 to turn into a movie.
0:19:37 And so I’ve been like down this rabbit hole trying to do that.
0:19:38 Do I know what book it is?
0:19:40 You don’t, don’t say it, but do I know what it is?
0:19:42 Yeah, I can’t say it, but yes, you would definitely know it.
0:19:45 And it’s like the rights have bounced around from big studio to big studio.
0:19:47 And it just never got made for one reason or another.
0:19:49 Oh, COVID happens and then production dies.
0:19:52 Oh, this, this person’s on board and then they get canceled.
0:19:54 And that project stalls out.
0:19:57 And I’m like, I can’t believe this has not been turned into a movie yet.
0:20:01 And so, so anyways, I’m in this like really like interesting path right now
0:20:03 where I’m trying to acquire the rights to like create a movie.
0:20:07 But along the way, I was like, Hey, maybe I should like figure out how movies are even made
0:20:08 and like how this works.
0:20:12 So aside from like normal chat GPT stuff where I’m like,
0:20:13 how do movies get made?
0:20:16 What’s the name of the person who doesn’t know how to do anything,
0:20:19 but provides the money and the, the will to make it happen.
0:20:21 They’re like, that’s called an executive producer.
0:20:26 And like, I had a kind of amazing magical experience with chat GPT.
0:20:27 So here’s what happened.
0:20:33 I’ve used chat GPT to like question and answer.
0:20:34 I don’t know this.
0:20:36 Tell me, do this or explain this to me.
0:20:39 What I hadn’t used it for was as kind of a creative assistant.
0:20:41 Have you ever used it in that way?
0:20:43 Or can, should I describe what I mean by that?
0:20:46 Yeah, like sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll upload,
0:20:48 like I use the, I’ll download.
0:20:52 I got this tool where like, for example, Scott Galloway, I love his writing.
0:20:53 He’s got a hundred blog posts.
0:20:57 I got this tool where I downloaded in PDF, all of his blog posts.
0:20:59 I uploaded it all to chat GPT.
0:21:01 I called the voice Scott, I’ll write something.
0:21:04 I’ll say rewrite it in Scott’s voice.
0:21:07 And I won’t use the whole thing, but I’ll just one or two nuggets.
0:21:08 I’m like, that’s a cool sentence.
0:21:09 I’m going to be inspired by that.
0:21:10 So I’ll use it a little bit like that.
0:21:11 Yeah, that’s sick.
0:21:13 And so I did the same thing and I was like, you know what I love?
0:21:15 I love Aaron Sorkin.
0:21:18 Aaron Sorkin wrote, you know, the social network and West Wing
0:21:21 and newsroom and a bunch of cool things he’s known for is like snappy,
0:21:24 fast paced dialogue that’s witty.
0:21:27 And specifically, there’s like a bunch of like really nuanced things he does
0:21:29 where one character says something to the other.
0:21:32 The like, let’s say the beginning scene of the social network.
0:21:35 So the beginning scene is Zuck talking to some girl he’s on a date with.
0:21:39 Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China
0:21:41 than there are people of any kind living in the United States?
0:21:43 That can’t possibly be true.
0:21:43 It is.
0:21:44 What would it cost for that?
0:21:46 Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China.
0:21:48 But here’s my question.
0:21:50 How do you distinguish yourself and the population of people
0:21:52 who all got 1,600 on their SATs?
0:21:53 I didn’t know they take SATs in China.
0:21:54 They don’t.
0:21:55 I wasn’t talking about China anymore.
0:21:56 I was talking about me.
0:21:57 You got a 1,600?
0:21:57 Yes.
0:21:59 I could sing in a knock-up heli group, but I can’t sing.
0:22:01 Does that mean you actually got nothing wrong?
0:22:03 I could row crew or invent a $25 PC.
0:22:04 Or you get into a final club?
0:22:06 Or I get into a final club.
0:22:07 You know, from a woman’s perspective,
0:22:09 sometimes not singing in a knock-up heli group is a good thing.
0:22:10 This is serious.
0:22:11 On the other hand, I do like guys who row crew.
0:22:14 Well, I can’t do that.
0:22:15 I was kidding.
0:22:16 Yes, I got nothing wrong in the test.
0:22:18 Have you ever tried?
0:22:19 I’m trying right now.
0:22:19 To row crew?
0:22:20 To get into a final club.
0:22:21 To row crew?
0:22:21 No.
0:22:23 Are you, like, whatever, delusional?
0:22:25 Maybe sometimes you’d say two things at once,
0:22:26 and I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to be aiming at.
0:22:28 But you’ve seen guys who row crew, right?
0:22:31 It’s an awesome first scene.
0:22:33 She’s still catching up on the SATs in China,
0:22:35 but he’s, like, moved to the next part.
0:22:36 And it creates these little misunderstandings,
0:22:37 this little bit of tension.
0:22:40 And it’s part of why the dialogue really keeps you,
0:22:42 because it doesn’t feel rehearsed.
0:22:45 It feels genuinely like two people kind of in a quick rally,
0:22:47 conversational rally with the ball back and forth.
0:22:51 It makes a non-fast-paced scene feel fast-paced.
0:22:51 Exactly.
0:22:53 The whole scene is, like, seven minutes or something long.
0:22:55 It’s a long scene, which is a long time in a movie
0:22:57 for just two characters just to be talking to each other.
0:23:00 That’s usually, like, breaks a rule of film,
0:23:02 where you want to break it up with action and movement
0:23:04 and all these other things to keep people’s attention.
0:23:05 But he doesn’t do that.
0:23:08 Anyways, so I upload that scene,
0:23:10 and I say, here’s the screenplay for that.
0:23:11 How did you upload it?
0:23:12 You upload the screenplay?
0:23:15 It turns out all movie scripts are, like, available online.
0:23:18 Like, the actual original script is just there online.
0:23:19 So I go and grab the PDF.
0:23:21 I put it into ChatchabeeDSA.
0:23:22 You’re my creative assistant.
0:23:24 We’re writing a scene for this movie.
0:23:25 Here’s the situation.
0:23:28 Two characters, and let’s put them in a whatever, coffee shop.
0:23:28 All right, first I said,
0:23:30 “Explain to me what makes Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue
0:23:32 so good in this first scene.”
0:23:33 And then it explains it.
0:23:34 I said, “Great.
0:23:38 Using those characteristics, write a new scene for this.”
0:23:40 And what it did was, so it spits out a scene.
0:23:42 And the scene kind of sucks, but it spits it out instantly.
0:23:46 And so, like, there’s this trade between speed and quality.
0:23:48 And even though the quality was quite bad,
0:23:49 the speed was incredible.
0:23:50 It was, like, took two seconds.
0:23:52 So then I could just start to inch up the quality
0:23:53 by giving it feedback.
0:23:56 And so then I’m like, “Cool, but I don’t think it’s believable
0:23:57 that the character would say this.
0:23:59 For the first line, I think you should do this.”
0:24:01 And then it goes, “Sure.
0:24:03 I’ve taken your suggestions and wrote it again.”
0:24:05 I said, “Okay, cool, but, like, maybe instead of coffee shop,
0:24:07 put it in a restaurant.”
0:24:08 And it changes the restaurant
0:24:09 because I want the waitress to say this.
0:24:12 And then it does it again.
0:24:13 I say, “Cool, but give me an alternative.”
0:24:15 Just like, “No, not that, but I don’t really know why.
0:24:17 Just give me another alternative.”
0:24:18 It gives me another alternative.
0:24:21 And I say, “Okay, cool, but make it faster and snappier.”
0:24:23 And actually, I want the one character to be
0:24:24 a little bit of an asshole.
0:24:26 It does it again.
0:24:27 And what I realized was, I was doing this,
0:24:29 and I just kind of stepped back for a second.
0:24:30 I said, “Wow, this is amazing.
0:24:33 It’s what I have here.
0:24:36 I have an on-demand creative collaborator.”
0:24:37 It was 1 a.m. when I was doing this.
0:24:39 I couldn’t have called somebody and be like,
0:24:40 “Hey, do you want to just wake up real quick
0:24:42 and just start writing with me?”
0:24:45 So, in the moment where inspiration struck,
0:24:48 I was able to instantly have a genius creative collaborator
0:24:52 who spit out instant first drafts,
0:24:54 which let me not have to have the blank page,
0:24:56 which is the biggest enemy to any creator.
0:24:56 Right?
0:24:59 Instead of being the author, I got to be the editor.
0:25:01 So, now, ChampionGVC is the author.
0:25:04 I’m just the editor who’s like, “No, something else.
0:25:05 Ah, try again.
0:25:07 Tweet this a little bit this way.
0:25:09 Give me another variation with this happening.”
0:25:11 And it would instantly give me another one back.
0:25:14 And I thought, “Wow, the difference here would be,
0:25:15 let’s say I had a human doing this.
0:25:17 A, they wouldn’t have been online.
0:25:18 Let’s say I caught them the next day
0:25:20 when inspiration was half as much as it was
0:25:21 in the middle of the night there.”
0:25:24 Then I would say, “Can you write a draft for this?”
0:25:25 That would have taken a week.
0:25:27 Then they would have come to me after a week.
0:25:29 Again, I’m out of flow.
0:25:30 I’m now worried about 10 other things in life.
0:25:32 And then they would have given it to me.
0:25:35 And now I would have to, as you say, bubble wrap it for them.
0:25:36 I’d have to give them feedback,
0:25:37 but I can’t bruise their ego.
0:25:38 They just worked so hard all week,
0:25:40 giving me exactly what I asked for.
0:25:43 So now I have to say, “Hey, I really like part of it,
0:25:44 but I just think maybe we could…
0:25:47 Would you be okay if we tried something like this?”
0:25:48 Not to say this is bad, but I just want to try,
0:25:51 just for, you know, and I’d have to do all that.
0:25:54 And then I’d bubble wrap it and then I’d give them the advice.
0:25:57 Then it’d take another week to get the second draft.
0:25:58 And now on the second draft,
0:25:59 I have to give half as much feedback
0:26:01 because if I really push it even further,
0:26:04 if I say, “No, still try again,” bruised ego.
0:26:07 So I’m like, “Wow, you have an on-demand creative assistant.”
0:26:11 Who can instantly mimic and learn from any input I give it,
0:26:13 like, “Write this in the style of this.
0:26:14 Write this in the style of this.
0:26:15 Pretend this person is the director.”
0:26:18 Has no ego, takes feedback instantaneously,
0:26:20 and creates the revisions instantaneously.
0:26:21 And by the end of it,
0:26:23 I actually had a dope scene that was written,
0:26:25 a dope opening scene to a movie,
0:26:27 and I’m a guy who’s never written a screenplay before.
0:26:29 For me to have done that without AI would have been,
0:26:32 I don’t know, a hundred times harder.
0:26:33 So I thought that was pretty cool.
0:26:35 How was the output, the final product?
0:26:37 The final product is pretty good.
0:26:40 It’s like, I mean, of course, it’s not, you know, Aaron’s working,
0:26:43 but like, it’s a hell of a lot better than Sean.
0:26:47 So, you know, I got a superpower to be able to do that.
0:26:50 And I would say it is on par with like,
0:26:52 the average or slightly above average
0:26:54 from a professional who I would have paid
0:26:56 tens of thousands of dollars to write me a script.
0:27:00 Man, that’s, like, I guess when I watch a movie,
0:27:02 I kind of take for granted that someone had to sit down
0:27:04 and write all that crap out.
0:27:05 That’s so much work.
0:27:07 Like, that’s so much work.
0:27:08 And that would be so much.
0:27:10 And so when we tell that story as Sylvester Stallone doing it,
0:27:12 how fast did he do Rocky?
0:27:14 He wrote the first draft three and a half days.
0:27:16 That’s insane to me.
0:27:17 That’s insane.
0:27:18 But also if you watch Rocky, you’re like,
0:27:20 okay, this is not rocket science.
0:27:23 The script is not like super sophisticated either.
0:27:23 It’s a lot.
0:27:24 You’re making a whole world.
0:27:26 But let me tell you two other things.
0:27:28 So on that note, so you had,
0:27:31 so writing the thing, the other cool thing I got out of it.
0:27:33 You know, when I wasn’t writing,
0:27:35 I was watching like videos of Aaron Sorkin
0:27:35 talking about his process.
0:27:37 And one of the things he says is he’s like,
0:27:40 people don’t understand to get one good idea.
0:27:42 He’s like, my brain is a Rolodex
0:27:44 flipping through 50,000 bad ideas.
0:27:47 And he’s like, I have just exhausted so many
0:27:50 dead end paths that this could have gone
0:27:53 to find the one path that kind of works.
0:27:54 And I thought that’s such a good analogy
0:27:56 for how all creation works.
0:27:58 I’m sure you feel the same way about marketing ideas
0:27:58 or business ideas.
0:28:02 Like your brain flips through 50,000 permutations
0:28:03 of what you could work on and how we could work
0:28:05 or what the business model could be.
0:28:06 And then in the end it pops out and it’s like,
0:28:08 oh, Hampton’s a great idea, dude.
0:28:08 You know, like congrats.
0:28:10 It seems like it just worked right away.
0:28:11 It’s like, yeah, it worked right away
0:28:15 because my brain went through the idea maze on a speed run.
0:28:17 And I bumped into so many walls
0:28:18 and I flipped through so many ideas and permutations
0:28:20 with this could and could not have been
0:28:22 until I finally figured out one that would work.
0:28:24 Yeah. And it’s like magic how it comes out.
0:28:26 And it’s crazy that the, you know,
0:28:28 we talk about the shower thoughts.
0:28:30 And it’s like, it is weird how I spend so much time
0:28:32 thinking about something and all the permutations
0:28:34 and then when I’m out on a bike ride, it’s just like,
0:28:35 wait, why didn’t I think of that?
0:28:36 And you know, it just kind of all,
0:28:38 it is like a magical process.
0:28:41 And if I had to do that for a script for money,
0:28:43 that would be very hard.
0:28:46 Do we have to do a show real quick?
0:28:47 Yeah, let’s do it.
0:28:48 Speaking of writing.
0:28:49 Speaking of writing.
0:28:51 Speaking of writing.
0:28:52 If you’re trying to get your writing out there,
0:28:55 the way that Sam did it, the way that I did it,
0:28:59 the two businesses that we built that we sold and probably,
0:29:01 I don’t know, some of the simpler, easier,
0:29:04 would you say simpler, easier businesses that we ever made?
0:29:05 The simplest.
0:29:07 The simplest was a newsletter business.
0:29:09 And if you’re going to do a newsletter business,
0:29:11 back when we started it, back when you started the hustle,
0:29:13 for sure you built a bunch of things.
0:29:15 I had three engineers on staff.
0:29:18 I had three engineers on staff and we had to build everything.
0:29:21 And then I had like two or three growth people
0:29:24 and they spent half of their time filling out excel sheets
0:29:27 to try to just track all the information.
0:29:28 Right. Or build a referral program.
0:29:32 Or, you know, go and then you had 20 people in ad sales, right?
0:29:33 Like go and just try to generate revenue.
0:29:36 Oh, you have, we have, I think we had like 15 people
0:29:39 in ad sales and then we had like three people supporting them.
0:29:41 All just, so we basically, when we sold the company,
0:29:44 we were going to do about $20 million that year in revenue.
0:29:48 And we had something like 35 people, but only two writers.
0:29:49 And it was insane.
0:29:51 It was insane.
0:29:52 Like it was actually only two writers.
0:29:55 And one writer was just in case the first writer got sick.
0:29:57 Yes, it was 1500 words a day.
0:29:59 It was not that hard.
0:30:00 And so we had to build all of these tools.
0:30:02 It was a pain in the ass.
0:30:03 Let’s do a little bit of math on this just real quick.
0:30:07 So do you remember what your op-ex or payroll costs
0:30:10 roughly were for writing that one newsletter that had two writers,
0:30:13 but had 18, you know, had 33 other people in the company
0:30:15 that were doing all the other functions?
0:30:18 So two writers probably each made 150.
0:30:21 So add about 20% to that for healthcare.
0:30:23 So we’ll just round up to $200,000.
0:30:26 So $200,000 for three writers is $600,000.
0:30:28 And then we had roughly 30 people beyond those guys.
0:30:30 So what’s that, like $8 million?
0:30:31 Yeah, something like that.
0:30:32 So 8 million bucks.
0:30:34 And just even just the engineers part, right?
0:30:36 Because I remember you were building like a tool
0:30:38 that would segment the audience.
0:30:39 You were building an A/B testing tool.
0:30:41 You were building all these little features
0:30:42 to be better at your newsletter.
0:30:44 You lived in San Francisco at the time.
0:30:47 A San Francisco engineer, even with the Sampar special,
0:30:50 scrappy, find somebody, convince them that this is the dream,
0:30:51 200 grand each.
0:30:56 Right? So you’re paying basically $600,000 just on product cost.
0:30:57 And the products weren’t even that good.
0:31:00 Like, you know, like I’m not a tech company,
0:31:02 but it was hard.
0:31:03 Not your core competency.
0:31:06 Well, instead, how much does behind cost a month?
0:31:08 I think behind is like 99 bucks a month or something like that.
0:31:10 And they got like a free plan too.
0:31:12 And so instead of spending $600,000 a year,
0:31:15 you could have spent $39 a month.
0:31:18 That’s the price of the most popular plan, the scale plan.
0:31:19 And with that, you get the ad network.
0:31:21 So they’ll do your ad sales for you.
0:31:22 You get subscriptions.
0:31:24 So you put a paywall in and you can actually do subscriptions.
0:31:26 You didn’t have to build that feature.
0:31:27 You get a website builder.
0:31:30 You get all the email automation so that when somebody signs up,
0:31:32 you know, 60 minutes later, you send them this.
0:31:34 And one day later, you send them this.
0:31:36 And after they refer a friend, it automatically sends them this.
0:31:38 You have the referral program, which was huge for you,
0:31:42 huge for us, and required basically like one and a half
0:31:43 to two people to run on our side.
0:31:44 You didn’t have an engineer, did you?
0:31:46 We didn’t have an engineer because Beehive was out
0:31:47 when we started at the Milk Road.
0:31:49 So we just used Beehive.
0:31:50 But half of these features didn’t exist
0:31:51 when we did the Milk Road.
0:31:52 So I remember when we were building it, we were like,
0:31:55 “Hey, do you have this automations feature?
0:31:57 Do you have analytics that will do this, this, and this?
0:31:58 Do you have surveys or polls?”
0:32:00 So at the bottom of the email, we would always write,
0:32:00 “How was it?”
0:32:03 And it was five stars, three stars, or one star.
0:32:06 And we used that to basically give feedback to the writers
0:32:09 on like what worked, what didn’t in each newsletter.
0:32:11 And we could actually measure the quality of the writing,
0:32:12 the quality of the content.
0:32:14 And now they have all those features.
0:32:16 So if you want to do a newsletter today,
0:32:18 no brainer, use Beehive.
0:32:23 It’s beehive.com, B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:32:26 The only downside is their name spelling is really hard.
0:32:28 But once you get past the name, everything is gravy.
0:32:31 All right, let me tell you a quick story
0:32:33 about someone who I spoke with the other day.
0:32:34 And it was kind of a life-changing conversation.
0:32:37 So for Hampton, we have this podcast called Money Wise
0:32:38 where we get people to come on
0:32:41 and they explain all their finances, whatever it is.
0:32:43 Spill the beans about the beans, you know what I mean?
0:32:44 Yeah, I’m stealing that one.
0:32:45 Thank you, that one’s now mine.
0:32:49 And they like to break down their whole portfolio, whatever.
0:32:51 But this woman I talked to,
0:32:53 have you heard of this company called Solid Core?
0:32:56 No, I’ve been described as that personally,
0:32:58 but never a company level.
0:32:59 I bet your wife has heard of it.
0:33:02 So her name’s Anne Malume.
0:33:05 So Anne is probably 41 right now.
0:33:07 And so let me tell you her story
0:33:09 because this was like mind-boggling to me.
0:33:12 So Anne started her career at the age of 25.
0:33:15 She started a nonprofit because she was out in a run
0:33:17 and she ran by a homeless shelter.
0:33:18 And she was like, you know,
0:33:21 I would love to figure out a way to help these people.
0:33:24 Running has helped me get over a lot of issues in my life.
0:33:26 I should start a running club for these guys.
0:33:28 And if I make them get up or if I encourage them
0:33:30 to get up early at 7 a.m. to come to this run,
0:33:31 maybe that’s going to encourage them
0:33:32 to make the rest of their day better
0:33:34 and hopefully they’ll get jobs, whatever.
0:33:36 So she starts this thing called Back to My Feet.
0:33:38 And it’s a nonprofit that does something
0:33:40 like $6 million a year in revenue.
0:33:42 So which is like in like corporate sponsors.
0:33:44 She does that over the course of five years.
0:33:47 So at the age of 31, she goes to LA
0:33:48 and she takes a Pilates class.
0:33:50 So have you ever seen like a reformer Pilates?
0:33:53 It’s like this weird like machine
0:33:55 where it’s kind of like yoga on a machine sort of.
0:33:57 – I’ve never done one,
0:33:59 but I’ve heard it’s like incredibly challenging.
0:34:01 – It’s awesome, they’re really awesome.
0:34:02 It’s mostly what women do.
0:34:03 And but after talking to Anne,
0:34:04 I’m actually going to start doing it
0:34:06 because it sounds pretty great.
0:34:08 And she goes to this class
0:34:10 and she was like a pretty intense runner.
0:34:11 And I think she did weightlifting
0:34:12 and she kind of was like,
0:34:14 I get hurt every six months.
0:34:16 I just expect that that’s part of the process
0:34:18 of being an athlete.
0:34:19 She starts doing these classes
0:34:20 and she’s like, this is awesome.
0:34:22 And the class was really cute and darling, whatever.
0:34:24 And she was like, I want to do this.
0:34:26 And so up until that point,
0:34:29 she had saved $175,000.
0:34:31 And so she moves back,
0:34:33 goes back to her hometown of Washington, DC.
0:34:35 And she goes, I want to start a studio
0:34:36 and I’m going to retire from my nonprofit,
0:34:38 which a lot of people call they’re crazy
0:34:40 because they’re like, why do you want to start like a gym?
0:34:42 Like gyms suck, they’re horrible businesses.
0:34:44 She’s like, no, no, no, we’re going to do a studio business.
0:34:46 So she quits her job.
0:34:49 I believe in August and by November,
0:34:50 she started her studio.
0:34:51 She started with $175,000.
0:34:55 She said she transferred her $175,000 in savings,
0:34:56 put all of it into the business account
0:34:58 and spent basically all of it,
0:35:00 except for 10 grand over two months
0:35:01 building out the studio.
0:35:03 And so she launches it.
0:35:05 And solid core, that’s the name of the business.
0:35:07 It’s like that Pilates thing,
0:35:09 but it’s kind of has like a berries kind of edge to it.
0:35:10 You know, like berries boot camp
0:35:11 where it’s kind of like cool,
0:35:12 like all black letters.
0:35:14 The music is just like 40% too loud.
0:35:17 Yeah, like it’s like, it’s like.
0:35:18 Looks like a nightclub.
0:35:19 Yeah, yeah, it’s like cool.
0:35:23 And she starts this thing and in month one,
0:35:26 does $90,000 in revenue.
0:35:28 And the reason she started it was she was just doing the math.
0:35:30 She’s like, look, like the way that this business can work
0:35:32 is I have my Pilates instructor.
0:35:34 I don’t even need like a front desk person.
0:35:36 The front desk person doesn’t need to be there
0:35:38 because we have classes going throughout the day.
0:35:40 And if I have like 15 of these performers
0:35:42 and I do eight classes a day,
0:35:44 that adds up to $3,000 a day.
0:35:46 I think I could fill this up seven days a week
0:35:48 and get the $90,000 and she does that in the year.
0:35:51 Did she tell you how she did that kind of $90,000 month one?
0:35:52 Was there like, how did she get the customers
0:35:54 to come to this new place?
0:35:56 Yeah, just like flyers and stuff,
0:35:58 just like telling all of her friends.
0:35:59 Like it was like super grassroots.
0:36:01 And if you do the math, it wasn’t that crazy.
0:36:03 I think her math was something like,
0:36:07 I need 15 people in every class or something like that.
0:36:08 And it wasn’t that crazy.
0:36:10 And she also was really good at branding.
0:36:12 So these women would go to these classes
0:36:13 and they’re like, this is awesome.
0:36:14 I’ll see you guys next Tuesday.
0:36:15 You know what I mean?
0:36:17 They wanted to do it over and over and over again.
0:36:21 So in month one, it does $90,000 in revenue.
0:36:23 She says that she kept growing it.
0:36:25 And by year two, she goes,
0:36:28 I was able to pay myself a million dollars in salary.
0:36:32 She goes, this thing took off because my costs were so low.
0:36:34 I basically just had to build out the studio,
0:36:36 which wasn’t terribly expensive.
0:36:38 And I had to build by these reformers,
0:36:39 which are like the machines.
0:36:42 And she’s like, our cost basis was awesome.
0:36:44 We had a very efficient operation.
0:36:49 And so by year, so we’re in 2013, she launched it.
0:36:52 By year 2016, she has 11 studios.
0:36:55 Still to this point has not taken any outside funding.
0:37:00 Keeps growing it by in 2020, shit happens
0:37:02 where like everything hits the fan, COVID happens.
0:37:05 They have to pause the whole business for a couple of years.
0:37:07 However, leading up to that,
0:37:08 she had taken a little bit of funding.
0:37:10 And along the way, she had taken PE,
0:37:12 where she took a little bit of money off the table.
0:37:14 So I think it was something like,
0:37:16 she was paying herself like $2 million a year,
0:37:20 but then took off, I think she raised $18 million,
0:37:21 of which six went to her.
0:37:24 And then she raised another like $20 million,
0:37:26 and then another 10 went to her.
0:37:27 And then finally, after 10 years,
0:37:29 she eventually has sold the whole business
0:37:31 for something like $250 million.
0:37:33 And across all of the rounds,
0:37:36 she had taken off the table something like $90 million.
0:37:39 And so this woman’s like crazy successful.
0:37:42 However, the big takeaway that I had from this lady,
0:37:44 and I have never met someone
0:37:46 with such a great growth mindset.
0:37:48 And let me give you an example.
0:37:51 After I sold my business, I was interested in real estate.
0:37:52 I learned everything about real estate,
0:37:56 or at least enough to kind of feel confident investing in it.
0:37:59 I start investing into it and I get scared.
0:38:00 I get real nervous.
0:38:02 I’m like, man, I just put down a lot of capital.
0:38:04 Like this isn’t exactly working.
0:38:05 Like I thought it would be working.
0:38:07 Like it’s not always up to the right.
0:38:09 And I got bailed, and I got afraid, and I bailed.
0:38:10 And I’ve done this many times.
0:38:12 Have you ever done this where like you learn about something?
0:38:14 Like you’ll learn about like, let’s say fitness.
0:38:16 And you’re like, well, if I do this for six months,
0:38:17 but then you’re like in month one,
0:38:19 and you’re like, this is never going to work.
0:38:20 She did not have that.
0:38:22 I’ve never met someone like her
0:38:24 that trusted the process so much.
0:38:26 And she would tell people like in year two or three,
0:38:29 she was like, I’m building this business to sell.
0:38:30 And so we’re going to do this.
0:38:31 And then by year five, we’re going to be here.
0:38:33 Year eight, we’re going to be here.
0:38:35 Year 10, I think we’re going to get like $200 million.
0:38:37 And here’s an example of what she said.
0:38:39 When she originally took out,
0:38:41 she had saved $10 million.
0:38:44 She bought a piece of land and developed a home
0:38:48 in the Dominican Republic for like four million bucks in total.
0:38:51 Sold that property after like two years to Albert Pujols
0:38:53 for like $9 million.
0:38:55 And I was like, that’s crazy.
0:38:57 You did half your net worth on this.
0:39:00 She’s like, yeah, well, I just like studied a bunch of experts.
0:39:01 I read a ton of books.
0:39:03 And I just like felt like I knew how to do it.
0:39:08 And I’ve never met someone who has such faith in the process.
0:39:11 And I was so inspired by that.
0:39:14 And now she’s got over $100 million or around $100 million.
0:39:17 And she’s investing in all these interesting deals.
0:39:19 And she’s like, yeah, well, you want to allocate 10%
0:39:21 of your portfolio to this, this, and this,
0:39:23 because I need a little bit of a high risk stuff
0:39:25 in order to off balance my conservative stuff.
0:39:27 And that sounds very logical.
0:39:30 And academically, that makes a ton of sense.
0:39:32 But when 10% is $10 million
0:39:35 and you’re doing $2 million bets or whatever,
0:39:37 that’s a very nerve wrecking thing.
0:39:41 But she was so good at dividing her emotion
0:39:43 from like her logic side of her brain and trusting the process.
0:39:45 I was incredibly inspired by this woman.
0:39:47 You have to follow some of the stuff
0:39:48 that this lady has to say.
0:39:49 She’s so interesting.
0:39:51 Also, she looks very cool.
0:39:52 Got a cool haircut.
0:39:53 She’s like a walking brand.
0:39:56 She will kick your ass is divide, but I get from her.
0:39:58 She’s a very strong looking woman.
0:40:00 Yeah, very cool.
0:40:02 So crazy story.
0:40:04 I didn’t realize how big this was.
0:40:07 I mean, it’s crazy that there’s a fitness chain this big,
0:40:09 this successful that I just never heard of.
0:40:10 Dude, it’s even bigger now, by the way.
0:40:12 I believe, was it KKR?
0:40:14 I think KKR bought it.
0:40:17 And now there’s rumors that they’re going to try
0:40:19 to sell it now for $800 million.
0:40:21 So her business, I guess it’s not hers anymore.
0:40:23 She sold it in 2024.
0:40:25 The projected to do 150 million in revenue
0:40:27 and 50 million in profit.
0:40:29 And Anne on the pod she was like,
0:40:32 I have the most profitable fitness studio
0:40:35 because we do, we just kept it lean.
0:40:37 Like we just don’t have too much excess stuff.
0:40:38 Well, it just seems like they must have figured
0:40:40 something out on the marketing side that’s,
0:40:43 they’re just not spending a lot on marketing, right?
0:40:44 We should have.
0:40:45 We should have.
0:40:46 And of course, the annoying answer, everyone,
0:40:48 I guess got a lot of word of mouth and it’s like,
0:40:51 God damn it, word of mouth is like the worst answer to hear
0:40:52 because you’re like, great.
0:40:55 Nothing I can do about that.
0:40:57 All right, like I have to go back to the drawing board
0:40:59 and create a more viral concept.
0:41:01 I have to create a more remarkable concept.
0:41:03 I have to make my product so much better.
0:41:04 It’s like the, the last thing you want to hear
0:41:07 as a marketer is, yeah, it’s just really organic.
0:41:12 It’s like saying I, I, I was genetically blessed.
0:41:15 Unfortunately, that’s how it feels to be at least
0:41:16 on the other side whenever I hear that.
0:41:18 Well, we don’t, with the money wise podcast,
0:41:19 we don’t talk too much about like getting customers
0:41:22 all that stuff, but we should have her on here
0:41:24 because I would, I did like off air.
0:41:25 I was like, how did you do that?
0:41:28 And she goes, I am world class at branding and community.
0:41:29 That’s what I do.
0:41:30 I know how to do that.
0:41:32 I was built to do that.
0:41:34 And so she didn’t tell me all the tactics,
0:41:35 but I believe that’s how it grew.
0:41:37 And that’s stupid answer of word of mouth,
0:41:39 but we should actually have her on and ask her all about this.
0:41:41 She’s super fascinating.
0:41:44 And if you Google her name, she, she’s very transparent
0:41:45 about finances because she’s like,
0:41:46 young women aren’t taught this.
0:41:48 And so I’m just going to like be transparent about this.
0:41:50 So like, she’s under talked about.
0:41:51 She’s not talked about a lot.
0:41:52 I never heard, I never heard of her.
0:41:53 Never heard a solid core.
0:41:54 So super good.
0:41:55 I’m glad you put her under my radar.
0:41:56 This is really cool.
0:41:59 The question I have is it seems like your takeaway was,
0:42:02 I’ve never seen somebody have so much.
0:42:02 What did you say?
0:42:04 Like so much faith or what did you call it?
0:42:06 Like first you said growth mindset.
0:42:06 They used to trust the process.
0:42:10 But okay, the business made $95,000 the first month.
0:42:12 The process was trusted.
0:42:13 What do you have to trust?
0:42:14 It’s working right away.
0:42:16 Like to me, trust the process is it’s not working.
0:42:17 It’s not working.
0:42:18 It’s not working.
0:42:18 It’s not working.
0:42:22 And then month 29, it finally turns the corner.
0:42:23 That’s trust the process.
0:42:25 But that’s not how people truly feel in reality.
0:42:28 So like with the hustle, when we were doing,
0:42:29 when we crossed a million dollars a month,
0:42:31 I still felt like fairly uncertain.
0:42:33 If you talk to, I mean, I talked to,
0:42:34 you talked to a lot of people.
0:42:35 I talked to a lot of people.
0:42:37 Like you could have a big business and you’re still like,
0:42:38 it’s still a tatering.
0:42:40 I don’t know if this is going to work out.
0:42:40 You know what I mean?
0:42:41 You still have that feeling.
0:42:42 Yeah, but you, you still kept going.
0:42:44 It’s not like you abandoned ship, right?
0:42:47 So I think it’s pretty, even if you have doubts,
0:42:49 doubts to me, of course, you’re going to have
0:42:51 random doubts that creep in or you’re going to have
0:42:54 some uncertainty, you know, will this work?
0:42:56 If it starts working, will this last?
0:42:57 Those are natural questions.
0:43:01 I guess like, I think a lot of what she did is awesome.
0:43:03 And in fact, the first thing you said about having
0:43:05 a growth mindset to me made a lot of sense as in,
0:43:08 she just had the confidence and faith in herself
0:43:10 to go do something completely different,
0:43:12 put her entire life savings into it,
0:43:15 and trust it in herself that she would make this work.
0:43:17 I think maybe that’s more what you mean.
0:43:21 No, I mean that and like when I was asking her about
0:43:24 new initiatives and things that she would get into,
0:43:26 like she was like, well, I wanted to learn a little bit
0:43:27 about stock investing.
0:43:30 And like, so I started, I studied all the earnings per share
0:43:32 and I learned what all that meant.
0:43:36 And like I bought Nvidia a while ago and it worked out.
0:43:39 And so I guess what I mean is she was quite good
0:43:42 at acquiring information and then trusting
0:43:44 that that information was good and trusting
0:43:45 that the way she learned was good and trusting
0:43:47 that the process that she learned about would give
0:43:49 the outcome that hopefully she wanted.
0:43:50 Okay, that makes more sense to me.
0:43:51 Okay, yeah, I like that.
0:43:55 So here’s the deal.
0:43:59 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:44:01 It was called The Hustle and it was a daily newsletter
0:44:03 at scale to millions of subscribers.
0:44:05 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:44:09 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees
0:44:12 and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
0:44:14 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:44:16 building out the tech for the platform and selling ads.
0:44:19 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:44:22 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:44:25 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:44:27 If you want to grow your newsletter,
0:44:28 if you want to monetize a newsletter,
0:44:32 they do all of the stuff that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
0:44:34 So check it out. Beehive.com.
0:44:38 That’s B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:44:43 In fact, I had a kind of similar idea.
0:44:45 So I’m writing this essay.
0:44:47 By the way, you had this in one of your emails.
0:44:50 You’re, what’s it called? Tuesday?
0:44:51 Have to Tuesday?
0:44:55 Yeah. Where that guy Hoffman, his last name was Hoffman,
0:44:56 where he said something like,
0:44:58 “No good business is a good business.”
0:44:58 Or what did he say?
0:45:00 Orrin Hoffman. Yeah, he basically was like,
0:45:02 I forgot the exact wording of the tweet,
0:45:05 but it was every business looks like a shit show on the inside.
0:45:08 The successful ones and the unsuccessful ones, right?
0:45:09 When you–
0:45:11 I think he said there’s no such thing as a good business on the inside.
0:45:14 Yeah, every business looks incredibly messy
0:45:16 and like upside down on the inside.
0:45:19 And I found that that’s true, at least in my experience.
0:45:21 Like, I’ve never been a part of a company where I’m like,
0:45:25 “Wow, it feels buttoned up. It feels figured out.
0:45:28 It feels like this is just firing in all cylinders.
0:45:30 This is just a well-oiled machine.”
0:45:31 You didn’t feel that way with Twitch?
0:45:37 Twitch was–
0:45:40 Twitch, honestly, this is going to sound a little bit bad.
0:45:42 But, you know, when Twitter started getting big
0:45:43 and suck came out,
0:45:45 and it was a little bit of jealousy or hatred,
0:45:48 but he was like, “They drove a clown car into a gold mine.”
0:45:50 That was Twitch.
0:45:51 Wait, Zuck said that?
0:45:53 Yeah, you never heard this?
0:45:54 No, that’s awesome.
0:45:58 It’s one of the first non-politically correct things he ever said,
0:45:59 which is like just the honest thing,
0:46:00 which is these guys are driving.
0:46:02 They drove a clown car into a gold mine.
0:46:06 And Twitch very much was the same way,
0:46:10 which was Twitch could get 100 things wrong internally,
0:46:13 but it didn’t matter because they had a network effect,
0:46:14 they had a moat,
0:46:14 and they had–
0:46:16 Basically, once you build a marketplace,
0:46:17 once you get a marketplace to work,
0:46:19 you can now screw up so many things,
0:46:22 and they just got more popular as gaming grew.
0:46:22 So it was like,
0:46:25 I would see just bullshit going on internally,
0:46:28 just wasted efforts here, wasted efforts here,
0:46:29 bad strategy here,
0:46:31 and then COVID happens,
0:46:33 and everybody’s at home playing video games online.
0:46:34 Boom, business takes off.
0:46:36 And you see, you know,
0:46:37 we’re trying this thing to create growth.
0:46:40 Trying this to create growth, nothing is even working.
0:46:41 Nobody has any fucking clue to grow this thing.
0:46:43 Fortnite becomes the biggest game in the world,
0:46:45 played by everybody.
0:46:48 And Twitch grows like crazy on top of Fortnite,
0:46:52 because what Emmett and the team had done early on,
0:46:53 they got right.
0:46:55 And even then, probably, I’m sure–
0:46:55 I wasn’t there,
0:46:56 but I’m sure many things felt broken
0:46:57 or unfigured out at that time,
0:46:59 but they got the core thing right,
0:47:01 which is they created the biggest marketplace
0:47:03 of supply and demand of content creators
0:47:05 for video gaming content and consumers.
0:47:08 And that gave them the privilege,
0:47:10 the right to be wrong so–
0:47:12 They got to fire so many shots on goal after that
0:47:13 that didn’t even have to work out,
0:47:15 didn’t have to be well-executed,
0:47:17 because the more popular gaming got,
0:47:19 the more people were online stream–
0:47:21 online being content creators,
0:47:22 the bigger Twitch got.
0:47:23 And so they were just–
0:47:25 Then the analogy we used internally was,
0:47:28 we don’t create the waves, right?
0:47:31 When every time somebody did the growth analysis,
0:47:33 it’s like all the things that caused growth
0:47:35 were exogenous factors.
0:47:37 It was not some feature we created
0:47:38 that drove growth necessarily.
0:47:41 It was the popularity of a specific game
0:47:43 where it was a new device gets released
0:47:45 and now the new PlayStation drives,
0:47:47 a big boost in whatever, or the new gaming PCs,
0:47:49 or the chips get better,
0:47:50 which make it easier to stream while you’re playing,
0:47:53 because the graphics cards can now handle both.
0:47:54 And so there was always these exogenous things,
0:47:56 and the analogy we used internally was,
0:47:57 we are the surfer.
0:48:00 We are out there paddling, waiting for waves,
0:48:01 and when the wave comes,
0:48:04 it’s our job to be ready to surf it and not wipe out.
0:48:06 But let’s be clear, we don’t create the waves.
0:48:08 And internally, we all wanted to create the wave
0:48:10 because you want growth to be a button you can push,
0:48:13 but in that business, that’s just not how it worked.
0:48:16 And by the way, a Twitch diehard person
0:48:17 would totally disagree.
0:48:19 I’m sure they would be shaking their fists saying,
0:48:22 no, no, no, we were great internally,
0:48:24 and we improved the conversion rate
0:48:26 and the discovery rate and the retention rates,
0:48:28 and that all causes growth.
0:48:29 So there is like a counter argument to it,
0:48:33 but I think on the whole, I know what I saw.
0:48:34 I know what was going on inside of there.
0:48:38 It’s not like, by the way, that’s what I thought I would find.
0:48:40 I thought I would go from my messy startup
0:48:42 where I’m an idiot and I created a huge mess over here
0:48:44 and I got 20 people and I don’t know how to do anything.
0:48:46 Oh, I’m going to go to this company
0:48:48 that could bought by Amazon as a multi-billion-dollar company
0:48:50 with seasoned executives.
0:48:52 Now I’ll go learn how a business is supposed to look on the inside.
0:48:54 And instead, I was like, man, this is not it.
0:48:56 We’re on a tangent.
0:48:58 What were originally were you going to say?
0:48:59 Do you remember?
0:49:01 Oh, I’m writing this essay called “Who’s Your Elon?”
0:49:04 And I wrote this because I have this philosophy
0:49:05 that you are what you admire.
0:49:07 So pick and choose what you admire
0:49:10 because your body will start to gravitate towards that.
0:49:14 And I think as founders, the default, the factory setting
0:49:16 that you get wired with when you decide
0:49:17 I’m going to be a founder is cool.
0:49:19 Then you should want to be Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.
0:49:22 All right, those are the, that’s the North Star.
0:49:24 Would you agree for most people?
0:49:27 Like just the default factory setting for entrepreneurs?
0:49:28 Yeah, and before Elon, it was Zuck.
0:49:31 And before Zuck, it was Steve Jobs.
0:49:33 And before Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or whatever.
0:49:36 That’s kind of like the transition here.
0:49:39 And so Elon today, he’s the goat and it makes sense.
0:49:41 He’s built badass companies that change the world.
0:49:45 Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, open AI, even actually he helped create start.
0:49:47 He’s the richest entrepreneur in the world.
0:49:49 He’s the most famous entrepreneur of the world.
0:49:51 He seems like a badass because it goes after
0:49:53 these hard problems in these big markets.
0:49:56 And he’s just doing cool electric cars,
0:49:57 launching rockets that will land themselves
0:49:59 on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean.
0:50:00 Like he’s incredible.
0:50:02 Convincing dozens of women to have his children.
0:50:06 And then convincing the rest of the public that it was cool,
0:50:08 that he was just doing his part to save civilization
0:50:11 instead of just impregnating everybody around him.
0:50:14 So he’s incredible.
0:50:16 But also, I don’t want to be him, right?
0:50:18 Because his family life is a mess.
0:50:19 He seems super stressed.
0:50:21 His schedule is not the schedule I would want.
0:50:23 If you want those trade-offs, great, more power to you.
0:50:24 It’s not the trade-offs I would choose.
0:50:26 And so I think it is important to–
0:50:27 You can see when he tweeted out
0:50:31 where Zuck was doing the surfing thing on 4th of July.
0:50:33 And Elon was like, that’s cute.
0:50:34 I’m busy working.
0:50:38 Yeah, he could have his parties on his yachts.
0:50:39 I prefer to work.
0:50:40 Oh, my God.
0:50:41 That was the lamest shit I ever heard.
0:50:44 Also, somebody replied with a great thing.
0:50:47 They posted the analytics of how much–
0:50:49 how many tweets and likes he had done that month.
0:50:51 And it’s like, I prefer to work.
0:50:54 And he’s like, tweeted and likes like 1,000 times that month.
0:50:55 It’s like, bro, you’re not working.
0:51:01 Anyways, I think that Elon is great in many ways.
0:51:03 If he’s your North Star, more power to you.
0:51:07 But if he’s not, it’s important to pick who is your North Star.
0:51:09 And I guess you were talking about this woman, Ann,
0:51:14 and how we admire that she was able to just fearlessly go in
0:51:16 and learn new things, have the confidence,
0:51:17 learn just enough to be dangerous,
0:51:20 but also move on and have multiple chapters in her life.
0:51:25 I realized that that was my answer.
0:51:26 As somebody who’s more of a polymath,
0:51:27 somebody who has–
0:51:30 They walked into Disneyland and they said,
0:51:31 I want to ride all the rides.
0:51:33 They don’t spend all their time just perfecting one ride.
0:51:36 They were like, I only have a certain amount of time on this earth.
0:51:38 I want to go ride all the rides.
0:51:39 Who are examples for you?
0:51:43 So like the historical example is like Ben Franklin.
0:51:46 So Ben Franklin, he had a scientist era.
0:51:50 He invented the bifocals, the Franklin stove.
0:51:52 And then he created the best newsletter of its time, right?
0:51:56 He invented a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.
0:51:58 And then he was a founding father and he was in politics
0:51:59 and he helped write the Constitution.
0:52:02 Also convinced many women to have his babies.
0:52:05 Of course, that’s a prerequisite.
0:52:09 He then was the CEO of the US Postal System
0:52:10 for a period of time.
0:52:13 And then in music, he invented like a musical instrument.
0:52:16 He influenced many people.
0:52:19 Mozart, Beethoven said that Ben Franklin influenced them.
0:52:20 No way.
0:52:21 Like what a guy, right?
0:52:23 Like what a fucking legend.
0:52:28 And so I hear that and I’m like, dude, that sounds epic.
0:52:30 Like if I could think of what is the top of the top look like,
0:52:31 that’s really cool.
0:52:34 And there’s another, okay, modern day examples.
0:52:36 We had Jesse Itzler on the podcast.
0:52:39 And when Jesse’s episode, you can go watch it.
0:52:40 It’s a, I don’t know what episode number,
0:52:42 but go just go on YouTube and try it.
0:52:43 Jesse Itzler, my first million.
0:52:46 This is a guy who was like, I’m going to be a rapper.
0:52:48 He’s a white Jewish rapper.
0:52:51 And then he becomes a corporate jingle writer.
0:52:53 Then he’s an entrepreneur, creates a coconut water brand
0:52:54 and a private jet brand.
0:52:56 And then he’s like, fucking,
0:52:57 I’m going to get really into health and fitness and running.
0:52:59 And it becomes an endurance athlete.
0:53:01 He lives in a monastery with monks.
0:53:03 He has David Goggins come live in his house.
0:53:04 He wrote books.
0:53:05 He married Sarah Blakely.
0:53:06 He’s got four or five kids.
0:53:07 Seems like a good dad.
0:53:09 When I called him to prep for the pod,
0:53:11 he was like wrangling and herding sheep,
0:53:14 trying to get to the soccer game or soccer practice that day.
0:53:17 And I just find that really interesting.
0:53:19 People who’ve had these multiple different arcs
0:53:20 and careers and different zones and genres.
0:53:23 There’s a guy, Neil Centuria, who I really admire.
0:53:24 He’s in San Diego.
0:53:25 How do you spell his name?
0:53:29 Neil and then Centuria’s S-E-N-T-U-R-I-A.
0:53:31 He’s got a great book that is not popular,
0:53:33 but I met him and he gave me a copy of his book
0:53:35 that’s called “I’m There for You, Baby.”
0:53:39 And Neil’s story is like he was a Hollywood script writer.
0:53:41 Then to try to make a buck, he’s like,
0:53:42 “Dude, San Diego’s booming.”
0:53:44 And he got into the real estate development game
0:53:47 and built, helped like kind of fund and build
0:53:49 a skyscraper in downtown San Diego.
0:53:51 And then he met a kid in an elevator
0:53:52 who had a good startup idea.
0:53:53 He invested in it and it became Chegg.
0:53:55 And then he started a dozen companies
0:53:56 and some of them worked, some of them didn’t.
0:53:58 Some were in biotech, some were in consumer.
0:54:00 Like he started a whole bunch of different things.
0:54:01 And he’s into art.
0:54:02 He’s, you know, he’s got multiple chapters.
0:54:04 And when I met him, we went to his house and he’s like,
0:54:06 “Oh yeah, I’m writing this book now
0:54:09 about this woman who created the biggest Ponzi scheme.
0:54:10 And I think this should become a movie.”
0:54:12 And he was like, “This guy’s in his like 70s.”
0:54:13 And he says, “He’s still going.
0:54:16 He’s still got ideas and energy and his zest for life.”
0:54:19 And he’s like, “Doesn’t count himself out of any pursuit.”
0:54:20 And I think I like that.
0:54:23 I think I like people who don’t count themselves out,
0:54:25 who don’t feel like I can’t do it because I haven’t done it.
0:54:28 And that limiting belief is just one I don’t want in my life.
0:54:30 If you Google this guy, there’s not a lot of news
0:54:31 or information out of him.
0:54:34 But there is a San Diego Tribune article.
0:54:37 And its title is “Why having fun is good for the soul.”
0:54:39 Yeah, I’m down with that.
0:54:40 I’m down with that.
0:54:42 I’m very down with that.
0:54:46 Are you, have you seen the Ben Franklin TV show on Apple?
0:54:47 You know, I watched the trailer of it.
0:54:50 And then I just didn’t feel it hooked.
0:54:51 Is it good? Should I watch it?
0:54:54 If you’re a history nerd, it’s awesome.
0:54:56 And but he just fucking partied.
0:55:00 He was like, they’re trying to convince the French
0:55:02 to like join the American Revolution.
0:55:05 And do you know that scene in the office
0:55:07 where Michael Scott and Jan go to this dinner
0:55:10 at like an Apple Tuesday to convince that man
0:55:11 to do their business?
0:55:13 And Jan wants to get down to business.
0:55:16 And Michael talks for like two hours, right?
0:55:18 Yeah, he’s like, “Hey, you guys want to get some baby back ribs?”
0:55:19 And he starts taking the baby back ribs suck
0:55:21 and they all get drunk and he’s party.
0:55:23 And then at the end he does the deal.
0:55:25 And Michael’s like, “I fucking told you Jan.
0:55:26 This is how it works.”
0:55:26 Right.
0:55:28 That’s what Ben Franklin did.
0:55:30 He basically went over there with James Madison
0:55:32 and James is all buttoned up and they’re like,
0:55:32 “Let’s do our thing.”
0:55:34 And he’s like, “No, dude, we’re going to party.
0:55:36 Let’s go to the parties and they get wasted.”
0:55:38 And like there’s scenes where like him
0:55:40 and other diplomats are like pissing together
0:55:42 on a when they’re like drunk at a party.
0:55:44 And like while they’re peeing, he’s like,
0:55:46 “Hey, so the American Revolution, you know,
0:55:47 we could use your help.”
0:55:48 Like it’s things like that.
0:55:51 Like you see that he was like a pretty smooth dude.
0:55:52 And it’s pretty awesome.
0:55:54 It’s a great show.
0:55:57 And I thought his biography by Walter Isaacson,
0:55:59 I thought it fucking sucked.
0:56:01 I’m one of the few people that thought it was sucked.
0:56:01 It sucked.
0:56:02 But his autobiography is pretty good.
0:56:04 But yeah, Ben Franklin’s all right.
0:56:05 He’s the man.
0:56:08 Okay. What else we got?
0:56:10 I’ll do one more quick thing.
0:56:11 This is just a quick, funny thing.
0:56:14 Ah, I don’t even want to say it’s funny.
0:56:14 Interesting.
0:56:16 So rejuvenation Olympics.
0:56:17 Do you remember when we talked about that?
0:56:20 Is that the steroids allowed Olympics?
0:56:21 Is that what that one is?
0:56:23 No, that’s the enhanced games.
0:56:23 Which is awesome.
0:56:29 This is the reverse aging Brian Johnson thing.
0:56:30 Yeah.
0:56:31 So leaderboard.
0:56:33 We originally found Brian.
0:56:33 I take pride in that.
0:56:34 I’ve said that many times.
0:56:36 We kind of got, we were on a couple of people early.
0:56:37 Brian’s one of them.
0:56:40 Dude, you keep saying it and it actually destroys the value
0:56:42 that we had in finding them early.
0:56:44 Because it’s kind of like Jason Calicanus,
0:56:46 the third investor in Uber.
0:56:47 It’s like, it would have been cool if you’re like, you know,
0:56:49 Jason was, if somebody else says, you know,
0:56:50 Jason was actually the third investor in Uber.
0:56:52 But when Jason says, you know,
0:56:54 as the third investor in Uber a thousand times,
0:56:54 it’s like, dude, we get it.
0:56:56 Now you’re overcompensating.
0:56:58 I think that’s what’s happening here with,
0:56:59 we discovered Brian Johnson.
0:57:01 Look, I don’t have that many discoveries.
0:57:03 So I feel good about this particular one.
0:57:06 But Brian Johnson, we talked about him a bunch of times.
0:57:07 We had him on the podcast.
0:57:08 He went to his house.
0:57:10 Really interesting guy.
0:57:12 Originally when we talked to him,
0:57:14 we brought up the rejuvenation Olympics
0:57:15 and we talked about it.
0:57:17 And this website was super janky.
0:57:20 But now if you go to, it’s much better.
0:57:22 It still honestly sucks.
0:57:23 I just DM’d him and I’m like, dude, your website,
0:57:24 like, I don’t know how to use it,
0:57:26 but it’s a lot better than before.
0:57:30 Rejuvenation Olympics is this leaderboard where before,
0:57:31 he didn’t have a partnership,
0:57:35 but he would say like, go and buy this like $800 bloodwork
0:57:37 and upload your results here and do it.
0:57:39 If you do it three times, we take the average
0:57:40 and we’re going to create this thing
0:57:42 called the rejuvenation Olympics,
0:57:44 where they use this one bloodwork
0:57:47 to decide how slow you’re aging.
0:57:50 And so the people who are aging the slowest
0:57:53 based off this, I think it’s true diagnostics,
0:57:55 based off of their test,
0:57:57 they have this thing called like a dune pace score.
0:57:58 And it like measures.
0:58:00 Let’s just explain the simple thing.
0:58:04 Normally you would expect in one year of chronological time,
0:58:07 you would age one year of biological time.
0:58:09 So the idea with the rejuvenation Olympics is
0:58:11 in one year of chronological time,
0:58:12 so one calendar year,
0:58:14 can you age less than one year?
0:58:16 Can your body age less than one year
0:58:19 of kind of like cell damage basically?
0:58:24 And the top guy here, his average pace is 0.56.
0:58:26 So every year he’s only aging half a year.
0:58:29 Yeah. And so it’s like an interesting thing.
0:58:32 And it’s actually a super interesting business
0:58:33 for a few reasons.
0:58:36 One, he actually has a partnership with True Diagnostics.
0:58:37 But in order to do that,
0:58:40 to be verified on rejuvenationolympics.com,
0:58:43 you have to take the average of three tests.
0:58:44 Each test is very expensive.
0:58:47 And then in order to stay on the leaderboard,
0:58:48 you have to like continue doing averages.
0:58:51 So you have to like do this freaking test every quarter.
0:58:54 So actually the expenses add up.
0:58:58 But True Diagnostics, $500, living forever, priceless.
0:59:00 Well, it definitely has a price
0:59:02 if you look at some of these guys.
0:59:04 Because if you look at like the you,
0:59:07 when I got curious and I went through the list
0:59:10 of the people who are top on the rejuvenation Olympics.
0:59:12 And most of them are like,
0:59:13 like you’ll see like, what’s that dude’s name?
0:59:15 Peter Diamandis or whatever.
0:59:16 Yeah. Remember?
0:59:20 Like some rich guy, Brian Johnson is near the top rich guy.
0:59:22 It’s all like these like healthy people
0:59:25 or like healthy rich people or who are spending a lot of money
0:59:27 or it’s like a biohacker.
0:59:29 So like someone who’s like job is to do this stuff
0:59:31 and they like blog about it and they make money to do it.
0:59:33 I’m just gonna say this right now, Brian.
0:59:35 I love you, but I will not use this website
0:59:38 until you link their names to an Instagram.
0:59:41 This website is useless to me unless Craig McCall,
0:59:44 I need to be able to click and go see who this guy is.
0:59:46 I can’t use the site until that happens.
0:59:47 That is the only feature I need.
0:59:49 We are on the same page, my friend,
0:59:52 because if you look at the Instagram of the link,
0:59:55 so there’s a woman named Julia Gibson-Clark.
0:59:58 So roughly 8,000 people have like done this test
1:00:02 and she at the time when I was doing research,
1:00:04 if you go to view all rankings, let’s see if she’s still up top.
1:00:05 She’s like in the top eight.
1:00:06 Yeah. Okay.
1:00:07 She’s number two.
1:00:09 I did research on this woman.
1:00:10 She’s just a lady.
1:00:12 She’s just a lady who’s like fit
1:00:14 and someone else picked up on this and they’re like,
1:00:16 “Who’s this Julie Gibson-Clark woman?”
1:00:17 And they did this article about her.
1:00:19 She’s like, “I make a hundred grand a year.
1:00:20 Like I exercise five days a week,
1:00:23 but like, and I just eat vegetables,
1:00:25 but like I’ll just go for a walk sometimes or a rug.
1:00:29 Like I just live like a decently healthy lifestyle.”
1:00:31 And she’s like number six or number seven on this list.
1:00:34 And I thought it was awesome that this 57-year-old woman
1:00:36 who’s not a very wealthy person,
1:00:40 who isn’t like a professional at doing all this shit,
1:00:42 she’s just living like a pretty well balanced, it seems life.
1:00:44 She’s number seven and she’s kicking ass.
1:00:48 And if you click on some of the photos, very attractive woman.
1:00:49 Like she looks like a very healthy woman.
1:00:52 It doesn’t look like she’s got any like classic surgery.
1:00:54 She makes a hundred grand a year.
1:00:57 She eats vegetables for snacks.
1:00:59 So like instead of eating like potato chips,
1:01:00 she’ll just eat carrot sticks.
1:01:03 And she takes just a couple of vitamins in the morning.
1:01:04 And that’s basically it.
1:01:06 And she lifts weights twice a week, twice a week,
1:01:08 and she goes for runs twice a week.
1:01:10 And then the other day, she’s just walking a lot.
1:01:11 Right.
1:01:13 And she’s killing it.
1:01:16 By the way, I have to apologize to everybody.
1:01:20 I did an interview with Brian Johnson probably like a year ago now.
1:01:21 I don’t know how long this has been.
1:01:22 It’s been like six months, it’s been like a year.
1:01:23 I went to his house.
1:01:25 I did a three hour interview with him.
1:01:26 We had professional cameraman.
1:01:27 It was great.
1:01:29 And I was so excited about it.
1:01:30 We came back.
1:01:32 I started editing all, I did a bunch of interviews in LA.
1:01:34 And I started editing one by one.
1:01:36 And you know, I edited five of them.
1:01:37 We released them.
1:01:39 And the Brian Johnson one was kind of like my finale.
1:01:40 And I was so excited about it.
1:01:43 But I was also like, it’s a kind of like higher stakes.
1:01:46 And higher stake almost because I thought it could be great,
1:01:50 but it would require more time and patience in the edit,
1:01:51 partly because of the way we filmed it
1:01:52 with multiple cameras and whatnot.
1:01:55 And I put it off.
1:01:57 I got busy and I started doing other things.
1:01:59 And then I just didn’t do it.
1:02:00 I didn’t release the episode.
1:02:02 And so this earlier this week, I asked Diego, I said,
1:02:07 Diego, it is now out of my hands.
1:02:08 I said, I’m giving you this episode.
1:02:09 You are going to edit this.
1:02:11 And we’re going to release this even though it’s been a year.
1:02:14 Better late than never.
1:02:17 And I said, I have been the blocker of this
1:02:19 because I initially, I was a perfectionist about it,
1:02:21 which is weird because I’m never a perfectionist.
1:02:23 I just really wanted it to be good.
1:02:26 And then later I was like, well, now it’s been seven months.
1:02:27 Some of the stunning things he’s talking about
1:02:29 don’t even make sense anymore.
1:02:32 But whatever.
1:02:35 I told him, I said, you don’t have to ask me about it.
1:02:37 Just edit and make it good.
1:02:38 And then we’re going to release it.
1:02:41 So I will write my wrong and better late than never here.
1:02:46 Dude, no one cares or would know that it’s a year old, right?
1:02:49 Well, there’s some things he says that maybe he’s like,
1:02:51 oh, we’re going to launch this.
1:02:52 And it’s like it’s actually been launched now
1:02:54 or whatever, like a year later.
1:02:56 You know, he’s reversed age.
1:02:57 He looks younger now.
1:02:59 So you might throw people off.
1:03:05 Would you want to look like him?
1:03:08 Would I want to look like him?
1:03:10 Yeah, he’s just shredded.
1:03:11 Like when you say like exactly like him,
1:03:14 like I don’t look like me anymore or just like my body.
1:03:15 Your body.
1:03:16 Oh, hell yeah.
1:03:18 Dude, all he needs is a tan.
1:03:20 He looks so shredded.
1:03:21 He’s got an insane body.
1:03:22 He just needs a tan.
1:03:24 But actually it’s smart that he doesn’t do the tan
1:03:27 because like what I’ve realized is that Brian Johnson
1:03:30 is a marketing genius.
1:03:32 And no shit.
1:03:34 Whoever he’s hired to run his Twitter account,
1:03:35 which I don’t think it’s him
1:03:38 because his personality is he’s a really nice guy.
1:03:41 But he’s not like super, he’s not like super meme-y.
1:03:44 But his Twitter game is now like really good
1:03:45 and smart and like memes.
1:03:47 Well, I think he hired a meme dealer
1:03:49 and he’s got somebody doing his Twitter
1:03:51 because it’s very smart what he’s doing.
1:03:54 No, he seems like a guy who could like study it
1:03:56 and like implement.
1:03:58 And by the way, I’ll put one thing in the ground.
1:03:58 I might be fooled by this.
1:03:59 Who knows?
1:04:00 But there’s a lot of people who are like,
1:04:02 oh, he’s just doing this to make money.
1:04:02 I don’t know.
1:04:03 He made a lot of money.
1:04:07 He, I believe he did this because it gave his life purpose
1:04:08 after he had already made a bunch of money.
1:04:08 I agree.
1:04:11 And it gave him a purpose, a higher mission,
1:04:13 a more ambitious thing to do.
1:04:14 And he got really into it.
1:04:18 And I think he’s 100% genuine.
1:04:20 And even if he released products that are associated with it,
1:04:22 I think it’s only to help this cause.
1:04:24 Like, and I’m normally very skeptical.
1:04:25 Like when most people do things
1:04:26 and they say they’re mission driven,
1:04:28 I’m like, oh, is mission code for money driven?
1:04:29 Like, what are you talking about here?
1:04:32 In this case, I actually think Brian Johnson
1:04:35 is one of the few truly mission driven people in this.
1:04:37 And I think a lot of people, the more popular he gets,
1:04:39 the more people will want to tear him down.
1:04:40 And I’m just going to put out my position,
1:04:44 which is I believe that he is super genuine
1:04:46 about everything that he’s doing.
1:04:48 I mean, I believe he’s genuine in his intent.
1:04:51 And I believe he is actually mission driven
1:04:52 when he’s doing this.
1:04:53 Does anyone doubt that?
1:04:55 Oh, there’s a lot of people who are like,
1:05:00 you know, he named his olive oil like snake oil
1:05:02 because so many people were like calling him
1:05:04 a snake oil salesman because they’re like,
1:05:05 oh, you’re just trying to sell us supplements
1:05:07 and pills and blah, blah, blah.
1:05:09 You know, the one thing I think that might happen
1:05:13 is I don’t think he, I think he might be more experimental
1:05:15 in everything that he’s doing and not publish everything.
1:05:18 I don’t have any reason to say that.
1:05:20 I just, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true
1:05:23 because I think he’s truly going to be on the cutting edge.
1:05:24 And also there’s some responsibility
1:05:26 in what you put out there to others.
1:05:30 And maybe he waits until something is proven to be
1:05:32 effective or safe before he tells people
1:05:33 he’s been experimenting with it.
1:05:34 I think that might be true.
1:05:36 I just think that you have to be really rich
1:05:38 to tweet out how many boners you’re getting
1:05:39 in the middle of the night.
1:05:41 And like he does this whole experiment
1:05:43 where he’s trying to improve
1:05:46 how much erections he gets in the middle of the night.
1:05:47 It’s the only wearable worth wearing.
1:05:49 Have you seen the wearable?
1:05:50 It’s like a ring.
1:05:52 It’s like a little like a little Fitbit.
1:05:54 That’s how they measure.
1:05:56 Because that was my question.
1:05:57 When he started putting the data, I was like,
1:05:58 is there someone watching?
1:05:59 How do you know?
1:06:00 Well, how are you measuring this?
1:06:02 And then he showed the device.
1:06:04 It’s like a little rubber band around a stack of dimes.
1:06:05 Exactly.
1:06:07 We’re like, that’s cool.
1:06:08 But why is it so big?
1:06:10 I don’t think I’m going to need all that.
1:06:13 Is there one that fits on a baby carat?
1:06:16 Yeah, is this a bracelet?
1:06:21 How does it work when you measure it on my wrist?
1:06:25 Well, if you made it this far,
1:06:28 you got one of our rare dick jokes.
1:06:30 All right, is that it?
1:06:31 That’s the pod?
1:06:31 That’s it.
1:06:32 All right.
1:06:34 All right.
1:06:44 [MUSIC PLAYING]

Episode 610: Sam Parr ( https://twitter.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the $1b dollar app idea for millennial moms, how Solidcore founder Anne Mahlum emptied her life savings into a pilates studio that she sold for $88M + Shaan writes a movie using ChatGPT. 

Show Notes: 

(0:00) APP IDEA: Reddit For Moms

(3:50) Capitalizing on a reverse craving

(14:30) How we use our wives to predict trends

(18:54) Shaan uses ChatGPT to make a movie

(22:56) How to use ChatGPT as an on-demand creative collaborator

(34:14) The mind-boggling story of Solidcore

(37:21) The insane confidence of Anne Mahlum

(41:40) There’s no business that looks good on the inside

(44:07) “They drove a clown car into a gold mine”

(47:55) Who’s your Elon?

(50:34) Why Ben Franklin and Jesse Itzler are Shaan’s entrepreneurial heroes

(55:10) Bryan Johnson’s aging leaderboard

Links:

• Better Than Google – https://tinyurl.com/mskmpysd

• Beehiiv – https://www.beehiiv.com/

• Solidcore – https://www.solidcore.co/

• Anne Mahlum – https://www.annemahlum.com/

• Jesse Itzler’s episode – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff1z3GUcfO8

• I’m There For You, Baby – https://tinyurl.com/2m42ktk9

• TruDiagnostic – https://www.trudiagnostic.com/

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

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