My First Million - #182 - How an Astrology App Makes $10m+, Why a Boxing Announcer is Worth $400m & Creating a Personal Monopoly

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) talk about an astrology app that has been creating controversy throughout Silicon Valley -- Sanctuary. VCs have come out against the app as pseudoscience, but the guys question their logic. These kinds of apps go into the bucket of "me-businesses" or businesses that tell the user about themselves. So from there, the guys brainstorm on ideas within this framework. The second half of the episode is focused on "personal monopolies" -- the concept of creating a big personal brand and monetizing it. We talk about a few people who have done it successfully and how you can too. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (5:42) The controversy behind an astrology app * (20:18) Brainstorming "make-it-about-me" businesses * (28:40) Shaan and Sam's "one-night stand" businesses * (38:11) Why you shouldn't overthink your idea * (45:21) Personal monopolies: Michael Buffer, Judge Judy, and Ryan Seacrest * (54:57) Sam's Tim Ferriss story

I think you could build a easily 100,000 plus person list doing this product. And then there is a clear, like, premium offering on the back end. But the core of it is quiz funnel at top daily newsletter and get there and get to 100,000. I'm on a throw down the gauntlet for somebody who's bored and looking for a project that will actually stick, that will actually get, have some legs. Because I know this would have legs. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it.

All right, everyone. We're going to talk about some good stuff in this episode. But before you get to it, can you do me a favor? Go to Spotify and click the follow button. The reason why is lately we've been getting way more listeners on Spotify. And I think it's because we're going up the charts, but I want to be sure of that. And in order to go up the charts, I need you to click follow. So it's going to be like a big experiment. I'm going to reveal the results next time. But go to Spotify, go to my first million, and click that blue button that says follow.

Click it for me. Please, I'll reveal the results soon. I think that means we're going to go up in the chart. All right, first segment. We're going to talk about horoscopes. Specifically, there's a couple of companies that we talk about. Horoscopes.com, astrology.com, sanctuary world.coe, that make literally tens of millions of dollars a year talking about the horoscope business. It's pretty wild because something like 50% of women in America are interested in that topic, which I had no idea.

We also talk about Judge Judy and Michael Buffer. I know that sounds weird. You may not even know that name Michael Buffer. He's the guy who says, let's get ready to rumble. We talk about those two folks and how they're going to be. They make something like $400 million. I mean, actually break down why they make that money and how you can replicate that. And then finally, we talk about two little side stories about side products that Sean and I have.

We actually launched like dozens of products that we've never even told. These are our embarrassing side projects that we haven't talked about before that we reveal while we're talking about the horoscope thing. They range from starting a crystal business, which is just weird even saying that. And also to a fan page that I made for. pit bulls. It's kind of odd. And then finally, I talk about a story about meeting Tim Ferriss, and it actually happened when I was kind of high on drugs one time. You'll hear about it. Get to it. It's in the episode. Like us on Spotify. See you at the end of the episode. All right. What's going on? We're just talking about losing weight. Sean, yeah, you look good.

How long have you been doing meat only? Meat only is only four days in. But I had heard about this. Joe Rogan talked about the carnivore diet and then it sounded fucking ridiculous at the time. then you started sending me nude selfies and you were like I was like damn Sam's pretty stacked you're like yeah dude I'm just only eating meat I'm like what yeah I'm only eating meat I was like second person mentioned it and then my trainer was like he's like getting shredded for kind of his season or whatever and he's like I was like so what adjustments do you make he goes I just go to kind of a pretty much a meat only diet protein only grass fed ground beef uh grass fed grass fed beef some fish that's pretty much it a little bit of turkey and um So I was like, well, I don't know if this is going to kill me later, but I'll do it for two months. And let's see if there's any noticeable change. So we'll see. Well, yeah, I was just saying, you look great. You look, you lost how many.

I mean, I don't know, like pounds isn't the best way to measure it, but you probably have lost the equivalent of like 30 pounds of fat, maybe 20 pounds of fat. I don't know. That'd be a lot. My weight is the same or higher than it was when I started working out. But my, I do the Dexas scan, which we talked about, which we talked about, which is. is that business where you go, you lay down, and it's like a, it just shows you kind of like where the fat, muscle and bone is in your body, sort of like an MRI, I don't know, it looks like an MRI machine, but it's not an MRI. And according to that thing, I've lost, you know, like,

I don't forget, like, I do it every three months. And so the last three months, I went down three or four percent body fat. Now I'm going down another four or five percent body fat this time. So, yeah, hopefully it will lose like 10 percent of my body fat. So the first idea I want to discuss is going to start with a fitness story. That's my segue. But before we get into that, you're going to do, and so for the listeners, we're going to do mini episodes.

I think you're going to try the first one, right? I don't remember what it's going to be, but you wanted to do a rant on something. We don't even need to say what it was, but we're going to try a mini episode. I wonder if it's going to work. It's going to be probably five to ten minutes long, maybe. We'll see.

Yeah. Today we're going to talk about a horoscope idea, which sounds silly, but it's actually going to be pretty awesome. Then we're going to talk about Judge Judy and Michael Buffer. which is actually going to be pretty awesome. And then finally, we're going to talk about something that I've asked Sean to prepare, and it's about how he manages this team of interns to get a lot done.

I want to get right into it. So I want to tell you this story about this guy named Ross Clark. Never heard of you've never heard of Ross Clark, probably. That's okay. So he kind of looks like me, just a white-haired blonde, corn-fed-looking dude from, I believe, South Carolina. He was a triathlete, and he used to do Soul Cycle. And he would go to Soul Cycle, and he loved seeing these women walk out of SoulCycle with a glow.

They had a bunch of, they were very confident when they left. And he thought to himself, how do I make people feel like that? I want to make people feel confident. I want to make these women feel great about themselves. I want them to have a better life. And so he thinks, what can I do? What can I do to make that happen? And then it hits them.

And it's kind of a weird thing that hit them. But he goes, the best way that I can do this is I want to create a store or a brand that sells crystals and zodiac necklaces and T-shirts and customized birth charts and geos and smudged sticks, these things that make women feel great. Kind of weird, right? Yes. And so that's what we're going to talk about, the first idea. And he says he's going to launch this brand that creates all these, I consider them,

kind of weird, kind of woo-woo. And he goes, I'm going to create a brand that sells all this stuff. But first, I'm going to start with horoscopes. And that's the story of sanctuary world.com. So I guess it's, I think they just call it sanctuary, the URL of sanctuaryworld.com. And the reason we're going to talk about it is they just raised a seed round of $5 million. Is that correct? Yeah, something like that.

So they raised $5 million. And it's caused a little bit of controversy because horoscopes are, well, they're bullshit. They're bullshit in the sense that there's not a lot of facts behind them. They're not real. But a lot of people buy into them thinking that they are legitimate. In fact, something like 40% of women check their horse. on a regular basis, and they will make decisions based off their horoscope. And the reason why I want to bring it up is because, A, it's interesting.

So, by the way, what is this link to the soul cycle thing? That sounds like, who's this guy, Ross? Ross Parker, is that his name? That's the story, bro. Sounds like bullshit to me, Ross Parker. It sounds like he was like, oh, women believe this shit. Men believe this shit. I'm going to sell this shit to them.

I was standing outside of Soul Cycle. I saw them glowing and happy. And somehow I connected the dots between feeling good after exercise to selling crystals and horoscopes. That doesn't make any sense to me. It's a bullshit story. But what he's doing is he told it well. I'll give you that. He's connecting soul cycle.

He also in the article that I read, he mentions headspace. He's just name dropping. Right. This is going to be. He's trying to associate. At one point, he called it the Uber for Zodiac signs. Yeah, basically he's saying, if I say three or four legitimate company names alongside mine, I too will get the halo effect of being bucketed in with those guys.

All right, I'm like meditation, I'm like religion, I'm like fitness. Yeah, so that's what he did. I mean, calm.com calls themselves the Nike of spiritual fitness. So, hey, look, I ain't going to hate the game. I'm not going to hate the player. So let me explain to you why this is. is interesting. So Josh Wolf, a guy that I like, you like, he tweeted, this is bullshit. Whoever funds this idea is a crook.

Yeah. And I actually don't entirely agree with him. I understand where he's coming from, though. And now I want to give you some background about this app, the industry, and where the opportunities are. So the way this app works is you download. Can I read his tweet? He goes, this is Josh Wolf on Twitter. He's a well-known VC. He says, seriously, shame on anyone for funding. or encouraging this bullshit. No doubt there is demand, but this isn't peddling entertainment. It's encouraging slippery slope,

snake oil, flapadoodle. We ought to desire, informed, educated, rational, and not naive, gullible, superstitious society. And then he screenshoted all the investors who participated in the round. I'm here for that shots fired, although I disagree with what he said.

Go on. Yes. And so the way this app works, I downloaded it, it's actually beautifully designed and it sucked me in hardcore. And you sign up, you see like a spinning wheel. You are golden, dude.

I see the glow, so I should have known. It got me. And you sign up, you say what, you know, you click your, I'm a Gemini. I don't know what the other 12 signs are, but you select your birthday. And it says, today is your daily reading for your horoscope. It tells you, like, it's got these, like, text messaging vibes. So it feels like it's texting me this one or two sentence description of what I should expect. And then it says, by the way,

we want to tell you more in a few hours. Can you please turn notifications on? So we can tell you more in a few hours about what's going to happen to you. And they use this language that speaks exactly to me. And then they say, also, we have a little bit more that we can tell you if you sign up here. And then the way the app works is you can have this premium subscription where you get more info about you. Or you can stay for free where you get daily updates. Or now this is where it gets interesting.

You could pay a little bit more money and you could talk to a live, what do they call themselves? A reader. A reader. You can talk to a reader and she'll tell you all about you. So basically, we've talked about Ms. Cleo and how she made like a billion dollars. You get to talk to a Miss Cleo on the phone or via text and they're going to tell you all about what you can expect for the coming year, the coming day, yada, yada, yada. Now, that in itself is not entirely interesting. I mean, it is pretty interesting. But what's really interesting is how big this is. So as two 30-something-year-old men, we probably don't know too much about this. But it's, way bigger than I ever thought. And the reason why I started diving deep into this is I started reading articles about the horoscope industry in a lot of typical liberal, high educated blogs that were

written by women. And I would have thought, oh, these women are going to shit on it. They're going to say this is a scam. And you know what? All the articles were very positive. Even in TechCrunch, it was this woman named Sarah Perez wrote about it. And she goes, yeah, horoscopes aren't really harmful. It's just fun, meaningless entertainment. Whereas this guy,

Josh, completely shit on it. And the reason why these women, perhaps we're okay with it. It's something like 50% of women check the horoscope on a, on a monthly basis, 37% so they check daily. I always get into these awkward situations. My sister-in-law is a big believer in like the Zodiac thing. So, you know, a situation will be happening between her kids or we'll be talking and she's like, oh, such a tourist, you know, you're such a tourist.

Or like, well, that's because, you know, they're Gemini and Gemini are this way. And I'm always like, you know, I don't know how to respond to this because I'm like, yeah, yeah, but like that's totally fake. But yeah, yeah, that's super fake. And yeah, okay, good. Go on. Like, I don't know what to say in response to that. Like, I can't validate it or agree because I don't agree. And I don't want to shit on it because who cares?

I don't care if she believes, it puts me in this weird thing. I say, look, if I came on one second later at 1201, you're telling me that I'm going to react differently. about this or that just because of that one nanosecond. Or I always say, well, what if I'm born and I'll show you where the hemisphere is different and the seasons are different and the moon's different, but it's on the same day. By the way, in India, they have this, they have, in India's like this times 10. So if you think Ms. Cleo is big, and Miss Cleo was big. Miss Cleo, I think generated over a billion dollars in sales.

If you're, if you watch TV in the 90s, you know who Miss Cleo is. If you don't, you don't. But in India, they have this still on TV all the time. There's these gurus, these mystics. And in every village, even like the poorest village, In fact, especially in the poorest villages, because I think that's where superstition and religion is stronger than anywhere else. You take your, when your kid is born, you take your kid to a kind of like your local stargazer mystic guy. And he's basically, he writes this giant thing on an act, like on a scroll.

He gives you a scroll. And the scroll basically says, don't let him eat yellow lentils. It's just like all this like hypersmith. Like he shall not be married in the months of May, June. or August. And so people literally, I know that are like, you know, educated doctors, lawyers, bankers. They'll be like engaged. I'm like, oh, when's the wedding? This summer? They're like, no, we can't do summer. It's like, why? Because my parents had this reading done when I was two months old and it told them that I shall not be married in these months of the year. And so this is not

just like an American thing. It's a worldwide thing under many, many different names. This is worldwide superstitions. It's wild. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about the and some other people succeeding in the space. But I think I couldn't find too much on these folks' revenue numbers because they're relatively new. So the way that the company started was this young guy, or he's not, I mean, he's 39. He's Ross Clark or whoever I said his name was. He was, he went through Lauren Michaels, the guy who started or runs SNL.

He went through, apparently he has a like a digital incubator, I guess the NBC or someone's sponsors. It's weird. It's weird. And he went through it. And now he recently raised $5 million. including, I guess he raised money from NBC and Lord Michaels somehow has a stake. He raised money from Advanced Capital, which Advance owns loads and loads of magazines.

He raised money from Greycroft, which is a media investor. So he's raised money from all these media people. So this is like a traditional media company and traditional media people like this type of stuff. And the reason why they like this is Horoscope business has been a large business for years and years and years. I mean, I've already just told you the numbers. This is not niche. I mean, we're talking like a third of Americans are into this shit. So astrology.com.

Have you heard of astrology.com? Of course you have. Of course you haven't. So they do low eight figures in revenue. And the way that they make money is they do a lot of programmatic advertising. So they do low cost advertising like the bottom of the bull and upbringing. They get you to come into their website and they make a little bit of money off advertising. They have ads on their website.

So it's an ad to arbitrageous plate. And then they also sell subscription. So you do like a click this button. and you're going to get a little bit of an extra reading, they make tens of millions, low tens of millions doing that. And it's been like that for like 30 years. This is astrology.com and horoscope.com. Horscope.com is another competitor.

They do about 20, or they get about 20 million people coming to their website a month. So it's quite large. These guys have been around since like 1995, 1999-ish. So they've been around forever, just making 10 million plus in revenue. And kind of a pretty fascinating business. My opinion is I... About 15 million visitors a month to their website. which is a lot that's a lot and i bet you a lot of that is director search which is really good

yeah so which way do you want to go with this so i i think we can do a couple things one is there's the controversy you know vinov kosla josh wolf they came out saying oh how how evil for funding this and for doing this so there's agree or disagree there well we can actually address that right away which is they're i totally disagree in they're bullshit yeah they're wrong Look, like, let's like say, like, why would you ever invest in a nicotine business or an alcohol business? Like, dude, there's a place for all types of bullshit. Or a burger chain or Netflix or whatever, right? Like, you can believe that there are sort of negative consequences for society and humanity for Facebook as well, right?

I think in this case, their sort of view is retainted. And here's the easy example. If somebody was doing a religion app, they would be, they would never say anything about this. but because the religion is the stars instead of the gods, now it's snake oil, now it's bullshit, now it's peddling fake science. What is religion? What is the difference of religion, right?

It is a belief in something that is supernatural, that is invisible, that cannot be proved by science. It is blind faith in something, and that faith gives people comfort, entertainment, community, you know, like many positive benefits. And so if you're going to say this about horoscopes, you better also say it about religion. Otherwise, I view you sort of as a hypocrite there.

Yeah, we're on the same page there. And also, like, dude, I like many people, they have a shitty live. They go to work. They go home at 5 p.m. And they just want to fucking veg out. If a little horoscope gives them a little bit of hope, who cares? You know, I need all the help I can get. And I'm sure a lot of people do too.

So I don't care. And I will say it's bullshit. Just like I think a lot of religion is. Sorry, if you're religious, but I respect that if you like it. But I think it's bullshit too. But it's okay. Me too. Okay, so then the second piece is that I'll just say on that is fucking annoying the virtue signaling by VCs.

Nobody like this, the grandstanding that people do is so annoying to me. And I recently, we'll talk about this more in a month, weird teaser, I know, but we'll go, I'm going to go in depth about a topic in a month, about a fight I had on Twitter, a good old Twitter ruckus. But one of the things that came out of it was the just absolute hypocritical. nature of people and and virtue signaling. This is almost more annoying to me than like cancel culture is virtue, virtue signaling culture where people take any chance they get to say how they're greater than others because, you know, they sort of just try to take the moral high ground at any cost. And I find it to be so annoying and such a like weak move of people to do that. So if you're an investor to go and say, I'm a good guy, I would never fund something like this.

this, that is such an annoying move to me personally. What do you think of that? So I completely agree with you. I mean, like, I think that we have to remember that, like, there's some mom, like my mother in Missouri who's having a hard day. She needs to get off somehow. Like, that sounded weird, but you know what I mean? She needs to, like, find her a little bit of happiness somewhere.

I don't care if she watches a soap opera or reads about horoscopes. Who cares? Not everything needs to save the world. It just needs to be a little bit of fun and entertainment. And not everyone needs to agree with you. Okay, you don't want to fund it. No problem. You don't have to fund it.

But to, like, call out and demonize the people that do fund it, let them do what they want. Like, I find it weird that the people who are trying to be so, like, righteous, they lose the one, like, kind of like, one of the more fundamental things, which is open-mindedness, that maybe other people will have different beliefs than you and will act in different ways in accordance of their beliefs and that they should not be judged or demonized for it. So, anyways, I think that's kind of annoying. But. So for all the people who.

Yeah, go ahead. Who like this, let's talk about the opportunities and why this works. You want to talk about that? Yes, I have a couple. Okay, I'll go first. The first is Myers-Briggs and other personality tests. You can do this exact same thing with that. By the way, let's frame this as the most interesting subject to anybody is themselves.

Themselves. Exactly. And so that's the umbrella. We're not talking about selling pseudoscience. Yeah, that's actually like a technique. Why does this work is because the most interesting. topic to me is me. And the most interesting topic to you is you. And so because of that, if you accept that that is true, which by the way, it is, once you understand that that is true,

it opens up a set of business possibilities that you can go through and work through and try to figure out. So, okay, go on. So the goal is to find, so the reason why I went to this app, why it was so interesting. So for most apps, the free to paid conversion ratio is probably 1% maybe. You think that's about right? They can get higher. I can get to like 3 or 4%. Okay, with this app, I bet you it's as high as 10%. If they told me 10, I wouldn't be surprised. I'd be impressed and not surprised. I would be impressed and not surprised exactly.

And at 10% free to paid conversion rate is stupid. That is so good. The reason why it's good is you could spend a lot of money to advertise. Now, the churn might be high, but that's a situation we could address after we're already digging popular. So the reason why they're, let's just assume that that is true, let's say it's 6%. the reason why it's 6% is that it's so personal. And the reason this business works is that it is personal.

So what you need to do is go out and find personal stuff. So that's the reason why Myers any type of personality test because I could say, oh, so you've just told me these 10 things about you. That means that you're probably disorganized. Right. Let me tell you all about being disorganized and what that means. Personality tests are great. It's actually the same, in a way, the same thing as a horoscope. And what you can do is you can do it.

You could really just do a daily email if you wanted to start. It's not really simple. By the way, all those people. who are like horoscopes, like, yeah, that's for dumb Trump voters to believe in. And then they'll also be putting on their Twitter bio, like, I'm an ENTJ. Right. They'll go put their like fucking personality quiz results into their bio. And I know there's slightly more science that, you know, that says that that's a real thing.

But I don't know. This is all, yeah, exactly. This is all hand-wavy shit as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. And guess what? I'm in favor of it all. Right. I take these tests.

Enjoy them. So I think that you can do a daily email for this. I also think that paid content, paid subscriptions for these types of things works really well. And what this app is doing that I particularly love that I think could work for so many different things is you get a top of funnel thing where you give these tests. And then you do a come and talk to a person and you would charge $50 per person or per hour or whatever it is. And as a middle person, you take a cut. I think that is brilliant. I love this.

By the way, I was talking to, there was a company we talked about on here. It's called, I feel like it's called intro. Was it called intro? It was basically like you can book a call with like Justin Bieber stylist or like. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was called intro, I can't recall. No, it was called something else. But, oh, maybe you're right.

So anyways. Intro. com, you're right. Founders legit, sold his last company, starts this thing. He's like, oh, it's great, because I'm remodeled. my kitchen, wouldn't it be great to be able to do a 30-minute call with the person who remodels kitchens on H-T-TV? And so they got all these stars on and it's all good. Guess what vertical is the number one vertical for them?

Astrology readings. They found all these Instagramers. And you can go on Instagram, you could find all these people who have like cult Instagram followings. They have like 50,000, 150,000 followers. And they just post a daily sort of like, you know, reading. And people will pay to book time to get a personal reading from them. It's taking off. Now, he doesn't publicize that.

If you go to the website, it still looks like it's about style, home renovations and other things. And that is a part of it. But nutrition makeup. Fitness, nutrition makeup, all these things that, you know, smart people will nod their head and say, that sounds good. That sounds healthy. Then it's like, what do people really want? Where's the highest demand? It was in the, tell me about me through a reading, either a psychic reading, astrology,

reading, whatever it is. Okay, I want to go back to something you said very quickly, but I think is super legit. And this is, we need a sound effect for whenever me and you have such total conviction. It's like in, if you watch like, I don't know, America's Got Talent or something like that or the X factor. The golden button, the golden buzzer where they're just like, we don't need to vote. I'm going to push this button right now and you automatically advance. So I'm pushing the golden button right now for anybody who wants to take this idea of creating this funnel.

So to do this, you need to know nothing about code, but you do. need to be kind of like internet savvy and kind of clever. Here's what you do. And you should probably go and read like Ryan Hoover's book hooked. Near I asked. Ryan Hoover's like the editor. Whatever. Sorry, near.

Or go and read influence by Robert Chalini. Right, right. Exactly. Somebody who gets into this stuff and is non-judgmental. You're not going to do this forever. But here's the experiment. The experiment is you create a quiz that's the top of the funnel that basically says, find out your personality, find out your X, find out your X.

find out your Myers-Briggs, find out whatever it is, your horoscope, whatever. And you create a quiz at the top. And then to get your results, you put in your email, we email you the results. And then we send you a daily newsletter that's personalized to you, right? Because you are a, because you were born on this day of this year, I'm going to give you your daily horoscope. I'm going to give you your daily reading. And that's the whole product right now.

I think if we do this, I will put money in. I bet Samwood puts money in too. You put a little money behind the paid equitory. position here. And there's inherent virality because people will share their quiz results. They will share their readings, especially when it says, like, see if you're compatible with your brother, your girlfriend, your mother, whoever, right? You'll get somebody to share the quiz with somebody else. So I think you could build a easily 100,000 plus person list doing this product. And then there is a clear, like, premium offering on the back end. But the core of it is quiz funnel at top

daily newsletter and get there and get to 100,000. I want to throw down the gauntlet for somebody who's bored and looking for a project that will actually stick, they'll actually have some legs because I know this would have legs. And I don't know how big a legs, but I do, I would say with a high degree of certainty, if you work on this full time for three years, you have a $5 million a year in revenue. Or even simpler, right? Like a lot of people who, when I surveyed my audience, one of the biggest things was,

dude, I'd love to just have a side hustle that I could do a few hours a day that would bring in a few thousand dollars a month. This will do that. So if you want to do this, DM me, email me, email, email us, find a way to contact us because I want somebody legit to actually try this. Let me tell you about some experiments I've done in this area. I don't even know if you know about these things. So I don't know when it was, not too long ago, within the last couple years. I was quite bored. I had sold my company and I basically said, you know, last episode you asked, like, do you want to build something that lasts for like 30, 40 years, like a long lasting company? I'm like, yeah, sometimes I dream about that. And then sometimes I dream about what's something I could

do this weekend. That would be fun. And like I could throw away next weekend if I wanted to, like a low commitment fling of a business. Just a fun scheme. Right. A hookup. And so I wanted a business hookup. And I created, I wanted a business hookup. And I created, I, I had three ideas that I thought would work. The first was a IQ test. I always wanted to know my IQ. I don't know my IQ. I'd like to think I'm smart.

I think I'm above average smart. Guess what? Everybody thinks they're above average smart. And so I thought, why isn't there like an easier way to do an IQ test? If there was an ad on Facebook that was like a puzzle and it's like solve this puzzle and this is like the start of an IQ test, I would go through that.

I would take the IQ test for 20 minutes and then I would want to get my results. I'd give you my email, and I might even pay for, like, the full results of this thing. So I thought that was kind of interesting, doing IQ test and kind of like recreating Mensa as a sort of like online funnel. Again, no physical product needed, no shipping, no logistics, no supply chain, but a pure play sort of digital info product. Second one, have you read the book, the five love languages or five languages of love? Obviously.

Okay, yeah, you're married. So at some point, you were given this book. I've been like, hey, asshole, read this. And so that's one that that's a pretty successful franchise. So if you go look at my Facebook page right now, my Facebook profile, you'll see, why is Sean the admin of a page called The Love Doctor? Well, let me tell you why, because I wanted to take the five love languages test, put it online, send people through that flow where they answer a bunch of questions,

and then say, would you like to know what your love language is? Put your email in. And then I'll send you your results. And then I say, well, wait, we need to see who you're compatible with. Do your love languages match and do they know yours? Send this to your partner. And boom. And then by the way, like here, buy the ebook, buy the PDF that will tell you what to do

given your love language because there's only like five. So I can just make five PDFs and sell them. So these are these little business experiment flings. And I have one last one that I did because, as you can tell, these types of businesses appeal to me. I like simple, lightweight stuff that people. that has a lot of demand that Silicon Valley likes to poo-poo and say that they're better than that I find this as an opportunity.

So the last one is crystals. You said something about- Oh my gosh, yes, I did. So this guy, what he wants to do is he wants to sell crystals. I don't like, and I don't say, oh my gosh, and like I think it's wrong to say sell because I think it's like anything that, like, you know, Tony Robbins, is he bullshit? Yeah, but I read it sometimes to make you feel a little bit.

Helpful bullshit. Yeah. So who cares? but I think crystals are nonsense. Yes, exactly. So is a placebo a bad thing, right? If this thing has no measurable effects, but I believe it to have a positive effect

and it helps me feel better, then has it not achieved its purpose of helping me feel better, right? So I looked at these three ideas and I had to pick one because I didn't have too much time, right? I had a weekend hookup to go to. So I said, should I do the IQ one?

Should I do this love doctor one? The five languages love test? Or should I do this crystal thing? As I looked at the crystal thing, I saw a bunch of interesting things, which is that there's a lot of female kind of like influencers. So Adele carries a rose quartz crystal with her and uses it before she goes on stage for every performance. Gwyneth Paltrow from, you know, with Goop. She's all about, you know, these all about crystals.

You know, just go through the list of who's who. So the Kardashians, after Kim Kardashian got mugged or robbed and she was feeling like very unsafe, she credits crystals to being one of the things that helped her center herself, calm herself, and feel better about herself, and be able to go back into the world and feel safe again. So I found that, wow, a lot of these sort of like female celebrities and idols have pictures and quotes with these. I thought, oh, that'd be pretty useful to help sell this thing. And then I found that I could source crystals very easily, right? The crystals are not that expensive. And so I created a e-commerce store for crystals. I tried it for a couple weekends.

and I spent, you know, five, ten grand of booting this thing up, and I broke even, and I even made a little bit of profit. And in the end, I sort of like got bored of the, you know, I got bored of the hookup and was ready to move on with my life. But I kind of validated that this idea could kind of work. And there was, it wasn't like gangbusters. Like, look, if this started printing money, I wouldn't have given it up. No, but it could have been.

It could have been. It could be for a few weekends. Right, like, which is most things. You have to stay at it for a bit to actually get it to work. That's brilliant. I like hearing these stories. And as I was thinking, I made fun of crystals, but I actually had something similar. So there's this guy named Ryan Holiday.

You know Ryan Holiday? The author of, Trust Me, I'm lying. Is that it? Yeah. He's got a few books. You go to the enemy, I think, is one of his, right? I have some of them up here, and he's got many books. And his famous thing is stoicism.

So he talks a lot about stoicism, which basically just means how to be, how to deal with adversity, how to be a tough guy. Obviously, horoscopes, mostly women. is probably mostly men. And I read one of his books. I thought it was nice. It made me feel better about myself. And I went to Dailystoic.com and I bought a $30 coin that says some Greek thing on there.

I don't even know what it says, but it translates into like you live and then you're going to die. So like live well or something like that. It's just and I would carry it. I always, I don't know what it is. You're like that white dude who gets the tattoo of an Asian character on his arm. It doesn't know what it means.

Yeah. I don't. It doesn't matter what it means. It means something to you. When I was, yeah, like, it's got a, like, stoic on there. They're supposed to be tough, and I would carry it around me, and I paid 30 bucks for it. I think it costs a dollar for him to make. I think you make it a few million dollars.

So that shit works. I dig it. And by the way, my one night stand recently, about a couple years ago as well, our friend Ramon was killing it on dog stuff. I'm like, oh, my gosh, that looks so fun. And so he would create all these Facebook pages about dedicated to a specific dog breed. And I go, well, that looks fun. I just want to tinker.

I'm going to try it. I created this one page called Bully boo. So the word bully, and in space, the word boo, B-O-O-O, I just made that word up. Boli is like a bully breeds. They're like pit bulls, whatever, yada, yada. And I just went and got viral videos from Reddit and I posted it on Bully Boo. Dude, I got like 10,000 followers on Facebook, like in a matter of like five days. Yeah.

So that shit works. So anyway. By the way, I also have a pet one. I heard this guy was making a bunch of money by printing your pets photo on socks, as a gift. And I was like, great, weekend hookup, tried it, spun up the whole thing. Had a guy, you know, my friend Eric, who has this cool sock company called Tribe. He was like, I'll print the socks for you. Here's a link. Here's a easy way to set it up. Tried it. My results weren't great. But same sort of thing where I was like, I really enjoy these

mini experiments. And here's the thing like when I share these. I think part of it is interesting of just hearing these little like random things. Most people listen to this, I don't think do that. I think we're somewhat unique in that we have done many of these, right? Like, I didn't even know you did this bully boo thing. You didn't know I've done these three things. There's actually like 10 more that I've done that you've done that we haven't talked about. A lot of which are so embarrassing.

These are the ones we're talking about. Imagine the ones we don't talk about. So I think one of the like meta takeaways is like just experiment more and be willing to spin something up quickly and then throw it away when you're done with it. And like, don't try to like marry everything. You know, it's okay to date. It's okay to have a hookup or a flinger or a one-night stand with a business. And I think that it's a lot of where skill is built.

So in doing that, I used to tell kind of one of my interns who was working with me on the crystal thing, he's like, dude, I don't know if this crystal thing's going to work, but I'm amazed that in 48 hours, we went from you were just bullshitting about the idea to our first sale. and that's just kind of amazing. He called it a flash brand. He's like, I love that we just created this whole brand.

It looks real. It's got a name. We named it after my sister's kid. You know, like we created a logo. We got this like this Shopify store spun up. And in doing so, we learned all these like mechanics of like,

how do you get better at writing copy? How do you get rid of naming things? How do you get better at making a logo? How do you use these tools like Shopify and Clavio and all these different tools that you need the piping to sell stuff? And I think that there's a lot of, even if you think the ideas we're talking about are dumb, it's not dumb to use these as an excuse to go learn about Facebook ads or to learn about building a Facebook page quickly, because that might come in handy again three days later or three years later when you're trying to do the next thing.

And of course, that's not really what you're, the most important thing you're learning. What you're learning is the confidence to just go through the motion and get shit done. In the same way that it's a lot easier to get skinny when you know how to bench press properly or you feel comfortable squatting. And you're like, oh, yeah, I just do this, this, this, and I eat less. And boom, I'm confident. I can, I just follow the, I guess. Can I tell you a mini story on this real quick?

And then we'll move on. So I invested in that company, Maven, which is started by our mutual friend, Gagin Biani. He started you to me, and now he's got it, which is a $3 billion ed tech company. And now he's got a new ed tech company for teaching online. And I invested in the company. And in order to get in, it was such a competitive deal. In order to get in, he's like, look, you guys have a good audience. Like, you have a big Twitter following.

You got to do a course. If you agree to do a course, it be one of the teachers, a BAU. user, then I'll let you in the round. And I was like, done, because I wanted to invest. And so then he's been hitting me up like, dude, do the, where's your course? Come on, man, make your course. And so I was like, all right, shit. And so then I was overthinking it. And the lesson here is not, it really has nothing to do with my course. Or I guess I'll tell the end of the story and then I'll tell you how I almost fucked up. So the end of the story is, yesterday I took about 20 minutes. I wrote a three tweet, tweet storm about how writing has helped me. And I said, you know,

In school, I was a shitty writer. In school, they want you to write long essays. They have like a minimum word count you have to hit literally. And, you know, you study Shakespeare and you think that's what good writing is or you read the Odyssey. But then, you know, in the real world, it's the exact opposite. You know, you're paid to be concise, not have a lot of words, right? You're not trying to write like really epic, complex things.

You need to be simple and crisp and communicate well. And I said, I've gotten good at that. So I sucked at school writing, but I've gotten pretty good at real world writing through trial and error and studying some of the best people, yourself included, our friend Neville, I bought his course, I took that whole thing, I got better at copywriting. But I said in general, there's this whole like, like how much value can be unlocked if you're good at writing emails, tweets, blog posts, company memos, investor letters, like all those things can generate a lot of value.

It's made me millions of dollars. I think it can do that for other people too if you get better at writing. So anyways, I tweeted that out and I said, I want a package, you know, I've probably studied this stuff for like a thousand hours in my life. I want to distill it down into something you can learn in 10 days. If you're interested in that, it would cost 400 bucks. Here's a link, put into a shitty Google form where you put in your name and email and you tell me why you want to take this course. So I've tweeted it out. Guess how many responses I got? 300. So I got a thousand responses already of people who gave me all their info, said I'd like to sign up to be in the first batch.

I thought so the way that Maven works is they encourage you to do this to test demand to see if you have 100 people. If you get 100 people, they say, all right, there's enough demand. You should go, like, kind of figure out why they want to do this and then then launch your actual course. A thousand blew me away off of, you know, one tweet, basically, let alone email list or anything else. So I thought, oh, that's interesting. Wow. Like, let's say that, let's let's say that this is a thousand people. The course costs $400. Not all of them will convert, but like, 200 maybe. But this was, he said about 30 to 40% of people will come, will end up converting of, but that's if once you qualify the list a little bit. So, but even this was just

one tweet. So let's assume I also email it out or I tweet again about it. I think I could probably triple the size of the interest list because this was just whoever was on Twitter in that moment that saw it. So I could probably triple the size of this list. And then let's say 30% of them convert, 25% of them convert. Okay. So let's say the net net is $120,000. I could easily make six figures. I think $100,000 on the low end, $400,000, $500,000 on the high end of this course. Okay, so that's sweet, but what's the lesson here? The lesson here is actually that I was not going to send this tweet. I was telling, like, going to was like, all right, you know, you need to like test your test the demand for this course.

And I was like, great. So here's my plan. I'm going to, first I'm going to like work on the content of the course. I'm going to like make sure it's good. And then actually I want to like show people I'm good at this. So I'm going to do like 10 example. I'm going to do 10 emails showing me like taking something that was kind of bad writing and turning it, making it better. So that'll get people interested.

Then I'll do it. I'll mention it on the podcast. And then I'll do this other thing. And he's like, dude, you don't need to do all that. Like, trust me,

just say, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. You know, here's why I think it would be good for you. If you're interested, sign up. And I was like,

yeah, fuck, you're right. I'm doing that thing. And that thing is what most people do, which is you're afraid to fail so you overthink what you need to do to make it successful.

And Abra, you're listening to this. You're about to go to your own startup. Don't make this mistake that I, was about to make that I've made many times in the past that most people make every time they go do a new venture is that they are afraid to fail, therefore they, you know, they, they overestimate what they need to do to get started. I need to incorporate. I need to come up with a good

name. I need to buy the domain. I need to like build it to make sure, you know, I want to have a high quality product. I don't want to go out with a bad product and disappoint people. Or, you know, I need to like create a whole website before I do this thing. Nope. Shitty tweet. shitty Google form, thousand responses, right? Like, you can get results with a much shittier sort of go-to-market. And so, you know, the classic quote here is if you're not embarrassed by your first product, by your first version of your product, you waited too long to launch. And so anyways, the middle lesson I relearned was, don't overthink it.

I almost overthought it. Do you know what you're going to teach? Are you going to figure that out? Yeah, I have a good idea, actually. I think this would be cool. So tell me what you think of this. I haven't told anybody this yet. So I think the way to get good at writing is to write, obviously.

Sorry, it's the way to get good at anything is to do it. And so I'm like, all right, but I can't just tell you to go do it. If it was that easy, you would have already done it. So I thought, okay, what about this? What if every day I gave you a prompt? So like, let's say we want to get better at writing, writing for the real world, right? So let's say it's a cold email, like the way you cold email people that come be speakers at Hustok Khan.

Great. So I say, we're going to write a cold email to somebody who you want to come speak at event. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. First, try it. Put 15 minutes on the clock and just try it. Write a shitty version. So they try it. Then I'm going to give them a kind of a learning. So it's like do, learn, and then do. So you do it. Then I tell you how I would do it with four examples. Like here's one way of doing it. Here's another way doing it. Here's another way doing it. Here's the common principles I'm using in all these. All right, you learned that? Good. Now do it again. and you submit that one and I'll give feedback on all the submissions that people give and be like,

hey, this is actually awesome or, hey, this is much better than your first attempt. Look, in 30 minutes, you just went from like really shitty to pretty good. And here's how you can go from pretty good to like amazing if you made this one tweak additional. So I want people to get a daily reps at writing one of those things. So it might be a headline, right? Here's the story. Write the headline. Okay.

Cool. That was a bad headline. Here's what goes into a great headline. You better launch. You better launch fast. Someone, a listener is going to go and do this. Of course, they don't have 150,000 followers, but. Yeah, if you want to do this, help me do it.

I think this should exist. I think this would be a cool way for people to get better by actually doing something and doing it in like a controlled sandbox. So not just saying open it, I don't know, go write a bunch of shit. It's like very specific. Write this. Here's examples of what good looks like. And then boom, boom, now that you know the, now that you've learned the principle,

go apply it. So anyways, that's what I'm going to try to teach. Do you want to talk about Michael Buffer? Yes. What do you, so on our doc, Sean's got Michael Buffer and Judge Judy, personal monopoly written down there. I'm very curious what that even means. So this started with just curiosity. I was watching the Canelo Alvarez boxing match that happened last weekend.

Fun match guy, he fucking broke this guy's face. He's like, punched a guy, broke his face in three places, and then the guy quit between rounds. So anyways, boxing is this funny thing where, like, the match itself, only lasts for, you know, some number of minutes, but they need to charge you all this money for pay-per-view. So there's all this, like, pomp and circumstances, all this parade around it, right? They walk out with music and their kind of entourage and their outfit, and then the next person walks out, and then there's the introduction. And in the introductions, there's always this guy. You've probably seen him is this white guy who basically has, like, got a great voice. And in boxing,

he says, like, you know, ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to rumble, right? That's like the signature thing. Oh, like, you kind of get wired over the years of following the sport that, like, yes, this is the main event. This is the big one. And by the way, do you know who that guy's brother is? Bruce Buffer, right? So Bruce is in the UFC and he says, I'll let you do it.

He goes, it's time. It's time. And by the way, they didn't know that they were like both in their 50s. Exactly. There's a crazy story about that. So I was just watching this and I was like, how much does Michael Buffer get paid? Right? So I do the search, Michael Buffer, salary.

Do you know how much Michael? You might know. It sounds like you know some things. No, I don't know. But basically, 10 million a year. So Michael Buffer has made $400 million in his career doing what he's doing. He has made most of that off of the fact that he has created a personal monopoly. He is synonymous with a big boxing match.

And his phrase, let's get ready to rumble, is a trademarked phrase. Now, how is it a trademark? And he's trademarked it, and he licenses it out to video games, to, you know, like movies and shows and stuff like that. And actually, if you go watch, like, the back catalog of UFC fights, they cut out Bruce Buffers its time part because they don't want to pay him the royalty on its time. How? Well, first of all, I knew here as well because he looks like he's got a lot of work done on his face. So, like, he's got that, like, Wayne Newton look where Ler, like, Sigman-Froy, where I'm like, oh, that's that Las Vegas rich look. and second, how on earth does the boxing federation or whatever it's called allow him to own it along with Bruce Buffer?

So the way it happened was Michael Buffer is the is the announcer guy, right? And at first he's not making much. And boxing is kind of nascent. And he grew with the sport, right? So Tyson got popular and Holyfield and all these big names. You know, you just keep seeing this one guy for like 30 years. So he ended up building his own brand, you know, along the way. So nowadays he gets paid about, or sorry, I don't know exactly what Michael Buffer gets paid per event, but he got to the point where it's let's say 1984 and he's saying let's get ready to rumble.

And Bruce Buffer, who doesn't know that they are siblings, he is half. They're half siblings. So he's watching, what is it? He's watching the event or something like that. And he sees that this guy's last name is Buffer. And he goes, oh, that's cool. I've never met another buffer. He doesn't think they're brothers.

He just thinks this guy's last name's also buffer. That's cool. I've never met another buffer. He goes in the yellow pages and he looks and there's no other buffers. So he's like, dude, it's crazy. This guy's last name is Buffer. And he's driving with his dad or something like that. And he asks his dad, he's like, yeah, this guy's, oh, no, he finds out.

So he looks into Michael Buffer. He finds out he was, he grew up in a town like, I don't know, half a mile away from Bruce. He's like, dude, dad, how crazy is this? this guy you know the guy on the boxing thing Michael Buffer last name Buffer and he grew up you know half a mile away from us and the dad while driving just goes

yeah I think that's your brother he's like what he's like yeah you know you didn't know this but before you and her mom you know they've been married 50 years before you and your mom got together you know I had another I had a son I don't know if it's him but maybe that's your brother and so they go and they find out that they are actually half brothers they share a dad so Bruce then goes

to Michael and he says Michael, you're doing great, but you have no like business manager. I'll be your manager. And he's like, okay, what does that mean? He goes, dude, you need to trademark this phrase. This is your catchphrase. So he applies for the trademark. He gets it.

And then he basically says, takes that trademark and he starts licensing it out, merchandise, hats, shirts, video games, everything. So he starts building this guy's brand. And then later, Michael gets Bruce into the coming, the announcing game. And Bruce becomes the announcer for. or the UFC, so a different sport. And Bruce is making, like, on any given event, if you go watch a UFC event,

he's making 50 to 100 grand for that night's work, which is basically before every fight, he just announces, you know, in this corner we have this guy from that's right now. He makes 100,000 for big fights and 50 grandish. And this is like, we got a caveat. This is like, you know, when you Google someone's net worth, like, I don't know if this is actually his number.

This is like the, it's in a bunch of articles, but maybe they're all referencing the same shitty source. I don't know. Right. And he does probably three a month. Yeah. So you're looking at about three and a half, four million dollars a year. And it says that, you know, his net worth is sort of in the tens of millions, whereas

Michael Buffers in the hundreds of millions. And so this sort of came to this concept of creating a personal monopoly. So how do you build yourself to the point where you are unreplaceable? And this is like Ryan Seacrest with American Idol, right? When American Idol first started, there's two dudes. And at this point, Ryan Seacrest, actually, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, Ryan Sechrist is now, you know, sort of synonymous with American Idol. It's like Chris Harrison with The Bachelor. It's Jeff Probst with Survivor.

And, you know, these are, these are hosts that on the surface, it's like, oh, he just comes out here and says a few lines. Anybody could do that. It doesn't take any time. No, no, no. The fans grow attached to this person, and that becomes part of the brand of the event. And the consistency of seeing those same faces, those same recurring cast members, saying those same catchphrases is part of what makes it popular. So Judge Judy's... And at this point, Ryan Sechrest has Ryan Sechrest Productions, which is a production company, which frankly, I've always been wondering, like, what does a production company actually mean? Like, that's one of those Hollywood terms that I'm sure does something, but I don't want to get it.

But it does something like north of a hundred million in revenue. Well, he produced the Kardashians show, keeping up with the Kardashians. He was the creator and producer of that show, I think. So it was his idea. So he partly laid that into something. I don't exactly, like I said, I don't entirely understand And there's this fork in the road because at the beginning of American Idol, there was two hosts. And one guy after season one was like, oh, this is a hit. I want more money. And at that time, he didn't have a personal monopoly yet.

He was replaceable because the show was so new. And so they said, no, thanks. We'll keep Ryan. Ryan, you could just be the lead guy now. And Ryan Seacrest did it for like 15 years. And then by the end of it was sort of making, I don't know, 10, 15 million bucks a season doing it. Because he waited until he became entrenched in the franchise as like the face. and he became a valuable character like Simon Cowell and the other guys.

So Judge Judy is probably the greatest example of this. So the highest paid person on TV was Judge Judy for a number of years. She was making $47 million a year for, I don't know, 50, I think, days of filming. So she was making about $900,000 a day filming the show for Judge Judy, which is she was a judge before that making $113,000 a year. And so from the commodity, the skill of the job, of being a judge to building your personal monopoly as the show is called Judge Judy. She was able to turn $113,000 a year of pricing power into $47 million a year.

And then, you know, CBS bought the back catalog of Judge Judy for $100 million. So she's still making royalties without working anymore. So I just find this to be tremendously interesting. It's something that was counterintuitive to me. It seems to me like all these people are replaceable. But clearly the economics of Hollywood show that they're not. And so I just found this to be very interesting. And I also like the story of, you know, the long-loss brothers.

One brother finds the other becomes his manager, convinces him to trade market. And that trademark is, you know, that building that personal monopoly of IP is what helped him build a multi-hundred million dollar franchise. So I thought that was amazing. So I want to let's go down the strap hole. I don't think we're going to get to the intern thing, but maybe we will. Let's put down the strad of hole because I know a few people that have these personal brands.

Maybe some people think that I have that, but I actually don't have it because I'm not nearly careful enough. But you seem quite careful enough about your brand that you have this. Who comes to mine? I know Tim Ferriss. I know Tim Ferriss. I know Jack Butcher. Jack Butcher is a great friend of mine.

He created this huge following off of visualized value. Great name. All he does is he makes one picture that describes a thousand words. So basically you have this complicated topic. He makes one graphic a day and it explains exactly how it works. You would think that's silly. He's crushed it. He probably makes.

two to three million dollars a year selling a course on that topic. The second one, Tim Ferriss, and the reason why I can't do this is because these guys are so protective in particular about their brand. Tim Ferriss, I'm going to tell a Tim Ferriss story that I don't want to turn this into clips. I don't want this to get popular,

but I'm going to tell a story. So Tim Ferriss a years ago came to my office when he had just, I know Tim Ferriss because he would walk his dog. We were neighbors. We lived down the block from each other. we would walk our dogs together. Like he would be at the park and I would be at the park. And I wouldn't bring up business.

I wouldn't even act like I was a fan other than I'm saying, hey, I just listened to this podcast the other day. It was wonderful. Good job. Anyway, how was Maggie, your dog doing it. Can you tell the first time y'all met? Did you, because I think when people meet somebody that they know and admired, they often blow it by totally fan-girling over them.

What was the story? Do you even remember? Like, what was the first interaction where it became normal for you to talk? Okay. The funny story is I was on the way. home from the hospital after getting a kidney stone and I was super high on morphine and oxycodone. I had gotten a kidney stone and my wife Sarah, who was my girlfriend at the time, was driving me home. It was 8 a.m. because I got the kidney stone at like 5 o'clock in the morning. I was coming home 8 a.m.

I see Tim walking in front of my house and I was on the passenger seat riding dirty with my seat back because I was all high and shit. And I see him walk by and I go, hold on Sarah, back up. Hey, hey, Tim. What are you doing around here, man? And he goes, I lived down the street. I go, that's cool. cool. I'm a big fan. Just got a kidney stone. He got any tips for that? And I was like, oh, obnoxious. And then I saw him again the next day walking his dog. And I go, Tim, I just wanted to apologize.

I was under the influence. But anyway, I know your books, a big fan. What's your dog saying? Yeah, that's it. And then we were just, we would just talk about dogs. That's all. And then eventually he cold emailed me months later when he goes, hey, I heard about the hustle. It seems cool.

Do you want to have dinner so we can talk about it? I go to dinner and he goes, wait a minute, you're the guy with the dog. I go, yeah, man, what's going on? to me say I'm your neighbor. I didn't ever want to bring up email our business to you because, you know, I don't want to be tacky. So it was a weird thing that we knew each other. And so one day, after he invested in my company, comes to the office, he sees me drinking

a Coke zero and he goes, hey, man, can I have one of those? I go, yeah, dude, you can have as man as you want. Let me go get you one. I give him one and he chugs it super fast. He goes, can I get one more? I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I brought him two. He chugs them. We get done with this meeting.

There's six of us in the office. We're in a little baby conference room, which is basically. basically a one bedroom in one of the apartments. There's about six of my employees or four of them, and then Siva was there. And he goes, all right, well, that was a good meeting. And he pushes the Coke cans my way. And I go, what? He goes, you mind throwing those away for me?

And I go, yeah, yeah, I'll throw them away. And I take them. And he just didn't want to be seen walking out with a diet soda can. That's how particular this guy was. And you know what? I think it's great. I dig it. And whenever we work with Tim, if I write something and there's a miscoma or something,

He's on top of them. Right. And at first, I was like, you know, you're really being a pain in the butt. And then I realized, you know what? You're not being a pain in the butt. You're being too. You are being exactly how you should be. You are protecting your brand.

You want things in a very particular way. You're being demanding. And I respect that and I like that. And that's when I realized I don't think I could ever be a personal brand because you have to guard that shit like crazy. You have to be on top of it every single time. It has to be, it's got to be exactly a very particular way every single time. And that's how you build a really good brand.

You have to be on. when you're on. I mean, I'm sure. There's a phrase I used. I don't know if I made this up or somebody told me this. I have no idea. It was a long time ago, 10 years ago. It's called EPOC.

It stands for every point of contact. It said, if you want to make a great brand, you need to be congruent. So you need to have something you stand for. All right. Most people don't know what they stand for. They're not clear about it. It's not unique. It's not compelling.

It's not something notable. But once you do that, the second step is at every point of contact, you have to embody that, right? So you can't be before our body and be out of shape, right? You can't be like, you know, for our work week guy and then, you know, you're super inefficient and you're working 80 hours a week. So you have to be congruent at all times. That should be the goal as a brand is to at every point of contact a customer has with you in any place, they're getting that same, they're getting that same thing that you stand for. And so that's like an aspirational goal. Of course, you don't do that. It's not achievable, but it is a mindset to have in order to reinforce the brand

many, many times because people will have experiences with you, right? This is like Disney World. Disney World has all these things, right, where they're like, you know, there's no, I forgot what all the things are. It's like there's no trash cans and there's no, like, you can't see the mascots ever taking a smoke break with their head off, you know, you can't see Mickey Mouse smoking a cigarette. It's like, no, we have to be at every point of contact. This place stands for joy, then everything's got to be joy, right? The bathroom's got to be joy. The food's got to be joy, right?

Like all these different things. That's what great sort of brand owners are strive to do. And what you and I do, or at least I know I do it, is I test stuff with people. And so in a way, we have a podcast. I mean, I would say we're actually, what you see is what you get. I mean, you and I talk like this regardless if the camera's on or not. But I do know like which jokes hit and I'll test them on people. I kind of see like, oh, this story I just told, it caught that guy's attention.

I should tell it a little bit differently, though. And with Tim and other people, I've seen them repeat phrases. Like, I don't pretend to be a doctor and I don't play one on TV. Like, that's just like this phrase that he uses. And I guess it kind of hits. Yeah, you're so likable. And these phrases that I've seen these quote famous people. So a guy like Tim, who else do I know that fits this category?

Jack is definitely one of them. Jack Butcher. I've told the story before on the pod, but Chris Saka did this. and it blew me away. I met him in person. And for those who don't know, Chris Ockis is like one of the best investors ever, till the point where he's already retired.

He doesn't, now he only invest in climate change stuff because he's like, I already won the game of like money and success. He's, it's called post-economic. Yeah, he's post-economic, as Balaji taught us. So I met him in person and he told this story.

And as I was telling the story, he had all these little offhand little moments where he's like, he's like, you know, I didn't realize that at the time. Or like, he'd be like, he'd say something, he'd correct himself. And he'd be like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, I guess that would mean this, but blah, blah, blah.

Oh, but he used that line on everything. I saw him on CNBC one day. And he said the same fucking thing, the exact same fucking way, like a comedian does in their sets. Yeah. A comedian, if you go up there and it feels like a comedian has said this joke a million times, they're bored of it. Then it's not funny.

But a comedian has to sort of like, it's almost like they're realizing or telling this story for the first time. That's when it really hits. And so I saw him do that and I go, oh, there's levels to this shit. Like, not only do you have to be able to be good at it, this is like comedy. This is like storytelling. This is like this is like a play, you know, a Broadway show that goes on stage every night. And there's a new person in the crowd and they have to do it like it's the, this is a Tuesday night.

But no, this is our open. This is our best performance ever. This is the first time we've ever done it. This show matters the most. And we repeat our lines. And I thought, oh, wow, I've never even thought about that. But yeah, I guess it makes sense. You could kind of craft these stories that hit.

And you could tell them over and note. Once you have them, that's in your bank. And I tell this story, people feel this way about me. And that's cool. So I'm going to try and bring this back to the brand thing. But before I do, another way that you can see is when you're pitching stuff. So when you're pitching your company to people, you have to. And I mean, I did this well when I was selling the company, if I was ever trying to raise money,

if I'm ever trying to convince, you know, I do. when I am on other podcasts and also when I am hiring someone. I've got the same pitch and I look at the inflection of my, or I look at their person's eyebrows and I look at their body language to see where I get them to lean in. And I see where I get it to fold backwards. And you've got to find these hooks and you constantly got to throw them out and you got to see what, what bait works. And then you just rinse and repeat. And he was like, ooh, that line hit.

Or when I said I wanted to be like Ted Turner, fuck, they didn't know who Ted Turner was. Okay, what else do I got? You know what I mean? Exactly. Exactly. So to bring it back to Judge Judy, I don't know how I'm going to do that. Yeah, fuck, being back to Judge Judy.

Let's just move on. Anyways, cool story about Michael Buffer and Judge Judy, if you didn't know, they made a bunch of money. And, you know, it pays to have a personal monopoly. All right. That's the podcast. 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 a road, let's travel, never looking back.