All 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 like 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.
Ben, 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 a hundred to show you guys, and let's get it rolling. So, 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 vibecoded, but if you look at the website, 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 seat. 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.
The 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. This guy's figured it out.
Absolutely not. I am not going to this. Not a chance.
Do you think this will work?
Um, 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, you know, hundred billion dollar 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, you're an asshole.' And I agreed with that. 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 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, Todd D's wedding though, it says the dress code is enchanted woodland.
Been looking for an excuse.
What about 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 to go to other people's weddings 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 the thrill of shopping without the cost of actually buying the things. That made way more sense to me than this does.
All right, verdict is in. So, Clavicular, obviously this really popular looksmaxxing 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 claim for...
A claim that Sam also makes.
Another common thing you have with Clavicular.
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. Sam and Sean, would you email him? Do you want to be a part of this? Do you think it's a good idea?
Are you gonna email him, Sean?
Well, you know, think about it this way. I actually have this belief that Bryan 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 arc. We 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 pee. He's got all kinds of things going on that will all get reactions. He knows how to get reactions. And so, it turned into a very big business in Blueprint. So, I think for his — he released a waitlist, right, Ben? He has a waitlist for like his million dollar a year product where you can have his protocol, like 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 or...
Like 50 million a year after a year or two. And but the waitlist for his protocol, I think, was over a hundred 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 Kylie — you know, Kylie Jenner, what's her brand called? The makeup line or whatever, like whatever she did for 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 straightedge operator, is quite challenging when you have kind of lived this hedonistic lifestyle where you're like always out doing crazy [__]. And I think that there's more to it than just 'I'm going 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 Grede has done this with the Kardashians and launched multiple businesses with them. I know that — you know, what's that brand called, Ben? Congo Brands. Is that the name of those guys?
Yeah, Congo. The guys that did Prime.
Sam, you know these guys? Congo. 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 internet. 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 Congo Brands founder and you'll see a photo of a guy in a yellow shirt, if that's really him. It's like a guy in a yellow shirt in front of a really kind of dingy garage that looks like it's taken out of Kentucky. Yeah.
A guy who just went for a run in his front lawn.
That's like the only photo of him on the internet, by the way.
Yeah, that is really cool. Um, all 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.
Wait, I've never seen this video. Click it.
You didn't see this, Sam?
Was there a big denim convention? How did you miss this?
I don't really use Twitter that — I don't like log into Twitter. How did it — is that real? How did it fly like that?
Okay, 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 days ago that he 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 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...
Because 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.
Because that makes for insane speed and handling if you're racing. So, you know, tires can only go so fast. I think at like whatever some miles an hour, they just start spinning, and you need this ability to suck the air under you to stick to the ground in order to continue moving faster. Break that.
This doesn't make sense to me. That's real? That's real.
I don't — 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.
Uh, when do I use like...
When is the wrong question. The question is why. Like, why do I want rockets on you? Huh?
The only answer is because it's awesome.
Well, you can't like fly a car in Manhattan, right?
Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. But what it's going to be for people who want to take it on a private track and just do crazy [__]. It's like when people buy guns, you can't just go shooting people, but you can take it to a gun range and shoot your gun. It's kind of like that. Flying car ranges. But, uh...
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.
A little would have been nice.
Yeah. Like if they just had a big calendar and they said, 'This is when 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 is kind of like paid attention to this.
Except Sam. Sam's — I'm not in tech.
Sam's in fashion. Sam's in men's fashion.
Bodybuilding or something.
I'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 like, '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...
Yeah. Yeah. Our boy Nikita had a good tweet. Diego's reminding me that. Ben, did you see Nikita's tweet about this?
Oh, dude. I saw something on Twitter. You didn't. So 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. Confunctuous. That's...
All right. Conjunctivitis. Sorry we don't all have pink eyes. Can't see the vision.
All right. What do we got? What you got, Ben?
All right. And this morning, Elon kind of announced that he's gonna 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 like a really good way to get America bought into your stick, obviously, right? If everyone has a share, that's kind of insane. I think Anthropic said they're going to do the same, right?
Anthropic said not to every kid. Anthropic was like, we're going to give it to our tech philanthropy foundation or whatever. They're going to give it to something like that. They're setting up like a for-the-public thing, but it's not like you don't get it, you know? It's not like — right. This is basically saying, Sam, your children get a share of SpaceX each. That's pretty wild.
So, Ari, show this chart I just sent you. This is a favorability score of Elon Musk just in the last two years. So 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 was more favorable than disfavorable, and now you can see the purple line, which is people who have an 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 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 a start 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 is 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 could give them a Pokemon card, even if 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 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 her 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 $3,000. And guess who then became the biggest analyst of SpaceX? Who was following the Starship launch and the prediction markets and reading every bit of news and studying the feasibility of this thing, like became incredibly invested in this because 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?
That's hilarious. And does she read the reports on them and stuff, and she's coming to you with...
Constantly now. 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, and 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 she's just like in on the ride. And then...
She would hate that. But yeah, I wish she wouldn't come on.
Um, all right. What's the next one? All right. So, I recently started watching this Men's Health YouTube series called Gym and Fridge, where basically they interview everyone.
Andrew Huberman did see the Roadster, but you saw this, Sam.
Yeah, I saw this. Look at — let me 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.
Yep. 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, dog. Um, yeah, I thought it was awesome. He also talks about peptides in there, which I invented. Um, that tea brand he's got in there, I like that. Um, 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.
Inside the fridge was an affiliate code. Just use Hubin15 at checkout. Just paste it 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.'
I'm just going to blindly follow what you say. It's sort of like when you get stock investing tips from us. Um, 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 the — like, you know, he's McDreamy. He just start again with him as the 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, mainly I just like the branding of Gym and Fridge. I just thought that was an A+ 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 down every famous person. We do that. That'd be — tell me you wouldn't click that. Like Marc Andre said, 'Tidy whiteies and tons of pallet.' You know, that's where he's at.
Sean, have you seen this new podcast? Um, I'll have to find it for 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 gets really inner thigh, and like it's like, oh, two bros, we agree, and he like grabs — like the host grabs his thigh and he goes, 'That's really, really inner thigh grab.' And I was thinking like, can you and I have...
No, accident, that's his thing.
That's his thing. Could we do something like that digitally to make someone uncomfortable?
We just keep winking at the end.
Like, this has been really good.
I knew we would see a part of you we didn't see, but not that part. And we're 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.
It's just a very long shirt change. A lot of midriff is showing for too long.
All 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. So 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 his points are really interesting. So yeah, when I think of SaaS, I 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.
There was this debate where our friend Tyler has this company called Beehiiv, 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 — 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 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 didn't have is brand. I think network effects or 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 AI 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 demand either goes up or stays the same, 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 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 night out or humans getting together in some way. You know, those are good businesses to be a part of. Same, I think like Hampton's in 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. Uh, what's...
There's a lot more entrepreneurs too, right? Like there's a lot more — I'm joking, but what's the quote where it says 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 — like same meaning but totally different words. Uh...
Just like go out there, have fun, and break an egg.
Or like Cadillac reflexes.
Are you doing these on the spot? It's incredible.
Um, I... by the way, Peter Level built himself a kind of like a two- to 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. Peter Level's 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 a bunch of money. You don't need a billion dollars, but if you're making millions of dollars a year coding fun stuff 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 like 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 lived in the suburbs, so I had to get up at 6:00 a.m. I had to go to the office and I'd be home at 7:00 p.m. 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 want to have to write a blog post today. Oh, I got to record another podcast.' Like 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?
All 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.
