Brainstorming +$1M Business Ideas With Soylent's Co-Founder | ft. John Coogan (#496)

useful for crypto users to, to use a VPN. And so that was one of my ideas, but we sold before we got around to doing it.

That, that would've been cool if you would've done that. That would've been a, that's a pretty cool move. Too bad.

All right.

What's up? We got John Coogan here. Uh, John, somebody who I only know through a lunch at a, uh, Mexican restaurant in LA. And that's the best way to meet anybody who's gonna be a podcast guest. So, uh, you, you got a crazy background. I'll give people the rundown if they don't know who, who you are. So you've, uh, been an entrepreneur your whole life, never had a job, started two companies that were both really interesting. Soylent, which was basically making a, uh, a meal replacement drink is the easiest way to explain it. Tasted like the milk of Honey Nut Cheerios, which I always appreciated. And then, uh, 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. Um, you're also an EIR at Founders Fund, which is one of the more interesting places to, to kind of hang out or be a part of. And, uh, 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, which is amazing. You make really awesome videos. Uh, Sam was sending me one this morning. Sam, you like his stuff, huh?

I love it. Yeah, I like your stuff, John. I, uh, by the way, Sean, I'm an investor of Lucid, so I gotta 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 4 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 guys— 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 with like $60, $70 mil.

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 a, 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 5 people around him. He's got ideas. You know, 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 and he's amazing. Everybody's just captured by this guy. I'm like, we gotta have this guy on 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 to tell 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, I do think a lot of founders have a ton, 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, programmers, like it was really aggressive for a while there. Like anything you said would be like taken out of context, put in 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 the background, but yours Both are so interesting. Um, can you just tell us, uh, 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. Nobody was at that time. This was maybe 2012. I had just moved to San Francisco and, uh, you had kind of like Uber and Airbnb, but very few people were in the, in the San Francisco venture community were doing like, like a like a drink or like a product that you could eat, you could drink, um, that wasn't software-based and but still was innovative. And so it was like kind of in this mix. And I remember Andreessen 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, 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. 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, 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 5 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 6 months there. Eventually we moved to the Tenderloin, which is an even nicer community. And, and we're living in technically a 1-bedroom with 3 guys. So I was living in the living room and another guy, uh, Rob, the guy who actually came up with the idea for Swelland, 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. Um, 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. All the worst ideas you've ever heard on here where people come on and they give you their bad ideas. Like, 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 it just like weird stuff like that. There were some ideas that were good. They were just like way before their time. Like, uh, 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, 5 years too early. And also we didn't have a trillion dollars of data centers for free like Google does. So it like, 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's 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, he's a, he's, he's so unique and eccentric and weird and 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 programmers. So speaking of dating, he wrote a blog post saying how he hacked Tinder and, 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 talk to— this was like 10 years ago too, but like talk to, 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, you can imagine where that goes. But basically he had, he'd 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 our rent a year in advance. I think we were paying $1,500 for 3 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— yeah, is that literally how it works? There were two—

there were— yeah, there were two phases. The first phase was he told me like, oh, I'm, I'm doing this diet experiment. I think it's going to make me healthier. I'm going to, you 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? Like, the only thing that matters is like our code and like our business ideas. Like, we don't, we don't, which is very stupid because obviously you do need to be healthy to like be productive. Um, so that was a stupid take by me. Um, but I kind of wrote it off and then he kept doing it for a few weeks and then we were at a, like a dinner with a friend. She'd made like homemade sushi and it, 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 Soylent 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 Soylent. And I knew the reference and I was like, this is genius. We need to sell this today. Like, this is like, 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 video, viral articles was I paid a guy $2,000 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, that was great.

May he rest in peace.

Yeah, it was like he dropped dead. I did on day 15, and that's what made the story go viral.

The, the Soylent thing, that was the gift that kept on giving, particularly, I mean, for me as well, you know, like I, I got traffic from it too.

Yeah. And it was, it was like a left-right issue. Everybody hated it. Uh, 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 that 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 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, 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's 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 seen holding a Soylent, it was like this crazy signal was going out to the world. It's 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 at a brown guy in San Francisco. Probably would've guessed that one.

Okay.

What, what else does it tell you? It tells you like, I value productivity. But yeah, brown guy in Soma, you know, like backpack is like sagging to the back of my knees with so many like accessories in it. So, so then it's like, number 2 is like, you value productivity over things like taste, maybe even things like health, right?

Like, oh yeah, everything. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's, it's a value signal. Then it was like a contrarian signal and it was like a, I don't give a fuck what you think about me signal. It was so powerful as a signaling tool. For like this 1-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 Nestlé if it be— if every, 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 about Peter Thiel, uh, talked 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, 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-backed companies accrue value is through moats, the development of moats. And, you know, Hamilton Helmer has the POWERS framework. Peter has, you know, different, um, different theses around this. And, 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. Like, 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 multilevel marketing scheme, but it's not true if you don't build that infrastructure to make that happen. So we never, we never achieved 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, your, like, 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 going to say, no disrespect, but the outcome sucked. Like, for how compared to the hype and your peak revenue, I think it was like, it was sold by a publicly traded company. Did I read it was sold for $60 million?

Something. I mean, not, not a lot. I actually like 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, 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. Uh, are you there full time right now?

No, I'm like one day a week at Lucy. Um, 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, Soylent is this nutrition product. We run that for 4 or 5 years. And then Lucy is a nicotine gum brand and nicotine pouch brand. So if you're— if your viewers are familiar with Zyn, Uh, you know, we're a direct competitor to Zyn, but we differentiate on flavor, strength, and a couple other.

Dude, I'm a, I'm a all day, every day type of Zyn guy.

Uh, yeah, I imagine most people in the audience are. It's extremely popular.

I just wish that Lucie 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, uh, 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, 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 lotto tickets don't scratch themselves, my friend.

He's busy just in a different way than you expect.

Yeah.

I got to drop off like a pallet of Lucy at that exact 7-Eleven and just be like, here, it's free. Now Sam can get his Lucy.

The Lucy things are cool because basically a Zinn is just a pouch, but a Lucy 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, it's like a liquid flavoring. So yeah, I mean, a lot of people complain that the pouches, although they're, 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 do we address that? Well, let's just actually take liquid flavoring and put it inside a capsule then. And then when you break it, it moistens the pouch and then 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 in 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? Uh, you sent us a couple of bullet points, but explain them. So let's, 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, um, 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 watched a YouTube video can probably name 5 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—

Have you researched these guys?

Yeah, yeah, a little bit.

They're like all in Panama or Moldova, the, the Moldova, 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 CompareTech that was doing $14 million in revenue, $13 million in profit. Like I saw their financials and they sold. Yeah, to a VPN company. And I was like, these VPN companies are crazy. But I looked all up, 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 million a year in revenue.

Yeah, 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 cash. And there's not really going to be one winner because there's no network effect. Again, it's, it's, 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, easily in the billions, um, for, for, 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, no VPN reviewer who's independent can like 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 do, we check all these boxes, then it's just a marketing game. And that's why you see them advertise.

Is it just a commodity? Like with, with, I, I don't know much about the VPN tech. Like, is it, is it terribly complicated?

It is complicated programming-wise. Like it's, it's, it's somewhat complicated to write the code, I guess. But it's not complicated from like understanding the features that the customer wants. You're not trying to create some sort of—

And you called it Beast VPN. So what's your business idea here?

Yeah, I called it Beast VPN. I called it Beast VPN because obviously MrBeast is the biggest creator and he is an interesting place where he has an international audience. He has an audience that's— it'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.

Uh, nice.

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, maybe like, you know, some, the value of a random subscriber in India or 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 for in the US. So I think that's one big strength. And then obviously recurring revenue, uh, digital good or recurring revenue software is obviously amazing. I only give it a 9 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 1 point just on that alone.

Also, to be fair, uh, 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. When we 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? Cause 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, 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 a, that's a pretty cool move. Too bad.

Well, they still, the guys still own Milgron, so I, we still own a part of it. Well, I'm going to tell them after this and be like, hey guys, let's, revive this.

I mean, the main thing is that you just have to have the distribution.

You've listed, uh, Linus Tech Tips on your— you said, do you know this guy? Well, no, I just saw him. So you said that, uh, what's the guy's name? Marques? What's that guy's— what's his channel?

MKBHD? Yeah.

I like him. Everyone knows him. Uh, he's cool. This guy Linus Tech Tips has 15 million subscribers. Oh my God. What?

And like, I mean, he, he, 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, 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. 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 fault him because the screwdriver is like, you get to build, you're a hacker, you get to put your PC together. Like, that's fun. VPN, it's, it's a little boring. I use a VPN though. I like VPNs.

All right. What you got? Second idea.

Yeah. So, uh, uh, the— 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, 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 are buying guns and buying ammunition and obviously shooting is just a fun hobby. So the, the, over the last 3 years, the price of shotgun shells went from $10 to $16. Pretty big increase. And there's this massive shortage. So the, the idea here is basically like maybe you need a new, maybe we need to bring some, 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 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, the people that are coming out of HBS are probably not saying, I'm going to go roll up weapons manufacturers. And obviously, like, Anduril 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 that. You do this company, you buy a bunch of you know, all we do is make shotgun shells. You buy 3 of them, you move the employees around, you kind of optimize things a little bit. It's just like a very boring, like, 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.

A lot of gun YouTubers, you know, we could, we could mix that.

Oh yeah, yeah, we 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 shooting. Are you guys even allowed to own guns in California?

Yes, we're allowed to own guns.

What? 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 was 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, for, you know, if you're a gun fan, but—

Sean, Sean, you've been talking about getting your concealed 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 that you did.

That's hilarious.

Uh, 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, uh, out of like what I'm used to investing in that I was like, and I didn't know the guy.

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, and I, I understand how that's hypocritical. You know, I criticize Sean, because Sean wants to, like, invest in OnlyFans 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, like cognitive dissonance. But like, you know, I guess, I guess, you know, it doesn't have to be black and white. It's shades of gray. And like, I prefer to stay on the whiter 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 what—

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 at— in a hot war? Like it's your duty to America to optimize the ammunition supply chain because there are like, there are troops from, you know, some country landing in the beaches of California.

Would my opinion change? Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

And that's totally fair. And I think that's right.

And my opinion could change about the whole thing. I'm very open to new data points and changing my opinion. I'm just saying like, yeah, like Anduril, like I love Anduril. 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 husbands 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, uh, like gladiators and shit, just like battling to the death in front of everyone.

When's the last time you thought about something like that? Like this week?

Last night?

I mean, the funny thing here is that like, The, the meme immediately before that was like the in the arena meme and everyone in tech was posting literal like Roman Empire GIFs 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, they see somebody ask 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 her phone, videos me, is like, uh, she asked you this? You think about the Roman Empire? Yeah. And I was like, I'm thinking about it right now. Why? How'd you know?

And then all the comments are like, you know, that make— 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.

Like, yeah, and don't like—

minds 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 like, what would I do if I was on that plane?

You know what I mean?

Like, I think about that constantly. I think about that constantly.

Or like, 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, particularly World War II, is a precursor to becoming a Republican. Uh, like, it's not gonna happen today, but like, you know, it's early onset.

Right, early onset.

For sure.

Wait, Sean, you don't think about 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, I, 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—

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, like 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. I, you know, uh, John, we, there's this funny quote Scott Galloway said, he goes, uh, um, you should exercise so you can kill and eat most everyone in a room or be able to outrun them. Uh, and that's like at its root, that's kind of like what we're talking about right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

Yeah.

Very natural there, John.

I want to ask you, you, um, so Sam is basically like clearly just like surging on testosterone. You, uh, are EIR at Founders Fund, which is, I remember at one point when they were talking about PayPal, they said, uh, oh, you know, Max Levchin interviewed some engineer back in the early days of PayPal and then he was like, no, no, can't hire this guy. It'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 3 times a week. That's not a thing. And so they were like very anti-jock. Um, 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, uh, 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 Rabois that buries like 5 times a day.

Yeah.

I don't know if I would call Keith Rabois a jock.

But like, he's like a workout nut. He's a fitness nut for sure.

But Barry's—

yeah, he's not trying to be the best at sports, you know, he's trying to be the best at exercising. Why is that? Why? No, I'm just joking. But why is that guy— why is Keith Rabois such a dickhead on Twitter? Like, why does he behave that way? He's like needlessly rude.

I think a lot of it is just like holding the line on like, 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, it's like going to hurt him. And it's like, you know, it doesn't have to, you know, you, you could love it. And also it's not the best.

A lot of these things are, you know, I think learned behaviors. 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, uh, Rahul Ligma, Daniel Johnson, like those type of guys, right? Like, do you guys remember that publicity stunt that they did? They fooled CNBC into reporting that they were Twitter employees that were fired. It was very like that. That's just like, you know, those guys, um, they're like doing a normal startup.

They're like building some dev 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, um, some version of Punk'd or like, uh, you know, something for the tech industry. They should have just gone all in as personalities. I would have dropped the startup, like 6 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. Um, Yeah, I don't know. I mean, how would you monetize that if they— would you just be doing standups?

I think you 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. Uh, you know, like the, the all-in 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, uh, 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, I like— it seems like they're pretty legit at what they're doing. They're like actually good programmers. I can't find this client info.

Have you heard of HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application.

Every team can stay aligned. No out of out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.

HubSpot. Grow better.

You have, um, a thing on this document that I want to fight you about.

Yeah. Yeah. I knew this. I was getting— 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— 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 compliment.

I don't mind being the king of it, but 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, we, we, we, we do both. We think both are cool. That, that's, I, there's very few people I think that are in the middle and I think we are in the middle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fair. That's fair. Um, and so yeah, basically I think the point is just that, uh, lifestyle businesses are great.

Define that.

So I would say, I would say like non-venture-backed, non-blitzscaling, 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 costs, insane thing.

And what's hypergrowth? 2 or 3 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, 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, like, like disproportional outcome. And I believe that, 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 $100 billion company compounding at 2% a year, 5% 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 1% or 99% of the value is created by the 1% of companies that raise money. That to me is also saying that like, look, 100% 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 land on that beach. And I'm like, yeah, but the other ones 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, 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's an obvious answer.

But no, no, no, it's not. It's not. For, 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 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 selling nicotine gum? Like, let's, let's be honest here.

Yes. Oh, I mean, that's hilarious that 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, right?

Yeah, but don't let facts get in the way of a good argument.

But, but, but, but, 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 an 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, we raised VC for, 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 Soylent, 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 you—

I think that you would have been more impactful if Soylent hasn't— hadn't raised and you had gotten rich and then you would have been able to like say—

like 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.

Yeah.

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 want to take secondary because you are more dangerous when you have $10 or $20 or $30 million. 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 100% feel like I'm in that category.

Like that, that puts you in a dangerous category, I think.

Yeah, I 100% feel that I'm 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, but that it's like moonshots are good, but, 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. Uh, and so Andrew Wilkinson had, had tweeted something out like this that was like, uh, you know, um, you know, learn to, learn to crawl or learn to walk before you run. And he's like, most, 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 do, you know, 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. 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, uh, 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 Zip2. 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, 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. Um, 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. Um, 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, um, you know, first of all, not everybody is like that much of a mastermind.

Yeah.

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 3 spaceships, uh, you know, to be able to fund 3 of my own ships. Like, I don't believe that.

Yeah.

Also, he went and did X after Zip2. So it's like, oh, if you, you already had, you know, whatever the, you know, I, I don't know what he netted. I think like some like $60 or $80 million outta Zip2. Um, like, I'm, I'm, it'd be surprising to me if he was like, you know what? It's not gonna be enough. I need to go get to $250 million. That's the magic number.

Yeah, there's a big question about, yeah, like, like, should you ever sell a company? Because if, 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 could rule that out. I'm 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 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, like you'll probably have a net positive view on society.

Like my trainer has a great way of saying this. He goes, uh, 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 improved 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 work.

Is your personal trainer like your life coach too? Yes.

Oh, yeah. That's a recurring 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 in that you have your foot in the startup world and you're hanging out with these bigwigs, 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, uh, yeah, I, I really like this guy, Mark Hurd, who's a Republican from Texas. Uh, he was Uh, 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, 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, the, 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, 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, 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.

Now these large language models, LLMs, are 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 knocking certain AI startups because they're, oh, it's just a wrapper on top of GPT. It's just a wrapper on top of what OpenAI 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 or 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 ChatGPT wrappers, 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, um, like just, just narrowing down to something very— there are few people that have done like, uh, like almost like dating coaching, kind of like, uh, 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 could go to ChatGPT 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, whatever.

Homework help. They'll do rap lyrics. They'll do whatever, right?

Yeah.

And I don't, 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, lifestyles 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 in now, you're doing the venture-backed thing. It's going to make a lot of money.

Like, it doesn't matter what the thing was, right?

It's like, oh, I was hustling sneakers, or, oh, I was like selling, reselling, uh, 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 on the pod. Um, but so, so basically with the, with the, uh, we need, I want the Lensa for ChatGPT moment. So Lensa, for those of you who might not remember, was, I don't know what that is. So, 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, it, that looks like Sam's face, but it's on Superman.

Or it was like, but it was really like a Russian company. That was, 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 Lensa.

Um, I, I think, I don't, I, I just haven't looked into the company, but, and it made a bunch of money and it was like number one in the App Store for a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was based on, it was based on Stable Diffusion, which is this open source software package and Dreambooth, 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 Lensa or Dreambooth is, but she probably downloaded and paid for Lensa magic avatars and had that as a profile picture for a little bit. So it was just like this, this fun viral moment that was really successful. And I think that there's a lot of people who I would hate if they're toying around with ChatGPT and they don't build something that's really fun and cool because they're like, Oh, well, this won't be like a hyperscaler 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, um, there's a few things that these, that these, uh, systems are really good at. You know, obviously there's been huge progress in helping software developers program with GitHub Copilot, which is you know, built by OpenAI under the hood. There's also, you know, just the Google use case. Like, I go to ChatGPT all the time, just ask it 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, your next, your next big OnlyFans investment will have an AI component, probably. But, but I think that the, 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, like, something that sounds like it's very specifically tailored to you, but it's actually vague and applies to everyone. So, 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, ChatGPT LLMs and make some sort of like viral personality quiz, viral astrology app, something along those lines that—

Miss Cleo.

Yeah, that ex— that, that exploits this effect that LLMs are really, really good at. And then, 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 Lensa 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, well, did you get your custom personality test through this chatbot 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, uh, 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, oh no, they showed me a Steve Jobs clip. And Steve Jobs goes, once this technology happened, then 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, I'm glad I got the thumbs up on all my, all my—

yeah, your ideas were actually very, very, uh, very solid.

You, you said you did your high school flipping thing.

Uh, you also were a, uh, uh, what was it called?

Like a phone, a telemarketing scam artist. Telemarketing scammer.

Tell that story. We'll wrap on that.

So this is a phenomenal story.

Were you like Workaholics?

Uh, yeah, yeah, a little bit. I, I use The Office as a reference point because that is the, 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, um, it was like, uh, 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 Darryl is down in the shipping department, right? And now you're talking to the guys down in the shipping department. And, uh, the, the scam was selling 2-inch clear tape. So the guy picks up from the shipping department, says, shipping department, you know, John here. Or Darryl, and, and then you say, hey, you're— you guys are still using the 2-inch clear tape, right? That was the line. So this is the secret. It's like, it's like asking an office if they use 8.5 by 11-inch paper or like asking, you know, a podcaster, like, do you still use microphones? You know, it's like, yes, everyone uses 2-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 2-inch clear tape, right? We didn't say that we sold you, but then, 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 2-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 for you. And I— and they're running me through this. 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 like, I need to know because like, what if they ask me? They'll never ask you. And I was like, no, but 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, 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, 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 like driving around in sports cars, like, 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 and like, you know, but even then I think I, 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, so they send out, I talked to the guys in our shipping department of the scam and, and and I— first off, 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, like if, if they have manufacturing defects, that's what they buy for like $0.10. And then they sell that for $500, which is already an order of magnitude more than you could just get from Staples.

Are they, 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, I think the, I think the CEO had your jacket, Sam. He was wearing a black t-shirt like you.

Did he drive a black Escalade?

Yeah, yeah, probably. No, I, I think, I think they were doing like Audi R8s. 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 tape guy who keeps calling me those gift cards.

And then there's like, and then there's like a thousand other people are like, so how do I get the leads to the shipping company? I'm in the tape business now, boys.

The gang sells tape.

This is like one of the funniest things. I ran into a guy who'd worked there a year later. And he was— he came up to me, I was at a concert and, and he was like, oh, John, like, I remember you, the tall guy. Like, how's it going? I was like, remind me where we know each other from. He's like, Delta Shipping. 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 3 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 Ponzi scheme. Like, you got to like, 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, 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 he's 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, step up. I'm not into that, but I have some friends that are.

Like, we can make a deal. That's amazing. You, uh, 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 us, you're creating content. So tell people what the channel is and why you do it.

Yeah, I mean, basically just bored during the pandemic. Had always been, I mean, our first viral success at Soylent was, you know, content and content's super important for launching companies and I'm an entrepreneur, so having a voice is very important in that equation. Um, 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. Um, not an interview show, it's just kind of deep dives on these power law people and companies.

These really good names. That's a good title. That's a good idea.

Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. It's, uh, yeah, it's a lot of fun. I just, I really like it and, um, yeah, check it out. And I, 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 Jumero, like breaking down his business. Like I just, I'm all over the place, but, uh, 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, uh, you're cool, man. We, we, uh, this has been awesome. We appreciate it. Hey, we, and we don't have a lot of focus either. Look, we went from scams to who are you going to vote for to guns.

So this is, I, this is like you, your, 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, don't go too crazy with it.

Well, thank you. We appreciate it. And thanks for coming on. And that's the pod.