3 businesses we think are about to blow up

going back to the roots a little bit with m mfa everyone says they want more ideas i've got two of them i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a tray one okay so everyone's lonely we know this i wanna talk to you about two different radical ideas you're listening to this podcast we know you know we know well i these two ideas i've already been interested in and i was just front 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 ish right we have predicted a couple like bio hacking things not predicted that takes too much credit but like we talked about it fairly early in the adoption cycle which you we're basically big pharma yeah predicted and developed several from several pharmaceutical drugs on this podcast would you like to go down memory lane and have a couple of them i don't actually know all the ones that we did obviously gl ones testosterone what else are were we talking about for a long time you you've brought up gl ones kind of before they even got to market before oz ever got to market t businesses and you were towing 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 have invested in we but well we invested one that 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 in the different business opportunities that exist in ivf i think anyone's actually done those yet the idea there is to build a a trusted brand in the ivf for world a chain the chick f a of ivf as i like to say and a boise you trust okay but go on what are you doing 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 gonna be popular and two probably the best way to position this new trend i've ever seen so okay palmer lucky ceo founder of andrew also started oc he was at this conference and someone said something to him a question that i tend to hate and he's the 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 wipe you out you gotta start again didn't have your network 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 wanna stay together most of the people who don't wanna stay together should stay together especially for their kids look if people think ss i's are fine which they're not but if they were then oxytocin doping to so it's really critical right so you know people sort of drift apart over time oxytocin is safe but it if it's understood we use infants the bonding hormone more that's right it's the mammal pair bonding chemical there's things you can do to increase the uptake and there's there it's it's very well understood also totally unregulated which is great unregulated spaces or a lot easier you do you can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on sig chemicals supply right now and if you do that maybe you won't maybe you won't dial alone okay so let's recap what we just heard here so palmer lucky tens a billing there guy very successful he said if i had a work 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 good you you're absolutely right most of the time when you ask somebody like what would you do if you started it up again they'll just give you the most vague hand wavy he immediately had not only a great original novel surprising idea but he had the pitch ready to go lock to the bass the best and i hate using the f word first principles i hate using that word because it's over played and it's just not used correctly but this is like a kind of a textbook case of that he starts with divorce is a huge deal it impacts fifty percent 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 and on 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 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 followed these weird subreddit with bio hacking and this is how i learned about gl ones this is how i learned about a little bit about testosterone and what i've noticed is oftentimes these people are wrong they'll say things that are it's 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 on reddit at the subreddit and there's there's this one called just oxytocin and i've and it's basically mostly autistic people so a lot of people who have asp burgers a lot of people who suffer from ps 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've like are 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 the infant and so it right when they have the kid it like oxytocin i believe it's one the it's when it gets released the mother starts creating milk and they bond men get it after they have sex you know when you're c you know that nice feeling right that's because of oxytocin a lot of mammals a lot of animals the is there's a strong correlation between when you when mammals have a lot of oxytocin they do bonding better with their partners so they'll be like they study these i think it was called prairie dogs 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 da up with somebody perfect hand clap i i feel a small surge of this male pop 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 have you recently just had like silent eye contact very like you're four inches away from your wife and you just hold eye contact for like thirty seconds to them and 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 icon together and i told my wife i was like hey i wanna try this and it's like so we have like we have like a scheduled time to do this i'm get it's a little bit weird but if you wanna be adventurous tonight the eye contact thing is is it awful thought eye contact do you do it hey i wanna 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 brainstorm 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 sponsored this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys back to the show yeah i've done this before and my wife literally starts crying it would cry within thirty seconds she starts crying it's like the most bizarre thing to me because i don't feel the urge to cry i did it's 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 gonna do it today i'm gonna do it tonight in fact that's everybody's homework tonight thirty seconds maybe a minute if you feel freaky of straight up eye contact yeah it doesn't matter if it's your spouse or roommate just the mirror if you're really you know if you're really in one of the spotify wrapped top one percent listeners well one of the reasons why you feel that way is because of the chemical or the hormone oxytocin this is is it this also why like skin to skin contact with a baby like kind of you you hold the baby on your chest they make you like take your shirt off in the hospital amongst amongst laugh yeah yeah that i mean i do that with my kids i'll be holding of i'll take my i pop the top i take the shirt off and i and like i wanna hold them because it it feels special you bond more and and what i didn't realize is that i i i if you if you google buy oxytocin you'll get like a bunch of interesting websites they're they're usually called like something sciences or something pharmaceuticals where you can buy it and like a pure i don't know if it's pure i'm not using these words correctly but from a from a idiot point of view like a pure block of it it's a powder like a butter what do you mean like it looks like a nasal spray okay so here's what i'm getting at it's it it's like a it's like a a powder but now like something whole sale yes so you 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 blue chew which sells e dysfunction medicine if you if you go to him i imagine they might start selling this but you're noticing is that this french thing is be being turned into a nasal spray because that's the only way that you could take it you can either take it to that or i think like a like a gas mask you you can't inject it it's and it's not a pill but they're starting to sell this and my you do need a prescription for that looks like not to buy on some of these websites like you can just you can click and order it right now yes so you you you sent this over and this immediately got my like i i feel like my brain overheated for a minute because when you hear a genuinely interesting great idea you bet you don't understand fully you don't know you haven't researched it you don't know the the efficacy of you don't know the safety of so that those are all the caveats yeah but but the way soul of an could it it could still be bullshit like right like this is totally under understood so let's preface everything by saying that well we should explain the prairie prairie volt thing the the study that they did so most animals are not mono right but there are a few that are that have an intense you know bond a mono and so they studied these prairie bowls where once the male and female mate and they bond and they spend enough of this like brief time together they will be mono meticulous for life and they will not only not go with other partners they'll even attack if another like if a male there and a female comes he will like kinda push her away and then they did studies on this in and a very small sample size so not like a robust study like a maybe bullshit 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 fifteen centimeters apart from the attractive but 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 how we're gonna feel and how we're gonna act and so i'd say there's one 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 and thinking your way there it's a feeling thing but feelings to them are this am morph sort of you know mystical thing it's just something that happens to buys like the idea of a soul whereas in truth the feel basically a feeling is a chemical brain state that you're in and then you have a conscious read of it that says oh i really like the way that that means that means i'm in love right this brain state this 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 right so we have a a kind of a read of the chemical state and if we could find safe ways to alter or or or grease the wheels on certain chemical states that's really interesting to me and the reason why is these all these ideas sound a little far fetched before we had the miracle weight loss drugs like they 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 for love or for being bonded with your partner if i find that really really interesting and then i think further the example you just gave of people who are autistic or have as burgers using this to bridge maybe a social gap that they have is really interesting and when i was reading about this just before the pod because you mentioned this idea and i'd never heard of it one of the ways that it was described was it's like a highlighter so it's not that like it's not a love potion it's not like you take something that 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 they did studies where if somebody was domestically abused they wouldn't this wouldn't like override that and make them feel loved 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 wanna get away from that person and if it was good the warmth it would amplify the warmth for that person so i find that really i find that 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 so i was listening sending to someone else some other doctor talk about it and he was basically saying he was like look like there's not like that much data to back this up so it's not necessarily that it's proven 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've have been like coworkers 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'd like ideas that seem very freak 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 all putting that's strange yes but like maybe baby that's kind of interesting it's so i went in texas newman somewhere it's like yes not weird we are doing that but i just i i think it's interesting i i think this is very 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 a a selfish standpoint of like maybe 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 a subreddit where these guys there's one guy who had asp burgers and he was talking about i keep calling it asp burgers is it asp burgers am i saying it wrong sorry guys there's a pee in there somewhere between the is it is it murderer that you're saying it's not ass ask per sorry guys the subreddit where these guys who have this are talking about like the writing daily journals and they're like alright i just took the dose sorry okay i'm feeling hoarding now that's probably too much of a dose okay ten hours later i took a second dose i noticed that i it's 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 twelve months you and me and our listener are gonna 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 i don't do drugs i i i don't even go to burning man because i'm scared of like you know just new new experience i'm very happy in my life i just kinda like to chill you know in in a happy little bubble i've i always have a a 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 i there's there's all obviously you can protect yourself that way but it's also oh over time i've seen how things that initially sounded very fringe can become very normal and not that long of a time you know like when you years ago were like oh i heard my achilles and so i injected bp vpc whatever one fifty set and in my and it's and it's healing my achilles and i'm like that's a crazy thing to do you're like now it's the wolverine stack or whatever right like yeah i'm like yeah even more reason not to take this you turns you to wolverine whatever like don't know i don't want that evan and now peptides are are are shockingly common and same thing recently a psychedelics company just got acquired for three billion dollars by eli lilly did you see this no what was it called is probably the biggest psychedelic acquisition ever this company called i don't know how you say it ata beck they just got bought for two point eight billion and you know psychedelic are the same sort of thing right like you know growing up psychedelics we're seeing as a certain way right it's like you know tripping balls and it's a way to have a good time and then 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 twenty years of therapy in twenty minutes type of shit now again this is maybe anecdotal there's whatever all i know is it went from very fringe and and labeled a certain way to way more mainstream and now seen in a very different light but it's the same thing this the sort of social acceptance shifts over time for these things and i suspect that something like this is also something that we're social acceptance could shift over time the idea you said of hey before we go to this team retreat you know quick everyone pop you know let's let's do the flo in our nose here real quick it's gonna help that sounds like laughable right now but i don't know that i've seen this shift over time many times now right i said so who's to say this isn't also one where where that might might be true i have i texted jack smith our resident bio hacker and i said have you ever taken this and he said no but one time in intern internet my company got f 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 that was is so the the opportunity sniffing blood hounds something's there so that's cool that that was one of mine but i think that's interesting and so this is this is one of those things where we're gonna have to look back in twelve months and be like where we where we on that or not ten out of ten a great segment 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 usual you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft 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 dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses okay second one have you ever heard of the knights of columbus so no is this that medieval play that you told me about once no that's 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 to check this out so we're talking about the lonely loneliness epidemic a little bit so in eighteen eighty two there was this guy he was a priest up in new haven in connecticut what was his name his name was mc give he was a catholic priest someone in this parish died and he was like dude this sucks this man had two kids at a wife and he died he was the earn for his family we have to do something about this so he convinced something like two hundred of his male people and his priest to join what he called a mutual benefit society where they would all chip in money and they would help pay for the guy's family for a little while and then if en any of them other 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 f phenomenal organization that's been around since eighteen eighty two it has something like two or three million members they have thirty billion dollars in assets they do like ten or five or ten billion dollars year in revenue and it's a internal organization for catholic men and the whole thing is that they you pay dues something like three hundred dollars a year and you basically show up in your church after hours and you guys plan charities that you're gonna 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 they like it's quite powerful but the way they midday 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 and help other people or help themselves in a variety of ways and it monetize 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 fourteen thousand 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 both like between thirteen and forty 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 no what is 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 dollars a year and you get some better insurance for your rv but you also get like you get act discounts to like campground grounds and things like that okay another one is there's this thing for it's called the usc i was a member of it when you get your concealed and carry license you can pay three hundred dollars 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 four hundred million dollars a year 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 it 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 kinda get community belonging you get maybe some discounts that immediately kind of justify the value of your your membership because this is marketing for them but the real the real banana is you figure out how to sell a finance a commodity financial service but people will have some preferential attachment to you because you are the community one hundred percent 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 well i i mean i've never heard of this i have heard of health care shares i mean i just it in general that's a thing right like there's a whole health insurance life insurance model that's kinda like this as you you usually religious i think is the the general way these go and i'd never understood if this is just some tax loop loophole type stuff or if there's a better value prop for these things do you do you know a lot about these healthcare share programs for some it depends what your offering is for some of them there is tax benefits so there's some like weird rules around if you are a membership and you are considered a i think they call it a a mutual benefit membership where like everyone gets the same benefits you do get you don't have to pay taxes on i think it's the the the investment gains of your premium something like that there is some tax advantages for sure but that's not required in order to make this awesome so so i'm looking at this now so so it looks like these healthcare care share programs are often like instead of paying into your paying you know two grand a month to blue cross you pay the same two grand a month or maybe even a little bit less you pay maybe thousand a month into a health care share program and now if anybody in the community has that forty thousand dollar surgical bill the group coordinates to get the money paid out to that person who needs it but i think there's some weird stuff for like legally they're not obligated to pay it it's like a ty trust type of situation but like not contractual in the same way that that health insurance might be although people who have had trouble getting health insurance to pay for things that they think should be covered probably would disagree that that that is any more likely to be paid out is is is probably a fair fair criticism but what's going on here first of all health insurance is like a whole another thing where i'm like i i don't know if i would touch that that's very messy but the majority of these businesses they not insurance companies they are partners with someone else who does it and they get a more tailored plan so so the nights at columbus they just have all the money and the members and then they go to who nights to columbus might be one of the few that does it maybe does bring enough now but like aa if you know aa so aa does billions of dollars in revenue is association of retired people i think it's if you're above fifty or sixty you automatically get a letter from aa that says hey come join aa they'll get our magazine you can come through some of our events and you'll get a discount on your health insurance and they partner with united and so they are not they license their name so they are the trusted brand and something like the marketing channel but they do not actually provide the health insurance but but they're a partner and so they aren't actually running that well these these faith based business are very interesting so just a a a interview with the guy behind angel studios so angel is probably the tenth biggest studio in the world and you've never heard of it and it's basically all values based content they call it which is like one out of every ten of their movies or tv shows is religious like it'll be like the g like game of thrones for but the but the book underlying book is the new testament and it's like told the chosen are chosen something like that it's like a a show about jesus and he said two hundred million people have watched that show that it's like it's like on amazon prime it's like one of the one of the most watch shows ever in the history of television is that show it's on seven it's on the seventh season and they help produce the first three seasons of that but they make they make all kinds of movies and shows and their community is basically three million members who want content that's gonna have no cursing no drinking no drugs stuff like that and also just heroes like good good people doing good things are in the movie so like it can't be just like a dark film where like everybody's kinda bad right or like everybody's flawed and messed up and it's just a bunch of messed up people living together right like they're trying to avoid that type of content and so like for example they have one movie right now called the runner if you watch the trailer for it's owen wilson and sky allen whatever richardson and something like that and basically the the premise of the thing is they're delivering an organ donor like the they're organ donor van they're like driving this this liver and suddenly like three cars like pull up in front of it and i have guns and they're like how much does this liver go for in the black market they're like a million dollars and they're like oh shit we gotta get out here they're all that trailer last night in a movie and in my head i was thinking there's like eighteen guys like trying to this this body part for only a million dollars it's crazy like they did so much at work for i i got of margins is this this operation running i just overhead worth it right like in the movie they're like blowing stuff see the cost of ammunition lately and they definitely spent more than a million to to get yeah i saw that get delivered but the and so what about it well the so but this this business is a juggernaut they're doing four hundred plus million dollars a year in arr why four hundred fifty million in arr it's a public company you can see their their their data and the way they did it was they basically said they had a worldview in fact the guy who started he is epic marketer who did the marketing behind like poo at squat potty was like one are these like really viral marketers you know like dollar shave club like they would make videos like that do like a whole like mormon cabal of these like really good marketers up there in salt lake and they they all those companies that i think you named are either mormon based or like some affiliation and they're really good marketing so this guy is a latter day saint and and you know so what he did was he was like tired of looking at like youtube videos where you you know your kids you never know what you're gonna get when your kids click on youtube like they can get to they're two clicks away from watching somebody like you know smoke meth and so he's like you know that's not great so he created this like filter and like because the the project didn't even start as a real business he literally just took a movie i think it was like cinderella man it it it it would wipe out all of the cursing the sex scenes the drug scenes but it would leave the the rest of the movie and so he's like you know the gluten furry movie basically yeah and so he creates this filter and he publishes it he publishes the movie and immediately gets sued and he ends up having to like pay ten million dollars at a lawsuit somewhere along the way but he hit this tool and these movies started attracting a lot of people so like a hundred thousand people eventually wanted like the service they then started doing this thing where like you would go rent that like technically you would rent the dvd for a dollar and then that gave that his group the like permission to like wipe out all the scenes and then give it back give you the streaming version of it or something like that like created this whole loop loophole to try to make this business work and finally said alright i'm tired of getting like sued by the by the movie industry because they don't like that we're doing this why don't we just make our own movies in our own tv shows that just have like out of the box are clean you know better for you did you raise funding yeah they raised some money but like it's amazing that they've you know they've reached this incredible scale and it's really only like you know the they it's like two or three million people it's not like that many people but two or three million people each who pay you know thirteen to twenty bucks a month for the subscription this streaming service you know just like you're paying for peacock and paramount and you know whatever tier two tier three streamer service that you you you subscribe to and then the members vote on the content so basically they'll take a a movie that's already made and they'll show the the trailer or they'll show like a snippet of the movie to the two million members and the members vote and if seventy percent of less than seventy percent green light it the deal is dead no matter what but if more than seventy percent say yes then the movie like kind of gets picked up by them and it's gonna go into their marketing pipeline and whatnot and they have like a higher average like rotten tomatoes and hit rate than you know all the popular studios how did you meet this guy ben met him somewhere at a barbecue or something like that and it was ben knows that i've been you know curious about the movie and tv industry making a movie and he said you know you should talk to this guy he's done it you know he's went from no experience the movie business to now doing almost half a billion dollars a year in revenue for their movie kinda it's kind of their like values based a twenty four right like do you know anything i i saw a movie last night i went and saw the chris hansen movie you know what that is catch predator yeah yeah it's got movie it's about him that he doesn't like like didn't he get canceled also or something though what i think he was cheating on his wife i don't think he was a predator but i i yeah i don't think he was breaking the law but i think he was doing not good stuff oh that's that's part of the movie is that he was while he was doing this he wasn't like the the a good husband basically and it's called prime time it was pretty great and it's got robert patti it was awesome it's an a twenty four movie in every great trailer leading up to the movie was eight twenty four i don't really know anything about eight twenty four other than scott be right who who i have a man crush on with a tech guy is now working there do you know anything about eight twenty four well what do you wanna i know something's about eight twenty four but not at how on how does someone start a studio like because it seems like they came out of nowhere it seems like there was a start up at first and if i remember correctly their movies early on but kinda kinda dumb or arts seat like they weren't like mainstream movies but now it seems like everything they do i wanna see it well one of my business theories is that a great way to think of a business idea is to find the reaction to the action like for example when facebook was in its absolute prime and everyone was using facebook facebook created this world where all your photos would be public and they would be permanent you post them on your profile your timeline your history everyone could see them and so that became the action and the reaction became snapchat photos you could send that would self destruction in ten seconds and it's actually that the the popularity of one creates the need for the other and you see this a lot of times right so you as you know we talked about gl ones as food calories become abundant you know you have door and you have fast food and you have all these you know the the way that the food industry went well then there became a higher a greater need for the reaction and this happens over and over and over again you see this right now with like screen time limiting apps and brick and things like that like things that are getting quite popular that are really just like a reaction to kind of the the current norm and so a twenty four was also a reaction to the action in a way where the movie studios and the people in hollywood really started to become extremely conservative and predictable in the movies that they would film fund because why would you fund an unproven screen play by this you know cool hips who's drinking matcha when you could just go to spider man seven you know like why not why does just do spider man again and so they kept g towards what they call these like four quadrant movies i know if you've seen seem like the quadrant have if you ever heard this before what are they it's like males under thirty females under thirty males over thirty females over thirty is whatever a simplified version of that but it's basically the big short i if if both of us said like y do you like the big shorts i love the big short well we love the big short because we're in one of those quadrant and it hits for us but guess who it doesn't hit for it doesn't hit for like women over forty in the same way as it does for you know men and they're kinda twenty to forties and so the highest kind of potential for a film is something that satisfies all four quadrant you know harry potter right now it's like if you go you know the new hbo series for harry potter they will put a billion dollars into this because they know that millennials who read it growing up are now thirty forty fifty you know fifty years old they like it but so kids still and so you're gonna get this a huge demographic the tam is really large and so what happened was studios became quite risk ave diverse and they started g towards sequels superhero films and other things a that created an opportunity for folks like a twenty four who could go pick up at pretty low cost and pretty un competitively all the other films that were being ignored all what what are the great films that are being ignored right now and so what they found was that these independent directors were creating really interesting things that could be produced on a fairly low budget had pretty low expectations because they there was not a lot of demand in hollywood for their their product and so they started creating cool edgy they're making stuff nobody else was making so they were like differentiated out of the box do you remember the the early movies it looks like like it was like the movie the room which i saw was pretty awesome i don't know some of the other earlier ones so do no and i'm sure by the way this is like an extreme overs simplification and somebody who like lives in the movie business is probably like yelling at their phone right now being like what that's not a that's not a whole story you're forgetting a b and c and i'm sure there's a b and c and they they did a bunch of things well you know they they branded their studio well they have limited edition merch they figured out a different form of marketing so like the timothy cha like where he leaked his the movie trailer instead of saying this this summer coming to a movie theater interview you this guy this guy in the pot film of the year it was like a zoom recording like a meeting that got accidentally leaked that had a file name that sounded like a real thing and was like an hour long and it was this weird thing that they were doing you know that that sort of stuff you know for example the guy yesterday was saying they have a movie with kevin james you know like kay queens kevin and kevin james and they were like he was like to market that movie kevin james was like hey you know the character in this he's like this painter just like teacher who's like a painter so let's just create an instagram account where i'm a teacher and a painter we don't even mention and people are gonna be isn't that kevin james but then people will be like is that just like a kevin james lookalike alike this guy says he lives here and he's just painting every day and he doesn't what what's going on let's just do weird shit like that and then they sent him to the super bowl and they bought twelve seats and they left you know ten of them empty and he sat you know eleven of them he sat in the middle of the super bowl with with empty seats on either side he was wearing a tuxedo when he's was holding flowers because that's like a famous scene from the movie and they didn't even explain what was going on and suddenly and but they paid for other influencers to be in the same section because they knew those influencers food be like do dude that's kevin james and why are all those empty seats why is he bringing tuxedo and why is it holy flowers they put out their story and it created intrigued and people started wondering what the hell going on and then the movie comes out and it does really well because they can like do this gorilla marketing that the traditional studios don't really understand or don't have the like dna to go do i think a twenty four and some of the ups starts had figured out that because make like when you think about the cost of making a movie it's pretty mind blowing so he talking about a movie they made and he goes yeah cost fourteen million to make okay how much you spend on marketing forty so fourteen million to make and forty on marketing whoa so the fourteen million dollars does that include the actor salary everything yeah okay production cost so it's fifty four million dollars all in for this all in so so but but this is very common i i was talking to a friend who made a movie and i was like he'd been three or four years since he had first told me about the idea to when it came out and i was like damn that's takes forever but i guess that's just the creative process he's like do you know how long filming takes for a movie i like that he goes thirty days thirty seven days for us i was like you shot the whole thing in thirty seven days he goes yep end to end thirty seven days and that's was like was that fast he goes was not as normal thirty days that's how long it normally takes to shoot these things is that now editing takes a production what's that a normal movie can only take thirty or sixty or ninety days the should the actual shooting of the the filming of the movie wow so you really spend time like rioting and getting it funded that could take like years sometimes to get it like it to get it to the for day one of principal production and then afterwards you have to do all the other like mixing mastering color correction like all that stuff that could take time to edit can take a lot of time and then you have the marketing and distribution so the whole thing takes years but the the making of the movie like the the actual like hey lights camera action go say your lines that thing's like thirty days which is insane to me same thing with us like i think the grand theft auto games they would spend like a couple hundred million making the game like years of development and engineering time and animation and all that stuff but then they would spend equally like hundreds of millions on marketing then like maybe that grand theft auto specifically but video game for the video game industry is very common to do that so for movies and and video games which are two of the kind of like because you know parts of the american economy they spend more money on marketing than they do on actually making the product which is some people would say it's kinda sad but it's kinda crazy thanks podcast guest is brought you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that have so like it 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 so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call him an a members fdic this business is foreign to me i definitely we should do a whole episode of like seems like a terrible business he was telling me he was who was our biggest hit it did two hundred fifty million box office and but and it only cost us fourteen to make so then i go okay how much was the other cost like marketing so that's forty okay so now we're at now we're at fifty four two hundred fifty million in revenue alright that's not bad you got a five extra return oh wait that's a box office so how much do you keep out of that like what does the theater get the the distributor he's like well fifty percent because we're big be much smaller than that if if you're kind of a new cover so the two fifty becomes one twenty five one twenty five on against fifty four million to create so you you your biggest hit in like a hits driven business where you're can have lots of flops yeah that profit needs to cover six flops this this is like a two point something x return but that's the same way with with with all creative businesses that's the case so for example mark manson when he came on two or three years ago he either said this on the podcast or when i was hanging out with them his book for i think it was penguin sold twenty million copies and he was telling me one time he was like yeah like my mom and dad like they always kinda gave me a hard time because i was they thought i was just kinda playing on the computer because i was blogging and then i turned into a book deal and all this stuff and i was like well when did they start taking you seriously he was like well penguin put out their annual i think it was penguin i could be getting it wrong they put out their annual report because they're owned by news corp and he was like they said that i outs sold hillary clinton and i was and i helped like make the whole company profitable that year and he like was and i was like wait so you were the reason the company was profitable and basically with a lot of these publishing businesses whether it's games or it's movies it's like one or two things it drives everything and the rest is like hopefully it doesn't fail that's normal what was surprising to me mean was that the one or two things that hit really big your biggest hit i would have just expected to be much more than like a two and a half return i would've have thought it's like a like a in his case like a book yes you're right most books fail sure but when a book hits like the subtle art hit and you sell ten twenty million copies well that book costs almost nothing to print and so they're printing money when it hits and that's what i was surprised at you know like can start investing like you get a fifty x a hundred x a two hundred x a thousand x return when you hit and i was surprised that the movie business isn't like that or at least my layman's understanding from a few of his a few of his examples and looking at their business yeah and it doesn't seem like it's a fun business to be in right now and i think he explains why by the way he goes have you ever met a billionaire who doesn't wanna make a movie i haven't and he said like there are every year let's say a thousand films get made far less than that get distributed so most even of the films that get made not just the films that get pitched and and written like screen plays and stuff but i think there's some tax advantages there i get pitch this all the time and i never like i get these emails and i never like actually seriously read them but is there something where if you find a movie there's some type of like you can depreciate yeah something weird but it's it's not that good like you can it's a you can write it off but it has to be has the thing has to go into production so it's not like you could just like say you're doing it and like get it you have to actually spend the money that the money has to go into the project and the project has to actually go get get start you know day one of production they change the rules on this and so it has to actually get get made and if there's no return well yeah you might have saved money in tax but you lost your entire principal you know what i mean like you a million dollars and maybe you get a three hundred gave write off but you might lose your million dollars you'll probably lose your million dollars i didn't think it was gonna take the entire episode to give a shout out to grind it by the way they listened to the so we had the are you wearing a are you wearing a grinder vest dude they listened to the episode that we had with the or the the former owners of grind great episode did not hit in terms of youtube wonderful episode with make a rick marine when we talked about grinder and how they like turn the business around they decided to send me some merch and it's kind of the least gay merch ever it's it's an art tare vest like i wanted something a little bit more like with some bizarre a scarf yeah i don't know like something i like this is this is way too straight for me i wanted something a little bit more gay i thought it'd be more enjoyable but i appreciate the love grinder i just wish that you'd lean in a little bit grind where's my puffy vest is a hot collab grinder m m well that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from we're actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast