We Bet This App Idea Could Be Bigger Than Reddit
Sam, I want to start with an idea today. I have an idea that I genuinely believe is going to be big if somebody does it. I've tried to convince one of my smartest friends to do this, but they're already a little too rich and too happy to go try something new. So I am putting this out there to the universe. If anybody does this, more power to you.
I feel like I could 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.
The funny thing about this idea is that it started off on one of our drunk idea episodes. Which we do from time to time where we take like, I don't know, half-baked ideas, kind of bad ideas, but maybe there's a nugget in there that's interesting. And we call it Drunk Ideas where we, we both get a little tipsy. We pretend to be at least, and we, we pitch each other ideas.
What was the drunk idea?
I joined it. I love it.
I joined it.
Yes. I love it.
They didn't, they didn't accept my request. Oh man. I, I'm sitting here pending still.
So like, here's an example. Yesterday there was this woman who like wasn't that pretty and she was like 23 years old and she was like, can I or should I get Botox now? Will I look prettier? And she posted her face and there was like all these very positive, not necessarily positive, like you do or do not need it, but like, you know, we're not going to make fun of you, but here's the pros and cons.
The premise of this, there's a backup a second. There was an Instagram influencer. I think her name is Amber Lancaster and Amber Lancaster is a Instagram mom. She's got, you know, a million followers or whatever. And she had created this group and I think she kind of like created it, but she's very hands-off with it. It's not like a very calculated thing that she did. And so the group is called Better Than Google. And the premise is inside this group is like 17,000 kind of like millennial mobs, like moms, like her audience, people who, you know, cause I was asking my wife, I was like, what is the group? And she's like, well, it's just a bunch of moms who are like, We're all kind of like in our 30s. We all want to have a good life, be a good mom, be a good spouse, watch good TV shows, be healthy. Like we just have like a certain set of things. We're just trying to have a, a certain quality of life. And in doing so, if you put a bunch of those moms together, then they could really help each other out. It's better than Google. If you ask a question here, you're going to get better than Google type of answers.
Here's an example question. Has anyone found an effective way to get rid of cellulite? I'm pretty petite and I work out daily, but my leg still has cellulite. And it has 30 comments of people discussing how they did or didn't get get rid of cellulite.
100%. It's like a media company. It's got juicy content, just like clickbait, you know, click-worthy content, but there's no editors, there's no writers. This is just people's real lives. So a woman went on there and she was saying, my husband was cheating on me. I found out, I confronted him about it, he got really defensive, and I want to file for divorce. But then over the last few days, I noticed he was— he knew— he like referenced things that were in my private messages, like my messages to other people, like How is he reading my iMessage? And then the world's greatest tech support was in the thread where it was like, all right, you need to log outta your iCloud. You needed to do this, you needed to do this. You might have a second iPad that's connected to your thing, and that's how he's been able to read this. And they really helped her out. She's like, oh, thank you. I figured it out. He, there was this iPad and whatever. That's how he was reading my messages. And so now I can do whatever. That's a better answer than you would get if you just Googled the sort of same thing. And it's more trusted and trust is the key word here. So when I originally came on this Drunk Ideas thing, I was just laughing. Better than Google is just like a, you know, what a funny way to create a Google competitor. It's like, what's better than Google machine learning artificial intelligence? It's like 10,000 moms who are bored and scrolling on their phone. And it's kind of true though. The wisdom of the crowds is actually a very strong force. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this is actually a really good potential business idea. Here's why. So I've long since had this theory that Whenever one thing gets really popular, it creates a craving for the opposite. So we see this in many ways. I, a classic example of this was Facebook became the biggest social network in the world, and Facebook was basically, uh, photos, but it was permanent and public, right? You would post your albums there, everybody could see them and they stayed there forever. Well, as Facebook got more popular, it created the need for something like Snapchat, where you would have photos that are impermanent and not public, private. Snapchat succeeded, but it wouldn't have succeeded unless Facebook had already shifted the way that culture was working and it almost created a craving in people for the opposite. And I think you see that today where the more the world got woke and, you know, you can't say this and you can't say that and you have to use these pronouns, do this, do that. And then it creates a craving for a character like an Andrew Tate or even a Donald Trump or somebody who's, oh, he's a straight shooter. He's just going to call it like it is. And those people become very popular because they're a counterpunch to the way that things are going, or the, the, the other strong opposition. So similarly, I started thinking about this. I said, man, in an AI world, a lot of shit's gonna change. And if you're gonna just type into, you know, a box and it's just gonna give you the answer and it's gonna scrape the internet, it's just gonna give you some generic answer, that's gonna be big for sure. There's, there's definitely a market for that. But what's the opposite of that? What craving does that create? And what I realize is it's gonna create the craving for almost like the, the old village wisdom, right? How, how you can get answers from a bunch of humans who you could see their name and face and they could tell you things that are their personal experience rather than generically the right answer. And I think that if somebody made an app that was the same premise, the Better Than Google premise, And it was a community of, you know, 10,000, 20,000 moms who were going to answer questions. That would be a really powerful app. I think it would be really addictive because you would get the type of content like the Botox question. By the way, one key thing is you can share anonymously in the groups. You go anonymous and then you post about the infidelity in the marriage. And that's, that's part of why it works. So I think you would need those features, but think about how valuable that would be for a second. Like if I could pick any one customer segment. To have like a rabid community of, it would be moms. Like it would be people that control the household budget in America. That would be the most valuable audience segment that you could have. And I think this is the way to get it.
Do you remember ChaCha?
ChaCha? Was that like the old search engine that was kind of like this, like Yahoo Answers type of thing?
Yeah. So I'm just pulling this up right now, but basically I remember it when I was in high school. And so that was about 2008. So it was launched in 2006. It went bankrupt in 2016. And so basically it was a service and I didn't actually realize any of this, but it raised $6 million including from Jeff Bezos. And they had 5,000 freelance guides, meaning people who they hired. And I would send a text message to ChaCha. I remember this was during the World Cup and I was like testing it out and I was like, what's the tallest and what's the shortest player on this particular soccer team? Because I was just testing it out and I think I paid them 2 or 3 cents or something like that. And they would message me back in like 3 minutes with an answer. And at the time it was amazing. And I'm just reading their page now. It looks like they actually had raised up to $60 million and the, and they had something like 1.7 billion questions a month of people that, that people were asking. And it was like magic back then because We didn't have Google on our phone. I didn't have a smartphone. And I remember this being amazing. And eventually it went out of business because Google's just better. But I just don't know if it could ever make any money. I think I paid like 2 cents or something like that. A text message.
Well, that's the, that's the beauty of it. You don't need to actually pay for an expert answer. So, so like, here's some different analogs to this. So you have a Quora, which is a bunch of more I would call it tech nerd type of community. And then you have GLG, which is highly paid intellectual information, right? And there's a different customer for that. For the customer for that, it's going to be a hedge fund or some sort of investment banker or something, something like that. And then you have Google, which is the general search. And, you know, Google's market cap today is, I think, $2.3 trillion. And if you think about like search on the internet, so the big, the general search on the internet, Google was $2.3 trillion., and then you can like silo that into different things like searching for restaurants. It's like Yelp. And I don't know what Yelp's market cap is.
I mean, it's billions, but it just hasn't grown in years.
2 billion, right? So, you know, the search for restaurants and handymen in your area became 2 billion out of the 2 trillion. And then Glassdoor, which was like search for, you know, good places to work. And then you have search for jobs and then you have search for whatever. And there's a thousand tiny search engines. And these are all like single-digit billions companies for the most part that got created. And so I think, and, and then we have DuckDuckGo, which is kind of like the, uh, for the, you know, tech savvy person who cares about privacy and likes to not be doing the mainstream thing. Here's DuckDuckGo. And we've talked about them before about how much insane amount of traffic that they have. So I think that while search and this kind of question and answer thing feels like a solved problem. Um, and even the kind of community questions and answers, like you would think, well, why not Quora? Why not Reddit? Dude, my wife is not getting on Quora and Reddit. Reddit is just like, it repels women.
Like, dude, isn't it funny how Reddit works? So Reddit is, I don't remember what they are now, but 2 years ago they were like the 6th or 7th most popular website. And yet if you asked people, do they use Reddit? A very common answer was like, what's Reddit? It's a very strange thing. I love Reddit, by the way.
I use like, I do too. It's made for dorks like us, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. Guys with body odor, right? It's not made for the millennial mom who wants to go in a high trust place and not get trolled and not get spammed and not get like, you know, made fun of and not like, she doesn't get all the weird memes and they kind of like, it's just different. It's a different culture. And so I think that this kind of Reddit for moms, uh, angle, which you, you couldn't really If you had pitched me that generically, I wouldn't believe it. As soon as I saw Better Than Google, I thought, man, if somebody really created an app that's supposed to do this and they seeded it correctly, the beauty of this was it was seeded with only followers of a certain type of Instagram influencer, which created a like-minded community of members and it excluded the general trolls of the internet. If you could find a way to do that again, I think that thing would scale and I think that thing would be really, really valuable. The value per user would be really, really high.
Let me play the pessimistic person right now.
Are you going to devil's avocado me?
Yeah, I'm going to devil's avocado you. I've built a handful of things and one of the hardest things that I've tried to do that I've not been able to pull off is getting people. So like I own, I own a variety of Facebook groups. Some of them have 80,000. There's one or two that most of them have like 2 or 3 or 5,000. One has like 80,000. Get in. When we started them, I wanted to do Facebook group because Facebook is where the person already was. When I, when I started a lot of these, it was like 2014, '15, and my reasoning was that getting someone to go specifically to a website, like, uh, for example, let's just say that you had like, uh, a food, uh, recipe website, and then they're like, well, let's just create a, a community for our readers to talk. So getting people to go to myrecipes.com forum and to actively participate is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. And I've, I've never actually pulled it off. And so I think there are people who do know how to pull it off. I think there, those people are rare. Getting, getting people to come to a destination to type new content and to register for something, that is one of the hardest things to figure out, I think, when it comes to mostly internet-based companies.
I agree. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying I think there's a billion-dollar idea here, but like most billion-dollar ideas, it requires threading the needle. I'll give you one other analog to this. So in terms of shopping, you have the big retailers. I could go to, you know, target.com, I could go to macy's.com, whatever. And then Amazon came out and Amazon was like, cool, we'll just aggregate all the products. And Amazon's the Google of that space, right? It's the general shopping search. Then there's Etsy, and Etsy is like a complete counter to Amazon. It's never gonna be bigger than Amazon. It's always gonna be some tiny fraction of Amazon, but a tiny fraction of a giant number is still a pretty damn big number. And what Etsy did was they were like, cool, we will do basically moms buying from other moms. So how do we do handcrafted goods? How do we do things that are personalized? Kind of the non-scalable, non-generic products only. And, um, you could see the maker here. She is, you could trust her. She's got a, you know, her little shop. And so let anybody create a little shop and sell to other people who like to shop kind of that same, like, you know, flea market type of vibe. And Etsy's totally succeeded because it was so different. And I think in a world that's going in a hyper-fast speed towards AI just tells you the answer, it's hyper-intelligent, this is generically the answer for things. I think it's going to create more than ever. The, the desire for more of the Etsy feel where it's like, yeah, cool. But what if I just wanted 100 other people like me who might have been through something like this to tell me their recommendations? So another thing that's really popular in this group will be like, hey, I got like an Amazon gift card. What are your best, best finds on Amazon for me? Here's my waist size. Here's my, my chest size. Here's whatever, like what will fit me well. And they'll just be like, oh, here's really good Amazon finds that are like clothes that are actually like pretty good fitting and actually gonna last long, but are still good on a budget.
How are you seeing this stuff? Are you like, hey wife, give me your phone. And like you scroll on hers or is she like saying like, oh, hey, check out this.
She'll show me things.
Right.
So first it was her showing me and me being like swatting away the phone. Like, I don't care. Who cares about this? Like, and she's like, no, like this lady was looking for somebody. And then she asked the group and then the group found that person that she had bumped into at the bus stop. It was crazy. They knew it because of the description of the shirt that he wears. And somebody said, wait, I think I know that guy. And I'm like, all right, whatever, who cares about this story? And then the fourth or fifth time I was like, okay, every time I've paid attention to what my wife is really into, I'm like early to something that's actually like a very valuable investment.
What's another example of that?
I mean, the e-com brand that I started was very much in this vein, but in general, there's like, this is not new, like Stanley mugs, right? Stanley mugs now are like all the rage. And like 2 years ago, she just kept talking about this and like, kept being so excited and wanting to show me about this like jumbo oversized overexpensive mug that she bought. But this is like one of like a thousand examples of these types of things. And so, yeah, anyways, this, this type of stuff I've learned that I should not ignore because she is really high signal when it comes to— she's a consumer and she's a specific type of consumer that is the opposite of me, right? I am like an internet native person. I, I'm an early adopter of products. She's the opposite. But the things that do kind of pass her filter, there's something there.
Are you still using—
Is your wife the same way, by the way? Like, is that a signal for you?
No, no, it's not.
Why is that?
I mean, my wife is, uh, a young millennial or an old Gen Z. I guess she's, uh, 31. And so typically it's with like TikTok trends. So like, For example, remember the Hok Tui thing? Like, I had to be like, dude, what the hell is this about? Like, what is this thing?
She's like your Urban Dictionary.
Yeah. If it's like there's some new, like, singer named like Charli X, she's like, so this woman's going to be like a huge deal. And I'm like, why? She's like, well, just all my friends are talking about it and it's popular on TikTok. And so we do it like that. So no, but not like business stuff.
You know, like those Golden Goose shoes. Do you know those shoes?
Those are so stupid.
Those like, like fucking dirty shoes that are $700.
Oh, they're so dumb.
So it was like really early on that too, on that train. And then like, you know, the one, uh, no, cause she's vegan. So that was like another thing that she was vegan, like a lot, like a lot earlier than before the plant-based became like a bigger deal. And so I used to be like, okay, uh, you know, great, high maintenance. Uh, where do we find like milk or butter or like any of the things that you need to do stuff? And she would find these niche brands. She'd be like, oh, I really love Oatly. Oatly is really great. This was before Oatly was like in coffee shops and all that stuff. And Oatly was this, it's this brand that's like, I don't know, it was like a Swedish brand or something, something in Europe and nobody ever heard of it. It's got this funky bottle. And I remember, you know, whatever, like 7 years ago and she was showing me all these plant-based products and then these creators who were really small at the time, but they were plant-based creators that are now all huge because plant-based recipes became very popular. Another version of this was Kayla Itsines, who we talked about on here. I don't even know how you say her last name, but she's like the fitness influencer. Yeah. So when I was like, hey, do you want to like do like, I don't know, like, uh, like, should we get a trainer? Let's work out together.
My wife was doing that shit too. Did she buy the PDF?
First she bought the PDF. I'm like, you're using a PDF to work out? She's like, yeah, it's great. And I'm like, a PDF? You paid for a PDF? You don't pay for anything. And she's like, I just really trust her. I'm like, who is this random woman in Australia? Like, who is this person? And then sure enough, she then creates the Sweat app. Sweat app then becomes like a multi-hundred million dollar app. And again, I was kind of like, dude, why are you paying attention to this random Instagram influencer? Like, she's not even like a real trainer. Like, why don't you watch these videos? Or why don't you go to this, this official certified thing? But no, her trust was in a certain type of person. And I kind of wrote that off. But then later I learned like, actually, that's just the way the world is going. That's where people are going to get their information. That's where people are going to get their trust from. In a kind of noisier and noisier world.
Sarah was like that with me, with Emma Chamberlain. Do you watch Emma Chamberlain?
I don't, but I know about her.
Dude, this woman is the best. I'm like, she's like Casey Neistat for chicks. And I'm like going back and like watching all of her old stuff. She's so darling. Like I'm all about it. Um, by the way, uh, are you still using OpenAI every day as a search engine?
Yeah, not just as a search engine. Can I tell you about a crazy thing that I did with OpenAI, uh, ChatGPT, basically?
Yeah. What?
Like, nobody else is going to care about this, but I think, uh, whatever. I give a shit. And I think you will find this interesting too. So I've been playing around with the idea of writing a movie. And so I was, but I've never done, I've never made a movie before. Not a filmmaker.
Do a play. Do a play.
Never written a script. Never written a screenplay. I thought about play, but I had a specific idea for a movie. There's a movie that, there's a book that I wanted to buy the rights to, to turn into a movie. And so I've been like down this rabbit hole trying to do that.
Do I know what book it is? You don't, don't say it, but do I know what it is?
Yeah, I can't say it, but yes, you would definitely know it. And it's like the rights have bounced around from big studio to big studio and it just never got made for one reason or another. Oh, COVID happens and then production dies or, oh, this, this person's on board and then they get canceled and the project stalls out. And I'm like, I can't believe this has not been turned into a movie yet. And so, um, so anyways, I'm in this like really like interesting path right now where I'm trying to acquire the rights to like create a movie. But along the way I was like, hey, maybe I should like figure out how movies are even made and like how this works. So aside from like normal ChatGPT stuff where I'm like, how do movies get made? What's the name of the person who doesn't know how to do anything but provides the money and the, the will to make it happen? They're like, that's called an executive producer. And like, I had a kind of amazing magical experience with ChatGPT. So here's what happened. I've used ChatGPT to, um, like question and answer. Uh, I don't know this, tell me, do this, or explain this to me. What I hadn't used it for was as kind of a creative assistant. Uh, have you ever used it in that way, or can, should I describe what I mean by that?
Yeah, like sometimes what I'll do is I'll upload, like I use the, I'll download, I, I got this, uh, tool where like, for example, Scott Galloway, I love his writing. He's got 100 blog posts. I got this tool where it downloaded in PDF all of his blog posts. I uploaded it all to ChatGPT. I called the voice Scott. I'll write something, I'll say rewrite it in Scott's voice, and I won't use the whole thing, but I'll just one or two nuggets. I'm like, that's a cool sentence. I'm gonna be inspired by that. So I'll use it a little bit like that.
Yeah, that's sick. And so I did the same thing and I was like, you know who I love? I love Aaron Sorkin. Uh, Aaron Sorkin wrote, you know, The Social Network and West Wing and Newsroom and a bunch of cool things. He's known for his like snappy, fast-paced dialogue. That's witty. And specifically, there's like a bunch of like really nuanced things he does where one character says something to the other. The, like, let's say in the, the begi— the beginning scene of The Social Network. So the beginning scene is Zuck talking to some girl he's on a date with.
Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?
That can't possibly be true.
It is.
What would account for that?
Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China, but here's my question. How do you distinguish yourself from in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs.
I didn't know they take SATs in China.
They don't. I wasn't talking about China anymore. I was talking about me.
You got a 1600?
Yes. I could sing in an a cappella group, but I can't sing.
Does that mean you actually got nothing wrong?
I could row crew or invent a $25 PC.
Or you could get into a final club.
Or I could get into a final club.
You know, from a woman's perspective, sometimes not singing in an a cappella group is a good thing.
This is serious.
On the other hand, I do like guys who row crew.
Well, I can't do that.
I'm just kidding.
Yes, I got nothing wrong on the test.
Have you ever tried?
I'm trying right now.
To row crew?
To get into a final club. To row crew?
No.
Are you like, whatever, delusional?
Maybe it's just sometimes you say two things at once. I'm not sure which one I'm supposed to be aiming at.
But you've seen guys who row crew, right?
It's an awesome first scene.
She's still catching up on the SATs in China, but he's like moved to the next part, and it creates these little misunderstandings, this little bit of tension. And it's part of why the dialogue really keeps you, because yeah, it doesn't feel rehearsed. It feels genuinely like two people kind of in a quick rally, conversational rally with the ball back and forth.
It makes a non-fast-paced scene feel fast-paced.
Exactly. The whole scene is like 7 minutes or something long. It's a long scene, which is a long time in a movie for just two characters just be talking to each other. That's usually like, breaks a rule of film where you want to break it up with action and movement and all these other things to keep people's attention. But he doesn't do that anyway. So I upload that scene and I say, here's the screenplay for that.
How did you upload it? You uploaded the screenplay?
So turns out all movie scripts are like available online. Like the actual original script is just there, uh, online. So I go, I grab the PDF, I put it into ChatGPT, I say, you're my creative assistant, we're writing a scene for this movie. Here's the situation, two characters, and let's put them in a whatever coffee shop. All right. First I said, explain to me what makes Aaron Sorkin's dialogue so good in this first scene. And then it explains it. I say, great. Using those characteristics, write a new scene for this. And what it did was, so it spits out a scene and then the scene kind of sucks, but it spits it out instantly. And so like, There's this trade between speed and quality. And even though the quality was quite bad, the speed was incredible. It was like, took 2 seconds. So then I could just start to inch up the quality by giving it feedback. And so then I'm like, cool, but I don't think it's believable that the character would say this for the first line. I think it should do this. And then it goes, sure, I've taken your suggestions. I've wrote it, wrote it again. I say, okay, cool. But like maybe instead of coffee shop, put it in a, in a restaurant and, uh, changes the restaurant because I want the waitress to say this. And then it does it again. I say, cool, but gimme an alternative. Just like, no, not that bad. I don't really know why. Just gimme another alternative. It gives me another alternative. And then I say, okay, cool, but make it faster and snappier. And actually I want the one character to be a little bit of an asshole. Tries, does it again. And I, what I realized was I was doing this and I just kind of stepped, stepped back for a second. I said, wow, this is amazing. It's what do I have here? I have an on-demand creative collaborator. It was 1:00 AM when I was doing this. I couldn't have called somebody and be like, hey, do you wanna just wake up real quick and just, uh, start writing with me? So in the moment where inspiration struck, I was able to like instantly have a genius creative collaborator who had, who spit out instant first drafts, which let me not have to have the blank page, which is the biggest enemy to any creator, right? Instead of being the author, I got to be the editor. So now ChatGPT is the author. I'm just the editor who's like, no. Something else, ah, try again, tweak this a little bit this way, gimme another variation with this happening. And it would instantly, instantly gimme another one back. And I thought, wow, the difference here would be, let's say I had a human doing this. A, they wouldn't have been online. Let's say they, let's say I caught 'em the next day when inspiration was half as much as it was in the middle of the, the night there. Then I would say, can you write a draft of this? That would've taken a week. Then they would've come to me after a week. Again, my, my, I'm out of flow. I'm now worried about 10 other things in life. And then they would've given it to me and now I would have to, as you say, bubble wrap it for them. I'd have to give them feedback, but I can't bruise their ego. They just worked so hard all week giving me exactly what I asked for. So now I have to say, hey, I really like part of it, but I just think maybe we could, like, would you be okay if we tried something like this? Not to say this is bad, but I just want to try just for, you know, and I'd have to do all that and then I'd bubble wrap it and then I'd give 'em the advice. Then it'd take another week to get the second draft. And now on the second draft, I have to give half as much feedback because if I really push it even further, or if I say, nope, still try again. Bruised egos. So I'm like, wow, you have an on-demand creative assistant who can instantly mimic and learn from any input I give it. Like, write this in the style of this, write this in the style of this, pretend this person is a director, has no ego, takes feedback instantaneously, and creates the revisions instantaneously. And by the end of it, I actually had a dope scene that was written, a dope opening scene to a movie. And I'm a guy who's never written a screenplay before. For me to have done that without AI would've been I don't know, 100 times harder. So I thought that was pretty cool.
How was the output? The final product?
The final product is pretty good. It's like, I mean, of course it's not, you know, Aaron Sorkin, but like, it's a hell of a lot better than Sean. So, you know, I got a superpower to be able to do that. And I would say it is on par with like the average or slightly above average from a professional who I would have paid tens of thousands of dollars to write me a script.
Man, that's like, I guess when I watch a movie, I kind of take for granted that someone had to sit down and write all that crap out. That's so much work. Like, that's so much work. And that would be so much. Uh, when, and so when we tell that story of Sylvester Stallone doing, how fast did he do Rocky?
He wrote the first draft in 3 and a half days.
That's insane to me. That's insane.
But also if you watch Rocky, you're like, okay, it's, this is not rocket science. The script is not like super sophisticated either.
It's still a lot. You're making a whole world, but let me tell you.
Two other things. So on that note, so you had, um, so writing the thing that the, the other cool thing I got out of it, you know, when I wasn't writing, I was watching like videos of Aaron Sorkin talking about his process. And one of the things he says is he's like, people don't understand to get one good idea. He's like, my brain is a Rolodex flipping through 50,000 bad ideas. And he's like, I have just exhausted so many dead end paths that this could have gone to find the one path. That kind of works. And I thought that's such a good analogy for how all creation works. I'm sure you feel the same way about marketing ideas or business ideas. Like your brain flips through 50,000 permutations of what you could work on and how we could work, what the business model could be. And then in the end it pops out and it's like, oh, Hampton's a great idea, dude. You know, like congrats. It seems like it just worked right away. It's like, yeah, it worked right away because my brain went through the idea maze on a speed run and I bumped into so many walls and I flipped through so many ideas and permutations of what this could and could not have been until I finally figured out one that would work.
Yeah. And it's like magic how it comes out. And it's crazy that the, you know, we talk about the shower thoughts and it's like, it is weird how I spend so much time thinking about something and all the permutations. And then when I'm out on a bike ride, it just like, wait, why didn't I think of that? You know, and it just kind of all, it is like a magical process. And if I had to do that for a script for money, that would be very hard. Do we have to do a shill real quick?
Yeah, let's do it. Speaking of writing. Speaking of writing, speaking of writing, if you're trying to get your writing out there the way that Sam did it, the way that I did it, the two businesses that we built that we sold and, and, uh, probably, I don't know, some of the simpler, easier, would you say some of the simpler, easier businesses that we ever made?
The simplest.
The simplest was a newsletter business. And if you're going to do a newsletter business, back when we started it, back when you started The Hustle, for sure you built a bunch of things from the ground up.
I had three engineers on staff. I had three engineers on staff and we had to build everything. And then I had like two or three growth people and they spent half of their time filling out Excel sheets to try to just track all the information, right?
Or build a referral program or, uh, you know, go— and then you had 20 people in ad sales, right? Like going, just try to generate revenue.
You have— we have, uh, I think we had like 15 people in ad sales and then we had like 3 people supporting them all just so we basically— when we sold the company, we were going to do about $20 million that year in revenue and we had something like 35 people but only 2 writers. And it was insane. It was insane. Like it was actually only 2 writers.
And one writer was just in case the first writer got sick.
Yes. It was 1,500 words a day. It was not that hard. And so we had to build all of these tools. It was a pain in the ass.
Let's do a little bit of math on this just real quick. So do you remember what your OpEx, your payroll costs roughly were for writing that one newsletter that had 2 writers, but it had 18, you know, had 33 other people in the company. That were doing all the other functions.
So 2 writers probably each made $150,000. So add about 20% to that for healthcare. So we'll just round up to $200,000. So $200,000 for 3 writers is $600,000. And then we had roughly 30 people beyond those guys. So what's that, like $8 million?
Yeah, something like that. So $8 million bucks. And just even just the engineers part, right? Because I remember you were building like a tool that would segment the audience. You were building an A/B testing tool. You were building all these little features to be better at your newsletter. You lived in San Francisco at the time. A San Francisco engineer, even with the Sanpar special, scrappy, find somebody, convince them that this is the dream, $200 grand each, right? So you're paying basically $600 grand just on product cost.
And the products weren't even that good. Like, you know, like I'm not a tech company, but I had to like, it was hard.
Not your core competency. Well, instead, how much does Beehive cost a month? I think Beehive's like $99 a month or something like that. And they got like a free plan too. And so instead of spending $600,000 a year, you could have spent $39 a month. That's the, that's the price of the most popular plan, the Scale plan. And with that, you get the ad network. So they'll, they'll do your ad sales for you. You get subscriptions. So you put a paywall in and you can actually do subscriptions. You didn't have to build that feature. You get a website builder. You get all the email automation so that when somebody signs up, you know, 60 minutes later, you send them this and one day later you send them this. And then after they refer a friend, it automatically sends them this. You have the referral program, which was huge for you, huge for us, and required basically like 1.5 to 2 people to run on our side.
You didn't have an engineer, did you?
We didn't have an engineer because Beehive was out when we started the Milk Road. So we just used Beehive, but half of these features didn't exist when we did the Milk Road. So I remember when we were building it, we were like, hey, do you have this automations feature? Do you have analytics that will do this, this, and this? Do you have surveys or polls? So at the bottom of the email, we would always write, how was it? And it was 5 stars, 3 stars, or 1 star. And we used that to basically give feedback to the writers on like what worked, what didn't, um, in each newsletter. And we could actually measure the quality of the writing, the quality of the, of the content. And now they have all those features. So if you want to do a newsletter today, no brainer, use Beehive. It's beehive.com, B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com. The only downside is their name spelling is really hard, but everything else beside, once you get past the name, everything is gravy.
Um, all right, let me tell you a quick story about someone who I spoke with the other day, and it was kind of a life-changing conversation. So for Hampton, we have this podcast called MoneyWise where we get people to come on and they explain all their finances, whatever, spill the beans about the beans, you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm stealing that one. Thank you. That one's now mine. Uh, and they like break down their whole portfolio, whatever. But this woman I talked to, have you heard of this company called Solidcore?
No, I've been described as that. Personally, but never at a company level.
I bet your wife has heard of it. So her name's Anne Maloum. So Anne is probably 41 right now. And so let me tell you her story, because this was like mind-boggling to me. So Anne started her career at the age of 25. She started a nonprofit because she was out on a run and she ran by a homeless shelter and she was like, you know, I would love to figure out a way to help these people. Running has helped me get over a lot of issues in my life. I should start a running club for these guys. And if I make them get up, or if I encourage them to get up early at 7:00 AM to come to this run, maybe that's gonna encourage them to make the rest of their day better and hopefully they'll get jobs, whatever. So she starts this thing called Back to My Feet, and it's a nonprofit that does something like $6 million a year in revenue. So, which is like, uh, in like corporate sponsors. She does that over the course of 5 years. So at the age of 31, she goes to LA and she takes a Pilates class. So have you ever seen like a reformer Pilates? It's like this weird like machine where it's kind of like yoga on a machine, sort of.
It's, I've heard it's, I, I've never done one, but I've heard it's like incredibly challenging.
It's awesome. They're, they're, they're really awesome. It's mostly what women do. And, but after talking to Anne, I'm actually gonna start doing it because it sounds pretty great. And she goes to this class and she was like a pretty intense runner and I think she did weightlifting and she kind of got, was like, I get hurt every 6 months. I just, I just expect that that's part of the process of being an athlete. She starts doing these classes and she's like, this is awesome. And the class was really cute and darling, whatever. And she was like, I want to do this. And so up until that point, she had saved $175,000. And so she moves back, goes back to her hometown of Washington, DC. And she goes, I want to start a studio and I'm going to retire from my nonprofit, which a lot of people called her crazy because they're like, why do you want to start like a gym? Like gyms suck. They're horrible businesses. She's like, no, no, no, we're going to do a studio business. So she quits her job, I believe in August, and by November she started her studio. She started with $175,000. She said she transferred her $175,000 in savings, put all of it into the business account and spent basically all of it except for $10,000 over 2 months building out the studio. And so she launches it and Solidcore, that's the name of the business. It's like that Pilates thing, but it's kind of has like a Barry's kind of edge to it, you know, like Barry's Bootcamp where it's kind of like cool, like all black letters.
The music is just like 40% too loud.
Yeah. Yeah. Like it's like, it's like, it looks like a nightclub. Yeah. Yeah. It's like cool. And she starts this thing and in month 1 does $90,000 in revenue. And the reason she started it was she was just doing the math. She's like, look, like the way that this business can work is I have my Pilates instructor. I don't even need like a front desk person. The front desk person doesn't need to be there because we have classes going throughout the day. And if I have like 15 of these reformers and I do 8 classes a day, That adds up to $3,000 a day. I think I could fill this up 7 days a week and get to $90 grand. And she does that in year 1.
Did she tell you how she did that kind of $90 grand month 1? Was there like, how did she get the customers to come to this new, new place?
Yeah, just like flyers and stuff. Just like telling all of her friends. Like it was like super grassroots. And if you do the math, it, it's, it wasn't that crazy. I think her math was something like, I need 15 people in every class or something like that. And it wasn't that crazy. And she also was really good at branding. So these women would go to these classes and they're like, this is awesome. I'll see you guys next Tuesday. You know what I mean? Like they wanted to do it over and over and over again. So in month 1, it does $90,000 in revenue. She says that she kept growing it. And by year 2, she goes, I was able to pay myself $1 million in salary. She goes, this thing took off because my costs were so low. I basically just had to build out the studio, which wasn't terribly expensive. Expensive and I had to build, buy these reformers, which are like the machines. And she's like, our cost basis was awesome. We, we had a very efficient operation. And so by year, so we're in 2013, she launches, launched it by year 2016. She has 11 studios still to this point, has not taken any outside funding, keeps growing it. By in 2020, shit happens where like everything hits the fan. COVID happens. They had to pause the whole business for a couple years. However, leading up to that, she had taken a little bit of funding and along the way she had taken PE where she took a little bit of money off the table. So I think it was something like she was paying herself like $2 million a year, but then took off. I think she raised $18 million of which $6 million went to her, and then she raised another like $20 million and then another $10 million went to her. And then finally after 10 years, she eventually has sold the whole business for something like $250 million. And across all of the rounds, she had taken off the table something like $90 million. And so this woman's like crazy successful. However, the big takeaway that I had from this lady, and I have never met someone with such a great growth mindset. And let me give you an example. After I sold my business, I was interested in real estate. I learned everything about real estate, or at least enough to kind of feel confident investing in it. I start investing into it and I get scared. I get real nervous. I'm like, man, I just put down a lot of capital. Like this isn't exactly working. Like I thought it would be working. Like it's not always up to the right. And I got bail and I got afraid and I bailed and I've done this many times. Have you ever done this where like you learn about something like you'll learn about like, let's say fitness and you're like, well, if I do this for 6 months, but then you're like in month 1 and you're like, this is never going to work. She did not have that. I've never met someone like her that trusted the process. So much. And she would tell people like in year 2 or 3, she was like, I'm building this business to sell. And so we're going to do this. And then by year 5, we're going to be here. Year 8, we're going to be here. Year 10, I think we're going to get like $200 million. And here's an example of what she said. When she originally took out, she had saved $10 million. She bought a piece of land and developed a home in the Dominican Republic for like $4 million in total. Sold that property after like 2 years to Albert Pujols for like $9 million. And I was like, that's crazy. You did half your net worth on this. She's like, yeah, well, I just like studied a bunch of experts. I read a ton of books and I just like felt like I knew how to do it. And I've never met someone who has such faith in the process. And I was so inspired by that. And now she's got over $100 million or around $100 million and she's investing in all these interesting deals. And she's like, yeah, well, you want to allocate 10% of your portfolio to this, this, and this. Because I need a little bit of a high-risk stuff in order to off-balance my conservative stuff. And that sounds very logical and academically that makes a ton of sense, but when 10% is $10 million and you're doing $2 million bets or whatever, that's a very nerve-wracking thing. But she was so good at dividing her emotion from like her logic side of her brain and trusting the process. I was incredibly inspired by this woman. You have to follow some of the stuff that this lady has to say. She's so interesting.
Also, she looks very cool. Got a cool haircut. She's like a walking brand.
She will kick your ass is the vibe that I get from her. She's a very strong looking woman.
Yeah, very cool. So crazy story. I didn't realize how big this was. I mean, it's crazy that there's a fitness chain this big, this successful that I just never heard of.
Dude, it's even bigger now, by the way. I believe— was it KKR? I think KKR bought it and now there's rumors that they're going to try to sell it now for $800 million. So her business, I guess it's not hers anymore, she sold it. In 2024, they're projected to do $150 million in revenue and $50 million in profit. And Anne on the pod, she was like, I have the most profitable fitness studio because we do, uh, we just kept it lean. Like, we just don't have too much excess stuff.
Well, it just seems like they must have figured something out on the marketing side that's, uh, they're just not spending a lot on marketing. We should, we should be like, and of course the annoying answer everyone, oh yeah, it's just got a lot of word of mouth. And it's like, God damn it. Word of mouth is like the worst answer to hear because you're like, great. Nothing I could do about that. Right? Like I have to go back to the drawing board and create a more viral concept. I have to create a more remarkable concept. I have to make my product so much better. It's like the last thing you want to hear as a marketer is, yeah, it's just really organic. It's like saying I was genetically blessed. Unfortunately, that's how it feels to me. Me at least on the other side whenever I hear that.
Well, we don't— on with the MoneyWise podcast, we don't talk too much about like getting customers, all that stuff. But we should have her on here because I would— I, I did like off air, I was like, how did you do that? And she goes, I am world-class at branding and community. That's what I do. I know how to do that. I, I was built to do that. And so she didn't tell me all the tactics, but I believe that's how it grew, that stupid answer of word of mouth. But we should actually have her on and ask her all about this. She's super fascinating. And if you Google her name, she, um, she's very transparent about finances because she's like, young women aren't taught this. And so I'm just going to like be transparent about this. So like she's under talked about, she's not talked about a lot.
I never heard, I never heard of her. I never heard of Solidcore. So super good. I'm glad you put her under my radar. This is really cool. The question I have is it seems like your takeaway was I've never seen somebody have so much, what'd you say? Like so much faith or what did you call it? Like first you said growth mindset, then you said trust the process, but okay. The business made $95,000 the first month. The process was trusted. What do you have to trust? It's working right away. Like, to me, trust the process is it's not working, it's not working, it's not working, it's not working. And then month 29, it finally turns the corner. That's trust the process.
But that's not how people truly feel in reality. So like with my, with The Hustle, when we were doing, when we crossed $1 million a month, I still felt like fairly uncertain. If you talk to, uh, I mean, I talked to, you talked to a lot of people. I talked to a lot of people. Like you could have a big business and you're still like, it's still teetering. I don't know if this is gonna work out. You know what I mean? You still have that feeling.
Yeah.
But you, you still kept going. It's not like you abandoned ship, right? So I think it's pretty, even if you have doubts, doubts to me, of course you're gonna have random doubts that creep in or you're gonna have some uncertainty. Will it, you know, will this work? If it starts working, will this last? Those are natural questions. I, I guess like, uh, I think a lot of what she did is awesome. And in fact, the first thing you said about having a growth mindset to me made a lot of sense as in, She just had the confidence and faith in herself to go do something completely different, put her entire life savings into it, and trusted in herself that she would make this work. I think maybe that's more what you mean.
No, I mean that. And like when I was asking her about new initiatives and things that she would get into, like she was like, well, I wanted to learn a little bit about stock investing. And like, so I started, I studied all the earnings per share and I learned what all that meant. Like I bought Nvidia a while ago and it worked out. And so I guess what I mean is she was quite good at acquiring information and then trusting that that information was good and trusting that the way she learned was good and trusting that the process that she learned about would give the outcome that hopefully she wanted.
Okay, that makes more sense to me. Okay, yeah, I like that. In fact, I had a kind of similar idea. So I'm writing this essay—
by the way, you, you had this in one of your emails, your, uh, uh, What's it called? Tuesday, Tuesday. Yeah. Where that guy Hoffman, his last name was Hoffman. Um, where he said something like no good business is a good business. Or what did he say?
Oren Hoffman. Yeah. He basically was like, I forgot the exact wording of the tweet, but it was every business looks like a shit show on the inside, the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones. Right.
When you, I think he said there's no such thing as a good business on the inside.
Yeah. Every business looks incredibly messy and like upside down on the inside. And I found that that's true, at least in my experience. Like, I've never been a part of a company where I'm like, wow, it feels buttoned up, it feels figured out, it feels like this is just firing on all cylinders, this is just a well-oiled machine.
No, Twitch was— Twitch, honestly, and this is going to sound a little bit bad, but you know when When Twitter started getting big and Zuck came out and it was a little bit of jealousy or haterade, but he was like, they drove a clown car into a gold mine. That was Twitch.
Wait, Zuck said that?
Yeah. You never heard this?
No, that's awesome.
It's one of the first non-politically correct things he ever said, which is like just the honest thing, which is these guys are driving. They drove a clown car into a gold mine. And Twitch very much was the same way, which was Twitch could get 100 things wrong internally, but it didn't matter because they had a network effect. They had a moat and they had basically, once you build a marketplace, once you get a marketplace to work, you can now screw up so many things and they just got more popular as gaming grew. So it was like, I would see just bullshit going on internally, just wasted, wasted efforts here, wasted efforts here, bad strategy here. And then COVID happens and everybody's at home playing video games online. Boom, business takes off and you see, you know, we're trying this thing to create growth, trying, trying this to create growth. Nothing is even working. Nobody has any fucking clue how to grow this thing. Fortnite becomes the biggest game in the world played by everybody. And Twitch grows like crazy on top of Fortnite because what Emmett and the team had done early on, they got right. And even then, probably, I'm sure I wasn't there, but I'm sure many things felt broken or unfigured out at that time, but they got the core thing right, which was They created the biggest marketplace of supply and demand of content creators for video gaming content and consumers. And that gave them the, the privilege, the right to be wrong. So they got to fire so many shots on goal after that, that didn't even have to work out, didn't have to be well executed because the more popular gaming got, the more people were online stream, you know, online, uh, being content creators, the bigger Twitch got. And, and so they were just, then the analogy we used internally was we don't create the waves, right? When every time somebody did the growth analysis, it's like all the things that caused growth were exogenous factors. It was not some feature we created that drove growth necessarily. It was the popularity of a specific game, or it was a new device gets released and now the new PlayStation drives, you know, a big boost in whatever, or the new gaming PCs, or the chips get better, which make it easier to stream while you're playing because the graphics cards can now handle both. And so there was always these exogenous things. And the analogy we used internally was we are the surfer. We are out there paddling, waiting for waves. And when the wave comes, it's our job to be ready to surf it and not wipe out. But let's be clear, we don't create the waves. And internally, we all wanted to create the wave because you want growth to be a button you can push. But in that business, that's just not how it worked. And by the way, a Twitch diehard person would totally disagree. I'm sure they would be, you know, shaking their fists saying, no, no, no, we, we were great internally. And, you know, we improved the conversion rate and the discovery rate and the retention rates and that, that all causes growth. So there is like a counterargument to it, but I think on the whole, I know what I saw. I know what was going on inside of there. It's not like I, by the way, that's what I thought I would find. I thought I would go from my messy startup where I'm an idiot and I created a huge mess over here and I got 20 people and I don't know how to do anything. Oh, I'm going to go to this company that got bought by Amazon. It's a multi-billion dollar company with seasoned executives. Now I'll go learn how a business is supposed to look on the inside. And instead I was like, man, this is not, not it.
We're on a tangent. What were originally, were you going to say? Do you remember?
Oh, I'm writing this essay called Who's Your Elon? And I wrote this because I have this philosophy that you are what you admire. So pick and choose what you admire because you will, your body will start to gravitate towards that. And I think as founders, the default, the factory setting that you get wired with when you decide I'm going to be a founder is cool. Then you should want to be Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, right? Those are the, that's the North Star. Would you agree for most people? Like it's just the default factory setting for entrepreneurs.
Yeah. And before Elon, it was Zuck.
And before Zuck, it was Steve Jobs. And before Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or whatever, like that's kind of like the transition here. And so Elon today, he's the GOAT and it makes sense. He's built badass companies that change the world. Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI, even actually he helped create Start. Uh, he's the richest entrepreneur in the world. He's the most famous entrepreneur in the world. He seems like a badass because he goes after these hard problems in these big markets. Uh, and he's just doing cool shit. Electric cars, launching rockets that will land themselves on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean. Like, he's incredible.
Convincing dozens of women to have his children.
And then convincing the rest of the public that it was cool, that he was just doing his part to save civilization. Instead of like just impregnating everybody around them. So he's incredible. But also I don't want to be him, right? Because like his family life is a mess. He seems super stressed. Like his schedule is not the schedule I would want. Like if you want those trade-offs, great, more power to you. It's not the trade-offs I would choose.
And so I think it is important to see when he tweeted out where Zuck was doing like the surfing thing on 4th of July and Elon was like, that's cute. I'm busy working.
Yeah, I prefer that's what he could have his parties on his yachts. I prefer to work. Oh my God. That was the lamest shit I ever heard. Also, somebody replied with a great tweet, a great thing. They, they posted the analytics of how much, how many tweets and likes he had done that month. And it's like, I prefer to work. And he's like tweeted and liked like 1,000 times that month. It's like, bro, you're not working. Yeah. Um, anyways, I, I think that, uh, Elon is great in many ways. If he's your, if he's your North Star, more power to you. Uh, but if he's not, it's important to pick who is your North Star. And I guess, uh, you were talking about this woman, Anne, and how we kind of admire that she was able to just like fearlessly go in and learn new things, have the confidence, learn just enough to be dangerous, but also move on and like have multiple chapters in her life. I realized that that was, that was my answer is somebody who's more of a polymath, somebody who has, they walked into Disneyland and they said, I want to ride all the rides. They don't spend all their time just like perfecting one ride. They were like, I only have a certain amount of time on this earth. I want to, I want to go ride all the rides.
Who are examples for you?
So like the historical example is like Ben Franklin. So Ben Franklin, like, you know, has a, he had a scientist era. He invents, like he invented the bifocals, the Franklin stove, and then he created the best newsletter of its time, right? He invented a newspaper, the, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and then he was a founding father and he was in politics and he helped write the Constitution and then also convinced many women to have his babies. Of course, that's a prerequisite. He then was the CEO of the US Postal System for a period of time. And then in music, he invented like a musical instrument. He had like, he influenced many people. Mozart, Beethoven said that Ben Franklin influenced them.
No way.
What a guy, right? Like what a fucking legend. And so I hear that and I'm like, dude, that sounds epic. Like if I could think of what does the top of the top look like, that's really cool. There's another, okay, modern day examples. We had Jesse Itzler on the podcast and when Jesse's episode, you can go watch it. It's, uh, I don't know what episode number, but go, just go on YouTube and just write Jesse Itzler, My First Million. This is a guy who was like, I'm going to be a rapper. He's a white Jewish rapper. And then he becomes a corporate jingle writer. Then he's an entrepreneur, creates a coconut water brand and a private jet brand. And then he's like, fuck it. I'm going to get really into health and fitness and running. And it becomes an endurance athlete. He lives in a monastery with monks. He has David Goggins come live in his house. He wrote books. He married Sarah Blakely. He's got 4 or 5 kids. Seems like a good dad. When I called him to prep for the pod, he was like wrangling and herding sheep, trying to get to the soccer game or soccer practice that day. And I just find that really interesting. People have had these multiple different arcs and careers in different zones and genres. There's a guy, Neil Centurion, who I really admire. He's in San Diego.
How do you spell his name?
Neil, and then Centuria is C-E-N-T-U-R-I-A. He's got a great book that is not popular, but I met him and he gave me a copy of his book. It's called I'm There for You, Baby. And, um, you know, Neil's story is like he was a Hollywood scriptwriter. Then to try to make a buck, he's like, dude, San Diego's booming. And he got into the real estate development game and built, helped like kind of fund and build a skyscraper in downtown San Diego. And then he met a kid in an elevator who had a good startup idea and he invested in it. It became Chegg. And then he started a dozen companies and some of them worked, some of them didn't. Some are in biotech, some are in consumer. Like he started a whole bunch of different things and he's into art. He's, you know, he's got multiple chapters. And when I met him, we went to his house and he's like, oh yeah, I'm writing this book now about this woman who created the biggest Ponzi scheme. And I think this should become a movie. And he was like, this guy's in his like 70s and he's just, he's still going. He's still got ideas and energy, energy and a zest for life. And he's like, doesn't count himself out of any pursuit. And I think I like that. I think I like people who don't count themselves out, who don't feel like I can't do it because I haven't done it. And that limiting belief is just one I don't want in my life.
If you Google this guy, there's not a lot of news or information out of him, but there is a San Diego Tribune article and its title is Why Having Fun Is Good for the Soul. Yeah, it's about him. I'm down with that. I'm down with that. I'm very down with that. Are you, have you seen the Ben Franklin TV show on Apple?
You know, I watched the trailer of it and then I just didn't feel hooked. Is it good? I should watch it.
If you're a history nerd, it's awesome. And okay, but he just fucking partied. He was like, like they're trying to convince the French to like join the American Revolution. And do you know that scene in The Office where Michael Scott and Jan go to this dinner at like an Apple Tuesday to convince that man to do their business and Jan wants to get down to business.
And Michael talks for like 2 hours, right?
Yeah. He's like, hey, you guys want to get some baby back ribs? And he starts singing the baby back ribs song and they all get drunk and he's partying. And then at the end he does the deal and Michael's like, I fucking told you, Jan, this is how it works, right? That's what Ben Franklin did. He basically went over there with James Madison and James is all buttoned up and they're like, let's do our thing. And he's like, no, dude, we're going to party. Let's go to the parties. And they get wasted. And like there's scenes where like him and other diplomats are like pissing together on a, uh, when they're like drunk at a party and like while they're peeing, he's like, hey, so the American Revolution, you know, we could use your help. Like, it's things like that. Like, you see that he was like a pretty smooth dude, and it's pretty awesome. Um, it's a great show. Uh, and I thought his biography by Walter Isaacson— I thought it fucking sucked. I'm one of the few people that thought it sucked, but his autobiography is pretty good. But yeah, Ben Franklin's all right.
He's the man. Um, okay, what else we got?
Uh, I'll do one more quick thing. This is just a quick funny thing. Ah, I don't even want to say it's funny. Interesting. So Rejuvenation Olympics. Do you remember when we talked about that?
Is that the steroids allowed Olympics? Is that what that one is?
No, that's the Enhanced Games, which is also—
Yeah. So the leaderboard, we originally found Brian that I take pride in that I've said that many times. We kind of got, we were on a couple people early. Brian's one of them.
Dude, you keep saying it and it actually destroys the value that we had in finding him early. 'Cause it's kind of like Jason Calacanis, the third investor in Uber. It's like, it would've been cool if you're like, you know, Jason was, if somebody else says, you know, Jason was actually the third investor in Uber. But when Jason says, you know, I was the third investor in Uber 1,000 times, it's like, dude, we get it. It's too, you're now you're overcompensating. I think that's what's happening here with, uh, we discovered Bryan Johnson.
Look, I don't have that many discoveries, so I feel good about this particular one. Uh, but Bryan Johnson, we talked about him a bunch of times. We had him on the podcast. You went to his house. A really interesting guy. Originally when we talked to him, we brought up the Rejuvenation Olympics and we talked about it and this website was super janky. But now if you go to— it's much better. It still honestly sucks. I just DM'd him and I'm like, dude, your website, like, I don't know how to use it, but it's a lot better than before. Rejuvenation Olympics is this leaderboard where, uh, before he didn't have a partnership, but he would say like, go and buy this like $800 blood work and upload your results here. And do it— if you do it 3 times, we take the average and we're going to create this thing called the Rejuvenation Olympics, where they use this one blood work to decide how slow you're aging. And so the people who are aging the slowest based off this— I think it's True Diagnostics, uh, based off of their test, uh, they have this thing called like a Dune Pace score, and it like measures—
let's just explain the simple thing. Normally you would expect In 1 year of chronological time, you would age 1 year of biological time. So the idea with the Rejuvenation Olympics is in 1 year of chronological time, so 1 calendar year, do you, can you age less than 1 year? Can your body age less than 1 year of kind of like cell damage basically? Yeah. And the top guy here, his average pace is 0.56. So every year he's only aging half a year.
Yeah. And so it's like an interesting thing and it's actually a super interesting business for a few, a few reasons. One, he actually has a partnership with True Diagnostics, but in order to do the, to be verified on rejuvenationolympics.com, you have to take the average of 3 tests. Each test is very expensive. And then in order to stay on the leaderboard, you have to like continue doing averages. So you have to like do this freaking test every quarter. So actually the expenses add up.
But True Diagnostics, $500. Living forever, priceless.
Well, it definitely has a price if you look at some of these guys, because if you look at like the— you— what I, I got curious and I went through the list of the people who are top on the Rejuvenation Olympics, and most of them are like, like you'll see like, what's that dude's name, Peter Diamandis or whatever, remember? Like some rich guy. Bryan Johnson is near the top, rich guy. It's all like these like healthy people or healthy rich people or who are spending a lot of money, or it's like a biohacker. So like someone whose like job is to do this stuff and they like blog about it and they make money.
I'm just going to say this right now, Brian, I love you, but I will not use this website until you link their names to an Instagram. This website is useless to me unless Craig McCall, I need to be able to click and go see who this guy is. I can't use the site until that happens. That is the only feature I need.
We are on the same page, my friend, because if you look at the Instagram of the link, So there's a woman named Julia Gibson Clark. So roughly 8,000 people have like done this test. And, uh, and she, at the time when I was doing research, if you go to view all rankings, let's see, is she still up top?
She's like in the top 8.
Yeah. Okay. So number 2, I did research on this woman. She's just a lady. She's just a lady who's like fit. And someone else picked up on this and they're like, who's this Julie Gibson Clark woman? And they did this article about her and she's like, I make $100 grand a year. Like I exercise 5 days a week, but like. And I just eat vegetables, but like, I'll just go for a walk sometimes, or I'll run. Like, I just live like a decently healthy lifestyle. And she's like number 6 or number 7 on this list. And I thought it was awesome that this 57-year-old woman who's not a very wealthy person, who isn't like a professional at doing all this shit, she's just living like a pretty well-balanced, it seems, life. She's number 7 and she's kicking ass. And if you click on some of the photos, very attractive woman. Like she looks like a very healthy woman. Doesn't look like she's got any like plastic surgery. She makes $100 grand a year. She eats vegetables for snacks. So like instead of eating like potato chips, she'll just eat carrot sticks and she takes just a couple vitamins in the morning and that's basically it. And she actually, she lifts weights twice a week, twice a week, and she goes for runs twice a week. And then the other day she's just walking a lot, right? And she's killing it, by the way.
I have to apologize to everybody. I did an interview with Bryan Johnson probably like a year ago now. I don't know how long it's been. It's been like 6 months, been like a year. I went to his house. I did a 3-hour interview with him. We had professional cameramen. It was great. And I was so excited about it. We came back. I started editing all— I did a bunch of interviews in LA and I started editing one by one. And I, you know, I edited 5 of them. We released them. And the Bryan Johnson one was kind of like my finale. And I was so excited about it, but I was also like, it's a kind of like higher stakes. And, um, higher stakes almost because I thought it could be great, but it would require more time and patience in the edit, partly because of the way we filmed it with multiple cameras and whatnot. And I put it off. I got busy and I started doing other things. And then I just didn't do it. I didn't release the episode. And so this earlier this week, I asked Diego, I said, Diego, um, it is now out of my hands. I said, I'm giving you this episode. You are going to edit this and we're going to release this even though it's been a year. Better late than never. And I said, I have been the blocker of this because I initially, I was a perfectionist about it, which is weird because I'm never a perfectionist. I just really wanted it to be good. And then later I was like, well, now it's been 7 months. This is some of the stunning things he's talking about don't even make sense anymore. Um, but, but whatever, I'm going to, I told him, I said, you don't have to ask me about it, just edit it and make it good. And then we're going to release it. So I will, I will right my wrong and, uh, better late than never here, dude. No one.
Would like, no one cares or would know that it's a year old, right?
Well, there's some things he says that maybe he's like, oh, we're going to launch this. And it's like, it's actually been launched now or whatever. Like, you know, a year later, uh, you know, he's reversed aged. He looks younger now. So, you know, he might throw people off.
Uh, would you want to look like him?
Um, would I want to look like him? Yeah.
I mean, just shredded.
Like when you say like exactly like him, like I don't look like me anymore or just like my body, your body. Oh, hell yeah, dude. All he needs is a tan.
He looks so shredded that he's got an insane body.
He just needs a tan. But actually it's smart that he doesn't do the tan because like what I've realized is that Bryan Johnson is a marketing genius and no shit, whoever he's hired to run his Twitter account, which I don't think it's him because his personality is he's a really nice guy, but he's not like super he's not like super memey, but his Twitter game is now like really good and smart and like memes well. I think he hired a meme dealer and he's got somebody doing his Twitter, uh, cause he's, it's very smart what he's doing.
Um, no, he seems like a guy who could like study it and like implement.
And by the way, I'll put one thing in the ground. I might be fooled by this. Who knows? But, uh, there's a lot of people who are like, oh, he's just doing this to make money. No, no, no. He made a lot of money. He, I believe he did this because It gave his life purpose after he had already made a bunch of money. I agree. And it gave him a purpose, a higher mission, a more ambitious thing to do. And he got really into it. Um, and I think he's 100% genuine. And even if he released products that are associated with it, I think it's only to help this cause. Like, and I'm normally very skeptical. Like when most people do things and they say they're mission driven, I'm like, cool. Is mission code for money driven? Like, what are you talking about here? Um, in this case, I actually think Bryan Johnson is one of the few truly mission driven people. In this. And I think a lot of people, the more popular he gets, more people will want to tear him down. And I'm just going to put out my position, which is I believe that he is super genuine about everything that he's doing. Meaning, I believe he's genuine in his intent, and I believe his, he is actually mission-driven when he's doing this.
Does anyone doubt that?
Oh, there's a lot of people who are like, Theo, like, he named his olive oil like Snake Oil because so many people were like calling him a snake oil salesman because they're like, oh, you're just trying to sell us supplements and pills and, and blah, blah, blah. You know, the one thing I think that might happen is I don't think he, I think he might be more experimental in everything that he's doing and not publish everything. Um, I don't have any reason to say that. I just, I wouldn't be surprised if that was true because I think he's truly going to be on the cutting edge. And also there's some responsibility in what you put out there to others. And maybe he waits until something is proven to be effective or safe before he tells people he's been experimenting with it. I think that might be true.
I just think that you have to be really rich to tweet out how many boners you're getting in the middle of the night. And like he does this whole experiment where he is trying to ex, uh, improve how much erections he gets in the middle of the night.
And he's like, the only wearable worth wearing. Have you seen the wearable? It's like a ring. It's like a little, like, uh, Fitbit. That's how they measure. 'Cause, 'cause that was my question. When he started putting in the data, I was like, is there someone watching? How do you know? Well, how are you measuring this? And then he showed the device.
It's like, it's like a little rubber band around a stack of dimes.
Exactly. Like, uh, that's cool, but why is it so big? I don't think I'm gonna need all that. Is there one that fits on a baby carriage? Yeah.
Is this— is this a bracelet? How does it work when you measure it on my wrist?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, if you made it this far, you got one of our, uh, rare dick jokes. Um, all right, is that it? That's the pod?
That's it.
All right, all right.
I feel like I could 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.