We Got Drunk And Came Up With 8 Business Ideas

0:01All right, boys. Here we go. We're doing double liquid death. Crack open a tall one. Crack open a second tall one.

0:16it is time for my favorite episode of the year bar none do we have a famous guest no is this idea is this episode full of insights questionable is this the annual drunk ideas episode of the year yes it is sam we're here how do you feel i feel like i can rule the world i I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. Why are you so amped? What happened this morning? Because it's my favorite episode of the year and I'm drinking double liquid D's. Is that literally just water? You've never had one? No, it's carbonated water. That's it, right? This is like the Austin National Anthem is drinking this.

0:59It's like I still want to go to the hipster bar, but I have to cold plunge and put sunlight into my eyes in the morning so I don't actually drink. That's a drunk idea. So we had that guy, we had the founder of Liquid Death on the pod years ago, like right when we first started. And he was explaining his idea. And we were like, yeah, that's really dumb. Now the company, I think they're getting ready to go public, aren't they? Yeah, exactly. It's the success story. It's like that one couple on The Bachelor that's still together after 42 seasons. It is the one idea left standing of all the drunk ideas.

1:34So for those who don't know, drunk ideas was this concept we had in a stroke of genius many years ago, which was there's a bunch of ideas we wanted to bring up on the podcast as like possible business ideas, but they're bad. And we know they're bad, but we had to bridge this gap. How do we still get this half-baked idea off our chest knowing that it's not really a great idea? Using the cover of alcohol. One of the time-tested methods of saying dumb shit is to say that you were drunk. And so even though neither Sam nor I drink, we call it drunk episodes. And it's basically where I show up buzzed slash tipsy, high on my own supply.

2:11And I pitched Sam. Usually it was me pitching Sam, really bad ideas and him reacting. But then I peer pressured Sam into coming up with these. It was hard for you, right? Well, I'm not exactly like a preparer to be funny type of person. I'm not exactly a funny type of person in the first place. But like you love like preparing this stuff. And your best one ever was actually called the very long distance girlfriend. Yeah, dude, I'm not some beggars. I was looking through the old list just now and I saw the secret camera roll where you don't want to put some pictures on your main camera roll in case anybody clicks it.

2:46So there's a calculator app that if you push in the right numbers in the calculator, it turns into your photo with your secret camera roll back there. How is this not built yet? What are the what are the computer science departments at Stanford waiting for that this is not built yet? I don't really understand the holdup. how do you want to do this? Like you have way more than me. I've got three or four. You've got like eight. Can I just go first and just start? Start off with a bang? Yes. All right. So it's a new year. And you know, with the new year, everybody's trying to establish better habits.

3:16Yeah. So this idea is called Habit Island. It's actually a remix of one of your old real ideas called Hostage. Hostage SF. Hostage SF, which was Sam's weight loss guaranteed business idea where he just comes and he grabs you, puts you in the back of a white van and takes you away for 30 days and deprives you of food. So you guaranteed will lose weight. Well, let me just say, when I say I like this idea, that's selling it short. I love that idea. And to the point where I have now taken the baton and ran with it, like I'm the anchor of this four by 100 relay. What do they say in Waterboy? He goes, not only can I do that, but yes, I can do that.

3:59Not only do I love it, but yes, I love it. This is the only podcast hosted by millionaires that will quote Waterboy. And if you're into that combination of redneck and green wallet, we got you. All right. So Habit Island, what is it? I know so many people that want to start putting these good habits together. They listen to Huberman. They listen to Peter Atiyah. They subscribe to Brian Johnson. They're paying attention to Brian Johnson's nighttime erections. They got like all kinds of health in their world. They're trying to improve their habits. So Habit Island, what is it? It's a place that you go.

4:36Here's what we're going to do. We're going to buy an old school prison, right? A defunct prison. But we're going to jazz it up a little bit, all right? You're going to check yourself in. And not only are you going to check yourself in, you're going to leave a hefty check at the door when you check in because this is kind of like prehab. So it's, you know, when you have a drug problem, you go to rehab to try to sort of help you recover and fix your habits. Well, this is prehab. This is before you have a drug problem. This is you were just normal person, but you wanted to level up. You wanted to level up all of your healthy habits proactively.

5:07And so you check in and guess what? You want to establish a habit of sleeping on time, sleeping early. Lights out at 930 and no Wi-Fi, prison wide. So on Habit Island, we just force you into all of the habits that you need. It's 42 days. It's a 42-day experience. They say 21 days is enough to establish a new habit. Double that. And we're going 42. And so we just force it. So you want to wake up and you want a cold plunge? Guess what? Showers are only cold from certain hours of the day. Or there's just a plunge, and you're just going to go single file line, hop in, hop out, get your plunge done.

5:44It's peer pressure. Everybody's doing it. You want to eat shitty? Or do you want to fix your habit about eating shitty? There's no shitty food. We're only serving super veggie here. And we're on the Brian Johnson diet by default. There is no other food in this island. So like Hostess SF, you really have no choice. We're taking choice out of it. And we're just reprogramming you with badass habits. What do you think of this idea? It's great. Have you ever heard of our friends? Jack does them. I've had a few other friends do them. They go to silent retreats. Have you ever heard of these? So basically, our friend Jack goes to one.

6:16He goes to one in Bali. but I've got other friends that go to one outside of Austin and they're silent retreats for five days. Not only are you not supposed to talk, they actually only feed you light food. So bananas and like fruits and very light food. And you can't even make eye contact with people. And I've got friends that go and do the, and some of them you're not even supposed to read. So no phones, obviously, but you don't, they don't even want you reading. And they come back from these things and they, they act like they're transformed. Have you heard of people going to these? Well, yeah, they say they're transformed, but they don't ever say it for the better or not.

6:46and I always question that.

6:51Well, those are also upsells on Habit Island. So if you want to go sensory deprivation for five days, just for a small extra fee, we have a room where we'll just put you in and you can come out in five days and see how it goes. I like the silent meditation idea. We'll just gag people so they can't talk for a couple hours. We're going to just, it's a la carte menu actually. You could just sort of choose how transformed you want to be And then again, it's baked in and you have handlers that are handling everything. I say this in jest, but like every great drunk idea, there's a sliver of a phenomenal idea in this idea.

7:28Am I right? Or am I right? Yeah, no, I'm into it. It's, I mean, you're just, you're, this isn't breathtaking. You're just talking about grownup fat camp and I'm on board with that. I would love that stuff. Exactly. See, you have, you have a little gift to, to sort of reframe that. I like that. That was nice. Yeah. All right. Let me tell you about something really quick. Have you paid attention to some of these fake AI influencers? I have. Some of them are really fascinating. So there's this one called, what's her name? It's Karen. Karen Majori. I think we actually talked about it a while ago. And so basically, this is not particularly a totally fake AI person.

8:03It was a real person. She's a real person. And she made sexy pictures, whatever. That was like her little shtick. Then she took 2 ,000 hours of her video content and teamed up with someone. and they made a fake AI version of her who you could talk to and she'll send personal videos to you, whatever. It's kind of killing it. In week one, I believe she did$72 ,000 in revenue. And I think she's using FanView, which is like a OnlyFans style subscription platform. Well, anyway, it's worked well. But she appeals to men, whatever. But you know who makes more money doing the same stuff, but just doing a different way?

8:42It's the Andrew Tates of the world. And so we need a fake tape. And I've noticed that there's been these guys on Twitter that are fake guys. So there's one named Derek Guy. Have you seen Derek Guy? His Twitter handle is dyeworkwear. And he gives fashion advice. Oh, he's not fake. He's real, right? He's a real guy, but we don't know who he is. Like, you can't find a picture of him. I'm like, you don't know too much about what he's done. You know that he's a real guy and he gives great advice. And by the way, I subscribe. I pay money for a dyeworkwear newsletter. letter. And then there's Wall Street Playboys, which I also paid for.

9:15It's anonymous guys talking about Wall Street, which I'm not even a part of, but I find it so fascinating because the anonymous angle. What I think we should do, or not we, a person, instead of these attractive women doing the fake AI things, we need a fake Tate. Fake Tate. Okay. Okay. Because what's the biggest downside of becoming Andrew Tate or becoming Dan Blazerian? You have to be them. You actually have to be them. I don't want to go to jail in Romania. I don't want to get canceled and to say this stupid hateful shit in order to like get famous I don't actually want to do any of that but like I like the idea of having a really big audience I like the idea of selling Hustlers University I don't want to live that life I don't want to trap myself in that box so I've been following this one that you have on here Emily Pellegrini which sounds like a bottle of sparkling water but it is actually as you wrote here a 23 year old fun loving girly from LA did you write that?

10:08that's amazing and basically what this person is doing so she's this fake influencer she's an AI she's an AI generated girl but she looks real but she's kind of like too good to be real in fact they intentionally made her they actually asked AI to generate like the average man's dream girl and so you know there's like guy hot and girl hot like girls think a certain girl look is hot and guys think a certain this is guy hot it's like Kate Upton versus Kate Moss yeah well said and so you go she's got like 200 ,000 Instagram followers and that's in like a year. And basically what they do is there's a real person behind it who films the video, but then they deep fake it to switch the body and the face of this AI girl.

10:52And there's like, they show the Instagram DMs and there's like celebrities, politicians, athletes sliding into her DMs. I don't know if they don't know if she's not real or they just don't care. I'm not sure. But when I saw this, I was like, oh, oh, okay. We thought AI was going to take the jobs of blue-collar workers and stuff like that, because I saw all those Boston Dynamics robots, robot dogs that can lift boxes and stuff. Actually, AI is coming for the Instagram thoughts, and that's who's going first, is only fans and Instagram models. But I like your twist here, which is everybody's doing hot girls.

11:29Nobody's doing ultra-masculine guys, right? Just train hey GPT GPT5 I know you're in the middle of a training run just pause you need to watch these videos of entertainment fight club and that guy who chops wood on TikTok and is hot and like you need to like train the most powerful AI I need like 10 ,000 GPUs pointed at that and it's going to come out with just this absolute savage gentleman 50 shades of grey motherfucker who is going to just take over social media and get tons of subscribers. Yeah, we need a fake Tate, a fake Hermosi, whatever it is. Someone who says what they have to say but makes it so I don't actually have to live that life.

12:14So, you know, I could talk the talk, but I don't have to walk the walk. And when they get cancelled because what they did was they were like, oh, this Emily Pellegrini, she's brunette. Guess what? She's got a sister Fiona, blonde if you're into that, right? You just copy and paste all the different variants of what people's dream personality and body and face are and you create all the variants yourself. One of the people who was behind one of these things, they were an agency and they had to hire influencers. And they were like, this is a pain in the ass. These influencers suck. And so they just made their own.

12:43And they pivoted their agency to start making these. And that's the whole thing. This is the next social network movie, right? You know, the social network movie starts with Zuckerberg getting rejected from the houses of the frats at Harvard. And he like, you know, as his revenge is like, I will create the social network that everybody on earth will use instead. and that's what's going to happen here. It's like, I'm so sick of these influencers. Wouldn't it be a shame if I replaced all of them and controlled all of them, right? Wouldn't it be a shame if they just did everything I ever wanted at my whim and that's what's going to happen here.

13:15And the reason this is interesting is like, because I know based off my behavior, I am buying advice or buying content from these anonymous people. I'm not buying porn from these people. Yeah. Like, like, gross. Like that's almost, I mean, maybe in the future one day. I never say never. I'm not dogmatic. You know, I'm open-minded. But like, I just think that these anonymous Twitter handles are actually really cool. You know, the car dealership guy? Have you seen what he does? Yes, I've seen him. I bought a car from him. Yeah, that's crazy. You bought a car from him. I'm never going to pay $5 a month.

13:55You literally bought a fancy SUV from him. and you don't even know who he is. I don't know if you know who he is or not. I don't know who he is, and I ask him for advice. He's got 600 ,000 followers now, and he does this car. I know, and I wish I didn't know. Life was better when I didn't know. Sometimes it's better to not know. All right, let me do the next one. What do you got? I'm going to hit you with three names of ideas, and I want you to pick. Frivolous Lawsuit Company, Use It or Lose It Gym, or Better Than Google. I want to hear Frivolous Lawsuit and then better than Google. All right, frivolous lawsuit.

14:31So I don't know if you know this, but my e-commerce business got sued recently. And I didn't come to you and I didn't cry on your shoulder, but it didn't feel good. Can you say a ballpark reason? It's the same reason every e-commerce business that gets to any scale gets sued, every single one. ADA compliance. You know how outside of buildings you have to have the ramp for anybody in a wheelchair to be able to get into your building? But how does that pertain to a website? Websites have the same thing, dog. They have a accessibility requirement by law, which means it needs to be like, let's say, so let's say you can't see color.

15:06It needs to allow for like the gray, gray scale shit. Or let's say you're blind. It needs to be able to be used by screen readers. So basically the text to speech needs to be able to navigate. Like if you move your mouse, it'll say hovering over menu, click menu. Got it. Okay. Under the menu, you have this, this, this, this. And so there's all these little rules around this. And it's like a total conversion killer if you do it, right? Because like first you have to put this ugly badge on your site that like takes the place of where you would put your upsell or like your pop-up that's like, hey, check out now or give us your email address.

15:37Instead, it's like ADA compliant. And then you have to do all this work that's like not going to drive sales in order to maintain compliance. Did you have to pay a lot of money? Well, we're still negotiating, but like on average, these will settle between 10 and 20 grand. Okay, got it. There's just a law firm out there that all they do is they file the suit. They use the same six plaintiff names. It's like, I'll just make up a name, like, you know, Rebecca Jones. And it's like, oh, wow, Rebecca Jones has sued 3 ,000 companies this year. And why is that? Because there's a law firm whose whole business is, and it's like a major law firm, but there's like a major law firm in New York whose whole businesses, they just file these cases nonstop every single day for every site that they can find that does this.

16:21they've automated the frivolous lawsuits in the e-commerce space. And you talk to any e-commerce owner who's been around for a couple of years or does over$10 million in revenue, and they'll all tell you the same thing. Yep, we got hit with it. Pain in the ass. Can't fight it. Just settle$10 ,000,$15 ,000 and install this app. This app costs$1 ,000 a month that keeps you compliant. It's a whole bracket. And it'd be one thing if this was actually a legitimate complaint, But these are not from people who actually have any actual issue with the website. All right. How do I make my pain into my pleasure?

16:55What if we did this to the AI companies? Because there's an infinite number of AI companies right now, all with a huge amount of funding. And there's a huge gray area around what's legal and not legal when it comes to AI. So for example, if you go to ChatGPT and you say, hey, make me a picture of two brothers who are plumbers that like to eat pizza. Guess what? It's going to show you Mario and Luigi. It's going to generate that art. That's not their IP. They can't just create art of Mario and Luigi, but they do because that's what they were trained on. I am stunned that somebody is not just suing every AI company and being like, cool, I'll settle for 20K.

17:32Go ahead. Or 50K settlement. But otherwise, you're just going to be wrapped up in this. It's going to hurt your future fundraising. It's going to be an issue for you. it's because more people are going to come attack you if I make this loud. I think there's a lot of money to be made if you hate your life and are a complete asshole and want to do that. Some people are angry drunks. That's like an angry drunk idea. It's like, oh, that friend, he gets drunk and he does things that none of us can defend. And if you talk to any lawyer who's like, hey, can you help me with this? They're like, let me guess.

18:02It's blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. And you're like, yeah, how'd you know? They're like, because they're the only ones doing this. because they file 10 ,000 of these a year. And they own another law firm that helps defend e-com companies. What a racket. Let me let you bake, man. What else? Keep going for the second one. The better than Google. All right, better than Google. So I'm talking to my wife and I don't know. Do you know about this mug, the Stanley mug? Dude, it's insane. I think they grew from 70 million in sales to 700 million or around that in 24 months. That is correct. in, not 24 months, in 2019, they were 70 million and then 2023, 2022, 2023, they're at 750.

18:43So like three years. That's insane. Do you know the backstory of this, by the way? It's pretty fascinating. No, I know that it's an old, I mean, like I'm from Missouri and in Missouri, it's like Carhartt and Stanley. So it's like Carhartt is what construction workers would buy. And that's what I would, I remember for Christmas, we'd go to the hardware store and get a new coat from Carhartt. And then in the Stanley mugs, used to be thermoses that you'd put coffee or like soup in for lunch or for construction workers at lunch. yeah nailed it exactly it's like a hundred year old brand that was like construction workers would use it to keep their coffee hot all day while they're on on site and then a couple years ago this mommy blog out of utah was like we love these we love these bugs and they were like we love this drink and then they they gifted it to some influencers they were like hey on behalf of us like they're called the buy guide on behalf of the buy guide they gave it up and somebody at Stanley noticed it and they reached out.

19:36They're like, hey, thanks for doing that. Hey, do you think your audience would like this? You guys seem to be big fans of this jumbo water bottle. And they were like, yeah, we are. They're like, how about we do this? How about we give you guys 5 ,000 of these cups to try to sell through your site? They're like, okay. So they scramble, they get warehouse space, they post it. And in like five minutes or something like that, it sells out. And then they do it again and it sells out again. And then Stanley was like, whoa, there's this like cool mom market that we're not really touching. And the moms were like, yeah this is great because every mom wants to be hydrated we're all like chronically dehydrated this you know this drink is cool it's whether i have iced coffee or hot coffee it's like this mug is great but the colors suck and they're like what do you mean these are classics you know who doesn't want like dark moss green like you know construction red and they were like no no you need pastel pink and so they created some new colors and then it fucking took off and it became the thing.

20:29And then all these crazy moments happen. I don't know if you saw that one where a car caught fire and burned. Did you see this video? What? And the Stanley mug survived? There's a Stanley mug in the cup holder and it's untouched. The whole car is scorched. The whole car is black and just destroyed. And she picks up the Stanley mug. The straw is a little belted, but the cup is still good. And then she shakes it and the ice is still inside. It's like, this kept my drink cold even through a fire. And then the Stanley was like, holy shit, this is amazing. And they were like, get this woman on a plane out here.

21:02They bought her a car and they gave her a bunch of Stanley and it went super, super viral. All these mugs have this. Do you remember the Nalgene bottle? We're going to go way back into the drinkware history. Nalgene bottle. What was the whole thing with Nalgene bottle? You could run over it with your car and it wouldn't break. Do you remember that was like their... I didn't even know that. No, that's amazing though. Which, by the way, we tested it. It definitely broke. But that was like the things like, these things are so strong. They're indestructible. You could run over it with a car and it won't break.

21:29Right. Because that's the problem I'm having with my water bottle. Well, yeah. Or being in a fire and in your eyes. Cars keep running over it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Stanley would just like, they're like, okay, new marketing plan. Arson. All right. So back to my better than Google idea. All right. So my wife is in these groups, these Facebook groups that are always tipping her off on these things. And I'm like, what is this group? And she shows it to me. And I go, why is this called better than Google? And she's like, yeah, there's like this influencer. She has this group for her fans or whatever, but they call it Better Than Google.

21:58And I was like, because if you ask a question here, you're going to get a better answer than Google. You're going to get 10 ,000 moms who have actually tried things, care, are not sponsored, and are going to answer your question. And I was like, shh. Finger to the lips, my wife. And I go, this is a drunk idea. I need to go write this down. Because Better Than Google, what an amazing premise and so true, dude. Do you remember back in the day, this app called Jelly that came out? No. What was it? So the creator of Twitter was like, my next act is this company called Jelly. And he came out with this app.

22:36And this app was like, it's kind of like Quora. But it was like, you know, Quora is old. It's like desktop based. And Quora is just full of Indian people. Like this is completely full of Indians. Like I think half the daily users are like in India or something crazy. So Jelly came out and was going to be the cool version of it. You ask a question on your phone, and it'll ping your friends, any of your contacts, as well as one degree removed. So it's only friends and friends of friends. And Jelly, for like seven days, was the greatest app of all time. It was like somebody would ask a question about what microphone is best for podcasts, and you would get Tim Ferriss to reply because he's a friend of a friend of somebody.

23:16The problem was it was just a bunch of tech guys who don't actually have that many day-to-day life questions. In the same way that I call my mom once a week to say hi and just chat and be a good son, whereas my sister will call my mom 10 times a day asking for her opinion about which trinket she should get from Ross. She just has to get an opinion on everything. And so I think women is the right market for a product like this. It's people who want an opinion on everything and want to discuss and want to get answers and want high trust recommendations. So I think this idea of a vertical Google where it's moms asking questions to other moms, dare I say, trillion dollar idea?