#173 - How Beachbody Makes Money, 75 Hard Explained, & Brainstorming "HackerNews for X"

in this class, there was one guy who was always talking. He would raise his hand first thing for every single question. He had a big opinion on all these topics. I'm like, dude, how does this guy know about all this stuff? And he was just super into the internet. And at the time, my head labeled this guy as a loser. I was like, wow, this guy's like this overeager student dork who's like kind of a know-it-all and like kind of sucking up to the teacher. And like, why is he so into this? Wow, what a loser. He spends his nights researching the pros and cons of net neutrality. Okay, now fast forward. Now that's me. I'm that loser. I was just late to the game. And that guy Dan ended up joining Coinbase as one of the early employees.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back. Abreu, what is your rating of today's episode?

I'd go A-. We rambled a lot, but I kind of like that, that we go into different topics. I mean, we're everywhere. Pod Grant, Hacker News stuff, crypto for Hacker News, the origin stories of Product Hunt, 75 Hard, Tony Horton, Sean pouring his heart out at the end. We got everything in there.

What was your top 2 favorite things?

I like talking about like the origin story. So Product Hunt, how Ryan kind of hacked his way to growing that. That was kind of cool. The P90X origin story as well. That was kind of cool. I have to look up that YouTube video that Sean mentioned. That was definitely interesting.

Listeners, let us know if you like having this up front. Let's get to today's podcast. All right.

What's up?

What's up? Sorry I was late. I was sitting here working.

It's a podcast, bro. Nobody knows you were late.

I'm never the late one. I take pride in that. And I was just literally sitting here working and I had no idea. I didn't even look at the time.

The funny thing is I was also 2 minutes late, but When I saw your message that was like, uh, hey, sorry, I'm running it. I'll be there in a minute. I was like, boom, hop it. I need to hop in there now. So I'm there first.

Yes. I'm not typically the late one, but I was, but I will tell you a few things that I was working on. So just a quick recap. I'm working on some growth stuff, so I wanna run just a few quick ideas by you. This will only take a second, but first, yeah. So in the last, whatever we launched, however long that's been, not including month 1 to month 2, because it was like a 500% growth rate. So not including that, we have grown on average 10% a month.

Okay.

Okay. This month, uh, April's not over, but if, if you take the average of the trailing 3 weeks and give it a 4th week, it's going to be about 400,000, a little bit over 400,000 downloads, which, um, if you, so if you take that multiplied by the, uh, to January, So we're going to hit a million downloads a month by around January at 10% growth rate.

If we keep going at this rate.

Yeah.

Um, so right now we're on pace for about 5 million downloads a year. And then what you're saying is 400,000 downloads a month. That's 5 million a year.

That's assuming zero growth.

Right, right. With the growth, it'll be like 6 million or something like that. More.

8-ish. Yeah, because the last— the end of the year is going to be starting to get 800, 900, a million downloads a month.

And dude, if people start commuting, they need a little— they need a little good, good, good in their ears while they're commuting. That's what we needed. We took a 20% cut, I think, when COVID happened. Yeah, I saw the numbers dip and then we rebuilt from there.

So the current growth rate is actually quite good. It's just like— it's just— this is the same thing of like, if you just focus and just do the same old, same old over and over and over again, it's going to work. But of course we want to expedite that. And so the things that we're working on is we've already talked about what we've worked on, but let me bring up a few things. First, I actually think that we need to be a little bit tighter with our content, meaning what are the— like, I don't watch sports, but I know you do. What are like the sports shows where they like go through topic by topic and they like have like a time limit?

Yeah, like Pardon the Interruption, they do that where it's like 5 minutes. It's like, all right, we're talking about— and they always have like, you know, the shit people care about, or, you know, they have these, these little like names on the side and it's like you kind of want to tune in to hear what they're going to say about X and what are they going to say about Y.

So I think we should start doing that and I'm trying to figure out how to do it, but I would like us to— we're going to start— I'm going to try it for an episode and I'll coordinate it next. Everything that is on Instagram and on YouTube, we have to drive all traffic to iTunes, not to Spotify, even though a lot of people say they listen to Spotify. The numbers are more people, just barely though, listen to iTunes. But if you click subscribe on iTunes, it automatically downloads and we get credit for that. Whereas Spotify, it doesn't do that. So gaming the system and playing within the rules, that's the way to go. And we currently are not linking to any of our iTunes stuff. Finally, um, or no, second to last thing is recapping old stuff. So we have 170 episodes. Did you know that? I didn't know that.

That's a lot.

Yeah. Um, and so what I'm going to do is go through all the old ones and bucket them into categories. Categories and we could re-release them just with the new intro because I think they'll be great.

Dude, that's really smart. If we basically take our best episodes from earlier when we had half the size of the audience and maybe we cut off some bullshit if it was like there was something dumb, but we just take the, you know, in the month, like last year, this month, if we had 3 good episodes and we just say, boom, we're bringing back those business ideas and repackaging them in a way that's better. And we sort of rerelease our greatest hits. I think that's a good idea.

Oh, it's not what I was thinking. Trims the fat. I think that will work. But what I was thinking of is grouping it. So let's say that in episode 5 and then 34 and then in 8, we— there was a religion-based thing, like a church, right?

Make a religion composite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you do that. And the reason why is so you can create a how-to title, because what I've looked at and all the data anything that's how-to related gets more than pass, more than other stuff. Speaking of which, smart. And this is one of the last things we can retitle old ones to be more click— I'll fucking say it— clickbait headlines. And then last but not least, Alex Garcia on my team who's been going wild on Twitter is going to join the podcast team a little bit as growth. And then we also are hooking up with HubSpot. They've got a team that are an outsourced production company that I want to look into. And they have claimed that if you get a lot of like, if you increase the production value significantly, even on shit like this, it increases downloads. I don't believe it, but it's, it's interesting, right?

Well, we're going to throw it all at the wall and we're going to see what happens. Speaking of growth, Can I transition to an app that's growing that I want to talk about? Or we can actually, we can do your rundown of the things we're going to talk about on this episode. So I'm going to talk about some things that are in the fitness space. So this app 75 Hard and how it relates to P90X and a whole bunch of different fitness things, trends that I've seen. So I'm going to break that down in detail. We're going to talk about Hacker News and basically niche news websites., and you have an opinion on that, and so do I. And then we might talk about MVNOs. I'm not sure if I'll get to it today. Did you have any other ones that you wanted to talk about?

And what was your last one?

MVNOs. This is when you basically can start your own cell phone carrier company. Uh, it's pretty cool.

Uh, I think that that, that actually probably might be a lead for, I think, next one, because that's a pretty big idea. I think it's really interesting. And I, and I, and I, what I did this week is I actually just researched everything you had. And I have points and counterpoints. And I didn't research that one because it's very interesting. Can we wait for the next one?

And instead— it takes a lot.

Yeah, right. And instead go to, uh, this Teachable for Devs thing because I have some intel for that. So I went and got some intel on that. I went and got intel on, uh, 75 Hard. And I think the most interesting is the Hacker News stuff. I, uh, I went and talked to a friend, Andrew, your friend, uh, our friend who owns, uh, company in the space and I got all these numbers.

Okay, great. All right. Where do you want to start? We can start on any of those topics. Hacker News. Okay. So I was looking at, I saw this tweet from this guy, Dan Romero. And Dan Romero, actually, it's kind of a funny story. I'll just lead in with a personal story. So when I was in college, I don't know, when you were in college, were you trying, like, what was your strategy? Were you trying to take the hard classes, the easy classes, what you're interested in?

Yeah.

So So if you could take— so some people do the hard ones, some people do what they're most interested in, and some people like me were just looking for the easy way out. And it sounds like you're the same. And so I—

thank you, Rate My Professor.

I use Rate My Professor and I would find the easiest classes. I would find out what classes the football players and the basketball players got to take because those are the easy classes. So like Rocks for Jocks was the code name for this class. I was like, geology, but it was like the easiest fucking class ever. I got into this class. I don't even know how. I was genuinely trying to take an interesting class about sports psychology or sports medicine or something like that. And it turns out this was a class only the female basketball players at Duke were in. So there was 10 students. They were all the female basketball players at Duke. I looked at the schedule. I was like, oh, there's no classroom. Where do I go? Where do I go for my class? I emailed the teacher. He's like, there's no physical meetings for this course. I don't know how you got into this, but he's like, you just need to read this one book. It was the Lance Armstrong book, uh, Lives, whatever his book was called. And at the end of the year, so read that one book, which is like the easiest fucking book to read, by the way. And then at the end of the year, you write a 2-page report on it. And that was the whole class. No, you're kidding me. Sorry, Duke. You know, you definitely do the thing that all schools do with education.

I get that why it's cool when you're a kid, but also as a kid and now as an adult who's going to send his kids to college, I'm like, What a waste.

Waste of money. What a waste of money, dude. I thought I had hit the lottery.

I was a D1 athlete in college and they made me take— I was a runner, mind you. They made me take gym and the gym class was aerobic walking.

It's like if you got to the classroom, you're done.

You show up and then you go for a walk. It was called aerobic walking and I was a division 1 athlete.

I think we have to send this podcast to Dan. I think you should apologize.

I will issue— he doesn't even probably know who I was because again, I was this fucking silent guy eating Chick-fil-A in the back of the class, never said a word. I was just judging him in my head. And I do apologize to Dan for judging him. And clearly I was wrong and he's done amazing. So anyway, he put out a tweet. I follow him and he was like, why isn't there a Hacker News So if you don't know, Hacker News is this website that people just post links. It's like Reddit, but it's just for engineers.

Reddit, but only one forum. And well, it's not a forum. It's like you post links and it's all nerd culture, internet nerd startup culture.

We, you know, back in the day, we used to get the newspaper every day and open it up. And like my dad would go to the business and politics section. I would go to the sports section. Well, the internet just made it so that there's an infinite number of sections.. And so now if you're an engineer, you would wake up and you would maybe go to Hacker News.

I go to Hacker News every single day.

Same. And so anyways, it's a cool website. It's started by Paul Graham and sort of baked into Y Combinator. I've done an exercise, by the way, of trying to like, what would you value Hacker News at? And I think it's sort of priceless. I pretty much think there's no price where Paul would sell Hacker News.

Yeah, I would say easily $100 million because it's, it's also the category leader. It's the N of 1 in its category. Anyway, so, um, Dan tweeted this out. He goes, why isn't there a Hacker News for crypto? You know, like any, like, discussion for all the interesting things that are happening besides the price. Which I think is like the key distinction here, which is that almost all the conversation— there's a lot of places that talk about crypto, and they're almost all just tracking the daily price moves. Like, over the weekend, crypto went down like 17%. And so everybody was like talking about the price. And in reality, there's a whole lot of other interesting developments, technologies, kind of like usage that's happening that's not price related. And you almost need a firewall to say, look, in this forum, you don't talk about price because otherwise price is always going to dominate the conversation. Uh, that's just the nature of crypto. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. I started looking into some of these, and I guess like for me, I would say like there is an opportunity for somebody to create the Hacker News of crypto. And so I'll throw out a couple that were pretty cool that I found. One is casebitcoin.com, and this is basically a website that's just— it's just a dashboard of stats. So it's not like news and links, it's just dashboard of stats. That's basically saying this is the case for Bitcoin. It's like Bitcoin is now worth 10% of gold market cap. Here's the top headlines about pro-Bitcoin. It's just a pro-Bitcoin dashboard.

Do you remember that time that you made Bitcoin headlines because you tweeted that you're putting 20% of your net worth into Bitcoin and someone wrote like entrepreneur and investor Sean Perry, and then you didn't, I don't think you did put 20% of your net worth.

No, I did. I tweeted I was putting 25%. I ended up putting 20% and then it grew. The price started going up so fast that that quickly became— it's now like almost 50% of my net worth or something. So it ended up being more, but it was ridiculous that there was news about it because I think they thought I was much wealthier than I am. Like, I'm not going to move the needle in crypto. I could put 100% of my net worth in it. It was not going to move the needle of crypto. Crypto is too big. And so that was funny. Actually, my college friends texted that news article to me this week and they were like, whoa, what? What is this, by the way? What have you become? Yeah.

And that was like before you actually got famous fame. I mean, you're like kind of a big deal now. And that was like pre-big deal.

Well, that's part of the strategy of becoming a big deal was carry yourself like you're a big deal, right? Me announcing how I'm moving my net worth around is sort of like carrying yourself like you're a big deal even before you are. And people start to like, they just accepted my implication that I'm a big deal for tweeting that.

I'm just going to start calling like my car, my furniture assets. And just start using words like asset. Exactly.

I'm doing a liquidation. It's like, no, you're doing a garage sale, bro.

Yeah, we're having a fire sale of some of the assets.

Exactly.

Not the garage sale.

So go into that. Yeah, so let's call these aggregators, I guess, because you're not actually creating anything, but you're aggregating And The Hustle is like a, is a little bit of an aggregator. We create stuff, but we aggregate a lot. So I know a little bit about aggregating, aggregator businesses, and I think that they're really, really great if you can have them, if you can make them. I was with Ryan, what's his name? Ryan Hoover the day before he was launching Product Hunt, which is ultimately kind of like an aggregator. And he was telling me about it and I go, oh, this is really dumb. This is not going to work. I was wrong. It worked out wonderfully. He did a really good job financially. It was mildly successful, but it was culturally incredibly successful and could have been even more successful if he owned it for a long time. But anyway, now I went and talked to Andrew Wilkinson, who's going to be on the podcast actually tomorrow, which I don't know for the people listening when that actually airs tomorrow, the next day, something like that. He bought this thing called Web Designer News. So it's actually just web design.

I think it's just Designer News.

Oh, just— is it just— is that— are you sure?

I think it's just designernews.com. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. Let's see.

Oh yeah, sorry, not web designer, uh, Designer News. Okay, so basically this was a Hacker News thing, um, it was just for designers.

It's like it was literally a clone, like it looked almost the same except for then Hacker News is kind of ugly, they just cleaned up the design a little bit, but it's the same idea.

Yeah, and it was pretty, pretty good when he bought it, uh, and I asked him how's it going and he said it's basically dead, uh, it's done. So, uh, I think he got the money back from what he paid for it, as in he earned that much back, but he— I don't think he anticipates making a lot more money. And what I thought was his case, his opinion, and what happened— my opinion and what happened to his site is actually kind of the same. But basically, uh, here's what he told me. He goes, the issue is you have to get a whole bunch of people to visit daily, and you're only as good as your posters because it's social news. And there's endless amounts of way to game the system with a bunch of bots, which oddly people do it a lot. So you need constant moderation and algorithms, which is very expensive to hire the devs to make that. And then you also need real live moderators, which also is expensive. And then if you have any period where the content gets bad, then everyone just moves to Reddit. So it's a little bit like lightning in a bottle and it has this kind of magical network effect, but it's hard to catch lightning in a bottle is what he said. And, uh, I actually agree with that. And so my point is I actually think that if you can build this, it is one of the greatest things that you can own. And there's a few examples of this. So there's Techmeme, which is also— these are all things I'm a fan of. So it's all going to be a little bit.

But Techmeme, I can't submit to it as a user, right? It's not social news. They, they curate it themselves.

Well, it solves the same problem.

Yeah, it's all the same problem for the end customer, which is you go to a place and you see all the interesting links of the day in my niche that I care about.

It's the same habit. And the reason why it's important to mention Techmeme, because with Hacker News, as with Reddit,, the creators or the owners of the site can actually just submit a ton of fake stuff that you wouldn't even know they submitted, and it would look populated. And that's in fact how Reddit got started. So the hard part is—

there's a great video, by the way, on YouTube if you want to see the, the how Reddit got started, their fake it till you make it strategy, where they had 20 or so accounts of different names and they were posting every day on the subreddit, like from 20 different personalities to try to make it look like there was this great young community of interesting people. And then they described— they were doing that for, like, I don't know, a couple of months or something. And then they described the day where they went on it and just it was all happening before they went with their fake accounts. Like, the real people had built up enough steam, had learned, like, monkey see, monkey do. They had learned how to behave here, and they were just posting the links and commenting. And it was like, wait, dude, that's not my account. That's a real account. Holy shit, this is actually working. And so that's how they started.

That's in the running niche.

Yeah.

Is that why you—

it's like dorky runners, long distance runners, very dorky.

So So let me tell the story of Product Hunt at the beginning, how, how Ryan did it, right? Because I think for a lot of these, it's one thing to hear, oh, it's like, I would agree with you. These social news sites, social news aggregators are amazing when they work and they usually don't. Okay. So how do you get it to work? Well, I actually got to see Ryan build Product Hunt kind of from the inside from day one. And if anybody doesn't know, like there's a funny article, basically Ryan was interviewing to come work at Monkey Inferno where I was the CEO at the time. I was trying to recruit Ryan because I loved his blog posts and he was interviewing with us and he got to the final interview and didn't make it. And I kept in touch with him. I was like, hey, sorry it didn't work out, but I'm still a big fan of yours and I want to give you the feedback why it didn't work. Hope that's not salt in the wound, but if I were you, I'd be curious why didn't I get it? And I really do want to keep in touch. And then the next week he was starting Product Hunt. Literally, I think one week later he launched Product Hunt. And I remember, like you, I was thinking, oh, this is cool, but this is just some pet project. It's not going to go anywhere. Why doesn't he come work on the real shit? And in reality, Product Hunt was more successful than anything we did in the lab. So he won in the end. But I would say what worked for him. So he started it on this thing called LinkyDink, which was like an off-the-shelf little social news tool at that time. I don't even think it's still around.

It's not even—

we started it there.

Yeah, it was like an email It was so weird. It was like a—

so the way it worked was it was like Hacker News. It was a list of links, but then it would send a recap to all the subscribers of that board, like an email recap. So even if you forgot to go to the website, you'd get the wrap-up automatically. That was kind of like a killer feature there because you're trying to build the habit of people coming, but they first, like, if you could just deliver them value through email, this will work. So I would say like, that was one like nice thing he did. He didn't need a tech. He didn't need an engineer at the beginning. He used LinkyDink, and LinkyDink, the key was that they would email the recap. Then he only invited like friends that he had developed that he knew were as nerdy about products as he was. So I think I'm user number 15 or 17 of Product Hunt, and it's because I was one of his nerdy friends who really like geeked out about new apps and new products, right? That's what this podcast kind of is in a sense, right?

This word product, or like now you'll see people like, oh, I'm a product guy.

I'm almost— it wasn't that popular then.

I'm almost positive people didn't really use that word or phrase, or if they did, people were like, what are you talking about?

Well, it was around like product manager was obviously a phrase people talked about product, but it wasn't as like it wasn't seen as like an anime fan or a sports fan. Like it didn't seem it wasn't like a thing. And he really said it a lot like this is for people who geek out on products. That was his tagline at the beginning. And that's why I'm sure—

phrasing. I knew what he was talking about, but I never heard anyone say that. And so he definitely kind of created a little bit of a category.

And it still probably crushes. I use Product Hunt regularly. I don't actually know the numbers anymore because I'm not sure, but I bet you it's still quite successful and it could potentially be successful for 10 years.

So let me tell you about something that we're launching at The Hustle. You guys can use it or not. I don't care. I'm not pimping it out right now, but it's related to this. So what we are launching tomorrow on Tuesday, this podcast comes out on Wednesday, so it's actually already live, but I don't even know if you're going to be able to find it yet. But anyway, it's called Hustle Plus. And what we're doing is we're kind of launching something just like this because I'm I'm obsessed with these types of products and I love these things. And so, uh, when a user signs up or they can click out of the email once they're already a subscriber and they can tell us, they can either explicitly tell us what they like or implicitly we can see some of your behavior. And then we're going to have a section of headlines. And in order to get those headlines, we built this tech that crawls the internet and finds the most shared stuff and shared headlines. And then let's say that you tell us or you click on a bunch of articles related to media and we've tagged all the links. Like this is a media, this is a media and a bootstrapping story, whatever. Right. You're going to get those links in your email. So you're going to get the hustle, which is like 2,000 words of like editorial stuff, but you're going to have one huge section with 10 or 20 just headlines. Then we're having, we're hiring a team of editors to write a one-sentence description of that article. So it's part human, part machine telling you interesting stuff, right? Very, very similar to Hacker News, Techmeme, things like that. Um, so that's actually—

we— that's cool.

Yeah. And so, um, we're— I'm doing that because I love these types of things. So it's basically a hack— it's very similar to a Hacker News, not so much user-submitted right now, but kind of a similar idea. So I love these businesses, and we've talked about Drudge Report. I think that if you can get this to work It takes a ton of work up front, very little work to maintain.

Yes, yes, exactly. Okay, so let's, let's switch topics. Let's do one of the other ones.

75 Hard. 75 Hard. Okay, so you've done a ton of research about 75 Hard. I've had so many friends talk about this, friends that mostly are not fit, and this has inspired them to get fit.

Okay, so tell me about that part. I haven't heard any, but only Ben has told me about that.

Oh my gosh, everyone is talking about this, man. So do you remember Van Trump Report, the newsletter guy? I told you about this guy who's got this newsletter that crushes it in ag tech. I became friends with his son. That's right. His son lives in Kansas City. He's kind of talks with a southern accent. He's not like a techie. He came over to my house 'cause he was visiting in Texas. He's like, hey, I know you have a gym. I'm on my last workout. I need to come use your gym. Can I use it? And then another friend, Sujan Patel, has been doing it. And 75 Hard has taken over like my friends and they commit to it like a religion. Like they don't, Miss it, right?

So describe what it is to somebody, and then I have a bunch of thoughts around.

So 75 Hard, uh, I think what it means— it's the— it's only got like 6 rules. It's basically you have to do for 75 days 2 workouts a day. Each workout needs to be 45 minutes. 1 workout needs to be outside. I don't think either workout needs to be particularly hard. The only rule is that you have to sweat. Uh, the second rule is you have to have a diet for all 75 days. It doesn't matter what diet, you just have to do it. And that might be it. Is that the only rule?

I think that's it. So I had heard about this. Ben told me about this a little while ago, and then today he's like, check out the app charts. And it's the number 3 paid app in America right now. I said, wow, that's kind of amazing. And so I started looking into it, and I actually didn't do a ton of research on 75 Hard, but I researched this category. I'm very interested in this category.

Finish the story on 75 Hard. It started by this guy Andy. I don't know his last name. You wrote it here. I don't want to— Priscilla. Okay. Everyone makes fun of me because I can't say stuff. He's actually based out of right near me, Fenton, Missouri. He has a supplement company called, I think, Forma, and it does about $200 million in sales. He was in my local newspaper because he, um, they like, they bought a $20 million building and invested it and made it nice. So I think they're, they're, it's legit.

He's had several supplement companies because I was like, who is this guy? Because if you see, if you Google him, it's like, it's one of those red flag type of profiles. Like, entrepreneur, speaker, bestseller, coach to celebrities. You know, it's like, oh fuck, what have you done? Who are you?

It screams not legit, but he is legit.

Exactly. And I mean, I can't shit on it too much. Like, I'm a big Tony Robbins fan. And if you were to describe Tony Robbins, it'd be very, very similar. And like, but you kind of got to dig in and be like, I definitely— what I don't do is I don't take that at face value. Right. Cool. So what are those businesses? Okay, great. What is this book like? You know, let me, let me check this out. Let me, let me get a sense here. So this guy's got actually the top, one of the top podcasts in our category, in the business category. It's called MFCEO or something like that. Oh my gosh. As you know, Mother F and CEO or something. He's got a big Instagram following. So who is this guy? From what I know, which I just did a very quick dive, actually I'd love to have this guy on the pod. He basically, he started a couple supplement companies. I think first was like a brick and mortar supplement company. Called something supplements, super supplements or something like that. And he's done that 2 or 3 times. His third one is called Form 1, and that's, I think, the biggest one. It's been the most successful. And the hook or the tagline is like, these brands do over $100 million a year. So, okay, he's in the supplement space. He did well with that. Great. And then he translated that into a life philosophy. And I think he preaches kind of— he's like a bit of the Jocko Willink kind of school of thought, which is just like, It's hard. Man up.

You got to work hard.

Man up. Do it. Grind, hustle, blah, blah, blah. Those are the words, right? So he's like Gary Vee if Gary Vee was like jacked. And so he's like in that vein. That's the outsider. I have not drank the Kool-Aid of what his stuff is. That's my outsider quick point of view. Okay, great. But I started thinking about this category.

By the way, I'm going to cover your ass here. Sean sounded, and so did I, a little dismissive of this guy. I don't think you are trying to sound that way, and neither am I. I think this guy seems like a good dude.

I view it very much in the— I can have two thoughts at the same time. One thought is, oh, when I hear this stuff, it's usually a bit of hand-wavy, and usually these people are kind of like stereotypical kind of caricatures, but also they're probably actually giving out good information, inspiring a lot of people, have had great success in their life, and live up to a lot of these things. And I think both of those are kind of true. I kind of make fun of Gary Vee, but I think Gary Vee has built kind of an awesome brand and an awesome company, and he's an awesome guy. I don't know him personally, but I can simultaneously make fun of the character while also being like, respect, you did your thing. You did the thing you want to do, and that's not easy. Most people do nothing. So props for not just doing nothing, but doing something very unique. So this space. So this space. So I'm very interested in this. For kind of a reason. I've actually considered launching something like this, so that's why I looked into it. So 75 Hard, I'm very interested in these time-bound challenges, time-bound programs. So the big one that I personally had experience with was P90X. So I don't know if you— did you ever do P90X? Of course.

Tony, Tony, what was his name? What was the guy's name? Tony Horton. Tony Horton. Of course.

Well, there's a difference, I think. So if I— I don't know. I don't think it's like this anymore. But when 75 Hard first started, It was around as a free movement. So basically this guy would say like, all right everyone, it's that time of year, we're doing it.

And he would do it. It's like No Shave November.

Yeah. I forget the months, but I've seen it for a couple years now. And he would basically, I guess, Instagram like, now's the time for the challenge. And I think he did it for like maybe 4 years before it even became a thing. So P90X, I think it's a, you enroll and you have 90 days to get it done. This 75 Hard thing was a, you know, November 1st, get ready, like, you know, time to get seasonal thing. Yeah. And it worked really well, I guess. Is 75 Hard now like a rolling 75?

Yeah, and I think in his case, it's an— I'm reading all about him. It's an MLM, but it's not— I don't find this to be unethical or bad. I mean, it's just he's making customer salespeople for him.

So I was once talking to a friend and he was like, dude, we need to create this product and we'll do it. We'll sell it as an MLM. And I was like, dude, MLM, is it that like, you know, isn't that like a sin? And he's like, why? He's like, it's basically you get your, your hardcore believers. Do I know this? Arm them with the ability to sell it. You know the friend.

Yeah, I think I know. And I think they love MLMs because an MLM almost bought them. Yeah. And MLMs inherently are not wrong.

I didn't know that.

Okay, so what are we going to launch in this space?

So I've been working with my trainer now and I'm actually like, I've hit some tipping point where I'm starting to get results. Like I look at my body like during our sessions in my garage, we work out in my garage. There's this one area where the sun like comes into my garage and the shadow is just perfect and I look fucking great. And I'm like, dude, I need to stay in here. Like, can we do my set over here?

That's how it works with exercising. It's like no results, no results, no results. Boom. It all kind of feels like it happens.

Dude, that's how everything valuable is like Slowly, slowly, slowly, then suddenly. And so it's like all business success works that way. And I'm now saying even fitness success works that way where there is this tipping point and where now the workouts, I don't dread them, I enjoy them, I'm looking forward to them. I feel bad if I ever miss a day, whereas before I was like, sweet, snow day, don't have to work out. I was looking forward to missing it. Now I'm looking forward to doing it. So anyways, I was talking to my trainer and I was like, dude, I'm going to help you. I'm going to help you create— because he's always hearing me talk about business and it's like he's a black belt in fitness. I like to consider myself really good at business and we're trying to help each other out. And so I told him, I was like, dude, why don't you do this? Why don't you create— he's a gem to me. He's not like a normal trainer. He's like— I've told many stories about how he helps my mindset and all this stuff. And he's really cheap too. I'm like, dude, you're a cut above most people. I was like, we should create one of these where it's like, I was like, just with my friends, like just the people I know in my life who if I post a photo of me today and I post a photo of me like a few months ago before I started working out with you, like I'm going to post that before and after photo. That's my own pride moment of like, I did it. I actually turned the corner on this thing that's been forever a really hard thing for me. I've never really considered myself fit or shredded or like been proud to take off my shirt, but I think I'm going to get there pretty soon. Like within a few months, I think I'm going to get there. I was like, when I post that after photo, I was like, we should open up something that says, if you want to do it, like, let's create our own 90-day program and like let people in. Because I was like, the way I was thinking about it was he has this philosophy, which is like, we talked about like, how do you feel when your friends get successful? And I told him honestly, I was like, yeah, like it's been hard for me. Like when my friend, when Sam sells his company for 10, all of a sudden Sam's got tens of millions of dollars. That's like, I'm happy for you. Yes, I'm not happy for you, but there's a bigger part of me in that moment, right when the news hits, that's like, oh, fuck, I'm behind. And I was like, the honest truth was like, I get kind of jealous or I'll get kind of envious. And so he helped me sort of reframe that in my mind. This is not about you, but it's been this way for decades. I always felt this way. If somebody's successful, good for them, but bad for me. And he's like, it doesn't have to be that way. Good for them, bad for me. It can be good for them. It's good for me. He's like, it's just this philosophy you got to have where do you carry yourself where you say, it's not just that I'm going to win, I'm going to help bring up all the people around me. We're all going to win. And it's going to be more fun that we're all going to win. He's like, you do this with investing, right? You share your deals and you co-invest and you want your friends to invest in your companies because when you win, it's more fun to toast together and drink together. He's like, same thing with all aspects of life. You should be thinking about, I'm not just going to win, I'm going to win so much. There's going to be so much success around me. That all the people around me are going to be successful too. So anyways, long story short, I heard him tell me about that and I took it to him. I go, "I'm going to help you build a business that does this. I'm going to take the thing you're really good at that you're doing for me." And now I have him working with my sister, my mom, my sister's kids, my sister-in-law. We do all of their fitness now through him. He's like my family's personal coach. Really? And so I'm like, yeah, he's doing— we're his only clients anymore.

It's just my family. Can you like tell me what you pay this person?

No, I don't want to put him on blast like that.

You want to talk about his name? You want to say his name or do you want to even hide him?

Yeah, I mean, I call him J.A. That's his name is John Alexander. So he goes short for J.A. and he's not big on social media, nothing like that. Like he doesn't try to be like some influencer guy or whatever. A trainer? Yeah, he's a trainer. That's what he's been doing. He's been fit his whole life and, you know, he's really good at that.

I think I see him.

A shaved head white guy? No, I'll send you his Instagram later. But basically, I want to help him be successful. I think we can use one of these, like, I think we can use this model of this P90X or 75 Hard. Let people commit to something that's reasonable for them. That's the way I did it with him. I was like, all right, I'm going to commit. I don't know how good you are, how bad I am. I don't know if I can do this long term, but like, I'll commit. I'll give you 30 days to get my ass off this couch. Like, I'm just, I'm sick of this. Get my ass going. 30 days, I will do anything you fucking say. 1 hour a day, I will sweat my ass off. And like, that got me hooked. And so I think we're going to come up with some program like that. This is— we're like months away from actually launching something, but I want to do that because I think, A, I want to share him with more people, and B, I just think this is a cool business model.

Why do you do everything you do? Why? Like, why do you not focus more on one or two things? And I criticize you. I don't criticize you. I challenge you often. Why continually, why do this, do that, do that, do this? Why not just do one thing and crush it? Because your answer might be, well, 'cause I just wanna explore and see everything out there. But it's pretty obvious what you're good at. Which is what? I have a feeling that your rolling fund is gonna be wildly successful. I have a feeling that like you pull a lot of the weight on the podcast because you're very good at content. Why do everything instead of just be the best at this, at your, this, in this little lane?

I do think about that. Um, I think I've graduated out of being an operator. I no longer want to operate one entity. The only entity I want to operate is, uh, you know, Sean Co, my life. And when I think about like what would be the most exciting version of that, how do I, how do I marry this part of me that's just super curious and every day I want to go down the rabbit hole and learn how 75 Hard works and P90X works, right? Before this podcast, I would do that anyways. I just didn't have an excuse. I didn't have an outlet. I would just do the research, shove it in my head, and then I would go about my job and my life and I would keep running my company, which had nothing to do with fitness, right? This podcast was a cool thing because it gave me an excuse to do more of that thing I'm interested in, I do good at, and now it's a win-win. Now I go down those rabbit holes, I learn those things, I come here, I share the learnings and cool.

We, we get, we grow, we make money. Step 3, which we're both doing, which is, and then you like, oh, I think this is actually a really good idea. Let's go put money again.

I'm going to push back there a little bit because I actually think that your premise might be a little flawed here, which is I'm going to wake up and I'm going to do what I want. I'm going to—

no, no, no. I'm going to go learn about what I'm most interested in and what I'm most curious about.

And I would actually challenge that a little bit because it's like Well, you're kind of implying that each day you're going to do a new thing.

Not necessarily. Like for crypto, I've spent months in crypto, right? Because years of curiosity, but then like months of pretty hardcore curiosity around that. I think that's good. And it's become like a bigger part of my portfolio of time and money. And so same thing with e-commerce. I got more interested in e-commerce, right? Same thing with live streaming. For many years, it was all about live streaming. So These don't have to be every day it's a new topic. I think that would be a bit extreme. But with the podcast, yeah, we do 2 of these a week. We talk about 3 different topics each time. We're by no means experts at any of those. It's like very kind of like off the cuff type of conversation and research. But I think it's like, the way I think about it is like Tim Ferriss has done this. If I've seen anybody do it, I think that Tim Ferriss has done this where he's very curious about certain things that he wants to go learn. So then he goes talks to people in that space. He does experiments on himself. He reads books about that topic. He reads research papers about the topic, and then he packages it up into something that's sellable sometimes, and sometimes it's not sellable and it's just for him. It's just for his own curiosity. I think I could do that. I think I can create the new, new business model of being Tim Ferriss. So that would be if what's my one thing? I think it's that. But to the outside, it looks like a lot of variety. And to me, that's good.

It's, but it's, well, I'm not trying to criticize you here. I'm just trying to bring in a different perspective. Because I was thinking about, I, I saw, I know this guy who's like getting something off the ground and I see him constantly talking about like side projects, day trading, Bitcoin, yada, yada, yada. And this business is really related to something totally separate. And I'm like, what are you doing, dude? Just like lock yourself in the room. Don't do anything except for like be with your family, exercise, and like work on your thing, right? Because like it seems almost— not, not impossible. Some are really good at it, but for most it seems almost impossible to create anything meaningful without a maniacal amount of focus, at least early on, for an extended period of time. More likely than not, though.

I think that's true. I think that's true. And it's— it would be definitely true if I said, oh, I'm going to go start a company. I'm going to raise a bunch of money and this is going to be, I'm going to make this huge company. I'm not doing that. That's not my thing right now. So when I was doing that, I didn't have a podcast, I didn't have a fund, I didn't have a blog, I didn't have a girlfriend. I didn't have many things. I sacrificed on many of those because I was all in sleeping at the office 200 days a year. I just know that that's not what this next phase looks like for me. I could do that again. I don't really want to.. And so I'm trying to see, is there a better model for me that feels effortless to me? That always felt like a lot of effort. And I think that there is a version of life that it doesn't have to be so hard. I think it can be speedy and easy. I think it can be effortless if you're doing the thing you really enjoy doing. I agree with that on a day-to-day basis.

I wouldn't use the word effortless, but it's rewarding.

Like when you play, do you feel like you're working hard? No. I can go play basketball. I could be really tired by the end of it. Meaning fatigue, because I've play basketball for 3 hours, but at no point in it would I feel like I'm having to like do something I don't want to be doing. I disagree with that.

I mean, if you want to use that play thing, like, I don't always— I love to exercise, but I don't always want to go do it, but I'm always happy that I did do it.

Uh, and, and like, I don't want to do it because to me working out is not like play. Play is a really specific word. Uh, play is like, you know, I could be tired from my job and I'll come home and I could play video games, and video games take actually like you know, focus, hand-eye coordination, strategy, talking to your teammates, all that stuff. But because it's fun, it doesn't feel like work to me, right? And so I'm interested in play now. I'm not interested in hard work.

So where do we go from here?

I think we might wrap it. It's been a little— we went on kind of tangents there.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.