My First Million - 3 Niche Business Ideas: AI Psychics, Creator-Owned VPNs & Guns with Soylent co-Founder John Coogan

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Episode 496: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk with John Coogan (https://twitter.com/johncoogan), co-Founder of Soylent & Lucy and EIR at Founders Fund. John shares the most underrated creator-business no ones talking about, what Peter Theil and Keith Rabois are like, why he thinks lifestyle businesses are worthless and much more. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Want MFM Merch? Check out our store here. — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Other Cool Stuff: • MFM Clips Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@ClipMFM • MFM Merch - https://store.mfmpod.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:15) Soylent origin story (14:50) Lucy background (17:00) Business Idea 1: Creator-owned VPN (23:20) Business Idea 2: Ammunition Rollup (28:45) How often does Sam think of the Roman Empire? (32:20) Thoughts on Keith Rabois (34:40) Best Twitter follows (36:15) Debate: Lifestyle businesses vs. VC-backed (48:15) Who John’s voting for (51:00) Why AI wrappers are great businesses (53:30) Business Idea 3: Lensa for ChatGPT (57:40) Scam artist telemarketing (1:04:05) Closing thoughts — Links: • John Coogan Twitter - https://twitter.com/johncoogan • John Coogan Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/johncooganplus • Soylent - https://soylent.com/ • Lucy Gum - https://lucy.co/ • Sam's Soylent article - https://tinyurl.com/mu8yhbyv • Linus Tech Tips - https://www.youtube.com/user/linustechtips • Anduril - https://www.anduril.com/ • Founders Fund - https://foundersfund.com/ • Keith Rabois - https://twitter.com/rabois • Sean Parker - https://twitter.com/sparker • Ligma Johnson - https://tinyurl.com/yx598zcc • Peter Thiel - https://twitter.com/peterthiel • Will Hurd - https://twitter.com/WillHurd • Lensa - https://prisma-ai.com/lensa • Power Law with John Coogan - https://tinyurl.com/3fdz6axs • Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. — Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

It's useful for crypto users to use a VPN. And so that was one of my ideas, but we sold before we got around to doing that. That would have been cool if you would have done that. That's a pretty cool move. Too bad. 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. All right. What's up? We got John Coogan here. John, somebody who I only know through a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in L.A. And that's the best way to meet anybody who's going to be a podcast guest. So you got a crazy background. I'll get people to run down if they don't know who you are.

So you've been an entrepreneur your whole life, never had a job. Started two companies that were both really interesting. Soylent, which was basically making a meal replacement drink is the easiest way to explain it. It tastes like the milk of Honeynut Cheerios, which I always appreciated. And then Lucy gum, which was like a nicotine gum, both of them went through YC. Together they've raised over $130 million. A bunch of good lessons there. You're also an EIR at Founders Fund, which is one of the more interesting places to kind of hang out or be a part of.

And like us, you've made the mistake of leaving entrepreneurship to just be a YouTuber. And this is great. So you know how to make content too, which is amazing. You make really awesome videos. Sam was sending me one this morning. Sam, you like his stuff, huh? I love it. Yeah, I like your stuff, John. By the way, Sean, I'm an investor of Lucy, so I got to get that out of the way. And probably a user, too, at one point for sure. But I mean, I think you did invest like four years ago. So, you know, the fact that I haven't been on yet. I think I earned my stripes by posting on YouTube, playing in the content world, you know.

What is your guy? I don't even know. Can you say what the valuation is? I think I invested $25,000 at a $10 million valuation. And 10. Yeah, you were probably in like the seed round. And now the company's worth like 60-70 mill. All right. On paper, I've made a little bit of money. Yeah, not bad. We had, I think we could tell the story. We had one of the other co-founders of Lucy come on the pod once. And this guy, we had met him at some like event, maybe a hustle event, some, some nighttime event.

And this guy was holding court. That was Dave. Dave, yeah. He was telling stories. There's five people around him. He's got ideas. He's like, oh, there needs to be something called Pleasure Island. And it's a place where you could just go sin.

And I was like, wow, who is this guy? What is he talking about? And he's telling stories. He's amazing. Everybody's just captured by this guy. I'm like, we got to have this guy in the pod. He comes on the pod. Tells none of the stories and none of the ideas.

He's like, nah, I don't want him to sell all those on the pod. And we were like, dude. And so I don't even think we ever ran the episode because he refused to tell the good stuff. So, John, will you make the same mistake as your pal? Absolutely not. I mean, I do think a lot of founders have just a ton of scar tissue built up from like the last 10 years of like the media just going after tech founders. and like tech bros,

brogrammers. Like, it was really aggressive for a while there. Like anything you said would be like, taken out of context, putting some clickbait.

But now that Elon bought Twitter and kind of just like caused enough chaos, like you can just say whatever you want. And there's like no, I've been telling every founder I know like cancel culture is over. Like don't worry about things.

Just say whatever you believe. So we're going to do some of your philosophy, some of the philosophy, like cancel culture is over. But first, let's run through the background here because both of these startups, normally we try not to spend too much time

on the guest with background, but yours both are so interesting. Can you just tell us, you know, give us the origin story for Soylent because when this came out, it was a very different idea than anything I was seeing anybody do in Silicon Valley. At that time, this was maybe 2012. I had just moved to San Francisco. And you had kind of like Uber and Airbnb, but very few people were in the, in the San Francisco venture community were doing like a, like a drink or like a product that you could eat, you could

drink that wasn't software based and but still was innovative and so it was like kind of in this mix and i remember andreson horowitz got behind it and some others and so it was a very interesting thing and i think it started out of like a hacker house right like you guys had a crazy house is that right yeah uh i mean a bunch of funny stories from that this was the yeah warby parker was like the first e-commerce company to kind of think about it from like a tech first angle uh we were a couple of years after them, right around the same era as like Dollar Shave Club, if you remember that company. But yeah, we met in a hacker house.

My co-founder and I, we went to preschool, middle school, high school together, went to college in the same city. And so we move out to Silicon Valley. We're looking for a place. We find something on like Craigslist. It's like an Airbnb listing. And they're like, this place is incredible. It's got a pool.

It's got five bedrooms. It's exactly like the social network. You're going to love it. We show up. The pool is filled with algae. The bathrooms don't work. It's just absolute squalor. So we grind for like six months there. Eventually we moved to the tenderloin, which is an even nicer community. And we're living in technically a one bedroom with three guys. So I was living in the living room. Another guy, Rob, the guy who actually came up with the idea for Soreland, he was living in what was technically a closet because it didn't have a window. And we were just, We were just hacking. We were just not a lot of dating going on. Yeah, not a lot of dating. Not a lot of anything. Just wake up, program, go to sleep.

Wake up, program, go to sleep. And we just had sticky notes on the wall being like, okay, after this idea fails, we'll build this next idea. All the worst ideas you've ever heard on here when people come on and they give you their bad ideas. Like, we were building them all. And they were all failing. Give us a couple. What were they? Like, take a picture and it puts it through a filter and it puts it on a shirt and it like mails you the shirt.

Like, just like weird stuff like that. There were some ideas that were good. They were just like way before their time. Like, do you know Google Stadia? It allows you to play video games in the cloud, streams it to you? Like, we basically built that. But it was just like five years too early.

And also we didn't have a trillion dollars of data centers for free. Like Google does. And even Stadia, I think, failed. So like even Google couldn't pull it off. And so of course we weren't going to be able to get it done. So there was just a lot of those ideas where it was like too early, wrong team, bad execution or just terrible go-to-market. Like, there were some things that we built that were pretty good, but it just didn't work.

And living with Rob, living with Rob would be odd because I know Rob. He's so unique and eccentric and weird in such an interesting way. Yeah, so he'd been writing on his blog and posting on Hacker News, and he wrote a bunch of basically viral clickbait targeted at programmer. So speaking of dating, he wrote a blog post saying how he hacked Tinder, And he was saying this was before like bots and stuff. So he basically claimed he didn't really do this. It was more just like for satire and for fun.

But he said he wrote a script that would automatically swipe right on everything. And then and then Generative AI talked to, this was like 10 years ago too, but like talk to the person. And then it would use the Uber API to call them a car. And then it would order DoorDash and deliver the food. And so like the punchline at the end of the at the end of the story was basically like he wasn't involved at all. Because it was like, you know, you can imagine where that goes. But basically, he built a little bit of a following on hacker news. And so when the question was like, we like building these software companies, we like coding and building stuff, launching businesses.

But we are going to run out of money and we're going to have to get jobs. So we need to look at our expenses and understand where are we burning money. We paid a rent a year in advance. I think we were paying $1,500 for three dudes to live in the heart of San Francisco, like crazy low money. We owned our laptops, paid our internet bill. Like there was really no cost other than food. And so figuring out how to get food as cheap as possible was like a very logical, you know, conclusion from that.

So Rob starts whipping up the powders, figures out this meal replacement. He's like, instead of buying a cheeseburger over here or some groceries over there, let me buy a 200 pound sack of protein powder. Do you remember that first conversation when he's like, guys, I got it? We'll just get a bunch of powders and then that'll be the food. Like, is that literally how it was? There were, yeah, there were two phases. the first phase was he told me like, oh, I'm doing this diet experiment. I think it's going to

make me healthier. I'm going to, you know, monitor all my macros and micros and start working out and get in shape. And I was just like, who cares what we look like? The only thing that matters is like our code and like our business ideas. Like we don't, which is very stupid because obviously you do need to be healthy to like be productive. So that was a stupid take by me. But I kind of wrote it off. And then he kept doing it for a few weeks. And then we were at like a dinner with a friend, she'd made like homemade sushi. And I mean, that's like a treat when you're broke. And he was like, no, I'm not going to eat. I'm on this soil it thing. And I was like, this is crazy. It's so, I mean, it's sort of like the Brian Johnson before Brian Johnson, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the stress test. So basically, he told me that I was like, do you have a name for this? And he was like, I'm calling it so soilant. And I knew the reference. And I was like, this is genius. We need to sell this today. Like this is like, this is going to be the market entry strategy. This is going to be so viral. But yeah, I mean, he basically did a stress test. He lived on it for 30 days and then people would just be like, yeah, I think this ingredient's stupid or I think this is bad, but like, hey, if you survived 30 days only on this, like, I can probably take a sip and see how it tastes. And so it created this curiosity. When we launched my content company, The Hustle, one of the first early viral articles was I paid a guy, two G's to live on it for 30

days while he was running 70 miles a week as like an amateur runner. Yeah. May he rest in peace. Yeah. He dropped dead on day 15, and that's what made the story go viral. The Soylent thing, that was the gift that kept on giving particularly, I mean, for me as well. You know, like, I got traffic from it too. Yeah, and it was like a left-right issue. Everybody hated it. And then you'd post it.

And then this was back in the day when, like, the Facebook algorithm was like entirely comment-driven. So people would correct us. And they'd be like, oh, you made a mistake. You named, you accidentally named your company after a movie. with Charlton Heston in it, that's a sci-fi movie. And it's like, no, obviously we did that on purpose. Like, what are you talking about? But the fact that there would be that comment,

and then another person would come in and be like, oh, well, there's actually this book. And somebody would be like, oh, you need to fire your marketing people. Be like, oh, I actually got the reference. And then they'd be talking every single time we posted anything, in addition to all the comments about, is this good, is this bad? What does it mean for society?

So just massive viral fuel, any article went viral. And so we were able to kind of trade up the chain and go from Vice News to, you know, the hustle to BBC to the New York Times, New Yorker. And then eventually Rob was on the Colbert report with sitting next to Stephen Colbert. It's crazy. Well, it definitely shows the power of a viral product. But also it was my first time learning about signal.

So like I had never bought a fancy watch or a car or jacket or anything. But the first time I was seeing holding a Soiland, it was like this crazy signal was going out to the world. Like I'm in tech, first of all. You know that just by this drink. You don't have to ask anything else. All right, maybe we'll look to this brown guy and Stanford says.

They probably would have guessed that one. Okay, what else does it tell you? It tells you like, I value productivity. Yeah, brown guy, it's soma,

you know, like backpack is like sagging to the back of my knees with somebody like accessories in it. So then it's like, number two is like you value productivity over things like taste, maybe even things like health, right?

Like, oh yeah, everything. Yeah, yeah, so it's a value signal. Then it was like a contrarian signal. And it was like,

I don't give a fuck what you think about me signal. It was so powerful as a signaling tool for like this one year period. Yeah, but that actually cuts both ways. Because food is such a signal and there's so much badge value, it's very hard to accrue like monopoly power. And how do you actually go about disrupting Nestle if every food is like an extension of personal expression? It gets very hard because as soon as everyone is doing one thing, I'm going to want to do something different. And so there's this constant like ping ponging in these products. So it's very, very hard to create like one brand to rule them all. You said something. something about Peter Thiel talk to me. And for one, in one hour, he diagnosed everything that would

go wrong in my business. Was that about Soylent? Yeah. What did Peter tell you? Yeah. I mean, we went in for like the pitch and sat down and did like kind of a working session. And, uh, I mean, now everyone knows the framework because he's written the book zero to one. It's, it's like incredibly popular. Everyone kind of knows that, you know, the, the way venture back companies accrue value is through moats, the development of moats. And, you know, the Hamilton-Helmer has the powers framework. Peter has, you know, different the, different theses around this. And we know the basics. It's like, you know, brand, intellectual property, complex coordination, scale economies, network economies, right? Network effects. And so,

but at this time in 2013, everyone thought that there would just be a magical network effect that would show up. And that's just not true. So there was this weird dynamic where, you know, a lot of investors that we talked to were like, oh yeah, like you don't need to advertise. You can just like, like the people like it so much that they'll sell it to each other. And that's true in a multi-level marketing scheme. But it's not true if you don't build that infrastructure to make that happen. So we never, we never achieve like escape velocity there. And he was just kind of like, yeah, like this is just a widgets business. Like run this like a, you know, any other business. Like you need to sell. Like you have product market fit, which we did. Like you just need to maximize, you know,

you're like run the playbook of you know market bring the customer in make sure you're bringing them in cheaper he was basically like this is a great lifestyle business guys congrats and and then we raised a bunch of venture and it was a disaster what was your peak what was your peak revenue like almost 100 mil almost 100 mil and um i was reading you guys sold it recently and uh not a good outcome all right i was gonna say no disrespect but the outcome sucked like for for how compared to the hype and your peak revenue. I think it was like, it was sold by a publicly trade company.

Did I read it was sold for $60 million? Something. I mean, not a lot. I actually don't even know the exact dynamics because there's a bunch of other like assets that were like rolled up and it's part of this combined thing.

But it was sold for like maybe as much or less than you raised. You raised $100 million? Yeah, exactly. Which basically means like the common doesn't get anything. Got it. So you didn't get much. You didn't get that wealthy from it. Yeah, we got a decent amount.

but not like what we should have, you know, if we'd maximize the value of that company. But then you started Lucy. So Lucy is cool. Are you there full time right now? No, I'm like one day a week at Lucy, mostly helping out with stuff like this, doing content, and then ideally like brokering deals with other content creators. Like we want to do more. We being Founders Fund. No, no, me being the, we being the Lucy team. Got it. So to give some background, you know, Soil and is this nutrition product. We run that for four or five years. And then Lucy is a nicotine gum brand and nicotine pouch brand. So if your viewers are familiar with Zinn, we're a direct competitor

Zin, but we differentiate on flavor, strength, and a couple other. Dude, I'm a all day, every day, type of Zin guy. Yeah, I imagine most people in the audience are. It's extremely like to do. I just wish that Lucy sold it at 7-Eleven because going to the gas station is like part of my routine. You know, I got to go see my boys there and hang out. I mean, 100%. That is the name of the game. And that was what will actually unlock, like, massive value in the Lucy business. 100%.

People should know that, by the way. When you email Sam, you're like, hey, I know you're a super busy guy. And so I'm going to keep this brief. Sam's busy at 7-Eleven shooting the shit with his boys on the curb. Those lot of tickets don't scratch themselves, my friend. Exactly. He's busy just in a different way than you expect. Yeah, I got to drop off like a palette of Lucy at that exact 7-11 and just be like, here, it's free.

Now Sam can get his sushi. Well, the Lucy things are cool because basically a Zen is just a pouch. But Lucy has, it's called a breaker. And so you like bite into this and you get like a little menthol or something, like a flavor. I love it. I like the citrus. Yeah, it's like a liquid flavoring. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of people complain that the pouches, although they're much better than the pouches of previous years, they dry your mouth out.

And that's the number one complaint. So we figured it out, you know, how. How do we address that? Well, let's just actually take liquid flavoring and put it inside a capsule. And then when you break it, it moistens the pouch and then it doesn't dry your mouth out. Gotcha. All right. And let's talk about ideas. So those two ideas you did, I would say, are the like top 1% of weirdo ideas, which means I love it and I love you. What are your other weirdo ideas that you're not doing? You sent us a couple of bullet points, but explain them. So let's run through some of your ideas. Yeah, I mean, I think the first one that would be interesting to talk about just because, you know,

You guys are obviously creators as well is just this idea of a creator-owned VPN. So we've seen that VPNs might be the number one advertiser on YouTube. I don't have the exact stats, but anyone who's listened to a podcast or watch a YouTube video can probably name five different VPNs. And yet none of them are venture-backed. There's not like one or they're not like majorly venture-backed. They're not big venture winners. There's not like one that's running away with it.

Have you researched these guys? Yeah, yeah, a little bit. They're like all in Panama or Moldo, the Maldi, or what's it called Moldova? Like Maldives, I've tried looking them up on LinkedIn because I did a ton of research about this. Specifically, I did a lot of research on the VPN review website. So there was one called Compare Tech that was doing 14 million in revenue, 13 million in profit. Like I saw their financials and they sold to a VPN company.

And I was like, these VPN companies are crazy. But I looked up the employees on LinkedIn And like you can't find their employees on LinkedIn Even though they're companies that are doing 300, 400, 400 million dollars a year in revenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a very, very odd space And basically like there's no there's no big like venture winner There's no like, oh Airbnb, we all know the CEO.

He's taking the company public, you know, there's no like, there's no like front facing company that's like, Oh, this one's winning and going to run away with it. It's more like there's a bunch of them. They all print. and there's not really going to be one winner because there's no network effect. Again, it doesn't have a big moat. The moat is marketing.

And that's why they all spend on marketing. And that's how they differentiate is just you check all the boxes. How big are they? Easily in the billions for the aggregate industry. And like you said, there's certain that are doing, there's certain VPNs that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars of sales. And so the name of the game is just check all the boxes so that no VPN reviewer who's independent can take you down and be like, there's a fatal flaw and do not use this VPN because

I know for a fact that it doesn't do the right thing. But once you've actually implemented all the features where, yes, we check all these boxes, then it's just a marketing game. And that's why you see them at risk. Is it just a commodity? Like, I don't know much about the VPN tech. Like, is it terribly complicated? It is complicated programming-wise. It's it's somewhat complicated to write the code, I guess. But it's not complicated from like, understanding the features the customer wants. You're not trying to create some sort of. And you called it BeastVPN. So what's your business idea here? Yeah, I called it Beast VPN. I call it Beast VPN because obviously Mr. Beast is the biggest creator. And he is an interesting

place where he has an international audience. He has an audience that's just it's just everyone. His audience is everyone. And so what's a product that you can sell all everywhere across the world that's very high margin, low churn, VPN. And that's why VPNs are advertising all over YouTube is because it doesn't matter if the ad is served to someone in Japan or India or Europe. Like the VPN's available there. So I'll give this idea a 9 out of 10. What I like about this idea is exactly what you said.

It takes the weakness of creator businesses, which is you get a bunch of low value kind of subscribers, might be like, you know, some, the value. you have a random subscriber in India, a random subscriber in Croatia. It's like hard to get ad money for that type of viewer. But this product is actually even better for international people than it is in the U.S. So I think that's one big strength. And then obviously recurring revenue, digital good or recurring revenue software is obviously amazing. I only give it a nine instead of a 10 just because it's the first idea. And I'm not that easy. So I got to, I got to dock one point just on that alone. Also, to be fair,

It might make more sense for like a Linus tech tips and an MKBHD to do this because they're more of like tech people. We were going to do this at Milk Road actually. We were built Milk Road. We were like, okay, cool. We're making money. We were profitable on just newsletter ads. But I was like, what's the best product we could do? I was like, what if we did a crypto, a VPN for the crypto economy?

Because we're at that time, we're, you know, one of the more trusted brands. We're like, it's kind of a commodity software. It's useful for crypto users to use a VPN. And so that was one of my ideas but we sold before we got around to doing that. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. You should have,

that would have been cool if you would have done that. That would have been, that's a pretty cool move. Too bad. Well, the guys still own milk ground. We still own a part of it. I'm going to tell them after this and be like,

hey guys, let's revive this old idea. I mean, the main thing is that you just have to have the distribution. You've listed a Linus tech tips on your, you said, do you know this guy? Well, no, I just saw him. So you said that, what's the guy's name?

Marquise. What's the guy's, what's his channel? MKBHD, Marquez Brownlee. Yeah, I like him. Everyone knows him. He's cool. This guy, Linus Tech Tips, has 15 million subscribers. Oh, my God.

I mean, he has a team that's like, you know, I think over 100 people. Wow. Multiple channels, podcasts, like everything. He actually built his own, like, media platform where you can, like, go in. and watch videos and talk to each other. It's like a forum site. Didn't he just release like a screwdriver and sold like $5 million of a screwdriver or something like that?

Yeah, I'm sure he did great on that. The question is like, would he have done better if instead of buying a screwdriver, which needed to be bought probably locally or it was really expensive to ship internationally, he sold something that was recurring software that was 99% margin. A VPN. The only thing is that like, honestly, the screwdriver is cooler than a VPN. So, you know, I can't fall. him because the screwdriver is like you get to build your hacker, you get to put your PC together,

like that's fun. VPN, it's a little boring. I use a VPN though. I like VPNs. All right. What's you got? Second idea. Yeah. So, obviously Americans love guns. You're an American. You own some guns. That's not changing. We've seen through, you know, the past few decades that, like, you're like, real, like, restrictions on guns are not coming. And so the business is probably pretty durable. We've seen that the stocks of munition companies are doing fine over the last decades. But the price is increasing. A lot of that's just due to supply chains, but there might be some more structural issues. Also, just more people are hunting. More people are buying guns and buying ammunition and obviously shooting. It's just a fun hobby. So over the last three years, the price of shotgun shells went

from $10 to $16. Pretty big increase. And there's this massive shortage. So the idea here, here is basically like maybe you need a new, maybe we need to bring some efficiency to the ammunition supply chain. And I think it's an interesting idea. I don't actually know enough about how to run an ammunition depot or an ammunition factory. But what I do know is that the hottest trend right now in business is like roll-ups or search funds. And every guy who graduates from HBS is like, I'm going to go roll up laundromats or I'm going to go roll up. Dentists. Dentists. It's like everyone has an idea for these things and they're all very commodity. They're not very contrarian. And so there's probably not a lot of alpha there. But it's like the people that are coming out of HBS are probably not saying, I'm going to go roll up weapons manufacturers. And obviously like Anderol is crushing it in the venture side. But they're doing like insane software, hardware, building drones, building like these really advanced AI powered weapon systems. This is not.

not that. You do this company. You buy a bunch of, you know, all we do is make shotgun shells. You buy three of them. You move the employees around. You kind of optimize things a little bit. It's just like a very boring like, you know, private equity style roll up. And then maybe it accrues power over time because obviously it is a massive industry. But you're not coming in and trying to reinvent the wheel. You're not being like, we're going to actually 3D print the shell or something. No, it's just like good operations. There's a lot of gun YouTubers, you know, we could we could mix that. Oh, yeah, yeah. could get them in. Do you live in California? I do. I do. Are you guys even, so I used to live in California. I live in Texas now. I own guns because I have a ranch and it's fun for shooting. Are you guys even allowed to own

guns in California? Yes, we're allowed to own guns. No, like what's the rule? No, no. I mean, you can, there's a whole bunch of restrictions on like rifles, like certain capacity magazines, but the, I think most recently, like, it's pretty easy to get a concealed carry permit in San Francisco. It's kind of a narrative violation. Wait, what? I thought for years that wasn't impossible. Yeah, most people think it's like unthinkable, but in fact, it is becoming easier, which is kind of crazy. But yeah, I mean, obviously California is not like a dream state for, you know, if you're a gun fan. Sean, you've been talking about getting your conceal and carry for years now, right? Not at all.

Guns scare me. But I did look at investing in an ammunition roll-up. I'm trying to find the deck. You did? That's hilarious. Yeah, we got introduced to somebody who was doing it, and I was like, I kind of love this idea. But it was so far field out of like what I'm just investing in that I was like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, how do you know, yeah, how do you know that they can actually do the due diligence? Like if you can't do the due diligence. Exactly. I don't think I would touch this. I wouldn't touch this either. Why? I wouldn't want this in my obituary that I, you know, even though. And I, and I understand how that's hypocritical, you know, I criticize Sean because

Sean wants to like invest in only fan companies and I'm like, I'm not touching that. But at the same time, I consume porn. So like there's definitely like a little bit of I acknowledge the hypocrisy. It's like cognitive distance. Yeah, yeah. But like, you know, I guess, you know,

it doesn't have to be black and white. It's shades of gray and like me. I prefer to say on the wider of the of that side. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's totally fair. And I think that's why there might be alpha in this area because I think that dummies like you, Sam.

That's why this opportunity exists. Because that made no sense. They made tons of sense, dude. What are you talking about? You're like, I love guns, I enjoy them, I buy them, I'm buying the ammunition, but, you know, I don't want to support. I don't want to invest in it because only bad people would buy it. Like, what does that mean? No, no, I didn't say only bad people.

I said, I don't want to own it. I didn't say, I say that I buy the stuff, I use it. I think it's very enjoyable. I love shooting for fun, but that doesn't mean I want to make it my career. I mean, Sam, would your opinion change if we were actively in a hot war? Like it's your duty to America to optimize the ammunition supply chain because there are like there there are troops from you know some country landing in the beaches of California. Would my opinion change? Yeah, of course.

And that's totally fair. And I think that's right. And my opinion can change about the whole thing. I'm very open to new data points and changing my opinion. I'm just saying like, like Andrel, like I love Andrew. I like, I think that's a very patriotic mission. But I know, 100%. owning Remington, like right now, I'm like, uh, I don't know, man.

Like, yeah, I could probably make money in other ways. And my conscience would be a little less, like it would be, it's very, it's just an easier decision. Sam, I got, I got a question for you. There's a thing going viral on TikTok right now. That's, uh, girlfriends asking their boyfriends or, you know, wives asking their husband something. I'll be the wife here. I'm going to ask you a question, uh, that they're asking. Hey, when's the last time or how, no, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? anything to do with the Roman Empire? Oh, all the time, a lot.

Like, why? Under what circumstances would you need to think about that? Just like gladiators and shit, just like battling to the death in front of everyone. When's the last time you thought about stuff like that? Like, this week? Last night? I mean, the funny thing here is that, like,

the meme immediately before that was like the in the arena meme. Everyone in tech was posting literal, like, Roman Empire gifts because everyone in tech is, like, obsessed with the arena. And I know that there are two separate communities. Like, that's not why the meme popped up. But it's like, yeah, it's so funny to see all these women are like, they're like, they see somebody asked the question. The guy answers some exact, almost verbatim what Sam just said. Always. Always.

It's like, I'm thinking about it right now. All the time. Yeah. Like, what do you mean? Of course. Yeah. My wife has a video of that where I didn't know about the meme and she takes out of her phone videos means like, oh, how do you think about that? Roman Empire. Yeah, and I was like, I'm thinking about it right now. Why?

How do you know? And then all the comments are like, you know, that makes, you know, that's crazy. And then they come back, reply, like, I just asked, he said last week, he said he thinks about it twice a week. And like, binds are being blown. They're like, I can't fathom why this man who doesn't take out the trash on time, who forgot to pick up our daughter from preschool, why he is thinking about the Roman Empire twice a week. Dude, I think about 9-11 and World War II, like 90% of my day. Like, do you guys not think of, like, what would I do if I was on that plane? Oh, all the time. You know what to be?

Like, I think about that constantly. I think about that constantly. It's just a very normal masculine urge. Like, there's this joke, Shane Gillis. He's like, just so you know, being obsessed with history, particular World War II, is a precursor to becoming a Republican. It's not going to happen today, but like, you know, it's early onset. Right.

Early onset, for sure. Wait, Sean, you don't think about it. like World War II, like, on a regular basis. No, but I have my own version of it, which is like, I'm constantly, like, if I walk into a place, I'm, like, assessing how, if I had to, how would I, like, rob this place?

Or, like, if some shit went down, like, what's the move? All right, what's the move? Okay. There's some sort of, like, masculine daydreaming that happens, like, my buddy, David, like, he, he imagines, like, ninjas coming through every door and window and how he would, like, take them out tactically. Like,

That's his. Dude, every time I'm in a baggage claim, I'm like, I could take any of these bags right now and just walk out. There is no security in this place. Are you kidding me? Like the baggage claim, I will never get over that. Why it's so easy to just take anyone's bag. My wife and I go out to dinner, we have like a rule. Sam's back does not sit to the front door.

I have to see the front door. Like, you know, I can't have people coming in without me knowing. I've got to see the front door. I do think it is a man thing. You know, John, there's this funny quote. Scott Galway said, he goes, you should exercise so you can kill and eat most everyone in a room or be able to outrun them. And that's like at its root. That's kind of like what we're talking about right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

John, I want to ask you, you, so Sam is basically like clearly just like surging on testosterone. You are EIR at Founders Fund, which is, I remember at one point when they were talking about PayPal, they said, oh, you know, Max left to interview some engineer. back in the early days of PayPal. And then he was like, no, no, can't hire this guy. He's like, what? He passed everyone else's test. He's like, he plays basketball.

I don't know any great programmer who goes and plays basketball three times a week. That's not a thing. And so they were like very anti-joc. Do you get to hang out with the founders fund people a lot? Like, do you hang out in person at all? And what's that like? Because it seems like a room full of very interesting, very different people. Yeah, it is.

It's oddly, they've done a great job of not creating a monoculture in a very small organization. So, yeah, there are definitely like complete jocks that I mean, obviously we know Keith Rabeas that Barry's like five times a day. Yeah, I don't know if I would call Keith Rboy a jock, but like why he's like a workout nut? He's a fitness nut for sure. Yeah, but Barry's not trying to be the best at sports. You know, he's trying to be the best at exercise. And why is that guy, why, no, I'm just joking, but why is that guy, why is Keith Roy is such a dickhead on Twitter? Like, why does he behave that way? He's needlessly rude.

I think a lot of it is just like holding the line on like when he sees something that's like not true. He doesn't want it to spread. And so he just like shuts it down like really aggressive. Yeah. He's like put it. He's like he's put his flag in some silly things like Miami. So it's like if Miami doesn't work, it's like going to hurt him. And it's like, you know, it doesn't have to.

You know, you could love it. And also it's not the best. A lot of these things are, you know, I think learned behavior. I think everyone in tech is somewhat like, like just injured from the past, like, for sure. It's very obvious. Of just getting like just beat down for every little thing. And so a lot of people have put up walls. And I think that it's time, I agree with you.

I think it's time to kind of take down the walls be a little bit less defensive generally. But I understand where all these behaviors are coming from. What's Sean Parker up to? We haven't heard about that guy in years. Yeah. We got to get him back on Twitter because if you or X, because if you talk to anyone who knows him, they will just say that he was the greatest poster of all time. Who's the best on Twitter now?

I mean, probably like Rahul, Ligma, Daniel Johnson, like those type of guys, right? Like, do you guys remember that publicity stuff that they did? They fooled CNBC into reporting that they were Twitter employees that were fired. It was very, like, that's just like, you know. guys, they're like doing a normal startup. They're like building some dead tool. Yeah, no, they're not like comedians. They should have just gone all in on like, oh shit.

We need to just create like this sort of like some version of punked or like, you know, something for the tech industry. They should have just gone all in as personalities. I would have dropped the startup, like six months sabbatical on the startup. I'm just going to see what happens if I fully troll and like maybe I could be the thing that the community needs. Dude, Rahul Ligma still makes me like spit water out my nose. when I hear that.

It's so funny. It's so funny. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, how would you monetize that if they, would you just be doing stand-up? I think he would get silent donations from billionaires. I've seen that guy. And he only hangs out with successful billionaires when I've seen him in person. Like, because everybody who was big in tech loved that troll.

Elon loved it. You know, like the, the holding guys are like, oh, my God, it's the best. It's the best. I feel like they could have a Patreon of billionaires only that just fund them to, like do statement art, you know, like comedic statement art against the media, against the local politicians, against whatever. That's what I would have done if I was them. That's maybe that's not a bad idea, but I don't know. I like it seems like they're pretty legit at what they're doing. They're like actually good programmers. You have a thing on this

document that I want to fight you about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew this. I was good. You're good. Here's the. So John sent us this document. He says, unique philosophies. Lifestyle businesses are worthless. What do you? Make your case. Before we make you walk the plank. Yeah. Exactly.

No, no, I, I, this is mostly just like, let's have a fun debate because I'm like, you know, working at a venture capital firm and I can kind of represent the VC crew and you guys are like the kings of like the lifestyle business. So we aren't the kings of that, by the way. I want to be the king of it actually. I actually will accept that a compliment. I don't mind being the king of it. What I'm saying is I think that we are one of the very few.

kind of content creators. You pay proper respect to it. Yeah. What I'm saying is we do both. We think both are cool. There's very few people, I think, that are in the middle, and I think we are in the middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fair.

That's fair. And so, yeah, basically, I think the point is just that lifestyle businesses are great. Define that. So I would say, I would say, like, non-venture-backed, non-blit scaling, non-hyperscaling, non-monopoly, something without a crazy moat, where it's just like you go and work at it and maybe it gets really big and maybe you wind up being a billionaire, but you didn't, you didn't like do this growth at all cost insane thing. And what's hypergrowth two or three times a year? I mean, sometimes 10 times a year, right? It depends on the scale. At the early stages,

it goes really, really fast. But I'm specifically thinking of like Facebook, right? I'm specifically thinking of the power law outcomes in venture. And my point is that basically only about 1% of companies that get started raise venture capital, but about 99% of the market cap in the public markets, they took venture. And so venture has this very like disproportional outcome. And I believe that the bigger the company, the bigger the impact on the world. And so if you want to have a really, really big impact, you should actually be trying to raise money grow very, grow very quickly.

Like, you're not going to build a hundred billion dollar company compounding at two percent a year, five percent a year over your lifetime. It just won't happen. All right. Let me play the other side of that. Please. Your analogy of, well, okay, so you're saying one percent or 99 percent of the value is created by the one percent of companies that raise money.

That, to me, is also saying that, like, look, 100 percent of the soldiers on D-Day who ended up killing like the Nazis that ended that battle they had to land on that beach anyway right so you might as well lay on that beach and i'm like yeah but the other one's got like fucking killed and destroyed how about i just like not worry about killing Nazis and like i can just like start this little thing on the side you know what i mean like it's like it's like dude like this whole thing with like vc it's like you're funding all the you as the investor are funding all these companies and you're like dude i don't give a fuck which one of you dies out here because i know one of you is going to like make me my money. And so from my perspective, I'm like, yeah, so if I can get rich

with a higher likelihood, which is maybe in most cases the number one reason for starting a business. In not most cases, like other cases, it's like the number three version. Let's say your number one version is like, I want to like create change. Getting rich is still up there. So like, if like if you can get rich and create value and have fun and work for yourself and have a higher likelihood of doing that, why wouldn't you go that route? So, so the reason I think you shouldn't go with that route is because I think your overall impact on humanity and society and the world will be lower. If it survives. Yeah, this whole question of would you rather own 100% of a $100 million company or 1% of a $10 billion company? I don't even think it's a question. Obviously,

the $10 billion company, because the $10 billion company is having a much larger impact on the world. That's that an obvious answer. But no, no, no, it's not. It's not. For a lot of people, they say, I would rather have 100% and be able to go on vacation and, you know, chill and just have these cash flows come directly to me and not to have to deal with, like, you know, all this other stuff. And I get that. But my point is that, like, I believe that humans have a duty to each other to go and have the largest impact possible. And that is often done with the backing of venture capitalists. I don't think you believe that. Yeah. I do. Wouldn't you not be like curing cancer instead of sell a nicotine gum? Like, let's be honest. Yes. Yes. Oh, I mean, that's hilarious.

you use that as an example because that's like the actually the best way to stop lung cancer is to get people to switch. Yeah, but don't let facts get the way of a good argument. But I will actually synthesize this for you and I think we will agree on this point, which is that what you should actually do with your life is pick the hardest, most interesting, most value creative problem that you are equipped to solve. So can I create a cancer-curing drug? No, I don't have that background. It's not, not. option for me. So I would fail if I went into that industry. But I should pick the most ambitious thing and the best idea that I have. And then I should be very rigorous about whether or not that idea is appropriate for venture capital. And I think that if Mark Zuckerberg didn't raise venture capital, his company would be dead. And I think there's a lot of companies. I've been a part of

some of them where we raised VC for a company that didn't need VC. And it also killed the company, I think. So basically, you have to, you have to pick the best idea that you're equipped to solve and then decide the financing strategy that aligns with that. And there's no one size fits all solution. Do you wish you would have done a different idea instead of Soylent? Or do you wish that you just hadn't taken VC and you got wealthy? Oh, I don't know. That's interesting. I mean, right before So that I was working on natural language generation in 2013, which is like the hottest trend now. And so if I'd probably just like stuck with that for a decade, I'd probably be doing something cool right now, maybe. I think that you would have been more impactful if Soylent hadn't raised and you had gotten

rich, and then you would have been able to like say like... Do something else? Well, you would have been like, I don't care about money as much. So I'll just do this other crazy thing that is a moonshot. Like, I think it's, because I took a similar argument as you. And then someone corrected me and they're like, yeah, but it's a lot easier to go after moonshot ideas when you don't have to worry about a mortgage. And as someone who had a bootstrap exit, I agree. I'm like, it's pretty like, I understand why founders, uh, want to take secondary because you are more dangerous when you have 10 or 20 or 30 million dollars. Like, you are more dangerous when you don't worry, where you're like, I'm rich enough that I don't have to worry,

but I'm not rich enough that I want to stop. Yeah, I do 100% feel like I'm in that category. Like that, that puts you in a dangerous category, I think. Yeah, I, I, 100% I'd feel it in that category. And thus, because that's true, I think lifestyle businesses are awesome. Oh, because they can get you there faster. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Get like the base hit before you do the big thing. Yeah, not unreasonable. And I think that's also kind of a synthesis of what we're saying. We kind of agree that it's like moonshots are good, but the path might be circuitous to them, right? And there are freaks out there, like an Elon, like a Zuck. Well, I don't know about Zuck, but like an Elon who's willing to risk it all.

Yeah, even Elon like PayPal. could be framed as like less ambitious than SpaceX and Tesla, right? It's like the mission might not be as big. Who knows? Well, he tweeted this out the other day. And so Andrew Wilkinson had had tweeted something out like this that was like, you know, you learn to crawl or learn to walk before he run.

And he's like most people who want to do a big, crazy, ambitious thing should start by doing a smaller thing. So they learn how to do business and then make things happen and then graduate up. and a bunch of people were agreeing with him. I totally disagreed. I was like, if you know the thing you want to do, you should just go do the thing. You know, the way that doing something before you do your bigger thing works well,

I believe is at first, that was the biggest thing you knew. And then as you did it, your worldview expanded and your ambition expanded and your set of possibilities you were aware of expanded. And then you went and did that thing. However, Elon did reply almost. confirming what Andrew had said for him. In his case, he was like, yeah, you know, I couldn't have created SpaceX if I didn't have the money and the skills and reputation as I had during Zip 2.

And specifically, somebody had said that, like, they had talked to Elon and he, you know, I don't, I don't believe this for the record. I don't believe a word of this. But they were like, yeah, I talked to Elon early on. And, or I talked to Elon and he said that early on he decided, oh, I want to die on Mars. Just not. He said the following. I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.

And, you know, that's like his joke. And then he's like, and I decided the way to do that was I needed a lot of money. And so then I went to the internet just to go get the money quickly, you know, as quickly as I could. I don't believe that to be true because, you know, first of all, not everybody is like that much of a mastermind. You know, when he was like sleeping under his desk as like a college kid. I don't think that he was like being like, I'm only doing this so that I can amass a fortune to launch three spaceships. You know, to be able to fund three of my own ships. Like, I don't believe that.

Also, he went and did X after Zip 2. So it's like, oh, if you already had, you know, whatever. You know, I don't know what you did. I think like some like $60 or $80 million out of Zip 2. Like, it'd be surprising to me if he was like, you know what? It's not going to be enough. I need to go get to $250 million. That's the magic number.

Yeah, there's a big question about, yeah, like should you ever sell a company? Because if your real goal in life is to have an impact on the world, maybe the company is the best way to do that. and so you should just continue to run your company endlessly. I mean, you guys, everyone on this call sold companies. Well, my goal is very simple. Yeah, what's your goal? You said, like, if you want to have maximum impact on the world, that is not my goal.

And so it's very easy for me to just be like, oh, cool, I can rule that out. I am trying to have the best lifestyle that I could have. That is my selfish and very transparent goal. I am trying to improve my quality of life. And with that comes, my family's quality of life. With that might come living in a good place. And being a happy, content person walking around the world is my contribution to society. I don't feel the obligation to go save the world, but personally.

I mean, the beauty of that is that, like, by, you will naturally have a positive impact on the world by doing what you do to achieve those ends. It might not be as big as, oh, you got us, you cured cancer, got us to Mars. But, like, there's going to be economic activity that provides value and utility to various people as you, like, go about your business. And as long as you have, like, a moral compass that doesn't, that doesn't result in you doing something. really unethical. You'll probably have a net positive of you on society. Like my trainer has a great way of saying this. He goes, you know, we, I was like, yeah, my goal is to like have an amazing lifestyle quality of life, right? That's my, my number one, like, you know, why I do things is around that. Does this improve my quality of life?

Oh, if I go do this thing, I'm stressed out all the time and I have meetings all the time and I don't see my kids. No, no, no, you've, it is not improve my quality of life. But he said, the other thing he said is mutually beneficial so that all the things I do are mutually beneficial to the people that interact with us. If I make a product, it needs to be mutually beneficial to them. If I have a partner or I interact with somebody, it needs to be mutually beneficial. And so that's the only caveat that we added to it to make it, you know, work. Is your personal trainer like your life coach too? Yes. Oh, yeah. That's like a, that's a recurric theme is

Sean's personal trainer. John, you, uh, you're cool because you, um, I think you're like us, uh, but maybe even more extreme in the tech world than that you have your foot in the startup world and you're hanging out with these big wigs, but you're also can just joke around and shoot the shit and like you're pretty self-aware. Who, uh, What do you align with? Who do you align with politically? Oh, yeah. I really like this guy, Mark Hurd, who's a Republican from Texas. He was, he's a smaller candidate, so he's not polling super well, but he worked for the CIA, and he also was on the board of Palantir. And he would be the first computer scientist president.

And I think that that would just be very, very interesting to see someone with a CS background. obviously I love programmers and I think that they think about the world in very interesting ways. And we've had this very long arc of, you know, lawyer, lawyer, businessman, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, right? Like, that's the story. And he's like a younger guy. So I'm proud to endorse him. Are you more Republican than Democrat or do you vote both? Yeah, yeah, I vote both.

It just kind of depends on who is, who can have like the highest impact on mostly, technology and the business community. I think that those are kind of the things that we need to be thinking about. I do think there's the interesting, as I look back on Trump, I didn't vote for him, didn't support him, voted against him twice. But I think that there's this weird situation where like the problems that Trump brought were obviously really bad. I think he really like divided the country and just created a lot of chaos. And I think that was like probably net negative for the United States. But he did kind of get China right. And he started this like, he got people waking up about the fact that we are in a great power competition again. And so you could see a world where

the China situation dissipates and things get better. And that would be phenomenal for the world. And that's what I hope happens. And in that case, Trump will be remembered as like an idiot, basically. But the opposite could also happen where the China situation gets hotter. And then people look back to Trump as like a genius who foresaw this all and like took the first steps to like make things safe. And so I think the what's interesting is that the way we remember presidents is often not by what they actually did, but by how their decisions look in hindsight. And it comes back to the, you know, don't judge a venture investment until it's 20 years later, 10 years later. It's the same thing. It's like, like maybe we shouldn't judge our presidents until

we, you know, with the full history of time. you had said something earlier about like you were working on natural language generation in 2013 yeah um now these large language model lLMs all the rage and you had an idea around this that i liked because it was very different than how most people most investors talk about this so you had said something like everybody is um knocking certain AI startups because they're oh it's just a rapper on top of gpt it's just a rapper on top of what open a is doing it's a flimsy little thing you had a different take what's your take? Yeah, my take is that that might be a reasonable critique for a growth stage venture capitalist to debate with their partners at an investment committee meeting. That is not necessarily what we should be putting out on Twitter X to the next generation of young builders. And if you are, you know, I know a lot of these kids who are 17, 18, 19, and they're hacking and building chat GPT rappers and some of them are making a ton of money and it's fine. What's an example?

Yeah. I mean like an example would be like just just narrowing down to something very, there are a few people that have done like almost like dating coaching kind of like to help with if you're bad at texting. There was a whole South Park episode about this where it's pretty funny. Yeah, yeah. Like if you're if you don't know what to text someone on like a dating app, you can have like You can go to chat GPT and say, hi, I'm on Tinder, and I need to send a response to this girl,

and I'm feeling awkward. Like, what should I say? And it'll give you a recommendation. But these apps have kind of, like, fine-tuned it to be a little bit more, like, spicy or, you know, engaging or whatever. People will do homework help. They'll do rap lyrics. They'll do whatever, right?

Yeah. And I don't know the details about those, but a lot of people will be like, oh, those aren't appropriate for venture capital. Therefore, like, they should not be built. And this is kind of where I'm flip-flopping to my, you know, lifestyle. are bad it's like no actually these are phenomenal because we need these these like people to get experience building and I think maybe I think about it even less from the economic side and more from just the experiential side of like if if you ever talk to somebody who's like they were able

to you know run some small business when they were in high school that's always a bull signal for entrepreneurship like there it's always like oh you're and now you're doing the venture back thing that's going to make a lot of money like doesn't matter what the thing was right it's like Oh, I was hustling sneakers or, oh, I was like selling reselling concert tickets. Like my thing was I bought DJ equipment in the United States. And then I would export it to Australia. And I was just like hustling that stuff in high school. Like everyone has one of these stories.

I'm sure you guys have tons that you've told them the pod. But so basically with the, I want the lens for chat GPT moment. So lens for those of you who might not remember was. I don't know what that is. So it's this app that you would. download and you'd upload, you know, 10 selfies of yourself from your camera roll. Yeah. And then it would generate AI images that looked like you.

So it would be like, that looks like Sam's face, but it's on Superman. But it was really like a Russian company. That was the rumors that it was a Russian company. I don't think that one was. But yeah, I mean, there are some weird, like these apps come from all over. I'm not sure about Lenza. I think, I don't, I just haven't looked into the company. And it made a bunch of money.

It was like number one in the app store for a bit. Yeah. Yeah, it was based on stable diffusion, which is this open source software package and Dream Booth, which was this paper that Google put out that then people went and implemented. Like, no one knew what those things meant. No one, your aunt doesn't know what stable diffusion or Lens or Dream Booth is, but she probably downloaded and paid for Lenza Magic Avatars and had that as a profile picture for a little bit. So it was just like this fun, viral moment that was really successful.

And I think that there's a lot of. lot of people who I would hate if they're toying around with chat GPT and they don't build something that's really fun and cool because they're like, oh, well, this won't be like a hyperscalor combining like generational company. It's like maybe you just need to go build the fun thing and put it out there and see how it goes. What would be something you build? So I have an idea about this, which is basically that there's a few things that these systems are really good at. You know, obviously there's been huge progress in helping software developers program with GitHub co-pilot, which is built by OpenAI under the hood.

There's also, you know, just the Google use case. Like I go to chat GPT all the time and just ask you questions that I would normally ask Google. People are doing a lot of like AI girlfriend stuff. Like, you know, Sean, I'm sure your next big only fans investment will have an AI component probably. But I think that one of the interesting things, that these language models are particularly good at is something called the Barnum effect. Have you guys heard about this? No.

So the Barnum effect is this psychological phenomenon where, like, I can say something that sounds like it's very specifically tailored to you, but it's actually vague and applies to everyone. So an example of this would be, Sam, you have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned into your advantage. Like, these things resonate with everyone. They certainly resonate with me. I feel like, yep, yep, yep.

But, and they feel personalized. It's like astrology. Yeah, yeah, they use this in astrology. And so what I'm thinking is like someone should take the, you know, chat GPT LLMs and make some sort of like viral personality quiz, viral astrology app, something along those lines. that Miss Cleo. Yeah, that exploits this effect that LLMs are really, really good at. And then uses it.

It's just like, yeah, you, oh, yeah, did you get your personality test? It's like, did you get your lens of magic avatars? Like, yeah, I got them. Like, I had to do the in-app payment. It was $5.99. It's like, oh, did you get your custom personality test through this chat bot that's new and going viral? Like, yeah, sure, I did that. I think that's a great prediction.

I think that's going to happen very soon. And this will look back at this clip and be like, dude, he called it. John called it, that that was going to happen. It has to happen. Somebody said this the other day, they go, they showed me a Steve Jobs clip. And Steve Jobs goes, once this technology happened,

there was a set of 20 things that were going to happen no matter what. It didn't matter who was going to do them. They were going to happen. A series of events were going to unfold once that breakthrough, once that first breakthrough happened. And you just didn't know when and you didn't know who, but you definitely knew that they were going to happen. That's how I feel about this idea.

I love it. I'm glad I got the thumbs up on all my Yeah, your ideas were actually very, very, very solidating. You said you did your high school flipping thing. You also were a, what was it called? Like a phone telemarketing scam artist. Tell that story. We'll wrap on that.

This is a phenomenal story. What are you like workaholics? Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I use the office as a reference point because that is the default. like small business in America. You know, they make a thing and then they ship it out. And so the scam worked like this.

I found the job on Craigslist. I show up and I'm wearing a suit. I'm probably 17 years old or something. And I'm like, I brought a resume. I want this job. And they're like, it's not that type of job. Like you do not need to be wearing a suit. Just sit over there.

You're going to call these numbers. Call down the list. And when they pick up, read this script. And the script goes like something like this. I probably still remember it by heart. but it was like, when they pick up, you do not ask how they're doing. You do not talk to them. You just say, shipping department, please.

And you want to make it sound like you've been disconnected. Like, I was already talking to the shipping department. Half the time, people are like, what are you talking about? This is a law firm. We don't have a shipping department. But the other half of the time, people are like, yeah, we got a shipping department. I'll transfer you down there. Like, you must have just gotten disconnected.

Then you're down in the shipping department. So imagine Dunder Mifflin from the office. You know, you just talked to Pam. Pam transferred you down to, I think, Daryl is down in the shipping department, right? And now you're talking to the guys down in the shipping department. And the scam was selling two-inch clear tape. So the guy picks up from the shipping department. So the shipping department, you know, John here, or Daryl.

And then you say, hey, you're, you guys are still using the two-inch clear tape, right? That was the line. So this is the secret. It's like, it's like asking an office that they use eight and a half by 11-inch paper. or like asking, you know, a podcast or like, do you still use microphones? You know, it's like, yes, everyone uses two inch clear tape in a shipping department because what you use to just tape boxes. It's the clear tape that you use to pack things, packing tape.

And so they're obviously going to say yes, but it sounds like you've already sold to them. You know, you're still using the two inch clear tape, right? We didn't say that we sold you. But then if they say yes, then you say, you know, hey, I just want to, you know, like, thank you. Not for being a customer. Just thank you. I want to thank you. And we're going to send out,

I want to send out another box of that two-inch clear tape for you guys. And I'm going to throw in a Starbucks gift card for you, personally. Your name's going to be on it. This is one's for you.

And they're running me through this. And I'm like, how much is the Starbucks gift card for? I'm like, I need information. I'm like, obsessive about information. And so he's like,

don't worry about it. And I'm like, no, but I need to know because like, what if they ask me? They'll never ask you. And I was like, no,

I have to know. Like, I just, I cannot do this job unless you tell me. And he was finally like, it's $5. It's like, wow. So they, so they, you know, they do the Starbucks gift card thing. They get the guy to say, you know, yes, I'd like, you know, I'm still using it. Send it out. And then they send it out with an invoice.

So you don't need to collect the credit card details over the phone. They send it out with the invoice. And they've priced this clear tape at exactly the level that they think most accounting departments will just stamp it. So it was $500 for a box of clear tape. And it cost them $5 to produce this tape. How much money did the company make? Millions.

I mean, the guys were driving around in sports cars. And I ran the numbers. And it was like, you know, while I was there, I only worked there for one day. And then, like, I quit because I was like, this is a scam. I figured it out, like, almost immediately. But a lot of people stuck around, like, you know. But even then, I think I sold $1,000 of clear tape. And they're just trying to get that one sale.

And the conversion rate is insane. Yeah. So they send out. to the guys in our shipping department of the scam. And I, first up, hilarious. The guys don't use their own clear tape because it just falls apart. It just disintegrates. It's like the worst product.

They buy the stuff that gets thrown away in China, basically. Like if they have manufacturing defects, that's what they buy for like 10 cents. And then they sell that for $500, which is already an order of magnitude more than you could just get from Staples. Are they still doing this scam? I don't know. I don't think so. They had like an F from the Better Business Bureau, and then, like, I imagine that it, like, dissolved. They probably got, like, all their phone numbers blocked or something.

What did these guys look like? Did they look like what I think they would look like? I imagine. They actually looked exactly like the three of us. Which is what I thought. Yeah, exactly. I think the CEO had your jacket, Sam. He was wearing a black teacher like you.

Did you drive a black escalade? Yeah, yeah, probably. No, I think they were doing like Audi Rates. I think that was like the big move. There's some guy listening to this that's in a shipping department that just had a holy fuck moment. He's like, that goddamn, that tape guy who keeps calling me, those gift cards. And then there's like, and then there's like a thousand other people who are like, so how do I get the leads to the shipping company? I'm in the tape business now, boys.

The gang sales tape. This was one of the funniest things. I ran into a guy who'd worked there a year later. And he came up to me, I was at a concert. And he was like, oh, John, like, I remember you. You're the tall guy. Like, how's it going? And I was like, remind me where we know each other from.

And he's like, Delta shipping. And I was like, oh, yeah, I worked there for like a day. Like, what's up? Like, are you still there? He's like, no, they fired me. They fire everyone like every three months because they need to turn people over. Because as soon as one person finds out it's a scam, they will tell everyone else. It's the same thing with like a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme.

like you got to like exert you got to like you know get out anyone who knows the truth and keep the blinders on everyone who's there because as soon as soon as one person figures it out they're going to tell other people and be like don't you think it's kind of unethical what we're doing or don't you think this is like what if the police come like would we be in trouble you know and then that scares everyone and then the whole thing the whole well is poisoned so I'm like oh you got fired like that's I'm sorry man that's tough like what are you doing now hopefully you got like a better job he's like yeah I'm selling drugs at this concert I was like what And you just like, I've never heard anyone like so proudly tell me that they're like a drug dealer. But I was like, okay. Like, I'm not into that, but I have some friends that are. Like, I mean, that's a deal. That's amazing. You tell people what your YouTube channel is. And also tell us, why are you doing YouTube?

You could be going out there building another business, but you're like as your create content. So tell people what the channel is and why you do it. Yeah. I mean, basically just bored during the pandemic. It always been, I mean, our first viral. success at Soylent was content and content's super important for launching companies. And I'm an entrepreneur, so having a voice is very important in that equation. My YouTube channel, you can find it, just John Coogan search there.

I also have a podcast now, powerlaw.fm, power law hosted by John Coogan, not an interview show. It's just kind of deep dives on these power law people and companies, these really like outsized outcels. That's a good idea. Yeah. So it's interesting. It's a lot of fun. I just, I really like it.

it and yeah, check it out. And the biggest problem with it is that I don't have a lot of focus. I'll talk about geopolitics. My last video was on Doug Jumuro, like breaking down his business. Like, I just, I'm all over the place. But it's so much fun. And like, there's clearly value in what we do. Like people enjoy it, makes them happy.

And you meet interesting people. We got to have a great conversation because of it, you know? We appreciate you coming on. This has been really fun. You're cool, man. We, this has been awesome. We appreciate it. Hey, and we don't have a lot of fun.

either. Look, we went from scams to who you're going to vote for, to guns. It's the dream, man. This is, this is like, your audience, you won't be perfectly optimized, like, oh, we're, like, the best ever, but in terms of the lifestyle, like, we all agree, like, this is the way

to run the content machine. Don't go too crazy with it. Well, thank you. We appreciate it. And thanks for coming on, and 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 the road let's travel never looking back like