My First Million - #210 - How Celebrities Have Made Billions off Their Names
Episode Date: August 18, 2021In this episode Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@theSamParr) dive into a few industries and talk about the players behind them. They start off talking about car dealerships and the handful of politicians wh...o make major coin through them. They then transition to celebrities and how some have leveraged their name to make even more money. They finish the episode with a few anecdotes on how some people started to accumulate wealth and a snippet on anti-aging and scientific discovery. --------- * 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: * (0:59) Intro * (2:47) The Skip Barber racing school * (6:48) Digitizing the gun range * (10:57) The politicians making money with car dealerships * (23:06) The cool growth hack used by Spoonflower * (28:48) Celebrities making bank of their celebrity * (35:26) George Clooney hooking up his friends with $1M cash * (39:51) A feel good story about Shaan's trainer * (41:58) The Bar & Bat Mitzvah hack to wealth * (44:57) A unique twist on Universal Basic Income - the birth dividend * (47:35) Aubrey de Grey and how scientific breakthroughs work
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Once you've been in the market for 21 years and you look at that account and you get to see it going up,
you're going to like realize the value of investing and that that's, you know, like the true path to wealth.
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.
All right.
We're live.
What's going on?
How is Steph?
Nice fancy pants background.
Yeah.
I'm in a mechanism.
It's a fancy pants office.
Do you know what mechanism is?
I've heard of it.
That's the agency guy who's a friend of yours.
I kind of know him a little bit now.
Yeah, they have an agency, maybe a 200-person agency.
And they've got, as you do with agencies,
you've got very fancy offices in Soho and New York.
And no one is here.
And I'm in the fancy office here right now.
All right, good stuff.
Yeah, you miss Steph.
She was great, as always.
So she had a bunch of ideas.
It's like, I know it's funny.
Like, we've had Abraeu be kind of like our version of Jamie,
like Joe Rogan has Jamie.
We've had a brayu.
We now have Dan.
And you get a sense because at the end of every episode, we go,
oh, Dan, how was it?
Hey, Abrae, how'd we do?
And I feel like they both, like, really keyed in on the same thing,
which I don't know if listeners care in the same way,
but, like, the more random tangents we go on,
they kind of like, they kind of love it, but they kind of hate it at the same time.
Whereas when Steph comes on, it's like, here are five ideas.
we're going to do idea one, then two, then three, then four, then five.
What a jam-packed episode of ideas.
And it's like, you know, me and her don't have the same chemistry.
Me and you have of like just being able to go on on random tangents or just kind of bullshit a little bit.
And so it's more packed with info, but it's less packed with detours.
And I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's packed with info.
So I think definitely Dan liked it.
I think a lot of people will like it.
But it's interesting to me how that goes.
Yeah, and I've also noticed that a lot of the things that I like,
the things that I, if I think it's going to be good,
I think it tends not to be good.
And if I think it's going to be bad, that's what I've noticed with content.
But the reason I wasn't here is, so let me tell you this funny story about Twitter.
So four months ago, three months ago, I tweeted out that I wanted to go drive race cars.
So one of my 2021's resolution was I wanted to do more adventurous stuff.
So I want to take a sniper class lesson.
I wanted to go hunting.
Yeah, I wanted to go hunting and kill what I've eaten, which I've never done before.
I wanted to do a cross-country trip.
I did it.
And I wanted to go learn how to do race cars.
And so I tweeted out, I wanted to go to a driving class.
This professional NASCAR driver named Parker hollered at me on Twitter.
And so me and Jack Butcher, who's a buddy of ours and a buddy of mine, we drove up here out
to the country, two hours out of New York to Connecticut.
And we took this class.
It was $2,500.
It was at this place called Skip Barber, Skip Barber driving rate.
driving class. We met the owner of the class. This is a business that, that's a driving school.
It does like 15 million in revenue. Crazy interesting. Kind of cool. It was an ex cop owns it,
like a New York cop. He's like, he's like, oh, just try it because I don't work as a cop anymore.
It turns into a thriving business. He told me his goals to hit to $100 million in revenue in the
next five years. Off this one track or like he has many of these. So here's what they do. So it's
called Skit Barber Racing. It's like a famous brand. It's from the 60s. He bought it out of
bankruptcy. I imagine he paid like low hundreds of thousands of dollars. He bought the brand name.
It's basically a website where they get leads. So Skip Barber, if you're in the cars, it's like a
famous racing school. He owns the website. And so people go and submit leads at where they want to go.
And they go and find like tracks throughout the country and they rent like 20 days at the track.
And they show up with their tractor trailer with like 20 Mustangs that you can, that they drive.
And then it's like a traveling circus. They go from place to place to place to place. It was pretty
interesting. So what did you drive?
It's, by the way, I know nothing about cars. So you're going to say something.
I don't be like, oh, cool. No, no, no, no. I'm not even going to know.
It looks like a Mustang, but it's like, it's a race car. So there's no seats. You're locked in.
You wear a helmet. You're locked in. What do you mean those seats?
There's only a driving seat. Like at the inside, it's like a, it is a race car. There's a roll bar.
There's no like AC or radio or anything like that. But it looks like a Mustang from the outside.
Anyway, that's where it was. Crazy fascinating business.
That's pretty cool. Um, while you were.
saying that you said something about he used to be a cop and we had talked about the retired
the mafia tours in new york business i'm going on it a great idea and so if you don't if you
didn't hear that episode is basically retired cop in new york takes you on a walking tour of new
york city to the different like areas where the mafia families lived and it kind of tells you stories
that's like we all like crime tv shows or whatever and uh and this is like basically crime tv walking
tour. And so you get to hear all these stories. You guys you're going on it. That's cool.
And we had said he had done over a million dollars in sales on his Airbnb experience of doing this,
which is pretty freaking awesome. So this thing you're talking about, though, I think there could be
a really cool version of that that somebody makes, which is basically a cops and robbers,
like a cop chase, a car chase, basically. So they could just have a driver who knows what they're doing
as the kind of like main driver. And then you get to be in a cop car. Like they just take some junk
cop car and you get to drive that thing you get to be talking on the little radio try to get their
license plate and it's basically like a you know controlled simulation of a car a cop chase like a actual
cop chase you go you get them you spin them out then you get out of the car and you get like
you arrest them as the end of it and i feel like that would just be a super fun and be a lot of people
would pay for that and the video of it i uh yeah so we pay i paid 25
$300 shows.
I think I paid an additional $300 for a video.
Of course.
Yeah.
Man, it was awesome.
It's fun.
It's fun to do this stuff to get out of our comfort zone and do exciting stuff.
So that's where I was.
Nice.
Okay, I love that.
All right, let's do some ideas.
I have an idea that's kind of related to this.
So I was watching Dana White, who's the president of the UFC, and he was doing this
YouTube video.
He's like, check out.
No, not that one.
There was one that he just goes, check out how
sick my hotel room is right now in Houston. Did you see this? Yep. And he had a go. Go ahead. Describe it. And I'll
tell you the part. If I remember correctly, he had a movie theater in his hotel room. I think he had a full or no, half-sized
basketball court. Yep. That was painted like the Rockets basketball court with the official scoreboard on the, on the wall and stuff.
And what else did he have? He had a bunch of stuff. So he had that. He had like a full gym. Like so, you know, like hotels have a gym. His hotel room had a gym.
which is kind of amazing.
And then he's got like, whatever, cool bed, bathroom, full steam room.
But the thing I thought was interesting, he goes, check this out.
And he grabs this huge rifle off the wall.
It was like a rifle, a shotgun sitting next to each other.
And he was like, this is cool.
It's like a virtual shooting range.
Yeah.
And then he like, they kind of panned over it.
They went over it real quick.
So I couldn't even really see what it was.
But in my head, I just immediately thought of, you've seen these like golf driving ranges
that are basically it's a green screen.
And then you swing a real club.
and you hit a real ball into the green screen,
and it, like, simulates where it would have landed
if you were on a real golf course.
And those are, like, semi-popular.
So he's got this rifle off the wall,
and I started thinking, oh, that's kind of cool.
Basically, if you've ever held a real gun,
it feels totally different than, like, you know,
the duck hunt gun or, like, an arcade gun.
Like, a real gun has, like, weight to it,
has, like, a recoil if you fire the thing.
So I was thinking somebody could probably build
a high-end version of this niche business,
which is basically virtual shooting ranges.
So you have either a screen, like a green screen or like a plasmid or like a big flat train TV.
And then you give them like what feels like a real gun, but it's like a digitally enabled thing.
So you don't have to have bullets and go outside and do all that stuff.
And I feel like somebody could build a pretty unique business doing that, providing that either to bars or even for at home stuff or corporate events.
That's a fantastic idea.
Have you ever been to an indoor shooting range?
Indoor shooting.
Oh, like where the targets there.
have the earmuffs on or whatever?
Yeah, I've never got it.
Okay, it's miserable.
I've only done outdoors.
So the outdoor shooting ranges are fun.
Indoor shooting rains, miserable.
It has lights like a hospital, and it is so loud.
Right.
If you ever been next to like an AR-15 or some, like, you know, like a huge gun,
when it shoots, it rattles your neighbor.
So you're standing right next to someone, and it's not just loud, but it shakes me.
And it's a miserable, unsafe, horrible experience.
I would way rather do something fun like this over that.
Yeah.
And I feel like because it's digital, you can do fun stuff.
Right?
So when I went to go shoot a gun for the first time,
I'm not into that, my brother, my brother-in-law is.
He, you know, we went and it's like, you're outside.
It was kind of cold.
You're shooting these like paper targets.
They don't move.
You have to stand still.
Every five minutes have to stop, reload the fucking gun, takes time.
Like, those take a lot of breaks in between the action.
The action is fun.
But like, there's a lot of other stuff going.
going on. It was uncomfortable. And I get that like, you know, real man shit, not supposed to be
comfortable, but guess what? People like comfort. So I think what you could do instead is you basically
make a souped up version of the Deer Hunter game where you get the digital gun, but it feels like the
weight of a real rifle or a real shotgun. And then you have like a digital scenario, right? You
wanted to do a sniper class or I don't even know what you said, like a psychopath, but like you probably
want to like simulate actually like sniping someone at a like situation like you can only see
part of their head they're really far away or whatever so you could do that instead of just a paper
target so i think this could be a good idea i'm sure something like this exists but it's all about
turning it into a business in a box or a traveling circus like you said and like coming up with a
model that that productizes this better i think it's great idea and i would love to i would love to attend
all right let's do another one you uh you pick either one for yours or one for mine this is a little bit less
of an idea, but more of an experience that I had. So last week, I went down to Nashville. I had an issue
a few weeks ago where I had a car problem. I had to leave my car at the dealer in Nashville. I went to
go pick it up and I started shooting the shit with the salesperson. They sold, he told me,
this is a Mercedes-Benz Music City dealership. That's what it's called. They told me that they sold
200 cars in June. Does that boggle your mind? I never really thought about how many cars that is.
$20 million in car sales in one month. That's crazy to me. And so I went and looked at what the
figures were for how many cars are sold June to January, because I would think January or February
would be a slow month. It's mostly pretty steady. It's like $1.6 million on a high month and
$1.2 million on a low month. It's not crazy different. So if you assume that the average sale price
was $100,000, and then you assume that they did $20 million for $6,000.
of the months and $15 million for the other six of six months. That's $210 million in one location.
And then I was talking with the guys who ran the company, who ran the dealership. They told me that
they can expect to make 10 to 15 percent profit on that. Does that kind of boggle your mind
that one location could do that much in sales? And was this like, did you feel like it was like
an outlier location, like killer, killer real estate or something like that? It's a Mercedes
dealer in Nashville and there's three in the city. So did I think,
think that that's an outlier. In one sense, yes, because they're selling, you know, expensive
cars. So, like, it's not like a Hyundai where you're selling $20,000 cars. But it's an,
and it's also in Nashville. There's probably 10 to 20 cities in America that are of equal booming
as Nashville. So outlier in one sense, yes, but not crazy outlier. And so I got interested
in this. And so there's this amazing website called Open Secrets. Have you heard of that?
I've heard of it, but I've never gone to it. What do you, you actually go to it? It's like
reading WikiLeaks or something.
I go to it all the time, and here's why.
So if you go to it, you can go, it's called open secrets, maybe open secrets.org.
And so I don't know if it's legal or if it's customary, but if you are a senator, if you're in the House of Representatives,
if you're in a certain type of office in America, they typically disclose their income taxes and also what their net worth is.
And you could browse through and you could see how much money they have in different bank accounts.
You can see how much money they have in different stocks.
You can see how much money they value their privately held business.
It's incredibly fascinating.
So, for example, if you Google Open Secrets Net Worth Senators,
you'll see a list of the richest senators,
and it will tell you where their money is.
And you can click it in some cases, if it's from the 90s, for example,
if you go and look at George Bush's net worth,
you can actually see it's still a handwritten W-2.
So it's incredibly fascinating.
And I browse through there a fair bit because I think it's really fun.
Who cares if they're politicians or not?
But what's interesting is that they're incredibly wealthy.
And you could see how do people allocate money?
Where does their income come from?
How does that work?
And I noticed that there was a fair bit of people who made money through car dealerships in Congress.
And I actually made a list of them.
So the first one, Vernon Buchanan, he's a congressman out of Florida, $157 million network.
Where does his money come from?
Buchanan Automotive Group, where they sell new and used cars in Florida.
And he assigned 50 million.
Hold on.
I'm just going to this list.
I did not realize these senators, there's this many senators that are this wealthy.
So first, the funny thing is there's the richest and poorest.
So, okay, on the top side, you have Mark Warner, richest senator.
He's in Virginia, I think, and at $214 million.
P poorest senator, poor Al C. Hastings in Florida,
negative $7.5 million net worth.
This guy is in a whole of debt.
This guy is just, and, you know, the lowest one that,
is non-negative, let's see.
Probably like a hundred grand or something, like a Pete Feechick or something.
I'm exporting all these CSVs.
This is going to be great.
Go on.
Sorry.
I went and looked at some of the Congress folks that were rich, and it was Vernon Buchanan.
He owns an automotive group.
He assigned around $35 million of his net worth, sorry, almost $100 million of his
net worth to car dealerships.
Ron Williams from Texas, net worth $67 million.
He had close to $10 million.
because he is part owner of a Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep business.
John Campbell net worth of $23 million.
He owns franchises for Nissan, Mazda, Ford, Saturn, and Saab.
And Mike Kelly, net worth $20 million.
He assigned at least $5 million for his car dealers.
It was incredibly fascinating.
So I dug even deeper.
This Nashville dealer, you want to know who's the co-owner?
Who?
Nick Sabin, the coach from University of Alabama.
And he owns a bunch of them.
He owns three, four, or five.
crazy fascinating to me about car dealers. And I was just so curious as to how the rest of them do.
And so I did a little bit more research and I read different interviews with car dealers.
And typically they make about 5, 10% in profit. But the secret is that, A, they have to make most of their money from service and parts because that's where the big margin is.
And B, there's actually a lot of ways that you can test this. So you can do loads of test advertising.
And they kind of do this like MVP style advertising where they'll advertise in different places, see which cars sell and then become an import.
or a dealer of that particular car.
I just thought it was so fascinating
about how these car dealerships work.
Have you ever, like, do you know anything about this?
First of all, you're on fire right now.
So I just got to give you a little bit of credit.
You're on fire right now.
I don't know if this is Jake, the researcher.
I don't know if this is Sam, the deal hunter.
I don't know what's going on, but good job.
I love this.
I love open secrets.
I love the senator thing.
And I love the car dealership thing.
All right, so let me just put that on the table.
Have I thought about this?
No, but it's been hidden in plain sight.
I grew up in Colorado, and John Eloy always had dealerships.
It was like everywhere.
And I just, I never really thought about it, but like clearly the guy was making bank on
these dealerships, otherwise he wouldn't be spending so much time and energy doing all
these little kind of like marketing meet and greets at his dealerships.
And that combo of like local hero car dealership, I think has just worked for a long time.
Like in the movie Little Giants, I think that's how the guy had his money too is like local
football star, you know, car dealer is like, just like a formula that works. And I know that
there's like the guy who gets a lot of press during, whenever the Toronto Raptors do well,
they have this super fan, this Sikh Indian guy who shows up at court side of every game,
Nav back at Batia. I actually have them listed here. So he started as a Hyundai salesperson and he
eventually started owning a car dealership and he claims his net worth is $50 million. Exactly. And he spends
all of his money traveling with the team and buying courtside tickets to every single game.
The guy's like a maniac. He goes to every single game and he has for like 20 years,
courtside, and he's like cheering like crazy. And yeah, he started as a salesman. You're right.
Okay, so this is kind of interesting. I want to share with you a couple of things that I can add to this.
Have you ever heard of... And by the way, if you scroll down, you can see all the examples I have
of people who have made at least a billion dollars to car dealers. You see that?
Yeah, this was pretty impressive. So the Benson family, they on the Saints,
Pennsky, Wayne Hizenga.
You love that guy.
He started with Auto Nation.
Yeah.
And he owns the Miami Dolphins.
That guy's a baller.
We should feature him.
You know a lot about him.
Mark Wahlberg has one.
Michael Jordan has one.
All right, that's pretty interesting.
So that's cool.
I didn't really realize that this is like one of those franchises that you kind of want
to own.
I wonder if that's changing.
So in my head, I'm like, car dealer, isn't this dead?
Like aren't car sales just moving online?
And then you have platforms like,
Carvana that's become like a $7 billion company of like buying cars online.
So definitely some of buying cars moving online.
But not all.
And so I actually ran into this company called Modal.
Have you ever heard of modal?
Tell me about it.
The URL is just modalup.com.
And a buddy of mine is Samir, this great guy, Samir Bala.
He basically, he was going to do a startup.
And then I checked his LinkedIn.
He's like, oh, I'm C-O of modal now.
I was like, what the heck?
He took a job?
I was like, if this guy took a job, this must be an interesting business because he would
not go join a company unless he thought this company had like really good prospects.
And I trust his judgment.
And so I should have invested.
I asked him to invest.
I even made room and that I got cold feet at the last minute for some stupid reason.
But basically, I think this is a great business.
What they do is they basically made it so that any dealer, it's like Shopify for car dealers in a way.
So it basically lets you sell cars, digital.
and online. So it creates like a website, a checkout button, a buy button that you can just
send customers to that, that want to buy from you. It also just like automates all the
workflow. So like with buying a car, when you go by a car, you're going to end up sitting in the
dealership for like an hour because there's like the paperwork. If you're doing a loan or at least,
you have to do even more paperwork. And then, you know, you just have to like collect all these
signatures and get all this stuff to get the title in your name. And these guys basically turned
all that into software. And they were growing really, really well.
basically going to car dealerships and getting them to adopt this software so that they could
keep up and compete with the kind of like online-only platforms. It's like, hey, don't stay stuck
in the brick-and-mortar-only ways. Yes, you're a car dealership, but you should allow some
digitalization, digitalize your workflow and let your customers go check out online and just buy
products. And what they do is they actually claim that they can, you know, boost sales by like,
like, I don't know, 30, 35 percent or something like that. And it shortens the cycle time because usually
people take quite a while to look through stuff and they speed up the purchase time as well.
So I think this is a pretty cool business that's going to be quite big.
I'm on board with all the digital stuff.
I was just fascinating at just the brick and mortar.
And it's still growing like crazy.
In fact, there's loads of data on this because I didn't realize how impactful cars are.
I mean, of course, we all have them.
But I didn't realize how they kind of, in a sense, are minor, maybe major,
players in our country, in how we even develop laws, things like that.
And so there's all this data that you can go and learn about this.
So the average car dealership, like a physical dealer, the average one in last year,
2021, did 36 million, or sorry, year to date, the first six months, $36 million in sales.
And just the average car dealer.
And we sell something like...
Yeah, but that's like GMV.
That's like car sales.
So, you know, they don't, you just have 10 to 15% maybe is their margin on that.
So that's a $3 million, you know, take for the whole dealership.
It's still astounding.
And then if you can also go and look at another website you can go to is pro-Republica.
And you could see which lobbies give money to the government for different laws.
Car dealer or the car lobby, which there's like eight of them, they give substantial amounts of money.
And anyway, that's my, that's my segment on car dealers and cars.
Pretty astounding.
I was shocked by it.
we can move on.
You know what's cool, by the way, Tesla, no dealership model.
So bold move by them to not have any dealers.
And in doing so, basically kept a lot of the profit for themselves and went direct to consumer.
They were the first direct-to-consumer car company that exists.
So good job by Elon.
Yeah.
And I could see that taking off, but the market is massive.
Not everyone's going to do the same thing.
And so there's room for everyone.
Sam, always holding it down for blue collar America.
I love it.
In my mind, it's just two coasts squished together with some stuff in the middle,
and you're like, no, no, the middle is, there's a lot of beautiful stuff in the middle,
and it's not all just going away and becoming, like, fancy tech right away.
Not yet, at least.
All right, let's do some more.
So look at my topics here and tell me which one's interesting.
Spoonflower is one of the most interesting things I've seen lately.
Had you heard of this before, spoonflower?
No, no.
So check it out.
I don't even know the URL.
I think it's just spoonflower.com.
They sold for $225 million.
So I got familiar with this because for a clothing company that we were working on,
we need to look at patterns.
And I was like, where do you find patterns online?
You can find patterns in many places.
But one place was Spoonflower.
So this is basically a marketplace where you have on one side designers who come up with, like,
let's say, a nice floral pattern or sunflower pattern.
And then you can take those.
So like I think your mother-in-law is doing like a pillow business.
And so she could go on spoonflower and say,
ooh,
I really like this fabric swatch pattern.
I want to basically buy this pattern and turn it into pillows.
I want to buy this pattern and turn it into wallpaper.
And so you can use it for all the things that patterns go on.
Wallpaper, you know, like mats, pillowcases, whatever,
different stuff like that, blankets, curtains, shit like that.
So it's this niche marketplace.
Most people haven't even heard of.
And then you go there and you see it and you're like,
oh, this makes total sense.
And so they sold for $225 million to Shutterfly.
I thought it was really cool.
And just like kind of this niche product
that has been around for a while that sold.
And then I wanted to share also a growth hack.
But what's your kind of like first reaction to this?
I think this is brilliant.
I'm looking at it right now.
There's a few reasons why I like this company.
The first is that I believe it's based in North Carolina.
I like things that are not in Silicon Valley, not in the heart.
I think they're not in the heart of technology hubs.
I think that's amazing.
There's so many wonderful things about this business.
It's just, I mean, it's a win, win, win type of company
where you help people make money, you help people get what they want.
The company, Spoonflower makes a little bit of cash.
I'm into it.
Right.
And it was started in 2008.
So it's been around for a while.
It's one of these that like most marketplaces.
Marketplaces are extremely valuable when you get them to work, but they can take time to work
because you have to keep cranking the wheel of supply and demand
to get it to work.
You need enough designs and enough designers,
you need enough buyers,
and then you have to keep, like, do a lot of manual stuff to make that work.
So one thing I liked, this guy who listens to the pod,
Adam Kiesling, I think this is how you say his name.
He was talking about this deal,
and he was pointing out this method that they used to grow.
And he's like, I'll just share with you a couple things that he pointed out.
So Spoonflower, 3.3 million unique artists, 4,000 new designs uploaded on average every day.
So that's a pretty crazy scale.
And what they did was they would do design challenges.
And so Spoonflower would host a design challenge.
And then the top 50 popular voted designs would get featured as the winner circle.
And it would get to the top of the website.
And then if you go to the website, you click, like, you know, oh, let me see the best Halloween designs.
that would drive like 95% of the sales to a lot of the creators.
So it was kind of feaster famine.
You would take your shot to get notice.
But if you got notice, you would get a ton of inbound sales for those contests.
And it might just be like a thousand or 2,000 people participating in each one.
And so I thought this is a pretty smart model of how they bootstrap the marketplace.
So they're like, all right, we need, buyers want content for Halloween.
How do we get a bunch of designers to make the right Halloween content and make it
all make a bunch of new ideas that are unique. You can only find them on spoon flour. I'll host this
contest. And the contest winners get like, I don't know, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars.
It doesn't have to be too much money. And they get exposure through that process. And then
he was, Adam was sharing that like, you know, food 52 that they used to do the same thing.
When they were seeding their marketplace of recipes, right, they had chefs uploading recipes
and then people coming to download them. They would, they created a contest called your best recipe using
fresh mozzarella, right? So give me your best
mozzarella recipe. And then, you know, they would get whole foods to
sponsor it and get a gift card. And then like the grand prize is $1,000, right?
And so they would keep doing these contests around things that people were searching
for in order to cede the marketplace with the right content. So I thought that was a cool
learning as well from this. This is amazing. And what's even more interesting or as interesting
is that Shutterfly bought them. I forgot about Shutterfly. I just looked up.
Shutterfly, I think they got, did they get delisted?
They were public.
They had a $2 billion market cap and like close to $2 billion in revenue.
Right.
And so one, that's a complicated, that's a crazy space.
That's where Shutterfly is.
So, you know, good luck.
Good luck to them on that one.
I think Spoonflower's badass.
Can we, can I tell you something that surprised me?
So the other day, Rihanna was named a billionaire.
That's pretty amazing, right?
Yeah.
I think that's amazing.
And so I got curious.
I started working with Jake.
I was like,
what other celebrities have gotten rich in ways that I wouldn't really have known right away?
And it kind of got, I kind of got into.
This is going to be a YouTube segment right here.
10 celebrities that got rich, not from their fame.
Well, it is a little bit extended from their fame.
But I'm going to give you six of them.
So the first, you know who Jimmy Buffett is?
You're not white, so you may not be in a Jimmy Buffett.
I've heard the name.
But if you said, here's five old white guys point out Jimmy Buffett,
I would just point to the far right.
I have no idea.
So Jimmy Buffett, I don't even know how to just explain them.
White 60-year-olds who wear Tommy Bahama.
Do you even know what that is?
Yes, I know that one.
Okay, white 60-year-olds who wear Tommy Bahama love him.
He's the guy who created Cheeseburger in Paradise that song.
So he also had this album called Margaritaville.
It's all about the Caribbean and being on a boat
and living this parrot-style life.
I think that's parrot heads is what he's called.
So he's got Margaritaville.
It's a subsidiary of Cheeseburger Holding Company.
which is pretty funny. He's got 30 restaurants,
and he has vacation clubs, hotels,
a retirement village, and tequila.
Collectively, the holdings do something like
$2 billion a year in sales. Is that crazy?
Then, you also probably don't know about this one.
This isn't in your wheelhouse, but Dali Parton.
Do you know Dali Parton? Is that his girlfriend?
Who is this?
You don't know who Dallie Pardin is?
Again, I've heard the name.
If you showed me five old white ladies,
I couldn't point out Dali Parten.
So Dali Parton was a famous country singer,
but she did more than just country.
Have you heard the song,
I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston?
Yes.
She wrote that.
She wrote working 9 to 5,
which has been covered many times.
She's just a hit maker,
but she was famous.
You probably remember photos of her.
She's in her probably close to 80s now, 70s,
but she's famous for having blonde hair and huge boobs.
You definitely remember her.
She has famous phrases.
Like, you'd be amazed at how much money it costs
to look this cheap.
She's got phrases like that.
But she's actually a great person.
and she has an empire.
She's a great person.
Well, she's like, she's known for her philanthropy and for doing good.
She gives back to the community.
She seems like a wonderful person.
And it's kind of a joke that she looks cheap.
That's like her joke.
Right.
But it's estimated that she has a net worth of like $600 million.
And I was driving through the Smokies recently just two weeks ago.
And I drove through Glett, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which is a small town in the mountains of Tennessee.
And right outside of that, she has a fucking theme part.
It's called Dollywood.
Her name's Dolly Parton?
She has Dollywood.
There's rides.
It's a huge deal.
It's amazing.
They've got, just imagine six flags,
but it's all about Dolly Parton,
and it's called Dollywood.
It's amazing.
You know we're like 15 years away
from like Paul World in L.A.
And it's the Paul Brothers, you know,
version of Disney World.
That's what's going to happen here.
They are our Dolly Partons of our generation.
It could be.
So I'm shocked.
You've never heard of Dolly World.
Dolly World. You've never heard of that, Dollywood?
No, no. It's a huge thing. It's very big. It's like a mini six flags. It's not even a mini six flags. It's almost as big as six flags. And people in the South, I'm from Missouri. I lived in Tennessee. So I'm kind of Southern. People in the South are obsessed with it. That's where you go on vacation. You go to Dollywood. And you actually go to a lot of different casinos in the South. You'll see Dolly Parton-themed. Casinos. It's crazy. All right. Another one. Sammy Hagar. That doesn't ring a bell either to you, does it?
No, this is just to humiliate you on session.
God, that's so funny.
Van Halen.
Do you know what Van Halen is?
I heard the name.
Dude, you are so...
Couldn't help a song if I wanted to.
God, that's so funny.
Okay, so Sammy Hagar from Van Halen,
he sold a tequila company for around $80 million.
And it was a tequila brand.
And I'll just tell you two quick ones.
You don't know any of these people.
It's all just like white basic people.
Kate Hudson.
You know, Kate Hudson?
I know Kate Hudson, but I see the words.
There we go.
Fabletics written here.
She,
what does she have to do
this abletics?
She helped start it.
She was one of the co-fathers.
Oh, no way.
Okay, I didn't know that.
Crazy, right?
Your wife probably wears it.
I mean, it's like a,
they sell fancy tights, right?
Two, 2020 revenue,
$500 million.
Wild.
And then finally,
Jessica Alba.
She owns 20% of it.
Yeah, I know Jessica Alba.
Yeah, so 20% meaningful.
And finally,
Jessica Alba started or helped start
the honest,
company. It just IPOed. It's got a market cap north of a billion dollars, I believe.
And her stake are around $130 million. It's pretty amazing, right?
I like it. Yeah. So what do you think is like the best model? So what do we see here?
We saw like entertainment, so hotels, casinos, you know, like kind of like amusement parks.
Then we saw basically like makeup company, skincare company, you know, fragrance company and alcohol brand.
which one do you like or do you think there's another one that their celebrities are sort of leaving on the table?
Alcohol seems like the best.
Kahn-Megregor recently did it.
He sold proper 12.
I believe his steak was worth around $100 million.
I think alcohol is the best one because you can charge $50 for a bottle of a certain type of alcohol.
And there's a chance that someone will want to buy that many times a month.
So I think alcohol is interesting.
Makeup's okay.
I obviously don't know anything about that.
Rihanna crushed it.
Her brand is killing it.
It's called, what's it called Fenty?
And she's got, she's got a couple brands.
They kill it.
But I think alcohol is number one.
Though I do think that there's a world.
If I was a Lance Armstrong, and I've told them he should have done this when he was
on the podcast, if I was a Lance Armstrong, a Michael Phelps, something like that,
I would 100% partner with a hotel brand and do fitness focused hotels and try to have
branded, a branded pool or a branded pool instruction that you could do in that
pool, like a workout, or do a cycling branded hotel.
I think that would crush.
And I think you could make money every year for 50 years doing that.
Right.
Yeah, I think doing something that's on brand is kind of the key.
Like Sam Harris doing this with a, Sam Harris did this with a meditation app, right?
Because that's what's on brand for him.
If San Harris came out with alcohol or like, you know, like a skincare line, no thank you.
But Sam Harris with a meditation app, that can work.
and I think that thing prints money.
It does, and so I've heard.
All right, you want to do a few more?
Yeah, Dan has one on here, by the way.
George Clooney, make it a billion dollars with Casamigos, tequila.
Somebody told me this story.
I didn't plan to say this.
I don't know if it's true or not.
I might be making it up.
George, have you heard this George Clooney giving his friends a million dollars each?
No.
So George Clooney, this is the story.
So George Clooney, at one point in time, he was like, you know, when I, I think he was thinking, like, when I retire, when I die, like, I want to basically give some of my wealth to my friends because these friends are like, some of the best people in my life.
I used to sleep on their couch when I was like trying to make it.
And they really like help me in one way or another.
All these friends have helped me.
And then he decided like, okay, why am I going to wait until I die?
Like, that doesn't make any sense.
And so he invited them all to like a dinner or like a dinner.
or like a dinner at his like whatever, cabin or something like that.
I'm making up a lot of these details.
But what I was told was he invites them all to a dinner and he brings 14 briefcases or like
suitcases, a Tumi suitcase, actually.
Each one was filled with a million dollars in cash.
And he invited them over for dinner.
And he gave each of them the suitcase.
And they each just got a million dollars from him.
And he was like, you know, I've been through some hard times.
And, you know, I want you to not have to.
worry about your kids, your mortgage, your school, whatever it is.
You know, here you go. Enjoy.
And I was like, that is a baller move.
I love that. Why haven't I heard this story before?
I think that's kind of amazing.
And that actually comes to a point.
I've actually been reading about this lately.
So there's this great book and this concept called Die with Zero.
Have you heard of this?
No, but I get the idea just off the title.
So it's a good title.
Yeah.
So it's called Die With Zero.
And the idea that we all have is I want to try to earn money.
And when I die, I've got something to give away to my family.
If you don't have family, I can give away to causes that I care about.
And this whole concept behind Die with Zero is, why would you do that?
And regardless if you believe in heaven or not, I don't.
What I think, when I was like, well, when I die, it's going to feel like just how it felt like before I was born.
Right.
Nothing.
And how did it feel like before I was born?
Nothing.
So do I really care about a legacy?
Like, do I care about what people are saying about, like, Tim, about me when I'm,
you know, pre-born feeling.
Right.
Of course.
I don't care.
So if I'm going to, and that's not, he actually doesn't say that in the book.
That's my, that's me.
But the point of the book is, all right, why would you care so much about what, what you're
going to do with you're dead?
Just give it to people or your friends, like do that plan before you die and enjoy it
with your, your friends and family.
Create a giving plan now.
If giving matters to you, create a giving plan now and do XT you donate now and not when
you're dead, right?
Two scenarios.
Scenario one, you wait until you're 88 years old, 92 years old.
old, you pass away. Then there's a will reading and, you know, a couple of your friends are there.
They're also in their 88 to 92 year old range. And your kids are there and their kids are there,
whatever. And you pass, you know, you pass along some money to them. And your 88 year old friend is like,
oh, thanks for the, thanks for the million dollars, George. Appreciate it. Like, it'll go straight
to my, like, you know, dialysis machine. Yeah. You know, like, what do I need this for?
And your kids are also like, cool, could you use that when I was paying off student debt
for years or wanted to start a business.
But now that I'm 42, I'm glad that I'm 45,
I'm glad I got this inheritance from you.
Thank you.
And so that's scenario one, scenario two.
You invite your friends over for dinner.
You bring us to me suitcase with a million dollars in it,
and you say, what I eat, we all eat.
Let's go.
And basically, you hook up the people who have helped you
and it mattered to you and you help their lives today
because why wait 40 years and let them have
more discomfort or suffering along the way when you could, if you're trying to give to make an impact,
impact today is worth a lot more than impact 45 years from now. And so I'm a big believer in this.
I hadn't really thought about it until I heard this George Clooney story. But when I heard it,
I was like, oh. And my friends, if I invite you to a dinner and a cabin and I show up with 14
suitcases, like you know what's happening. I'm about to George Cleaning your ass because that's what's
going on. And I really have taken this mindset of when I eat, we all eat.
and I really think it's a lot more fun to live that way.
The other little story I'll share, I was talking to my trainer,
and I was like, I was like, so I call him JA.
I was like, you know, Jay, so you know about my goals, my dreams,
you're helping me get there because you're my coach.
And you talk about like you want to spend up your business,
you're starting this fashion line, great.
Like, what's your like, what is your dream though?
Like we do this imagination exercise.
You know what I'm imagining for myself.
and we love that feeling and we use that.
What's yours?
And he has this thing, which is you don't imagine the outcome.
So like, let's say you wanted to be rich.
You don't imagine selling your company to HubSpot
and looking in your bank account and seeing X dollars.
You imagine like the congratulatory conversation.
Like once it happens, you won't be so fixated on it happening.
Your life will just be different because it happened.
Right.
So you might imagine, you know, you might imagine your, you know, you might imagine your friend
calling you congratulating you on the deal or you might imagine booking a trip because you have all this
free time now and so you don't imagine the money you imagine what happens after you had it and you
you know this the sort of implied state so anyways his was oh i imagine getting a text from my mom
saying you know son thank you for the six thousand dollars this month like that's huge for me like uh you
i'm so grateful to have a son like you thank you so much and then so he he was talking about that
I was like, oh, that's cool.
So instead of saying, I want to be a millionaire so that I can forgive my mom something,
he imagines the text from his mom.
And then that got him thinking.
So the next day, he goes and he sends her $600.
He's like, look, I can't send her $6,000 every month right now, but I can send her $600
today.
And then he showed me the text he got the next morning.
And it was literally like almost word for word what he had told me in the garage.
He was like, she texted him.
She's like, son, I don't know what I did to deserve such a blessing of a son like
you the money you sent me you don't even know i needed that uh like it's going to go to exactly what i
need thank you so much like you know i love you so much son i hope you're you know i hope you're doing
well and i was like damn that was kind of cool to see it come together and i love that he didn't wait
till it was all done to start the giving plan all right so since you were talking about giving money
away i saw that you wrote something pretty funny in our document called the jewish hack to wealth
Barton's Fuzz.
I totally agree with you.
I have so many.
I don't even have more to say.
That's just kind of it.
I have, I, my wife is from a Jewish family.
I've got a lot of my Jewish friends.
I am so envious of how the,
and at my wedding,
when all of our Jewish guests,
they gave us significant checks.
I also think it's a New York thing,
or I don't know if it's a New York thing
or a Jewish thing, but my Missouri friends would give $100.
Our Jewish New Yorker friends would give $1,000.
Right.
And it was amazing.
And I think that there's something in that particular community where you give a significant
amount of money for gifts so you can help one another out and money kind of flows a little
bit more freely.
Getting $8,000 or $5,000 or something when you're 16 years old or 15 years old, I've talked
to some kids.
That's like how a lot of like interesting businesses have been started.
They said the user Bart Mitzvah money.
I completely agree.
Yeah.
I don't know how many Jews there are in the world.
I think there's like 10 million Jews, something like that.
It's like 20, I think.
14.
Yeah, something like that.
14, 20 million.
Not a lot.
But Jewish people have that.
They punch above their weight.
They have a lot of impact.
They have a lot of power.
They have a lot of success.
And I don't think it's genetic.
I think it's cultural.
I think basically there's a strong foundation
of basically like helping each other out.
So everything from birthright, right?
Like a free, basically all expense paid trip to your home country at one point in your life.
That's kind of an amazing program.
And that keeps the, instead of the brain drain and people just sort of like leaving and not
having this like emotional tie to the culture, no, that one transformative experience
keeps people tied in.
There's, you know, bar mitzvah, right?
So like, I don't know how many times I've heard, yeah, I just took all my bar mitzvah money
and I used that to like start the business or I use that to like start investing in the stock market.
And like my buddy, he had, I think, I don't be like 12 grand or something like 10 grand from his bar mitzvah, like money, something like when he was whatever.
I don't know how old you are. 13 that's something when it happens.
And by the time we were in college, he was like, he's like got a fucking portfolio of a quarter million dollars.
And I'm like, how do you have all this money?
He's like, oh yeah, it's just been compounding for, you know, for 10 years, basically.
and he's like, yeah, one of the guys, you know, our family friend who gave us the thing,
he didn't even give me cash.
He gave me straight stock of this one biotech company that he really believed in.
The biotech company has like 10xed in the seven-year period.
And yeah, so like I have, you know, what do we want to do?
I got $200,000 if we wanted to start a business.
And I was like, man, what a hack.
And so two things.
I think it's amazing.
I think more culture should do this.
I also had heard a pretty interesting idea of like, you know,
universal basic income. So it's like the idea of like every year you give people some amount of money,
$10,000 a year or whatever. I don't know what the proposed numbers are, but some amount of money
as your universal basic income, like Social Security for all people. And it's like pretty expensive.
And so some people think it's great. Some people think it's bad. I don't really know. I don't really
care. But I do think this other idea I heard was better, which was what if you got a birth dividend?
So let's say every U.S. citizen when you're born, the government or whoever puts $2,500
in your account.
Could be $2,500 or $5,000, something like that.
So from age zero and you can't touch it until you're 21.
So age zero to 21, you have this thing compounding.
And if something's compounding over 21 years, it's going to double probably at least,
I think, three times.
so three to four times.
And so, you know, everybody walking out at 21 years old would have $15,000 to $20,000,
ready for them to do whatever they want as a cushion for life, as a way to start something,
as a way to fund a creative pursuit, if they want to be an artist or whatever.
And I thought that was a pretty powerful idea and like a great sort of one-time bonus for every citizen.
Who does that?
And then it's invested, so it's actually fueling the economy.
So it's not like universal basic income where you get it.
You might save it.
You might spend it.
You don't know what you'll do.
But it's going to be invested in like an index for 21 years.
And then in doing that, everyone is bought into a particular type of thing.
And so that way, even if you have different opinions, so I think that we should do this.
I think we should do that.
That's cool.
But at least we all have a little bit, even if just a tiny bit of skid of the game.
And so we're incentivized in a similar way.
And everybody would learn about investing and competition.
compounding and the benefit of time in market, right?
Time in market is the most important thing, right?
There's the Buffet phrase, time in market is over, I take that over timing the market.
And so once you've been in the market for 21 years and you look at that account and you get
to see it going up, you're going to like realize the value of investing and that that's,
you know, like the true path to wealth if you just do more of that.
Whereas if you never get started, then you never really feel it real.
So I think that's a big benefit.
I think we should have the American butt mitz for fun.
That's actually a great idea.
That's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's incredibly interesting.
Um, all right.
Maybe what we want to do one last one.
Um,
tell me about Aubrey de Grey because, uh, I, I, I've known a little bit about this.
I've known a little bit about them.
I've listened to podcasts with this guy.
I believe he's an, he's an anti-aging doctor and professor.
Yes.
So this is a funny story.
I find it funny.
Other people are going to be like, how could you say that's funny.
The funny, it's ironic.
I went on Twitter last night, as I do,
and I see this tweet that says,
Aubrey de Grey is a sexual predator.
I don't know who Aubrey de Grey is.
So I'm like, but that's a bold tweet.
Okay, what are you talking about?
So, you know, my gossip, the gossip part to me starts getting excited.
So I click it.
I start trying to see what's going on.
And basically two things happen.
I found out that this person, Aubrey de Grey, has, you know,
kind of like, I don't know exactly what they've done,
but made people feel uncomfortable at the least
and maybe sexually harassed people at the most.
I'm not 100% sure,
but basically two women who are in that field,
Laura Denning and I forgot the other person's name,
they came out yesterday or recently this week, something like that,
and they published stories saying,
Aubrey de Grey made me feel uncomfortable,
said things to me that were totally inappropriate,
abuse of power,
and the organization that funds him knew about this,
covered it up because he was so important
for fundraising and for the science,
of this because he's been basically like a lifelong leader of this movement of anti-aging.
So I see that.
Then I'm like, I just want to see what he looks like.
What is this Aubrey de Grey guy?
He has got this huge beard.
Have you seen him?
Yes.
He looks like a little bit like there was a, what's the famous philosopher from the Soviet Union?
Not Nosutas.
Rasputin.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, he looks like, you know, Gandalf or Doubledore or something like that.
You know, he looks like, you know, of that lineage.
You know, you wouldn't be surprised if he's Dumbledore's cousin.
So he, I see him and I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
What's this guy like all about?
What is he a big deal?
And I click and I look and I listen to this TED talk.
And ironically, the funniest thing in the TED talk was at the end, somebody asked a question.
And they go, if you're so into anti-aging, why do you try to look like an old man?
That's pretty good.
That was hilarious.
The second thing is this guy is pretty fast.
fascinating, very charismatic, very weird, and very interesting. And the whole topic of anti-aging
is fascinating. And so I know yesterday was like he's getting canceled and like, you know, he probably
did some fucked up things. And I don't really know the guy's character, maybe he's a bad guy.
I have no idea. But this topic of anti-aging and that was ironic that that was my entry point
into it, but I was blown away by what's going on in this field. So I wanted to kind of share this
with you. I basically wanted to like summarize this guy's TED talk for you in like two minutes.
So he gives us TED talk back in 2005 and he's talking a million miles a minute. I talk fast.
He talks 10 times faster than me. And he's got these slides that are the white with black text and then like red font callouts of like his opinion.
So he took like, you know, 12 minutes to make these slides. But they're actually very effective and communicating.
And so he basically gives us talk. He goes, um, aging and ill.
and death are, you know, people think today that these are inevitable and that they're okay
and that they're good. I don't think any of those things are true. I do not think it's inevitable.
I think we will defeat aging. I think we will be able to live thousands of years. I do not think
they're good. And I do not, I think we should just sit by and just let, let, you know,
150,000 people die every day. That was like how he starts, right? So you're like, okay,
tell me more. He's like, first, I'm going to tell you about the bad arguments,
against what I'm trying to say.
By the end of this, I'm going to convince you that it's not only possible,
it is probable that we're going to do this.
And I'll tell you how.
But before that, I'll convince you, I'll let me get rid of some of these really bad arguments.
He's like, bad argument, number one, oh, we'd be so bored if we didn't die, right?
Bad argument number two is, oh, the population will get too big and humans are bad for the earth or whatever.
And he goes through these arguments.
He kind of like debunks each one of them very quickly.
And he's basically like, look, what we want to do is we want to be healthy for a long time, right?
We're not just trying to be old and, like, dependent and feeble for a long time.
We want to be healthy for a long time.
And he's like, here's what's going on in this field.
And so this was kind of interesting for me.
I didn't know any of this.
So he's like, there's two schools.
He's like, first, why do we die?
And he's like, why do we die?
We die for two reasons.
He's like, to live, our body does all these metabolic processes.
Basically, like, heating your body, cooling your body.
immune system,
digesting food,
like learning,
growing, building muscle.
All these are metabolic processes.
We do them to live.
And just like any machinery,
like a car or a factory,
the more you use the machinery,
the more like as the physics
of the thing moving happens,
damage happens over time.
It accumulates and eventually
the thing breaks and stops working.
So he goes,
living creates damage.
Damage is happening all the time
and then eventually
the damage kills yourselves and then you die.
And he's like, all right, so there's two schools of thought.
Schooled thought number one is that let's stop the damage, prevent damage, right?
Prevention is better than the cure.
And he's like, bad idea.
We barely even know how metabolism works.
And it's highly unlikely that you're going to be able to keep the high function of the machine running
and like stop damage from happening.
Damage seems kind of like inevitable if the machine's going to run.
And he's like, that's called whatever.
school of thought. It doesn't matter what the name is. He's like, then there's another called
geriatrics. A geriatrics basically is like, cool, damage happens, but how do we like either repair
damage or like limit the damage so that it doesn't kill yourselves? And he's like, that's where
I think this is going to work. So here's like this guy's case on how this is going to work. He goes,
we are going to reach a point where we have a therapy called human rejuvenation therapy,
H-J-R.
I think it called HR-H-R-T or something like that.
I don't know what he calls it.
Human rejuvenation therapy.
Let's just call it that for short.
He's like, basically, you're going to, he's like,
what we know is that you're living,
by the way, is this boring or should I keep going?
No, I'm looking at what he's saying now as you go.
Keep going.
Okay, so basically he's saying, like,
he's like, one thing we notice is that the damage is happening from the day we're
born, right?
Your cells function, you damage,
but you don't really feel the effects until you're like middle-age.
or getting older. So 40, 50, 60, that's when you start to, the damage starts to accumulate,
the cells start to die. And that's when brain function slows down, muscle function slows down,
reaction time slows down. It's like, so there's this like point where there's too much damage.
So we need to give you a therapy before then. It's like, we can't just like modify your DNA so
there's no damage happening. What we need to do is by the time you're 30 or 40, we need to be able
to give you something that's going to like repair the damage that's happening faster than the damage.
is happening. And he's like, that's how we're going to solve this. Number two, we're going to
solve it first in mice before we solve it in humans. He goes, mouse lives two years. The test is
going to be, can you get the mouse to live five years? But here's the trick. You can't breed the
mouse differently. You have to let the mouse live normally for 18 months. Then you have to give
them something at 18 months that extends life by two years. That's going to be the test. And he's actually
put up like a million and a half dollar prize or whatever, like there's a multi-million
dollar prize for anybody that can do that. You have to do a test where it's like an ex-price.
It's like, let a mouse live for 18 months, give him a therapy, and now his life needs to be
extended. And in the control where you don't give the mouse the thing, he needs to die six
months later as plan. And so that's like the, that's the breaking point. He's like, once we figure
out how to do that, then like 10, 15, 20 years later or something like that, we'll be able
to translate that into humans. But we don't know how to do it in mice yet.
He's like, right now we can extend their life a few months, but not years.
He goes, the second thing, people think that this is really far away.
Like, oh, yeah, maybe people will live forever, but not in my lifetime.
He goes, the way that science works is, he has this curve.
He shows, like, if you were 80 years old and we discover this shit, it's too late for you,
you're dying.
If you're 60 years old and we discover this shit, it's kind of too late for you, you're dying.
If you're 50 and we discover it, we might extend you by a good 30 years, but you're probably
going to die at that point.
He's like, but if you're 40 or 30 and we discover this, like at the time when we discover
this, you like have escape velocity, as I call it, meaning I'm going to give you the
therapy before enough damage has happened and you're going to live, like the guy who's 10 years
older than you is going to live until he's 150 and you're going to live till you're a thousand.
He's like, that blows people's minds, but it's true.
It's just the way that this works, which is once we have the therapy, the difference between
somebody living an extra 40 or 50 years and an extra thousand years will just be like a 10-year age
gap because you'll be just below that threshold of damage.
How far away are we?
And so he's like the part he says, they just discusses the science of breakthroughs.
He goes, in every field, there are breakthroughs.
Breakthroughs are extremely hard to predict when they happen.
He's like flight.
Even, you know, from prehistoric ages, we've had this idea of being able to fly.
and then nobody knew how to fly until like 1903.
1903, the Wright brothers figure out how to fly.
And then from there, it's like every 25 years,
there's like a pretty big jump from two dudes and a plane
that's basically going to kill you
to like a plane that's reliable,
to a plane that can go really far,
to supersonic planes, to like,
now we get on a plane, it's super safe,
you go to sleep, you watch a movie, and you fly, right?
Like every 25 years, incremental progress happens after the breakthrough.
So you can predict incremental progress,
So he knows after we get the breakthrough of figuring out mice,
we're going to have like 15, 20 years before we get it to be a therapy in humans that extends
life 20 or 30 years, healthy life.
But, you know, we don't know when that breakthrough is going to happen.
He's like, the bad part is it's been like 100 years and basically nothing's happened
for this breakthrough.
And so, so yeah, so that's where that's kind of like where it's at right now.
But I was pretty fascinated.
I was like, I want to go, this is just like a, like I'm at the TED Talk level.
So, like, you know, that's the surface of the surface.
But I'm very interested in going deeper and learning more.
So there's this book on longevity.
I believe it's called Lifespan.
I'm going to, I'm thinking about reading it.
I'm very fascinated by this too.
Something that I've been thinking about, and we're going to have to wrap up here,
it's always like when I was thinking about dying,
it seems like we mostly like all just die from like some type of cancer or Alzheimer's or
something like that.
Like we, like, if the timeline's long enough, like we're all going to get cancer or
like some type of Alzheimer's or something like that and die.
And I've always been wondering to myself,
isn't it weird to you that with everything that we have,
that someone could still die from one of these illnesses
that you could have had for six, 12, 24 months?
Like, I've always thought, like, you should know right away.
You should know, like, once that cell forms,
or, you know, I don't know anything about medicine,
but you understand.
And so anyway, this is, I've also been obsessing with that.
Maybe it's because, like, I'm getting in my 30s now,
and I'm like, well, I kind of,
I'm very slowly, but I kind of just felt like a little bit of like soreness.
I don't want to like get older and I'm flipping out a little bit.
So I'm a bored with this.
I'm going to start reading this.
Yeah, there's, there's a, what's it called?
There's a chart that's great.
And the chart basically shows why do people die?
It's like a visual chart.
So it's like blue if it's, you know, it just happens in yourself.
It's non-transmissible.
Red is if one person passes it to another, like the flu or,
COVID or whatever. And then there's like a, the size of the bubble is basically how many people
die of that every year. It's like, number one is cardiovascular disease and then number two is cancer.
And that's like, you know, that's bulk of the deaths, right? And then like number five is influenza
and then you kind of, you know, whatever, you go on from there. So you're right. It is these sort
of same causes stuff that people are trying to fix, but no, no breakthrough yet that like just radically
eliminates that. Like remember when people used to die of cancer, that will happen. It's just a matter of
when, which is pretty sweet, honestly.
Yeah, it's interesting to me.
All right, I think that that episode was a nine out of ten.
What do you think?
I liked it.
What do you think, Dan?
I give you a nine as well.
All right.
I think that was good.
Dan's got a little bit of a Ned Flanders in him.
I can see Dan being the Ned Flanders of a neighborhood.
I don't think that's a compliment.
No, Ned Flander is a cheerful great neighbor.
What's wrong in Dead Flander?
Flanders.
All right.
I'll take it.
Like a very positive guy.
Yes.
I thought that was a comment.
All right.
Thank you.
That's the episode.
Uh-huh.
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.
