We Bet This App Idea Could Be Bigger Than Reddit

22:49It was like, took two seconds. So then I could just start to inch up the quality by giving it feedback. And so then I'm like, cool, but I don't think it's believable that the character would say this. For the first line, I think it should do this. And then it goes, sure, I've taken your suggestion. I wrote it again. I said, okay, cool, but like, maybe instead of coffee shop, put it in a restaurant. And it changes the restaurant because I want the waitress to say this. and then it does it again. I say, cool, but give me an alternative. Just like, no, not that bad. I don't really know why. Just give me another alternative.

23:16It gives me another alternative. And I say, okay, cool, but make it faster and snappier. And actually I want the one character to be a little bit of an asshole. Try and does it again. And what I realized was I was doing this and I just kind of stepped back for a second. I said, wow, this is amazing. It's what do I have here? I have a on-demand creative collaborator. It was 1 a.m. when I was doing this. I couldn't have called somebody and be like, Like, hey, do you want to just wake up real quick and just start writing with me? So in the moment where inspiration struck, I was able to instantly have a genius creative collaborator who spit out instant first drafts, which let me not have to have the blank page, which is the biggest enemy to any creator.

23:56Instead of being the author, I got to be the editor. So now ChatBGVT is the author. I'm just the editor who's like, no, something else. Try again. Tweet this a little bit this way. Give me another variation with this happening. And it would instantly, instantly give me another one back. And I thought, wow, the difference here would be, let's say I had a human doing this. A, they wouldn't have been online. Let's say I caught them the next day when inspiration was half as much as it was in the middle of the night there. Then I would say, can you write a draft of this? That would have taken a week.

24:26Then they would have come to me after a week. Again, I'm out of flow. I'm now worried about 10 other things in life. And then they would have given it to me. And now I would have to, as you say, bubble wrap it for them. I'd have to give them feedback, but I can't bruise their ego. They just worked so hard all week giving me exactly what I asked for. So now I have to say, hey, I really like part of it. But I just think maybe we could. Would you be okay if we tried something like this? Not to say this is bad, but I just want to try just for, you know, and I'd have to do all that. And then I bubble wrap it and then I give them the advice.

24:54Then it take another week to get the second draft. And now on the second draft, I have to give half as much feedback because if I really push it even further, if I say, nope, still try again, bruised egos. So I'm like, wow, you have a 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.

25:25And I'm a guy who's never written a screenplay before. For me to have done that without AI would have been, I don't know, 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 10s of 1000s of dollars to write me a script. man that's like i guess when i watch a movie i kind of take for granted that someone had to sit down and write all that crap out that's so much work like that's so much work and that would be so much and so when we tell that story sylvester stallone doing how fast did he do rocky he wrote the first draft three and a half days that's insane to me that's insane but also if you watch rocky you're like okay it's this is not rocket science the script is not like super sophisticated either.

26:22It'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... So writing the thing, the other cool thing I got out of it, when I wasn't writing, I was watching 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 kind of works. And I thought that's such a good analogy for how all creation works.

26:56I'm sure you feel the same way about marketing ideas or business ideas. 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. 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 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 uh 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 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 um do we have to do a shill real quick?

27:46Yeah, let's do it. Speaking of writing. Speaking of writing. Speaking of writing, if you're trying to get your writing out there the way that Sam did it, the way that I did it, the two businesses that we built, that we sold, and probably, I don't know, some of the simpler, easier, would you say 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. I had three engineers on staff. I had three engineers on staff and we had to build everything.

28:18And then I had like two or three growth people and they spent half of their time filling out Excel sheets to try to just track all the information. Right. Or build a referral program or, you know, and then you had 20 people in ad sales, right? Like going to just try to generate revenue. Oh, you have, we have, I think we had like 15 people in ad sales and then we had like three people supporting them. All just so we basically, when we sold the company, We were going to do about$20 million that year in revenue. And we had something like 35 people, but only two writers. And it was insane. It was insane.

28:50It was actually only two 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 two riders, but had 33 other people in the company that were doing all the other functions. So two riders probably each made 150. So add about 20 % to that for healthcare. So we'll just round up to$200 ,000. So$200 ,000 for three riders is$600 ,000.

29:25And then we had roughly 30 people beyond those guys. So what's that, like$8 million? Yeah, something like that. So$8 million. And just even just the engineers part, right? Because I remember you were building a tool that would segment the audience. You were building an A-B testing tool. You were building all these little features to be better at your newsletter. You lived in San Francisco at the time. A San Francisco engineer, even with the Sampar special, scrappy, find somebody, convince them that this is the dream, 200 grand each. So you're paying basically 600 grand just on product cost. And the products weren't even that good.

29:58Like, you know, I'm not a tech company, but it was hard. Not your core competency. Well, instead, how much does Beehive cost a month? I think BeHive's like 99 bucks a month or something like that. And they got like a free plan too. And so instead of spending 600 ,000 a year, you could have spent$39 a month. That's the price of the most popular plan, the scale plan. And with that, you get the ad network. So they'll do your ad sales for you. You get subscriptions. So you put a paywall in and you can actually do subscriptions. You didn't have to build that feature. You get a website builder. You get all the email automation so that when somebody signs up, you know, 60 minutes later, you send them this.

30:32And 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 one and a half to two people to run on our side. You didn't have an engineer, did you? We didn't have an engineer because Beehive was out when we started 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?

30:56Do you have surveys or polls? So at the bottom of the email, we would always write, how was it? And it was five stars, three stars or one star. and we use that to basically give feedback to the writers on like what worked, what didn't in each newsletter. And we could actually measure the quality of the writing, the quality of the content. And now they have all those features. So if you want to do a newsletter today, no brainer, use Beehive. It's beehive.com, B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com. The only downside is their name spelling is really hard. But everything else besides, once you get past the name, everything is gravy.

31:29All right, let me tell you a quick story about someone who I spoke with the other day. And it was kind of a life-changing conversation. So for Hampton, we have this podcast called Money Wise where we get people to come on and they explain all their finances, whatever. Spill the beans about the beans. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm stealing that one. Thank you. That one's now mine. And they like 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 company level. I bet your wife has heard of it.

31:59So her name's Ann Maloom. So Ann is probably 41 right now. And so let me tell you her story, because this was mind boggling to me. So Ann 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, 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 encourage them to get up early at 7am to come to this run. Maybe that's going to encourage them to make the rest of their day better. Hopefully, they'll get jobs, whatever.

32:34She starts this thing called Back to My Feet. It's a nonprofit that does something like $6 million a year in revenue, which is in corporate sponsors. She does that over the course of five years. At the age of 31, she goes to LA and she takes a Pilates class. Have you ever seen a reformer Pilates? It's like this weird machine where it's kind of like yoga on a machine. I've never done one, but I've heard it's incredibly incredibly challenging. It's awesome. They're really awesome. It's mostly what women do. But after talking to Ann, I'm actually going to start doing it because it sounds pretty great.

33:06And she goes to this class and she's like a pretty intense runner. And I think she did weightlifting. And she kind of was like, I get hurt every six months. I just expect that that's part of the process of being an athlete. She starts doing these classes and she's like, this is awesome. And the class was really cute and darling, whatever. And she was like, I want to do this. And so up until that point, she had saved$175 ,000. And so she moves back, goes back to her hometown of Washington, DC. And she goes, I want to start a studio and I'm going to retire from my nonprofit, which a lot of people call it.

33:37They're crazy because they're like, why do you want to start a gym? 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 two 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 kind of has a Barry's edge to it, like Barry's Bootcamp, where it's kind of cool, all black letters.

34:12The music is just 40 % too loud. Yeah. It looks like a nightclub. Yeah, yeah. It's like, cool. And she starts this thing, and in month one does$90 ,000 in revenue. And the reason she started it was she was just doing the math. She's like, look, the way that this business can work is I have my Pilates instructor. I don't even need 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 15 of these reformers and I do eight classes a day, that adds up to$3 ,000 a day. I think I could fill this up seven days a week and get the 90 grand.

34:47And she does that. And did she tell you how she did that 90 grand month one, was there like, how did she get the customers to come to this new place? Yeah, just like flyers and stuff. Just like telling all of her friends. It was like super grassroots. And if you do the math, it wasn't that crazy. I think her math was something like, I need 15 people in every class or something like that. And it wasn't that crazy. And she also was really good at branding. So these women would go to these classes and they're like, this is awesome. I'll see you guys next Tuesday. You know what I mean? They wanted to do it over and over and over again.

35:17So in month one, it does$90 ,000 in revenue. She says that she kept growing it. And by year two, she goes, I was able to pay myself a million dollars in salary. She goes, this thing took off because my costs were so low. I basically just had to build out the studio, which wasn't terribly expensive. And I had to buy these reformers, which are like the machines. And she's like, our cost basis was awesome. We are a very efficient operation. And so by year... So we're in 2013, she launched it. By year 2016, she has 11 studios. Still, to this point, has not taken any outside funding. Keeps growing it.

35:57In 2020, shit happens where everything hits the fan, COVID happens. They have to pause the whole business for a couple of years. However, leading up to that, she had taken a little bit of funding. And along the way, she had taken PE, where she took a little bit of money off the table. So I think it was something like she was paying herself$2 million a year, but then took off... I think she raised$18 million, of which 6 went to her. And then she raised another$20 million, and then another 10 went to her. And then finally, after 10 years, she eventually has sold the whole business for something like$250 million.

36:31And across all of the rounds, she had taken off the table something like$90 million. And so this woman's crazy successful. However, the big takeaway that I had from this lady, Ann, 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 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. This isn't exactly working like I thought it would be working.

37:05It's not always up to the right. And I got bailed and I got afraid and I bailed. And I've done this many times. Have you ever done this where you learn about something, you'll learn about, let's say, fitness. And you're like, well, if I do this for 6 months, but then you're 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 in year 2 or 3, she's like, I'm building this business to sell. And so we're going to do this. And then by year five, we're going to be here. Year eight, we're going to be here.

37:33Year 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 two years to Albert Pujols for like$9 million. And I was like, that's crazy. You did half your net worth on this. She's like, Yeah, well, I just studied a bunch of experts. I read a ton of books. And I just 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.

38:10And 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 her logic side of her brain and trusting the process. I was incredibly inspired by this woman.

38:45You 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. 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.

39:21She 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... We just kept it lean. We just don't have too much excess stuff. Well, it just seems like they must have figured something out on the marketing side that's... They're just not spending a lot on marketing. And of course, the annoying answer, everyone goes, oh yeah, it's got a lot of word of mouth. And it's like, goddammit, word of mouth is like the worst answer to hear because you're like, great. Nothing I can do about that.

39:55I 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 products 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, at least on the other side, whenever I hear that. Well, with the Money Wise podcast, we don't talk too much about getting customers and all that stuff, but we should have her on here. because I did off air. I was like, how did you do that? And she goes, I am world-class at branding and community.

40:28That's what I do. I know how to do that. I was built to do that. And so she didn't tell me all the tactics, but I believe that's how it grew. 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's very transparent about finances because she's like, young women aren't taught this. And so I'm just going to be transparent about this. So she's under talked about. She's not talked about a lot. I never heard of her. I never heard of SolidCourse. I'm glad you put her under my radar. This is really cool.

40:56The question I have is, it seems like your takeaway was, I've never seen somebody have so much... What did you say? So much faith or what did you call it? 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. 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 a million dollars a month, I still felt like fairly uncertain.

41:31If you talk to, I mean, I talked to, you talked to a lot of people. I talked to a lot of people. Like you can have a big business and you're still like, it's still teetering. I don't know if this is going to work out. You know what I mean? You still have. 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, course, you're going to have random doubts that creep in, or you're going to have some uncertainty. Will this work? If it starts working, will this last? Those are natural questions. I think a lot of what she did is awesome.

42:01And 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 and like i bought nvidia a while ago and it worked out and so i guess what i mean is she was quite good at acquiring information and then trusting that that information was good and trusting that the way she learned was good and trusting that the process that she learned about would give the outcome that hopefully she wanted.

42:49Okay. That makes more sense to me. Okay. Yeah. I like that. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They're the fintech of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. I myself use it for eight different companies. The reason why we all choose it is because it does everything you need under one roof. So like my e-commerce company, it's super important for us to be able to easily wire transfer, pay all our different vendors and suppliers all around the world. And the old way with our more traditional bank that shall now be named, I'd try it online. It would say no. It would freeze my account. Then I'd have to go in, book an appointment, speak to a specialist who would try to upsell me on something I didn't need.

43:24And then finally, after 30 minutes there, then they charged me 50 bucks for the pleasure of that terrible interaction. And now with Mercury, I just go online, push two buttons, and I'm done. It's such a seamless experience. It's very intuitive. Everything's under one place. They basically took all the things any company would need for their financial tech and they made it super easy to use to put it under into one platform so highly highly recommend it if you're not using mercury i question your judgment so that's it you've heard on my first million for more information check out mercury.com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details 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?

44:05Tuesday? 5-2 Tuesday? Yeah, where that guy Hoffman, his last name was Hoffman, where he said something like, no good business is a good business, or what did he say? 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? I think he said there's no such thing as a good business on the inside. Yeah, every business looks incredibly messy and upside down on the inside. And I found that that's true or at least in my experience. I've never been a part of a company where I'm like, wow, it feels buttoned up.

44:40It feels figured out. It feels like this is just firing in all cylinders. This is just a well-oiled machine. You didn't feel that way with Twitch? Dude. No. Twitch was... Twitch, honestly, this is going to sound a little bit bad, but when Twitter started getting big and Suck 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.

45:20And Twitch very much was the same way, which was Twitch could get a hundred things wrong internally, but it didn't matter because they had a network effect, they had a moat, and they had, basically once you build a marketplace, once you get a marketplace to work, you can now screw up so many things. And they just got more popular as gaming grew. So it was like, I would see just bullshit going on internally. Just wasted efforts here, wasted efforts here, bad strategy here. And then COVID happens and everybody's at home playing video games online. Boom, business takes off. And you see, we're trying this thing to create growth, trying this to create growth.

45:55Nothing 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 is they created the biggest marketplace of supply and demand of content creators for video gaming content and consumers. And that gave them the privilege, the right to be wrong. They got to fire so many shots on goal after that that didn't even have to work out, didn't have to be well executed because the more popular gaming got, the more people were online stream, online being content creators, the bigger Twitch got.

46:39And 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.

47:14We are out there paddling, waiting for waves and when the wave comes, it's our job to be ready to surf it and not wipe out. But let's be clear, we don't create the waves. And internally, we all wanted to create the wave because you want growth to be a button you can push. But in that business, that's just not how it worked. And by the way, a Twitch diehard person would totally disagree. I'm sure they would be shaking their fist saying, no, no, no, we were great internally. And we improved the conversion rate and the discovery rate and the retention rates. And that all causes growth. So there is a counter argument to it.

47:46But I think on the whole, I know what I saw. I know what was going on inside of there. It's not like... By the way, that's what I thought I would find. I thought I would go from my messy startup where I'm an idiot and I created a huge mess over here and I got 20 people and I don't know how to do anything. Oh, I'm going to go to this company that 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 it. We're on a tangent. What were originally were you going to say?

48:14Do you remember? Oh, I'm writing this essay called Who's Your Elon? And I wrote this because I have this philosophy that you are what you admire. So pick and choose what you admire because your body will start to gravitate towards that. And I think as founders, the default, the factory setting that you get wired with when you decide I'm going to be a founder is cool. Then you should want to be Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. 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.

48:47And before Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or whatever. That's kind of like the transition here. And so Elon today, he's the GOAT. And it makes sense. He's built badass companies that changed the world. Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI. Even actually, he helped create Start. 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. 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. He's incredible. Convincing dozens of women to have his children.

49:20And 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 figure out where Zuck was doing like the surfing thing on 4th of July. And Eli was like, that's cute. I'm busy working.

49:52Yeah, I prefer. 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 posted the analytics of how much, how many tweets and likes he had done that month. And it's like, I prefer to work. And he's like, tweeted and likes like a thousand times that month. It's like, bro, you're not working. Yeah. Anyways, I think that Elon is great in many ways. If he's your North Star, more power to you. But if he's not, it's important to pick who is your North Star. And I guess you were talking about this woman, 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.

50:37I realized that that was, that was my answer. As somebody who's more of a polymath, somebody who has, they walked into Disneyland and they said, I want to ride all the rides. They don't spend all their time just like perfecting one ride. They're like, I only have a certain amount of time on this earth. I want to go ride all the rides. Who are examples for you? So the historical example is Ben Franklin. So Ben Franklin, he had a scientist era. He invented the bifocals, the Franklin stove. And then he created the best newsletter of its time. He invented a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. And then he was a founding father, and he was in politics, and he helped write the Constitution.

51:17Also convinced many women to have his babies. Of course, that's a prerequisite. He then was the CEO of the U.S. postal system for a period of time. And then in music, he invented like a musical instrument. He influenced many people. Mozart, Beethoven said that Ben Franklin influenced them. No way. 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. and there's another, okay, modern day examples. We had Jesse Itzler on the podcast and when Jesse's episode, you can go watch it.

51:55It's, 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 he becomes an endurance athlete. He lives in a monastery with monks. He has David Goggins come live in his house. He wrote books. He married Sarah Blakely. He's got four or five kids. Seems like a good dad.

52:23When I called him to prep for the pod, he was like wrangling, 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 Centuria, who I really admire. He's in San Diego. How do you spell his name? Neil and then Centuria is S-E-N-T-U-R-I-A. He's got a great book that is not popular, but I met him and he gave me a copy of his book. It's called I'm There for You, Baby. And Neil's story is like he was a Hollywood script writer. Then to try to make a buck, he's like, dude, San Diego is booming.

52:58And he got into the real estate development game and helped 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 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 he's still going he's still got ideas and energy energy and 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.

53:42And 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's a San Diego Tribune article and its title is Why Having Fun is Good for the Soul. It's about him. I'm down with that. I'm down with that. I'm very down with that. Have you seen the Ben Franklin TV show on Apple? You know, I watched the trailer of it and then I just didn't feel it hooked. Is it good? Should I watch it? If you're a history nerd, it's awesome. Oh, okay. But he just fucking partied. He was like, they're trying to convince the French to join the American Revolution.

54:18And do you know that scene in The Office where Michael Scott and Jan go to this dinner at an Apple Tuesday to convince that man to do their business? And Jan wants to get down to business. And Michael talks for like two hours, right? Yeah. He's like, hey, you guys want to get some baby back ribs? And he starts 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 gonna 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 a pretty smooth dude and it's pretty awesome.

55:09It's a great show. 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 is alright. He's the man. Okay, what else we got? I'll do one more quick thing. This is just a quick funny thing. 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 uh steroids allowed olympics is that what that one no that's the enhanced games which is also got it mixed up which is this is the reverse this is the reverse aging brian johnson thing yeah so leaderboard we originally found brian that i take pride in that i've said that many times we kind of got we're 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 them early because it's kind of like Jason Calacanis, the third investor in Uber, it's like, it would have been cool if you're like, you know, Jason was, if somebody else says, you know, Jason was actually the third investor in Uber.

56:07But when Jason says, you know, I was the third investor in Uber a thousand times, it's like, dude, we get it. Now you're overcompensating. I think that's what's happening here with, we discovered Brian Johnson. Look, I don't have that many discoveries. So I feel good about this particular one. But Brian Johnson, we talked about him a bunch of times. We had him on the podcast. You went to his house. Really interesting guy. Originally, when we talked to him, We brought up the Rejuvenation Olympics and we talked about it. And this website was super janky. But now, if you go to... Is it cool now? It's much better.

56:37It still honestly sucks. I just DM'd him and I'm like, dude, your website, I don't know how to use it, but it's a lot better than before. Rejuvenation Olympics is this leaderboard where before, he didn't have a partnership, but he would say, go and buy this$800 blood work and upload your results here. and if you do it three times, we take the average and we're going to create this thing called the Rejuvenation Olympics where they use this one 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, based off of their test, they have this thing called a DUNE pace score.

57:14Let's just explain the simple thing. Normally, you would expect in one year of chronological time, you would age one year of biological time. So the idea with the Rejuvenation Olympics is in one year of chronological time, so one calendar year, can you age less than one year? Can your body age less than one year of kind of like cell damage, basically? 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 reasons. One, he actually has a partnership with True Diagnostics.

57:52But in order to be verified on rejuvenationolympics.com, you have to take the average of three tests. Each test is very expensive. And then in order to stay on the leaderboard, you have to continue doing averages. So you have to do this freaking test every quarter. So actually, the expenses add up. Well, 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 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 Brian Johnson is near the top rich guy it's all like these like healthy people or like healthy rich people or who are spending a lot of money or it's like a biohacker so like someone who's like job is to do this stuff and they like blog about it and they make money do it i'm just gonna say this right now brian i love you but i will not use this website until you link their names to an instagram this website is useless to me unless craig mccall i need to be able to click and go see who this guy is i can't use the sign 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 done this test.

59:15And 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 eight. Yeah. Okay. So she's number two. I did research on this woman. She's just a lady. She's just a lady who's like fit. And someone else picked up on this and they're like, who's this Julie Gipps and Clark woman? And they did this article about her. She's like, I make 100 grand a year. I exercise five days a week. And I just eat vegetables. But I'll just go for walks sometimes or a rug. I just live a decently healthy lifestyle. And she's number six or number seven on this list.

59:48And I thought it was awesome that this 57-year-old woman, who's not a very wealthy person, who isn't a professional at doing all this shit, she's just living a pretty well-balanced, it seems, life. She's number seven and she's kicking ass. And if you click on some of the photos, very attractive woman. She looks like a very healthy woman. Doesn't look like she's got any plastic surgery. She makes 100 grand a year. She eats vegetables for snacks. So instead of eating 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 lifts weights twice a week.

1:00:23And she goes for runs twice a week. And then the other day, she's just walking a lot. And she's killing it. By the way, I have to apologize to everybody. I did an interview with Brian Johnson probably like a year ago now. I don't know how long it's been. It's been like six months. It's been like a year. I went to his house. I did a three-hour interview with him. We had professional 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, you know, I edited five of them. We released them.

1:00:53And the Brian Johnson one was kind of like my finale. And I was so excited about it. But I was also like, it's kind of like higher stakes. And 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 earlier this week I asked Diego I said Diego it is now out of my hands I said I'm giving you this episode you are going to edit this and we're going to release this even though it's been a year better late than never it doesn't matter if it's a year away I have been the blocker of this initially I was a perfectionist about it which is weird because I'm never a perfectionist I just really wanted it to be good and then later I was like well now it's been seven months some of the stunning things he's talking about don't even make sense anymore but whatever I told him I said you don't have to ask me about it just edit and make it good and then we're going to release it so I will right my wrong and better late than never dude no one cares or would know that it's a year old right well there's some things he says that maybe he's like oh we're gonna 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 he's just shredded like when you say like exactly like him like i don't look like me anymore or just like My body.

1:02:30Your body. Oh, hell yeah. Dude, all he needs is a tan. He looks so shredded. He's got an insane body. He just needs a tan. But actually, it's smart that he doesn't do the tan because like what I've realized is that Brian Johnson is a marketing genius. And no shit. Whoever he's hired to run his Twitter account, which I don't think it's him because his personality is he's really nice guy, but he's not like super. He's not like super Mimi. 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. Cause he's, it's very smart what he's doing.

1:03:08Um, no, he seems like a guy who could like study it and like implement. And by the way, I'll put one thing in the ground. I might be fooled by this. Who knows? But there's a lot of people who are like, Oh, he's just doing this to make money. 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. And I think he's 100 % genuine. And even if he releases products that are associated with it, I think it's only to help this cause.

1:03:39And I'm normally very skeptical when most people do things and they say they're mission-driven. I'm like, well, is mission code for money driven? What are you talking about here? In this case, I actually think Brian Johnson is one of the few truly mission-driven people in this. and I think a lot of people, the more popular he gets, 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 he is actually mission-driven when he's doing this.

1:04:08Does anyone doubt that? Oh, there's a lot of people who are like, you know, he named his olive oil like snake oil because so many people were like calling him a snake oil salesman because they're like, oh, you're just trying to sell us supplements and pills and blah, blah, blah. The one thing I think that might happen is I don't think he... I think he might be more experimental in everything that he's doing and not publish everything. I don't have any reason to say that. I 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.

1:04:50I think that might be true. I just think that you have to be really rich to tweet out how many boners you're getting in the middle of the night. And like he does this whole experiment where he's trying to improve how much erections he gets in the middle of the night. And he's like only wearable worth wearing. Have you seen the wearable? It's like a ring. It's like a little like Fitbit. That's how they measure. Because that was my question. When he started putting in the data, I was like, is there someone watching? How do you know? How are you measuring this? And then he showed the device. It's like a little rubber band around a stack of dimes.

1:05:21Exactly. That's cool, but why is it so big? I don't think I'm going to need all that. Is there one that fits on a baby carry? Yeah. Is this a bracelet? How does it work when you measure it on my wrist?

1:05:40Well, if you made it this far, you got one of our rare dick jokes. All right. Is that it? That's the pod? That's it. All right. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:06:04All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:06:31It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

1:06:56For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.