We're going back to the roots a little bit with MFM. Everyone says they want more ideas. I've got two of them.
Okay. So, everyone's lonely. We know this. I want to talk to you about two different radical ideas.
If you're listening to this podcast, we know.
You know, we know.
Well, these two ideas I've already been interested in, and I was just trying to find an excuse to tie them together. I'm trying to make this cohesive, but they're two great ideas and we have a precedent of getting this first one somewhat right. We have predicted a couple like biohacking things. Not predicted, that takes too much credit, but like we talked about it fairly early in the adoption cycle. Would you agree?
We're basically big pharma.
We have predicted and developed several pharmaceutical drugs on this podcast. Would you like to go down memory lane of a couple of them? I don't actually know all the ones that we did. Obviously, GLP-1, testosterone, what else were we talking about for a long time?
You've brought up GLP-1s kind of before they even got to market, before Ozempic ever got to market.
TRT businesses and you were toying around with the idea of like, hey, I really believe there's a big business to be built here. We didn't end up building one, but we both invested in one.
Well, we invested in one that worked. You also talked about sperm freezing, not just egg freezing, and I think that's also become quite a big deal. We've talked about IVF, you know, fairly early on and the different business opportunities that exist in IVF. I don't think anyone's actually done those yet. The idea there is to build a trusted brand in the IVF world, a chain. The Chick-fil-A of IVF, as I like to say, and a place you trust. Okay, but go on. What do you got now?
So, I was scrolling on Instagram the other day and I saw two things. One, a new version or rather another health trend that I think is going to be popular. And two, probably the best way to position this new trend I've ever seen. So, Palmer Luckey, CEO, founder of Anduril, also started Oculus. He was at this conference and someone said something to him, a question that I tend to hate and he's one of the few people I've ever seen to answer this question in a great way. The question was basically, Palmer, if you were starting from zero and you had nothing, no connections, what would you do? What would you work on? And he had the best answer.
If you were starting with zero today, some bet you made wiped you out, you got to start again. You didn't have your network, you didn't have your wealth. What would you do today, Palmer?
I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling. We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids. Look, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to...
I've heard about this. It's really critical, right? So, you know, people sort of drift apart over time. Oxytocin is safe, but it's...
It's understood. We use a lot of it in infants.
It's the bonding hormone.
That's right. It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilo of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich chemical supply right now. And if you do that, maybe you won't die alone.
Okay, so let's recap what we just heard here. So Palmer Luckey, a billionaire guy, very successful. He said, 'If I had to work on something again, it'd be saving America from the tragedy of divorce.' And that would be oxytocin doping for marriage counseling. If you do this, maybe you won't die alone. How great is that? Is that brilliant? Is that the...
Dude, you're absolutely right. Most of the time when you ask somebody like, 'What would you do if you started up again?' They'll just give you the most vague handwavy. He immediately had not only a great original novel, surprising idea, but he had the pitch ready to go, locked in.
The best. And I hate using the F-word, first principles. I hate using that word because it's overplayed and it's just not used correctly. But this is like a textbook case of that. He starts with divorce is a huge deal. It impacts 50% of people. What are some potential ideas that could solve the tragedy of divorce? You could say a bunch of stuff. You could say like helping people find the right person. Having good conversations early on in a relationship. Okay, whatever. Like what all can do this? And somehow he got to this idea of oxytocin. And I think that is brilliant. I'm not saying that I... in fact I am saying I know nothing about oxytocin other than a little bit of like nerdy research. So I'm not saying that oxytocin is necessarily great. What I'm saying is the packaging of this is beautiful. And when I heard this I realized this is actually an interesting business idea. And I've heard about oxytocin. The reason I've heard about it is I follow these weird subreddits with biohacking. And this is how I learned about GLP-1s. This is how I learned a little bit about testosterone. And what I've noticed is often times these people are wrong. They'll say things that are kind of ridiculous, but occasionally there comes conversations where you're like, 'Okay, there's a signal here. Something is interesting.' And I followed along on the oxytocin forum on Reddit, the subreddit, and there's this one called just oxytocin. And it's basically mostly autistic people. So, a lot of people who have Asperger's, a lot of people who suffer from PTSD and they've been taking oxytocin for a few years now because it's fairly unregulated and I'll explain what it is in a minute and they're writing like a daily journal about how it makes them feel and it's kind of amazing. So, what is oxytocin? Oxytocin is a hormone that naturally occurs in your body. The most common way that people get oxytocin is when women have babies. It creates a bonding between the mother and the infant and so right when they have the kid, oxytocin, I believe it's one of the things that gets released, the mother starts creating milk and they bond. Men get it after they have sex. You know, when you're cuddling, you know that nice feeling, that's because of oxytocin. A lot of mammals, a lot of animals, there's a strong correlation between when mammals have a lot of oxytocin, they bond better with their partners. So they'll be like, they study these, I think it was called prairie voles, something like that, and they have huge amounts of oxytocin and they are lifelong partners with their spouse forever, right?
Yeah. Like if I have a really solid dap up with somebody, perfect hand clap, I feel a small surge of this pair bonding chemical released in my body, I can almost hear it when it happens.
Or when you look your dog in the eye. So there are studies that show when you look at your dog and make eye contact with your dog, you release a little bit of oxytocin. Dude, when is it... Have you recently just had like silent eye contact very... like you're 4 inches away from your wife and you just hold eye contact for like 30 seconds to a minute. Have you done this?
No, but your friend Chris Williamson put out this thing where it was like questions to ask spouses to like make you bond and like part of it was looking at eye contact together. And I told my wife I was like, 'Hey, I want to try this.' And it's like, so we have like a scheduled time to do this.
It's a little bit weird, but if you want to be adventurous tonight, the eye contact thing is full on eye contact.
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Yeah, I've done this before and my wife literally starts crying. It would make me cry. Within 30 seconds, she starts crying. It's like the most bizarre thing to me cuz I don't feel the urge to cry. There's definitely an intensity to it when you're just quiet and you're looking straight into the eyes of somebody who you know really well. Yeah, I'm going to do it today. I'm going to do it tonight. In fact, that's everybody's homework tonight. 30 seconds, maybe a minute if you're feeling freaky of straight up eye contact.
Yeah. It doesn't matter if it's your spouse or a roommate. Just the... or the mirror if you're really, you know, if you're really in one of the Spotify wrapped top 1% listeners.
Well, one of the reasons why you feel that way is because of the chemical or the hormone oxytocin. Isn't this also why like skin-to-skin contact with a baby like kind of... you hold the baby on your chest, they make you like take your shirt off in the hospital amongst other things at you and laugh.
Yeah. Yeah. That I mean I do that with my kids. I'll be holding them and I'll pop the top. I take the shirt off and I like I want to hold them because it feels special. You bond more. And what I didn't realize is that if you Google buy oxytocin, you'll get like a bunch of interesting websites. They're usually called like something sciences or something pharmaceuticals where you can buy it in like a pure... I don't know if it's pure. I'm not using these words correctly, but from an idiot's point of view, like a pure block of it. It's a powder.
It's like a butter. What do you mean?
Like it looks like a basil spray.
Okay. So, here's what I'm getting at. It's like a powder, but now...
Yes. You can buy a ton of it. And what a lot of companies I'm noticing they're slowly getting into. If you go to BlueChew, which sells erectile dysfunction medicine, if you go to Hims, I imagine they might start selling this. But what you're noticing is that this fringe thing is being turned into a nasal spray because that's the only way that you could take it. You can either take it through that or I think like a gas mask. You can't inject it. It's not a pill, but they're starting to sell this. And my prediction...
You do need a prescription for it. It looks like...
Not to buy it on some of these websites. Like you can just click and order it right now.
Yes. So you sent this over and this immediately got my brain... like I feel like my brain overheated for a minute because when you hear a genuinely interesting great idea that you don't understand fully. You don't know, you haven't researched it. You don't know the efficacy of it. You don't know the safety of it. So those are all the caveats of an idea. It could still be like right, like this is totally understudied. So let's preface everything by saying that. Well, we should explain the prairie vole thing, the study that they did. So, most animals are not monogamous, right? But there are a few that are that have an intense, you know, bond, a monogamy. And so they've studied these prairie voles where once the male and female mate and they bond and they spend enough of this like brief time together, they will be monogamous for life and they will not only not go with other partners, they'll even attack if another... like if a male is there and a female comes, he will like kind of push her away. And then they did studies on this in a very small sample size. So, not like a robust study, like a maybe study where they did this with humans and they had a placebo and they had humans that would take oxytocin and they would see what would happen. And you know, for example, in one of them, they would have an attractive female come in and if the person had had the oxytocin bonding with their partner, they would sit like an extra 15 cm apart from the attractive female, they would create distance between them and the attractive female or they would spend less time looking at them, things like that. Now again, small studies, but it's very interesting that most people, we like to think that we're in control of our mind, that we're in control of how we're going to feel and how we're going to act. And so, I'd say there's one group of people that think they can think their way to a behavior. There's another group of people that would be feelings-based, and they say, 'Well, it's not about logic and thinking your way there. It's a feeling thing.' But feelings to them are this amorphous sort of, you know, mystical thing. It's just something that happens, about like the idea of a soul. Whereas in truth, basically a feeling is a chemical brain state that you're in and then you have a conscious readout of it that says, 'Oh, I really like the way that... that means I'm in love, right? This brain state, the way I feel when I'm doing this or when I'm with this person, that means I love this. That means I hate this. That means I'm disgusted by this.' Right? So, we have a kind of a readout of the chemical state. And if we could find safe ways to alter or grease the wheels on certain chemical states, that's really interesting to me. And the reason why is all these ideas sound a little far-fetched before we had the miracle weight loss drugs, right? Like there used to literally be a phrase that was like, 'There's no magic pill for weight loss,' but now there is. There's literally a magic pill for weight loss. Well, what if there's a magic pill for love or for being bonded with your partner? I find that really, really interesting. And then I think further the example you just gave of people who are autistic or have Asperger's using this to bridge maybe a social gap that they have is really interesting. And when I was reading about this just before the podcast, you mentioned this idea and I had never heard of it. One of the ways that it was described was it's like a highlighter. So, it's not a love potion. It's not like you take something and you immediately fall in love with the first person you see or anything like that. What it does is it highlights or amplifies what you feel. So, they did studies where if somebody was domestically abused, this wouldn't override that and make them feel love towards the person. It would heighten their sense of distance between that person. So, it was taking whatever the social feeling you have underneath and just amplifying it. So if it was bad, it would amplify that you want to get away from that person. And if it was good, the warmth, it would amplify the warmth for that person. So I find that angle of it to be really promising because that would be life-changing for people who have trouble connecting socially and in relationships, right?
Yeah. It's pretty magical. Well, the idea is magical. And I was listening to someone else, some other doctor talk about it and he was basically saying, he was like, look, there's not that much data to back this up. So it's not necessarily that it's disproven but it's also not proven yet. But he was like, we've been doing some small stuff where we would give it to like small teams. And he didn't explain what a team was but it could have been like co-workers or even a sports team, whatever, people working together. And he was like, 'They worked together so much better when they all had small doses of oxytocin.' And I found that to be really fascinating. And I like ideas that seem very freakish and strange. Like imagine walking into your office or going to a team retreat, which I just had, and everyone has to do oxytocin in advance. That's very weird, right? That's off-putting. That's strange.
But like maybe that's kind of interesting. And so I went and texted...
Adam Neumann somewhere is like, yes, not weird, we are doing that.
But I just think it's interesting. I think this is really interesting and I tweeted this out. I'm like, who has done this? And someone was like, 'Don't do stuff that you read on forums.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, don't do it because we are talking about it or because someone else is talking about it.' But there's some interesting signal there, particularly from a marketing standpoint, but potentially for like a selfish standpoint of like maybe there is something here because I've seen this enough times that when people that we call strange, where they're doing something, there's something there. And there's this subreddit where these guys... There's one guy who had Asperger's and he was talking about... I keep calling it Asperger's. Is it Asperger's? Am I saying it wrong? Sorry guys. I think...
There's a P in there somewhere between burger that you're saying.
It's not ask-per. Sorry guys. The subreddit where these guys who have this are talking about like they're writing daily journals and they're like, 'All right, I just took the dose. Okay, I'm feeling horny now. That's probably too much of a dose. Okay, 10 hours later, I took a second dose. I noticed that I struggled to make eye contact with my children most of the time. Now, it was way easier to make eye contact and I had a significantly better conversation.' Like, they're documenting this and it's so interesting to me. I would not be surprised if in 12 months you and me and our listener are going to get a lot of Meta ads saying this will cure divorce or something like that.
Well, I'm the type that I have an initial reaction to these things. Like, I don't do drugs. I don't even go to Burning Man because I'm scared of like, you know, just new experience. I'm very happy in my life and it's kind of like to chill in a happy little bubble. I always have a kind of fear-based reaction to things that sound weird, unfamiliar, or like, you know, chemically altering. And I think there's some good... there's definitely some good in that, right? There's obviously you can protect yourself that way. But it's also over time I've seen how things that initially sounded very fringe can become very normal in not that long of a time. You know, like when you years ago were like, 'Oh, I hurt my Achilles and so I injected BPC-157 in my... and it's healing my Achilles.' And I'm like, 'That's a crazy thing to do.' You're like, 'No, it's the Wolverine stack or whatever.' Right? Like I'm like, 'Yeah, even more reason not to take this.' You know, turns you into a Wolverine or whatever. Like I don't know. I don't want that. And now peptides are shockingly common. And same thing recently, a psychedelics company just got acquired for $3 billion by Eli Lilly. Did you see this?
It's probably the biggest psychedelic acquisition ever. This company called, I don't know how you say it, Atai Beckley. They just got bought for 2.8 billion. And you know psychedelics are the same sort of thing, right? Like you know growing up psychedelics were seen as a certain way, right? It's like you know tripping balls and it's a way to have a good time. And now psychedelics is I would say amongst smart friends considered to be one of the best interventions for people who have PTSD and other forms of deep trauma as a way to kind of do 20 years of therapy in 20 minutes type of... Now again this is maybe anecdotal whatever. All I know is it went from very fringe and labeled a certain way to way more mainstream and now seen in a very different light. But it's the same thing. The sort of social acceptance shifts over time for these things and I suspect that something like this is also something where social acceptance could shift over time. The idea you said of, hey, before we go to this team retreat, you know, quick, everyone puff, you know, let's do the flow in our nose here real quick. It's going to help. That sounds like laughable right now, but I don't know. I've seen this shift over time many times now, right? So, who's to say this isn't also one where that might be true?
I texted Jack Smith, our resident biohacker, and I said, 'Have you ever taken this?' And he said, 'No, but one time an intern at my company got effed up on it after he took some. And then once I took a taxi driver and I was telling the taxi driver about it and he asked to be paid in it.' So the opportunity sniffing bloodhounds, something's there. So that's cool. That was one of mine. But I think that's interesting. And so this is one of those things where we're going to have to look back in 12 months and be like, were we on that or not?
10 out of 10. Great segment.
Okay. Second one. Have you ever heard of the Knights of Columbus?
No. Is this that medieval play that you told me about once?
Where you go. It's like a buffet. What is that called?
No, that's a Renaissance fair. I forget the name of the restaurant, but... So, check this out. So, we're talking about the loneliness epidemic a little bit. So in 1882, there was this guy. He was a priest up in New Haven in Connecticut. What was his name? His name was McGivney. He was a Catholic priest. Someone in his parish died. And he was like, 'Dude, this sucks. This man had two kids and a wife and he died. He was the earner for his family. We have to do something about this.' So he convinced something like 200 of his male parishioners to join what he called a mutual benefit society where they would all chip in money and they would help pay for this guy's family for a little while and then if any of them died, some of the money would go towards them. This sounds very similar to life insurance, right? And that's sort of what it became. And so the Knights of Columbus is now an organization. It's a fraternal organization that's been around since 1882. It has something like 2 or 3 million members. They have $30 billion in assets. They do like 5 or 10 billion a year in revenue. And it's a fraternal organization for Catholic men. And the whole thing is that you pay dues, something like $300 a year, and you basically show up in your church after hours and you guys plan charities that you're going to do together. So predominantly it's like pancake drives or they do a lot of like homeless stuff and they're there to help each other and at this point they're a huge lobby. It's quite powerful. But the way that they make money is they sell life insurance to their members and they crush it. It's been around for over a hundred years and it's a massive business. And I've always been interested in this type of business. And what this is is basically a shared interest group that they get together for and help other people or help themselves in a variety of ways. And it monetizes by selling financial products, insurance products. And I think that this is a really interesting business for a couple reasons. Number one, the Knights of Columbus, they are actually growing mostly through young men. For decades, young men were not joining. It was mostly old men. And they have local chapters. I think they have like 14,000 chapters all over the country and it was mostly old men and it was kind of dying and what they're noticing is that young men like between 30 and 40 are joining and it's their fastest growing segment. So I'm interested in it for that reason. The second reason I'm interested in it is because these exist for all types of organizations. So for example, let's use Good Sam as an example. Have you heard of Good Sam?
Good Sam is an RV owner membership. So, it's all based around a shared identity and community and they monetize through financial stuff. So, Good Sam is if you own an RV, you spend a couple hundred a year and you get some better insurance for your RV, but you also get like discounts to like campgrounds and things like that.
Another one is there's this thing for... it's called the USCCA. I was a member of it. When you get your concealed carry license, you can pay $300 and you can get access to monthly trainings for like gun ownership, but also you get insurance if you ever get prosecuted for shooting someone. And they do about $400 million a year in revenue. And these are huge businesses that last a very long time. And in my opinion, there's a lot of interesting opportunities to jump on this whole loneliness thing and monetize it via financial products.
You're saying you basically take a deep interest-based community.
Yeah.
Could be religious, could be non-religious, could be RV owners or whatever. And then you become a member. You get to meet other members. So you kind of get community belonging. You get maybe some discounts that immediately kind of justify the value of your membership because it's marketing for them. But the real banana is you figure out how to sell a commodity financial service, but people will have some preferential attachment to you because you are the community.
100%. And I think now is an interesting time because the loneliness thing, it's quite easy to like capitalize on that. And two, these things last forever. What do you think?
