Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, "How Much is Pomp Worth?", and More

I've heard a phrase. It's like basically what rich nerds do on the weekend, everyone will be doing in 10 years, right?

Yeah. And that's exactly what this is.

Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.

All right. On this episode, we are talking about the Barstool Sports drama, Dave Portnoy versus the world. We have a Billy of the Week, this guy Brian Johnson, who to me is kind of like the Elon Musk you've never heard about. We have two business ideas, one around e-commerce idea and then another one for restaurant drive-throughs. And then we end with a funny story about this dog walker that went to Sam, and we play a little game called How Much is Pomp Worth, where we guess how much our friend is worth because he just gave back all his investors their money and, uh, he's just gonna invest his own money from now on. So that's the episode. Hope you enjoy.

Did you see, Sean, that people were tweeting saying they liked what they liked hearing what Ben had to say, and then he retweeted that?

As he should. Dude, I retweet every compliment. Not every compliment, but if I get a bunch of compliments, like if I check my phone and there's a bunch of compliments in there, one of those is definitely getting retweeted. Yeah, I think it's obnoxious when other people do it, but I also notice it. And so I'm like, this is effective. Obnoxious but effective.

We, uh, we have some cool stuff to go over today, but the coolest one is the Dave Portnoy stuff.

Yeah, let's talk about this. I've been wanting to talk to you about this, Sam, since it happened, and it's still happening, so that's great. It's like there's just more that's come out. And also, I think you surprised me because I think you're not— I thought you would be so pro Dave Portnoy, and I think you're actually not from our text messages. So first explain what happened, and then we'll, we'll debate it.

Okay, so let's start with— if you don't know who Dave Portnoy is, Dave Portnoy is the founder of a company called Barstool Sports. They're basically known for like smut bro comedy that's actually pretty genius, and I'm typically a fan of it.

It's like if ESPN was drunk, this is what they would— this is the news they would make.

Yeah. Exactly. Um, that's a great way to describe it. And Dave Portnoy is a— he's what— and this isn't an insult, but he's kind of like Trump in that he's like ridiculous and he's got fans that will do anything for him. And he plays this part that's exaggerated and silly and, and just overboard in everything he does. Um, so the Business Insider released an article last week on Friday or Thursday, coincidentally right when Barstool, which is owned by a publicly traded company, had their earnings call. They released their article at the same time, and it basically was an 8-month investigative journalistic piece where this woman named Julia Black spoke with loads of people who had sex with Dave Portnoy. And this is basically either him or her or both The girls DMing Dave, and Dave had— there were screenshots that said something like, "Do you want to be famous? If yes, I'm a good place to start." So like saying like some silly, ridiculous, douchey stuff. And the women saying like, "I would love that. Yes, I'm in." And they have sex, no problem. But in the article, some of the women accused Dave of having basically rough sex, nothing like illegal, I believe was was being accused of, but basically like saying like, he spit in my mouth, I had to wear a leash, he filmed me, things like that. Not illegal. Then hearing this, Dave gets livid and he goes on a scorched earth war mode where he goes after Business Insider and he mocks them because their founder, Henry Blodgett, years ago got in trouble with the SEC. He goes after our friends Morning Brew. Because they are owned by Business Insider, and he is just going crazy on everyone. And the fans of Dave Portnoy are attacking these people like crazy, and it's become a little bit of a frenzy, and it's pretty wild. That's basically the summary, right?

Yeah, I'll fill in a couple of, uh, tidbits. So, so Dave is— what do you need to know to submit, to have an opinion on this? So Dave is not married. He's a single guy. I think he's in a relationship now, but like, you know, he's a Bachelor, right? So he can do whatever he wants. He's a rich guy. He, he's famous. He's in his 40s. And so there's always this kind of like, it's not illegal, but is it wrong thing when it's like a guy who's 40-something. I don't know, what is he, 44 or something like that?

One of the women was 18, uh, or 19.

19, I think. Yeah, 19, 20, something like that. So, you know, there's always this sort of thing where you're like, uh, okay, it's not, it's not illegal, but is it right? You know, some people have an opinion on that. All right, but whatever. He's known for being like, um, like a, like a loudmouth, but he speaks, um, he doesn't like pull any punches. So he's direct. He, uh, I think he's a fairly honest guy. Um, and he's honest to the point of, uh, fault sometimes. So for example, the news, the news story hits. What do 9 out of 10 people do, especially CEOs of companies, presidents of companies? He's not CEO. He's like the chairman or president. He, um, you know, you're supposed to sort of lay low. Your publicist will release a press release that says, you know, we categorically deny any wrongdoing, um, you know, the truth will come out, and, uh, and you let it blow over and you hope you didn't get canceled. He did the opposite. So he comes out immediately on Instagram Live, or it's Instagram IGTV, and he just says, look, my lawyers say don't say anything, but I'm gonna say exactly what's going on here. 'Um, so here's the deal. These guys are been— I've known for months these guys are putting out a hit piece because they contacted like dozens of people that I've been with, and they said they're fishing for something bad about me.' And then these people would come tell me, 'Hey Dave, you know, there's a reporter asking around for, you know, if, if, you know, if you've done any wrongs to me.' And I said, 'No, because you haven't, but like, just so you know, this is what's going on.' So he knew this was coming. Finally it drops, he addresses it directly, and he said— he basically turns it on them. He said, 'You try to cancel me I'm gonna cancel you. And so all of a sudden on Twitter, cancel Business Insider is running because he's like, look, you're trying to profit off of this story. You, you act like—

oh, which is part of the story, which is this article is paywalled. It's paywall. They're sharing it like crazy.

They're putting tons of ad money behind this. Come read this story about Dave Portnoy, the bad guy. We are exposing the bad guy, but you just got to pay $9.99 a month if you want to read this story. So he's like, dude, you're using my name and likeness. You made up this story where there's nothing wrong. You know, these were consensual relationships with legal adults. You know, he's like, I feel bad if somebody felt bad after we hooked up and they didn't like me or they didn't like what that they did it. Like, okay, that's one thing. But this was a completely legal consensual thing. What are you digging up here? What are you trying to say? And then he goes on the offensive, Whereas most people are on the defensive, he goes on the offensive. So he's getting people to cancel their Business Insider membership. He's getting people to unsubscribe to Morning Brew. Unfortunately, a bunch of people started sending death threats to our friend and people who work there, and that's not cool.

He—

and he's like, go buy my pizza. My pizza's out in stores. Let's go, go buy a pizza. There was another angle to this, by the way, that really pissed him off. So I think he was a little bit mad at the hit piece, and then I think he went scorched earth once the— there was a reporter for Business Insider that started reaching out to Barstool's advertisers and saying, hey, are you aware of this story we wrote about how bad Dave is and business and Barstool? Like, you know, would you like to comment on being an advertiser on their platform? Basically trying to take money out of their pockets, trying to get the advertisers to, to, to cancel their relationship with Barstool, which is not journalism at that point. That is like warfare as far as I'm concerned, and it is warfare as far as Dave was concerned too. So that's when he went really like nuclear.

So all right, and let's, let's say a few more facts here. And, um, a few more facts— I'm gonna try and be as factual as possible, but you know, I'm gonna be— I'm gonna paraphrase. At one point he did a live thing on YouTube and he made jokes, but I don't know if they were jokes where he said something like, you know, I think I'm going to hire a private investigator to go and follow every single Morning Brew employee and find everyone who they've had sex with and see if there's any dirt there. Right. And what else has he done that we didn't say that was like part of the facts?

Well, I guess we should say what is the sort of the, the crime or the wrongdoing? So, so the Business Insider article made it sound like girl goes to his house knowingly that Dave wants to hook up, hooks up with Dave, feels shaken up about it afterwards because it was kind of kinky and crazy. She sleeps on the couch, she leaves, and a few days later she tells her friends that she's feeling depressed and suicidal. And, and her mom, I think, is the one who went and reported to the police and said, Dave is a bad guy. You guys need to be on the lookout for him. And the police are like, wait, what did he do? You know, and it's like— and the mom's like, he's— I went to the fish market and they said that he's here with a different girl every week. And it's like, all right, you know, being a player ain't a crime. You know that there's no crime here, ma'am. Like, I understand you're upset that your daughter, you know, had a bad experience, but that is not a crime, you know.

And in a follow-up on his feed, he tweeted out a picture that she sent him afterwards that said, like, I want to get with you again.

He basically leaked the DMs, and the DMs were basically like, they hooked up, okay, she slept on the couch, then she, she shared a photo online of her with Dave, kind of like to get the attention from her friends and whatnot on social media to get the likes, uh, you know, her kind of posing next to Dave. And then also, you know, he was like, you know, do you miss me? And she's like, haha, yeah. And you know, she's basically— they're like planning their next hookup, you know, and it, you know, never happened. So he kind of— he, he sort of— the Insider article made it look like he traumatized slashed, you know, almost raped these women. But then he released the DMs, which were basically like them joking around after the fact and saying, uh, you know, you know, do you miss me? Uh, you know, when are we gonna hook up again? Blah blah blah. And the girls definitely like down as far as the DMs go. Now that's not to say it wasn't like, you know, a bad experience or weird experience, but again, that's what the allegations were. So That's what, that's what came out. Now I wanted to get your take on two things. One is this offensive versus defensive strategy. What do you just think about this in terms of The Art of War? So what do we learn from something like this? Because cancel culture is everywhere. I think you and I both don't like it. We don't like the general quick trigger that exists with cancel culture and how, like, how that's just becoming more and more common, uh, for a variety of reasons. But then how do you deal with it? What's one to do? So, so what do you think about this offensive versus defensive strategy?

There's two parts to the story. There's like the actual deed and things that he's accused of, and then there's the reaction. So in terms of like, I think from just the article, it's clear he has done nothing illegal. I don't agree with what he did, and I personally, I find it to be a sleazy and unethical move. That said, my ethics don't exactly—

to hook up with somebody much younger than you, or what bothers you?

I think that's weird. Yeah, I think, I think a 45-year-old fooling around with a 19-year-old, I think that's a little weird. But, but I think that's people's right to be weird, right? The law, there's a clear like cutoff. You could do what you want, right?

You're not putting me in a leash in bed, but if that's your thing, that's your thing. There's that. Who am I to say?

I don't want my daughter to be part of that. I don't want my family to be part of it. I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that to people, and I don't really want to be friends with someone who does that. So I don't agree with it. I don't want it in my life, but people can do what they want as long as there's adults who are consenting. That's cool. You know, it's—

there's a difference between you did something wrong, need to like, you know, not have your job, or your company needs to suffer and you need to go to jail. There's like your reputation needs to be besmirched versus I don't like that behavior, I don't want to do it myself, and I don't really want to hang out with people who do that, right? Those are two totally different responses, and what you're saying is more like the second one, which is, I don't want to do it, and I don't really think it's cool, so I don't want to hang out with people who are doing that. But, you know, you're not saying that this guy's a trash bag.

Totally. Well, I don't know if I'm— do I think he's trashy? Yes, totally, totally I do. But that— there's nothing wrong with that, right? Yes, I don't like it. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, everyone can live their lives.

I don't know why I had to hit her like that.

So I do think that he's trashy, but that's his right. You could do that. Now, the reaction I think is totally inappropriate, and I think it totally makes him look butthurt. I think it makes him look weak. I think it's a bad move. The reason why it's a bad move is because Dave has fans, and he could be like, well, you know, I'm only— maybe he could say he's only joking. Maybe he could say, you know, I'm not saying that I'm gonna do something bad, right?

Right.

But I didn't believe this until I had someone close. So we're— I'm friends with the Morning Brew guys, and I see how I actually— they didn't explicitly say this, but I think that they're fearful that something bad is going to happen because Dave's fans are going to go after them. I actually believe that might actually happen. And because of that, I think that like when you have that great responsibility and that power of these crazies who will do whatever you say, you have to act careful. And I don't think that he's being careful. I think he's being harmful. Additionally, the guy— a lot of the people who work at that company, Morning Brew, it's just like my company. It was like dumb 24-year-olds who are like talented but like inexperienced at life and don't know how to handle a lot of like stuff because they're still learning. I saw Dave like tweet at some of the young people who work there and I was like, I mean, this, this guy is just an innocent bystander. He didn't do anything wrong. Why are you making fun of him?

I think it was— I agree with you. I think it was a big mistake to go pick on the little guy. He had it right at the beginning when he was picking on the big guy. Oh, Business Insider, you're, you're trying to ruin my reputation. You're trying to hurt my business and my advertising, my revenues and my, my name. And you're trying to profit off that. It's a good move to go after Business Insider, the brand, the big name, the CEO of that who's like, you know, some 50, 60-year-old guy who's rich and successful. You know, okay, that's fair game. Um, but when he was going after Morning Brew, that's a different company, bro. Like that's a, this didn't even, that's not who wrote the article just because they own this asset. Like, you know, that doesn't make any sense. If they own a rental property somewhere, you're gonna go deface it. Like, you know, that doesn't make any sense. So I thought that was a bad look. And I thought that picking on those founders who didn't say a word against him, picking on the employees of that company, now you're punching down. And so I think that was his tactical mistake in this art of war. I also disliked the—

which is—

go buy my pizza thing.

Like, hold on, stop there. Yeah, stop there. Swinging below, that's the rule here. Swinging below, you can't do. So like, when you're trying to create an enemy, you always got to go up, right? You always have to go up. If you go down, you're a bully. If you go up, you're David.

Yes, exactly. And so he, he had, he had the momentum on his side because he had you know, he was the one being picked on. He said, I've done nothing wrong, and he has fans, and he could have mobilized the army if he had stopped at cancel Insider. Go cancel your membership over there because these guys are just trying to make a quick buck on the salacious story. That would have worked. Um, that would have been, you know, the good version of revenge. And then he went to the bad version of revenge. Okay, so that's the offensive versus defensive. Let's say that something happened to you, and, um, you know, would you— do you think you would go on the offensive, uh, Or would you be a lay low kind of guy?

Offensive. Offensive for sure.

Yeah, I think it's good to go on the offense even though, like, I guess, have you ever had a situation like this come up where you had to kind of go on the offensive?

Thank God, no, I don't think so. I don't think so.

Okay, good. I'm glad if you ever need to go on the offensive, I got your back because that's the other thing. He did it all himself, whereas he could have had other people kind of go to bat for him and create a little bit more Uh, not just one man versus the world. Um, I also see you have a business idea here. What is your business idea?

Wait, I do?

There's one under here. I don't know, did you write that? Maybe some— maybe Ben wrote that. Uh, it says, it says business idea: Twitter beef as a service. Is that you?

Oh my god, no, that's not me. Okay, but let me— wait, let me tell you one, one thing, or there's some more facts here. This story that is actually quite interesting. So, uh, a publicly traded company bought Barstool like, uh, they bought part of it like 2, 3 years ago, maybe a year ago. I forget exactly. I think recently they announced they're going to buy the rest of it. So how much, uh, of Barstool does— is made up, or how much of Penn, the owning company, do you think does Barstool make up?

Ah, that's a hard question. I don't know.

I know the answer.

Okay. Yeah, go for it.

I think it's like 8%. So if you like, in terms of like revenue and value, what's Penn's, uh, What's Penn's market cap?

9 billion.

Okay, so Barstool was bought for 600 million, I think. I, I think. And their revenue is probably 100. Penn's is probably like, uh, 5 or something like that. Whatever. It's a— so it's a small percentage. However, Barstool makes up a significant amount of the, like, brand equity of Penn, right? So like no one has known— I mean, very few people knew about Penn. It wasn't an— they don't— they— it's a regional casino. Yeah, I believe it's regional. It's like on the East Coast. Now it's a global name because of Barstool and because of Dave. So I would argue that while it only makes up 5 or 10% of the actual metrics for business, it actually accounts for like 60, 70, 80, 90% of the brand equity. So here's the thing. The stock went down, I think, 30% the other day when this got announced. In my opinion, I wouldn't want to own this stock necessarily, because I think more of these things are going to happen. However, I think there's a— the PENN is actually an interesting buy right now because if Barstool only makes up like 8% of the, their business, and business is doing pretty good, the business of Barstool, the ad business, would have to go away almost entirely for this to make up like a meaningful impact. And yet the stock went down 30%. This might be a good stock buy right now. I was, I was looking at the math. It might make sense to buy stock.

Stock Market Sam, I love it. Stock pick at the end of this segment. Uh, yeah, yeah, I just, I think, I think that's probably right. Uh, I think Barstool is, is, uh, this is gonna go away. And you know, this 20% dip that it's taken is not, uh, that's not, that's not a permanent thing. Uh, but I would say, um, A, not financial advice before we get sued, and B, um, I think that this is going to be something you see over and over again. You see it with Dave Chappelle right now, he's going on the offense. Uh, you saw with others where they just disappeared, they lay low for a bit, right? Louis C.K., or, you know, the different, different people who got canceled and they go disappear for a while and then they come back 2 years later and they sort of beg and, uh, apologize and try to get back in the good graces of things. I think that, um, I think that going on the offensive is going to become much more the norm, and, uh, you're going to see, you're going to see that. Now, he is perfectly positioned to do this because he is, like you said, a Trump type of character. He always speaks what speaks his mind. He's always kind of, you know, off the cuff. He has devoted diehard fans that will believe him even when he's in the wrong. They'll back him up. And so, you know, I think that that was, uh, that was working in his favor here.

If you're the CEO of Penn, how do you feel right now? And what do you do?

I don't know who the— we should look him up. I could tell you.

His name's Jay. He's a young guy. His name's Jay.

I was gonna say, if I could just look at the person, I can figure out, uh, no, it's Jane, Jane Sikati or something like that.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Jay or Jay. He's like a youngish guy. He looks like he's in his mid-40s, maybe.

No, no, it's a girl, Jane.

The CEO of Penn?

Yeah, CEO of Penn National Gaming, Jane. Skaketti or something like that.

Well, for this, there was a guy who— oh yeah, I see what you're talking about. The guy that you see, his name, you see, Jay Snowden. Yeah, he was the guy who was like, uh, he's, he's the president and chief officer and director of Penn Gaming since 2020. I don't know.

I don't know why they have two. Okay, whatever. You know, I think they're probably like, you know, a bit nervous about this whole thing, but you got to know who you're getting in bed with. When you buy Barstool, you know it's coming with the hair on the deal, and the hair on the deal is its greatest strength, which is that, you know, the big personas, the no-fucks-given attitude towards content— well, they're using this content also. He turned— he turned scandal into more content.

But do you tell Dave to chill, to cool it, or do you just stay out of it entirely?

You got to have him find the line, right? That's what I'm saying. We're saying— we're showing some points where he crossed the line in the wrong way. So there's like, you know, don't turn this into an actual legal problem, and B, You know, make sure you're doing this strategically. And in the art of PR war here, you need to be punching up, not punching down. You need to be— don't stick your, your, you know, don't do that.

Do you teach him?

Do you teach him?

Do you teach him, or do you say, Dave, you cannot do this again, strike one? Like, do you— are you disciplining him, or are you—

I think you're good.

Being friendly.

You're getting in the car, you're sitting shotgun with him, you say, okay, look, I know how you feel right now, and normally we would say this, but I know you don't want to do that. You don't want to just kind of hide away and let this thing blow over. Okay, we're on board, but let's set some ground rules, right? We want— here's how we want this to end, right? It's like a negotiation with a, uh, with somebody who's got— he's taking people hostage. It's like, how would you like this to end? Um, you know, do you want to get out of here? Do you— are you trying to hurt people? What are you trying to do? And okay, I can help you get there. You want a pizza? Let me order you a pizza right now. You need a car? You need a getaway car? How about you let someone out and then I could work on that car for you? Um, that's, that's the way I would be talking to Dave if I was, uh, a, you know, Jane Sakati or—

Dude, these businesses, when you, when you buy media companies, HubSpot did it with us and we're not anywhere near as extreme, but when you like this whole thing of like every company's a media company, when you start getting to that territory, I think it's good, but a lot of people do it not realizing that these are some of the consequences.

Right. Yeah. You're in the media all the time. Uh, all right, let's do another, let's do another segment. I got some ideas for you. Uh, I wanna, I wanna do some business ideas. So, I've been looking at, um, I've been looking at a bunch of e-commerce companies and I'm in e-commerce myself, plus invest in a couple and just friends with a bunch of store owners. And we look at kind of the numbers and I look at some businesses that are doing well, some that are not doing well. And I wanted to share with you an idea that I have that I don't know if it's a really dumb idea or really smart idea. I can't tell you.

Okay.

You tell me which one do you think it is? Okay. So in e-commerce, Um, e-commerce is amazing because there's way less friction. You don't have to go into a car, drive to a store, spend the time, you know, you just— you could be on your phone on the toilet, you're shopping, and you push two buttons and hey, it's gonna arrive in two days. That's kind of a magical, amazing thing. What's the one downside? Well, for the downside is it's hard to know if the product's any good or bad because you didn't see it, you didn't feel it, you didn't touch it, and you don't know if you could believe the reviews. But even more than that in the whole— one huge category of e-commerce is fashion and apparel. And in that, fit is the number one thing. Like, you know, you're wearing a black fitted shirt right now. It fits you very well, but you don't know, are you a large, an extra large, a medium in different brands? It's always different. And isn't that just like kind of a crazy thing that we just don't know what size we should buy? Like, that's like the stupidest reason for—

I think it's crazy.

Accounts for like 40% of returns or something ridiculous like that, right?

Like, I think it's crazy.

Returns account for like, you know, somewhere between, I don't know, 3 and 10%, uh, you know, of revenue for these brands. And then of the reasons for returns, it's not that it was defective, it just didn't fit right. And so what— how do we solve this problem? Okay, so I invested in this company Bolt that does one-click checkout, and it's basically like, hey, why do you have to type your freaking card and address in every single time? If you do it once, we should just let you check out again, saving that and You know, you don't have to create an account with every single merchant.

Like, uh, does it work for Shopify?

So Shopify has their, has their own called Shop Pay, and Amazon has their own One Click Checkout. This Bolt, the reason it works is 'cause it's for everybody else. If you are not on Shopify, you're not, you're not named Amazon, then you probably wanna offer the same level of like frictionless checkout. But, um, you can't get people to make an account with your little leather boots company. You know, maybe they made it with this jacket company and now they should just be able to check out at the boot company even though the jacket and the boot company are two separate things. All right, so Bolt is kicking ass and it's multi-billion dollar company already and they made checkout more frictionless. Okay, so how do I make deciding to check out more frictionless? So here's my idea. I think you gotta have a brick and mortar location. I think you basically put up pop-up stores, a cor— you put up actually like nice kind of showroom style stores. In LA, you know, SF, New York. You just go through all the major cities, go to the top 20 cities, and you open up in downtown a fitting booth. And it's called The Perfect Fit or True Fit. And what is True Fit? So you go in and this thing is going to measure you head to toe using the whatever the best goddamn technology is in the world for scanning a body and knowing its exact dimensions, like a tailor measuring your crotch and all that. It's going to basically measure you automatically like a when we get like a DEXA scan or something like that. You go lay down in this thing and it's going to measure you for 5 minutes, and now you have your True Fit. And any store you go to, you could just log in with your True Fit, uh, or just saved in your browser and saved on your phone. And basically it just gives the store your exact— it knows what your exact size is and fit is, and maybe even your preferred fit. Like, do you like things tighter or looser? Yeah. Do you like it, you know, baggy around the stomach or tight around the stomach? Right? Like Maybe you even have that level of preference. And then every store, it's like an API. So every store would just say, oh cool. Like just like we all have the metric system, we have this like standardized system that we can say, oh, I can, I know how to describe the length of my thing because I can use the metric system. I can use inches or millimeters or whatever it's gonna be depending on which system you use. But we have these central systems. So I think we need one for fit. And I think if you created this, you could just say you come in, you get scanned for free. And now you're gonna have better fitting stuff, better fitting shoes, clothes, jackets, all that stuff on every website you visit. And then you go to the websites and you say, hey, would you like people to return less of your stuff? Would you like them to know exactly what size to get without having to go look at your size chart and then go measure the, you know, the how many inches their chest is?

Like, yeah, that's brilliant.

Ridiculous. And so now you just ping the system. The system says this person should be a large in your, in your, in your clothing, uh, in your, your brand. So that's the idea. What do you think of this?

So I think it's amazing. Let me, let me— one thing, look up Zozo suit. Z-O-Z-O suit.

I think I've seen this before. This is— it's the motion detector thing. It's like they send you this black suit, right? Well, how does this work?

It's a rich guy, right?

Didn't this billionaire create this?

Yeah, so I'm going off memory. I think it was 4, 5, or 6 years ago And it was a guy in Japan. He was a successful entrepreneur, I think in the clothing space. I think he owned some type of like fast casual Japanese clothing company.

Right.

And he created this suit and it was either free or like $5. And basically it's a bodysuit. So if you've ever seen like behind the scenes of, of like Lord of the Rings when they're filming on the green screen, or if you ever seen like a bobsled, like a bobsled or something like how they have the suits that go over their head, it looks like that, but it's all black and it has polka dots all over it. And you put it on and then you hold it up, your camera up to it, your phone, and it's supposed to like figure out the dimensions of your body. And he was gonna mail one of these to like everyone in Japan or something like that, and it failed. I don't know why it failed. I just don't think it worked that great.

Yeah.

However, that— I— are you looking it up? When was that? Was this like 5 now? Was like 5 years ago.

Yeah, I don't know where the time frame is of this, but I remember you told me about this multiple years ago because you were like, dude, I thought it was amazing. And so I thought this was such a good idea, and there was people—

so I used to go to, uh, Grail.com.

I think it's still going. October 29th, 2020, so last year, one year ago, they launched the Zozo Suit 2. Um, so you know, they're still going with this.

I think it's great. And I remember going on Reddit, and I would like— on Reddit there was these subreddits where you could buy and sell like fancy clothing, and I would buy and sell clothing on there. And there was these guys that would kind of bootleg it where they would download the app and then use the suit to just like get their own measurements and then they would just like write that down and then they would like use that as like their way to do sizing. And I actually think that the suit would— I don't know the technology behind it. I think you could do a better job though than what you're describing. And it's freaking amazing if it works right. But I don't know if it worked well, but if it does work, The idea of this is awesome. And people were also using it. Athletes were using it for their like body measurements and you could like use it to see if your muscles are growing or not growing. Additionally, there's this one scale that never really took off, but they had a Kickstarter and I'm— when I saw it, it was amazing, but it was a little too expensive for me to try before it got built. And basically it was a scale that looked like a normal bathroom scale. You stand on it, but then this arm came out. And it does it like— if there's arm that comes out the bottom and it does a loop around your body and like wraps around your body, and it would use a camera to scan your body, and they would tell you all about if your measurements are going up or down. I thought that was amazing. I love those things. And I thought that that would— do you remember that scale?

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

It's called like Naked or something, something like that.

Didn't, didn't seem to catch on, but I think there's something here.

Yeah, it's called Naked, nakedlabs.com.

And I think that, yeah, I think it's, I think it's harder to do as a startup. I actually think that this is better to do if you're Amazon or, or you're Bolt. Like, this might be my free idea for Bolt. Hey, hey guys, here's what you should do. Uh, you've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. You should, you know, you might have to pour $40, $50 million into developing this network of stores that has this technology that basically all day is just measuring customers, but it's also, in this case, it would be driving people to put in their information. So now they can just check out with Bolt anywhere and, um, you know, you're, you're on file, but you'd not just have their payment info on file, but you'd have their size info on file.

So now I would buy so much more stuff.

Bolt becomes more valuable to every merchant because it not only stores payments, but it has their customer fit information. And I also think that this is not the easiest thing. So it's not just about scanning the body because you actually kind of need to see how the clothes fit on somebody. So you'd almost want, if you're going to do this perfectly, and I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but you'd almost want like 10 shirts that are like the stock shirt fits. And it's like, okay, try these 5 on. Yeah, that looks good on you. Do you like how this fits? Yes. Okay. You are, um, you are a size medium, specifically this many centimeters. Uh, you know, all your, all your measurements are here and you prefer the fit of X. So we know how to translate that now to any brand, how any brand can use that against our standardized measurement system. And so, so I feel like this is kind of an impractical idea, but I just wish it worked because it would reduce friction so much in shopping. It would make people way more willing to shop. So way less returns.

We asked Marc Lore. Marc Lore was the guy who started Jet.com, sold it to Walmart for some many billions. And we asked him, what's an idea that you would work on right now if you wanted to sell it $100 million in 2 or 3 years?

This is it, right? This is what he said.

And this was it. He said, he goes, the, the number one problem, the number one, um, cost that our company has at, you know, walmart.com, the, the third or fourth or second most popular e-com website in the world, the number one thing is returns due to bad sizes. So if you figure out a way just to help us save that just a little bit, we would pay a whole lot of money for that. Right. And you know, you actually could do this where you could, if you weren't techie, you 100% could just open up small shops that were like $2,000 or $3,000 a month in rent, have 2 tailors there, and, um, and then go out to some of the bigger retailer brands and be like, hey, will you put our, you know, our, uh, our logo on your site and help us?

And there's scrappy ways to do this. You might be able to partner with existing stores and you just have it, you just have like a booth and you have an agent there who can do it. Uh, so you may not even need the space. But all right, this is one, that's one idea. Okay, let me give you another idea. Future of shopping continued. So, um, I don't remember where I heard this, but I heard somebody's talking about this and I just— it was like a no-brainer moment for me. Okay, so we all know that like, you know, software keeps getting better, robots keep getting better, and it's sort of like, uh, what's gonna happen to all these trucking jobs if they're self-driving trucks? What's gonna happen to all these retail like cashier jobs if, uh, you know, like the Amazon Go store where you just walk in, you pick up an item and you walk out, and it just knows from what you picked up off the shelf how much to charge your Amazon account, right? Looks like kind of amazing. And I think those are two of the most popular jobs in America, is truck driver and, um, like retail cashier. And so, uh, okay, what, what, what is like even further down this? So here's an easy one that I thought was kind of cool, um, restaurant drive-throughs. So restaurant drive-throughs, you know, you go, you pull up, you roll down your window, and they say, oh yeah, welcome McDonald's, what can I get for you today? And you're like, um, you know, and let me get the number 3. They're like, you, you know, what do you want to drink?

Blah blah blah. So why do you know what a number 3 at McDonald's is?

A number 3 at McDonald's, I'm gonna go with a double cheeseburger. What is it?

I think it's a double cheeseburger or a Quarter Pounder. Number 1's a Big Mac.

It's probably Quarter Pounder.

Number 2 is the 2 cheeseburgers. That was my, that was my order. I think number 3 is Quarter Pounder.

I'm more of a chicken sandwich kinda guy, so that's what I get.

That's like a 7, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, there's, like, the shitty fried one. That's like the 8. And then there's, like, the kind of less fried one.

The artisanal one.

Yeah, the artisanal one with a tomato on top. Now you're healthy. Um, so the idea here is, like, why does that person have to be in the store?

They don't.

They don't, right? Like, we have Zoom. We're doing this podcast. In two different cities, you know, 100 miles apart. Why can't— why does that— why isn't that person just at home on Zoom just taking orders for me in every location? There's no downtime.

All right, we talked about this before. There's these things that look like Segways but with like an iPad screen on it, and there's like a woman who you can like talk to and she's like rolling around the store. It's— those have never taken off. They've never taken off.

They've never taken off. I know why, by the way. We had one office Uh, so we had like one of these, it's called the Double, it's called Double Robotics is the name of the company. And at first it's like, oh wow, this is cool. Like you could be working remotely, but you're like, you're the remote manager and you're just wheeling up behind people's desks and you're like, hey, hey, how's it going? And then they turn and your face is on the iPad. And like for, for, for real simple reasons, it doesn't work, which is like, A, it can't go upstairs. So if you have like any stair in any, any part of your office, they just like can't get there. I can't like open doors. You know, so if you have like a meeting room, it can't get in. Like, the iPad would die and it's like, ah, fuck, iPad's dead right now. Okay, we're gonna have to go charge this. Never mind, just, just call me. And like, that happens 3 times and then you just start skipping the robotics thing because you're like, just call me, dude. Like, we always end up on the call anyways for one of these 5 reasons, and so just skip that whole step. So it never really took off, but it was too complicated, too fancy. The drive-through thing, you, you don't even see the person anyways. They're literally just a speaker in the wall. No, there's a speaker in the wall.

When you give them money, you do.

Yeah, yeah, because that's a separate person, right? That's, that's like a— that's their other job, you know? That's like they do this other thing, you know, and while they're trying to give you their change, they're talking to the next person in line. This should just be like— imagine the downtime. So like, you know, one of the reasons that like Uber is expensive is because there's a whole bunch of time that a human is driving around without a passenger, right? Because they're driving from one trip to the next. Same thing happens in drive-throughs. There's like, there's like time in between cars, in between orders. But if I was remote, I could be working at 5 locations at once, and anytime somebody has a person there, I just hop, I just connect to that screen, I talk to them, and I connect to the next screen. There's no downtime.

There's this crazy stat where I think it's like 1 in 16 Americans have worked at a McDonald's. Have you ever heard that?

No, but I believe it.

It's something like 1 in 16. You know, McDonald's is one of the largest employers in the world. And it's basically like, they call it like, like internally or even externally, like when you're applying for a job there, they call it like the world's greatest first job. And so like the whole shtick is like, we're really good for just, we know you don't want to be here forever. Yeah. And they embrace it. And I think that's smart. And when I think about my, my aunt, uh, um, I have an aunt who's been a cashier at a grocery store for 40 years. That just was her job. She still is. And when I think about this stuff about the self-checkouts and not having someone there at drive-thru and how like, I'm almost positive it's 1 in 16 Americans, it's something shockingly high, have worked at McDonald's. Do you think that you have an obligation as an employer to continue doing some of these minimum wage jobs just so you exist to like further society along. Otherwise, if that isn't the case, then you guys have to— you're gonna have to do some type of universal income or something like that.

Yeah, it's gonna be creative destruction, and it's gonna be rocky before it gets good. And I think you have to let the progress happen. So, you know, here's how this is gonna go. Today in California, they're paying, you know, like if you go look at any McDonald's or Chipotle or whatever, it's like, now hiring, please, please fucking come work here. $24 an hour. And it's like, wow, $24 an hour for this? Like, this is not a minimum wage job. That's like 3 times the minimum wage. So, and they're still having trouble getting people to come work there.

What's the minimum wage? Minimum wage in California is like $15 now.

California is higher now, but it's still double. It's like double the minimum wage. And so, uh, and that's for McDonald's. So what does that mean? You know, that's just going to cause prices to go up. Or it's going to cause some stores to close because they're just not economical when you have crazy labor costs. And so, um, so what's going to happen is that's going to go to— first, they're going to do the remote thing that I talked about, which is instead of paying somebody $24 in California, they're going to find somebody in Nebraska who can Zoom in and say, can I take your order? Um, as long as they could say, can I take your order, and push a button, then— and they're willing to do it for $12 from at home. That's gonna happen. And then that's gonna get replaced because they're gonna be like, I'm tired of paying this schmuck $12. What? Oh, Amazon just released its Alexa product for all brands, and I can just, uh, I can just have it be like an Alexa where it just asks the question and then it just auto, like, figures out what I want. Um, cool. Like, just like at airports, you know, people check in at kiosks now instead of at the front desk. Like, the companies are going to go this way. They're going to go towards automation because it just makes too much financial sense.

I don't think you should get in the way of progress. But are you— are you bored with remote work? No, dude, I'm so fucking bored. I'm so bored.

I like— I miss people.

I miss hanging out. Like, I miss it so much. I feel like I have way less friends right now. I miss it so much. I am so bored. And like, I find myself going to Target like 3 days a week just to walk around and like see stuff. I go to Whole Foods like all the time. Like, I purposely won't go like once every 2 weeks or once every 10 days for a big trip. I'll do lots of small errands. I go to the corner store all the time. I find myself just like going, I'm like, let's go shop. I just need to get out and I need to be around people. And if the people went away from that, I would also be pretty bummed. Um, that, that I would be pretty bummed out.

Well, I think it would just shift, right? Like, okay, so now with all this free time, what do you go do? You go do something else. And so you go do something else that gives you that people hit. Uh, you'll, you'll unbundle the socializing part from the like cashier part, you know, like, okay, the cashier can become a robot, so I'm gonna get my people fit— my people hit from something else. And I actually think there's gonna be a whole new job that is just basically like software supervisor. Like, I just think that's gonna be a job. Like, software is gonna replace what a lot of people do, but then it's gonna get stuck and it's not gonna know how to solve some problem, or it's not gonna understand somebody's accent at the drive-thru. And then you as the supervisor are gonna have to step in and say, hey, human here, yeah, I can help you out. Sorry about that. Sorry, this stupid software doesn't work well.

And, uh, I don't want this to exist. I hate, I hate that.

I hate it.

I hate it. But I, I agree. It's inevitable.

Inevitable for sure. And, uh, so I think there's a whole set of jobs called software supervisor or like robot repair or like robot manager. You're just going to manage robots. It's like, what is my job? I used to have to walk around and pick up these things. Now this machine in this warehouse goes and picks up everything. I just have to watch the machine to make sure it doesn't hit something else. And if it gets stuck or it needs, you know, some grease, I go grease it because I'm a robot manager. That's what I do, and that's gonna become the normal job.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's gonna happen. Um, can I show you something cool really quick?

Yeah, what else you got?

All right, Ben, hit it.

A million dollars isn't cool.

You know what's cool? A billion dollars. All right, we got an interesting segment. You like that? This is Billy of the Week.

We're gonna—

I'm gonna talk to you, Sean, about this guy named Brian Johnson. Um, I showed you this guy. Um, let me give you a little bit of background about who— about who this is, and I'm not actually going to talk about his business. So Brian Johnson started a company called Braintree. If you are an entrepreneur or you work in like e-com or anything that takes payment, Braintree is— you probably know what it is. It's a payment gateway. It's basically Stripe but different. Uh, he bootstrapped the company for a long time, raised a little bit of money once it was already quite successful, and then sold it for a huge amount of money. And this was like 5 years ago, I believe. They also bought Venmo. Braintree bought— yeah, sold it to PayPal. And if I had to guess, at this point he's probably worth at least a billion. Um, that's how much money he made. I think he sold it for like 6 or 7 or 800 million. Yeah, it was 300.

He sold it for 300, a few hundred million. Yeah, so something like 300, more like 300, I think.

Oh, got it. Okay, so he's in the range, maybe. He's very wealthy. So this guy is incredibly interesting, and because he just launched something called Blueprint. So if you go to blueprint.bryanjohnson.co, his name is Bryan, B-R-Y-A-N, Bryan Johnson. He's doing something pretty amazing. Basically, he's spending all of his time right now trying to lower his biological age. So his chronological age, his real age, I think is 45. His biological age is 35, and he's measuring all 70-plus of his organs. He's measuring all—

nobody knows what this is. What the heck is a chron— so chronological age is the number of years you're alive, right? That's, that's what that is.

Yeah.

And then what biological age is what?

Yeah. So frankly, I don't, I'm not entirely aware of how they measure it, but I know that I have one using, I use this site that Huberman, who was on our podcast, promoted. It's called InsideTracker and it tracks your blood and different parts of your body and it tells you what your biological age is. And I think they do that by looking at the averages. So, but, but frankly, I'm not sure. But they basically— like, you can be 50 years old but have the body of a 40-year-old. And this biological age thing, it's like a standard way of measuring, but I don't know what all goes into it.

And by the way, you're right, 800 million is what he sold it for. Okay, so I'm on— so you were right about that. So let's go to this guy's thing, which is— by the way, this guy's doing something else too. He's basically creating, um, like a Neuralink, which is like the same thing Elon Musk's trying to do. It's like a brain interface.

It looks like a helmet. And you could like think something and it happens. Exactly.

So you could think like, it can just read your brainwaves and it can cause something. They can type out a text message off of, off of a thought. That'd be the, that'd be the dream or the idea.

And this new thing is this blog where basically he's basically measuring everything in his body. And he said, LeBron James said he spent $1.5 million a year to improve his body. I'm spending more than that. I've developed all the tests. I've got as much money as you could possibly have. My whole goal here is to lower my biological age, and I test all my organs. And when I test them, I put all the results here so anyone could do it. And he lists his diet, his workout, everything. And he listed his diet. Let me just read what he had for breakfast. Breakfast was super veggie. He basically had broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, mushrooms, garlic, and salt and vinegar. That was his breakfast. Lunch, lunch, leafy greens, veggies, berries, seeds, and nuts. Dinner was nutty pudding. I don't know what that is. Almond milk, macadamia nuts, chia seeds, blueberry, raspberries, pomegranate juice. That's it. And then he lists all of his supplements and there's like 20 of them.

Children's hemoglobin, uh, you know, like horse, horse, uh, horse serum. This guy's—

yeah, he's like eating like crazy stuff. and he's jacked. So he's 165 pounds. He's probably only 5'10", 6 foot. So he's not like huge, but he's, I think, 6% body fat. He has his body fat all there. And he has like all of, I don't know how you, you know, I don't, you can click through this and you could see all of the attributes to each organ and things like that. Um, so I don't, I don't understand a lot of it, but it's incredibly fascinating. And I think it's fascinating because A, I just think this is interesting, but B, I think I've been saying this for a little while. I think what this guy is doing is going to be very common, not in 5 years, but like maybe in 15 or 20 or 30 years. And the reason why I've always thought that this is weird, and this is like the biggest problem, one of the biggest problems we have as humans, it's basically how often have you heard the story of like person just found out that they have cancer and it's like stage 5, stage 4, whatever. Had they known, it could have been cured. And it's Freaking crazy how reactive we are to health and not proactive. And so I actually think that what he's doing, which is proactive, it's going to be the future. I don't think it's going to be this extreme because like I've always said this, like even though like, you know, drugs are bad, like you still got to get fucked up sometimes. You can't be eating fucking macadamia nuts and shiitake mushrooms every goddamn meal. Like, you know what I mean? You got to have some cake and like some tequila once in a while. So like, I'm down to get fucked up once in a while. But I do think that like, this is pretty cool.

This is amazing. Uh, I can't believe I haven't seen this before. So it's new.

It's like 2 months old.

This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. I'm just clicking through it right now and like, I don't even wanna do this podcast. I wanna go read all of this and I wanna see what's amazing.

Right?

So there's, I, I, I totally agree with you that, um, the future looks more like this than it does like today. So, uh, like, it is crazy that we don't know what's going on inside our own body. In fact, there's a question that you can ask yourself which gets you to think a little bit differently and see the world a little differently, which is, in 50 years— like, today, all right, let's say we look back 100 years ago. So 100 years ago was the year 1920, and, um, how many things in our day— how many things that, that they did back then would just seem so primitive? Right? So it's like, okay, wait, did you just say 50 years ago was 1920? 100 years ago. So 100 years ago is 1920, right? So let's say 100 years ago, I don't know what, what's, I don't know the exact timeline of things, but like, you know, 1920, like World War I just happened.

Yeah, so smoking was far more common. You could advertise cigarettes to people, you could smoke, you could smoke anywhere you want. So that was quite common.

Like there's a whole bunch of things. So, so all the things we do, like if I look at my day today, it's like, well, nope, there was no internet, there's definitely no cell phone, There was definitely no— I don't even think there was, like, I don't even know, like, could women vote? Like, I don't know when all these things happened, but like the world—

It was just happening right around then.

World looked very different, let's put it that way. So world looked very different, and, you know, but it looked— it felt completely normal at the time. And so if you think about, if you go forward, you say, okay, cool, so then, you know, you fast forward to today, and then you go forward 100 years. You know, when I look back and I see slavery, I say, wow, that's crazy. I can't believe that was— that was okay. Or, you know, the— when the Holocaust was happening, I can't believe people just stood by while that happened. And it's like, what are the holocausts of today? And it's like, I think— so for personally, for example, I believe that people will look back and be like, you just killed animals all the time? You just murdered them for food? Like, you murdered them for lunch, for that number 7?

I don't think we're gonna— we're gonna do it— we're gonna— we're not gonna necessarily do it about that, but I think what they will say is So you would just like raise these chickens, like a million of them, under this barn, and they would be shitting on each other. And like, you just like— or these cows, they're like born into this pen, and straight from the pen they go straight to the butcher where they're killed as veal. Like, you treated them that way so the mom never— like, I think that we're gonna be like, I can't believe you treat—

I think that's how people— people are starting to feel that now, right? That's like where, you know, like a lot of the kind of vegan plant-based stuff comes from, is you see what's going on at a farm, you're like, this is horrible. Um, horrible from like a moral, ethical level, you know? Like, I, I, like, I, I, for example, my wife's vegan, and, um, I was like, yeah, okay, you know, like, I get it, like, killing animals to eat them is probably not good, right? That is killing a live thing. And like, I love my dog, and if I spend time with like a horse, I kind of like love that horse too. Like, cows, you know, like, they're not that far— they're not that different, right? Like, um, yeah, I guess I could see how If I had to like think about it emotionally, that would feel really wrong. Okay, but what about, you know, just like having milk and eggs? It can't be that bad, right? Like, what's wrong with milk? And I love cheese. What's wrong with cheese? And then they showed that like, you know, like, you know, earmuffs if you're sensitive, you can't handle the stuff. But basically the way that, the videos I was watching that were like how they get milk, it's like milk basically, a cow gives birth to a baby. They then separate the baby from the mom. They put it like nearby enough where the, where the mom can hear the baby crying for milk, but it can't reach it. So the milk gets produced like at this like much higher rate or whatever. And first of all, to even get them pregnant, they like artificially inseminate them. They like basically like rape them with their arm with a plastic bag over it. And, uh, they just keep them pregnant year round. So they're just constantly pregnant in order to constantly be producing milk. And then they're constantly taking the babies away to cry and then they go kill the baby. For food, and then they let the mom just keep milking. So it's like, yeah, it's a pretty messed up thing, you know. Like, if once you know, it's pretty hard to—

I'm down, I'm down to kill them to eat them. I just, I would like to treat them a little nicer before we kill them.

What I'm saying is that's gonna be like, that's gonna be like, you know, that's gonna be seen like, I like my house slave, like I treat them well, like I feed them.

No way.

I think that's how it's gonna be seen 100 years from now. I think the way we treat animals today—

dude, we've been eating animals since the beginning of time. I don't think that's gonna change.

It's gonna change.

You're on drugs. I think we're gonna treat them nicer. You are on drugs.

It's gonna change because we're gonna have a good substitute, which is lab-grown meat. So people are gonna be able to make, make the, make the same steak you want without killing the animal. And then in that case, killing the animal is gonna look absolutely barbaric. It's gonna be only a hobby sport. It is not gonna be the way you feed, feed the population.

So I think you are so wrong about this.

Okay, fair enough. But there is a thought experiment that I believe that in 100 years—

I think we are gonna treat it— I think we're gonna treat them better. I totally think that. That's why I try to buy— yes, before we murder them. Yeah, dude, I'm higher up in the food chain. I'm gonna eat you. I think I've been trying to buy a cow here. Have you ever— you know, you could buy like a whole cow. Like, you can drive to the farm here in Austin and like see like the farm, and then you pay like $10 or $8. Yeah, and you can like buy the cow. I've been trying to do that because I think that's a good way to do it, but it's—

I haven't— okay, anyways, my point is there's— you can think of a whole bunch of things. One, what else is gonna seem barbaric? I think the health thing that you're talking about right now, which is that you can't— you don't know what's going on in your body at any given time.

Like, it's fucking crazy.

Fucking crazy. They're gonna be like, so you just— you were just winging it? Like, yeah, you know, we go to the doctor like once a year and we just say, hey, Is everything all right?

Once I said you've been to the doctor, bro, dude, don't go to the doctor, dude. Then don't go to the doctor.

I've been a doctor in like 5 years. I've made an appointment and I missed it because I was late. You know, I'm late to everything. I'm late to this podcast. I was late to the doctor and he—

yeah, like, I, I haven't seen a dentist in like 20 years.

For, for sure, a dentist, you can miss me with that. So there's basically like, you know, there's no point, but, but I'm down to have like some chip in my body or some blood sensor that's like I want to at all times know what's going on in my body. I just don't want to go to the doctor. So yeah, that's gonna be seen as crazy that we— it's like people who, you know, it's like if you go drive around without a map or something, it's like, whoa, you renegade. We're gonna be seen as the ultimate renegades for having just like lived life, I agree, not knowing when there's cancers and blood diseases that are just floating around in our body and like, hope, hope we caught it in time, you know. Oh, we didn't, that's too bad, you know. It's crazy to me.

So have you heard of the, um, the Mayo Executive Health Clinic?

I've been thinking about doing it.

It's like, I'm gonna do it. I'll do it with you.

Explain it. It's like $5,000, right?

She's our, uh, let's use our, and our NFT money and do it. So basically, yeah, let's do that. It's $5,000 or $6,000, and it's hosted by the Mayo Clinic, and they have locations in probably— where's Mayo? Indiana, I think. Notre Dame. Is that Notre Dame? And I think they have another one.

Arizona. Yeah, there's Arizona, California. I don't think there's one in California. I think Arizona is the closest one.

Is it Arizona?

But describe what it is, because I didn't know about this until a buddy told me, and I was like, oh shit, yeah, we should do that.

Yeah, I've been thinking about doing it, but I wasn't sure if it'd be beneficial to me at my age. I thought maybe it'd be more beneficial a little bit older. But basically you spend $5,000 to $8,000 and you go to this Mayo Clinic, a hospital ultimately, uh, in Arizona, and you stay there for 2 nights, 3 days, and they just do a ton of tests on you. So So you get an MRI done, you get all your blood work done, you get— I don't even know. I mean, you just get— they have a list. If you type in Mayo Executive Health Checkup or something, they have it. And basically, in order to get— so when we sold the company, I had to get this thing called— and even before we sold it, I had to get it because we were big enough to where, like, if Sam, if me, if I got sued, it could be bad for the company. And so we would get this thing called board of directors insurance. Have you heard of that?

Yep, yep, yep.

And so it's cheap, it's like $1,000 or $5,000, I forget how much it costs. And if you're a little bit older, um, or you're unhealthy, it's what I think sometimes you have to get one of these, one of these things done in order to qualify for that health insurance or to get a discount on it. And, uh, basically you go to this place and they do a ton of different shit on you just to see like what your health, how healthy you are. And you're supposed to go once a year, right?

And so you do, uh, does it say what the scans are? So there's a bunch of preventative high-level—

what they are.

Yeah, like cardiovascular. Okay, whatever, this is not gonna tell us anything. But they test for like, I don't know, like metals in your body or like other shit that like you don't get at the normal doctor. And it sounds like, you know, over the top, like I wouldn't really think about it. But the person who recommended it, they were like, hey, like, you know, we're now like all like 30-plus, and like, you know, shit happens. Like hopefully not in your 30s, sometimes in your 40s, get into your 50s, 60s, 70s, it becomes like a probably type of thing. And they're like, you know, we've been fortunate to make some money. Like, the best use we can do of our money is health. And so like, let's just do this thing. Let's just do it every year. We'll make a fun trip out of it, and let's go get this screen done. And like, let's just stay.

Yeah, he's trying to get— he's been trying to get Ramon to do it. I'll do it. I'm gonna do it.

Yeah, so we should— we should book this thing. So Let's go back to this Bryan Johnson thing. Okay, so he is basically monitoring his body at an extreme level, and it looks like he's basically measuring the health and age of his organs, of his individual organs. And then he's looking at, if I take this, you know, 30 micrograms of melatonin before bed, how does that affect X? It's like, you know, the quantified self nerd stuff, but on steroids, on, you know, on like the This is like the most extreme example I've seen of it.

It's the most extreme example. I don't think it's a good way to live because like it, it's, it's, you have, you probably don't have that much joy.

No, this isn't for the normal person. This is for the, like, the human population needs like 0.1% of the population. Yeah, to be this weird and do these tests and push the boundaries and like live in the future. Like there's that phrase I forgot what it is. I have a simplified version of it. The simplified— the complicated version is like, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. But I just say the future is already here, it's just not everywhere, which is like the simple way of saying that, right? Like, it's like, this guy's living in the future, we're just not all living in the future right now. Like, the thing he's doing, we will all know this level of detail about our bodies.

I've heard a phrase, it's like, basically what rich nerds do on the weekend, everyone will be doing in 10 years.

Right. Yeah. And that's exactly what this is. This is amazing.

Have you seen a picture of him? Look at his— like, look at him without a shirt.

By the way, this is like— yeah, he's insane. So he's 6 feet tall. He's 40-something years old, and he has 3.5% body fat. He's insanely ripped.

But he's also— and he said that— he said that wasn't optimal. He goes, that was too low. So I went back up to like 6.8%.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's pretty sick. Click that video.

I found 6.8% to be too low, so I went to 26%.

Right, look, there's a picture of him, there's a video of him dunking or like jumping up there. Have you— like, he looks great, man. This guy looks super good.

He is to me like, you know, like Elon Musk gets a ton of worship because it's like, wow, you're the genius billionaire inventor and you like say dick jokes, like you're my hero. And it's not that this guy's like better than Elon or Elon's worse than this guy, nothing really like that. But man, I love finding these guys that are like— they're not like— they're, they're no different. Like, this guy is just as smart, has been super successful. He is absolutely ripped, which like, you know, someone like Elon has not been prioritizing that. You could tell. So it's like, this guy lives a different lifestyle, but it's like, this guy will have one one-millionth the fame of Elon Musk right now, you know what I mean?

Like, if I go look this Elon Musk up, I think he's got 2,000 followers on Twitter. Let's— I'm gonna DM him.

Yeah, like, we should have him on because I think this guy's fascinating. And like, we've actually talked about it before, by the way. We did him as Billy of the Week before this because he told the story about, uh, door-to-door sales, and I went on this long rant about door-to-door sales and how I thought that was like an amazing hack for hiring anybody who's done well with door-to-door sales. So Elon Musk, 63 million followers. Bryan Johnson, I think he's like 2, 3, 4, 5,000. Yeah, like, uh, let's see, he's okay, he's at 27,000, so he's not nothing, but in 27,000, 63 million is like, I think he got a bunch because he went on the Lex Fridman podcast and that like really boosted him. But yeah, he's basically like, you know, one, 1,000, uh, more than 1,000 times less famous. But I think these types of people are like way more accessible, way more interesting to learn from and just more fun to be a fan of than just being a fan of, you know, the Yankees type of thing.

Yeah. All right, let's get him on.

It's—

this guy's fascinating. Um, he, he's very interesting. And, uh, Ben, by the way, he's a Mormon, right?

So, uh, so Ben, you're basically related to him. Ask your cousin if he'll come on then.

Yeah, don't you know him? Um, all I can say is I'll see what I can do. Yeah, you like— you definitely, you definitely have a cousin.

Is that there like a group chat?

Basketball camp with him or something?

All 15 million of us.

Yeah. Yeah, like your social network or something. You surely have— you have something just for this. We do have a social network, actually. No one uses it, but we do have one.

What is it called?

I don't even know. Just Tabernacle or something? It's, it's a, it's an app that was made by the church. It's called Nature. Yeah, I'll look at that. That can be next episode. I'll tell you all about the— yeah, just the church app. Just call them.

Sounds like a business opportunity. If the Mormon social network exists but nobody's really using it, I feel like all you got to do is, you know, airdrop some tokens and, and all of a sudden people will be using this thing. Like, yeah, by the way, did you get either— you guys, you guys don't own—

by the way, just ask Mitt Romney for an intro. He knows him. Shit.

Yeah, there's definitely a group chat for like the successful, super successful Mormons.

Yeah, they all took the blood oath.

So do you know what an airdrop is?

No, I see everyone talking about it and I'm too afraid to ask.

Okay, so basically an airdrop is this amazing thing in crypto where you just wake up and then there's thousands of dollars in your wallet that you didn't have the day before. And so that's what happened yesterday is anybody who owned, uh, what's called a.ens, the Ethereum Name Service, which is basically like a, you know, you could have.com,.org,.io. There's a.ens now. And so like when I did my crypto week, I was like, oh, I want to have my, like my namespace in the, in the, on the blockchain, like the, the, in the Ethereum world. So I created a, a.ens, like how much money did you get? So I got like $4,000 yesterday just for having, and I only have one. I have friends that have like Hundreds of these names, they've, they, they made like $50,000, $100,000 yesterday. What?

Really?

You know, you, you bought this thing, like, you know, I paid $100 in gas fee or $200 of gas fees to get my name. And, uh, you know, that thing paid off with like a $4,000 airdrop. So basically the, the organization that's behind this, they created their own token yesterday for that will be used to like vote on how this thing works. So like in the domain world, there's like ICANN, you know what I mean? Like, uh, it's this, it's this committee. Called ICANN, and ICANN gets to decide when there's a new domain, which is bullshit, like.photo or.business.

ICANN is such bullshit.

So they're— that's the governing body, right? And so with, with the crypto world, it's decentralized. So the way it works is everybody who owns a name gets to vote. So if you're, if you're a user, you get to vote. And so how do you vote? You vote with your tokens. And so they dropped— they airdropped a bunch of tokens to, to everybody, and so everybody made a bunch of money. Nobody's gonna care about the vote. It's like reading the privacy policy of a website. You're just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, agree, agree, agree. Sure, I'll, I'll vote with the majority, no problem. Just give me my, give me my free money, please. Uh, but this happens all the time in the, in the crypto world is if you own an asset, the group that made that can airdrop more tokens to you, and those have some market value, uh, associated with them. Like that happened with Bored Apes. If you had a Bored Ape, they, they airdropped you this potion that you could give your ape and turn it into a mutant. And that potion and the mutants basically, it just like doubled the value of whatever you own. So you owned a thing that was worth I think the cheapest one right now is like $150,000. So at the time they were like $50,000, and people were basically getting a free $10,000 to $20,000 item airdropped to them by the organization. It's kind of insane.

Now that Bitcoin's $67,000, what, um, how much of your net worth is in crypto?

I don't even calculate it anymore. Like, I don't know.

I don't keep track.

Over 50%? Probably, yeah, probably, because, you know, I basically started it My goal was to put in 25%. I think put— I put 20 in and then it started going up so much I just, I stopped at 20. And, uh, you know, I should have just gone all in. I should have gone all in like I believed, and I should have gone to 80%.

What about— what do you think, what do you think Pomp has? How much crypto do you think he has?

He says he was 90% crypto, but I don't think he had a ton of money at the time. And the question I have is like, he then started making easily a few million dollars a year over the last, let's say, 3 years.

I wouldn't say easily, I would say, I would say $2 to $3 million a year if I had to guess.

Right, right. So that's a few million dollars a year for the last couple years. So that's like, let's say, after taxes and all that good stuff, let's say he got another $4 or $5 million out of, um, you know, all of his content sponsorships and all that good stuff, courses, that sort of thing. The question is, did he convert all that into Bitcoin as he was going, or did he hedge? If he converted it all, you know, that means he's got— I would, if I was gonna place a guess, I would say that, that if he had, when he was earning that, Bitcoin's gone up about 5x since then. So if you had $4 million, it's gone 5x, that's about a $20 million stake at that part, not, not including whatever you had before that. So I would guess the guy's net worth is probably I'd set the line at $30 million, the liquid net worth, um, not including— not, not, not only the ownership of startups, startup investments that he made that are, you know, speculative and illiquid at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, that'd be a home run.

I could be off. What do you think? Would you guess that?

I'd probably say lower if I had to guess. I've got no information. If I had to guess, I would say $15.

$15. Um, and I think when he started the, like, um The, like, before he was Pomp, the brand name, you know, like a lot of it depends on what was your base, right?

So like, well, he said in his article, he wrote this amazing article about how he's quitting. Um, yeah, that was fun and it was a great article. You shared it as like, uh, just great writing and I agree with you. I think you shared it.

Yeah.

Um, and it was really good. And so basically Pomp came on our pod a couple times. We should have him on again. Um, and he is this personality who has a Substack, has a podcast, has a, a fund where he raised, I think, $100 million. And he basically— was it $100?

I don't know if it was $100, but yeah, go ahead. Something.

Well, tens of millions, let's say. He wrote a letter to his investors saying, I'm shutting this down because I want more free time and I want to spend more time doing what I want. So here's your money back. He goes, I don't want to be a billionaire. I want to be a time billionaire. And, uh, I love that. I completely agree with that move. That's totally the right move. He basically said without saying that I was unhappy because I was addicted to screens and I don't want to be like on this dopamine game anymore, which is so common. We've been hearing that constantly.

Been hearing that a lot. Not surprising. The pendulum is swinging, right? We all got addicted to this substance. Um, and now, you know, some of us are coming off of it publicly. Uh, I read it a little bit differently. Here's how I read it. I read it like this, which is it doesn't really make sense for me to invest y'all's money now because I kind of got enough money on my own. That I'm just gonna invest my own money and not have to deal with any of you guys. And I don't need to like play this game of fees and carry when, which will just make me wanna like, I have to raise this bigger and bigger fund, deal with more of you guys, have to like deploy more and more capital, which takes more time. Like if I just invest my own money at this point, I'm gonna do much better. I'll make more money 'cause I'll own 100% of my upside. And secondly, I don't have to keep I don't have to deal with any people. I don't have to deal with anybody. I don't have to go fundraise. I don't have to write updates. I don't have to do any of this stuff. So I kind of read it, which was just like, that made— when I was famous but not rich, it was great to raise a fund, and that was the only way I could invest a bunch of money. But now I'm rich and famous, and so I don't need your money anymore because it comes with problems, right? Like, it comes with work.

Has your, has your mini fame exhausted you?

No, not at all. But I don't even really— I don't even feel that famous at all, so I don't like—

you don't get hit up all the time to do shit.

Yeah, but I just say no. I just say no all the time. So like, I—

me too, but I find it to be tiring. Like, it keeps me up at— like, for example, this young guy— I live next to a university— this kid knocked on my door last week and he goes, hey, I was wondering, do you have a dog? Like, I want to make some extra money. I would walk your dog for you. And I said, fucking A, good hustle, I appreciate that. I'm not just gonna give my dog to you though. Write up a letter, tell me all about yourself, and put it in here, and I'll determine if I think you're a good fit. And he did it. And I've been losing sleep each— because I'm like, I don't need someone to walk my dog, but like, I want to give this guy a little bit of money. How should I say— I've been like keeping up at night, like it's been keeping me up at night for like 5 or 7 days on how I'm gonna like reply to this guy and I get messages and email and I'm like, and sometimes I get it from people I love and they want me to do stuff and I'm like, I don't want to do this. How do I say no?

You should just say, look, uh, you know, I would just be, you should just say completely exactly what you're saying, which is I think your hustle was awesome, which made me want to say yes, but I also realized I don't, I actually like walking my dog. I don't need somebody to walk my dog. So let's do this. Um, I'm going to pay you for a week of walking my dog. You don't have to walk my dog, um, because I want you to be rewarded for what you're doing because I think it's really great. And, uh, I remember when I was you, um, so, you know, here's this money, uh, I need to sleep easy at night and I also want to walk my own dog. And, uh, hey, if you ever want to like do something else, uh, you know, like maybe if I ever have like a job for somebody who's— who I need a hustler to do something, I got your number. And, uh, just set up that. You'll make his day and then you'll be able to like chill out and not have to Think about it.

I was gonna just— I'm just gonna Venmo him like $50 and be like, I want to reward you, but make it a magic moment for him.

So like, this is a game I've been playing, and I think you should do this as much as you can. I'm really just giving myself this advice, which is let's say there's a situation like this and like you could give them— you could just say no, you could be nice and give them $50, but what would make it feel amazing is like probably just like a little bit more than $50 and some message like the thing I just said, which will make 'em feel like, oh shit, this guy's awesome. And like he rec— he saw me for being awesome. Like I got validated for this hustle that I was doing. Um, like there's Tony Robbins tells a story of like he was in this restaurant and, uh, the waiter was great. He was like, had a big, big group. It was like a big family dinner and everybody needed a different thing. And the waiter was so kind and he was just hustling and he was making everybody laugh and He did this magic trick for my daughter and like he was this young kid, 21 years old or something like that. And, um, he tells the story. He's like, uh, at the end of the dinner, uh, I already knew like, hey, this waiter was great and I'm gonna leave him a nice tip.

But he said, who'd you say? Who'd you say did this?

Tony Robbins. And, uh, and his kid is like, uh, somebody suggests something or he, he realizes, he's like, you know what? I'm not just gonna leave him a tip. What would make this a magic moment for this kid? All right, how can I do this? He goes, all right guys, When this guy comes out with our, with our to-go boxes or whatever, like the final thing, we are gonna— this guy's been amazing, right? We all agree this waiter's been amazing. We were gonna give him a standing ovation in this restaurant.

Oh my God.

And he's like, gets the whole table to stand up. They just start cheering for this guy as he's coming forward. He's like, what? Is everything okay? He's like— and then he just says, he goes, I need to talk to your manager. He's like, what? He brings the manager over. He just says, look, uh, you know, I've been coming to this restaurant for a long time. This is the best experience I've had. This waiter was amazing and he really just made the night for our family. And I just wanna thank you for that. Thank you for hiring this kid. And he just kinda like made the kid feel like a star. Um, and I think the story goes on, which is like, I think his daughter ended up marrying this guy or something like that. Like it ended up being some crazy story, but just, he, he kind of left that nugget. He goes, just think about what's the little extra 10, 20% you could do. Like it didn't take that much more effort to just like stand up and clap for the guy. Like it's a little bit embarrassing, I guess, but That's embarrassing. Unorthodox, but it is— it didn't, like, require more money or more time. It was just a little creativity of how to make this guy feel, like, a little extra. And, uh, and so I've been doing that from time to time where I'll just see a situation, I'll go, okay, dude, you cheered?

You stood up and cheered?

Or you're like, not in a restaurant. I haven't done it. I didn't want to do the exact same thing, but I used this, this idea of make it a magic moment for the person And it's like, you know, I could just do this. That'd be like the normal good thing. But what would make this like really pop off? And what would make this something that they will remember tonight? They'll go tell somebody that this happened for them. And then I do that thing and I never regret it. It's always like, you know, if my intention is good, like, you know, even if the execution is slightly awkward, I'd rather be the guy that does that than is in a shell.

You know, I think I agree. All right, fine. Lucky, lucky kid. I'll have to send him this podcast.

All right, we should wrap it up and, uh, yeah, we're good.

All right, that's the episode.