3 businesses we think are about to blow up

We're going back to the roots a little bit with MFM. Everyone says they want more ideas. I've got two of them.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel. Okay,

so everyone's lonely. We know this. I want to talk to you about two different radical ideas. If

you're listening to this podcast, we know. You know, we know.

Well, these 2 ideas I've already been interested in, and I was just trying to find an excuse to tie them together. I'm trying to make this cohesive, but they're 2 great ideas. And we have a precedent of getting this first one somewhat-ish right. We have predicted a couple like biohacking things— not predicted, that takes too much credit, but like we talked about it fairly early in the adoption cycle. Would you agree?

We're basically Big Pharma. We have predicted and developed several several pharmaceutical drugs on this podcast. Would you like to go down memory lane of a couple of them?

I don't actually know all the ones that we did. Obviously, uh, GLP-1s, tesamorelin. What else were we talking about for a long time?

You, you've brought up GLP-1s kind of before they even got to market, before Ozempic ever got to market, uh, TRT businesses. And you were toying around with the idea of like, hey, I really believe there's a big business to be built here. We didn't end up building one, but we both invested in one. One of the ideas. Well, we invested in one that worked. You also talked about sperm freezing, not just egg freezing. And I think that's also become quite a big deal. We've talked about IVF fairly early on and the different business opportunities that exist in IVF. I don't think anyone's actually done those yet. The idea there is to build a trusted brand in the IVF world, a chain. The Chick-fil-A of IVF, as I like to say. A place you trust. Okay, but go on. What do you got now?

So I was scrolling on Instagram the other day and I saw 2 things. One, a new version, or rather another health trend that I think is going to be popular. And 2, probably the best way to position this new trend I've ever seen. So Palmer Lucky, CEO, founder of Anduril, also started Oculus. He was at this conference and someone said something to him, a question that I tend to hate, and he's one of the few people I've ever seen to answer this question in a great way. The question was basically, Palmer, if you were starting from zero and you had nothing, no connections, what would you do? What would you work on? And he had the best answer.

If you were starting with zero today, some bet you made wiped you out, you gotta start again. you didn't have your network, you didn't have your wealth, what would you do today? Palmer?

So I've heard about this, it's really critical, right? So, you know, people sort of drift apart over time. Oxytocin is safe, but it's—

It's safe if it's understood. We use it on mothers and infants to have better bonding.

It's the bonding hormone.

That's right, it's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and there's— it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Supply right now. And if you do that, maybe you won't, maybe you won't die alone.

Okay, so let's recap what we just heard here. So Palmer Luckey, tens of billionaire guy, very successful. He said, if I had to work on something again, it'd be saving America from the tragedy of divorce. And that would be oxytocin doping for marriage counseling. If you do this, maybe you won't die alone. How great is that? Is that brilliant? Is that the—

Dude, you, you are absolutely right. Most of the time when you ask somebody like, what would you do if you started up again? They'll just give you the most vague hand-wavy. He immediately had not only a great original novel surprising idea, but he had the pitch ready to go. Locked and loaded. The best.

Right. Yeah. Like if I have a really solid dap up with somebody, perfect hand clap, I feel a small surge of this male, this pair bonding chemical released in my body. I can almost hear it when it happens.

Or when you look your dog in the eye. So there are studies that show when you look at your dog and make eye contact with your dog, you release a little bit of oxytocin.

Dude, when is that? Have you, have you recently just had like silent eye contact? Very like you're 4 inches away from your wife and you just hold eye contact for like 30 seconds to a minute. Have you done this?

No, but your friend Chris Williamson put out this thing where it was like questions to ask spouses to like make you bond. And like part of it was looking at eye contact together. And I told my wife, I was like, hey, I wanna try this. And it's like, so we have like, we have like a scheduled time to do this.

I'm gonna get— it's a little bit weird, but if you wanna be adventurous tonight, the eye contact thing, I could think of is, is it awesome? I think it's full-on eye contact.

Do you do it?

Hey, I wanna tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable, uh, ideas that we have brainstormed, and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. Yeah, I've done this before and my wife literally starts crying.

It would make me cry.

Within 30 seconds she starts crying. It's like the most bizarre thing to me because I don't feel the urge to cry. I did. It's, there's definitely an intensity. to it when you're just quiet and you're looking straight into the eyes of somebody who you know really well. I'm going to do it today. I'm going to do it tonight. In fact, that's everybody's homework tonight. 30 seconds, maybe a minute if you're feeling freaky, of straight up eye contact.

Yeah. It doesn't matter if it's your spouse or a roommate, just the—

or the mirror. If you're really, you know, if you're really in one of the Spotify Wrapped top 1% listeners.

Well, one of the reasons why you feel that way is because of the chemical or the hormone oxytocin.

This is isn't this also why like skin-to-skin contact with a baby, like kind of you hold the baby on your chest. They make you like take your shirt off in the hospital.

Yeah, amongst amongst other things.

You laugh.

Yeah, yeah. That I mean I do that with my kids. I'll be holding them and I'll take my I pop the top. I take the shirt off and I and I like I want to hold them because it feels special. You bond more. And and what I didn't realize is that I if you if you Google buy oxytocin. You'll get like, um, a bunch of interesting websites. They're usually called like something sciences or something pharmaceuticals where you can buy it in like a pure, I don't know if it's pure. I'm not using these words correctly, but from a, from an idiot's point of view, like a pure block of it. It's a powder.

A stick of butter? What do you mean? Like it looks like a nasal spray.

Okay. So here's what I'm getting at. It's, it's like a, it's like a, uh, a powder, but now a whole sale. Yes. You can buy a ton of it. And what a lot of companies I'm noticing they're slowly getting into, if you go to Bluechew, which sells erectile dysfunction medicine, if you, if you go to Hims, I imagine they might start selling this. But you're noticing is that this fringe thing is being turned into a nasal spray because that's the only way that you could take it. You could either take it through that or I think like a, like a gas mask. You can't inject it and it's not a pill, but they're starting to sell this. And my prediction—

You do need a prescription for it, it looks like.

Not to buy on some of these websites. Like, you can just— you can click and order it right now. Yes.

So you, you, you sent this over, and this immediately got my brain— like, I feel like my brain overheated for a minute. Because when you hear a genuinely interesting, great idea that you don't understand fully, you don't know, you haven't researched it, you don't know the efficacy of it, you don't know the safety of it, so that— those are all the caveats.

Yeah, but by the way, it could, it could still be bullshit. Like, right? Like, this is totally understudied. So let's preface everything by saying that.

Well, we should explain the prairie, prairie vole thing, uh, the study that they did. So most animals are not monogamous, right? But there are a few that are, that have an intense, you know, bond, uh, a monogamy. And so they've studied these prairie voles where once the male and female mate, and they bond and they spend enough of this brief time together, they will be monogamous for life. And they will not only not go with other partners, they'll even attack if another— like, if a male is there and a female comes, he will kind of push her away. And then they did studies on this in a very small sample size. So not like a robust study, like a maybe bullshit study where they did this with humans and they had a placebo and they had humans that would take oxytocin and they would see what would happen. And, you know, for example, in one of them, they would have an attractive female come in, and if the person had had the oxytocin bonding with their partner, they would sit like an extra 15 centimeters apart from the attractive female. They would create distance between them and the attractive female, or they would spend less time looking at them, things like that. Now, again, small studies, but it's very interesting that most people, we like to think that we're in control of our mind, that we're in control of how we're going to feel and how we're going to act. And so I'd say there's one group of people that think they can think their way to a behavior. There's another group of people that would be feelings-based, and they say, well, it's not about logic and thinking your way there. It's a feeling thing. But feelings to them are this amorphous sort of mystical thing. It's just something that happens about— it's like the idea of a soul. Whereas in truth, basically, a feeling is a chemical brain state that you're in, and then you have a conscious readout of it that says, oh, I really like the way that— that means I'm in love, right? This brain state, this way I feel when I'm doing this or when I'm with this person, that means I love this. That means I hate this. That means I'm disgusted by this, right? So we have a kind of a readout of the chemical state. And if we could find safe ways to alter or, or grease the wheels on certain chemical states, that's really interesting to me. And the reason why is these, all these ideas sound a little far-fetched before we had the miracle weight loss drugs, right? Like there used to literally be a phrase that was like, there's no magic pill for weight loss, but now there is. There's literally a magic pill for weight loss. Well, what if there's a magic pill for, for for love or for being bonded with your partner. I find that really interesting. And then I think further, the example you just gave of people who are autistic or have Asperger's using this to bridge maybe a social gap that they have is really interesting. And when I was reading about this just before the podcast, you mentioned this idea and I'd never heard of it. One of the ways that it was described was It's like a highlighter. So it's not that, like, it's not a love potion. It's not like you take something and you immediately fall in love with the first person you see or anything like that. What it does is it highlights or amplifies what you feel. So they did studies where if somebody was domestically abused, they wouldn't— this wouldn't, like, override that and make them feel love towards the person. It would heighten their sense of distance between that person. So it was taking whatever the social feeling you have underneath And just amplifying it. So if it was bad, it would amplify that you want to get away from that person. And if it was good, the warmth, it would amplify the warmth for that person. So I find that really— I find that angle of it to be really promising because that would be life-changing for people who have trouble connecting socially and in relationships, right?

Yeah, it's pretty magical. Well, the idea is magical. And I was listening to someone else, some other doctor talk about it. And he was basically saying, he was like, look, like there's not like that much data to back this up. So it's not necessarily that it's disproven, but it's also not proven yet. But he was like, we've been doing some small stuff where we would give it to like small teams. And he didn't explain what a team was, but it could have been like coworkers or even a sports team, whatever, people working together. And he was like, they worked together so much better when they all had small doses of oxytocin. And I found that to be really fascinating. And I like ideas that seem very freakish and strange. Like imagine walking into your office or going to a team retreat, which I just had, and everyone has to do oxytocin in advance. That's very weird, right? That's off-putting. That's strange.

Yes.

But like, maybe, maybe that's kind of interesting. And so I went and texted—

Adam Neumann somewhere is like, yes, not weird. We are doing that.

But I just, I, I think it's interesting. I, I think this is really interesting. And I tweeted this out. I'm like, who has done this? And someone was like, don't do stuff that you read on forums. And I'm like, yeah, don't do it because we are talking about it or because someone else is talking about it. But there's some interesting signal there, particularly from a marketing standpoint, but potentially for like a, a selfish standpoint of like, maybe, maybe there is something here. 'Cause I've seen this enough times that when people that we call strange where they're doing something, there's something there and there's a subreddit. Where these guys— there's one guy who had Asperger's and he was talking about— I keep calling it Asperger's. Is it Asperger's? Am I saying it wrong? Sorry, guys. I think

there's a P in there somewhere between the ass and the burger that you're saying.

Well, I'm the type that I have an initial reaction to these things. Like, I don't, I don't do drugs. I don't even go to Burning Man because I'm scared of, like, you know, just new, new experience. I'm very happy in my life, and it's kind of like to chill, uh, you know, in a happy little bubble. I've, I always have a, a kind of fear-based reaction to things that sound weird, unfamiliar, or like, you know, chemically altering. And I think there's some good, there's definitely some good in that, right? There's, there's obviously you can protect yourself that way. But it's also over time I've seen how things that initially sounded very fringe can become very normal in not that long of a time. When you years ago were like, oh, I hurt my Achilles, and so I injected BPC, whatever, 157, and it's healing my Achilles. And I'm like, that's a crazy thing to do. You're like, no, it's the Wolverine stack or whatever, right? Yeah. I'm like, yeah, even more reason not to take this. Turns you into Wolverine or whatever. I don't know. I don't want that. And now peptides are shockingly common. And same thing recently, a psychedelics company just got acquired for $3 billion by Eli Lilly. Did you see this?

No. What was it called?

I have— I texted Jack Smith, our resident biohacker, and I said, have you ever taken this? And he said, no, but one time an intern at my company got effed up on it after he took some. And then once I took a taxi driver And I was telling the taxi driver about it and he asked to be paid in it. That was his— so the opportunity-sniffing bloodhounds, something's there. So that's cool. That was one of mine. But I think that's interesting. And so this is, this is one of those things where we're going to have to look back in 12 months and be like, were we, were we on that or not?

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Okay, second one. Have you ever heard of the Knights of Columbus?

No. Is this that medieval play that you told me about once? No,

that's not—

Like, where you go, it's like a buffet? What is that called?

No. What is Good Sam?

Good Sam is an RV owner membership. So it's all based around a shared identity and community, and they monetize through financial stuff. So Good Sam is if you own an RV, you spend a couple hundred dollars a year and you get some better insurance for your RV. But you also get like, you get discounts to like campgrounds and things like that.

Okay.

You're saying you basically take a deep interest-based community.

Yeah.

100%. And I think now's an interesting time because the loneliness thing, it's quite easy to, like, capitalize on that. And 2, these things last forever. What do you think?

Well, I mean, I've never heard of this. I have heard of healthcare shares. I mean, I guess in general that's a thing, right? Like there's a whole health insurance, life insurance model that's kind of like this is usually religious, I think, is the general way these go. And I never understood if this is just some tax loophole type stuff, or if there's a better value prop for these things. Do you, do you know a lot about these healthcare share programs?

For some, it depends what your offering is. For some of them, there is tax benefits. So there's some like weird rules around if you are a membership and you are considered a, I think they call it a, a mutual benefit membership where like everyone gets the same benefits. You do get, but you don't have to pay taxes on, I think it's the, the investment gains of your premium, something that. There is some tax advantages for sure, but that's not required in order to make this awesome.

So, so I'm looking at this now. So, so it looks like these healthcare share programs are often like, instead of paying into your— paying, you know, $2,000 a month to Blue Cross, you pay the same $2,000 a month, or maybe even a little bit less. You pay maybe $1,000 a month into a healthcare share program. And now if anybody in the community has that $40,000 surgical bill, The group coordinates to get the money paid out to that person who needs it. But I think there's some weird stuff where, like, legally they're not obligated to pay it. It's like a high trust type of situation, but like not contractual in the same way that health insurance might be. Although people who have had trouble getting health insurance to pay for things that they think should be covered probably would disagree that that is any more likely to be paid out, is probably a fair— Fair point. Fair criticism.

But what's going on here? First of all, health insurance is like a whole other thing where I'm like, I, I don't know if I would touch that. That's very messy. But the majority of these businesses, they are not insurance companies. They are partners with someone else who does it and they get a more tailored plan.

So, so the Knights of Columbus, they just have all the money and the members and then they go to who?

Knights of Columbus might be one of the few that does it. Maybe because they're big enough now. But like AARP, if you know AARP, So AARP does billions of dollars a year in revenue. AARP is an association of retired people. I think it's if you're above 50 or 60, you automatically get a letter from AARP that says, hey, come join AARP. You'll get our magazine, you can come to some of our events and you'll get a discount on your health insurance. And they partner with United. And so they are not— they license their name. So they are the trusted brand and something like the marketing channel, but they do not actually provide the health insurance. But they're a partner. And so they aren't actually running that.

Well, these, these faith-based businesses are very interesting. So I just did an interview with the guy behind Angel Studios. So Angel is probably the 10th biggest studio in the world, and you've never heard of it. And it's basically all values-based content, they call it, which is like 1 out of every 10 of their movies or TV shows is religious. Like, it'll be like, uh, the Jesus— like Game of Thrones for— but the, but the book underlying book is, uh, the New Testament. And it's like called The Chosen or Chosen, something like that. It's like a show about Jesus. And he said 200 million people have watched that show.

What?

Um, it's like, it's like on Amazon Prime. It's like one of the, one of the most watched shows ever in the history of television is that show. It's on 7— it's on the 7th season, and they helped produce the first 3 seasons of that. But they make all kinds of movies and shows, and their community is basically 3 million members who want content that's going to have no cursing, no drinking, no drugs, stuff like that. And also just heroes, like good people doing good things are in the movie. So it can't be just like a dark film where everybody's kind of bad, right? Or everybody's flawed and messed up and it's just a bunch of messed up people living together, right? They're trying to avoid that type of content. So like, for example, they have one movie right now called The Runner. If you watch the trailer for it, it's Owen Wilson and, um, this guy Alan, whatever, Richardson, something like that. And basically the premise of the thing is they're delivering an organ donor, like their organ donor, uh, van. They're like driving this, this liver, and suddenly like 3 cars like pull up in front of it and they have guns and they're like, um, how much does this liver go for on the black market? And they're like, a million dollars. And they're like, oh shit, we gotta get outta here. And they—

Dude, I saw that trailer last night in a movie and I, in my head I was thinking, there's like 18 guys like trying to kidnap this, this body part for only a million dollars. It's crazy. Like they did so much work for— I, I— What

kind of margins is this, is this operation running?

I just, that doesn't, that doesn't seem worth it, right? Like in the movie they're like blowing stuff up.

Have you seen the cost of ammunition lately?

They definitely spent more than a million to, to get— yeah, I saw that.

To get the liver.

But the, um, and so what about it?

Well, the idea— so, but this, this business is a juggernaut. They're doing $400+ million a year in ARR.

$450 million in ARR. It's a public company. You can see their, their, their data. And the way they did it was they basically said they had a worldview. In fact, the guy who started it, he's this epic marketer. who did the marketing behind like Poo-Pourri and Squatty Potty. He was like one of these like really viral marketers, you know, like Dollar Shave Club. Like they would make videos like that. Dude,

there's like a whole like Mormon cabal of these like really good marketers up there in Salt Lake. And they, they, all those companies I think you named are either Mormon-based or like some affiliation and they're really good at marketing.

So this guy's a Latter-day Saint and, you know, so what he did was he was like tired of looking at like YouTube videos where, you know, your kids, you never know what you're going to get when your kids click on YouTube. Like they can get to They're 2 clicks away from watching somebody, like, you know, smoke meth. And so he's like, you know, that's not great. So he created this, like, filter. And because the project didn't even start as a real business, he literally just took a movie. I think it was like Cinderella Man. It would wipe out all of the cursing, the sex scenes, the drug scenes, but it would leave the rest of the movie. And so it was like, you know, the gluten-free movie, basically.

And so he creates this filter and he publishes it. Uh, he publishes the movie and immediately gets sued and he ends up having to like pay $10 million in a lawsuit somewhere along the way. But he, this tool and these movies started attracting, um, a lot of people. So like 100,000 people eventually wanted like the service. They then started doing this thing where like you would go rent, like technically you would rent the DVD for a dollar. And then that gave his group the, like, permission to, like, wipe out all the scenes and then give it back and give you the streaming version of it or something like that. Like, created this whole loophole to try to make this business work and finally said, all right, I'm tired of getting, like, sued by the, by the movie industry because they don't like that we're doing this. Why don't we just make our own movies and our own TV shows that just have, like, out of the box are clean, you know, better for you?

Did he raise funding?

How did you meet this guy?

Ben met him somewhere at a barbecue or something like that. And was, you know, Ben knows that I've been, um, you know, curious about the movie and TV industry and making a movie. And he said, you know, you should talk to this guy. He's done it. You know, he went from no experience in the movie business to now doing almost half a billion dollars a year in revenue for their movie, kind of, kind of their like values-based A24, right? Like,

Do you know anything about— I saw a movie last night. I went and saw the Chris Hansen movie. You know what that is?

Catch a Predator? Yeah.

Yeah. He's got a movie? It's about him that he doesn't like.

Didn't he get canceled also or something though?

I think he was cheating on his wife. I don't think he was a predator, but I don't think he was breaking the law, but I think he was doing not good stuff. That's, that's part of the movie is that he was, uh, while he was doing this, he wasn't like a good husband basically. And it's called Primetime. It was pretty great. Um, and it's got Robert Pattinson. It was awesome. It's an A24 movie. And every great trailer leading up to the movie, uh, was A24. I don't really know anything about A24 other than Scott Belsky, um, who, who I have a man crush on, was a tech guy, is now working there. Do you know anything about A24?

Well, what do you want to know? I know some things about A24, but I'm not an expert.

How on— how does someone start a studio? Like, because it seems like they came out of nowhere. It seemed like there was a startup at first. And if I remember correctly, their movies early on were kind of kind of dumb or artsy. Like, they weren't like mainstream movies, but now it seems like everything they do, I want to see it.

No, what are they?

It's like males under 30, females under 30, males over 30, females over 30 is whatever, a simplified version of that. But it's basically The Big Short. If both of us said, like, yo, do you like The Big Short? I love The Big Short. Well, we love The Big Short because we're in one of those quadrants and it hits for us. But guess who it doesn't hit for? It doesn't hit for, like, women over 40 in the same way as it does for men in their kind of 20s to 40s. And so the highest kind of potential for a film is something that satisfies all 4 quadrants. Harry Potter right now, it's like if you go, you know, the new HBO series for Harry Potter, they'll put $1 billion into this because they know that millennials who read it growing up are now 30, 40, 50, you know, 50 years old. They like it, but so do kids still. And so you're going to get this huge demographic. The TAM is really large. And so what happened was studios became quite risk-averse and they started gravitating towards sequels, superhero films, and other things. A24, that created an opportunity for folks like A24 who could go pick up at pretty low cost and pretty uncompetitively all the other films that were being ignored. All, what are the great films that are being ignored right now? And so what they found was that these independent directors were creating really interesting things that could be produced on a fairly low budget, had pretty low expectations because there was not a lot of demand in Hollywood for their, their product. And so they started creating cool, edgy— they're making stuff nobody else was making. So they were like differentiated out of the box.

Do you remember the, the early movies? It looks like, um, like it was like the movie The Room, which I saw. It was pretty awesome. Um, I don't know some of the other earlier ones though. Do you?

Whoa. So the $14 million, does that include the actor's salary?

Everything? Yeah. Okay. Production costs.

So it's $54 million all in for this.

All in. So, so, but, but this is very common. I was talking to a friend who made a movie. And I was like, it'd been 3 or 4 years since he had first told me about the idea to when it came out. And I was like, damn, that takes forever. But I guess that's just the creative process. And he's like, do you know how long filming takes for a movie? I was like, no. He goes, 30 days, 37 days for us. I was like, you shot the whole thing in 37 days? He goes, yep, end to end, 37 days. And that's complete. I was like, was that fast? He goes, no, that's normal. 30 days. That's how long it normally takes to shoot these things.

Is that— now the editing takes a long time.

Post-production. What's that?

A normal movie can only take 30 or 60 or 90 days.

The actual shooting of the, the filming of the movie.

Wow.

So you spend time like writing, getting it funded. That could take like years sometimes to get it like it, to get it to the first day one of principal production. And then afterwards you have to do all the other like mixing, mastering, color correction, like all that stuff. That could take time. The edit can take a lot of time. And then you have the marketing and distribution. So the whole thing takes years, but the making of the movie, like the, the actual like, hey, lights, camera, action, go say your lines. That thing's like 30 days, which is insane to me. Same thing with cost. Like, uh, I think the Grand Theft Auto games, they would spend like a couple hundred million making the game, like years of development and engineering time and animation and all that stuff. But then they would spend equally like hundreds of millions on marketing. Uh, and like, uh, maybe not Grand Theft Auto specifically, but video game for the video game industry is very common to do that. So for movies and video games, which are 2 of the kind of like biggest, you know, parts of the American economy, they spend more money on marketing than they do on actually making the product, which is, some people would say it's kind of sad, but it's kind of crazy. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe 7 or 8 businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? Uh, I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. Uh, one click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com/personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Column and A members FDIC.

This business is foreign to me. I definitely— we should do a whole episode

Yeah. That profit needs to cover 6 flops.

Is like a 2-point-something X return.

That's normal. What was surprising to me was that the one or two things that hit really big, your biggest hit I would've just expected to be much more than like a 2.5x return. I would've thought it's like a, like a, in his case, like a book. Yes, you're right. Most books fail. Sure. But when a book hits, like The Subtle Art hit and you sell 10, 20 million copies, well, that book costs almost nothing to print. And so they're printing money when it hits. And, um, that's what I was surprised at. You know, like in startup investing, like you get a 50x, 100x, a 200x, a 1,000x return when you hit. And I was surprised that the movie business isn't like that, uh, or at least my layman's understanding from a few of his, a few of his examples and looking at their business.

Yeah. And it doesn't seem like it's a fun business to be in right now.

But I think there's some, uh, tax advantages there. I get pitched this all the time and I never, like, I get these emails and I never like actually seriously read them. But isn't there something where if you fund a movie, there's some type of, like, you can depreciate or something weird?

But it's, uh, it's not that good. Like, uh, you can, it's a, you can write it off, but it has to be, it has, the thing has to go into production. So it's not like you could just like say you're doing it. And like, get it, you have to actually spend the money. The money has to go into the project and the project has to actually go get, start, you know, day one of production. They changed the rules on this. And so it has to actually get, get made. And if there's no return, well, yeah, you might've saved money in taxes, but you lost your entire principal. You know what I mean? Like, if you have a million dollars in, maybe you get a $300K write-off, but you might lose your million dollars. You'll probably lose your million dollars.

I didn't think it was going to take the entire episode to give a shout out to Grindr, by the way. What? They listened to the— so we had the—

Are you wearing a— are you wearing a Grindr vest?

Dude, they listened to the episode that we had with the founder, the former owners of Grindr. Great episode. Did not hit in terms of YouTube. Wonderful episode with Rick Marini when we talked about Grindr and how they, like, turned the business around. They decided to send me some merch, and it's kind of the least gay merch ever. It's It's an arctic vest. Like, I wanted something a little bit more, like, with some pizzazz.

Like a scarf?

Yeah, I don't know, like something. Like, this is— this is way too straight for me. I wanted something a little bit more gay. I thought it'd be more enjoyable. But I appreciate the love, Grindr. I just wish that, uh, you'd lean in a little bit.

Grindr, where's my puffy vest? It's a hot collab. Grindr MFM.

Well, that's it. That's the pod.

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 a road less traveled, never looking back.

All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School.

It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Siu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, This is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.