How This Guy Built a $100M Empire with No Followers

The point of this conversation is this is a gold rush and who knows how often these come around.

How much revenue will your brands do using this TikTok model this year?

100 plus.

So 5 brands, you're gonna do over $100 million this year and this is the playbook you're running across all of them.

Yeah.

So what's an example of one of these videos?

I think this video had made this kid close to $50,000. The single video.

What you said in this video will make people millions of dollars if all they did was just try to act on it.

Millions are being printed on TikTok Shop.

What are the mistakes people make?

My advice is be an observer, not a consumer. That's the best thing you can do.

Let's brainstorm live. $100 million TikTok brand.

Yeah, I'm gonna show you something that the world was never gonna see, but I'm gonna show how serious I take this.

All right, ready?

Has anyone ever wore a cutoff like this before?

The first one to bring the gun show to MFM.

So I was just thinking, like, I've watched a lot of these and I've seen a lot of guests and I was like, fuck, I'm different in a lot of ways, so I might as well visually capture that, you know, make a statement.

You were early to the Amazon trend and you took $5,000, you turned it into a $30 million company, you sold. And what you told me was basically that this now is the first and biggest thing you've seen since that Amazon opportunity. Is that right?

It is.

It is.

And I've looked for these. I didn't appreciate it in the Amazon era, but I look for these moments in time where you don't need a ton of startup capital. You don't need to raise money and you can basically just find something that works, a system, a platform, latch onto that and create something of substantial enterprise value. And TikTok represents that.

So what I want to do is I want to go through the big idea. So why, why people should be caring about TikTok right now, what you see as the, like the big opportunity, and then Specifically, what are some examples of people that are crushing it? How are they crushing it? What's the playbook? And then where are the opportunities that you see that are still open that anyone could go do? So that's my game plan.

Absolutely. So top of the funnel here, fundamentally, people don't appreciate what's actually happening with TikTok. Like, like Shop is a component of that. That's the center of their model. But you think about even restaurants, you think about Google, you think about Facebook, Meta ads, like all of the— there's a paradigm shift. So a good example, my now ex-wife and I went to Tokyo like a year and a half ago. And if we went 5 years ago, she would have gone to Google to search for restaurants. She would have Yelped. Now she goes on TikTok and wants to visually see what is going on, right? The shopping is turning more live. All of these things are fundamentally changing. Even the creators of this last generation, the influencers, they're coming up off short-form content. We all know how important, you know, clipping and all that stuff is.

By the way, I read that 30% of Gen Z's primary news source is TikTok.

Yep.

And so, and then same thing, primary search engine. So in my company, we did a little poll there that we were trying to work on our Google, like, search result.

Yep.

And I was asking our employees, I was like, so when you Google for this, what do you do? They go, I don't really Google for that. I just go to TikTok and type in the name and then whatever comes up on TikTok is what I use.

Yep.

That blew my mind because I wasn't using TikTok as a search engine.

Yep. And that, that's the paradigm shift. And that's, that's the opportunity because it's so early and it's, I don't like the word like gamifiable, but when you just think through these new models and like how information is being shared, that's where the brands of the future are being created. That's where the artists of the future are being created. That's where like fashion design, it's all happening through this new means of distribution. All right.

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By the way, this happens in everything. So I don't know if you ever heard the story story of why Obama was so successful when he did his first presidential run. Do you know this story?

Just tapping into the social media and all that.

It was kind of social media, but he got this big grassroots movement going from two reasons. One, he was one of the first presidents to build a huge email list. At the time, president— the people who were running, they were doing, you know, fundraisers, they were doing TV, they were doing, you know, traditional interviews, but they weren't building an email list. And he built a giant email machine before anybody else. And then he started using social media on top, and he basically hired people. Trump did the same thing. When Trump won in 2016, even this year when he, when he won, he raised way less money than his opponent, right? The first time, way less than Hillary. This time, way less than Kamala slash Biden. And in both cases, it was because he was using a different marketing strategy. His, his was all Facebook and online, and the others are doing all like traditional TV buys, commercials, stuff like that. And so when you see this, like you said, paradigm shift, it's like the new marketing opportunity. If you can pounce on that, that's where you can get rich. Can you quickly just say like, What you saw in Amazon and when that was back in 20— what was it, 14 or so?

Yeah. And I'll go from that to now, like the numbers we're seeing, the difference in terms of like ROAS, right? And it's challenging for people because it's happening so fast. Like, I think a lot of people still think that, you know, digital marketing is the new paradigm and like, actually it's like all the way over here now. And so Amazon's a great example. I remember seeing brands like billboards were a huge strategy back then. I'm like, I started by working with brands. That's how I got my start as like a consultant helping them sell on Amazon. And I'm going, guys, you're spending $50,000 on a billboard campaign. And when you give me $5,000 to spend on Amazon, you're having trouble tracking that. But right here, we're making $5 for every dollar spent. And this is me as a 22-year-old kid. They're like, no, this is the way it is. Or like, you know, we're going to double— bodybuilding.com needs these or, or, or, you know, GNC needs these. And by the time I finally— it probably took me like a year. I'm going, these guys are slow, right?

At first you think you're dumb.

Yeah.

Eventually you realize they're dumb. You're like, yo, I keep putting a dollar into this magic money machine and $5 are coming out, which is a 5x.

This is cool.

ROAS, for people who don't know, ROAS is return on ad spend. So it's for every dollar I spend on marketing, how many dollars do I get back out in revenue?

Yep.

TV, billboards, you don't really know, right? The famous advertising saying is half of our advertising doesn't work. Problem is we just don't know which half. And like, and actually for a while CMOs didn't mind that because If you can't track it, you can't be held accountable. But then Facebook and all these guys came and all of a sudden every dollar you put in, you get a like verified amount of how much revenue you're getting out of it. Now you're held accountable. But that also presents an opportunity.

Yep.

Just for a kid like you, you're like, all right, if this works, it's inarguable. This is working and I'm getting 5x return on my money.

And so now what we're seeing, what happens over time is that compresses, right? Enough guys like me do podcasts like this. Facebook ads are great.

Goddamn podcasting.

But it shrinks the margin. And, um, so like you look at like an Amazon now, which has been my, you know, I've been doing ads on there for 10 years now. And like a, like a 1 to 1.5 ROAS is like good in a hot category, which is not profitable, but you're, you know, that's where you're like, okay, repeat customers, building the brand. And so you have that modeled as like, that was the last couple of years. And then TikTok comes along and that organic algorithm is so damn good. And then if you, this is where now it almost goes back to the billboard era of like actually tracking becomes a little more difficult. But we're seeing just money spent on this, this system, which we can get into a little bit later. But this system is like 7, 8x minimum return versus a 1x ROAS and upwards of like when I first did this with, you know, Jimmy 18 months ago, it was like 30x, you know, like, and then the question was, how can we spend more?

I mean, it's like PEDs for marketing, right? It's like if you're going to get— if I can use this channel that not everybody understands, this playbook that not everybody understands and get 7x, or I go to Facebook and Amazon, I get a 1x, 1.5x. I mean, that's like cheat codes in the game of business. Can you give people a sense how much revenue will your brands do using this TikTok model this year?

So directly attributable to like TikTok Shop, we modeled probably like $40-ish million.

And overall, the halo effect of all that?

$100+ million.

So your brands, which is what, you have 3, 4 roughly brands or how many, how many you're running right now?

5 that I either own you know, majority of or a meaningful— Yeah.

So 5 brands, you're going to do over $100 million this year. And this is the playbook you're running across all of them.

Yep. Yep.

And by the way, how old are these brands?

1 or 2 years old. It's actually, it's unreal. And it, I don't want to say things stress or scare me at this point, but it's one of those things where it's like, all right, we got to see this through because the point of this conversation is this is a gold rush. And who knows how often these come around, right? And so I feel like I'm getting to go back to my 22-year-old self and saying, hey, like, this is going to be really big, you know, focus right now, do the right things, execute, you know, and, and that's where we're at.

Is that a conversation you had with yourself back when you were 22 and the Amazon gold rush was happening?

I took it really seriously, but you don't know what you don't know, right? And just, I didn't appreciate, like, who knew private equity was going to come in and value all these brands? And who knew that Amazon was going to grow to that extent. It was still kind of a discount site when I was first on there. That's why brands didn't want to do it.

You were in the supplements category and you said the way the supplement game worked was you had GNC or these like retail stores. If you wanted to be— if you wanted to win in supplements, you had to win in retail. And then you're like, Amazon came around and changed the game because now you have this online retailer and suddenly new supplement brands could win there where you couldn't get on the shelf at GNC.

Exactly.

You were saying now the same thing's happening to Amazon. Basically, there's new ones coming in and sweeping the rug. In creating the opportunity where maybe you weren't going to win on Amazon, but now you can win in this new way. Is that right?

That's exactly right. It's these continual paradigm shifts like Amazon. It was, you know, there's this brand BPI Sports who was number one in GNC. And then I just remember seeing that flip where Amazon all of a sudden was like 50% of their revenue. And then they didn't focus on Amazon and then there were brands passing them up. Right. And so the brands of the future were born on that digital platform and Amazon was, You know, there are Facebook ads, there are other digital means, but we'll call it the e-commerce era. And now it's happening again with like the short-form discovery era. So it's much less about what does your website look like or this and that. It's like, how are you optimizing for this means of information dissemination?

And, you know, I think when most people say gold rush, if you call 10 things a gold rush, then what's really a gold rush? But I feel like you genuinely believe you're like, yo, this— I'm not fucking around. I'm serious. Right now there is a window where something can happen. Could you like, make your pitch not to me, but to like the next Rob who is 23, 24, 25, 30 years old. Doesn't matter what age, but like to be like, yo, take this seriously. You can even just direct a camera. Like, what's your message to that person about this opportunity?

Honestly, I'm going to hijack. I'm going to hijack your, your friend here. How many, how many businesses a day do you think Ben looks at? Just in general?

10 to 15 a day.

A day? Yeah, a day. So he's constantly looking at opportunities and he sent me a text and he goes, oh, This TikTok thing really does seem to be the best opportunity to go from like no net worth to like $1 to $5 million with no skills, no background, no tech, whatever. And when he sent me that, because obviously I accept my opinion is going to be biased. I do this every day. But when Ben sent me that, I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, no, this is for real. And then you look at our own, you know, like we're doing this, our company growth, even though we have skills and we've been doing this a while, but to go from zero to you know, $100+ million run rate is actually insane with no, you know, which are not raising, it's more profitable, like super profitable.

Yeah. You've bootstrapped these, right? Like, you know, I'm a small investor in one of them, but you didn't take our money for the money. You just—

No, we love you.

You just want us to be on board. Uh, all right. So let's, let's stop, uh, teasing. What are the brands? Like, tell me some stories. Like, I don't live in this world. You do. Tell me some stories of some brands that are crushing it. What are some examples that make this real?

One that I think we can start with is this company Roos Research. And this guy had a little Amazon experience. He's 27, and this is like a 9-figure play. And I just couldn't be more excited for him. And so I'm like, you know, hyping it up here. But he reaches out to me 2 and a half years ago before TikTok's even taken off. And he's like, hey, I'm thinking about starting a supplement brand on Amazon. He picked the right category. He's like, longevity is getting bigger. He gets on Amazon. He's doing all right. And then TikTok comes around and he pours all in on it. And 2 years later, I believe this month, you know, he'll do, he'll do north of like $15 million between all online this month, this month.

So what is the product? What do they do? Is it something like research?

NAD, Roost Research. And it's that like, you know, it's that every couple of years a new supplement category comes along where like this might have long-term staying power. Collagen was the last huge one, you know, $4 billion. Exit Vital Proteins to, uh, Nestlé. And he's betting on that. And then he went all in, all bootstrapped, no raised money, not even like— he hasn't revamped the brand yet. If you go look at it, you're like, oh, this looks a little like, you know, it doesn't look like a multi-hundred million dollar thing, but that's what he's building. So I'd say that one.

So he spotted the health trend early, early enough, not like the first guy, but early enough. Built a good product in that space. You said he went all in on TikTok, you know, figured out TikTok. What did he actually do to make it work on TikTok.

He tapped into this creator model. So should we go in detail?

What's the playbook? So yeah, if I— for all these ideas, they have a playbook.

Yeah.

What's the TikTok playbook?

So it's important to preface it with this. Everyone is used to YouTube, Instagram, like where your followers matter, right? Like you have an Instagram following of a million people. That's valuable. TikTok shattered that. And you have to look at everything through the lens of views. You start a brand new TikTok account. I do. We walk out of here, we start a new TikTok account together. We start a video of dancing in the street that could get 10 million views. Right? And so that's the center of this whole model. Swings at bat. Screw your, your brand page. Like, Roost doesn't have a brand page.

Right.

They might run ads, but the key part of the model is how many people can we get creating product-specific content for the brand?

Like an army instead of one influencer becoming Kim Kardashian or The Rock or whatever, instead of I will become famous and get a lot of followers and then sell product. What you're saying is the new model is an army of people need to create content and then it's just the content wins. One of those pieces of content needs to pop in order for this to work.

Yep.

Is that it?

Yeah, exactly. And the first big use case of this before product was Andrew Tate. Like, that's how he— can we say that? Can we say that name? That's how he broke the internet. Not even like intentionally, but he had affiliates making Tate content, right? So he's not— Tate's not on TikTok, but he has 500 hungry little minions who love him.

And he was paying them, or they were just inspired? What was going on?

Yeah, there was an affiliate commission back to make more videos for him. So like, like you could get people paying $50 a month by making this content.

He created basically like a content MLM almost.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

No, exactly.

So he— and what was his— I mean, that's kind of genius of him to do that because no other, you know, we were content creators, podcasters, whatever. But if we created content, we just put it on our channel.

Yep.

And it was just us. Or like, we would hire people to create clips for us, but on our one channel.

Yep.

What he did was different. He's like, yo, here's a bunch of raw material, run it, you figure out how to go viral. And if you do, I'll pay you what, per view? Or what was he, what was he doing?

Per sign up they got back to the community that would teach you how to do that. So I mean, and the end result was most Googled man on the on the planet, right? And, um, and so now you see that everywhere. Streamers like Aiden Ross and those guys, they spend 6 figures a month paying on a CPM metric, paying people to chop up their streams and put it out on new TikTok. Like, I do that, right, with my, my stuff. Like, someone from my team will chop this up and you might see it, right? Swings it back. And so now take that same idea.

When you say my team, do you literally mean like my employees or you're like, I just Both.

We're trying to hit it from every way. And brands are too. Like, this is the fundamental thing. How can you get as much good quality swings at bat as humanly possible? And sometimes it's freelance people and then sometimes it's internally. It's a little harder on Shop So Beautiful because the model itself incentivizes it without us having to change hands. You know, like internally I'm trying to figure out metrics, like, you know, see, like all that, right? Whereas if you have talented creators, they just go. And that, that was Tate's too. It worked. It fed itself. The economics fed itself. So Shop feeds itself.

So just to explain, instead of just sending it to famous people, influencers, or random people, what happened was certain people realized, oh shit, I can make money doing this. So instead of just doing it once, what if I made 5 videos a day? What if I started picking brands that I thought would perform well and they started making $500 a month and $5,000 a month? You have creators that make— how much does like the most successful creators make per month? Just creators. They don't own the brand. They don't buy inventory. They don't have to run the operations. They're just making TikToks.

What do you think? What do you think?

I think I've heard that like there's like 20-year-olds that are able to make $100 grand a month.

Yeah. Like, yeah, like a lot and way more than you'd think. I was at an event for one of our, you know, the group that I own a little piece of, and we've had 27 people make over $100,000 in a month as freelance creators. And the important part is these are not influencers. Like Jacqueline, I have a YouTube video with, she was working as a server 8 months ago, making $20 an hour. And she made like $180 grand last month.

And what they did, they go in the lab and they're basically like, all right, I have to figure out what content can I create that will make this product, you know, interesting, appealing to other people. And then they get like, they're making like 30, 40, 50 videos a month. Most of them don't do well, but a few of them start to do well and they're studying and learning, oh, if I do this hook that grabs people, but it's not converting. Okay, what could make it convert better? And they're just specializing in the craft of short-form content. No, don't— not too dissimilar than David Ogilvy in the past, figuring out how to do print ads that are going to convert, right? All the great marketers in the past. It's just instead of going to an ad agency, you're going to these creator armies where young people are specializing in how to create short-form content.

And direct response marketing. Yeah. This means. That's exactly what it is. And there's varying degrees of it. There's like the innovators who can sit down, the algorithm's the algorithm. You have to capture attention, you have to keep them watching and then, you know, something to convert. And then there's the second wave of that, whereas, you know, one of the innovators hits what works and then there's literally 500 kids that are going to copy that same idea. Right. Only make 20% of it. But then what does that do for the brand? Right. Then all of a sudden you have all these videos going nuclear. I bet you.

So show me a video. So what's an example of one of these videos that this is?

This is a great one. I think this video, last I checked, I think this video had made this kid close to $50,000. The creator, the single video. And he paired, you know, a modern thing, Trump, like getting elected, with conspiracy and all this whatevers.

Just got into office one day ago and it's already going after one of the most predatory industries in the world. Watch this.

We have a public health system that does—

So that was the hook.

So the hook was he first, he's riding the news trend, Trump, instead Hey, I have a product I'd like to tell you about.

No, no, no.

He starts by talking about Trump and then he has this, curiosity. What would you call it?

That is that information gap, right? Where all of a sudden he went after one of the biggest industries in the world. What did he do?

Predatory. Which one? What's that industry and what did he do?

And then you hear it in the background. It's that mysterious— it's the trending sound, you know, and change starting today.

But you know what's crazy? His buddy Donald White was coming after—

by the way, even how raw this is, he's taking a video of like an Android phone.

Yeah.

So if— does— you don't think this is an advertisement?

No, exactly. And everything nowadays is shifting to that, just raw, organic. Like, you don't want to feel like an influencer is selling you, and that's not what he is, you know? Like, this is like— this is a random dude making—

telling you a story. Yeah.

Okay. What's he—

you put the raw materials back in.

I can skip ahead a little bit here. You know, it's the Trump thing, and then got Dana White, more social proof. Yeah.

Because around the same time they were trying to silence this doctor for giving us—

is this the scientist now?

Yeah, yeah, uh, Berg, it's another famous scientist. So they're building— he's building this case for, for something.

Still hasn't told you about the product, right? Problem that lives up and through here, and oil of oregano is the absolute best remedy for that. It's antimicrobial, antibacterial, antifungal, anti-candida, antiviral, antiparasites, and antimold.

Now I did some research, and not only is oil of oregano— so really, you get the idea.

Right? And then he still hasn't sold you. He's building this idea of oil oregano, and then at the end, I believe he—

but I've been taking two of these pearls anytime I feel like I'm coming down with something, and it knocks that shit right out. The only bad thing about this product is how fast they sell out, especially around this season. So if you're sick of being sick and you want to try these out for yourself, and you see that orange cart right there, that means they are still in stock and the flash sale is still live.

Masterful TikTok shop video.

That's a masterful TikTok shop video.

And like, if you don't market and you see it and you go, yeah, But you forget, like, the average person sees that and they're like, you know, they're going to the coffee table at work the next day and talking about, man, you know, like mold and fungus is everywhere. But I hear you take this oil of oregano.

Dude, I got cousins that will send me this.

Yeah.

And they'll be like, yeah, you got to start taking this. Yeah, the government's out to get you. Yeah, whatever. They have these like that conspiracy combined with, you know, in ancient times this used to be the way we do things. And then, you know, his last like scarcity call to action where he's like, the only downside is They sell out so fast. So if you see the button is orange, that means they still have it. Just get it while it's still there. You better go.

And it's on sale, it's on flash sale right now. You know, it's like, did you see, um, you know, the brand you're invested in? Did you have anyone send you content from that at any point?

Like, just not only did I have people send me content from that brand, which we were, when the founder of it doesn't want us talking about it. All right. But then also he sent me video of other people creating videos being like, I'm tired of hearing about this, which is like the ultimate sign of respect. It means it dominated TikTok so much, which is like, the video was like, if I see one more video telling me about this, I'm not going to buy your thing. But like, even that video had 7 million views of the person complaining about seeing this so much, which means mission accomplished.

We got 600 million views in a month. Like, that is an insane, insane number. And that was before shop.

How much did you spend? That month to get 600 million views?

It was a little over 100 grand. That, that was before Shop too. So Shop now is changing the unit economics. I'd say like not in the favor of the brands, but at the end of the day, it adds a level of scale. But now with commissions and stuff, that was when we were like sending it to Amazon and just, we're not even tracking it. We're just like, if we can get 600 million views, we're going to be all right. You know, for 100 grand.

Well, it creates this amazing flywheel, right? Because you hear about a brand a bunch on TikTok. You go then Google it and click the link, or you go to Amazon and you search on Amazon. It tells Google, it tells Amazon, people are searching for this brand name. It ups your rank there. So now you get organic ranking off of this social in addition to the direct conversions on social.

Yep. No, exactly.

Where do you go to find these brands that are crushing it?

This tool, and this is the other crazy thing, Kalodata is directly plugged in to TikTok's API. Kalodata. K-A-L-O-D-A-T-A. Data, D-A-T-A. Like, so they, if you go to the homepage here, you're seeing top products, top videos. So you can go look at like, you could study, you can study. That's, that's that kid's video. I know him. He's in our, in our group, but that was like the one of the top videos from last week. It made it.

So if you go right now to like the top products, what do you see? And they just, it's like rankings weekly or how do they do this?

Yeah. So like beauty, beauty and personal care, you can filter however you want. So this is last.

Are you, are you in this list?

This is last 30 days. We are in this list. We're top 5, and we're not 3, 4, 5. And then I think if you expand it, like, we have a couple products in the top 10.

Can you talk about what your products are? Which products can you talk about?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, a really good example has been—

are we gatekeeping here, or are you—

no, no, I don't. I mean, I yap about stuff on Instagram all the time, so. Evil Goods has been a really good case study of beef tallow in the, you know, skincare section.

How did you decide to do beef tallow?

That was an investment. And so one of our students or whatever, like, saw that category as similar to longevity, like, okay, holistic wellness is obviously becoming huge. People don't like toxic skincare. This seems to have some good supporting, like, it has this, like, grassroots Twitter movement. Let's bet on that. And so, you know, that's what we did. And pretty much whenever you see the ability to market to fear like that, big pharma or whatever it might be, or insecurities from individual—

yeah, whatever—

that, that, that will do well on this platform. Like, just, just period, because people feel like they're learning something. And so it checked all those boxes. He came out with a crazy aggressive name. Evil Goods is like, um, you know, we'll see, because that could disrupt the ability to like go to retail and stuff like that. But at the same time, Liquid Death.

Yeah. So, so it could be a Liquid Death.

Exactly. Exactly. So hopefully plant the flag on that. But this thing has gone just nuclear.

What's, what's your cologne brand?

Top Shelf. And so this ties back to my thesis that massive industries are overturned, like in these eras. I want Top Shelf. It's like a passion project of mine, but I want to build a Creed for Gen Z. you know, Creed-like fragrance. And, um, it presents the opportunity to do that.

So the way that cologne— like, I don't know much about cologne, uh, but it seems like it's kind of luxury sold through retail traditionally, super high margin, like crazy margins. It's basically, you know, water and a little bit of essential oil or whatever. And so how do you sell that? How do you make a popular— how did— how did you make a popular cologne brand? And could you say, like, Revenue-wise, what that's going to do this year?

We've been doing, we've been doing close to $1 million a month. So it's been, it's been, but it's, it's a unique challenge for me that I like. This ties back to, I mean, seriously, everyone in this world, if you're venturing into it, pick something you like and see some area of disruption and make stuff for yourself. Like that, that's really what I see. And as I've gravitated more towards, you know, we've talked about offline, but I like high fashion, I like design. And so this seems like the perfect segue for me to go from consumable to something that can play in that world, right?

Fashion culture.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so like Creed is relevant at like these big fragrance houses are relevant in, in Paris and stuff like that. And so for me it's been a—

I know it's luxury because I've never heard of what you're saying. Must be good.

Have you seen Creed or no? No. You probably see like Creed Aventus. It's like a, you know, popular fragrance that sells for $250 a bottle. And so when I'm seeing that, I'm going, I can There's a lot of—

let's walk through it. So you're like, all right, I want to go into cologne. You get it made. How? Where'd you go to make it?

So I had to hire a— he calls himself a professional nose, you know, and has been like designing fragrances for God knows how long. Okay, so I'm learning—

just Google this guy, or how'd you find him?

Um, relationship through other business partner. He had done skincare before, and this guy was like a known guy in the industry. Charges an arm and a leg, made one good product. Don't think I like it, right? So I'm like, how can we build this out internally? And I've learned more about the industry. Like, you know, what smells actually fascinating, like, like how it makes people feel.

What's fascinating about it?

Just all the different, you know, mechanisms and mixes and like, like you go to Abercrombie, you know exactly what it smells like. It's like it can be a signature of branding. It can be a signature of a, of a person, you know, like it's probably like the least used sense in marketing. So 1000%. But do you think about like a fresh pair of Nikes? Like that. That's intentional, right? And like new car smell, new car smell. And, and, and, uh, so it's just been a fun avenue to learn more. And I'm far from an expert in it, just to be honest. Like we have the one product we're moving well with and then we're trying to build out.

Oh wait, so tell me, so you say you went to the nose, nose makes something for you, that's what you use, or you say you didn't like it?

So he actually made us 8 different samples. We, we chose the one he wanted to use. We blow it up. We did $700 grand our first month. It just gets murdered with bad reviews. People hate it. Like, hate it. And so now all of a sudden I got all these—

You liked it or no?

No.

Yeah.

Okay.

You yourself were like one star. Yeah.

And I'm kind of— I didn't hate it. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't like, oh, I would, I would wear this. And, um, and, and at the time with Genius, I was really big on making products for yourself and like being all in on that. And then we have all these things going nuclear. And so I'm like, money, right? Where's the money?

$90. I'm trying to make something for myself, but this time it's money instead of a product.

And honestly, I blew up in my face a little bit. And so we revamped on the second one and had a, you know, it's a winner and like it was very methodical. And so that's the one doing like a million bucks a month.

But before we made a billion a month, it must have made a dollar a month.

So how did it—

what did you do initially to get that to work? So you go to the creators.

That was the nice part. The first fragrance, we got the playbook, like the angles that worked.

And so good marketing, bad product. Yeah. And then you— so what was the angles that work? Give us an example for that.

That's another one. It's, it's huge in this. This Gen Z era, and I don't like saying Gen Z, actually, it's TikTok person and male. There's a billion users on there, right? So it's, it's a disservice to the app to say it's just Gen Z, although that's where a lot of these ideas percolate from. But like the self-improvement and dating and all these little boxes that this generation is trying to check are hyper relevant to smell. Like, like that's a thing in their world. Like, how do you smell around the girl you're trying to talk to? Very easy fear.

Yeah. What's the name of your thing? It's like Her Loss.

Her Loss. Uh-huh.

Where did that come from? That's genius.

It's actually— I went through this whole like Drake era on my personal brand, and he has an album called Her Loss. It's like, don't reinvent the wheel. He succeeded.

What would be like a killer hook to sell that cologne?

They do actual skits. So actually, actually one that worked really well is we had female creators do it, and they started calling it like pussy magnet juice. If you got a blue bag, my boyfriend came home in this or whatever, you know, and, and, um, really high converting stuff.

There's a story. So I just did a podcast with this guy, Craig Clemens. Do you know Craig? So he—

monster.

He told the story of like OG marketing that's super relevant for this. So I'm going to retell it because his episode is going to come out too. But he talks about like one of the greatest headlines he's ever read in marketing. He goes, he goes, I have 4 for you. And the first one he told was he talked about this headline. He goes, here's the story. This guy's a famous marketer. He's one of the best. He's known as one of the best marketers on earth. And this Hollywood actor hits him up and he says, my wife wants to launch her own perfume brand. Will you come and help us with the marketing of it? So he goes, he meets the wife. Wife says, I want to do this. He goes, say no more. I'll make this happen. And he goes and he starts studying fragrances and he goes to a mall. And you know the guys at the mall who are like, you know, they had like a make your own fragrance thing. Or like, you know, you have all these oils, you can mix your own. And he just asked the guy, he goes, what's the number one fragrance that women love? And he goes, oh, sir, easy. China musk. And he goes, China musk? And he goes, yes, China musk. Smells good. So he takes it. And this is like, you know, he's only a couple of weeks in, but he doesn't go back to the Hollywood wife. He sits on it. He's like, I need to make her wait for her to value this. I need to make it feel more important. So after 3 months, he comes back to her and he goes, I'd like to meet you. I have something for you. She goes, okay, what do you got? He goes, I've traveled the world. I've tested, you know, thousands of things. I've studied, I've talked to everybody, and I found it. I found the greatest fragrance, uh, for you. She smells the China Musk. She's like, this is perfect. In the meantime, he goes to, um, a jeweler and he goes, I need you to make me the fanciest bottle you can come up with for this thing. It's like this, like, whatever, diamond shape or whatever. And so he comes up with this beautiful bottle. He's got China Musk. And then he tells her, we're going to do a launch. And she goes, yeah, we could do it at this like small place. And he goes, no, no, no, we need to do it somewhere bigger. Um, how about the Crown Plaza Hotel? And she's like, that's huge. Like we would need thousands, you know, a few thousand people to show up. He goes, that's my job. So she, she makes the bet, she books the hotel and she's like, you better not embarrass me. So he goes home, he's like, I got to figure out a way. To get thousands of people to come to this grand launch. And he goes home and he writes this headline that says, wife of famous Hollywood star swears under oath that her new perfume does not contain illegal sexual stimulants. And he goes, she is— and then the sub is, he's like, um, to prove its safety and that it is not what people are claiming, she is doing a live testing where she will prove without a shadow of a doubt, um, that this, uh, that this fragrance works and is safe, um, at the Crown Plaza Hotel on this date. And like 10,000 people show up to this thing. It's like packed.

He cut—

he hires like armed security guards to walk in with handcuffs to a briefcase that contains the perfume. So people see them walking in, they're like, holy shit, what is this thing that's being presented in this way? And there's this whole story and it ends up becoming this bestseller. And he's like, that headline— but he's like, you know, broke down the elements. He's like, wife of Hollywood star. Curiosity gap. Which Hollywood star swears under oath, right? That's kind of like the conspiracy, the seriousness, the drama, the stakes of the situation. And then doesn't contain sexual stimulants. So like, how good is it? People think it's so good it should be illegal. And evil goods or the stuff you're talking about with your cologne hits those same notes. Now, that was back in the I don't know, like the '70s or something like that. It was a long time ago, but same playbook, just redone today in 2025.

And then Craig took it and put it in Facebook ads, and I'm taking it and putting it on TikTok. Quick side note too, for anyone, I know there's like a vast internet world of gurus and people that talk about stuff. And if a guru or like talking head in the marketing space doesn't know Craig, they're not really tapped in on the world.

Simple test.

Yeah, like actually a simple, very, like anyone that, like I don't know Craig personally. I don't know if he knows me. But I know that operation is run like fucking skunkworks.

Yeah.

And like, he is— he has popularized a lot of things. Like, actually, that framework has been seen on a Facebook ad from him that his name's not— you know, that he's— you don't—

you don't know him.

Yeah, exactly.

He's a madman. What else could you show me? So give me a couple other stories that you think are pretty badass that we should know about. The stuff that's working on TikTok.

Underbrush Gum is another example of really startup scrappy entrepreneur that's doing Millions a month now who makes this gum himself, and they built their own factory, and he's had a crazy rush over the last month. But, uh, like, like, brands will go like this and then down. You got to find the new angles, right? Like this, that Trump video I just showed you will work for a month and then it'll go away. Underbrush just hit a huge one this last month playing into TikToks going away. My small family business is going to get crushed. And it was the founder doing like some ASMR. Video of like how he's making it.

Right. While I'm talking about that.

Yeah.

Well, no.

And then he just gave that out and then the Army picked it up and all put their own play on it.

Gotcha.

So it was the same angle over and over again with different voices and some claiming it's their business. But that, that did millions for him over the last like 30 days.

Can I put you on the spot?

Yeah.

Let's do a little magic trick. So let's brainstorm live.

Yeah.

$100 million TikTok brand.

Yep.

So where do we start? I'll be your wingman. I'll be your brainstorming partner.

Let's go right into Gen Z and this younger generation that there's so much change. Like, we've talked about looksmaxing, right?

We're like, explain what that is.

So looksmaxing, it's, uh, it's interesting to say the least, but there's this subset of like young men that are hyper-focused on looks almost to the point of like it being super feminine, but like they're optimizing it. Yeah, exactly. And it's like they're, they're again, their heart's in a good place. Most things can be boiled down to basic human desires of like, they want to reproduce, right? But, but how they're going about it is all of a sudden, like, have you seen those funny videos on morning routines now? It's almost like Patrick Bateman-esque, but it's just like so elaborate. Yeah. Trim each like that. That's so that, but there's a market there. There's not enough products there.

Like the, um, so it's kind of like a community, you know, it sounds silly, right? When you say it sounds superficial, but you know, how different is that than You know, maybe the bodybuilding movement in the early days, it's like these guys who take it really seriously and they're counting the reps and the sets and they're figuring out, you know, what type of training is going to lead to like, you know, this muscle right back here, the lower head of the tricep. And it's to anyone else, it sounds like overkill, but they got into it. They got passionate about it and they wanted to like, what if we took this to the nth degree? Bryan Johnson doing that with longevity right now. Yeah, it sounds crazy. It's easy to make fun of him, but he's, he's like, I'm going to take it to the full money.

Yep.

And there's people who like rally behind that and they think that that's cool. And you're saying lookmaxing is this early wave where people are doing that. They're taking— guys taking their looks as seriously as women take their looks.

Yep.

Because we all know women have this huge, you know, like tutorials on eyelash extensions and every little, you know, nook and cranny. Now you're saying guys are doing it.

It's happening exactly for guys.

Okay.

And there's no— it's an underserved market. You've seen products like— there's a product called Jaw Size. Have you seen that?

Oh, Jaw Size, like your jawline?

Yeah, exactly. That's like the one of the core foundations of looks maxing. And so that product blew up, right?

It's like a jaw exercising, literally, right?

You just, you just bite it each day. Does it work? Does it not? I don't know. But then, you know, kids are right, right? Mewing.

And so you're just studying culture, it seems like. You're just watching. And I want to point out one thing, which is I had a really early friend in Silicon Valley teach me this. I never forgot it. He was the first product manager at Twitter. And if you remember, Twitter at the time was really like made fun of when it came out because it was, you would text a phone number. There's no app. You just text a phone number, whatever you wanted. And anybody who was subscribed to your phone number would get a message that says like, Sean's eating, just like, it was just say, I'm eating a ham sandwich. And so it got made fun of. If you go look up old TechCrunch articles, people make fun of it. It's this like frivolous, stupid thing. But it's not, but it turns out, you know, now it's like the beacon of free speech. Like that's what happens in the world. Right. And so at the time I go, why'd you take the job at Twitter? Did it, you know, like Did it seem like the next big thing? He goes, no, but he goes, I had figured out that anytime there's a phenomenon of behavior that you see as weird, you don't even understand why they're doing it, but they are in the— undeniably they are doing it. You should lean in as an investor or like a, like an entrepreneur. That's your signal to lean in. Whereas most people use that same signal and they, they point, they laugh, or they push away.

Yep. And it gets, it gets harder the older you get. But, but staying tapped in on that and, and not being oblivious to like the change in the future. Like, because that was my dad with Instagram. Like, what a stupid platform, people posting pictures. And now everyone knows you have to have an Instagram. And so that's happening again. And I think it's great advice.

Like, uh, we were hanging out with MrBeast last week and he has this thing he says, which is, you're crazy until you're successful, then you're a genius.

Yep.

And he goes, I've been doing the same thing the whole time. You know, I used to sit in my bedroom and make ridiculous videos. At the time I had no money. So his ridiculous videos back then were me counting to 100,000 and it's like a 19-hour video or something, or him taking a plastic knife and cutting through a plastic table, uh, with just like a knife. And he's like, it was just a stunt. Now it's like taking a bulldozer and cutting through the Eiffel Tower, right? Like he just scaled it up. But he's like, at that time I was seen as stupid and crazy. And why are you wasting all your time on this YouTube thing? Go to school, get a degree, get a good job. And now I'm this, you know, I used to be weird. Now they call me passionate. I used to be, you know, I used to be kind of like, you know, crazy. Now I'm obsessed. And he's like, I didn't change the whole time. And so kind of what you're saying is you see the culture doing something that seems novel, seems new. Instinct as somebody who's a little bit older is that's stupid. That's stupid. And now you're like, get curious instead.

B, my advice is be an observer, not a consumer on all of these platforms. And so observe what's actually happening. Like, hold your opinion to yourself. Just be super matter of fact and observe. Because if looksmaxxing views are going up month over month, that just is. I don't really care what your opinion on it is. Like, that just is. That's, that's, that's fact, right? And work backwards from that. But so, so looksmaxxing, I mean, with that, all of a sudden it's literally This is how broad it becomes. Just like when pet supplements became a thing on Amazon, it's a category that becomes potential billions overnight with nothing in it. And so men, like, who makes men's skincare products? Well, like 2 or 3 brands that aren't even focused on it. And so, I mean, right there you can build a anything.

So you would be like, look, Maxine Trend, go in and you would brainstorm maybe like skincare, mastic gum, like jawline stuff.

Yeah. I like to look at exploding topics and I like to still look at Amazon data. Like there's different tools you can use and you'll see searches for those.

And do you get afraid, oh, somebody's already doing this or whatever? No, it's like more validation of the idea. And then you're going to try to out, you know, out-horsepower them on the marketing. And then you come up with the hooks. So like, what would be like an example of a hook for, let's say, let's just go looks maxing. Now what's, what's an example of the product? It would be like a a gum or like a jaw thing, or you think skincare, which one would you go into?

Let's just say gum.

Because what?

Consumable, novel, repeat buys, probably relatively straightforward to do.

Okay. And now you have a gum. Great. We got our product. You want to name it as part of our improv here?

Ooh. ChatGPT.

Yeah. What would you prompt? Because you use AI for a lot of stuff.

A ton. I actually do. And that's—

Yeah, let's do it. Let's go on ChatGPT.

Yeah. It's actually gotten so good.

Do you think the jaw angle is the trick with the gum, or would it be breath, or what do you think?

No, it would be jaw. You'd call them feminine in some capacity for not having a strong—

I like how your brain went there. I have this phrase that I say, which is the only positioning is counter positioning.

Yeah.

Like, a lot of people just want to say their position. Oh, we're healthy. We're good for you. Everybody is saying those same things. So you got to be counter. You got to have something you're— is the enemy, or you got to call, you know, diagnose a problem and then sell the solution. So the only positioning is counter positioning. So what you're saying is if you're not working on your jaw, you probably have a feminine jaw.

Exactly.

And if you can live with that, if you could sleep at night with that, then that's all you need.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So I start by asking ChatGPT, like, do you understand looksmaxing? Yes. It's about small natural tweaks. The goal is to maximize aesthetic appeal. Emphasis on facial harmony, symmetry, and overall attractiveness. I'm creating a product for a jawline— jawline enhancement gum. Something every day. I like— I like dual meanings and stuff too. I love when names have like, you know, like I like double entendres. I like stuff like that. So that's where I would probably go with this. I would say that would consume every day. I'm looking for a clever, powerful name that has, you know, dual meaning. Chisel. So Chisel's a nice— I feel like that's a nice name.

Is that what it gave you?

Yeah. Chisel's the first one. Masticate is chewing, but also sounds intense. And Chad Chew. These are all great names. You know, I like Chisel though.

Chisel's good.

Yeah, Chisel's my favorite so far.

All right, so we got Chisel Gum.

Yep.

And now you got to come up with how we're going to market this. So you're going to go to your creator army. You tell them what you want to do. You just let them go wild.

I let them go. And this has been part of respecting the future, but understanding that I'm not the person in that anymore.

Letting go.

Yeah, exactly.

And so let's pretend we're those creators. We're not. So we're like, we're going to be, you know, white belts at this, whereas there's black belts. But like, I see videos trending on TikTok all the time about transformation. So it's like weight loss, whatever. And so you could almost make it where you're not talking about a gum, obviously. It's like, you know, somebody being like my, you know, they use the trending music that people are using.

They take a fitness influencer and they would put them up there and they would like highlight the different things on the facial symmetry and this and that. And then like, look at his jawline, right?

And why this— what you're saying, why this person is attractive. The human mind is attracted to symmetry, the golden ratio, stuff like that. You would use like, oh, I'm kind of teaching you a science about why. Or you could even do like, why guys don't think this guy's attractive but girls do.

Yep.

And you're like, oh, okay, what's the difference there? Or you could do a transformation and be like, I did 5 things. I took creatine, I did this.

Yep.

The third thing is I started chewing this gum daily. Honestly, I, I didn't believe it, but look at this. Boom, boom. And then you're like, it's available on Amazon. Back to my story about like, you know, my transformation. It'd be a video like that.

Yep. That was one of the first ones that blew up on Evil Goods, was, was literally that. This girl had like hormonal acne and it was like the— it was the 3 things that helped with that. And she showed a before picture and after. And that was part of it. And it just went nuclear.

All right. So we got our hooks there. We got our brand Chisel. So what was the other one you said you were like, basically we can fund a startup right now. We can find an operator. It's a request for operator.

Yes. Luxury pet is screaming at me. Like Louis Vuitton is doing full pop-ups of $500 dog bowls. And it just shows again, it's like luxury is such an interesting world, right? Because it's just like signaling and status. What are people willing to pay? There's no luxury pet brands yet.

Did you hit it again? Where my initial reaction is, oh my God, that's so stupid. What a waste. How? I can't believe people are doing this. But you're saying people are doing this, period.

Louis Vuitton.

That's the important part.

Louis Vuitton validated it.

This is stupid. It's the second part of the sentence. People are doing this. That's a fact.

Yeah.

You can't deny that.

Well, I've just seen— so I had this idea probably like 18 months ago when I was just hearing what people spend on their pets. Like, it's actually insane from a, like, even the pet supplements, you know, it's like they're paying more for pet supplements than human supplements. And so I'm like, okay, there's something here. I wonder if you could ever do anything luxury. And then Louis Vuitton rolls out literally, like, you know, it's like lovers, like pet lovers, and they're doing $500 dog bowls and, you know, $300, you know, high-end leather collars. I'm just like, oh, validated, right? And how many do you have to sell in that area too to have a successful business, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Would you— so my initial hesitation would have been, can you build luxury on TikTok? Like, isn't TikTok kind of like, you know, it's more like a Walmart than it is like a luxury? But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's just there's a billion people on it, and so you can't generalize like that. That—

and that's why I love— that's why I said let's not do a disservice to the app and the, and the platform they build. That's why I did on Amazon with Genius. Genius is a very high-end supplement brand. Like we were selling, you know, we had, we had $130 product that was by all intents and purposes like luxury and like, oh, that would never work on Amazon. It's a discount site. And TikTok has a lot of those components in it now too. But again, you tie back to a billion people and you tie back to, I mean, my cologne's $90. So it's that, that's not, that's not cheap, right? It's not a $30 cologne. $30 clones outsell us, but I only need to sell one of those for every three. And, and it's done well. So I think it's, it's there.

And how would you, if you did this luxury thing, like what would you do to make it, to build the brand? Because I think you study high fashion, you study like kind of the cool stuff in culture. What would you do if you were translating that to the TikTok world? What would you do for, for luxury pet brand?

Do you know René Girard?

Like Peter Thiel's, like memetic theory.

Mm-hmm. I love that.

And so I can explain the simple explanation of that.

I mean, people don't know what they want, so they want what others want. And so from our perspective as brand owners influencing influencers and finding, you know, those names, I think the most straightforward way to run this one is, is find one of these streamers or, you know, if I could get a clip of Drake using my cologne, and then give it to the creator army, we would do millions of dollars. And I think you can do that in pet where, I don't know if Kim Kardashian has a freaking poodle or whatever. Sure she does. But not even that. You don't even need that big of name, just someone in that space. And then you feed it to the army. And I think that's the most straightforward thing. And I think it would go overnight.

Yeah. I almost wonder if you could even just use the outrage.

Um, so like, yeah, of the cost of it, of the cost. I was thinking that too.

I can't believe people are doing this. This is the craziest thing I've seen celebrities. Are doing this. It, it makes me sick, whatever. And some people in the, like, it'll get to so many people and most of the comments will be negative about the idea, but it's just going to get so much reach that some people are going to either just, it'll plant the seed that this exists.

Yeah.

That I'm not doing it, that other people are doing it, that, hey, maybe I would do that. I do love my pet.

Yeah. Or even like you could even play into Louis Vuitton doing it like with the, you know, there's, I think there's a lot of different ways to approach it and I just like those areas. Where there's, there's that much margin to play. There's just more. And, and again, it ties back to like human nature. We exist in a culture, in a world where we've created so much abundance, like bottom line, like, like we, we could afford things like universal basic income and we're automating the hell out of everything and anything and everything is, is freaking possible. And so with that in mind, there's really no shortage. Like you see some of the services that exist for billionaires, like it is just the most absurd hyper— But it exists. And the people providing those do well. Isn't that like a Hormozy thing? He says, sell to— I want to sell to people with more money or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah.

Something like that.

One of his many genius insights. Sell to the people with money. But there is a, there is a, like an actual, like business framework here, which is if you take what the rich have, but you find a way to democratize it, you can build a huge business. So Uber is a classic example of this. Rich people had private drivers where, you know, when they're done with it, when they're done with the meeting, they send a text, done, driver pulls up, they get in, they get out. They don't have to go worry about parking and gas. Some— there's a guy who does that. Uber democratized that private driver experience, and it literally— that was their homepage, was a private driver for everyone. Um, and so like that became— that was the start of Uber, black cars. Um, you know, even Airbnbs. What is an Airbnb? It's having a vacation home. It's being able to go and stay in a home in, you know, Tahoe or in all these different places. Airbnb became a thing that rich people have vacation homes in different cities, but now everybody gets access to that. In a, in a different way. Marquee Jets was private, private flight. So instead of buying a private jet, you know, $50 million, $100 million, you would instead buy a fractional share and get to ride certain hours. And there was a huge market of people that wanted to do that.

Even JSX now, probably to some extent.

JSX is exactly like that. So, so, you know, that's a bit— if you can find a way to drop the cost and, you know, even Duolingo, like we have rich people who will hire a Mandarin tutor for their, for their kid. But then if you have an app that can teach your kid, you know, a foreign language, in a way it's doing the same thing. And so I think that's, um, that is just generally a business model. What are the mistakes people make? So like if somebody was to go into this, what are the common pitfalls someone could fall into that you could just like save them?

Super top of the funnel here, how they treat those affiliates. It's very culture-based. It's, I've seen brands, there's so much money being made right now. Brand owners need to be super generous because, you know, a market's a market. And right now people are paying— you talked about the Goalie Challenge.

Yeah, explain this because that was an old episode. So yeah, explain what they were doing.

This brand comes in and in an effort to get as many creators as possible, put together all these prizes with like the number one, if you did $1 million in sales for them in a month, I believe they'd give you a condo in Brickell or the cash equivalent, which was like $600 grand or something like that.

Lamborghini was the next one. It was like this like rewards tier list.

Rolexes left and right.

And you're selling Goalie gummies. Like, they just make these, like, apple cider vinegar gummies, basically, which also was a health— kind of like a holistic health wellness thing. Like, apple cider vinegar has benefits in your gut and whatever.

Maybe.

Maybe. Yeah, that— well, that at the time was the narrative.

Creator said so.

Yeah, this 22-year-old who's trying to win a condo told me that that's how the world works.

Oh, man.

Do you believe any advertising at this point?

No.

Once you've seen how the sausage is made, you're like—

There's a reason I hate supplements too. I'm not launching a new supplement. I mean, there's some good stuff out there, but overall, when you really peel back all the— like, it really— like, a decent amount of health advice online nowadays is coming from 18-year-olds making conspiracy videos.

Yeah, that's pretty wild.

It's just reality. So a brand like Goalie comes in though, and they, they set the stage for how creators are being treated. And obviously they have a lot of money and they're trying to mess the game up for everyone else, right? They can afford that, maybe lose some money. But then if you're this startup brand owner and you're coming in and you're, no, man, I don't want to give you 25% commission. I'm going to give you 20. And that, that can be super off-putting. And so in this current era, I would say, and even the culture from like, like the group we own part of, it's like abundance. It's like, put it out there, it's going to come back. And I think as an owner of a brand, like bringing that, not, you know, accepting that we are a different generation and not not infringing on them. I think that's the best thing you can do.

Right. All right. Give me your, like, just summarize. If I tuned out and I just need to hear one thing to summarize what your thoughts are on this kind of TikTok opportunity, give me a little summary. Then I want to ask you about some other stuff.

Millions are being printed on TikTok Shop.

Like, what are you doing?

Like, you're just starting brands and trying to get as many. I'm trying to perfect short-form content. And short-form content distribution, like, period, from a brand.

Why do you believe so much in short-form content?

Because it's changing the world in front of our eyes. Like, it's from personalities we know to songs we know. Like, it's so, like, music even. We're hearing songs that are blowing up from this world, and that's just, it's the future.

Do we have this friend Connor Price? Have you seen what he does on TikTok?

Wait, who's he again?

He's a rapper, white guy rapper.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

He used to work in Ramone's warehouse, like moving boxes.

No shit.

And he was like, and then during COVID warehouse shuts down. He goes home. His wife's like, you should put your music out there. Let's do something. We're just sitting at home. And he was really shy about it. And she's like, you got to start making content. He puts out a YouTube video and it gets like, you know, 11 views like most YouTube videos do. And then she had this genius. She's like, she's the real mastermind behind it because she was like, let's make a TikTok. And he was like, he had the same reaction. TikTok, that's stupid. That's, that's not serious. Like, I'm an artist, I'm a musician. I'm not just one of these kids dancing.

Yeah.

And what he did was he started making these videos. We'll put one on the screen here so people can watch it. But he created a little skit. So his, instead of just saying what I would have done like a boomer is I would have been like, hey guys, I got a new song here. Or I would just make a video of like playing the song.

Yeah.

And guess what happens when you, when you're scrolling through TikTok, you're swiping every 3 seconds. And a song starts to play that you've never heard before, you just keep swiping. Like, it doesn't grab you right away.

Yeah.

So instead he started doing these funny skits where he would— he was 3 characters, almost like an Eddie Murphy movie. He would open the door, like every skit starts with him opening the door. And there's, uh, that's the rapper coming into the studio. He's got the guy with the headphones on. That's him, him as the producer. And then you have the weird brother. And the weird brother is kind of the key to make the whole thing work. So he would walk in and he'd be like, like, he has one where he's taking a carrot and he's drilling holes in a carrot. And you're like— and it's like the sound of a drill, it's the carrots, visually weird. And they're both like, like, he's being weird again. And then he's like, let's get down to work. Um, you want to play that song? And then the— then you hear this flute playing, and they both look at the brother and he's playing the carrot flute, but it's the beat of the song. Like, it just— they— he overlaid it that way as if that was the beat. And the producer's Go with it. Go with it. And then he starts rapping and then, then the song hits and the song is almost the punchline of the skit.

Yep.

And dude, he became like independently, no record label, billion streams on Spotify, doing no marketing on Spotify, only on TikTok.

Off that. If I want to summarize all of this, it almost seems dark for a second, but like one of my favorite, you know, quotes is, you know, if you tell a lie enough times, it becomes truth. And that was obviously war propaganda back in the day, but you take that idea and then you just think purely in terms of views and more specifically cost of acquisition of views. So you have like a, um, you know, when, if you're a tobacco company, whenever, and you're getting doctors to promote it, like you have the money to get the views and the net and control the narrative. Right. And the more you can do that, it's usually a pay-to-play game. Except in these windows, when all of a sudden an Andrew Tate burst on the scene, it doesn't matter what he's saying is real or not. He's getting seen a billion times a month. And so all of a sudden that become— there's some narrative there being formed that he has serious impact on. And these gold rush windows are when there's the ability for normal people without, you know, multinational level marketing budgets to form a mainstream narrative or get a billion views on a Spotify. And, you know, become something because of these windows. We couldn't have done that. He couldn't have done that without TikTok. Like, he just— the old Instagram, you wouldn't have gone viral on. There's no means of connecting.

Yes, it's amazing circle. Like, 12 years ago, Instagram comes out, and imagine if you were like, what are you doing all day today? It's like, oh, I'm filming myself. I'm making— I'm cooking at home and taking pictures of it or making videos of it.

It's like, you're a weirdo, dude.

Get a job.

Like, what are you doing?

So you go from weirdo wasting his time, but you were early on the platform to now, let's say you wanted to go become a food creator. It's like, dude, it's too saturated, man. It's impossible to win. It's like, but now everybody's accepted that influencers are a thing and that they have, they can, they can move product, they can, they can become rich, they can become famous doing this. And what you're saying is kind of like on TikTok, it's the same model, but instead of you becoming a famous creator, it's your product can become famous by putting it in the hands of talented people who are going to make all kinds of videos, taking literally like 1,000 shots on goal a month. And if they get the right story or the right premise and they keep innovating on that, your product gets famous that way.

Yep.

Whereas, dude, you weren't going to be able to walk into Walmart or Target and get on the shelf.

Yep.

You're not even going to be able to really go on to Amazon and just rank number 1 in these categories because they're so competitive anymore.

Right.

You're not going to become an influencer, influential creator on Instagram. It's harder. This is where the greenfield is.

My dad called me an idiot when I was pouring into Amazon. Like, actually, like, you know, like, like, questioned my sanity as like a, as a human, right? Like, it was like a crazy experience. Now, in hindsight, it's like, God, thank God.

$30 million later.

Yeah, thank God I didn't listen to my parents, you know? And it's just, it's just weird. That's why I admire guys. Elon's a good example. I think when you look through things, look at things from like a very ground-up perspective and don't take the common there's so much arbitrage everywhere because humans are narrative machines and we live off that. So it's like common knowledge becomes whatever. And yet technology is reshaping everything. That's why I just want to keep leaning into that and being— I think more people that aren't afraid to just send it with like that in mind in some capacity, the more it gives others the confidence to stand up on their own right and do their own thing, you know? Right.

I like that you said send it. You have this phrase I like. So we talk about looksmaxing. You have said this phrase before, lifemaxing.

Yeah.

And I kind of like the philosophy, but I don't really fully know it because we've only hung out in group settings a bunch of times. What is the lifemaxing philosophy? Is this something that you think more people should be kind of taking as a mantra?

Yeah, I think, I think so. I think there's a lot of existential dread in today's world. And there's also a lot of us trying to, even amongst successful people, you mean, especially among successful people, especially among successful people. And it manifests in all sorts of weird ways. You know, look at Rian Johnson. I'm kidding.

Crazy take.

But love you, Rian. No, he's awesome. He really is. He really is. And I think he's a good example of someone that's all in on life maxing, because everyone— my thing is we have this—

he took it literally.

He did.

Lifespan maxing.

Lifespan maxing. But we have this blank, you know, uh, scorecard, right? And, and we have this finite time here on the earth. And I think the more you can fill it up with things that you thoroughly enjoy and then kind of like maxing out those stats, so to speak, we're capable of so much. And instead we fall into this like, oh, I'm only going to chase money, or, oh, I'm only going to do this, where living a well-rounded life—

what's the difference between just being well-rounded and life maxing? Are they the same thing with just a cool name, or is there a difference?

I don't see many people— it ties back to that full sending it thing. I don't see many people that are really like, yo, I'm living for this. Like, what was your shower thoughts this morning?

My shower thought was I realized that the optimal way in terms of how the optimal mindset for me is to be ignorant of the past, realistic about the present, and delusional about the future.

Yeah.

Too many people are living in their past, or they vacation there all the time. They just keep going to visit, and they tell themselves it's for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it's therapy is telling them to go think about their childhood. Maybe it's they're saying, I'm going to go learn lessons. Reality is, the more you live in your past, the less happy you are. Yeah. You want to be delusional about the future. Why not? Why be realistic about the future? Because you can be— only when you're a little bit delusional about the future do you actually kind of blow your own mind. You get to do more than what you thought was reasonable. But then you got to be realistic about the present. If you're just delusional about the present, you're like, no, I am the best dad. But you're not. Then you go nowhere, right?

Oh, I'm already—

uber duper successful. Like, bro, your bank account's, you know, 3 digits right now. It's like, you got to be realistic, but just say like, all right, that's where I am. That's not where I'm always going to be. Forget the past. It don't matter if I failed 10 times.

Like, most—

the most successful people, when you talk to them, they're like, yeah, 10 years you grind it. If you ask them like, what was that like? What were you doing? It's almost hard for them to even remember. Yeah. And it's not because it was so long ago. It's because there's actually like a, a useful part of your brain that just blocks it out. It's like my wife, she did natural delivery of birth like 3 times. And if I ask her about it, it's like her body has a mechanism that's like, you never forgot that. I never forgot. I'm traumatized. I'm like, how could you do this to me?

She's like, what are you talking about?

I'm fainting. Right? And she's like, forgot about it. She's like, only remembers the good. It's like, wow, your brain gave you a survival mechanism that was actually really good for you, that you don't remember how bad it was, how hard it was. And I think ignorant of the past, realistic about the present, delusional about the future. I think that's a good motto to live by.

So I take that. There's two things. I'm obsessed with this idea of character design and that, that's what I'm living real time. I think we have the ability when you zoom out long enough to create literally whatever type of thing you want to be like, you can, you can truly design that. And so you have that and then you have another idea I'm obsessed with, which is Bezos's 80-year regret minimization framework where he wants to like that view of his deathbed, you know, how he wants as few regrets as possible. And so when you work through those two avenues, you can quite literally like do anything.

So explain the character design, because I've heard the regret minimization, which is basically like, if I'm dying, I want to have the least regrets possible. So therefore today, which, if I have a fork in the road, you know, do the one that will lead to the least regrets when I'm 80, when I'm 90, when I'm 100.

That ties back to your piece. Be relatively delusional about the future while being very aware of where you're at today while pretty much disregarding everything.

Right.

And so like when I look at like, like this is music I've been working on, right? And I remember going to a show in Puerto Rico, John Summit, and I was like, you know, in the booth right next to the DJ thing and just watching him command that crowd and the energy and like the impact. And I was like, you know, if I'm 80 years old and I didn't at least try to send it in this space, I'll regret it. And then I start thinking through the character lens of what does an artist look like and what is this like? Things I have in me. So I'm not like completely disconnected from reality, but now taking all of the, hey, this is a business. Hey, now the product's music. Hey, this is streaming. Hey, you know, marketing. And that's, that's where I'm at with it.

One of the things that you're reminding me of when you're talking about, let's say, the music production or getting people to remember is You were talking about whether it's marketing or music, or if you have something good to say, you almost owe it to yourself. It's like, do you believe in the thing you made? The thing you have to say? Because people are very bashful about marketing. They're bashful about putting it out there.

I know this.

I would write things. I wouldn't even send it to my own friends and family. I wouldn't post on social media. I wouldn't promote my product. I just kind of wanted it to be organic. And I, when I look back at that, I'm like, damn, I did myself a disservice. Like, did I think the thing I did was good or not? If I think it was good, then I owe it to that to do marketing, just to send it, to fully send it and send it. And you know, when you, when you talk about storytelling, music, you got to study the art of how do you get your, your stuff out there.

It's a phenomenal skill. It's like a crazy, crazy, like, that's the vehicle.

You put the package in the trunk, but you need the vehicle that's going to actually get it out there to the masses. It's crazy, dude. We're going to watch this video, this, this YouTube video right now. You just said it yourself. What you said in this video will make people millions of dollars if they, all they did was just try to act on it. Give it 2 years, try to act on it. You will become a millionaire if you just follow what you just said. And if I go look at the YouTube video stats, the retention chart is going to look like it's just a downhill slope. Most people are going to click off within 30 seconds. And then by the end of this, there's only going to be, you know, 25% of people are still watching this at the end. I mean, 75% of people clicked on this because they wanted something out of their life and then are not going to even stick with it enough to watch the video.

Yep.

But that's just the laws of nature.

And don't be that guy. But with that in mind, I think this last chunk of the video, we're talking about these stories and the ability, like the model is becoming less important the more I understand people and tapping into whatever that innate thing in all of us is. Is way more important. And I want to bring that out of more people because I've been through like a fuck ton of stuff in a short period of time. And I think the more I can bring that forward, the more general impact there'll be. There's one of my other favorite internet clips, you know, for the Elon Musks and like what, Brett Hancock. Do you have him on or not?

Like, Adcock. Yeah, Brett Adcock.

Sorry. There's those minds that are just like obviously incredible in their own space. But then there's that Elon interview and it's like, like, Elon, you inspire everyone in this room. Who inspires you? It's like, Kanye West, of course.

You know, it's just like what he said.

It's hilarious. And it's, it's, it's— that's the opposite side of that. Like, yeah, okay, Kanye is nuts in every way, but just that ability and desire to create and stand up for new things and, and like have that confidence in yourself regardless what people say. Is nothing short of not only incredible, but necessary for people.

I love the send it attitude. I mean, I want to make merch with the send it thing. And also, I think you made me realize there's probably the way I used to think about it, which is well-rounded. Mike Posner came on the podcast, famous musician. He wrote, like, took a pill in Ibiza and all those songs. First song went viral, and he tells the story. He's like, first song went viral. I'm like, Of course, that's what I do. I guess that's what I do. I put out a song, I go triple platinum, and then the second song went double platinum, then single platinum, then no platinum. And then he was on the shelf. The record label was like, it's not even worth paying to produce your music because we don't think it'll sell. But also, you can't go do something else. You're under contract. So he was like, dude, I'm shit out of luck. He went back to school and started learning how to sing better. He's like, dude, I'll just work on my craft. And then he came back, and now he's had this resurgence. But he talked about, he goes, I had to look at my life and realize, yes, I was uber-duper successful in my career, but I was a desert wasteland in relationships and health and whatever. He's like, that I realized was just not success for me. And so I was inspired by that and I started thinking, yeah, you do want it to be well-rounded. You want to be the dad, the husband. You also want to be having fun. You also want to be, you know, being creative and making cool shit and being successful, making money. But the well-rounded thing is more like a check the box. It's like, am I doing, you know, a sufficient amount of X, Y, and Z, right? Whereas life maxing is saying, what would it look like if I really sent it in terms of my fitness? Like, yeah, I'm going to work out anyways, but like, I know you, you do Muay Thai, right? You're like, I'm going to work out for an hour anyways. What could I do that makes me like, what would be full send on this workout?

Dramatically better. And that's the great example. It's like 2 years ago, I couldn't fight at all. And I feel pretty comfortable, like, in there with a lot of people, right, that aren't named Jon Jones, you know? But just taking things seriously and really putting that notch on your belt. It's like, now music, or even like learning Spanish is one that I'm like, going to do, and I'm going to take it very seriously. And it's not going to be I'm half learning Spanish. I'm going to be fluent in, you know.

Do you do these one at a time, or how do you— how do you— like, how do you not stretch yourself too thin?

That's what I'm discovering. It's like, like how much— and I like that healthy balance of pushing yourself. We're capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. I've already seen that, but there is some line. And so I don't have a good answer for that. But I'm trying to also be an open book and show it all real time. I want you to look back at my fighting clips from 2 years ago, and I want all of it. I want to be an open story that is ongoing and constantly iterating.

So this year, Jesse Itzler came on the podcast and gave this idea of a misogi. He's like, oh, there's this Japanese tradition and way kind of the American translation or the way he translated the Japanese idea is, um, one grand challenge a year, but specifically like do something so grand that it changes you.

Yeah.

That it changes you. So then it's like, so he, for him, it was like he ran this 100-mile race, like, and he, every year he picks a different one. One year was write a book, uh, another year. So he's done this for like 15 years or so. And I was like, damn, I never really do something like that.

Right.

Like I have like New Year's resolutions, things I want to improve about myself, but I never really like put out the misogi, the grand challenge for the year. And so I made one. I was like, all right, I want to— and I like that it's one because I was like, oh, I want to do this and this and this. And all that was going to do was guarantee none of them happened.

Yep.

So all right, what's the one for this year? And I was like, I would love to be— I was like, I want to have more fun in my life. I have fun playing basketball. I have fun doing the podcast. I have fun, you know, in business, my kids. Where can I— where can I dial up fun? And I was like, I want to be able to jam out with music because music is like its own little like magic potion. Music makes you feel good in 13 seconds. I can play a song and change your mood in 13 seconds. There's not much I could say to you that's going to do that, like to change your mood for the better. And so I was like, all right, I want to be able to jam out on a piano. But then I was like, all right, what's the life maxing version of this? So I was like, all right, not only am I going to learn to— not only just going to learn piano, like I'm going to get good. I'm going to be able to jam out to any song I want on the piano. That's going to be my mission. Two, what if I could also teach my daughter? She's 5. I was like, what if she could do it with me? Now I'm getting dad points while I'm getting piano points at the same time.

Finding those synergies to weave it all together.

So I was like, oh, it's integration. I'm not choosing family or my piano hobby.

It's both.

So she comes with me to every single lesson. She begs me to do piano now every night. I'm like, okay, that's cool. Then I was like, all right, what would be like the max out, the full send version of this? If I really was to send it, what would I do? And at first I was like, would I make a song? Would I perform at a theater? And I felt like that's kind of playing somebody else's game. So I think a key part is like, pick what's real for you. Don't just like take somebody else's scorecard and be like, that's now how I'm going to judge myself. So I had this idea from my cousin of go play, go play a recital at an old folks home.

Okay.

I was like, oh, that'd be just like more fun. Like, that would just be more fun for me, more meaningful to me versus like post it online and get a bunch of views or performing in front of other people. It's like, dude, go to this place where I've been to a bunch of, like, senior centers. Uh, not a lot is happening there. Like, I could go be their Kanye because there's nobody else there.

Yeah.

And for me, that would be meaningful. Like, I made other people's day brighter if I did that. Um, so I was like, to me, that was a real learning lesson of, like, how to choose these side quests, how to choose these misogis, these one-year challenges in a way that I'm going to use now going forward.

Absolutely. No, I think you hit the nail on the head with being hyper-individualized. Like, my, my life-maxing scorecard is not, is not yours, and it shouldn't be. We're all drawn to different things, and, and I think keeping it individual is important while keeping that— like, my main framework is like, don't let anyone else dictate it for you, or don't let anyone tell us, tell you what you can't be or can't do, right?

What's your, what's yours? Like, what do you, what does that scorecard look like for you?

All right, so I'm like, Muay Thai is starting to take like a, a back burner thing. I'm putting, you know, being a dad at the top of that, which has been— so that's like reshuffling everything because I'm learning what it means to be present as an individual. And that means like, you know, way less phone, which inherently means like it starts to crumble some of the other pieces. But the beautiful part of this is when you put your priorities in place, things start to handle themselves. Like then all of a sudden you start thinking smarter just naturally, like, okay, like that's still has to get done. So I have to trust you know, my team for that and this and that. So that, that's at the top of it. The music is the second, second piece. And then still the other, you know, it's like I'm taking content as one of these things now, like just from storytelling, like some of the stuff I'm gonna do on YouTube I think is gonna, is gonna—

Well, let's talk about content real quick.

Yeah.

When I first met you through a mutual friend, you showed up and you had this like, again, you always have a different like crazy outfit on. And somebody was like, oh, you got to check out his Instagram. And I go and I was like, bro, like I was having a great conversation with you. And then I went to your Instagram and I was like, I was like, I would never talk to this guy. Your brand name was like the genius CEO. Every video was like Dan Bilzerian meets like Instagram meets like a dropshipper. It was like, it was like, oh man, this guy's selling courses. And every video was like over the top. He's talking about how you can make millions instantly. It was a get rich quick vibes. But I met you, I was like, dude, you, you, yeah. And you, and you were like, I'm like, you're like, it's an experiment. Like I'm being intentional. I'm intentionally turning that knob up that way because I want to see what happens. And you were into that at the time. I think now you're making a shift, but like, can you just describe what you did there? Because I almost was, once I met you and I was like, oh, that's, he created a character. So my, I was like, that's actually respectable in a way.

I'm huge. Like one of my core things is obviously intense ownership of like oneself. And one of my problems after I sold that business with Genius, I had my first daughter. I was really frustrated with the world. Like I just was, and it started to become like a cope and like a, you know, other people have weird ways of ducking ownership and responsibility and like disconnecting from their own unhappiness. And I remember just thinking like, oh, I don't like where the world's headed. And so I could sit there and keep crying about it, or I could try to have some influence or some dent on it. And that's what kind of drew me to intentional social media. I had tried to do like this cool health content and like, like I was doing not, not full Bryan Johnson, but like Dave Asprey level stuff like 7, 8 years ago, like hyperbaric chamber, red light, and like literally nobody cared. Nobody cared.

And now in hindsight, the nice guy was finishing last.

Yeah. And in hindsight it was, I didn't know how to make the content yet. Right. But I saw this like clear formula of, oh my God, if I post a car, like I am actually rich. I still have a business. And if you post a car or watch or whatever, people respond. And so as that started to work, I started doubling down on those, those things. And, um, it wasn't until like, like you kind of got to play the game to change the game a little bit. It was, is, was my opinion. And, um, that's when you met me kind of in that wave where pseudo-relevant, even if maybe not in the right, right lens. But until you have learned those skills and learned to kind of, you know, develop a platform, then, then literally nobody cares. Like nice guy does finish last. And so I guess that's just been my personal evolution. Like it's been fun because I got, I'll be the first to say I got way too far in that stuff. Like I got lost in it. Like that actually does happen. Ben, your, your partner, um, flagged that for me like 7 or 8 months ago in a really casual Ben way.

But like, Ben's non-confrontational. What did he say to you?

It was just something along the lines of like, well, if you do that stuff enough, don't you start to kind of believe it or become it? And that stuck with me. And I don't think he knows that stuck with me. I don't even know if he remembers he said that. But there were a lot of little things like that that prompted me to—

It's like an actor.

You stay in me. And, and unfortunately, like a lot of the things I was leaning into do make you like cool or whatever. So now there's this, this audience that looks up to you in a very specific light. So you have two choices. You keep down the same path or you say, whoops, you know, like this is what I actually am. And so I feel like I've separated a lot of the negative parts while still like, I love fashion. I love design. Like I genuinely do. I think it's individualism. I think there's like, you know, um, can we do the fashion?

Uh, okay. So, so here's me. I have Nike shoes. It should have been just New Balance to go full dad mode. I'm wearing sweatpants and a plain black shirt.

Those Kobe's though?

No, these are not Kobe's. These are $90 Nikes. I just like this color of green. So let's go head to toe. Teach me what you got on here.

Full San Francisco. This is full— and I love it.

I got matching socks today. That's only because I knew I had to step my game up for you. Normally it'd be mismatched socks. It'd be more sweat jeans. These are Lulu's at least. And then like, this might be my daughter's, but I was like, oh, hold on, he's going to have hella accessories. Let me come strong with the—

I got less accessories than usually. So let's start with the wrist. How much do you think this is?

You start with the wrist. Is that like part of the fashion?

No, no, no.

Build around this.

I don't want to talk about Louis Vuitton.

So, okay. That looks— it looks fancy to me.

All right.

My honest guess would have been that that's a $20,000 watch.

This is a vintage Oakley from like the '90s, and it was like $3,500.

Okay.

So I don't believe that like expense and cost— I have some expensive stuff, but I think like it's way cooler to put together like unique kind of stuff. This shirt is, uh, this, this gentleman, the brand's ERL, I can't pronounce his name, but he's like the head photographer for Vogue and like he did all of Kendrick Lamar's stuff. And again, not super expensive, but like very on the come up. The jeans were from Kanye's, like this is probably like, he's not cheap, like probably $300 or something, but not mind-blowing. Kanye's Free Larry Hoover tour with Drake. These were probably like $150, like $30, not expensive. Louis Vuitton boots, which were expensive, they're $2,500. I love what— Pharrell is one of my business idols. I think there's a huge gap between like artistry, culture, and actual business. Pharrell has that quote, it's creativity without business is victimization. And business without creativity is just dumb. And I think he stepping into the head of Louis Vuitton, like a brand I would typically never wear or care about, is the perfect example of those two things merging creativity with meaningful enterprise. Bernard Arnault is top 3 richest people because of that. All right.

I got a little bit, I got a little bit cooler. I don't think I could pull it off.

I think you could pull it off.

But maybe, I don't know, you got to give me like the, uh, the dad baby steps version of these. I'm going to start just I'm going to start at the wrist. Take it, take it simple, and then we'll go from there. Actually, I should just show up for— we should have done a thing where it's like, I don't know if you've seen Rick Glassman. He does these interviews where he does a podcast, but he'll go and then it'll cut and they'll switch outfits. It's so funny when they do shit like that. Well, we'll just pretend I did that.

That's awesome.

Rob, thanks for coming on, man.

You—

everybody should find you. Rob the Bank, which is one of the greatest handles of all time.

Thank you for that.

Well, you were already saying it. I didn't come up with it, but I was like, dude, that should be your handle. That should be your brand. What is this? The Genius CEO? No, no, no. You should be Rob the Bank.

And just wait, full disclaimer before we— you know, my last company was the Genius Brand, so I didn't just, you know, it just looked bad. It looked bad. But no, thank you for having me. Seriously, like, this means the world. I really appreciate it.

Awesome. Thanks for doing it.