We spent 8 hours finding the best stuff on X. Here it is.

Introducing Ben and Twitter culture

0:00All right, here's how we'll kick this off. First, introducing Ben. This is my business partner, Ben, the guy who's usually behind the scenes, but in the Wizard of Oz, we're pulling back the curtain. We're showing who's actually pulling all the strings around here, and it's always Ben. Ben is a prolific Twitter user. Ben, how many hours a day are you spending on Twitter? I think if I checked my screen time, it'd be eight hours a day on Twitter. Maybe too much.

0:30Ben, let's do this. Let's put those eight hours on Twitter to good work. Show us the most interesting stuff going on, and then we will react to it. So, Ben, take it away. All right, what's up, fellas? All right, so I got five things. Technically, it's a lot more than five things, but it's less than 100 to show you guys, and let's get it rolling.

Buying tickets to weddings

0:50So I saw this tweet this weekend that went viral. It's basically about how you can—there's now a website that essentially lets you buy tickets to go to someone else's wedding, and supposedly, according to Sheil, there's also one of these in India. It's crazy. It's vibe-coded, but if you look at the website, there's already—they already have 20,000 users. Wait, so this is not you paying—it's not you paying for someone to come to your wedding because you need friends. It's you paying to go to someone's wedding? People want this? People want to do that? This is you paying to go to someone else's wedding with an empty

1:20seat. Would you do this, Sam? This is ridiculous. No, not a chance. Absolutely not. Not only do I not want to do that, I'm a big fan of not giving gifts for children's birthday parties or going to a wedding that's outside of a 50-mile radius. A general Scrooge mentality, huh? Yeah, not a chance. No, I'd rather sit home and watch Netflix. I'm not going to a wedding. You read The Grinch, and you're like, this guy's just misunderstood. Yeah, he's—this guy's figured it out. He's got some quality ideas. Absolutely not. I am not going to this. Not a chance.

1:54Do you think this will work? What does work really mean? Do I think it will— Is this like Airbnb, where we think it's weird that people are going to be sleeping on an air mattress and somebody's going to serve you porridge in the morning, and then suddenly it's like a $100 billion company? Is it that? No. No. I don't think it's that. So, I thought it was a generally accepted fact of life that nobody wants to go to someone else's wedding. I heard a comedian say this once. He goes, if you invite me to your wedding,

2:25you're an asshole. And I agreed with that. You know, I don't want to go. You know I don't want to go cross-country. I don't want to go to Detroit for this, but I have to now, now that you've invited me, and I guess we'll just do this. And it's a cost of doing business as a friend. I can't imagine that people want to go to weddings voluntarily. Dude, T&D's wedding, though, it says the dress code is Enchanted Woodland.

2:49I kind of like that. I mean, yeah. I've been looking for an excuse to whip out my finest flannel. I guess that's all right. Not for me, you know? What do we say? Cornrows and sleeve tattoos. Cool, but not for me. I'm going to put paying other people's wedding in that category. I was way more down with the Korean fake dopamine sites where you get to shop for things that will never arrive. And you can buy vacations that you'll never go on because it's all fake. But you get this thrill of shopping without the cost of actually buying the things. That made way more

Men's skincare and social media

3:22sense to me than this does. All right, verdict is on. So Clavicular, obviously, this really popular looks-maxing influencer. He went to the All In Summit, and he basically talked about how he invented the peptides movement, which I don't think is true, but he took a claim for it. A claim that Sam also makes. Yeah. And then yet another common thing you have with Clav. But then he was talking about his new business idea, which is basically to start a men's skincare and makeup line. And he asked people to email him that are interested in being a part of it.

3:55Sam and Sean, would you email him? Do you want to be a part of this? Do you think it's a good idea? Yeah. I will not email him. Yeah, it's a fine idea. Are you going to email him, Sean? Well, you know, think about it this way. I actually have this belief that Brian Johnson is the greatest social media player of all time, that he is the Michael Jordan of social media. He figured something out and plays the game of social media like a fiddle. And he used that starting on this podcast in many ways. He came on this podcast very early on in his content creator.

4:30We were literally the first podcast he ever did. Okay. So we saw him at Squirtle and now he's Blastoise. This guy has evolved into a social media juggernaut. He's doing shrooms on live stream. He's talking about his wife's peepee. He's got all kinds of things going on that will always get reactions. He knows how to get reactions. And it turned it into a very big business in Blueprint. So I think he released a waitlist. Right, Ben? He has a waitlist for his million-dollar-a-year product where you can have his

5:01protocol. You can do the same things he does for a million dollars a year. He also has a cheaper thing, like the supplements that he sells. And I think he said it does, I kind of think it said 40 million a year, give or take. Yeah, it was like 50 million a year after a year or two. But the waitlist for his protocol, I think, was over 100 million in revenue of just pipeline from just letting people know that it exists. No marketing besides that. So would it surprise me if this guy, Clavicular, does the, you know, Kylie Jenner, what's her brand called? The makeup line or whatever, like whatever she did

5:34for the women's skincare market and women's beauty market, could he not do for the men's market and actually kind of make the market because it's sort of small today? I don't know anything about this guy except for like the three clips that I've seen of him that have gone viral. I think that starting a company, even if you have a straight-edge operator, is quite challenging when you kind of like live this like hedonistic lifestyle where you're like always out doing crazy shit. And I think that that, I think there's more to it than just I'm

6:05going to Instagram this product. Yeah, I think you got to find somebody who is equally as genius as you in the behind-the-scenes business side, right? So, you know, Emma Greed has done this with the Kardashians and launched multiple businesses with them. I know that, you know, what's that brand called? Ben Kongo Brands? Is that the name of those guys? Yeah, Kongo. The guys that did Prime. Sam, you know these guys, Kongo? It was like a 26-year-old kind of genius guy, wasn't he? Yeah, there's like two guys in Ohio that you've never heard of. There's no photos of them on the

6:37internet. Literally the opposite of a famous influencer. Yet, they built Alani Nu, I think sold that for one or two billion. They built Prime with Logan Paul and KSI. And they own more of the business than those guys do. I think if you do something like that, it can work. If you're going to try to juggle being mega, mega famous on the internet with also being the CEO of these things, that seems extremely rare and difficult to pull off. Google Kongo Brands founder. And you'll see a photo of a guy in a yellow shirt, if that's

7:08really him. It's like a guy in a yellow shirt in front of a really kind of dingy garage that looks like it's like taken out of Kentucky. Yeah. A guy who just went for a run in his front lawn. Is that the founder? That's him. That's him. That is awesome. That's like the only photo of him on the internet. By the way, what a choice. Yeah. That is really cool.

Elon Musk and the new Roadster

7:33All right, Ben, what do we got? Okay. So Elon announced two big things in the last week. Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. Won the Roadster. Yeah. Announcing the Roadster. Crazy car.

8:07Wait, I've never seen this video. Click it. You didn't see this, Sam? No. Was there a big denim convention? How did you miss this? I don't really use Twitter. I don't like logging to Twitter. How did it, how did it, is that real? How did it fly like that?

8:23Okay, we got to take three steps back. Elon's been teasing the new Roadster for like 10 years and he did a demo a couple of days ago that he like promised would be the craziest product demo of all time and basically showed that the new Roadster, it was a collab with SpaceX and had SpaceX rocket boosters built into the car. So the very first thing, he starts off with a ramp that goes like, curls all the way around. So the car drives up and goes upside down and is just suctioned to the top of the ramp because...

8:55Because it's going so fast? No, it's going slow. It just has so, it can generate so much downward force using like air suction that it essentially can go upside down. But why do I want that? Because that makes for insane speed and handling if you're racing. So, you know, tires can only go so, so fast. I think at like whatever, some, some miles an hour, they just, they just start spinning and you need this like ability to like suck the air under you to like stick to the ground in order to continue moving faster, break that speed.

9:25This doesn't make sense to me. That's real? That's real. I don't know why I want it. I don't know why I want it, but I don't know how they do it. That's amazing. Basically, the car can kind of fly. And apparently this car is coming next year and you can buy it with like a normal, just a normal car, or you can upgrade to the rocket package and you have the SpaceX rockets in it.

9:50When do I use like... When is the wrong question? The question is why? Like, why do I want rockets on... Huh? The only answer is because it's awesome. Well, you can't like fly a car in Manhattan. Right. Not yet. Not, not yet. Not yet. But what... It's going to be for people who want to like take it on a, like a private track and just do crazy shit. It's like when people buy guns, you can't just go shooting people, but you can take it to a

10:21gun range and shoot your gun. It's kind of like that, but for a car. Yeah, but there's not flying car ranges, but I think that... Okay, so yeah, I think my take on this is what would have been the coolest demo if there was like a proven way that the car was going to be delivered at the time when they said it was going to be delivered?

10:43Punctuality would have been nice as a demo. They just had a big calendar and they said, this is what it's going to be delivered. Here's proof because it's been years. I mean, I think people have been putting deposits on these forever, haven't they? Yeah. Yeah. So this is like new deposits now for this thing. I was at, I went to San Francisco, Sam, this week. And of course this got brought up because anybody in tech has kind of like paid attention to this. Except Sam, apparently. Except Sam. Sam's not in tech. I'm not in tech. Sam's in fashion. I'm not in tech. Sam's in men's fashion. Bodybuilding or something.

11:13I'm into like my kid's birthday this weekend. Yeah. So at the table, I started, I was, somebody said like, oh, did you see this? And I was like, yeah, kind of crazy. I mean, it's not legal. Like, I don't really understand the point. And then it went around the table where everyone was like, literally the next guy goes, what I loved about it was a, it was a, what's it called? A Rorschach test where they were like, it just shows who has vision and who doesn't. And I was like, oh yeah, me. Right. It was like, anybody who doesn't get it is just fundamentally lame at their core. And I was

11:47like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. What I said earlier, I meant to say, that's what I saw other people saying. And I totally disagree with it. I'm with you guys. Best car ever putting down a deposit. Oh my God. No. I mean, I think it's awesome. It's just, uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our boy Nikita had a good tweet. Diego's reminding me that, uh, Ben, did you see Nikita's tweet about this? No, it wasn't. Oh dude, I saw something on Twitter. You didn't. So he, uh, he goes, sometimes a demo is simply meant to remind the world that your competition has no desire to dream and no ability to evolve. 21,000 likes. Okay. Confunctious. That's

12:25all right. Conjunctivitis. Sorry, we don't all have pink eye. Can't see the vision.

12:35All right. What have we got now? What's got, Ben? All right. And this morning, Elon kind

SpaceX shares for kids

12:39of announced that he's going to give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America. So do you think this is the start of like basically his redemption? Um, I don't think so. No, but I do think that's pretty awesome. I do think that the Trump accounts are pretty amazing. What's, this is kind of, uh, like a really good way to like get America bought into your, to your shtick, obviously. Right. If everyone has a share, that's kind of insane. I think Anthropic said they're going to do the same, right? Yeah. This morning. Anthropic said not to every kid. Anthropic was like, we're going to give it to our

13:10effective altruism foundation or whatever. They're going to give it to something like that. They're setting up like a, like for the public thing, but it's not like you don't get it. You know, it's not like I like, right. This is basically saying, Sam, your children get a share of SpaceX each. That's pretty wild. So I think that's awesome. Ari, show this chart I just sent you. This is a favorability score of Elon Musk just in the last two years. So the purple line, the green line is people who are favorable towards Elon Musk, meaning like it's like a president has like an approval rating. So two years ago

13:43was more favorable than disfavorable. And now you can see the purple line, which is people who are, who don't like, have a unfavorable view of Elon Musk and how it is now the majority of people. And so I actually think this kind of is the start of the redemption arc. Now the problem is it's like OJ, just when he got acquitted and the glove didn't fit, he got it. He has to come out and write a book called, well, if I did it, here's exactly how I did it. And so I do think Elon, although this is a very generous and I think of a favor of the

14:13start of what could be a very favorable arc, I don't think he's got the behavior control to not upset people over the next four years. But if you think about this, this is, how many shares is this? So I think this is like something like 70 million or something like that. There's like 70 million kids in America or something. 72 million kids. And so 72 million kids is something like $10 billion that he's giving directly to people, not to a nonprofit that might help people. Like just, it's in your account, check, go, it's there for you. And so I think this

14:47is kind of amazing. I do think this has a pretty big impact. I've seen this with my kids. Like when you give them something, they become incredibly invested in that thing. You can give them a Pokemon card, even though they didn't care about Pokemon cards. If you say, this is a really rare one. This is a good one. They'll start to care about other Pokemon cards and suddenly have a binder full of them. And I noticed that I have a family member who shall remain unnamed. And in her retirement account, she had for a long time just left cash. She was very conservative. And, you know, I was telling her about SpaceX or whatever. And she, you know,

15:18her kids were telling her about SpaceX and she decided when SpaceX was going to IPO, she decided to buy $3,000 of SpaceX stock and accidentally bought, I think like 3,000 shares of SpaceX. It was like a half a million dollars instead of, instead of $3,000. And guess who, guess who then became the biggest analyst of SpaceX, who was following the Starship launch and like the, you know, the prediction markets and reading every bit of news and studying the, studying the feasibility of this thing, like became incredibly invested in the, in this

15:50because, you know, she was now aligned with the success of SpaceX. So I think this is actually a pretty powerful move. I'm surprised more companies don't do this. Wait, so one of your aunts or whoever accidentally bought half a million dollars worth of SpaceX stock? Really? Yes. Yes. That's hilarious. And it, does she read the reports on them and stuff? And she's coming to you with... Constantly now. Every, like every day she's like, yeah, you know, she said no to like an event because the Starship launch was happening that day and she needed to be on the live stream. Like she was not going to not see how that went

16:22and it went well and she was ecstatic about it. She was fully aligned. And her take on it was once she bought it, she was like, it's just too inconvenient to click sell. Like I just have to do it. Well, it went down like right away and you know how people are with like loss aversion. So like selling right then would be like a small defeat of 30 grand or something. And so she did not want that. She's like, well, let me just wait till it goes up. And now, and now she's just like in on the ride and... We should have her on.

16:51She would hate that, but yeah, I wish, I wish she would. Come on. All right. What's the next one? Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer

17:21platform for growing businesses.

Andrew Huberman's gym and fridge

17:23All right. So I recently started watching this men's health YouTube series called Gym and Fridge, where basically they interview everyone. I saw it. Andrew Huberman did one. I didn't see the roadster, but you saw this, Sam. Yeah, I saw this. Look at that thumbnail. That's my type. And there's one specific 10-second part of this video that I wanted to show you guys. All right, click play.

17:44Yep. And now I own cucumbers. They called me that for a different reason. So you saw this, Sam? You've already seen this video? Oh, yeah. Of course, Doug. Yeah, I thought it was awesome. He also talks about peptides in there, which I invented. That tea brand he's got in there. I like that. Yeah, I've seen it. Wait, so what are his best things? So he eats three cucumbers a day. I did not know that despite him putting out 3,000 hours of podcast content a week. He talks about his favorite protein brand. I think it was Momentous.

18:15Inside the fridge was an affiliate code. Just use Huberman 15 at checkout. It's just pasted in there. What makes me mad about him is whenever he suggests dope stuff, he always starts off by saying, now you should talk to your doctor. You should do things right. You are my doctor, Andrew. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm just going to blindly follow what you say. It's sort of like when you get stock investing tips from us. But yeah, I mean, it's awesome. And he showed off his gym. Dude, he's a guy's guy. He could single-handedly bring back Grey's Anatomy, but for men. Just reboot the whole thing. And he's McDreamy. You just start again with him as

18:49the lead doctor. I think that would be very possible. Yeah. Have you ever seen him without a shirt on? No, I won't let myself go there. Yeah. Yeah. It's a slippery slope. What interested you about this, Ben? The fact that he eats two cucumbers a day? I mean, manly, I just liked the branding of gym and fridge. I just thought that was an A-plus brand for men's health. Dude, we need something like that for MFM, right? It's got to be like stocks and jocks or something. You know, it's like, show us your, what boxers do you wear and your portfolio? And we just go to

19:19every famous person. We do that. Tell me you wouldn't click that. Like Mark Hendry said, tidy whities and tons of pallet tear. You know, that's where he's at. Sean, have you seen this new podcast? I'll have to find it to you. But they just had Blake Griffin on. It's the one where he's like, this guy, he's like trying to agree with Blake Griffin, but he smacks him on the thigh, but it's really inner thigh. It's like, oh, two bros, we agree. And he like grabs, like the host grabs his thigh and he goes, that's really,

19:53really inner thigh grab. And I was thinking like, can you and I have something like that? But it was no accident. That's his thing. That's his thing. Could we do something like that digitally to make someone uncomfortable? Would you just keep winking at the end? Yeah. Or just like- This has been really good. I knew we would see a part of you we didn't see, but not that part. Or just like mid episode, like change, like act like you're taking off your sweater and your undershirt accidentally comes off and we just nonchalantly put the shirt back on.

20:27It's just a very long shirt change. A lot of midriff is showing for too long.

Peter Levels and software moats

20:34All right, Ben, what do we got? All right. This next one is, I guess, back to serious, but Peter Levels. So he basically tweeted and made this blog post about how in 2022, he pivoted to AI apps. And then now he's basically like, I no longer believe in SaaS. I now only believe in these moats. So I'm trying to pivot everything. And the moats we can go through real fast are proprietary data or content, network effects, audience or distribution, physical, I think capital is the next one, and then regulatory.

21:06So I'm curious, one, do you guys believe, do you believe he's right? Like if you own an app or you make SaaS, should you be pivoting out to one of these things? And then dude, what do you think? So I think it was FDR had like a picture of Abe Lincoln on his desk because before making a big decision, he would often say, what would Abe do in this situation? I think that with Peter Levels all the time, I love how he thinks. I think he's so awesome. I think that he's a little bit being an alarmist here, but I think that like his points are really interesting. So yeah, when I think of SaaS,

21:39I do think, I think like three weeks ago, I was like, it can't be that bad. It might be. It might be that bad. What changed? There was this debate where our Fred Tyler has this company called Beehive and he had a great rebuttal where he's like, everyone's trying to replicate me. Here's all the things they have to make. And it was really a huge list of stuff. And I thought it was a great reply. And I think he might be right. But I just think that we're just touching the surface on what people do with AI. I think I saw somewhere that I think only 2% of Americans have a paid GPT or Claude account. And the rate of speed at which it's growing, I do think software

22:15is like, I would not want to own a software company necessarily right now. Would you? I mean, it definitely doesn't seem like the place to be, right? You never want to be the one where you're in scramble mode, right? Like I'd rather, I would rather, you know, live in if there's a hurricane coming, I don't want, even if it's not going to affect me, I'd rather just not be in Louisiana at the time, right? Like that's not my preferred place to be where I have to figure out, you know, some new move. What moat do you believe in? Like if you were betting on a moat, which one do you want? Well, network effects is probably the biggest one, I would think. Network effects or one thing he

22:51didn't have is brand. I think network effects or brand, brand, if you look at the top, you know, 20 companies in the world, a large percentage of them have this massive contingency of customers who will just buy anything they put out because they're a trusted brand. So I think that one's real. And I think network effects is real. If you look at some of the greatest companies of all time, their products might totally suck. Craigslist, eBay, a bunch of different marketplaces fall into this, but you use them because that's where everyone else is. And so I think that network effects is probably one of the most important. Yeah, I think you want to be doing things where

23:25AI doesn't do the core of what you do, like fundamentally can't do the core of what you do, but it makes what you do easier. So for example, I think a company like Amazon has a really good position because people are still going to want physical things to come to their house. But now if all those physical things become cheaper because they're made more by robots than humans, and then the delivery and logistics becomes, you know, robots picking and packing orders, putting them in drones or autonomous vehicles, and then they get to your house for cheaper. So it's basically like, hey, people are going to want the, the demand either goes up or stays the

24:00same, but your cost to provide it goes down. And you were already very successful before that. That's a good position to be in. So I think like, you know, stuff like that's good. Really anything that's in person, right? So like, where is the, where is the value, the human connection and touch, right? So I think things that were previously fringe, more fringe, like art and sport become a little bit more defensible because, you know, that's the concert that people want to go to. That's the show that people want to see. That's the sport that people want to watch is humans doing it because that's their, their night out or humans getting

24:34out, humans getting together in some way. You know, those are good businesses to be a part of. Same. I think like Hampton, Hampton's at a good spot, for example, because I think you're getting humans together and that's not something that somebody wants to replace with AI for themselves. Yeah. Hampton's in a good spot because all the serious people are doing things that can make a lot more money. There's a lot more entrepreneurs too, right? Like there's a lot more people trying I'm joking, but what's the quote where it says, say, take something dumb, really serious. That's basically what I'm doing. I want to release a whole book of quotes that you just modify,

25:06like the same meaning, but totally different words. Just like go out there, have fun and break an egg. Exactly. Exactly. Or like Cadillac reflexes.

25:18He did these on the spot. It was incredible.

25:24I do find it, by the way, Peter Levels built himself a kind of like a two, three million dollar a year income stream, just doing this, sitting in Bali on his laptop in his boxers. And I think we've met a lot of very successful, rich, admirable people on this podcast. I believe that amongst our audience, at least, but I honestly think this is just where the masses are. The Peter's love, Peter Levels life is the life that people actually want. People want to live in cool places, not have a huge team, just work on their laptop, make

25:57a bunch of money. You don't need a billion dollars, but if you're making millions of dollars a year, you're coding fun shit on your laptop by yourself, creating cool projects. And then you spend the rest of your time hanging out with friends and lifting weights like that. I think that's for a lot of people more aspirational than the high powered billion dollar founder who's ultra busy and ultra stressed all the time. My father-in-law for roughly 30 years owned a moving company, like a commercial moving company in New York City. And he's like, he's wildly successful. But like when he was young, he was

26:29like this normal blue collar guy. And he was telling me these stories. He's like, yeah, I basically worked six days a week because we did our moves on Saturday. And so I would I lived in the suburbs. So I had to get up at 6am. I had to go to the office and I'd be home at 7pm. And I did that basically six days a week for almost 20 years in order to provide for my family. And I was thinking, how crazy is it that you don't have to do any of that. And you can make the same or way more money. And I complain. I'm like, I don't

27:00want to have to write a blog post today. Oh, I got to record another podcast. Like it's just it's just crazy what our heroes do or our peers do versus what we had to do 40 years ago. All right, let's do a few more. What else we got?

Brian Johnson's dunking challenge

27:14All right. So Brian Johnson's newest adventure is dunking, which I think Sean's that was going to be Sean's adventure this year, too. But check. All right, hit play.

27:29What is he holding? I can't see. It's like a little ball. He's holding a little ball on a nine six. I think he said nine foot eight rim. Pretty good. You think he can you think he'll be able to get there? So he wants to dunk a basketball. How old has he been? He's like almost 50, right? Yeah, I think technically he's 49. 49. Wow. But he is the youngest man in the world at the same time. So is he really 49? So to prove that he is getting younger and fitter and healthier, he's decided to use a performance benchmark. Again, he's the greatest social media player in the world. And he knew

28:04that if I just continue to talk about my hemoglobin levels, that will only attract so many eyeballs. But if I show that a 49 year old white unk can start to dunk, that will get people's attention and inspire them in a different way. Sam, as a white guy who can dunk, what do you have to say about this? Are you a believer? You think he'll be able to dunk? Does it say how tall he is? He's like six, six, six one, something like that. Yeah, he'll be. I think he can do it. I think you can do it. I can't dunk because I'm I have

28:34I've seen you dunk. What are you talking about? Well, like I'm not particularly coordinated, but I just I can I have attributes except for the the coordination one. So like it's not particularly easy for me to do it. But yeah, I think you can train to do this. I think most people can probably get to a 28, a 28 inch vertical or many people can, which is oftentimes high enough. The hard part is doing it with a ball like Ben Wilson could dunk and he's like not a high jumper, but he like does it perfectly. So yeah, I think he can do it. How great would this be?

29:05I think this would be pretty great. You could he so he's six foot 180 and he says he needs how much vert? Like 27. He says my my standing reach is 91 inches. Oh, no, no. He says that's a 39 inch vertical, which exceeds that of an NBA player, average NBA player, which is 35 and a half. So here's what I need. Blah, blah, blah. I don't think he's saying he has it. He's saying he needs it. He needs to get to that to be able to dunk, he says. If it's flat footed, no, he won't he won't ever do that. Sean, can we talk more about this? What

29:36you were trying to dunk this year? I had a fitness challenge for the year fitness Masogi, which was to do the Murph. And so I said, I was going to do the Murph. I was going to hit this weight goal and I was going to try to dunk. Now what people so people have asked me like, how's the dunking going? And the answer is I haven't even attempted to dunk and I don't even I haven't even done anything on the dunking because what I the whole plan all along was if I get to that weight, I think I'll be able to dunk. No, Murph training and dunking are way different. No, no. But I already could I already can like kind of touch rim with the top.

30:06Like I can kind of like not a full grab, but grab with the tips here. And that's so if I'm down 25 pounds, I think I would be able to to dunk an alley-oop. And also like I grew up like you said about Ben Wilson. Ben Wilson grew up playing basketball. I've grown up playing basketball. So then that motion is natural to me, which was my big argument against Brian Johnson being able to dunk, which is he's thinking it's about like ground force and, you know, like doing these like he's doing these like power deadlifts and shit like that. Jumping has a lot more to do with coordination. But then you said

30:37it's you're uncoordinated. So you're kind of negated my argument. What I'm saying is no, what I'm saying is I can jump super high and I'm very strong. And so I can my hand can get more than high enough. And it's just hard because I don't know how I don't know that motion. And so half the time when I'm jumping, I'm jumping too far away or that like it. And so what I'm saying is it's actually if you are a basketball player who's used to that motion, you don't have to jump that high in order to dunk. Like I played volleyball in high school and basketball. And in both of those, you do something called the penultimate step. And the penultimate step is basically like an approach jump that gets you to your max. If you've never done

31:10the penultimate step or you didn't do it growing up, that alone is like a learning curve. You have to work on to be able to do this. There's actually a good video. Ben, did you see Jason Kelsey, Travis Kelsey's brother did the same thing trying to dunk? Yeah. He did like a, he released the whole video. It's like a six month thing. And he like arguably was able to dunk, like he kind of went in, uh, you know, he got close enough, I would say to be able to do it, but he's also six, four, a professional, he was a professional football player can palm the ball. Like, you know, there was, there was, he had a lot more attributes going in his favor.

31:41So unfortunately I think Brian Johnson will not end up dunking. I think there's, but, but I think it's a, I'll take the opposite of that bet. I salute you. Oh, you think he's going to do it? Yeah, I think he'll do it. All right. We'll see. I'll bet you a five guys burger. Okay. Sounds good. All right. Next thing I found was, uh, so Alexander Wang went

Founder speed and psychology

32:01on the David Center podcast last week and he had this one great quote. It's about a 40 second clip play at Ari. I think he really has internalized that failure doesn't matter. It matters like when you win, how big you win. And I think this overall concept, I think enables him to operate. I think truly without fear in a lot of circumstances, because I think he is just very comfortable taking lots of risks. He's got that great line where it's like in a world of changing all the time, the biggest risk is not taking any. Yeah, exactly. I think he's internalized this

32:31quite deeply. Like there's certainly like versions of the world where meta looks a lot more like Google in some sense. Like it's just like, you know, more slow moving and more bureaucratic and it just like looks very different as a company. But I think he, because he's internalized some of these lessons so deeply, keeps the thing dynamic and moving and live. Dude, Sean, what you said about Zuck about two episodes or one episode ago, uh, where he was, you're like, he's more like Napoleon and how he like internalizes stuff was so good. He's so awesome when it comes to

33:02operating. He's the best. I did a podcast, um, the other day at James Currier's house. He teaches at Stanford and I was basically like, Hey, can you just teach me the thing? I didn't get into Stanford. Neither did any of our listeners. So, uh, can you just give us the class real quick? And he did. And his, one of the, one of the things he does, he calls it the speed talk. So he's like, um, you know, it's kind of like when your parents give you the birds and the bees talk. Well, this is what you give to founders is the speed talk, which is you think you're moving fast. You're, you're not, you could be moving far faster. I have to, unfortunately,

33:33I have to break your speed bar and then we're going to reset it where it needs to be. And he talked about like a bunch of examples of people moving fast. And one of the things he talked about moving fast is like, well, why don't you move fast? You start with that. What's, what slows you down? And one of the core things that slows you down is fear, fear that you're wrong, fear that fear that if you change your mind, people are going to judge you fear that if you go out and ask a bunch of people for money, they're going to reject you. It's a fear. It's like fear is one of the biggest things. And he said, there's some pretty big companies. I think like Poshmark gave him like, you know, 1% of the company to advise on growth. He was like, you know, it made sense for

34:07them because if I can get the company growing 20, 30, 40% faster, then obviously the valuation goes way up. Like it's a good trade. And so they expect me to come in and talk about growth. And instead it's all just founder psychology because the heart, the highest point of leverage in every business is the founder psychology. And the highest point of leverage within the founder psychology is what are they afraid of? And what are they avoiding? And if you could just get them to work around their fear and work around what they're avoiding, they will be much better off. And he goes, you see this because so many great things happen in business when the founders reach the effort moment. It's when they're,

34:39they realize they're out of cash. They realize that if this doesn't work, nothing, you know, then it's over. And all of a sudden they start making decisions way more decisively, way faster. They make better decisions. Their product becomes dramatically simpler because they're not being so precious about the whole thing anymore. And your preciousness is what gets you in the way. It gets in your own way. That's so good. That's awesome. I'm taking notes here. I'm going to go yell at my partner about why we should be moving faster. I'm going to go change. No, I'm going to tell him, this is what's wrong with you, buddy. I found it. I found the problem with you.

35:15That's how great leaders do. Everybody loves that, right? I was listening to this podcast and I realized that's your problem. I realized I'm failing at not yelling at you enough.

35:27That's so awesome. That's great. I like that. I don't know what else to say, except I like that. I'm ruminating on it, but that's awesome. All right. I got a few more here. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. Now, they actually just launched a personal banking account. I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products

35:58that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. Very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. If you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC.

Rich guy purchases and artistic hobbies

36:26All right. Hit play on this. This is a great video. Let's hit play before it spoils it. My favorite purchase. I think my best, my most favorite purchase part for me was I bought a heart. I bought like a gold heart. I got it upstairs too. That's a heart, like a music thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I bought a harp. I got a harpist that come play like twice a week while the sun is going down while the chef is in the kitchen. Is that the craziest rich guy purchase you ever heard? This is an NBA player, Sam. Jalen Brown.

36:59Who are the two guys? That's Jalen Brown, NBA star or very good player. And I think that's Lil Baby, rapper, I think. Like, that's what I thought. Did you just put a T in little? A little baby. A little baby. Come on, man. That's like a hard R. You can't put the T in there. Inspired by you, Sean. So you were saying that you learned the piano this year. And I don't want to learn the piano, but I did think like... The harp? I was not the harp, but I was thinking like, I would like to use my artistic side a little

37:30bit more. And I think we had someone on the podcast, maybe it was Joe Hudson, someone like that. They said like a woo thing that struck me where it was like, use like, you know, your art side a little bit more. Like that's like one of the facets of a holistic person. And so I bought a book to teach me how to sketch. And it has not stuck, but I would like it to. It's not stuck at all. So you're saying you're tired of using your autistic side and you decided to start using your artistic side instead. The other side of that coin. Have you seen Plant Daddy sketching? No. Is it awesome?

38:01Oh my God. Yeah. Ari, find this. So the Plant Daddy who's... I think he's been on the podcast, right? Did you do an episode with him? I think I wasn't there for that one. Explain who he is. And then while she pulls up this thing. Kevin is an amazing guy. He started a YouTube channel on a TikTok page. He's basically this kind of like... Gardening, I think it's called. Yeah. Epic Gardening. He's like this like really handsome, like cool dude who you would not think is into gardening, but he loves it. And he started a website, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube on gardening. And then eventually he raised money from the churning group, which is a very reputable firm

38:36for media creators building businesses. And now he has a business selling gardening supplies that if I had to guess is definitely approaching $100 million a year in revenue. And he came on MFM. I begged him twice to invest. I was like, bro, I just believe so much. Just please let me in just because when this is right, I just need to feel that validation of being right, which was not a very compelling pitch in retrospect. And he did not get back to me either time. He ignored you? No, he was like, yeah, yeah, for sure, man, for sure.

39:06And that's what he's drawing now? This guy's awesome. Show the journey. He did the same thing. I bought one at the first 10, I think. I have no idea where it is, but I bought one. It's kind of like how me and Brian Johnson both said we're going to dunk. And then he actually started training and can now almost dunk. This guy also said he's going to start sketching and now is amazing at drawing. And he's like, yeah, I just taught myself and learned. And it's so great. I have so much fun every day. I want to do this. You know who inspired me to do stuff like this, like the piano thing too?

39:38Tim Ferriss once said, he goes, yeah, just like I have a one hour that I dedicate to my body for the gym. He's like, I basically have like 45 minutes that I'll do a creative gym session. So he's like, I just do something creative. Could be drawing, could be music, could be like brainstorming, could be whatever. And he goes, it just gets my mind working the same way that I'll go do cardio to get my body working, to work on my heart. I was like, I would do the same thing for creativity. And I just thought, I've never heard anybody say that. It makes perfect sense to me. Obviously, if you have the luxury of a little bit of time,

40:09that makes more sense. But that really inspired me. And then he said it a second way. He goes, is it because, you know, I was like, you know, do you have any plans to do anything with that skill or that thing? He's like, no. He goes, but it charges my battery. And he goes, and if your battery gets, it doesn't matter if one thing charges your battery, you could still use that battery anywhere now. And like, you know, if you plug in your phone over here that you could still use it when you go over there because now the battery is full. And he goes, this charges my battery. It has been one of the very few times that I can get in flow. Like before it was exercising,

40:40but now I use so much crap when I work out that like I'm addicted to my phone and I use it to track my workout. So that makes it challenging. And I've noticed that doing the creative stuff is one of the very few times that I'm able to do that. I'm just dead at the end of the day. After I put my kids asleep, I just want to like do bad stuff with my friends and my friend being my wife. And the bad stuff is watching TV. Honey, you want to do some bad stuff tonight? Like click TV on, you're like, oh yeah. Here we go. I should do this at the beginning of the day. What are you guys watching?

41:13She just started East of Eden. I like Mobland, this new thing on Paramount. She also does, you and her are like in a little like fan club for the challenge. Is there a challenge going on right now? Yeah, we're about to be on the finale. They just made the final. What are you watching? Um, I'm watching the challenge. I'm watching Survivor season 51. I think we're on. I don't know if I'm watching a whole lot else right now. I don't know if I have any, I don't have any good like binge worthy shows right now. I've been watching. I've been reading. Yeah.

41:44I read. I'm reading the Mistborn series. Do you like the stuff like fantasy, like kind of like the good like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter type shit? I occasionally, usually I'll do, um, like the big, the big hits like Project Hail Mary, things like that. Um, but I do fiction. Yeah. Like have you read like Ender's Game or Ready Player One or anything? No, that's a movie. I've seen that movie, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, but I would. They're really good. Yeah. I love that genre. So anyways, I got into those. The audio books for those things are really good

42:16though. Like Project Hail Mary audio book was, was one of the best audio books I've ever heard. puts me right to sleep. If that's what you mean by good. No, I don't. How do people stay awake with audio books? What are you, what are you doing? You do it while you're cleaning the house, dog. That's the problem. Don't do that. Yeah. What's another option? That's it. That's literally it. Okay. What do we got, Ben? Let's do the last one. We got a few more. Last one. Skip this one, Ari. Let's hit the next one. So, uh, Lex Friedman just flew

42:48overseas to spend a day with Jensen Huang. Um, play this video, Ari, for 30 seconds. Jensen, I've heard you make amazing fried rice. I do. I watch videos on AI and fried rice. It's absolutely true. That's his whole algorithm. I think he's working and I hear the... AI, I have fried rice. Is that his wife? I have no idea, but his whole algorithm is fried rice, geopolitics, dogs, and panda bears. So I got to ask, what's your algorithm?

43:22Uh, mine was, um, modern wisdom with seven hard truths you need to hear of with Sean.

43:29What? Is that not it? No, no, no. You got it right. You got it right.

43:34Were they a little too harsh for you? Or those truths? They weren't harsh enough. They weren't harsh enough. They were not harsh enough. I wish they were harsher. Kevin, soft core truths. Modern man. Like, true things that I wanted to hear. That's what it was.

43:54Stuff I've already heard Sean say before. Part seven. I thought it was great. I thought it was a great podcast. People loved it. They go, Sean's going to be known more as a storyteller than a podcaster. The unintentional slap of a compliment. Honestly, it was a great episode. I walked out of there thinking, that was some of my finest work. That was a good performance. It was a solid, a solid performance. I was happy with my play on the field that day.

44:25My, my YouTube feed is succession clips, live music, studying or work music, and track and field. Mine are piano tutorials, uh, podcast clips, conspiracies about aliens and Jesus and, uh, Luka Doncic highlights. That's what Luka Doncic is my fried rice. If I was Jensen. That's pretty good. Leave in the comments, what is your fried rice in your YouTube algorithm? The thing we wouldn't expect,

44:57but it's there and you enjoy it and you're not ashamed to say it. Lately, like last night, I let my kid, um, cause her mom was out. So it was just me and my eldest. And before bed, I let her watch 10 minutes of like a, uh, Disney clip. And so I get so much kid shit on my YouTube. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. I'm totally bought in. Yeah, it's also Gabby's Dollhouse. True in the wishing tree. Yeah, we got a lot of, a lot of stuff going on there. I'm so bought into Frozen. Actually, YouTube kind of knows. It knows not to show me it in the recommendation

45:29for some reason, even though we have hours and hours of that. I mean, I'm not ashamed to admit this. Actually, I should say that. I am pretty ashamed, but I will admit it. For my youngest, who's now two, she's a third child and, um, our like good parent stamina meter ran out. And so she has never eaten a meal without YouTube on. Actually, once our nanny was feeding her and didn't have YouTube on. And I was like, well, it works. Don't, don't show my wife this. Uh, don't let her know that we could do this without. She watches a cartoon every meal.

46:02Ari, make that face again. Yeah. Yeah. I want everyone at the comments. I'll take your judgments. Throw your stones at my glass house. Judge, judge, judge. I'm Searcy walking the streets with the shame.

46:18Uh, Ben, thank you for gathering this stuff. Is there any last things you want to say?

Launching a local pest control business

46:23Last one I'll show you is my brother, inspired by MFM, started a new business a week ago. He wrapped the truck and he's doing pest control and booked his first $1,000 of revenue. Tell the full story. So Sam. Let's give a shout out. His name is Sam. He listens to the podcast and for years he's been kind of thinking, planning, plotting. He's a real estate agent by day, right? So Ben, tell the, tell the story a little bit. Yeah. So he's a real estate agent by day. He's been selling real estate for 10 years in Phoenix, Arizona, listening to the pod every, every week.

46:54But we gave him that itch. Every week, him and my dad listened to the pod, send me, send me notes, tell me things that Sean and Sam have said that I didn't notice or listened to in some cases. And, uh, tell him to send it to, tell him to send that to us. Yeah. It's a lot of like, Hey, Sam said this thing. That's awesome. Or Ben said this, or Sean said this thing, check it out. So my brother's been trying to figure out what he should do. He bought into a restaurant. He's like started a soft serve business. He started 15 things, but he texted me, this is the one he's doing for real. Bought a truck, made this website, hired a technician,

47:28and they booked a thousand dollars of revenue in their first week. So what he's doing here, wait, hold on. A thousand dollars of revenue in a week. Let's go. Is that him? So what he's doing is, So look at this branding. That's not him. We know what this is like, right? Yeah. What is this like, Sean? Inspired by MFM and Pinks. Pinks. The best. We gave the blueprint, which was take a, um, unsexy service business that serves your local, you know, serves your location, serves your, your locale, but do that sexy DTC packaging on it. Put, put a lovable, put a lovable hipster brand on it. And he, he kind

48:03of did. Did he use AI for the branding or did he make this himself? What did he do? I think he used AI mostly. And then he hired someone to do some of it, but mostly AI. How did, how did he go get that first thousand dollars of revenue? What did he do? Uh, I kept asking him and he kept saying, I'll tell you when, I'll tell you when it's much bigger. So I think he called friends. I think he hustled and, uh, found a way. He actually sent me a photo of a check that he also sent Sean that was from a trust. And I was like, damn dude, your first customer is a trustee of a, from a checking account. What an amazing photo.

48:34Does he know how to do, what, what is pest control? Is that spraying, is that spraying stuff? Yeah. It's like you have a, you have mosquitoes or something and someone comes out and they spray. You have, you have, uh, roaches. That's what he does. So he found a technician to do it. What's the URL? What's the URL? The URL is howdypest.com. If you're in Phoenix, Arizona, check it out. Yeah. If you're in Phoenix, go become a... Listeners, let's get this man to 3,000 in revenue. Let's, let's get this guy to 10K in revenue just off the back of this. Dude, this is so funny. Look at his website. Scroll to the very bottom. Look at that old,

49:06um, uh, like that old Bronco he's got in there. That's awesome. Do they drive around in cool cars or is it like a truck? It's like a branded truck. Uh, but I told him he should go buy cool cars once it gets a little bigger. That's awesome. Is he older or younger than you? He's two years younger. We should have him come on and, and coach him every couple of months to get to, to go to a million. That'd be fun. I'm in. But is he coachable, Ben? I feel like he doesn't listen to your advice, but that might just be because you're his brother. He needs, he won't listen to me, but he might listen to you guys.

49:38Maybe, maybe. Well, thank you, Ben. Um, and Sam, congratulations. That's awesome. Sam Levy, same last name? Yeah, same last name. He's, uh... All right, I'm going to look him up. Ben, if people want to send you interesting shit, where should they, where should they find you? Find me on Twitter, Ben M. Levy on Twitter. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no day's off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast

50:10that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

50:41We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.