EPISODE
210

#210 - How Celebrities Have Made Billions off Their Names

Aug 18, 2021·61:00·Sam & Shaan·Listen·AppleSpotify
0:0030:3061:00
19 moments · 142 paragraphs · synced to the second
SHAAN

Once you've been in the market for 21 years and you look at that account and you get to see it going up, you're going to like realize the value of investing and that that's, you know, like the true path to wealth. I feel like I could rule the world.

SAM

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. All right, we're live. What's going on? How is Steph?

SHAAN

Nice fancy pants background.

SAM

Yeah, I'm in Mechanism. It's a fancy, uh, it's a fancy pants office. Do you know what Mechanism is?

SHAAN

I've heard of it. That's the agency guy who's a friend of yours. I kind of know him a little bit now.

SAM

Yeah, they have, uh, an agency, maybe a 200-person agency, and they've got, uh, as you do with agencies, you've got very fancy offices in SoHo in New York, and no one is here, and I'm in the fancy office here right now.

SHAAN

All right, good stuff. Yeah, you missed Steph. She was great as always. So she had a bunch of ideas. It's like, I know it's funny, like we've had Abreu be kind of like our version of Jamie. Like Joe Rogan has Jamie, we've had Abreu, we now have Dan. And you get a sense because at the end of every episode we go, oh, Dan, how was it? Hey, Abreu, how'd we do? And I feel like they both like really keyed in on the same thing, which I don't know if listeners care in the same way, but like the more random tangents we will go on, the kind of like they kind of love it, but they kind of hate it at the same time. Whereas when Steph comes on, it's like, here are 5 ideas we're going to do. Idea 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5. What a jam-packed episode of ideas. And it's like, you know, me and her don't have the same chemistry me and you have of like just being able to go on random tangents or just kind of bullshit a little bit. And so it's more packed with info. But it's less packed with detours. And, uh, I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's packed with info. So I think, I think definitely Dan liked it. I think a lot of people will like it, but it's interesting to me how that goes.

SAM

Yeah. And I've also noticed that a lot of the things that I like, the things that I, if I think it's going to be good, I think it tends not to be good. And if I think it's going to be bad, be bad. That's what I've noticed with content. But the reason I wasn't here is, so let me tell you this funny story about Twitter. So So 4 months ago, 3 months ago, I tweeted out that I wanted to go drive race cars. So one of my 2021 resolutions was I wanted to do more adventurous stuff. So I want to take a sniper class lesson. I want to go hunting. Yeah. I wanted to go hunting and kill what I've eaten, which I've never done before. Um, I wanted to do a cross-country trip. I did it. And I wanted to go learn how to do race cars. And so I tweeted out, I wanted to go to a driving class. This professional NASCAR driver named Parker hollered at me on Twitter. And so me and Jack Butcher, who's a buddy of ours and a buddy of mine, we drove up here out to the country, 2 hours outside of New York to Connecticut. And we took this class. It was $2,500. It was at this place called Skip Barber, Skip Barber driving, driving class. We met the owner of the class. This is a business that, that's a driving school. It does like $15 million in revenue. Crazy interesting, kind of cool. It was an ex-cop owns it, like a, like a New York cop, like, and this is like his, was his, he's like, I'll just try it because I don't work as a cop anymore. It turns into a thriving business. He told me his goal is to hit $100 million in revenue in the next 5 years.

SHAAN

Off this one track or like he has many of these?

SHAAN

So what'd you drive?

SAM

It's—

SHAAN

by the way, I know nothing about cars, so you're gonna say something and I'll be like, oh cool. No, no, no, no, no.

SAM

It looks like a Mustang, but it's like, it's a race car. So there's no seats. You're locked in. You wear a helmet. You're locked in.

SHAAN

What do you mean like no seats?

SAM

There's only a driving seat. Like on the inside, it's like a, it is a, it's a race car. There's a roll bar. There's no like AC or radio or anything like that, but it looks like a Mustang from the outside. Anyway, that's where I was. Crazy, fascinating business.

SHAAN

That's pretty cool. While you were saying that, you said something about he used to be a cop, and we had talked about the retired— the mafia tours in New York business.

SAM

I'm going on it.

SHAAN

A great idea. So if you don't— if you didn't hear that episode, it's basically retired cop in New York takes you on a walking tour of New York City to the different, like, areas where the mafia families lived. He kind of tells you stories. It's like we all like crime TV shows or whatever. And, and this is like basically crime TV walking tour. And so you get to hear all these stories. I guess you're going on it. That's cool. And we had said he had done over $1 million in sales on his Airbnb experience of doing this, which is pretty freaking awesome. So this thing you're talking about, though, I think there could be a really cool version of that that somebody makes, which is basically a cops and robbers, like a cop chase, a car chase, basically. So they could just have a driver who knows what they're doing as the kind of like main driver. And then you get to be in a cop car like they just take some junk cop car and you get to drive that thing. You get to be talking on the little radio, try to get their license plate. And it's basically like a, you know, controlled simulation of a car, a cop chase, like an actual cop chase. You go, you get them, you spin them out. Then you get out of the car and you get like, you arrest them as the end of it. And I feel like that would just be A, super fun, and B, a lot of people would pay for that and the video of it.

SAM

I, uh, yeah, so we paid, I paid $2,500 for this. I think I paid an additional $300 for a video.

SHAAN

For the video, of course. Yeah.

SAM

Uh, man, it was awesome. It's fun. It's fun to do this stuff, to get out of our comfort zone and do exciting stuff. Uh, so that's where I was.

SHAAN

Nice. Uh, okay. I love that. All right, let's do, um, let's do some ideas. I have an idea that's kind of related to this. So I was watching Dana White, who's the president of the UFC, and he was doing this like YouTube video.

SAM

He's like, what's up, boys?

SHAAN

No, not that one. There was this one. He was just goes, check out how sick my hotel room is right now in Houston. Did you see this?

SAM

Yep. And he had a—

SHAAN

go, go ahead, describe it and I'll tell you the part.

SAM

If I remember correctly, he had a movie theater in his hotel room. I think he had a full or no half-size basketball court.

SHAAN

Yep. That was painted like the Rockets basketball court with the official scoreboard on the wall and stuff.

SAM

And what else did he have?

SHAAN

He had a bunch of stuff. So he had that. He had like a full gym. Like, so, you know, like hotels have a gym. His hotel room had a gym, which is kind of amazing. And then he's got like, whatever, cool bed, bathroom, full steam room. But the thing I thought was interesting, he goes, check this out. And he grabs this huge rifle off the wall. Was like a rifle, a shotgun sitting next to each other. And he was like, this is cool. It's like a virtual shooting range.

SAM

Yeah.

SHAAN

And then he like, he panned, they kind of panned over, they went over it real quick. So I couldn't even really see what it was. But in my head I just immediately thought of, you've seen these like golf driving ranges that are basically it's a green screen and then you swing a real club and you hit a real ball into the green screen and it like simulates where it would have landed if you were on a real golf course. And those are like semi-popular. So he's got this rifle off the wall and I started thinking, oh, that's kind of cool. Basically, if you've ever held a real gun, it feels totally different than like, you know, the Duck Hunt gun or like an arcade gun. Like a real gun has like weight to it, has like a recoil if you fire the thing. So I was thinking somebody could probably build a high-end version of this niche business, which is basically virtual shooting ranges. So you have either a screen, like a green screen or like a plasma, like a big flat-screen TV, and then you give them what feels like a real gun, but it's like a digitally enabled thing, so you don't have to have bullets and go outside and do all that stuff. And I feel like somebody could build a pretty unique business doing that, providing that either to bars or even for at-home stuff or corporate events.

SAM

That's a fantastic idea. Have you ever been to an indoor shooting range?

SHAAN

Indoor shooting? Oh, like where the target's there and you have the earmuffs on or whatever?

SAM

Yeah, I've never done it. Okay. It's miserable.

SHAAN

So I've only done outdoors.

SAM

So I, the outdoor shooting ranges are fun. Indoor shooting range, miserable. It has lights like a hospital and it is so loud. If you've ever been next to like an AR-15 or some like, you know, like huge gun, when it shoots, it rattles your neighbor. So you're sitting right next to someone and it's not just loud, but it shakes me and it's a miserable, unsafe, horrible experience. I would way rather do something fun like this over that.

SHAAN

Yeah. So, and I feel like because it's digital, you can do fun stuff, right? So when I went to go shoot a gun for the first time, I'm not into that, but my brother, my brother-in-law is, he, you know, we went and it's like you're outside. It was kind of cold. You're shooting these like paper targets. They don't move. You have to stand still every 5 minutes. You have to stop, reload the fucking gun. Takes time. Like, there's like a lot of breaks in between the action. The action is fun, but like there's a lot of other stuff going on. It was, it was uncomfortable. And, and I get that like, you know, real man shit, not supposed to be comfortable, but guess what? People like comfort. So, so I think what you could do instead is you basically make a souped up version of the Deer Hunter game where you get the digital gun, but it feels like the weight of a real rifle or a real shotgun. And then you have like a digital scenario, right? You wanted to do a sniper class or I don't even know what you said, like a psychopath, but like you probably want to simulate actually sniping someone in some situation. Like you can only see part of their head. They're really far away or whatever. So you could do that instead of just a paper target. So I think this could be a good idea. I'm sure something like this exists, but it's all about turning it into a business in a box or a traveling circus, like you said, and coming up with a model that productizes this better.

SAM

I think it's a great idea, and I would love to attend.

SHAAN

All right, let's do another one. You, uh, you pick either one for yours or one for mine.

SAM

This is a little bit less of an idea but more of an experience that I had. So last week I went down to Nashville. I had an issue a few weeks ago where I had a car problem. I had to leave my car at the dealer in Nashville. I went to go pick it up and I started shooting the shit with the salesperson. They sold— he told me this is, this is a Mercedes-Benz Music City dealership, uh, that's what it's called. They told me that they sold 200 cars in June. Is that, does that boggle your mind? I never really thought about how many cars that is. That's $20 million in car sales in one month. That's crazy to me. And so I went and looked at what the figures were for, uh, what, how many cars are sold June to January. Cause I would think January or February would be a slow month. It's mostly pretty steady. It's like 1.6 million on a high month and 1.2 million on a low, low month. It's not crazy different. So if you assume that the average sale price was $100,000 and then you assume that they did $20 million for 6 of the months and $15 million for the other 6 months, that's $210 million in one location. And then I was talking with the guys who ran the company, who ran the dealership. They told me that they can expect to make 10 to 15% profit on that. Does that kind of boggle your mind that one location could do that much in sales?

SHAAN

And was this like, did you feel like it was like an outlier location, like killer? Killer real estate or something like that?

SAM

It's a Mercedes dealer in Nashville and there's 3 in the city. So did I think that that's an outlier? In one sense, yes, because they're selling, you know, expensive cars. So like, it's not like a Hyundai where you're selling $20,000 cars, but it's an— and it's also in Nashville. There's probably 10 to 20 cities in America that are of equal booming as Nashville. So outlier in one sense, yes, but not crazy outlier. And so I got interested in this. And so there's this amazing website called Open Secrets. Have you heard of that?

SHAAN

I've heard of it, but I've never gone to it. What do you— you actually go to it? It's like WikiLeaks or something.

SAM

I go to it all the time and here's why. So if you go to it, you can go— it's called Open Secrets, maybe opensecrets.org. And so I don't know if it's legal or if it's customary, but if you are a senator, if you're in the House of Representatives, if you're in a certain type of office in America, They typically disclose their income taxes and also what their net worth is. And you could browse through and you could see how much money they have in different bank accounts. You can see how much money they have in different stocks. You can see how much money they value their privately held business. It's incredibly fascinating. So for example, if you Google open secrets net worth senators, you'll see a list of the richest senators and it will tell you where their money is and you could click it. And in some cases, if it's from the '90s, for example, if you go and look at George Bush's net worth. You could actually see it's, it's still a handwritten W-2. So it's incredibly fascinating. And I browsed through there a fair bit because I think it's really fun. Who cares if they're politicians or not? But what's interesting is that they're incredibly wealthy and you could see how do people allocate money? Where does their income come from? How does that work? And I noticed that there was a fair bit of people who made money through car dealerships in Congress. And I actually made a list of them. So the first one, Bernie Buchanan, he's out of— he's a congressman out of Florida, $157 million net worth. Where does his money come from? Buchanan Automotive Group, where they sell new and used cars in Florida. And he assigned $50 million.

SHAAN

I'm just going through this list. I did not realize these senators— there's this many senators that are this wealthy. So first, the funny thing is there's the richest and poorest. So, okay, on the top side, you have Mark Warner, richest senator., he's in Virginia, I think. And, uh, $214 million. Poorest senator, poor Alcee Hastings in Florida, negative $7.5 million net worth. This guy is in a hole of debt. This guy is just— and, you know, the, the, the lowest one that is not negative, let's see, probably like $100 grand or something, like Pete Buttigieg or something. I'm exporting all these CSVs. This is going to be great. Uh, go on. Sorry.

SAM

I went and looked at some of the Congress folks that were, that were rich and it was Vernon Buchanan. He owns an automotive group. He assigned, uh, around $35 million of his net worth. Sorry. Uh, almost $100 million of his net worth to car dealerships. Ron Williams from Texas, net worth $67 million. He had close to $10 million because he is part owner of a Chrysler Dodge and Jeep business. John Campbell, net worth of $23 million. He owns. Franchises for Nissan, Mazda, Ford, Saturn, and Saab. And Mike Kelly, net worth $20 million, he assigned at least $5 million for his car dealers. It was incredibly fascinating. So I dug even deeper. This Nashville dealer, you want to know who's the co-owner? Who? Nick Saban, the, uh, coach from University of Alabama. And he owns a bunch of them. He owns 3, 4, or 5. Crazy fascinating to me about the car dealers. And I was just so curious as to how the rest of them do. And so I did a little bit more research and I read different interviews with car dealers and typically they make about 5-10% in profit. But the secret is that A, they have to make most of their money from service and parts because that's where the big margin is. And B, there's actually, there's actually a lot of ways that you can test this. So you can do loads of test advertising and they kind of do this like MVP style advertising where they'll advertise in different places, see which cars sell, and then become an importer or a, sorry, a dealer of that particular car. I just thought it was so fascinating about how these car dealerships work. Have you ever, like, do you know anything about this?

SHAAN

First of all, you're on fire right now, so I just got to give you a little bit of credit. You're on fire right now. I don't know if this is Jake the researcher. I don't know if this is Sam the deal hunter. I don't know what's going on, but good job. I love this. I love open secrets. I love the senator thing and I love the car dealership thing. All right, so let me just put that on the table. Have I thought about this? No, but it's been hidden in plain sight. I grew up in Colorado, and John Elway always had dealerships. It was like everywhere. And I never really thought about it, but clearly the guy was making bank on these dealerships, otherwise he wouldn't be spending so much time and energy doing all these little kind of marketing meet and greets at his dealerships. And that combo of local hero car dealership, I think, has just worked for a long time. Like in the movie Little Giants, I think that's how the guy had his money too, is like, local football star, you know, car dealer. It's like just like a formula that works. And I know that there's like the guy who's— who gets a lot of press during— whenever the Toronto Raptors do well, they have this superfan, this Sikh Indian guy who shows up at courtside of every game. Navdeep Bhatia.

SAM

I actually have him listed here. So he started as a Hyundai salesperson and he eventually started owning a car dealership and he claims his net worth is $50 million.

SHAAN

Exactly. And he spends all of his money traveling with the team and buying courtside tickets to every single game. This guy's like a maniac. He goes to every single game and he has for like 20 years courtside and he's like cheering like crazy. And yeah, he started as a salesman. You're right. Okay, so this is kind of interesting. I want to share with you a couple of things that I can add to this. Have you ever heard of—

SAM

and by the way, if you scroll down, you can see all the examples I have of people who have made at least $1 billion through car dealers. You see that?

SHAAN

This is pretty impressive. So the Benson family, they own the Saints. Penske, Wayne Huizenga. You love that guy. He started what, AutoNation? Yeah. And he owns— he owns the Miami Dolphins. That guy's a baller. We should feature him. You know a lot about him. Mark Wahlberg has one. Michael Jordan has one. All right, that's pretty interesting. So that's cool. I didn't really realize that this is like one of those franchises that you kind of want to own. I wonder if that's changing. So in my head, I'm like, car dealer, isn't this dead? Aren't car sales just moving online? And then you have platforms like Carvana that's become like a $7 billion company of buying cars online. So definitely some of buying cars moving online, but not all. And so I actually ran into this company called Modal. Have you ever heard of Modal?

SAM

Tell me about it.

SHAAN

The URL is just modalup.com. And a buddy of mine, Samir, great guy, Samir Bala, he basically He was going to do a startup and then I checked his LinkedIn and he's like, oh, I'm CEO of Modal now. I was like, what the heck? He took a job. I was like, if this guy took a job, this must be an interesting business because he would not go join a company unless he thought this company had really good prospects. And I trust his judgment. And so I should have invested. I asked him to invest. He even made room and then I got cold feet at the last minute for some stupid reason. But basically I think this is a great business. What they do is they basically made it so that any dealer— it's like Shopify for car dealers in a way. So basically lets you sell cars digitally and online. So it creates like a website, a checkout button, a buy button that you can just send customers to that, that, that want to buy from you. It also just like automates all the workflow. So like with buying a car, when you go buy a car, you're going to end up sitting in the dealership for like an hour because there's like paperwork. If you're doing a loan or a lease, you have to do even more paperwork. And then you just have to collect all these signatures and get all this stuff to get the title in your name. And these guys basically turned all that into software and they were growing really, really well, basically going to car dealerships and getting them to adopt this software so that they could keep up and compete with the kind of like online-only platforms. It's like, hey, don't stay stuck in the brick and mortar only ways. Yes, you're a car dealership, but you should allow some digitalization, digitalize your workflow and let your customers go check out online and just buy products. And what they do is they actually claim that they can boost sales by like, I don't know, 30, 35% or something like that. And it shortens the cycle time 'cause usually people take quite a while to look through stuff and they speed up the purchase price, the purchase time as well. So I think this is a pretty cool business that's going to be quite big.

SAM

I'm on board with all the digital stuff. I was just fascinated at just the brick and mortar and it's, it's still growing like crazy. In fact, there's loads of data on this because I didn't realize how impactful cars are. I mean, of course I, you know, we all have them, but I didn't realize how they kind of, in a sense, are minor, maybe major players in the country, in our country and how we even develop laws, things like that.. And so there's all this data that you can go and learn about this. So the average car dealership, like the physical dealer, the average one in last year, 2021, did $36 million— or sorry, year to date. So the first 6 months, $36 million in sales. And, uh, just the average car dealer. And we sell something like, um, yeah, but that's like GMV.

SHAAN

That's like car sales. So, you know, they don't, you said 10 to 15%. Maybe is their margin on that. So that's correct. Million, you know, take for the, for the whole dealership.

SAM

It's still astounding. And then if you can also go and look at another website you can go to is ProRepublica and you could see which lobbies give money to the government for different laws, car dealer or the car lobby, which are, there's like 8 of them. They give substantial amounts of money. And anyway, that's my, that's my segment on car dealers and cars. Pretty astounding. I was shocked by it. We can move on.

SHAAN

You know what's cool, by the way? Tesla, no dealership model. So bold move by them to not have any dealers, and in doing so, basically kept a lot of the profit for themselves and went direct to consumer. They were the sort of first direct-to-consumer car company that exists. So good job by Elon.

SAM

Yeah, and I could see that taking off, but the market is massive. Not everyone's going to do the same thing. So there's room for everyone, or a lot.

SHAAN

Always holding it down for blue-collar America. I love it. In my mind, it's just two coasts squished together with some stuff in the middle. And you're like, no, no, the middle is— there's a lot of beautiful stuff in the middle. And it's not all just going away and becoming like fancy tech right away.

SAM

Not yet, at least.

SHAAN

All right, let's do some more. So look at my topics here and tell me which one's interesting.

SAM

Spoonflower is one of the most interesting things I've seen lately.

SHAAN

Had you heard of this before? Spoonflower?

SAM

No.

SHAAN

So check it out. I don't even know the URL. I think it's just spoonflower.com. They sold for $225 million. So I got familiar with this because for a clothing company that we were working on, we needed to look at patterns. And I was like, where do you find patterns online? And you can find patterns in many places, but one place was Spoonflower. So this is basically a marketplace where you have on one side designers who come up with, let's say, a nice floral pattern or sunflower pattern. And then you can take those. So like, I think your mother-in-law is doing like a pillow business, and so she could go on Spoonflower and say, ooh, I really like this fabric swatch pattern. Um, I want to basically buy this pattern and turn it into pillows. I want to buy this pattern and turn it into wallpaper. And so you can use it for all the things that patterns go on— wallpaper, you know, like mats, um, pillowcases, whatever, different stuff like that, blankets, curtains, shit like that. So it's just like niche marketplace you— most people haven't even heard of. And then you go there and you see it and you're like, oh, this makes total sense. And so they sold for $225 million to Shutterfly. I thought it was really cool and just like kind of this niche product that has been around for a while that sold. And then I wanted to share also a growth hack, but what's your kind of like first reaction to this?

SAM

I think this is brilliant. I'm looking at it right now. There's a few reasons why I like this company. The first is that I believe it's based in North Carolina. I like things that are not in Silicon Valley, not in the heart. I think they're not in the heart of technology hubs. I think that's amazing. There's so many wonderful things about this business. It's just, I mean, it's a win-win-win type of company where you help people make money, you help people get what they want. The company Spoonflower makes a little bit of cash. I'm into it.

SHAAN

Right. And it was started in 2008. So it's been around for a while. And it's one of these that like, like most marketplaces, marketplaces are extremely valuable when you get them to work, but they can take time to work because you have to get that to keep cranking the wheel of supply and demand to get it to work. You need enough designs and enough designers and enough buyers, and then you have to keep like do a lot of manual stuff to make that work. So one thing I liked, this guy who listens to the pod, Adam, Adam Kiesling, I think is how you say his name. He was talking about this deal and he was pointing out this like this method that they used to grow. And he's like, I'll just share with you a couple of things that he pointed out. So Spoonflower, 3.3 million unique artists, 4,000 new designs uploaded on average every day. So that's like pretty crazy scale. And what they did was they would do design challenges. And so Spoonflower would host a design challenge and then the top 50 voted, popular voted designs would get featured as the winner circle and it would get to the top of the website. And then if you go to the website, you click like, you know, oh, let me see the best Halloween designs that would drive like 95% of the sales to a lot of the creators. So it was kind of feast or famine. You would, you take your shot to get noticed, but if you got noticed, you would get a ton of inbound sales. For, for those, for those contests. Right. And it might just be like 1,000 or 2,000 people participating in each one. And so I thought this is a pretty smart model of how they bootstrap the marketplace. So they're like, all right, we need— buyers want content for Halloween. How do I get a bunch of designers to make the right Halloween content and make it all— make a bunch of new ideas that are unique? You can only find them on Spoonflower. I'll host this contest and the contest winners get like, I don't know, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars. Doesn't have to be too much money. And they get exposure through that, through that process. And then he was— Adam was sharing that, like, you know, Food52, that they used to do the same thing when they were seeding their marketplace of recipes, right? They had chefs uploading recipes and then people coming to download them. They would— they created a contest called Your Best Recipe Using Fresh Mozzarella. Right? So give me your best mozzarella recipe. And then, you know, they would get Whole Foods to sponsor it and get a gift card. And then they're like, the grand prize is $1,000, right?. And so they would keep doing these contests around things that people were searching for in order to seed the marketplace with the right content. So I thought that was a cool learning as well from this.

SAM

This is amazing. And what's even more interesting, or as interesting, is that Shutterfly bought them. I forgot about Shutterfly. I just looked them up. Shutterfly, I think they got— did they get delisted? They were public. They had a $2 billion market cap and like close to $2 billion in revenue, right?

SHAAN

And so one, uh, That's a complicated, that's a, that's a crazy space where Shutterfly is. So, you know, good luck. Good luck to them on that one.

SAM

Spoonflower's badass. Can we, um, can I tell you something that surprised me? Uh, so, so the other day Rihanna was named a billionaire. That's pretty amazing, right?

SHAAN

Yeah.

SAM

I think that's amazing. And so I got curious. I started working with Jake. I was like, what other celebrities have gotten rich in ways that I wouldn't really have known right away? And it kind of got—

SHAAN

I kind of got this YouTube— there's going to be a YouTube segment right here, 10 celebrities that got rich not from their fame.

SAM

Well, it is a little bit extended from their fame, but I'm going to give you 6 of them. So the first, you know who Jimmy Buffett is? You're not— you're not— you're not white, so you may not be into Jimmy Buffett.

SHAAN

I've heard the name, but if you said, point, here's 5 old white guys, point out Jimmy Buffett, I would just point to the far right. I have no idea.

SAM

So Jimmy Buffett, I don't even know how to explain them. White 60-year-olds who wear Tommy Bahama. Do you even know what that is?

SHAAN

Yes, I know that one.

SAM

Okay. White 60-year-olds who wear Tommy Bahama love him. He's the guy who created, uh, Cheeseburger in Paradise, that song. So he also had this album called Margaritaville. It's all about the Caribbean and being on a boat and like living this like Parrot style life. I think that's Parrot Heads is what he's called. So he's got Margaritaville. It's a subsidiary of Cheeseburger Holding Company, which is pretty funny. He's got 30 restaurants and he has vacation clubs. Hotels, a retirement village, and tequila. Collectively, the holdings do something like $2 billion a year in sales. Is that crazy? Wow. Then you also probably don't know about this one. This isn't in your wheelhouse, but Dolly Parton. Do you know Dolly Parton?

SHAAN

Is that his girlfriend? Who is this?

SAM

You don't know who Dolly Parton is?

SHAAN

Again, I've heard the name. If you showed me 5 old white ladies, I couldn't point out Dolly Parton.

SAM

So Dolly Parton was a famous country singer, but she did more than just country. Have you, uh, heard the song I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston? Yes, she wrote that. She wrote "Workin' 9 to 5," which has been covered many times. She's just a hit maker, but she was famous. You probably remember photos of her. She's in her probably close to 80s now, 70s, but she's famous for having blonde hair and huge boobs. Uh, you definitely like remember her. She has famous phrases like, "You wouldn't be— you'd be amazed at how much money it costs to look this cheap." She's got phrases like that, but she's actually a great person and she, uh, has an empire. Well, she's like, you know, well, she's like, she's known for her philanthropy and for doing good. She gives back to the community. She seems like a wonderful person. And it's kind of a joke that she looks cheap. That's like her joke. Right. But it's estimated that she has a net worth of like $600 million. And I was driving through the Smokies recently, just 2 weeks ago, and I drove through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which is a small town in the mountains of Tennessee. And right outside of that, she has a fucking theme park.. It's called Dollywood. Her name's Dolly Parton. She has Dollywood. There's rides. It's a huge deal. It's amazing. They've got— just imagine Six Flags, but it's all about Dolly Parton and it's called Dollywood. It's amazing.

SHAAN

You know, we're like 15 years away from like Paul World in LA and it's the Paul brothers, you know, version of Disney World. That's what's going to happen here. They are our Dolly Partons of our generation.

SAM

It could be. So I'm shocked you've never heard of Dollywood. Dollywood. Dollywood. You've never heard of that? Dollywood? No. No, it's a huge thing. It's very big. Like, it's like a mini Six Flags. It's not even a mini Six Flags. It's almost as big as Six Flags. And people in the South— I'm from Missouri. I lived in Tennessee, so I'm kind of Southern. People in the South are obsessed with it. That's where you go on vacation. You go to Dollywood, and then you actually go to a lot of different casinos in the South. You'll see Dolly Parton-themed, uh, casinos. Casinos. It's crazy. All right, another one. Sammy Hagar. That doesn't ring a bell either to you, does it?

SHAAN

No, this is just a humiliation session.

SAM

God, that's so funny. Van Halen. Do you know what Van Halen is?

SHAAN

I heard the name. Dude, dude, you are so— Couldn't hum a song if I wanted to.

SAM

God, that's so funny. Okay, so Sammy Hagar from Van Halen, he sold a tequila company for around $80 million, and it was a tequila brand. And I'll just tell you two quick ones. You don't know any of these people. It's all just like white basic people. Kate Hudson.

SHAAN

You know Kate Hudson? I know Kate Hudson, but I see the word Fabletics written here. She— what does she have to do with Fabletics?

SAM

She helped start it. She was one of the co-founders.

SHAAN

Okay. I didn't know that.

SAM

Crazy, right? Uh, your wife probably wears it. I mean, it's like a, uh, they, they sell fancy tights, right? Right. 2020 revenue, $500 million. Wild. And then finally, Jessica Alba.

SHAAN

She owns 20% of it. Yeah. I know Jessica Alba.

SAM

Yeah. So 20% meaningful. Um, and finally, Jessica Alba started or helped start The Honest Company. It just IPO'd. It's got a market cap north of $1 billion, I believe, and her stake around $130 million. It's pretty amazing, right?

SHAAN

I like it. Um, yeah. So what do you, what do you think is like the best model? So what do we see here? We saw like entertainment, so hotels, uh, casinos, you know, like kind of like amusement parks. Then we saw basically like makeup company, skincare company, you know, fragrance company and alcohol brand. Which one do you like? Or do you think there's another one that they're— celebrities are sort of leaving on the table?

SAM

Alcohol seems like the best. Conor McGregor recently did it. He sold Proper Twelve. I believe his stake was worth around $100 million. I think alcohol is the best one because you can charge $50 for a bottle of a certain type of alcohol., and there's a chance that someone will want to buy that many times a month. So I think alcohol is interesting. Makeup's okay. I obviously don't know anything about that. Rihanna crushed it. Her brand is killing it. It's called, uh, what's it called? Fenty. And she's got, she's got, she's got a couple brands. They kill it. But I think alcohol is number one, though I do think that there's a world— if I was a Lance Armstrong, and I've told him he should have done this when he was on the podcast— if I was a Lance Armstrong, a Michael Phelps, something like that, I would 100% partner with a hotel brand. And do fitness-focused hotels and try to have branded— a branded pool or a branded pool instruction that you could do in that pool, like a workout, or do a cycling-branded hotel. I think that would crush, and I think you could make money for every year for 50 years doing that, right?

SHAAN

Yeah, I think doing something that's on brand is kind of the key. Like, uh, Sam Harris doing this with a, um— Sam Harris did this with a, uh, a meditation app, right? Because that's what's on brand for him. If Sam Harris came out with alcohol or like like a skincare line, no thank you. But Sam Harris with a meditation app, that can work. And I think that thing prints money.

SAM

It does. And so I've heard. All right, you want to do a few more?

SHAAN

Yeah. Dan has one on here, by the way. George Clooney making $1 billion with Casamigos tequila. Somebody told me this story. I didn't plan to say this. I don't know if it's true or not. I might be making it up. George, have you heard this? George Clooney giving his friends $1 million each?

SAM

No.

SHAAN

So George Clooney, this is the story. So George Clooney, at one point in time, he was like, you know, when I think he was thinking like, when, when I retire, when I die, like, I want to basically give some of my wealth to my friends because these friends are like some of the best people in my life. I used to sleep on their couch when I was like trying to make it., and they really helped me in one way or another. All these friends have helped me. And then he decided, like, okay, why am I going to wait till I die? Like, that doesn't make any sense. And so he invited them all to, like, a dinner or like a dinner at his, like, whatever, cabin or something like that. I'm making up a lot of these details, but what I was told was he invites them all to a dinner and he brings 14 briefcases or like suitcases, a Tumi suitcase, actually. Each one was filled with $1 million in cash. And he invited them over for dinner, and then he gave each of them the suitcase, and they each just got $1 million from him. And he was like, you know, I've been through some hard times, and, you know, I want you to not have to worry about your kids, your mortgage, your school, whatever it is. You know, here you go, enjoy. And I was like, that is a baller move. I love that. Why haven't I heard this story before? I think that's kind of amazing.

SAM

And that actually is, uh, comes to a point. I've actually been reading about this lately. So there's this great book and this concept called Die With Zero. Have you heard of this?

SHAAN

No, but I get the idea just off the title. So it's a good title.

SAM

Yeah. So it's called Die With Zero. And the idea that we all have is I want to try to earn money. And when I die, I've got something to give away to my family. And if you don't have family, I can give away to causes that I care about. And this whole concept behind Die With Zero is Why would you do that? And regardless if you believe in heaven or not, I don't. What I think when I was like, well, when I die, it's going to feel like just how it felt like before I was born.

SHAAN

Right?

SAM

Nothing. And how did it feel like before I was born? Nothing. So do I really care about a legacy? Like, do I care about what people are saying about, like, about me when I'm, you know, pre-born feeling? Right. Of course not. I don't care. So if I'm going to, and that's not, he actually doesn't say that in the book. That's my, that's me. But the point of the book is, all right, why would you care so much about what you're going to do when you're dead? Just give it to people or your friends. Like, do that plan before you die and enjoy it with your friends and family.

SHAAN

Create a giving plan now. If giving matters to you, create a giving plan now and execute on it now and not when you're dead, right? Two scenarios. Scenario one, you wait till you're 88 years old, 92 years old, you pass away. Then there's a will reading and, you know, a couple of your friends are there. They're also in their 88 to 92-year-old range. And your kids are there and their kids are there, whatever. And you pass along some money to them and your 88-year-old friend is like, oh, thanks for the million dollars, George. Appreciate it. Like, it'll go straight to my, like, you know, dialysis machine. Yeah. You know, like, what do I need this for? And your kids are also like, cool, could have used that when I was paying off student debt for years or like wanted to start a business. But now that I'm 42, I'm glad that I'm 45. I'm glad I got this, this inheritance from you. Thank you. And so, so that's scenario 1. Scenario 2, you invite your friends over for dinner. You bring a Tumi suitcase with $1 million in it and you say, when I eat, we all eat. Let's go. And basically you hook up the people who have helped you and that matter to you and you help their lives today. Because why wait 40 years and let them have more discomfort or suffering along the way when you could— if you're trying to give to make an impact, impact today is worth a lot more than impact 45 years from now. And so I'm a big believer in this. I hadn't really thought about it till I heard this George Clooney story, but when I heard it, I was like, oh, and you know, my friends, if I invite you to a dinner in a cabin and I show up with 14 suitcases, like, you know what's happening, I'm about to George Clooney your ass because that's what's going on. And I really have taken this mindset of when I eat, we all eat. And I really think it's a lot more fun to live that way. The other little story I'll share, I was talking to my trainer and I was like, I was like, so I call him Jay. I was like, yo, Jay, so you like, you know about my goals, my dreams. You're helping me get there because you're my coach. Like, and you talk about like you want to spin up your business. You're starting this fashion line. Great. Like, what's your like, what is your dream though? Like, we do this imagination exercise. You know what I'm imagining for myself., and we, we love that feeling and we use that. What's yours? And, and, and he has this thing, which is you don't imagine the outcome. So like, let's say you wanted to be rich. You don't imagine selling your company to HubSpot and looking in your bank account and seeing X dollars. You imagine like the congratulatory conversation. Like once it happens, you won't be so fixated on it happening. Your life will just be different because it happened, right? So you might imagine you might imagine your friend calling you, congratulating you on the deal, or you might imagine booking a trip because you have all this free time now. And so you don't imagine the money. You imagine what happens after you had it and the sort of implied state. So anyways, his was, I imagine getting a text from my mom saying, son, thank you for the $6,000 this month. That's huge for me. I'm so grateful to have a son like you. Thank you so much. And then so he was talking about that. I was like, oh, that's cool. So instead of saying, I want to be a millionaire so that I can give my mom something, he imagines the text from his mom. And then that got him thinking. So the next day he goes and he sends her $600. He's like, look, I can't send her $6,000 every month right now, but I can send her $600 today. And then he showed me the text he got the next morning, and it was literally like almost word for word what he had told me in the garage. He was like, She had— she texted him. She's like, son, I don't know what I did to deserve such a blessing of a son like you. The money you sent me, you don't even know. I needed that. Like, it's going to go to exactly what I need. Thank you so much. Like, you know, I love you so much, son. I hope you're, you know, I hope you're doing well. And I was like, damn, that was kind of cool to see it come together. And I love that he didn't wait till it was all done to start the giving plan.

SAM

All right, since you were talking about giving money away, I saw that you wrote something pretty funny in our document called the Jewish hack to wealth. Bar mitzvahs. I totally agree with you. I have so many—

SHAAN

I don't even have more to say. That's just kind of it.

SAM

I have— I, I, my, my wife is from a Jewish family. I've got a lot of my Jewish friends. I am so envious of how the community— and at my wedding, when we, all of our Jewish guests, they gave us double, significant checks. I also think it's a New York thing, or I don't know if it's a New York thing or a Jewish thing, but my Missouri friends would give $100. Our Jewish New Yorker friends would give $1,000.

SHAAN

Right.

SAM

And it was amazing. And I think that there's something in the, in, in that particular community where you give a significant amount of money for gifts so you can help one another out and, and money kind of flows a little bit more freely. Getting $8,000 or $5,000 or something when you're 16 years old or 15 years old. I've talked to some kids. That's like how a lot of like interesting businesses have been started. They said they use their bar mitzvah money. I completely agree.

SHAAN

Yeah, I, uh, I don't know how many Jews there are in the world. I think there's like 10 million Jews, something like that.

SAM

Like 20, I think.

SHAAN

14. Yeah. So something like that. 14, 20 million. Not a lot. But Jewish people, they punch above their weight. They have a lot of impact, they have a lot of power, they have a lot of success. And I don't think it's genetic. I think it's cultural. I think basically there's a strong foundation of basically helping each other out. So everything from Birthright, right, like a free, basically all-expense-paid trip to your home country at one point in your life. That's kind of an amazing program. And that keeps the instead of the brain drain and people just sort of like leaving and not having this like emotional tie to the culture. No, that one transformative experience keeps people tied in. There's, you know, bar mitzvah, right? So like, I have, I don't know how many times I've heard, yeah, I just took all my bar mitzvah money and I used that to like start the business, or I used that to like start investing in the stock market. And like, like my buddy, he had, I think, I don't know if he had like $12,000 or something like 10 grand from his bar mitzvah, like money or something like that. Like when he was whatever, I don't know how old you are, 13 or something when it happens. And by the time we were in college, he was like, he's like, got a fucking portfolio of a quarter million dollars. And I'm like, how do you have all this money? He's like, oh yeah, it's just been compounding for 10 years basically. And he's like, yeah, one of the guys, our family friend who gave us the thing, he didn't even give me cash. He gave me straight stock of this one biotech company that he really believed in. And the biotech company has like 10x'd in the 7-year period. And yeah, so what do we want to do? I got $200,000 if we wanted to start a business. And I was like, man, what a hack. And so two things. I think it's amazing. I think more cultures should do this. I also had heard a pretty interesting idea of universal basic income. So it's like this idea of like every year you give people some amount of money, $10,000 a year or whatever. I don't know what the proposed numbers are, but some amount of money as your universal basic income, like Social Security for all people. Um, and it's like pretty expensive. And so some people think it's great. Some people think it's bad. I don't really know. I don't really care, but I do think this other idea I heard was better, which was, um, what if you got a birth dividend? So let's say every US citizen, when you're born, the government or whoever puts $2,500 in your account, could be $2,500 or $5,000, something like that. So from age 0 to— and you can't touch it till you're 21. So age 0 to 21, you, you have this thing compounding. And if something's compounding over 21 years, it's going to, you know, double probably at least, I think, 3 times. So 3 to 4 times. And so, you know, everybody walking out at 21 years old would have $15,000 to $20,000 ready for them to do whatever they want as a cushion for life, as a way to start something, as a way to fund a creative pursuit if they want to be an artist or whatever. And I thought that was a pretty powerful idea and like a great sort of one-time bonus for every citizen.

SAM

Who does that?

SHAAN

And then it's invested, so it's actually fueling the economy. Um, so it's not like universal basic income where you get it, you might save it, you might spend it. You don't know what you'll do, but it's going to be invested in like an index for 21 years.

SAM

And then in doing that, everyone is bought into a particular type of thing. And so that way, even if you have, um, different opinions, so I think that we should do this. I think we should do that. That's cool. But at least we all have a little bit, even if it's just a tiny bit of skin in the game. And so we're incentivized in a similar way.

SHAAN

And everybody would learn about investing and compounding and like the benefit of, of time in market. Right. Time in market is the most important thing, right? There's the Buffett phrase, time in market is over. I take that over timing the market. And so if you once you've been in the market for 21 years and you look at that account and you get to see it going up, you're going to like realize the value of investing and that that's, you know, like the true path to wealth. If you just do more of that. Whereas if you never get started, then you never really feel it real. So I think that's a big benefit. I think we should have the American bat mitzvah for fun.

SAM

That's actually a great idea. That's incredibly interesting. All right, maybe we want to do one last one. Tell me about Aubrey de Grey because I've known a little bit about this. I've known a little bit about him. I've listened to podcasts with this guy. I believe he's an anti-aging doctor and professor.

SHAAN

Yes. So this is a funny story. I find it funny. Other people are going to be like, how could you say that's funny? The funny— it's ironic. I went on Twitter last night, as I do, and I see this tweet that says Aubrey de Grey is a sexual predator. I don't know who Aubrey de Grey is, so I'm like, but that's a bold tweet. Okay, what are you talking about? So, you know, my, my, my gossip, the gossip part of me starts, starts getting excited. So I click it. I start trying to see what's going on. Basically two things happened. I found out that this person Aubrey de Grey has, you know, kind of like, I don't know exactly what they've done, but made people feel uncomfortable at the least and maybe sexually harassed people at the most. I'm not 100% sure. But basically two women who were, who are in that field, Laura Denning and I forgot the other person's name. They came out yesterday or recently this week, something like that. And they published stories saying Aubrey de Grey, you know, made me feel uncomfortable, made, you know, said things to me that were totally inappropriate, abuse of power. And the organization that funds him knew about this, covered it up because he was so important for fundraising and for the science of this, because he's been basically like a lifelong leader of this movement of anti-aging. So I see that and I'm like, who's this Aubrey? I just want to see what he looks like. Who's Aubrey de Grey guy? He's got this huge beard. Have you seen him?

SAM

Yes, he looks like a little bit like there was a— what's the famous philosopher from the Soviet Union? Not Nostradamus, Rasputin.

SHAAN

Yeah, he looks like Gandalf or Dumbledore or something like that. He looks like of that lineage. You wouldn't be surprised if he's Dumbledore's cousin. So I see him and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. What's this guy all about? Is he a big deal? And I click. So two things. One, I click and I listen to this TED Talk. And ironically, the funniest thing in the TED Talk was at the end, somebody asked a question and they go, 'If you're so into anti-aging, why do you try to look like an old man?' That's pretty good. I thought that was hilarious. The second thing is this guy is pretty fascinating, very charismatic, very weird, and very interesting. And the whole topic of anti-aging is fascinating. And so I know yesterday was like, he's getting canceled and he probably did some fucked up things. And I don't really know the guy's character. Maybe he's a bad guy. I have no idea. But this topic of anti-aging, and that was ironic that that was my entry point into it, but I was blown away by what's going on in this field. So I wanted to kind of share this with you. I basically wanted to summarize this guy's TED Talk for you in 2 minutes. So he gives this TED Talk back in 2005 and he's talking a million miles a minute. I talk fast, he talks 10 times faster than me. And he's got these slides that are white with black text and then red font callouts of his opinion. So he took 12 minutes to make these slides, but they're actually very effective at communicating. And so he basically gives this talk. He goes, aging and illness and death are— people think today that these are inevitable and that they're okay and that they're good. I don't think any of those things are true. I do not think it's inevitable. I think we will defeat aging. I think we will be able to live thousands of years. I do not think they are good, and I do not think we should just sit by and just let 150,000 people die every day. That was like how he starts, right? So you're like, okay, tell me more. He's like, first I'm going to tell you about the bad arguments against what I'm trying to say. By the end of this, I'm going to convince you that it's not only possible, it is probable that we're going to do this, and I'll tell you how. But before that, I will convince you let me get rid of some of these really bad arguments. He's like, bad argument number 1, we'd be so bored if we didn't die. Right? Bad argument number 2 is the population will get too big and humans are bad for the Earth or whatever.

SAM

Right?

SHAAN

And he goes through these arguments. He kind of debunks each one of them very quickly. And he's basically like, look, what we want to do is we want to be healthy for a long time. Right? We're not just trying to be old and dependent and feeble for a long time. We want to be healthy for a long time. And he's like, here's what's going on in this field. And so this was kind of interesting to me. I didn't know any of this. So he's like, there's two schools. He's like, first, why do we die? And he's like, why do we die? We die for two reasons. He's like, to live, our body does all these metabolic processes, basically like heating your body, cooling your body, immune system, digesting food, like, you know, learning, growing, building muscle. All these are metabolic processes. We do them to live. And just like any machinery, like a car or a factory, the more you use the machinery, the more, like, as the physics of the thing moving happens, damage happens over time, it accumulates, and eventually the thing breaks and stops working. So he goes, living creates damage. Damage is happening all the time, and then eventually the damage kills your cells, and then you die. And he's like, all right, so there's two schools of thought. School of thought number one is that let's stop the damage, prevent damage, right? Prevention is better than the cure. And he's like, bad idea. We barely even know how metabolism works. And it's highly unlikely that you're going to be able to keep the high function of the machine running and stop damage from happening. Damage seems kind of inevitable if the machine's going to run. And he's like, that's called whatever. One school of thought, doesn't matter what the name is. He's like, then there's another called geriatrics. Geriatrics basically is like, cool, damage happens, but how do we either repair damage or limit the damage so that it doesn't kill your cells? And he's like, that's where I think this is going to work. So here's this guy's case on how this is going to work. He goes, we are going to reach a point where we have a therapy called Human Rejuvenation Therapy, HJR, I think, or HRT or something like that. I don't know what he calls it. Human Rejuvenation Therapy. Let's just call it that for short. He's like, basically, you're going to— he's like, what we know is that you're living— by the way, is this boring or should I keep going?

SAM

No, I'm looking at what he's saying now as you go.

SHAAN

Keep going. Okay. So basically he's saying like, He's like, one thing we notice is that the damage is happening from the day we're born, right? Your cells function, you damage, but you don't really feel the effects until you're like middle-aged or getting older. So 40, 50, 60, that's when you start to— the damage starts to accumulate and the cells start to die. And that's when brain function slows down, muscle function slows down, reaction time slows down. He's like, so there's this like point where there's too much damage. So we need to give you a therapy before then. He's like, we can't just modify your DNA so there's no damage happening. What we need to do is by the time you're 30 or 40, we need to be able to give you something that's going to repair the damage that's happening faster than the damage is happening. And he's like, that's how we're going to solve this. Number 2, we're going to solve it first in mice before we solve it in humans. He goes, mouse lives 2 years. The test is going to be, can you get the mouse to live 5 years? But here's the trick. You can't breed the mouse differently. You have to let the mouse live normally for 18 months, and then you have to give them something at 18 months that extends life by 2 years. That's going to be the test. And he's actually put up like a million and a half dollar prize or whatever. Like there's a multimillion dollar prize for anybody that can do that. You have to do a test where it's like an X Prize. It's like let a mouse live for 18 months, give them a therapy, and now his life needs to be extended.. And in the control where you don't give the mouse the thing, it needs to die 6 months later as planned. And so that's the breaking point. He's like, once we figure out how to do that, then 10, 15, 20 years later or something like that, we'll be able to translate that into humans. But we don't know how to do it in mice yet. He's like, right now we can extend their life a few months, but not years. He goes, the second thing, people think that this is really far away. Oh yeah, maybe people will live forever, but not in my lifetime. He goes, but what the way that science works is he has this curve. He shows like, if you were 80 years old and we discover this shit, it's too late for you, you're dying. If you're 60 years old and we discover this shit, it's kind of too late for you, you're dying. If you're 50 and we discover it, we might extend you by a good 30 years, but you're probably gonna die at that point. He's like, but if you're 40 or 30 and we discover this, and at the time when we discover this, you have escape velocity, as I call it, meaning I'm going to give you the therapy before enough damage has happened and you're going to live— like the guy who's 10 years older than you is going to live till he's 150 and you're going to live till you're 1,000. He's like, that blows people's minds, but it's true. It's just the way that this works, which is once we have the therapy, the difference between somebody living an extra 40 or 50 years and an extra 1,000 years will just be like a 10-year age gap because you'll be just below that threshold of damage.

SAM

How far away are we?

SHAAN

And so he's like, the part he's— then he discusses the science of breakthroughs. He goes, in every field there are breakthroughs. Breakthroughs are extremely hard to predict when they happen. He's like, flight, even, you know, from prehistoric ages, we've had this idea of being able to fly and then nobody knew how to fly until like 1903. 1903, the Wright brothers figure out How to fly. And then from there, it's like every 25 years there's like a pretty big jump from two dudes in a plane that's basically going to kill you to like a plane that's reliable, to a plane that can go really far, to supersonic planes, to like now we get on a plane, it's super safe. You go to sleep, you watch a movie and you fly, right? Like every 25 years, incremental progress happens after the breakthrough. But so you can predict incremental progress. So he knows after we get the breakthrough of figuring out mice, we're going to have like 15, 20 years before we get it to be a therapy in humans that extends life 20 or 30 years, healthy life. But we don't know when that breakthrough is going to happen. He's like, the bad part is it's been like 100 years and basically nothing's happened for this breakthrough. And so, yeah, so that's kind of like where it's at right now. But I was pretty fascinated. I was like, I want to go— this is just like a— I'm at the TED Talk level. So like, you know, that's the surface of the surface, but I'm very interested in going deeper and learning more.

SAM

So there's this book on longevity, I believe it's called Lifespan. I'm gonna— I'm thinking about reading it. I'm very fascinated by this too. It's something that I've been thinking about, and we're gonna have to wrap up here. It's always like, when I was thinking about dying, it seems like we mostly like all just die from like some type of cancer or Alzheimer's or something like that. Like we, like if the timeline's long enough, like we're all gonna get cancer or like some type of Alzheimer's or something like that and die. And I've always been wondering to myself, isn't it weird to you that with everything that we have, that someone could still die from one of these illnesses that you could have, you could have had for 6, 12, 24 months? Like, I've always thought, like, you should know right away. You should know, like, once that cell forms, or, you know, I don't know anything about medicine, but you understand. And so anyway, this is the— I, I've also been obsessing with that. Maybe it's because, like, I'm getting in my my 30s now, and I'm like, well, I kind of— I'm very slowly, but I kind of just felt like a little bit of like soreness. I don't want to like get older, and I'm flipping out a little bit. So I'm on board with this. I'm going to start reading this.

SHAAN

Yeah, there's, um, there's a, uh, what's it called? There's this chart that's great, and the chart basically shows why do people die. It's like, it's like a visual chart. So it's like, uh, blue if it's it just happens in yourself, it's non-transmissible. Red is if one person passes it to another, like the flu or COVID or whatever. And then there's like the size of the bubble is basically how many people die of that every year. It's like number 1 is cardiovascular disease, and then number 2 is cancer. And that's bulk of the deaths, right? And then number 5 is influenza, and then you kind of whatever, you go on from there. So you're right, it is these sort of same causes, stuff that people are trying to fix. But no, no breakthrough yet that like just radically eliminates that. Like, remember when people used to die of cancer? That will happen. It's just a matter of when, which is pretty sweet, honestly.

SAM

Yeah, it's interesting to me. All right. I think that that episode was a 9 out of 10. What do you think?

SHAAN

I liked it. What do you think, Dan? I give you a 9 as well.

SAM

All right. I think that was good.

SHAAN

Um, Dan's got a little bit of a Ned Flanders in him. I can see Dan being the Ned Flanders of a neighborhood. I don't think that's a compliment.

SAM

It's definitely a great neighbor.

SHAAN

What's wrong with Ned Flanders? All right, I'll take it. Like a very positive guy.

SAM

Yes, that I thought that was a comment. All right, thank you. That's the episode.

SHAAN

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

SAM

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