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