My First Million - 3 killer businesses hiding in plain sight

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

140+ real business ideas database: https://clickhubspot.com/pkce Episode 850: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about massive businesses hidden in plain sight.  — Show Notes: (0:00) The wild economics of lab testing on monkeys (11:01) Salad oil crisis (15:35) the art of noticing  (24:38) enthusiasm (27:39) know thy 8-year old self (32:32) be shameless (37:08) Sam goes to SF for 7 days — Links: • Qoves - https://www.qoves.com/  • Charles River - https://www.criver.com/  • How To Do Great Work - https://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/  Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Guess how much a monkey costs? I don't know. A thousand dollars? Almost 20,000. One monkey is 20 grand. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel. Before we start, can I get a wellness check on my hair, dude? I just feel like I feel like I might have hit the point where I got to like start taking something. You know when I'm getting the hat on every day, I feel like that's, I'm literally waving the white flag, with this hat that like maybe, maybe we're getting a little thin on top. What's the thing that you would take? It starts with an R. Like, is it, it's the R word, neutrophol. Oh, yeah. Well, there's like a generic name for them and then there's all the

branded ones, but like Madoxaphyl something, something. Does that sound right? That sounds like something. One of the downsides on one of them, I think, is limp wiener. Right. Well, that might be two for one. I'm done having kids. So, you know, I was thinking about the vasectomy, maybe we don't need to do that. It's so funny, dude, Ben, as you know, you'll never catch Ben without a hat, you know, for similar reasons. And he met a guy and he was like, oh, I got a, I'm on a hair protocol from this guy. And I'm like, what? Like, what you got?

Turkish guy? Who you got? He's like, no, no, no, it's my friend. He's got me on this protocol. And you know, protocol has just become the fancy thing since he was a man and Brian Johnson. It's like, what do you mean? He gave you a pill? Is that a protocol?

And he was like, no, no, no, I got to like red light therapy, do this, put this serum, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So I was like, how's it going? And he's like, I don't know, man, you tell me when you see me. So I just saw him yesterday. He's got a beard now. Oh, thick beard? He's got a beard, but his hair looks the same.

So something's kind of working. It's hilarious. Beard looks great. I got to give him that. Have you seen, there's this app out? I've been targeted by like crazy. It's coves.com. So it's Q-O-V-E-S dot com.

I've been getting targeted like crazy by this app. I bought it. It's $150. The ad worked. Improve your looks without surgery. And then there's a woman posing. Life-changing transformations. We're looks-maxing? Is that what's going on here?

It's not even an app, really. And I don't even know if it's AI or if it's some Filipino who's got to criticize me, because when you sign up, it takes three weeks for me to get my results. So I feel like there's going to be, like, you know, a bunch of guys in the background, making fun of me. Did you get them? No, I just signed up for it. I got the ad while I was in San Francisco.

Instant conversion. Did you just stop on the middle of the street, sit down and download this? Well, they had an Instagram that has a million followers, and it basically tells you what people can do to improve their looks, and it was in a beautiful Instagram. And a lot of my hot friends also follow them.

So I figure, let's give it a shot. But I don't know if you ever heard of this. Who are your hot friends? All right. I think we need to let the comments predict before your results come in, where you're going to score. So here's some of the things.

Cheek activation. Zero 100. Facial femininity. That's going to be a tough one. Homogeneity. Is that good or bad? That's good, right? The categories themselves are cutting.

Wait, do I want to be more homogenous? I think you want to be more homogenous. Okay. Well. Dude, I got called Ugly when I was in the second grade by this girl I liked. I like this girl, and she was sitting in the front of class, and my friend, who I think really knew what he was doing. He was stirring the pot here.

He's like, dude, let me go tell her. You like her. And then maybe she'll, and then he goes up to her. He tells you like her. And I see them both smile. And then he comes back to me. And I'm like, and he goes, she thinks you're ugly. And I was like, oh.

I was like, wasn't even a yes or no. Just she thinks you're ugly. That was the end of it. And I was like, so no then? And he's like, I think no. What's her name, call her out? I think that was my earliest memory. Millie, was her name.

Millie. You asshole. Who's remembering? All right. I'd like to talk to you about the wild world of lab testing on monkeys. So I didn't realize. I never really thought about it. You know, like when you hear about a drug, oh, it's in phase one clinical trials, phase

two clinical. What does this all mean? And what's actually happening along the way of like a medicine, a cure, a vaccine, and whatever it is coming to market, I didn't really realize how much medicine gets tested on monkeys and how big of a business that is and also how big of a kind of like weird ethical thing that is.

So can I just tell you about like a little bit about this? Yeah, and what's the scale? I have no idea. All right. So basically more than 20% of all drugs are tested on monkeys. And what's a monkey? Like what is it the same breed?

Is it all? There's like a couple that they like, that are used specifically for this. So like the long-tailed, you know, I don't know how you say it. Like a Sino, C-Y-N-O. Like the Sino, whatever, it's like the long species name is the like the ideal monkey to test on. And it's kind of sad because it's like the ideal monkey because it's like smarter and like more close to a human. And so like if you look at these monkeys like in the wild, they're known for like they'll steal your phone and take a selfie with you.

You know, they'll like grab your hat and won't give it back till you give them. food, you know, they like kind of know how to play the game. And so this, this crazy business where, look, I get it, like, you know, you don't want a medicine to go and be tested on humans right away. You'd want it to start mice and rats and, but, but like eventually the closest proxy is monkeys. And so what happens is every year, you know, tens of thousands of monkeys around the world get imported. So the U.S. will import, let's say, 20,000 monkeys. And each monkey costs, guess how much a monkey costs? A thousand?

Almost 20,000. One monkey is 20 grand. They used to be two grand a monkey. When COVID happened, prices shot up because they needed to test for medicines, vaccines, whatnot. So it got to 20,000, 50,000 per monkey. And then what happened was at the time, China supplied like 60% of the world's, what they call NHPs, non-human primates.

They do everything. China does everything. They breed them. They were spying them. China just went cold turkey. They just went cold monkey. They just stopped exporting. They were like, we're going to keep them all for ourselves.

Okay. And so there was this huge supply shock. Price is sued up to 50,000 per monkey. And Cambodia steps in and Vietnam steps in. The Mauritius, whatever that is, islands step in. And they start providing these monkeys. So the U.S. kind of needs it. And there's these big businesses in the U.S.

So this is one business called Charles River Labs. Have you ever heard of this business? Charles River Labs. It sounds like a venture capital firm. Well, there is Charles River Ventures, so not to be confused with him. So Charles River Labs is like in Boston or something like this. They do this as like research and testing as a service for all the biotech companies. So they don't have to do it themselves.

Okay. So they basically have all the like the mice and the rats and the dogs and the monkeys all there and they do this testing. They work with like 80% of biotech companies. Like it's crazy. Like the scale is pretty crazy. Even crazy. I think it's like 80% of drugs that go to market get tested with them. Like they just have this absolute monopoly.

They do $4 billion a year in revenue. Yeah, it's a publicly traded company. They bought a monkey breeding business, like a supply, like part of the monkey supply chain because they were like so dependent on these wild swings. They bought one for $500 million just to control the supply better to make sure that they were not going to like lack the supply of these NHPs. What's a monkey breeding business? Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through.

they pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed, and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsor this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. So it'll be like in Cambodia or it'll be in Vietnam. And basically, so they certify that basically they breed these for testing. They don't take them out of the wild.

And then they like kind of tag them. They like track them, whatever. But they've gone wrong. So there's just a story in Fortune magazine of this guy. See this guy in the blue shirt here with the glasses? So he's like the director of wildlife in Cambodia. And these are like monkeys in a cage right here coming out of this pickup truck. And they're being transported.

And so this guy goes into the U.S. for like, you know, a business trip. It just gets detained. You know, they have a warrant for his arrest because they feel like monkeys from the, from wildlife were being passed off as like, lab testing monkeys, bread monkeys, and were being renamed, retagged, and being sold. And so he got jailed for like a year. He was like in house arrest for like, you know, a year waiting trial. In America? In America, yeah. And the DOJ kind of like impounded him, which is pretty crazy. So this is this wild world. Have you ever even thought about this? And so, no, but impounding,

is that the, is that your new term? I don't know. I said that. They can say that. That wasn't in Fortune magazine. They should have put them in a monkey cage. They towed them, yeah, exactly. So it's crazy. It just another reminder. One thing this podcast has done a lot of for me is it rewired my brain to understand that when I look around the room, nothing is here by accident. Nothing just appeared.

You know, like the little, like the lead that goes in this mechanical pencils. There's a company that makes out. There's a guy who you'll meet on a boat somewhere whose business is just to provide these lead. And he knows everything about the lead business. and he goes to me sits in meetings and they talk about three millimeter lead and six millimeter lead and everything is a business it would not exist if there wasn't a entrepreneur behind it making it exist and the world is full of these projects and it's bigger than you think and it's always bigger than you think it's always bigger than you think it's always big can you imagine someone making 500 million dollars by creating a breeding monkey and when you looked at the photos it looked like a huge shed almost that photo that you showed me it's crazy and you know I remember meeting people who were like the richest guy in my neighborhood growing up. What do you do? What's your job?

And he left. He's like, no, there's no job. He's like, I sell, you know, in a factory when there's like a conveyor belt or like, you go through TSA and there's like a conveyor belt. He's like the tread of that conveyor, conveyor belt. We make the tread. And I was like, what? How? How did you even start that?

Where does that even come from? You know, like I own an almond farm, a mushroom farm. I met a guy who makes the dye that makes the color blue. because blue is not really a naturally occurring, you know, a substance you find. You have to, like, make it. He's like, I make blue. And it's like, well, I love lamps, sir.

I don't know what you're talking about. And they're just like richer than you'd ever think. Did you, another thing that I've noticed is that there's companies that do things that I had no idea that they still did it. And it potentially makes a lot of money. So, for example, for the first time, I'm reading Snowball, Warren Buffett's biography. And I find, you had referenced this, but I didn't quite know what you were talking about. And I didn't want to ask. I didn't want to look stupid. But it's the soybean oil shortage.

And basically the idea here is that one of Warren Buffett's best trades ever was American Express. Because at the time, there was this whole scheme where basically there was a scam artist. And he realized that he could get loans against his source. soybean oil inventory. And so basically what this guy did was he had, I don't know if it was hundreds or dozens of massive tanks where he would store that oil. And let's say that oil was worth $5 million in aggregate. He could get a $4 million loan against that oil. And he actually went to, I think, 50 different banks and got a bunch of different loans, which is fraudulent. But then he did double whammy fraud because he got, in order to get the loans, he hired American Express to verify that the oil that he said was in the tank was in fact in the tank.

But what he noticed was that when they checked, there was a way that you could kind of like scam them. And eventually he filled these huge tanks with seawater, salt water. Right. And it was fake. The oil didn't exist. And for a variety of political reasons, a deal fell through. with Russia where they're going to import or sell them a bunch of oil. America said, nope, we're not going to do business with the USSR. Therefore, the price of soybean oil went down and it crashed.

And all these lenders said, hey, soybean guy, you owe us our money. And he was like, well, the thing is, is that none of the soybean oil actually exists. Therefore, I can't pay you. And because American Express was the guarantor, they were the company that promised that the amount of soybean oil promised to the lenders was there. They were the ones who had to pay this massive fine. Ed Warren Buffett goes around and he was like, you know, American Express stock is down right now. And a lot of people have no idea that they even like were in the soybean oil checking business. Right. But I have a feeling based off of going to restaurants and I'm talking to waiters, I have a feeling that the people who are using American Express, they don't really give a shit about this.

They still trust that American Express is good for, you know, credit cards. And I was reading about this and I was like, oh, that's a crazy story. But B, American Express is in the soybean oil checking business. And you'd have no idea how many strange variety businesses exist. And by the way, it was like a multi-hundred million dollar year business to like be in this soybean checking oil business. And it was one of those moments where I'm like, I can't believe this is a thing. And I think that crisis was so big that I don't think it brought down the economy. But I think it like, I think it hurt a lot of companies to the tune of like many tens. or hundreds of billions of dollars. Yeah, it's all hidden in plain sight. And the more of those you sort of download, two things happen. One is it rewires your brain to realize like it's just the world is full of gaps and then founders who plugged them. And so you start to realize, oh, that was a gap and someone plugged it.

That was a gap and someone plugged it. So you start finding gaps and thinking, could I plug that? And it changes you. That's what an entrepreneur's brain really like comes down to is seeing the world not as this like set, fix, solved thing that mommy and daddy have like, they'll take care of. But like, no, no, no. There's tons of opportunity you can go and just change it. You can literally just bend the world and make it, make it anew.

And then on the other side, you realize like, wow, there's a lot of business in the weird nooks and crannies of the world. There's a lot of money to be made doing things that are just off the beaten path because there's this arbitrage between what smart people learn about in their day-to-day life or school, which is why you'll see a lot of programmer. who will build to-do list apps and, you know, dating apps and things that, it's like, what's a problem that every smart person runs into? You simply want to just stay away from that and go into things that they just haven't heard

about. They don't know too much about, you know what I mean? Like, go into a category that is just not ripe with really smart, you know, high agency people and you're playing against weak competition. How do you think you do that? Because that's really hard. It's hard to find problems worthy of solving. that are 100% outside of your realm.

For example, we met a guy in San Francisco who had a business with dentists. It helped. It was a... Dental back offices. So it's called Daydream Dental. What they're doing was you're a dentist, your back office, you got Debbie sitting back there,

and she spends most of her day calling insurance companies, reading out billing codes, trying to get the claims filed, accepted, checking patient insurance, And that entire process is kind of the revenue lifeblood of the business. And guess what? There's a lot of times where things get either rejected, build the wrong way, cash not delivered, that sort of thing. And so, you know, it's a very lossy part of the business.

You would think you go to the dentist, you pay money, and then that's it. It's over. But that's not really how the dental industry works. And so what he was doing was he goes to those dentists and he says, hey, let us take over that function for you. We will use AI and smart people and computers to basically do a better job of that than Debbie can. And so you don't have to employ a bunch of people and have a bunch of overhead to do that. We will employ the people.

We will specialize in that function for you and we'll collect 15%, 20% more revenue that you're just leaving on the table. That's the pitch. And he was doing, I think, in year two, close to 10 million a year in revenue, something like that. You guys can listen to the episode to get all the details.

But we're like, how did you get this idea? Because he was a, he's either a Stanford grad or Stanford dropout. He's like this guy who like, you would think, look like my cousin. Yeah, he was like not hanging around a bunch of dental offices. I mean, he had great teeth, but he didn't look like he was like doing this like dirty work. And he was like, oh, my mother was a dentist. Yeah, he was like my summers when I was a teenager, I just worked in the dental practice. Yeah. And I was like the greatest gift that, and your mom's going to rub it in

your face, but the greatest gift financially that you've been given is the fact that your mother was a small business owner and you got to see firsthand these problems. And how lucky are you that you were you know, born in the situation where you are just, your eyes are open. We had another guy who had a business servicing generators. So basically like a nursing home who has an industrial-sized generator, they can't go out for even an hour because, you know, that's a huge deal or a hospital. You can't have your hospital generator or you can't have the hospital power go out in the middle of heart surgery. His job was installing and servicing generators. And this business might eventually become a $100 million, maybe billion dollar company. And he explained the story how he got

into it. And it was like this like winding row of like, I worked for this company that like one time we did a consulting project with this thing and I got into that, which then I got introduced to this other guy and this other thing. And I just was asking myself how like I was envious of like people who do these like dirty tech-ish jobs and they discovered these problems that I had no idea were even a thing. It's the art of noticing. I told you I spent. like a bunch of months looking at how some of the world's most creative people work. How do the best writers work, the best musicians, the best filmmakers. Because, you know, I spent so much of my life studying how great entrepreneurs work,

which is a lot of brute force, a lot of high agency, a lot of scaled thinking, a lot of hustle. And, you know, there's obviously creativity involved, but I thought, well, let me go study the people who specialize in this. If you go listen to, like, what Rick Rubin says, what the great comedians say, it's all about noticing. It is actually why comedians, when they get rich and famous, they fall off. Because it's the struggles of the everyday person that led them to an insight that when they set it in front of a crowd, everybody connected with it. But when you're flying private and you have four nannies and you have a chef and you have this and that, well, you don't really

encounter the same struggles that the everyday person does. So you stop coming up with the genius insights that make that resonate, like a truth that you say. said out loud to the audience. And so you have to really, like, create a system where you are going to be exposed to interesting things and then a habit of noticing them, of paying attention to them, of writing things down, of slowing down, of not being too busy, not being too distracted, of being more present. And that's where the great, if you look up like, remember Mark Manson came on the podcast and he's got this crazy hit book, right? You made, like, one of the best-selling books of nonfiction in the history of the world is the subtle art.

but not giving a f***. And he wrote that book and it's like he was blogging. He wrote thousands of blogs, but nothing really resonated. That one, that one, or nothing resonated the same level as this idea did. And,

um, where'd that name come from? And he was like, oh, I actually really liked this band. The band had a song called the subtle art of something. It was something, it was like,

the last part was different. He's like, and I just noticed that, like, I just really liked that name. And I remember, I couldn't tell you the other 15 songs on the album, but I remember,

that one. So then I wrote that down and that became the book title. And it's like noticing is such a superpower. It's a superpower for entrepreneurs. Paul Graham wrote this essay called How to Do Great Work. And what he describes is like a few step system. And I'll just, it's like a 3,000 word essay. It's probably one of his most important essays, but it's so long in it, he basically says, look, like here's the formula. You want to first just follow the path of most excitement, so of most interest to you. And he basically says, look, this is twofold. One is that, Being really interested in something is highly motivating. So you'll work more than other people.

You'll have more endurance than other people. And he goes, two, it's differentiating because exactly what interests you is not what interests most people. And so you have a specific, like, flavor palette for what you like. And if you follow that, truly, you will end up in a place of less competition. So he says, let your excitement or your interest be the motor of the boat as well as the rudder. So it's like it's the motor that motivates you and it's the rudder that guides you. and it's the rudder that guides you of which way to go. He goes, okay, so now you took that boat and you just let it go, and you just follow it,

and you follow it all the way to the edge of the frontier of whatever industry you're in, whatever fields you're in, whatever technology you play in. Go all the way to the frontier. If it's lead for this pencil, it's lead for this pencil. If it's the conveyor belt thing, it's the conveyor belt thing, whatever it is. And he goes, when you're at the frontier, when you're far away from the frontier, the frontier just looks like a circumference, like a continuous line. But if you get all the way out there, you notice, oh, shit, you've got to kind of step over these gaps that exist.

People don't know this. They don't know how to do this. Oh, you got to do this manually yourself. Nobody does this for you. It's kind of tedious. It's a pain in the ass. And it's only when you're in the frontier there that you will find the gaps. And then the entrepreneurial step is to just decide to fill one of those.

And it starts with noticing. That's a very good summary of that article. Paul Graham is another guy who's like, I don't know if he might be an artist. I don't know what he considers himself. I think he does, actually. I think he's a, in terms of traditional art, but also when he writes stuff, it's pretty amazing how he takes something that it's sort of like

how to win friends and influence people where they tell you certain stuff in the book and you're like, that's obvious. But the way that you put it makes it seem so much more important and insightful than I previously thought, and it is important and insightful. And so I have been wondering how to stay, as Eddie Murphy calls it, sensitive.

I told you what Eddie Murphy said, right? He had that documentary, and he was like, I'm a great comedian for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that I'm super sensitive to stuff. If I give the valet my car and he comes back with the car and it just slightly smells different, I can make that joke about that slight smell. Or if I notice a slight dent, I can just make a remark about that faster than other people because I notice it better than they do. And they're just not sensitive enough.

Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld has this book called Is This Anything? Have you ever read it? No. So Jerry Seinfeld has this. his daily writing habit every morning, first two hours of the day, he sits down with a legal pad and a pencil and a coffee. He just writes. He just writes jokes. And he's like, you know, writing is the game. And so he's been doing that for 40 years. So what he did was he compiled all of those yellow pages of just half jokes, which in the book is called, Is This Anything? Because

it's like, most of the jokes don't go anywhere. And he's just asking if I'm like, is there something there? Is there anything? Is that, is this something? And so he put them all together in a book. And one of his jokes is he just knows. notice that like, have you ever been on a phone call and it drops? And the other person calls you back and they're like, hey, yes, hey, sorry, I don't know what happened. He just noticed we always say that. And he goes, you know, how does everyone always say, I don't know what happened? Of course you don't know what happened. I don't know what's happening right now with this phone call. Do you think I could explain what went wrong? I couldn't even tell you what could just write.

I don't know how phones work. And so he just noticed how silly it is that we say, I don't know what happened, as if you had any power, control, or knowledge into the way my phone is magically connecting with yours anyways. And so the reason I get excited about this is that nobody will ever practice this. Nobody will ever say they're doing this. It doesn't sound cool. So there's a few of these traits where there's like high alpha because they matter a lot, but everybody else brushes them off or doesn't even know what to do with them so they just don't try. And so imagine like, you know, if you want to be the best Fortnite player in the world, you're competing against tens of millions of other kids who spent every day doing this, you're entering just such a competitive field.

But imagine there was another game that had the same prize pool as the World Fortnite Championship, but there's only seven players. You know, that's what happens with some of these traits like noticing. I've said another one is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is such an underrated trait. Everybody knows that it's better to work with somebody who's enthusiastic. Everybody knows that enthusiasm is a positive attribute to have, but it's something that smart people feel stupid when they do it. Like, it's a low status thing for a smart person to do is be enthusiastic.

And you seem sort of like dumb, like a golden retriever. Well, guess what? Everybody wants that person around. We love golden retrievers. And it's actually a very useful trait for going and doing something hard is to have enthusiasm every day versus just being beaten down by the reality of your situation. So there's these like handful of traits that smart people refuse to work on, which makes it like an uncompetitive playing field. You could just go dominate with very little effort. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content?

That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

This is something that I think about all the time, and I've never come up with an answer that has been truly effective for me, but how to find a thing that you love. So, like, you were talking about, like, this is the step before all of this stuff. But, like, whenever I read about Jerry Seinfeld and he, you know, I've known about his writing habit each day,

I'm like, how lucky are you that you, at a young age, you discovered something that you're obsessed about. And often I ask myself, how do you find something that you're obsessed about? And also, can anyone be obsessed about anything at all? Like, I get obsessed with something for a short time, but I'm not like, but anything that I've been interested in for 20 years, I would say that I'm like a 40 hour a week obsessed. You know, I can, like, I'm pretty, pretty, I'm mildly interested for a long period of time. But I'm not obsessed. I'm not obsessed. You really feel that way? You really feel like you don't have things you get obsessed about? I think you're the exact opposite, dude. No, I get obsessed about- You've got obsessed with fitness. You've got obsessed with denim. You got obsessed with the media business. You got obsessed with the media businesses. How we're almost at a thousand episodes of this podcast. There is no way that you've talked for a thousand hours about niche business ideas. Trust me, you're obsessed with those. It doesn't feel obsessed. Like, I don't know. I just like when I see the other people, it's sort of like a,

oh man, they have it, and I don't. And of course, I can look at my past actions and I could argue otherwise. But I'm just saying, generally speaking, for the average person, have you thought about how to find something that you're obsessed with? Or even can you become obsessed? I do think everyone is capable of it, but very few people ever do it. I think there's two interesting things I can say about this. The first is look into your childhood. Yeah, that's what Robert Green says. Yeah. So if you read about people who suggest, how to do this. A lot of the times they say, look at it to your childhood or pay attention to what you

did in your free time. Rather, it's your free time as an adult, but as adults, our free time sort of shrinks in smaller and smaller segments. And, you know, you fill your free time with errands or things you should do. But when you're a kid, you don't really think about what you should do. You just simply think about what you want to do. And so when you're a kid, you get obsessed with different things. You go into these different rabbit holes or different phases and then you grow out of them. But they often have like similarities. So, you know, I got obsessed with one video game, But then I would grow out of that, but then I got obsessed with online poker. And online poker has a lot of similarities to that video game, if you think about it,

but I didn't consider online poker to be a video game. And I got obsessed with business. And now I'm sort of obsessed with investing. And they're all the same frulein, right? It's sort of this game. There's points, whether the points are called stars or points or money or ROI, whatever it is, right? Like IRA. There's a different scoreboard, but it's the same idea.

And there's a game. There's competitors. There's strategy. And it's hard to win, but it's fun to win. and like you got to trial and error and try to figure it out. So like I like strategy games and I've always liked strategy games. It's very easy for me to get obsessed with a strategy game. Are you like a board game guy?

Yeah, like I'm a, I love board games. I love social strategy games. I love watching Survivor. I love playing card games where you got to lie and you got to do, you know, you got to sort of bluff that's poker, but there's also other social card games like that. You know, so you start to notice patterns and you got to think back. So there's a great story of Dan Brown.

You know Dan Brown, the author of The. Da Vinci Code, which is like one of the best-selling mystery thriller books ever and like demons and angels. He's got a bunch of books like this. So the guy's an amazing writer of these kind of like treasure hunt books where the hero is trying to find something and it's a race to find the thing. He's getting the clues and he's figuring it out. He's unveiling the mystery. Well, when he was a kid, his dad did something really wonderful for him and sparked this like passion in him. Every Christmas, instead of presents under the tree, his dad would put a treasure. map. Oh, that's baller. And so he would wake up and like every kid goes and they just

unpack the gift. His gift was, here's a map, go find it. He had a scavenger hunt to go find his gifts. And he's, and so guess what? That like kind of keystone memory and moment, like really like triggered a spark inside him of loving the idea of a treasure hunt. And if you look at the DaVinci Code, what is it? It's a treasure hunt story. And he just tells it better than anyone else on earth. And he paid attention to the things he was interested in loved as a kid. What happens is we find these things that we're interested in, but we blow them off. We just brush them off as if they're sort of trivial, they're meaningless. They are irrelevant or they're childish or they're silly or they're not serious.

I should do a serious thing. But it's the people who pay attention to these things that are on the surface somewhat unsurious, but they take a simple idea, they take it seriously and they turn it into something that actually matters. I'll give you that. Actually, it's a perfect example of this. I just took a trip to Toronto. and I went to Toronto and I was there to celebrate because we just had this huge win, huge business win. I'll talk about that later someday when I can kind of be a little more public

about it, but we just this biggest win of my life in the world of business. And so we flew our team out, you know, me, the CEO and Ben, we flew out together. We're like, let's celebrate. But our first thought was, let's go to Vegas. And it was just the thought of it. It's not just the thought of Vegas, like, induces like fatigue in my body. Like, I don't, I don't want to drink. I don't want to party. If we were at the club, the three of us, would be the three stooges. You know, one guy doesn't even drink. And so we went to Toronto.

One of the reasons we went is because we were like, we had this wonderful day where we played like Padell, which I had never played before. I love Padell. Immediately was like, oh, new life hobby unlocked. We went to this escape room that's unbelievable. It's like a castle. There's actors in it.

I'd never experienced an escape room like this. Like the escape rooms I've ever been to, it was like a small box with like, you know, toys inside. I love those. But dude, I loved escape rooms. And so it's like that. that same thing. This strategy, mystery, like unlock the puzzle type shit is what I like.

And that was what I chose to celebrate with. And so know thyself. But what were the other guys like, Sean, we'd rather have gone to the strip clubs. We're just going to play Settlers of Catan and try to escape this room. Well, no, that's kind of the beauty of it is if you do the shit that's the most you, you will only you'll repel people who want to be at the strip club

and you will attract people who are like you those will be the people who you end up working really well with right? Because like you will attract like-minded people it becomes a honeypot.

So what's the second thing though? You said... So just one is pay attention to your childhood notice what you love then. The second is don't sort of brush it off. Don't, you gotta be a bit shameless about it. And so I'll give you a...

So why did we go there? Well, our buddy who came on the show, Elon Lee, Elon Lee was one of the creators of the Exploding Kittens board game. It built it enormous, I don't know if he said the numbers publicly, but absolutely gargantuan business in the business of board games and card games. If you walk in the aisle of Target in the board card game aisle, he's made like seven of the top 10 selling games in the world.

You know, like dominant monopoly. So I went to his house. He's got a house in Toronto. I think he was like telling us that he was building it. he was like showing photos. Is it like a dream house? Well, this wasn't the dream house. This was like the house he's living in

while the giant dream house is being built. And I go up to his office. And his office is like a kid's toy store. Not only does he have all his games, but then there's like these insane Lego things that he's building. And he's wiring LED lights into them. And he's like this unbelievable construction.

Like, he's like a kid. He's just still doing the shit. He loved as a kid. He's still doing it now. He had a dinosaur egg. Like an actual dinosaur egg. a fossilized dinosaur egg. And he's like, if you kiss it or lick it, you get to sign the book.

So I kiss the dinosaur egg. I'm signing the book. And I'm like, this is like worth millions of dollars. He doesn't even have it like in this display case. He's like, how boring. Like the eight-year-old version of me would think, how lame. I don't get to touch it. Eight-year-old me would want to touch it and show my friends.

So he's got the egg out. He's letting his friends touch it, kiss it and lick it. And then he's, there's this Xbox sitting there. And he's like, that's the first Xbox. I'm like, dude, how much was that? He's like, oh, I got that one. They gave it to me. I'm like, well, how did you do that?

He goes, well, I designed it. I was, what? He's like, my first job was Xbox, you know, Microsoft handed me a bunch of money and a team and was like, designed a competitor to the PlayStation. So that's the first prototype Xbox we ever made. I'm real proud of that one. Wait, really, quite, to give perspective on this guy, he's wildly wealthy. Like, who knows, it could be a billion-dollar company, who knows?

Let's just say he's in 100-millionaire, billionaire status. He goes to us, a group of guys, 20 of us, he goes, hey, do you guys want to see my new game? And he gets on his hands and knees and he pulls out these glasses where he's trying to look, he's like, all right. He pulls out a monocle. What do you call a monocle when there's two of them? Okay, so these are glasses. These are the sticks, right? You need these to stay on your face. He had glasses that are just two lenses. Yeah, and they were like balancing. That he rests on his nose in a perfect balance. And he was wearing like sweatpants and socks. Like it was like

he was basically what I'm trying to get at it. He was like an old man kid. He's not actually old, but like he's a grown man kid and he's on his hands and knees and he's like, all right, so you just got this card. I think that's what it means is you have to do this. He carried in his pocket a empty deck that he could just take a Sharpie and make a game

up on the spot. That's kind of what he was doing for us. And he was like testing to see and he was like, this means do this and he was seeing if I would actually go and do it and if I was happy about doing it. And he was like prototyping on us. He was getting our reactions, like being a comedian

and throwing out jokes to see if they're any good. And it was so funny that he was doing this like, it was very natural to him. And I found that to be very inspiring. And so if you think about like, you know, that guy,

he's still, like, he didn't brush those things off as like, yeah, I like that, but now it's time to get to work. He just kept doing that until it became his work and he became the best in the world at doing that,

at making games, playing games, making games that people love. So he didn't like brush it off. And when we were hanging out, he was telling me about escape rooms. So I thought I liked escape rooms. And I thought us going there to go to an escape room was like a pretty indulgent thing

in this, like, passion of mine. Dude, he travels the world with a group of like 15 neckbeard guys testing every escape room, whatever the best escape rooms in the world are, he travels, he goes on like a bachelor party every couple years testing the world's best escape rooms and trying to escape them with his friends. And that's like how he vacations.

That was like one of the things he does. And I was like, wow, this guy is if you took the governor off or the filter off of like, yeah, that's me, but that'd be a little too weird. So let me just keep a little bit of that in. It's like, no, dude. What was it that you used to say at your office? Let your freak flag fly, baby.

Exactly. And that's what he does. And I think that's the second part. Notice what lights you up and then let it fly. that's so cool today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury they make the world's best banking product

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So I just got back from a seven-day trip in San Francisco. Can I tell you one of my biggest takeaway? So you did this with New York. You had a bunch of them. I had one major one. So San Francisco is the best city on earth, in my opinion, to induce the emotion of awe. So the definition or the paraphrasing the definition, it's basically experiencing both vastness, which means something that's really large, something that feels like endless or incredibly old, while also being a thing where it sort of breaks your mental framework, your mental schema. And so it basically, your brain has to do this thing called accommodating where you have to change how you think in order to fit what you are looking at into your schema.

And it's sort of like we use the word frame breaking. And it can't, but it can't be just like impressive. You know, it can't be something that's just big. It has to be so big or so epic where it's different from what I'm used to and how I define how life is. And that is the emotion of all. Well, I just looked up to the, I have the exact definition. I just very much what you said. but with a little extra. So it says, awe is a strong feeling of deep respect, wonder, and amazement,

often mixed with a bit of fear or nervous dread, which also happens a lot in San Francisco. Yes, and I felt that, but I want to explain why, like, I felt awe in the good way, because not awe is bad. Like, you can be in awe of, like, an atrocious act. Like, when you read about World War II, you can be an awe, and it's not necessarily good. But basically, awe is interesting because I have found, And I think that I can't just, I've read a little bit about this, but also some of this is my opinion, is that it reduces anxiety and depression because it creates the self-diminishing emotion. So a lot of times anxiety and depression exists because you are the center of all your problems. It's basically me, me, me, and you're constantly thinking of yourself. And I think that we all have to do like self-rumination.

I mean, I have to think about issues all the time. But when you experience, uh, awe opportunities that exist, they either seem much bigger than you think, or they just seem not important. And you stop thinking about yourself and you start more so thinking about like the stuff that you see. And when I'm in San Francisco, I drive through or ride through the Presidio and you see these massive hills and you see views. And what I've noticed is that seeing horizons, particularly when it's like a large view and it's an ocean, like you're above an ocean and you can overlook. It gives me this deep sense of calm,

this deep sense of like, well, of awe. And I find it to be incredibly addicting, but also a very inspiring emotion. And I left San Francisco thinking like, this is the greatest feeling on earth. Well, you describe the nature side of it. I was surprised you didn't talk about the entrepreneurial awe that you also get.

Because we sat there for a whole day, and just every 20 minutes, a new founder came in and sat in the seat in front of us. Basically, we did this episode where we had nine founders come and explain what they were working on. Yeah, it's sort of like sit in the hot seat, tell us what you're doing, tell us the numbers. We kind of nerd out about your business. What did you think of that? Because, you know, you're in New Yorker, in the hustle and bustle of things, but the types of businesses people do and the types of people who do business are very different in San Francisco. I thought it was fantastic, more so than the businesses.

they were working on. What I like about San Francisco is there seems to me an outsider, it felt like there was a significantly higher corky attribute, a significantly higher nerd attribute against the grain attribute that I particularly love and I get a huge amount of inspiration from. Like we met a guy who was an Indian guy. He made a machine that made basically for us Fetuccini Alfredo, like an Italian dish. And I was like, how silly and wonderful is this? that this Indian guy who talks about growing up in India is now using like a robot to make us Italian food. And like I thought that was like a really quirky cool thing. And we talked to all types of quirky cool people.

And that was in abundance. Yeah, San Francisco has the most startup ideas that will sound terrible and probably be terrible than anywhere else where you find entrepreneurs. Because like a lot of other entrepreneurs will be doing, you know, like if you go to New York or something, you'll meet a lot of like, let's say, media entrepreneurs. And they're doing media. and media is something you can understand and something's good. It's really an execution-based thing. Whereas San Francisco, it's like, you know, you're just digging for gold. And most of the time, you're just going to find dirt and sand.

And I could have told you there's just probably dirt there. But every once in a while someone finds gold, and that's what keeps everybody out there doing these kind of weird, undiscovered random-sounding ideas. The spread of the ideas is just so different than anything you'd see in most other, like, places where you're going to find business. I think if I was 22 years old or 20 years old and a recent college grad and I was remotely interested in technology, I still, without a doubt, I think it's the place to be. Yeah, agreed, agreed.

I just started reading, have you heard of this book called The Art Thief? No. Very, very popular book. I'm still like very early on into it, but it's a story of a guy, it's a true story of an art thief who stole, I think it was $3 billion worth of art. and what makes this book amazing and what this makes this guy spectacular to read about, he did not sell one piece of art ever. So he stole it and he had like a code. He felt it was the right thing.

He's like, you can't steal art and hurt people and you should just do it in the middle of the day while the museum is open. Like there shouldn't be like a big heist. And so like he was a genius, I guess you could say, at like going to, museum and when the go he would study the guards for weeks and when they were on their like routes where they would have to change he would like hurry up and unscrew one screw and you would take the screw out and put in his pocket and then just like walk around and then he would do it a bunch of times where he was able to get the art and what's crazy is that when he was arrested he had his girlfriend who was

his accomplice they lived in his mother's apartment in a rinky dink room and in this room was roughly three billion dollars worth of art it was like painting paintings, trinkets, and he was like, he had this famous statue. Look up the statue of Adam and Eve. It's like the size of a shoebox, but it's this beautiful statue. And I believe it's worth tens of millions of dollars. And he had it on his bedside table because he said, this art shouldn't be in a museum where there's going to be some tour guide telling you some, like, written story about it, and you're barely even going to be paying attention. He's like, it should be in my room where I could wake up and I could rub my hands across it and, like, truly experience this

piece of art. Is it weird to just really honor and admire this absolute criminal? Because I do. Yeah, it's weird. But that sort of goes back to the point about, like, awe and, like, how not all, all is good. And so, yes, I can, like, acknowledge that what he did was wrong. And also, I can still, like, be in amazement as to how pure your code was. even when it came to being a thief and how it relates to what you're talking about,

where the reason he was so passionate about this was his grandfather loved going around the beach with a metal detector. And so he got obsessed with finding treasures, very similar to what Dan Brown did. And he got obsessed with art. And so it's kind of an interesting story. And I'm like, why am I so drawn to this story? And you're kind of explaining why I'm so drawn to it is because enthusiasm's contagious. All right. I don't know how we got on all that, but that was amazing.

I got to run. So let's wrap this bad boy up. All right, that's it. That's the pod. 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, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Sue. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field, it. This is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcast.