Produced By - Silicon Valley Success Story: Conquering the Smoking Industry | #70: John Coogan

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

John Coogan is a dynamic entrepreneur, investor, and content creator who has made a significant impact in the tech world. As the Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Fund and co-founder of Lucy, John brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table. From his early ventures in Silicon Valley to raising over $100M in venture capital, John's journey is anything but typical. His YouTube channel, which has garnered millions of views, explores topics such as the metaverse, space exploration, AI, cryptocurrency, and more. In this episode, we delve into his thoughts on conspiracy theories, his successful nicotine company, Lucy, and his relentless pursuit of innovation. Join us to gain insights from a true trailblazer who continually pushes the boundaries of what's possible and be inspired by his remarkable journey. Connect with John: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnCooganPlus https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacoogan/ https://www.johncoogan.com/ https://x.com/johncoogan  Connect with Tommen: LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasloucky/⁠  Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/thisistommen/⁠  X: ⁠https://x.com/TomasLoucky⁠  Podcast: Links: ⁠https://linktr.ee/produced_by⁠  Website: ⁠https://produced-by-podcast.com/⁠  Support: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/ProducedByPodcast⁠  Produced (email newsletter): ⁠⁠https://produced.beehiiv.com/⁠ More: Trailblazed (marketing agency): ⁠https://trailblazed.digital/⁠  My SkillShare Course: ⁠https://skl.sh/3Rh7ZtY⁠  Produced (LinkedIn newsletter): ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7092551882589528065⁠⁠  Produced By with Tommen is your weekly dose of inspiration where ambition meets creativity. Join us as we dive into the journeys of content creators, entrepreneurs, and other remarkable individuals who break barriers and redefine success. Each episode shares unique stories, challenges, and triumphs. From heartfelt struggles to incredible successes, these conversations will motivate you to push beyond your limits and chase your own dreams. Whether you're on a creative path or just love great stories, tune in and become part of a community that constantly strives to push the boundaries. Sit back, relax and enjoy. Connect with Tomas:X: https://x.com/TomasLoucky⁠⁠⁠Stan: https://stan.store/TommenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasloucky/⁠⁠Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisistommen/⁠⁠Unproduced:Newsletter: https://unproduced.substack.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@unproducednotesSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033Ddo8ibDlLYoaP7FFLIWMore:Links: https://linktr.ee/produced_by⁠⁠⁠Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://producednewsletter.substack.com/⁠The Podcast Club: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/25420030/Tools & gear that support the show:Metricool: https://f.mtr.cool/HRJBZKRiverside: https://riverside.sjv.io/vDnDodFavikon: https://www.favikon.com?fpr=tommenRa Optics: https://ra-optics.myshopify.com/discount/TOMMEN?rfsn=8803777.591d19JamX: https://jamx.ai/podcasters-offer?ref_id=e02d48af-ef66-4e76-b804-c2e8d282a8bfSome links are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. If you find them useful, using these links helps keep the podcast running. Thank you!  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And for a lot of people, it's wealth, it's family, it's health, it's the mind, it's the interesting things that they're in touch with their spirit or their soul or their philosophy, their political impact, their impact in their community. There's a whole variety of things. If you don't recognize that the growth rate of the reward for the gradient descent doing, you're basically doing a gradient descent, you're this amoeba that's, that's, you know, hunting for the sugar and eventually like the reward declines. Before we dive into today's episode, please hit that subscribe button.

Your support helps us grow and inspire more people on their journeys. Thank you. Hello, John. Thank you so much for JNF today. It's a pleasure and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, John, for those who maybe don't know you, would you mind introduce you? in your own self. Yeah, my name is John Coogan. I live in Los Angeles. I'm an entrepreneur. I run a

company called Lucy. We sell tobacco-free nicotine products, alternatives to cigarettes and vapes. I also work at Founders Fund as an entrepreneur in residence. And I run, I do content broadly. I mainly run a YouTube channel, but also post a lot on X, formerly Twitter. And I've done podcasts and kind of all sorts of different content. But if this is on YouTube, that's probably where you know me from. Yeah. And I always like to start with a bit of your background to get to know you a bit better. So where do you come from from L.A.?

Is it actually where you grew up as well? Yeah, I grew up in Los Angeles. And I guess I went to school across the street from Caltech at a lower middle school high school. So in lower school, we would walk over to Caltech, which is a very, it's kind of like MIT, like of the West Coast, a lot of really hardcore engineers go there. Great biology program. But I remember as a kid going over there and they would do battle bots. So they would build the robots and fight them.

And they did different competitions. It wasn't as aggressive as that one that's on TV that's like just destroy the other bot. I think they had to do like different challenges, climbing one year. And then like robotic soccer and they'd kind of face off against each other. But it was just like a great experience. as a kid just going and seeing something like, oh, this is what engineering is about. This is what technology is about. This is a really positive environment.

And I always really enjoyed that. And then studied economics, moved out to Silicon Valley, Y Combinator. First company is a meal replacement shake company. Soilent, right? Soilent focused on just replacing meals and making it easier to stay on. diet essentially. I ran that company for four years. It's been so long now. It's been almost a decade since I was there and then left in 2016-ish to start this new company with my co-founder. I'm not really sure where you want to dig in because like it's such a huge story.

Yeah. But now you have the high level. If I'm not mistaken, I read that you never really worked a full-time job except the company that you started. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I had like, you know, internships and things that were technically full-time because I, but I was actively in college. But yeah, it's now been 12 years, no job. Let's go. And what is it actually that interested in entrepreneurship from such a young age? Yeah. I actually have this theory that like, you know, if you just like the fastest way to fail at being

entrepreneur is to just stop being an entrepreneur. And so, so like if you if you talk to people who are like, I've been an entrepreneur for 20, 30 years, like it's very rare that they're unsuccessful. They might not be like Bill Gates, like huge, but they probably have built something like because it just took a long time. Now, the really incredible entrepreneurs, they can build something amazing. Mark Zuckerberg took him like three years and he had a billion dollar company, you know, and it's been just amazing ever since. That's one in a million. But most people that just stay with it for, for 20, 30 years. Like they wind up successful.

And so I've always told that to people where it's like the guaranteed, they tell you this a white combinator, like don't die. If you run out of money, like that's the loss. Like there's no other form of loss other than just like running out of money and needing to stop doing entrepreneurship. And so yeah, as long as you don't accept a full-time job and you just keep doing entrepreneurship, whatever that means, like eventually it will probably accrue into something that's pretty big because it's on the side of capital and it's unbounded.

Like it has the ability to snowball. Your question was, how did I become interested in entrepreneurship? Yes, what were maybe some influences that made you interested in it. Yeah. I mean, right before, obviously like Paul Graham's blog was huge, but I remember being really young and a friend got me four-hour work week by Tim Ferriss. Oh, the classic. It's a classic.

And it's funny because it's not a book that, I mean, I love Tim, but it's not a book that's like critical in like Silicon Valley startups, like the big companies. But I think it's really good as an entry point into entrepreneurship broadly. So if you're thinking about, you know, starting a startup and raising a venture capital, you're much more likely to read a zero to one by Peter Thiel or Paul Graham's blog or Naval Ravicon like there are people who operate much more aggressively they run funds they're in Silicon Valley Tim Ferriss it's not like he raised money for his first company from Sequoia and

like was telling that story he was kind of like a drop shipper doing this kick kickboxing thing but like it was just a incredible book it was very well written and very fun entertaining very accessible and and I think that was one of the first times I realized like oh yeah like you can just do stuff which is like a funny lesson I agree it's very influential book and I heard it from many people that it was very in fact felt to them so I'm not surprised yeah I read a bunch of silly books around that time like even like rich dad poor dad was was funny I don't know you know that book of course and but it's funny because I was studying economics and we lived through the financial crisis.

And so I read the book in like maybe 2009, 2010. And by then, everyone knew that, like, everyone knew the full causes of the housing bubble. I understood credit default swaps and mortgage back securities and kind of like how the system had become over levered and then de levered. And a lot of people had lost money. And even my family had lost money on real estate during that crash. Like, it was very common. And so I picked up this book and rich dad, poor dad, it is good in the sense that it explains a basic concept of like how wealth is created in the form of real estate investing.

Now it presents it as this panacea where it's like, oh, if you become a real estate investor, you're going to be so rich. Like anyone who does anything else is stupid. Like, you know, it's very like hustle culture. Like anyone can do it. Just go out and buy a fourplex. And it's like, well, I was in college. I didn't have money to go buy real estate. Like, it didn't mean.

But the really interesting thing was that everyone knew that it was kind of a fraudulent concept because the market had just crashed. All of his numbers he printed in the book were like, like, this is guaranteed to work because, you know, historically it goes up by 10%. And then I could see that like the market had sold off like 50%. I could be like, okay, like clearly you were like at the tail end of like a real. really frothy bubble and like a big market cycle. And I think that was like more, more illuminating and just kind of like what the signs of a bubble

and cycle are. It's pretty, pretty fascinating. I like you mentioned this one because it was also another one that was very influential to me. I thought that it's going to be kind of another boring book about finances and business. I don't know. But when I read it, I got actually really hooked. And that's, I think, one of the biggest, one of the best books that was the most influential to me when it comes to businesses and finances.

So it was a great tip you mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's something about making these concepts accessible that is valuable. A lot of people get, like, frustrated by like these like gurus who like repackage, like, you know, concepts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there really is some value in it.

People, you know, some of the stuff is inaccessible. Like I also, during that time, I also read. Adam Smith, wealth of nations. It's like a thousand pages and it's like the most brutal 17th century, like, treatise on economics. It's fascinating. It will definitely tell you that you should be on the side of capital. The conclusion is also that you should start a company and be an entrepreneur.

The same thing is true for reading the communist manifesto, by the way. When you read the communist manifesto, the conclusion is also you should start a company and be an entrepreneur. The same thing is true as all, the same thing is true also for Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber manifesto. Oh, okay. If you read that, he says that he says that he's arguing that basically everyone is depressed because the work that they do is not linked to their survival. So you go out, you go to your job, you, you type in some spreadsheets that give you money, you go to the food, you go to the store, you buy food and you come home. And the work that you did, spreadsheets, is not linked to your survival. And, and, and, and this is a radical departure from the way humans used to

live where humans used to go out and hunt, bring back the deer. The breadwinner has literally gone out and won the bread. And therefore, you are satisfied because there's no abstraction. And crazy enough, in his manifesto, which is mostly deranged, he says that the one, the one activity that still satisfies the power process, as he calls it, is entrepreneurship. It's fascinating. So you can go to the pinnacle of all these different weird literatures and still come to the same conclusion, in my opinion. Or maybe that's just me. Maybe it's more just like everything I, it's a Roar Shock test and everything I read says the same thing to me. Maybe that's meaningful.

Like maybe I'm seeing patterns that don't exist. But you made me curious. I haven't read that one and I will give it a try. Of course, I heard of Ted, but I haven't read a book. So sounds good. Yeah, I mean, it's a very, it's a very interesting critique. It is, it is the best, it's probably the best manifesto. And it's, and it's, I think it's important because, because on the side of technology, I, I'm very much, I'm very optimistic about technology. And I'm very enthusiastic about technology. I think that on net technology has been a huge positive. And I also think that the critiques of modern technology have been awful. It's been like, oh, this company created this, like, amazing thing that everyone loves.

But, like, oh, like, someone did something weird in the office or, like, or their tax rates too low. It's like, it's not addressing, like, the fundamental is this good or is this bad for society? Or these, like, these weird, like, they always attacked Facebook for, like, storing your data. And it's like, I have yet to see anything that looks like a smoking gun that makes me uncomfortable using the product. Like, it seems fun. They don't really have an incentive. Like the arguments against technology often reject market economics. And that always frustrates me.

And what I mean by that is like, so I tend to reject conspiracy theories. I'm very open-minded, but I tend to reject conspiracy theories that presume the non-existence of markets in the sense that like, let's look at the moon landing. Yeah. If the moon landing was was fake, Elon Musk would have a massive financial incentive. to be the first man to land on the moon. So if the moon landing's fake, he would personally make so much money

by being the first person there. Yeah, yeah. He would be sprinting towards that goal very aggressively. And he would be pushing for that. And he's not. And there's tons of examples of this where it's like you think one company is doing something bad. Well, then why isn't the other company

promoting resources to to explain that and whistleblow on that and and draw attention to that because they would make more money. And so whenever there's a thing that just says like in order to believe this conspiracy theory, you cannot believe in markets. Like markets don't exist. Everyone's in on it. That's where I get really, where I get really, really hesitant about entertaining anything that they're saying.

And that's what I see with a lot of the Facebook stuff because there's like, oh, they're, they're doing all this nefarious thing. They're listening to your, your conversations on your phone in the background through the microphone. You've heard this one, right? Yeah, I mean, I heard so much stuff it did. Yeah, of course, of course. And it's like, there is a whistleblower industrial complex now where if they were doing that,

if they were listening to everything that you were saying and then using that to target ads, the person who's writing the code for that or doing the quality assurance on that or, you know, making sure the infrastructure works for that because if there's a whole system and there's a lot of programmers involved in this, any one of them could blow the whistle. I think they'd get paid by the government to blow the whistle. And then they'd also immediately have a book deal. They'd have a Netflix show. Like there is a whole massive market that is demanding this type of stuff. So if it was real, they would be able to capitalize so. quickly the lack of the fact that this hasn't happened indicates that it's not real to me and so that's where the critique of the of the technology industry has been it's been these kind of like

you know either very niche very like minor uh flaws or these like kind of downright conspiracy theories the the Unabomber manifesto though engages with the topic on a much more meaningful level on a level of like human satisfaction going down to like what makes humans happy broadly in this very abstract and philosophical way obviously he's not looking at data it was written decades ago but he makes a very like cogent argument and i think that's why he's been cited a lot in in the tech press or in amongst tech leaders because because it's the one time I think a lot of people who actually read it kind of blinked and we're like oh like he's Is this good?

Like, this is kind of, this is an interesting thought experiment. You're making me more and more curious. I really need to read it. But you raised some great points about those theories. I haven't really thought about it that way. But I can only say that I agree with you. You raise some great points and it makes sense to me. Yeah.

I mean, it's just a great test when you're starting. Like, it takes a lot to believe that like people are, not motivated by money or power or any sort of abstraction of money. And so that test works, at least at the first story, to dig into conspiracy theories and just ask yourself the question of like, is this plausible? There's so many examples. I mean, certainly like the JFK thing passes this test where there's no, there's no clear market incentive that would prevent it from being a different assassin. Now, I don't really dug into the JFK thing enough to be like, I'm convinced this guy

instead of this guy. I just know that there's like multiple shooters, but it's not one of these things where it's like, okay, if it was an assassination, there'd be this massive economic incentive for someone to figure it out. It's like, it's kind of just old history. And there's, it's not like, it's not like, oh, yeah, like, you know, this gun manufacturer's going to make a billion dollars if they can get to the bottom of this. It's like, it's really just like, like, some.

downside for some other people. It doesn't really, it doesn't really break that down, but there are specific conspiracy theories that do kind of break down when you continue to believe in the presumption of markets. Now, a lot of conspiracy theories, they just go out and say, oh, the Illuminati run everything. Basically, there's no free will. And it's like, I'm on the conspiracy theory. Everyone's in all the conspiracy theory. I think that stuff is ridiculous. But it is interesting. I don't know. I was about to ask you because this is an interesting topic. If there are actually any conspiracy theories that you believe in, maybe some well-known ones. I mean, the interesting thing about conspiracy theories is that we don't call them conspiracy theories if they come true and they are revealed.

We just call them history then. And so the classic example of this is 9-11 and not the 9-11. and not the 9-11 conspiracy theory. Oh, the towers didn't exist and the steel beams and all that stuff. What I mean is like the Wikipedia storyline that the established acknowledged truth, which is that Osama bin Laden conspired with a bunch of al-Qaeda terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center and do like the most horrific terrorist attack in history, right? Was that a conspiracy?

absolutely right there were a bunch of people conspiring it wasn't just one lone gunman it was a bunch of people they were conspiring for a long time it was literally a conspiracy it's like the textbook definition of a conspiracy so we know it checks that box now a conspiracy just out on its own is not a conspiracy theory there needs to be a theory someone needs to suspect something in order for it to be a conspiracy theory somebody could be conspiring right now to run a red light over there and And if I don't have a theory about it, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's just, it's just a conspiracy. It's just out there.

But we know that there was a theory because the intelligence agencies went to George Bush, and they issued a memos that said bin Laden determined to attack in America. So the intelligence agencies, which we don't typically think of conspiracy, we don't think of them as conspiracy theorists because we think of Alex Jones and tinfoil hat and aliens and all this crazy stuff. But their job is literally to theorize about literal conspiracies. And so if you think about the words in like a very, very rigid definition, I would say that 9-11 is the textbook definition of a conspiracy theory that came true. And my takeaway, I'm not saying this just to be controversial. Like obviously, like, you don't want to say 9-11's a conspiracy theory is everyone

will just immediately think that you're jumping to steel beams and stuff. Why it's important is that I think it's important because that is the clearest example in my estimation of something that sounded really, really crazy and then came true. And so, you know, obviously if you're in the White House and someone gives you a memo that says something really crazy, like you need to be able to be open minded enough to look at this and not just dismiss it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the same time, you can't just use a heuristic that's like, I believe nothing or I believe. Yeah. You have to think critically. You have to think critically.

But yeah, other than that, I mean, I'm not big on the aliens thing. I'm obviously not big on the moon landing thing. I mean, of course, for so many theories. I would just curious, but I like conspiracy theories. I think it's interesting. I think it's cool. No, I find it's interesting too, because it often surprised me what people believe in or what even people come up with that I would never think of.

Yeah, I don't think there's that many out there that are still lingering. Like, in the tobacco industry, there was a conspiracy and there was a theory about it. The conspiracy was that cigarettes killed you and that the big tobacco executives knew that it was deadly to smoke cigarettes. and they hid that information for years and years and years. And eventually the Surgeon General had a theory about it, a literal conspiracy theorist, the Surgeon General, issues a report saying that cigarettes cause cancer. And then what happens?

There's a huge cover up. There's a lot of public debate. Is this a conspiracy theory? Or is this true? We don't know. And then they litigate, litigate it, litigate it. And eventually all the information comes out when all those Brown & Williamson documents, like get dumped off at Stanton glances.

office and that's the story of the insider that movie it's a great movie and and so you know i don't think anyone would put that in the bucket of conspiracy because it's been exposed you don't need you don't need to call it a conspiracy anymore but it was it was literally a conspiracy and it took years for the truth to come out and so i'm sure that there are conspiracies going on right now for a variety of reasons. Some quite minor. Some quite minor. There might be minor conspiracies by small companies to infringe on someone's intellectual property or right. I see conspiracies to bring illegal vape products into the United States. Happens all the time. And I guess it's kind of known. You are interested or well informed about, right? Oh, absolutely. Thanks to working in Lucy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's fascinating. I don't know what the biggest conspiracy theories are right now. Obviously, the vaccine one's pretty big still. And I hate to tell it to all the people who believe that one. I'm not buying it because I know a lot of people that got vaccinated and not many of them are dead. And we can talk about whether or not it works or whether or not it stopped transmission or whether or not it's, you know, a net. benefit, but the idea that, you know, the vaxed population is going to drop dead tomorrow.

I'm not buying it. I'm still here so far. Yeah, I just, I don't buy it. I mean, yeah, it's, it's one of those things where people, people just extrapolated from like, the conversation was like, should you be forced to get this thing? And the answer to that's like, obviously not. And that never really happened, you know, at a national level, fortunately. And like, you do need to push back on that. But then the rhetoric just kept escalating to the point where it was like, this is, this is cyanide. And it's like, it's actually not cyanide. Like we can have a discussion about, you know, individual freedoms. Absolutely. Should you have to take this thing? Absolutely not. Like, that's ridiculous. And we know this. Like, and that's, and that's where we are now. And like,

there's zero pressure to get the COVID vaccine on a regular basis now, all the boosters and stuff. Like, oh, I haven't heard of me. in a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. It's available for people who want it. It's the nature of products. Like products should be available.

The FDA should review them. People should be able to choose. I think the FDA did a great job on that. Just like reviewing it very quickly. I think everything worked out really well. But yeah, the idea that like, oh, everyone's going to die. I'm not seeing it. We'll see.

Yeah, still. But I like this topic, but I don't want to be. Although I like, I like Joe Rogan, but I don't want to be like a podcast, like Joe Rogan. Yeah, sure. talking about it. But it's exciting for sure. Are you looking to elevate your online presents? Check out Trailblazed, our digital marketing agency. Whether it's standing out on social media, crafting a stunning new website or developing

impact visuals, Trailblazed has got your back. Visit Trailbased. Digitrace.digit your online potential today. But as we discussed that and talked about the Lucy, I was curious what made you actually start a company in this industry? Well, there's a few things. My co-founder and the current CEO was quitting smoking and didn't like his alternatives. It was a very classic solve a problem you have yourself thing. So you just wanted to address this issue? Yeah, at the time, you know, it was 2016. Vapes were still pretty unknown. And he wasn't enthusiastic about using those for safety reasons and just his own perception.

Yeah. And so he didn't want to vape. And maybe there was an aesthetic component to that. And then he also liked Nicorette. He thought Nicorette gum was was acceptable. He certainly thought it was safe. I mean, it has a decade long track record, multi-decade long track record. But the aesthetics of using a medicine when you're out on a date with someone or out with friends, it had a particular vibe to it that just wasn't right for him.

People, if you pull out Nicorette, they think you're a hardcore smoker and you have a problem. If you pull out a medicine in general, people think you have a disease. People think you have a problem. And if you pull out our products, hopefully, it doesn't have the same feel to it. It feels more like you've just chosen to use this particular product that you like for whatever reason. And that was very important to us, that we were going to, it also aligned with the with the regulatory situation in that it's extremely difficult to bring a new drug to market, a new pharmaceutical drug.

So something like Ozympic or, I don't know, Viagra. That's a funny one. If you want to bring a new drug to make a claim like that and it functions on the body in the same way, that's extremely expensive. That's why a lot of biotech startups, they will, A, they spin out of universities after decades of research. and then they go public before they even have a product. You never hear about that in Silicon Valley, but they might go public.

They might raise $100 million and just work and work and work at work. Moderna, similar thing. Huge company didn't have a product. Hadn't made really a dollar of like real revenue. What product is it? So smoking cessation. So Nicorette is the same regulatory framework in the sense that it is regulated as a drug. Now, cigarettes and vapes, and most of our products, we actually do sell a smoking sedition aid,

but most of our products are regulated as nicotine-containing products. Still regulated by the FDA, but they're in a different category. And so in this category, you cannot make drug claims. So you can't say this product is FDA-approved to help you quit smoking. You just have to say, I mean, first, you have to. to put a warning on it that says this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. But you can just say, this is the product, this is what it looks like, here's the flavor,

here's the strength. These are the facts. Take it or leave it. You're being very straightforward. Whereas with a drug product, you can say, this product helps you, if it's a Zepic, lose weight. Or if it's Viagra, you know, improve male vitality. I actually don't know what the claim is. But with Nicorette, the Nicorette claim is this product helps you quit smoking.

And so even though we were motivated by trying to help people quit smoking, that's obviously like the animating force behind the company, we knew that it was going to be a long, long road until we could really make those claims. Now, we do sell a nicotine lozange that is approved by the FDA as a smoking cessation aid. And it does allow us to say this product is approved. by the FDA to help you quit smoking. It's very satisfactory. But in order to, there's this tradeoff between what you can say with the FDA and the pace of innovation. So we wanted to bring a new product to market. And the burden of getting drug approval was so high. Because as I mentioned,

it's millions and millions of dollars, is much faster to go through what they call the PMTA process, the pre-market tobacco approval process. And the PMTA process is similar to a new drug application, similar to what the OZMPIC team put in when they tested their drug and found that it helps people lose weight. But instead of having the rigor of needing to target a disease like smoking or smoking-related illness and then cure that disease, like, you know, OZempic, obesity is a disease. and then OZempa can cure obesity.

I think this is the claim. I know for a while it was technically for insulin and diabetes, but effectively you can think about a weight loss product that gets approved by the FDA as saying, saying there is a disease obesity. This cures that disease, and therefore we are approved as a drug. And so their doctor can prescribe it

or it can be over the counter, things like Tylenol, aspirin. These are drugs in the FDA sense. Not like cannabis. Like weeded cannabis are not drugs in the FDA stance. Like they're not approved drugs for treating a disease. Now with with tobacco products and nicotine containing products like vapes. So the Enjoy menthol vape was just approved recently through this PMTA process.

The the pre-market tobacco approval process, this allows people not. to say that they cure a disease. It just says from the FDA's perspective that it's suitable for the protection of public health. That's the FDA's mandate. And so all they have to say is that on net, this will do more good than harm. And so cigarettes are obviously really bad. And so if your product is less bad than cigarettes and doesn't get new people to smoke cigarettes, it actually maybe gets some people to switch away from cigarettes, that's a net win.

Yeah. And you can't go out and say, oh, this is a miracle drug. It helps you lose weight. It helps you cure cancer, quit drugs or quit smoking. So anyway, the FDA has other pathways. So you might see something like a nutritional supplement. You've seen those like fat burners. Of course. Those products are regulated as nutritional supplements. And the rule there is that they can't say this, this cures obesity. This is a drug that cures obesity. They can just make what's called, I think it's structure and function claims. So that's when you go and you see a cereal and it says like promotes kidney health or something like that.

It's like it doesn't say it cures kidney disease. And it just says that it has this effect of like like people who use this like this metric went up or went down. Now, nicotine-containing products don't really make those claims, and they can't be regulated that way. The FDA actually has an entire office now. They basically have six offices, drug, biologics, medical devices, food, supplements, and nicotine-containing products. Which is interesting because cannabis doesn't have its own, alcohol doesn't have its own, and then all the more serious drugs that are prescribed by a psychiatrist, things like Xanax and Adderall, those products are regulated as drugs.

Nicotine has its own office. And so if you work through this process, it allows you to bring a product to market much quicker, relatively to a drug, and it allows you to create something that can compete with cigarettes. And that's what matters. And so even though, even though I don't know if we'll ever be able to say that our product helps you quit smoking, at least our gum in our pouch. we could apply for that.

We might be able to get approved. It's probably 10 or 20 years away. It's probably $100 million away. It's a big deal to make that claim. But in the meantime, we can sit on the shelves right next to cigarettes and we can compete. And we can compete on flavor. We can compete on texture. We can compete on strength.

We can compete on packaging and discreetness. We can make our product cheaper. We can make our product easier to use if you're going to Thanksgiving and you have a judgmental uncle who's going to yell at you for stepping outside and having a cigarette after dinner. If you put in a pouch or take a piece of nicotine gum and they don't notice maybe that's, maybe that lets us win. And so the name of the game is really beat cigarettes.

on first principles. Yep. We were very, very inspired by Tesla and what and how Tesla actually got people to stop using gas cars. Now, there were previous attempts at electric vehicles. There was the EV1 by GM, I think it's called. Yeah, I heard about it. In 2003, they wound up crushing them all.

All the celebrities came out. I think Tom Hanks is at one of the announcements and is like, this is a, amazing. We got to do this. Gas is, is causing smog. It's bad. Everyone knows this is bad. Let's make a change. Let's use electric vehicles. And it was a good pitch. Like it was, you know, true. Like, the cars are polluting. And this is a way to drive a car that doesn't pollute. It's great. Now there are questions about the supply chain and where the energy comes from. And if the energy comes from a coal plant, like maybe it's not net, not better. But it was definitely a step in the in the right direction. I think everyone agrees that, you know, in the future, we should just have all

electric cars. We should get the electricity from solar, nuclear, wind, you know, but why did the EV1 fail? It's because its primary value proposition was guilt-tripping people about using gas and was trying to force them into this like, you need to save the environment, you need to save the world. and so you need to give up something that works really well, which is your gas powered car, and instead use this car that sucks. And these things are terrible. They had like 30 miles of range. The zero to 60 times probably like over 10 seconds.

And what does Elon do? He doesn't go to you and say, you're going to save the world, you're going to save the environment. He rarely talks about that. It's not really what gets people fired up. It's the design. It's the lotus delis in the, in the, in the, roadster. It's the fast zero to 60 times. It's the self-driving technology. It's the, I mean, love it or hate it. It's the crazy design of the cyber truck. I'm not a truck guy. I think it looks

awesome. I would buy one of those. I would buy one as well. I think it's great that like the cyber truck, you know, people might hate it, but like there's a certain, there's a certain group that would buy that. And that's a huge benefit because they're not going to buy. Uh, an internal combustion engine truck. And so I think the electric transition, it was not fueled by bleeding heart. I need to change the world. I need to save the environment. So I need to give up something that's amazing and downgrade to an EV that's bad in a lot of ways.

It was, no, I'm upgrading to the coolest car, to the fastest car, to the car with the best self-driving, to the cheapest car in some in some ways. Like he just beat gas cars on like six metrics. And if you build a spreadsheet, now there are reasons to not buy a Tesla. Like if you are doing crazy road trips all the time, you drive 600 miles at a time, you don't want to charge or, you know, you need a full size SUV or a van or you need a convertible. Like they don't make a convertible right now. They don't make a station wagon right now. There are there are products that they don't make. But if you just need a car, like an appliance car, and you make a spreadsheet, the model three is really, really high up, right?

It's just cheap. It's fast. It works. It's good. And I think the design is really nice as well. Yeah, the design is nice too, especially if I remember. Fresh. Yeah.

And if I remember correctly the EV1 from GM, the design, it was quite ugly. It was so ugly. It was so ugly. But it's crazy. It's like, like, like, Lamborghinis existed at the time. time. Like, Ferrari's existed. Like, I don't know why they wouldn't just copy the design of like some really cool car.

Exactly like Elon did. He copied the design of the Lotus lease and he didn't copy it. He licensed it, right? Yeah, yeah. Lotus was like, I'm buying the chassis and elongating it. And I think that's great. And so what was the end result? The end result was that people wound up switching.

Yes, because they wanted to save the environment and they wanted to do the right thing. But I think that secretly a lot of people were like, I can justify buying a cooler, faster car and really I just love a cooler faster car. And so that's the way I think about product innovation and how you beat cigarettes. I think you need to beat cigarettes on all of the metrics that smokers care about, which are taste, flavor, strength, you know, packaging, price, all these different things, make a spreadsheet. And then it's good for my health or whatever. Like that is something that's right at the end because most smokers don't actually think about the health consequences because cigarettes are not something that kill you randomly.

It's only over a very, very long period of time. It's very similar to the smog that comes out of the back of a car. You're not just going to drive a car one day and then all of a sudden you get a blast of exhaust and you have consequences. That's not what happens. It's very, very slow. Everyone's driving these. there's a lot of smoke in the air, temperatures rise, and that's bad for the environment, right?

Yeah, yeah. And so we wanted to not, A, for FDA reasons, we really couldn't make that claim, but then also we didn't want to, and we didn't think it was the most effective way to reach smokers. And so we just wound up focusing on product innovation and trying to win on all of the other metrics that would go into a spreadsheet if you were trying to, if you were trying to make a decision about what product you use. That's really cool, and I would never think about it in such a way. So it's really interesting.

And about what you said, it sounds really tough to get the product in the market and succeed. So it's admirable that despite all the difficulties, you're still done it. And I'm not going to lie because I'm not a smoker and I don't use these products. I didn't really know what you see before, but I checked it. I looked at the website and everything. And as you said, I think it looks pretty cool, like when it comes to the drug. design, the website, and everything. So if I was the one using that, I would, I would like this one.

So it sounds like doing really well. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't look like, it doesn't look like a medicine. It's not talking down to you. It's not saying you have a problem and you need to fix this. And that's really important. For a while, we called it stealth help instead of self-help. So self-help is, is you have a problem.

I have the solution. Stealth help is I just have something that's better across the board objectively, and it winds up helping as a secondary consequence. And there are a few examples of this. Many in the consumer products space where the best product like the salad that you get at, you know, some salad restaurant, it's not the marketing around the salad probably isn't saying like you're out of shape. you're eating a salad right now, it's probably more just like we have the most delicious salads. And salads can be delicious when they're made this way with a lot of chicken and a lot of extra stuff. And it's the best and it's really delicious. And it's also affordable and convenient.

You don't have to make it yourself. And so, yeah, by making that available, you wind up eating more. And that's good. And it seems like that you are doing well in the company because if I'm not mistaken, you've got a longest tenured CEO in the industry? Yeah, it's fascinating. Big Tobacco turns over their CEOs like every three years, basically. No one can hold on to a job.

And so, yeah, sorry, years ago. Why is that? Is it specific to the industry or do you know what's the reason that's in this industry? Yeah, I think it's specific to the industry for a few reasons. I mean, the longest tenured CEOs are usually founders. So you look at Mark Zuckerberg. He has a massive control over meta and he has no other projects that he wants to work on. If he wants to go work on VR, he can just do that within meta.

He doesn't need to leave and start a new company. He doesn't need to do anything else. If he gets interested in a new topic or something, he can just go explore that with all the resources in the world, more resources than any venture capital firm or any private equity firm has, like he has the most money to do that within the organization. And he has tons of really great people. So there's no need for him to go anywhere else. So he's going to stick around, I think, for him.

I think he might be, you know, like Jensen Wong at NVIDIA, I think he's been CEO for, what, 30 years, something like that since the 90s anymore. Like he's only had one job. He just was like CEO of NVIDIA. That's it. It's amazing. But in the tobacco industry, I mean, these companies are conglomerates that have been formed over decades and they've split so many different times. Like the original Philip Morris was started in 1850 in London. It was like a tobacco shop.

and it it kind of languished for years and then some Americans brought it to America and started selling more tobacco products and then and then in the 50s like it was completely reorganized a new family came in own the whole business they introduced Marlboro they really exploded the company and made it like what it what it came and introduced Marlboro and had a bunch of really really huge hit products and then after the master settlement agreement where all the big tobacco companies got sued, Philip Morris eventually split into two companies, Altrio, which sells Marlboro's domestically in the United States,

and PMI, Philip Morris International, which sells Marlboros internationally. And now PMI, these were like sister companies, and they had a deal, like they're not going to compete in the United States. So PMI won't sell cigarettes in the United States. Altrio won't sell Marlboros internationally. But then on all the alternative products like vapes and pouches, and, you know, heat not burn devices, I quotes, they were competing.

And so now Philip Morris, PMI, the international arm owns ZIN, which is like the best nicotine asset in America. And so they're really like on Altria's doorstep. And that obviously puts a ton of pressure on Altria. And I think it's part of why they've been turning over their CEO so much. They also had the jewel deal that rent really, really poorly where they invested, I think, 8 billion or 16 billion, like billions and billions of dollars in this company. And then that got written down to nothing.

And they wound up swapping their equity stake for some intellectual property and just kind of getting out of the deal. So they lost a ton of money there. They've really been languishing. And anytime something like that happens, see the board replaced the CEO because the CEO is an operator and doesn't own, I mean, not a 1% of the business. Like a fraction, a fraction of the business is actually owned and controlled by the CEO. And so these big tobacco companies, I mean, they're dividend stocks, they're cash machines.

They make so much cash flow. And the job of the CEO is just to not jeopardize the piggy bank, make sure everything runs smoothly, not take risks. Zuck, on the other hand, can go out there and say, you know what, I'm spending $10 billion in VR, take it or leave it. Sometimes it's a miss, at least in the short term. Sometimes it's a huge win, like what happened with AI, where he had the forethought to build out, I think it's like $10 billion of GPU infrastructure. It has like this massive cluster because he thought that the data center that they built out for for reels on Instagram, there might be a new thing coming. He didn't even know what it was. But he was just like, I didn't know this.

Yeah, yeah. So they were kind of caught flat footed when TikTok came out because in order to launch reels, like it's not really the hosting. I think the hosting is not particularly difficult. Like Facebook and Instagram already had the ability to host a lot of, host a lot of video and image assets and deliver them across the mobile and web apps. But they had a problem, which is that TikTok, what makes TikTok work is that the content is algorithmically recommended.

And so every single individual person gets content tailored to them. And it's not just this quick lookup of, oh, let's see what your friends posted. It's not just like this quick database query. It's actually running some machine learning. And so that requires GPUs. That requires a ton of infrastructure, especially when you're operating at the scale of an Instagram,

which has hundreds of millions of users, right? Yeah. And so maybe a billion users, maybe more than a billion now. I know Facebook as a whole has billions at this point. But this isn't just something that they can turn on an AWS. Like it's very, it's very, you know, serious,

series data center. And so when when Zuck was building out the Reels data center, they were kind of behind on that. Eventually they caught up and they did kind of cut off a little bit of TikTok's growth by launching that product. Mark Zuckerberg was like, I never want to get caught again, flat footed. And so let's just build a second one. Let's just let's just order two X. And so they built another real size data center. And that's what they've been using to train Lama. And then now they've been able to build their own AI LLMs and their own tooling and their own and their own infrastructure there. And they haven't been dependent on Microsoft or Google and OpenAI because they've had that infrastructure in place already.

And that's something that the market in the short term on a quarterly basis will punish. Because it's like, why are you spending $10 billion on something that isn't making me money? I'm out. I'm selling my shares or this could be a dividend or this could be a buyback. Like what are you doing? but he's able to just make these decisions, take the stock price dip, and then if it pays off, he's able to think long term. That just doesn't exist at big tobacco companies. There's no CEO you can make it through a cycle like that, especially when the investments have been pretty bad.

I see. It's really interesting. I didn't know this about metal and Zach. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, but I like it. But just to be aware of the time, John, that we've been spoken for a while, I've got a few questions that I'm really curious to ask you. Sure.

Are there any books that are reading right now and that you'll recommend or that were impactful to you lately? Yeah, I'm reading a number of books on the tobacco industry. I don't know that I could recommend any of them right now. Barbarians of the Gate is a great book. It's about the largest leverage buyout in history. It happened during the 80s. For RJ Reynolds, a cigarette maker, which is also a packaged goods conglomerate at the time.

RJR Nabisco. So they had assets like Oreo and nilla wafers and Nabisco cookies and stuff. Fascinating story of like, you know, business dealings and intrigues. It's the birth of private equity and KKR. That's a great book. I'm also reading just like a lot of like like, like honestly like encyclopedias about tobacco. What I have, I have like these two huge tobacco encyclopedias that are just interesting. And then I'm reading The Match King about the this kind of like.

scam artist who ran a few match companies, like matches that would be used to smoke cigarettes. And then that became, eventually became Swedish match, which eventually launched Zinn, which is fascinating. So the story of Zin is, if you trace it all the way back, it goes back to actual matches and a desire to sell a product that was complementary to cigarettes. And there's been all this consolidation in the matchmaking companies in the mid-20th, century that's that I'm trying to still like really understand exactly what happened. I have a I have a few kind of like archival books from the companies like they were produced self-published by the companies and they're not really like general audience books. Yeah. The Magic King I think people will enjoy reading. That's a great book. There's been a few

good books about the vape crisis. The Devil's Playbook was pretty interesting telling of the jewel story. I think it gets a lot of things wrong, but it's still interesting in in the sense that like the reporting is pretty good and there's some more insight there. Other than that, I tend to believe that business books have like power law outcomes where one business book is possible that it's like a thousand times better than all the other business books combined. And for me, that's zero to one by Peter Teal. And so I reread that book every year at least because I think it's a timeless playbook for how to build a business. And I think that any time spent reading other business strategy book, books is kind of a waste because it's either a rehash of zero to one or it's actually proposing

incorrect theories that go in the face of zero to one. And I've seen that zero to one is very accurate and very timeless. And so I think it's important when you find, if it's a book on strategy or like how to live your life, I mean, it's the reason why Christians read the Bible constantly. They're not out there constantly looking for like new books. They just only got it because that is their moral code. And I think that's valuable. I think it's,

I think it's important to find books that, that are extremely accurate and extremely deep and then just, and then just reread them, just reread them over and over and over again. Now, that's not true for like history books, where it's just like, you're trying to get facts.

You're trying to learn a bunch of things. You don't necessarily want to be rereading, you know, the, I don't know, the power broker again and again and again. Like maybe, maybe you could.

But like, I think that, I think that books that just tell the, story of like a thing that happened. Nonfiction, like you can just kind of read those, you know, one at a time and try and learn as much as you can go for breath. But if it's a book that's, you know, perhaps like a fiction book that's extremely meaningful you, meaningful to you, rereading a book again and again and again and becoming an expert

in that and really absorbing and really like living that book, I think is, I think is valuable and I think it's under under appreciated. Yeah. Yeah. Those were some great tips. I read 0 to 1 from Peter Till a long time ago, but you made a great point to reread it. Because I follow Brian Holiday. I like him. And he often talks about that there is a reason why those books. Like for example, if Marcus Aurelius and his meditations, I heard it so many times recommended. And there is a reason. It's such old books. Sun Tzu, Art of War.

There are timeless books that you could just reread. And you don't necessarily, and most of the new airport reads are going to just be regurgitations of classics. Yeah. So maybe you don't need to do that. Once you found the truth, once you found like the canonical story, it's sometimes better just to double down on that. And when it comes to some inspiring people or people that you follow, can you name some? inspiring people. I don't know. I like Tyler Cowan. I like his podcast, conversations with Tyler. I think he's a really powerful intellectual. I love bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. I'll need to do my homework. I'm not going to lie. I haven't heard of that. Oh, yeah. He's great. He's a professor, George Mason, economist, blogger, thinker, very valuable. Ben Thompson

Stratory is very interesting very thoughtful analysis of big tech also just very enjoyable content very accessible in terms of like getting the news

those two provide a pretty good balance where Ben Thompson will get you up to speed on the news specifically within tech and then Tyler is doing more of like the philosophy deep conversations

about all sorts of things and very rarely are his episodes topical that he's certainly not talking about the election And neither has Ben Thompson, honestly. He doesn't really talk about politics all that much, but he will talk about Google earnings

and what's happening with Apple's new Siri iteration and the implications of that. Some would for the stock. I'm not a public markets, you know, day trader or anything like that. But I think it's very important to understand how the moats around these companies are evolving and what's happening in technology since it is the most important industry in the world. And so I find that very interesting. I will check them out both. I haven't heard of them. Yeah, they're great.

I think conversations with Tyler, it's all free. Stratory is kind of expensive, but it's worth it. There are free editions of the newsletter, but if you subscribe, you get like all of his podcasts and all of his daily updates and he just gets, he has a ton of content that's really, really good. But yeah, those two have been around for a long time and they keep kind of coming back to them. I mean, Mike Solana, Pirate Wires, like that's a great. politics. It's like funny. It's entertaining. It's great in terms of a bias because I work with them and I've

been on the podcast a bunch. And I've also written for PirateWires. But I think it's a very interesting thing where like Stratory is very like financial analysis of the tech companies. And Pirate Wires is like the political side of politics, culture of technology. But it's written from this insider perspective because of because Mike's been working for Peter for over a decade and really has has been there for all the major stories, knows all these people, but he's still, he's not an active venture capitalist. He's not actively like a tech founder. So he has a good distance to these things, I think, where it's not like he's constantly like shilling companies that he's like working with. And he's not purely a financial player. He thinks about things in a more philosophical and sociocultural perspective,

which I think is very valuable. And he's just been very good at understanding kind of like where the politics of Silicon Valley are going, and I don't think he over-extends in the way that a lot of tech political pundits do, where they become extreme right or extreme left, and it becomes like this war. He's still very, like, funny about it. Obviously, he has his own political opinions, but I think he's managed to maintain a really strong balance. Yeah, that sounds great.

And I would be curious, when can we expect something from you, such as on your YouTube channel on or your podcast. I think I have a few more videos that are like finishing out editing. Everything's like taking longer and they're just longer pieces now, longer run times, which is kind of the meta on YouTube right now. But mostly I've just kind of resigned myself to like I post when I want to post and I enjoy that and I like it being, I like it being like when I have something interesting, I'll post. That's kind of what it was at the beginning.

I enforced like a weekly cadence. just to make sure that I was like getting through and building the skills. But now that I have them and I'm confident in them, I like to just post when I have something that inspires me. And I've also been experimenting with a lot of different formats. I've done some documentary type stuff where I go and interview a lot of people. Those are very involved. And there's a ton of work involved in interviewing everyone and cutting everything together. And it's much higher stakes.

And then a video essay, it's much less differentiated on YouTube. There are a lot of video essays. I still don't think there are very many that speak from like a tech insider perspective. There's a lot of people that talk about the history of tech companies, but they tend to frame it in very clickbaity ways, like the most evil business ever. And it's like, okay, is everything evil, really? If everything is evil, like perhaps nothing is evil. You have to have some sort of gradation here.

I mean, there's some, there's some channel that made like, you know, capitalism is evil. and also communism is evil. Okay. And then super clickbaited thumbnails with people with, I don't know, green or red eyes. Exactly. I've learned to play that game enough

and I've played it and I've satisfied and I've reached the top of the mountain and I got something to go like mega viral and get like 8 million views and I'm like, okay, I've had that taste. I don't really need more. I enjoyed that. And now,

and then I also have like podcast stuff. and I enjoyed podcasting. And, you know, right now I'm just trying to go on more shows like this and do more, do more podcasts where I'm having interesting conversations, but I'm not doing the production. So I've enjoyed that a lot. And I've also been doing like kind of a quick podcast experiment with a friend about communications. We talk about politics and tech.

And that's really fun. Just putting that out on Twitter and her YouTube channel. And I might do something more. but I've never really seen the YouTube channel as like my primary business. It's never been my sole source of income. It's never been a serious source of income. It's always just been like the way people treat their Twitter accounts is the way I treat my YouTube channel.

So it's like I'll post whatever I want to post. I'll do whatever I want to do. I don't feel like a responsibility to put out a certain type of content or on a certain cadence. And I like it that way. So I don't know. It might become a podcast in the future. It might become just unscripted in the future.

It might just be I turn on the camera. and I talk about some news or some notes or some like I ran this podcast independently and called Power Law for a while. I haven't done one in a while, but it was very much like my video essays. I'd do a bunch of research. But instead of focusing on a company, I'd focus on a person and it would be still alive. And I would just read through it and it would be all unscripted, basically unedited. I would just upload it.

I like that. It was cool. It still required a ton of work to do all the research. But I could see that. I could see that working. Like what like Ludwig does with Mogul mail. if you've ever seen that. I don't know.

He's like, he's a big streamer. And he just turns on the camera and does one take about whatever's going on on the news. And he's good with like his titles and thumbnails and he gets a ton of views. I think it's kind of cool that like he doesn't need to get bogged down

and all this crazy editing. And he just can have all the tabs up and just kind of click through them and show you everything. It's just, it's a great experience. So I want to find things that are like creatively inspiring, interesting topics. And most importantly are,

are examples of the Feynman method. So the Feynman method is Feynman technique. There's a book, Shirley Uri, Joachin. He's a physicist at Caltech. He's in Oppenheimer in the movie. Yeah. And he said that like the best way to learn

is through teaching. If you can teach something, you understand that thing really, really well. And that's always been my theory for making these YouTube videos. If I can write a script, you know, read it into the camera, edit it, watch it, you know, I will remember that story for a very long time. Longer than if I just read the book, longer than if I listen to a podcast about it. And so for the things that I really want to understand, the process of making the video is very valuable to me.

If it's valuable to the audience, that's great. If it gets a few views, whatever, honestly, like, it's really matter. But most important things that then I understand that and I've learned the thing. I was about to say that I find it impressive that you run YouTube channel, did a podcast, your successful entrepreneur, got so many hobbies and you do so much stuff. So I cannot imagine how you juggle everything or how did you juggle everything. Yeah, you just kind of do what's interesting to you at the time. Whatever gives you energy.

Whatever gives you energy. If you're forcing yourself to do something, it's always like a rest of, be for burnout. Yeah, red flag. But John, to be aware of time and to respect your time, I mean, we've discussed it, but where can people follow you or where can people find you, where you are active? Mostly on X slash formerly Twitter, John Coogan. And on YouTube, I'm John Coogan as well. So that's, those are the two best places. You can drop your email on my website to, you know, power law as well. Yeah. I mean, there's some podcast episodes. They're interesting. I don't know if I'm going to do more, we'll see, but, you know, stuff's out there. If you follow me on

Twitter, like, you'll usually be able to see, like, what I'm up to generally. Yeah, I will add it to show notes. And is there any final piece of advice that you would like to share before we finish? I have this theory. Have you ever heard of a shepherd scale? Do you play music at all? No, I do not play. Okay. So shepherd scale is, so are you familiar with musical scales on a keyboard? You know, do, do, do do do do do do. Do, do rei, ah, sol la T. Yeah. I remember from school. Exactly. You remember that.

So if I say Dorei me, Faso Latito, you hear that it's going up. But at a certain point, like I get to the end. And then I have to start over at the bottom. Shepard scale is a very special type of scale where some notes are going up, while other notes are going down. So it sounds like it's just getting higher and higher forever. It's like an optical illusion for your ears. and you should really go on YouTube and type in Shepard tone or Shepard scale because it's crazy.

You can listen to this thing for 10 hours and it just sounds like it's increasing. Forever. It's crazy. It's also like, have you ever seen a barber pole? This is very old, but barber poles, it looks like a candy cane. It has a stripe and it spins. It spins. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it spins, it looks like it's going up or down infinitely. Oh, it's like in barbershops. right? Yeah, and barbershops. Exactly. Yeah. And so I've always thought that it's interesting to try and apply that to your life and think about, so some things, like if you're obsessed with just one metric in your life,

like money, eventually you're going to cap out, even if you're Bill Gates. Like, there was a moment when Bill Gates or Elon Musk, 10x. their net worth in one year and went from a billion to 10 billion. And that must have felt incredible. Going from $100,000 to a million dollars, that feels incredible. Going from a million to $100 million, the magnitude of the growth is the growth rate is what people feel. Money does not give you happiness. The derivative of money gives you happiness. It's not that you have a million dollars, it's that you have more than the previous year. And so the acceleration in the growth rate of the metric that gives you joy is what actually

creates satisfaction. You could talk to plenty of billionaires. If they made a million dollars last year, that's only a 1% gain or 0.1% gain, they're not happy. But the guy who was worth $1,000 who hit the lottery and made a million dollars, super happy, right? It gives high growth rate. Growth rates, like exponentials eventually become sigmoid functions.

So you grow very quickly exponentially. You're Elon Musk. You're worth $100,000, $1,000, $1 million, $100 million, $1 billion, $10 billion, $100 billion. Eventually, he's not going to be worth $100 trillion next year. The growth has to stop. And so once the growth stops in whatever that metric is, you're not going to get as much satisfaction out of it anymore. And so the question is, as the growth rate from that one metric is declining, what are the other metrics that give you joy that can be accelerating? And so I believe that like the key to happiness is having a few metrics that are always increasing and accelerating while some are declining.

So the examples are your health, your physical health. physical health. You're probably going to be peak athletic in your 20s. You're playing sports. You could maybe stretch that out to 30, 40, 60, you know, if you're really healthy. But eventually your body is going to break down. Your wealth might be really stagnant in your 20s. And then in your 30s and 40s, your investments might pay off. The companies that you've built might pay off. And you might see really big financial gain, especially later in life, especially if you're a longer-term entrepreneur and you sell your company when you retire, you might come and do a lot of money then. And that might be something that grows later in life.

Family, you might have kids and that might be something that's accelerating later in life as you have grandkids. And that gives you so much joy and energy. But I think it's very important to balance a few different metrics and few different goals and not just focus on one. I think the people that focus on just one, they only care about it. about money or they only care about, you know, like hooking up with a lot of people or they only care about being in the best shape ever. I think that that's when people get disappointed because

they put so much effort into this one thing forever. And when it eventually stops and it eventually declines, then they're unhappy because they're like, I've set my expectations so high. I can't get another 10x because I'm already the most jacked possible. I've dated too high. I've dated to the top of the hit mountain. I've been featured on the cover of men's fitness. I'm 6% body fat. There's no way I can go. I can't get any more shredded.

It's done. And so you have to have a balance of thinking about whatever makes you happy. And for a lot of people, it's wealth, it's family, it's health, it's the mind. It's the interesting things that they're in touch with their spirit or their soul or their philosophy, their political impact. their impact in their community. There's a whole variety of things. If you don't recognize that the growth rate of the reward for the, you know, the gradient descent doing, you're basically doing a gradient descent.

You're this amoeba that's, that's, you know, hunting for the sugar. And eventually, like, the reward declines. And it's the same thing that happens in the brain with drugs and even caffeine. You know, you drink coffee. You know, the first time you drink it, it's amazing. After you've been drinking it every day for, you know, 10 years, probably not getting that much out of it. I'm just switching up. And so backing off of the prioritization of certain things while prioritizing other things is, I think, the key to really lasting happiness.

Yeah. See, I would regret if I didn't ask you this question. It was a really interesting answer and I will dive deep into it. I think that's a great piece of advice to finish with, John. I want to say a huge thank you because as someone who's been following you and watching your content, I really enjoyed it. And there are many topics that we didn't have time to discuss. So I'll be happy to catch up anytime in the future again. And thank you very much.

This is a great conversation. Thank you, John. I wish you all the best and stay in touch. Yeah, yeah, you too. Bye. Thanks for listening to Produce by with Tomer. Check out show notes for all the links. and don't forget to like, subscribe and leave your feedback.

Speak soon.