Jack Smith On Biohacking, 2 Easy Business Ideas, PLUS Why Procrastination Is Good

some reason he's saying i one of the best measures of your aging is like your nighttime corrections so i'm i'm starting doing this treatment where it's you shock your penis etcetera and he's like i'm going once a month etcetera i'm like dude i have that machine in my house for i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a day's off hey josh is this aging stuff this anti aging stuff is this legitimate anti aging kind of as a it's emerging trend right and i kind of feel that it's just it's hard to know if this is scam or not and then why do we give brian johnson dave asp etcetera any credibility because how do we know that good at anti aging they're they're in their fifties dave asked can say he wants to live to a hundred and forty and stuff right and i i realized like it's really powerful and dangerous to criticize someone's appearance like i don't like it either but for me one the only measures we have about if these guys stuff is working is their aging score thing right i was just thinking of an analogy and i kinda of felt like saying that someone's a great marathon runner but they're only at the halfway point like maybe these guys are good at avoiding injuries so they're more likely to complete the marathon but how do we know if they're gonna get a good time in marathon only know when they're like a hundred or something in comparison so these are the people we looked towards as the influencers even like doctor rhonda the patrick for women's she's in her fault i think so they're all middle aged peter hub they're not a hundred years old so how do we know they're good at anti aging they're only halfway there i mean sam you had a better anti aging score you like you couldn't upload your results but you would be like number one i think on there from your thing yeah sean i did the rejuvenation olympics like basically the rejuvenation olympics it's this test done by true diagnostics diagnostics it's like it's like a blood work company and brian johnson has a partnership with them and i think the science is still like iffy but the idea is like if this if the length of a cell that you have i forget which what the cell is called mitochondria or something like that there's a theory that like the length of that is correlated to your biological age i did this test on and i scored great so great that i messaged brian johnson and i was like this is wrong right and he's like well no like you're you you you you're like the number three on the rejuvenation olympics and the thing is is like i'm a eighty twenty type of guy i do like eighty percent great and and then i like fuck off for twenty percent like i eat poorly sometimes and but i just think that a lot of this the takeaway from when i did that thing was it's mostly genetics i think i do mostly good stuff but there's people who do so much better stuff and i just think that it's like largely genetics but because that one of the only measures we have is this score then it means that that gives that's the only lender of credibility we have to if you wanna like you guys are able to present this podcast because you sold your companies right so you have some legitimacy there but the only legitimate litmus test we have here is your aging score but then it's like okay sam you have legitimacy so you can just say oh i have a great score because i have coke zero every day and then everyone buys coke zero and thinks that's anti aging best supplement right so what why do you spend so much energy on this then because you're spending money you're spending time yet it sounds like what you're saying is look the science the measurement is iffy the incentives are a little iffy because there's a lot of money to be made by by claiming certain things you know we're not it's not clear the cause in effect we don't know what what really works what really doesn't work you've spend fifty thousand dollars of supplements in your submarine it was like i didn't really feel anything maybe if for deficient you might feel something but you're a smart guy why still spend the time and energy in this space because actually i've tried out all these different things right and tony robbins that she has a book about all the emerging health stuff that he tries out etcetera so ninety nine percent of it i don't notice anything however one percent i do notice big things and for me it's kind of like okay we don't know what works what doesn't work but i've only got one life and i've only got one body and just experimenting i can find those one percent things that are very impactful and like under the radar and stuff the the the one percent stuff i had to guess is just eating mostly plants and animals and lifting heavy weights and like going for walks so actually not for me but yeah oh well fuck me then alright what is it so one thing and this is this sounds crazy as well right this so this this is the thing all of these things have all the science and they're like and dave asked be someone to be like okay this like extract of blueberry it reduces your aging because it does this etcetera like and an all his fifty medical studies etcetera one thing that actually has been a game changer for me my family the science just doesn't make any sense like the science isn't there and i don't spend much money but i i've spent fifteen thousand dollars on this thing and that's like the low end one it's called energy enhancement system and that that's my call sex by fred it's like sara is a divers see here but brought some ee tonight so what is it so basically at the high end these machines cost over a hundred thousand dollars the setup again the science when i'm looking at it like i'm a tech guy right so i'm going in i'm we in the waiting room and i'm looking at i'm like dude this is just a normal computer monitor like what what what what's the deal with they're saying like oh these are all there's like sixteen of these computer monitors and computers all laser aligned and it creates an energy vortex in the middle of the room which let let me explain if you google this you're gonna see a photo the photo looks like a doctor's waiting room except the chairs are literally lawn chairs we're talking thirty dollar lawn chairs the type you would bring to like your kid's soccer game and then the room has eight tvs and the tvs this looks like a sports book here go to vegas and where you can bet on sports and there's eighteen different monitors horse racing over here basketball over here and you sit in the shitty chair that's what this looks like and like you know how like when you a kid and you in the cable used to go out and it would be like a bunch of like colors on the screen it basically just looks like that that is it yeah that's what i'm i wanna let you know that's what i'm looking at and i wanna let you know this sounds incredibly ridiculous what you were saying yeah go ahead i minded continue there's also people claiming that this cured their cancer like if you look what this can be used for that just say alright whatever's was wrong with you this will cure it this pure cancer this cured aids so a better i go in and i'd actually been suffering for a year with severe headaches i had this thing where it's called new daily persistent headaches it means basically you wake up one day and you have a headache every day so i had been struggling with that for a year and i tried loads of stuff like ozone therapy ketamine like i tried everything and the i actually think that this ee thing is the only thing that worked i just went in there and i sat in a long chair for an hour maybe two hours and then just came out and in my stomach like i can feel my stomach like reorganizing etcetera turning but not only me yeah my wife cured her migraines her sister came out and then she'd been having trouble sleeping it like she had her sleeping issues and then her mom did it as well with us like is crazy actually tony robbins has you can pay like a lot more and sleep in the room overnight so tony robbins has spent two days in it so i have no idea about the science but i've tried out so much stuff and i actually think this was the only thing that works even though the science and nobody can explain it it doesn't make any sense it and it also doesn't help that when new google energy enhancement system the first listing is their website the second listing is paperwork from the state of nevada about how they're being sued so like the not a good look jack not explaining the science second listing is the a lawsuit that they're facing this sounds ridiculous where do we go from here i just playing jack i think this is very interesting to be honest i also again i can't emphasize this enough what's interesting about you is that as crazy as you sound right now you're actually a very smart guy and the cool thing about you is that you're a very independent thinker meaning i think if something somebody presents something to you you're quite skeptical by default even things that are like consensus you're you kinda question like wait why does that work how does that work are you sure that that works but you're also extremely open minded and experimental which means you're gonna land on random things i don't know if this is one of them but like random things that are kind of non consensus but but work right which is you know as an investor those are things that you want as an entrepreneur those are things that that have served you well and now in in in your post entrepreneur entrepreneurial career you're you're doing the same thing which i find thing i think i'm kind of just like if brian johnson drank too much coffee and just got adhd and tried that bunch of stuff like what i really admire about him is like if he's testing something he's like testing like okay how does this affect my blood work to know is it working whatever whereas i'm just like okay let's just froze shit at the wall and see what sticks like just trial out everything like some of the stuff that brian was trying like was just messaging on twitter i'm like dude i was trying that like two years ago like some of the different emerging stuff but i was not actually i i just tried some things and then see alright does that do anything like he had talked recently about for some reason he's saying that one the best measures of your aging is like your nighttime e corrections i don't know if you've seen this so he measures directions yeah looked peter i'm i'm starting doing this treatment where it's like shockwave therapy that you shockwave your penis etcetera and he's like i'm going once a month etcetera i'm like dude i have that machine in my house i didn't see that when i visited you should let me indonesia let me give it a whirl what my you tell you your guest that i would love to give him that give that thing a try and what's the word on that neck does it do anything we actually is yeah yeah i don't know how should we talk about nah not help stuff a bit yes okay bob i was gonna tell you if you want because that a bit is like yeah thanks again for having back on the pod because meet so many interesting people and your exposure has grown so much and then i've met a number of people even in portugal that listening to it and so i was speaking some listeners and said okay what we want is like they said to me like okay sam shawn sometimes they just tell stories too much so we want actionable stuff as well and we want business ideas so one idea that i can share with you so what you got i've got one business i was considering it but then it doesn't make any sense for me but it seems to make sense i would think for other people is that kind of like doing like the sam w brothers by the way did you sean did you just he just kinda like you know a lot of people are complaining about your podcast because of this i'm going to exit for you oh the complaint was like yeah you guys talk to us it's like like the podcast i wanna talk to me it's like don't worry i've got the solution things that are actionable specific useful insightful for not that other stuff that they usually do look oh what the sam warner brothers sam was like you know they cloned air airbnb and brought it to europe oh the sam brothers maybe we gotta give contact sam brothers are these these three german brothers who are famous because starting in like nineteen ninety nine they copied ebay but for germany and within ninety days they started and sold it for close to a hundred million dollars and then they did that with airbnb amazon so they would just find silicon valley companies and their whole thing they didn't use great words because they're german they're not allowed to use this word but they called it blitz they they would blood blitz sc the internet so they would find amazon and do that in thailand they would do airbnb button france whatever and oftentimes they were so hardcore they made them massive to the point where they couldn't even like they try to build a company to sell to group on but their group pot competitor got bigger than group on and they're like shit no one can buy us and so they're famous for doing that anyway go ahead so i was thinking you can do something similar but four just like bootstrap businesses like it doesn't need to be a tech vc type thing and just one dumb example is like in san francisco and they think they have in austin etcetera like you can get a d scan d x a for like twenty five thirty dollars and it body spec it's awesome awesome and the test takes like seven minutes and they've just got the process down amazingly they have a van with this dexter scan machine in it and they're just giving people seven minutes appointments like go in do a scan and gym people and many people in general will just love it because it's the i think it is the most effective way of measuring body fat in your body there's different methods you can use i believe this is the most accurate and if you're and it's measures like muscle mass so if you're working out at a gym it tells you if you're gaining muscle or not and in san francisco really accessible but then in portugal for example just one example like he can only do it at a hospital and in lisbon like it's not else in the rest of the country and it costs like two hundred dollars needs to drive there body spec was bootstrap and they built it to like more than two million in revenue even with just like fourteen vans i think and the rollout strategy is pretty simple like you just partner with like crossfit gyms and use parking their parking lot you know so you're like right on monday we're gonna be at in this crossfit gym on tuesday will be here etcetera so i felt like just cl that in portugal you just buy you can get a used dexter scam machine where we went to mr beast house and he has one in this office actually a deck it just people coming by and everyone thinks it's called to just do a dexter scan like he asked he asked us like oh does anyone want a dexter scan just i've got one in the office you can buy it for like it was great by the way one guy jumped on the dex scan and we all bet his body fat percentage to it's just like the ultimate like if you can't do this in society anymore but we were like oh no no he's for sure he's for sure eighteen point three no no way i'm going under and then somebody got it right how much of those machines i knew i think like fifty thousand and that was more affordable than i thought because a whole body mri scanner which looks kinda similar but is doing an mri scan that's a million dollars and so this like k reasonable and then i saw some used for like fifteen thousand and then you just put it in a van campbell our our buddy patrick just bought one oh he did for he basically so he lives in puerto rico and he bought so he bought a dex machine and he put it like i think in kinda like a community like he has like a gym and it's like kinda you you made it like a community area so like anybody in his kind of ex expat neighborhood can come there and like you know work out and do it so we did it as like a he's interested in it but also it'll attract other health people and like kind of a social thing almost by by adding this machine yeah i used to do that as a kid but we did it with breath like avoid buy a breath budweiser or go to a party we all all surround it and like try to guess yeah doing with the with the mri or whatever it would be a lot would be a lot more fun subject project the idea is to sam war body spec so you basically clone the body spec bootstrap business model in europe yeah because you could launch it for like less than fifty thousand dollars i mean van you can probably buy on finance as well in this medical machine just like finance etcetera and then just get one van and that could kind of serve all of portugal go even you know you must be like alright on monday i'm in lisbon and then on tuesday will be in this region on wednesday will be here and you book people seven minutes lots when that's working just even get another van or just get another van in spain in barcelona in france like because it's just not out here but every like it has strong it has wide appeal and it's affordable like even my wife is not into this kind of thing but she's interested like how is my i'm working out so is it working like i wanna see am i gaining muscle and stuff so yeah that was one i did that's a cool idea like that have you guys seen a pre novo have you seen p novo sean yeah yeah i've done a pre host can is so i'm gonna go do one as well it's a pretty like wild idea i don't know if it's effective or not but basically getting an mri like i think we've actually talked about the sean like i think in fifty or a hundred years we're gonna look back and we're gonna be like can you believe that since the beginning of time you could have cancer or something bad growing in your body and you would just have no idea you'd have no idea that it it'd be like an intruder in your home like i don't know there there could be someone down there we're not sure and oftentimes or or some of the times they say well had you just found this earlier basically had you come through our front doors and gotten this mri we could have solved this like this was a very sol thing and so they kinda take they're taking that that idea and anyone can pay money it's thirty five hundred for one or a thousand for like a lower end version and you could walk in off the street and get these mri full body stands and i don't know if they're if they're great or not but the idea that is cool was it cool sean i mean it's definitely cool you go you lay down and they basically do a full body mri which normally either like would take a long time it'd be like four hours or something but they do this in one hour because of their they basically have re jig traditional mri machines is what they tell you right so they say we the mri machines and now we can do it faster and we can get higher resolution we can get more more images and then we have special software that can they can read it and and all this stuff so i went there and lay down watched top gun and came out and they were like cool you don't have cancer i was like alright guess i'll just go back to my day then and you know that was that i thought that's kind of amazing and i i love the mission of it so i love the mission of basically knowing understanding what's going on your body being more proactive versus reactive when it comes to you know like you said so many things that if we had caught this sooner that's one of the the great regrets of life right and that you know it's like the tesla model they're starting with this really expensive thing that only rich health nuts can do and then but the goal is over time get this get the cost down through you know economies of scale as well as like the technology curve going down so that you know these become instead of a few thousand dollars like have a few hundred dollars to do and then more people will do them that's the idea now i must say the counterpart argument which is i was pretty pumped about this but i'm also a new i'm a le i don't i don't know the science behind the i don't know what's real what's not i showed it to a friend of mine who was a who was a surgeon and i my best buddy's is from college and i was like did this thing have you heard about it like no let me check it out and so he's like cool can you set like send me the scan and i was like oh you can yeah you can't get the fight like the folder here's the zip folder of all my my image is because he was like that doesn't sound right he's like i don't think you can do what they're saying you can do he he's like i don't believe that you can get that many images at that resolution using this technology nor do i think you can see what's actually like a dangerous thing without doing the like you drink the thing and then this contrast it lights up differently in your body he's like i don't believe that and so he's like show me the images so i show the images and and i'm trying to defend it but i also don't know shit i'm like no no it's technology like the guy he had the story his friend died so you know he was motivated and he's like what are you talking about just show me the images i showed him the images he's like so these are normal mri images these are not he's like first of all this is less images than they say they have he's like look at this on their website they say we take this many slices this many this many cuts he's like look there's twenty seven images in here so where's the images he's like exactly this looks exactly like an image bitch he's like thirdly i could see your penis in this i was like god damn and he's like four he's like fourth you know the resolution of the ability to see what's actually going on like this would not be useful enough do any kind of diagnosis and then i was at a dinner with the guy who started p novo and i was like hey not to be buzz killed but like i did a scan talk my doctor buddy and he starts laughing as soon as i talked to my doctor friend and he's like oh i know i know and i was like okay well i was gonna say it anyways he said that it doesn't make sense and it didn't really work and that there was not like not as many images and the resolution he's like no that's doctors always say that they didn't you blah like well isn't that a bad thing if talk always say that he's like no i mean like not all doctors but you know we hear that a lot i was like cool so what's the answer and know what would i tell my friend that would have him not believe that i'm you know getting their notes here and he was like you need like our software to be able to we have like machine learning and he started saying some worries like we have special software that reads this i was like cool but i felt kind of like he brush it off now he it might have just been because it was a dinner and he didn't have time to get into the details and maybe he is really sick of just hearing this over and over again i'm not sure but i personally didn't walk away super convinced that in either direction that this is like super useful or not and i'm saying the whole thing because i've seen a lot of people promoting this thing and just if it's useful here is a personal anecdote counter point do your own research and figure it out but that that's kinda where i where i landed with it where i thought well if somebody can explain something simply to me and in a way that's convincing then i i you know i'll i'll just air on the side of if it's probably not miraculous it's kinda where i landed to say one pro point sam and i were at a dinner and the lady said like she just had a feeling that her boyfriend should do the scan she wasn't sure why just kinda had a feeling and then did the scan and they found a lump and yeah he had cancer he had cancer and he got surgery like two months later and the surgeon was like how did you detect that you had this you don't have any symptoms and if we hadn't caught if you had called this just like a few months later you actually would even be dead or not be able to speak right now and so she's becoming like they are becoming like advocates for this in their marketing videos and stuff so that's a a pro that it it did catch you head of heterosexual and i've i i've heard that also from other people too and they when you go in they say one in twenty scans so you know five percent of people who come in have a potentially life saving diagnosis now it's again it's hard to verify a claim like this it's hard to know but yeah i have heard anecdotally other people say oh yeah we didn't go we did find something so you know it's not nothing and but but even besides that as a business this thing is gang busters right they make so much money off of off this they've got i don't know how many locations but they just raised like seventy million dollars for to expand novo and i think they're in like i don't know twenty look cities around the country now so one thing is as what say is like i've done this thing called cuba bio which it's funded by google and dare at least seventy million in funding perhaps more than a hundred million it's kind of a competitor to bruno novo etcetera so i've done that in america but they similarly say like okay well i was the chief medical officer at google and we have all these google engineers so we do ai and that's why we can do it in forty five minutes instead of four hours etcetera like yours sanctioned i did the same thing in india and got exactly the same results and i was only doing it for forty minutes like i think they're just silicon valley branding there also google engineers in india turns out there's just a lot of google engineers out there google engineers like the harvard extension school graduate right it's like there's a lot of people that have this stamp so one other business idea i did think after going to this retreat because this retreat i said there was six thousand dollars but what was a cop it's called a i w o is the center the six thousand dollars it included their mri that in america you're paying more than three thousand dollars for and that was just like like a few hours part of it this was a whole week and including your hotels etcetera but then speaking to other people they were like you know many other countries have amazing medical tech turkey korea etcetera the challenges they have with is branding and also like the printout outs might be in korean or turkish so i think what this guy the aw place is doing amazing is he's targeting people that are interested in bio joaquin following brian johnson and then he's getting the influences so he's just got the guy who's number one number two brian johnson's leader board he told that guy hey you can come for free but just refer eight people and you also be there to help people interpret their blood test results or whatever so get all these other people to pay six k and i'll give it to you for free i feel you could just brand a bio hacking center in any other country if you have strong links to the country because what they were doing here is they don't have their own mri scanner he just took us to all these different labs in india he just made connections with them and they kind of just got us to skip into the front of the queue you know so a concierge medical for anti aging but you could do that in other countries we had a buddy jack i don't know if you remember this sean you reminded him too when we worked out of the founders dojo they have this crazy business and it's didn't end up working but they had a lot of people who are interested but they couldn't get them over the line but basically if you wanna get a boob job or other types of plastic surgery you could get it in america of which it's elective and it's very expensive or you could go to india and get it done or mexico and get it done and the claim is that the doctors are as good the cares as good but it's five percent of the price so instead of i don't know how much a boot dot cost but let's say instead of twenty thousand dollars it's fifteen hundred dollars or two thousand dollars and these people had created his business called where it was all on medical tourism which i didn't know that was a thing and they got a lot of interest customers but because they were startup they could convince these people to trust them and things like that but it was actually pretty interesting when they told me this i was like there's no way people gonna do that but there are a lot of people going to do that i remember that john howard was doing that right john howard yeah it i don't remember why it didn't worked out i guess they just couldn't get people over line by we were in this office where but like guys were mining bitcoin and all this shit and they were like in this little room trying to get convince these people to fly to india to get like they're be a root canal yeah i get like a root canal in like mexico like you can go on the beach afterwards and just sit there like and it was just like i i know a lot people that actually do this and you know i think all he missed was it was just a hair transplant in turkey was all he needed to do that like jack you got feel head of hair but you have you looked into you explain to me what's going on with the turkey thing why is this seems incredibly popular and also why turkey i'm not sure why why turkey what they were saying in india is they're just like hey we've got so many people here in india that he's like if you in america you've you've got some obscure disease then none of the doctors have ever come across it before whereas in india like there's like ten of the patient they're had ten other patients that week with the same issue and is true a bunch of the doctors in india i was speaking to the guy and they had studied and worked in england they're not like going to somewhere random places he's like oh i studied at this medical university in england so they're saying it's quantity of people i'm not sure what attributes make turkey the leading bit for hair times and stuff alright i'm gonna do a deep dive on the turkey hair transplant it's insane like i have seen so many people do this i think it's like basically ten times less or something than than in the us so you know i think there there's obviously a cost it but i just don't know why turkey there's this funny photo that this guy shared a line where he was like on his way back from turkey on the air on the on the airplane and he took a picture of all the men sitting on the plane and there was literally like ten heads that you could tell the the hair had just gotten sewn in and so i was like holy shit this thing is big yeah like there's instagram influencer like transplant daddy's that are like the the the the turkish guys and they're just every day that's the content that they're posting and it seems like in any kind of incredible business for whatever reason you have this thing on here we asked you in advance what you wanna talk about you have this thing on here that i thought was interesting and i don't know what exactly what it means but it sounds intriguing you're like there's a counter to founder beast mode what does that mean it was funny because at the camp affair i was trying to explain to mister beast the project that i'm working on now so was saying like you know people working tech and then they get burned out and they so i'm building place for them to detox some technology and a recover from burnout and he's like i literally cannot relate the talk to this idea because i just don't get burned out but he has amazing strategy but like the thing ninety nine percent of people can't do this which is he said i'm either on a hundred percent or i'm off a hundred percent so he said i'll just work like seven days in a row until i pass out and sleep and i'll just keep waking up every day every day every day and just keep doing that but then when i feel that i'm getting burned out i'll just do zero work and i'll just watch documentaries all day and just procrastinate all day i'll feel better again and then i'll go a hundred but it could also be that you know he's in his twenties like he's not super old like i was speaking to this other portuguese start up here and they're like yeah i don't i don't know what burnout is either but they're like twenty three and they're just like working all these hours and i said one thing analogy i thought of is like i went to this thing like y comb angel pad and i've never worked that heart or achieved that much in three months it's free ninety days i worked so intensely and we just got amazing stuff down we raised two million pounds in funding we got a we came up with a business idea we managed to get a cto to join our team we achieved loads of stuff but for me that's a ninety day sprint that's if you're just trying to do that endlessly it's like telling you same bolt like okay great you just ran the hundred meters just keep up that pace we're now doing a marathon but just keep up that same pace you ran the hundred meters in doesn't work like at some point you might feel like it's going okay at some point i feel like you are gonna burn out so for me balance is important and not having tunnel vision just be like i'm being productive productive productive i feel procrastination can have benefits as well the way we came up with the idea for long is we was just playing around with a bunch of different mobile apps and we wanted to record a meeting with one of the coaches that we had there so we're hey is okay if we just record the meeting to take notes and so we open this voice recording app and then it was free and then it's started bla some video ads on like full volume and in that call for like coca cola or something and actually that's how we got the idea like wait a minute what if these ads instead of being really intrusive and advertising something not relevant to us what if they were advertising based on our user profiles other apps that we might like so is that kind of balance i think yeah i think what you're saying makes ton of sense i i think about everything in either seasons or gears there's are words i use a lot which is you know there are seasons of life seasons where you're gonna sprint focus seasons where you're gonna explore and wander i find it very useful for myself to label the seasons know what season i'm in and embrace that season because if you're in the season of wander it's very easy to feel really anxious that you're not being productive but you remind yourself that's not what this season is this is a season of that sort of exploring dabbling whatever if you're in a season of of productivity or focus you might feel guilty for saying no to go into your friend's thing or to go into this event or whatever but you remind yourself that's what this season is and this won't last forever the fact that it's time boxed as a season maybe it's thirty days sixty days ninety days a year is very useful because you know okay this is not forever but for now this was the right thing to do the other thing i talk about is gears like i need to have multiple gears like a car that i can shift into and out of personal life i do this with like i can be in work creator boss mode but if i bring that guy to my marriage it's not a great marriage right so i need to be a different guy when it comes to marriage when it comes to my kids i'm silly playful dad and so i like intentionally think okay like i almost visualizing my head like i'm shifting gears now i'm gonna be you that other guy and i wanna have a few of these characters that are very useful to me versions of me that i can say alright you're driving now i'm going to a workout so it's not so playful to add it's more of the workout which is like the guy who's willing to push harder to be you know a little more intense and so i think you wanna have both i think you wanna be able to when you know what to do be able to focus and when you when something's not working be able to zoom out and get go go wider diver and dabble and and sort of procrastinate and play until you figure out something worth focusing on not everything is obviously worth focusing on so i i definitely agree with you there i also think that the the stage of life for matters a right when i was when i first met sam and i met you jack i i was probably twenty four twenty five years old i remember the that that year i slept in the office i think two hundred and fifteen days out of the year it was a nice office but still you know i was just like totally devoted to it i don't think i was particularly productive i was just like willing to throw everything at this and when i wasn't at the office i was doing our mastermind dinners i doing other things that i thought might help me be successful because it was really the only thing i cared about at that time it was to be successful now i'm thirty six years old i i don't have that same burning desire to be successful i care about other things and so you know what today makes no sense to me made a lot of sense back then and and vice versa so you know i think i kind of i agree with pretty much everything you said i i don't think it's had odds with with the way that i operate at least well one bit i did thought was interesting to think about is that for me actually people don't put enough time into thinking what they want and i think sean like us you just touched on somebody about hall of us i think did clearly we we knew our north star why we're working really hard right and mister beast i told sam i was not joking but sam was like laughing off i was serious i was like i think mister beast if he wanted he can be president of the us at some point because he just since the age of fifteen has just had one goal and it's not changed for ten whatever years he just said i wanna be the number one on youtube and that has not changed he's not changed that and he said no to a bunch of things but he just decided on that and went all in on that and surrounded himself by other people who were chasing the same goal but it was just all in on that it kind of struck me a bit that i think actually a lot of people don't put enough time into thinking what they want yeah you you brought up something that i get pretty fired up about which is figuring out what you want and taking the time to do it i think i've i've been really bad about this the reason i get fired up because i look back at years of my life i spent on the wrong things and you that's a very expensive thing like years in my twenties are sort of like prime assets that's the b tran real estate of my life and if i spent it on things that i didn't really think through or actually in retrospect we're sort of obviously dumb things to to to work on that that brought a lot of kind of like lessons learned for me and i what what what what what was that lesson project selection is the most important thing that amongst talented people the the biggest sort of variable that actually happens assume you're gonna do the table stakes right which is you're not gonna do the thing talking about like you're not gonna just not like take no action on something like i i was already passed that i was gonna take action i was gonna work like hard enough maybe i wasn't gonna be the hardest worker on earth but i was willing to work hard enough to make the thing happen and again i'm was also like intelligent enough i was not the smartest guy but i'm that's not that's not the reason i'm gonna fail is because i just can't figure something out okay so there's me and like i don't know everybody i knew all of my friends we're all in that same but we're all we all wanted it we're willing to take action willing to work hard enough and we're all about smart enough to figure things out so what was the biggest difference in in like wherever everybody landed and how their life went and it was project selection it was you know the people like at the time when i sort of started to think about this i was trying to build a sushi restaurant that's like okay building a restaurant is probably you know on the low end of like poor project selection decisions especially for somebody like me who didn't have a passion for food nor was like you know that was not my dream like i did not get joy out of making food every day or you know bringing to life you know a man or whatever so absolutely the wrong project for me and then i just sort of made similar mistakes along the way when i even when i had a golden opportunity where you know the birch family believed in me they hired me they they name me ceo they give me a blank check and a team full of engineers and basically they funded like fifteen million dollars and a bunch of engineers to running this ideal lab where i could think of any idea i wanted but the the one boundary box was it had to be kind of consumer and then he liked social and i like social whatever like social to the the idea that we could create the next twitter and next facebook that was so sexy but it again like pretty terrible project selection where you know the odds of success even amongst the most brilliant people you know are are sort of like point oh like there's like six people have done it you know in the last thirty years period six human beings on earth that have made like a snapchat a twitter or whatever and so again poor project selection like at a time where what i really cared about was being successful i was choosing a project that had like almost no chance of being successful and i really wasn't smart enough to see the opportunities around me that that were much much better for me at the time but i wanna read you this this thing i was reading this essay by program it's called why smart people have bad ideas talks about this exact thing you know before he started y comb he did via webb but before he did via webb have you guys heard of the startup he did before that no not that remember it's something called arctic and so basically it was like nineteen ninety five and they have this idea called art and it's basically to put web galleries online and he's like oh it's great because i love painting i love art i'm kind of like a programmer i understand like this internet thing is here and that seems important so like what's the internet idea oh i should marry my two hobbies arc on the internet and he's like cool and so he says in retrospect i wonder how much how i wonder how we could have wasted our time on something so stupid galleries were not excited about being on the web even now you know decades later let alone back in nineteen ninety five they don't want to have all their stock visible to some random online anonymous visitor like that's not how the art world works and he's like basically we couldn't sell the like we couldn't get any customers and he's like by the way we're not alone here like paul allen and bill gates before the they start of microsoft they started you know travel data and he's like it was not anywhere near as successful with microsoft like same talent but working on the wrong project alex had a great way of saying this he said when he was doing his gym business he went to like a mastermind and at the mastermind the guy was like cool i heard everything you just said about how you made your five gym successful he's like you're like a nine out of ten execution on a two out of ten opportunity and you're asking us how to execute better when actually you should be saying you should be realizing that you're only working on a two out of ten opportunity for me that was speech sushi restaurants for him that was running brick and mortar gyms and once he changed what he was doing like he didn't have to work ten times harder but he could get literally one hundred times the level of success so paul graham says this thing he goes to why does this happen why do hackers have bad business ideas let's look at our case we had such a lame idea because it was the first thing we thought of i was new york trying to be a starving artist at the time the starving part was easy and he's like i was looking at ar galleries anyways and when i learned to make website it seemed natural to to mix the two together because if you're going spend years working on something it might be wise to at least spend a few days considering different ideas instead of just going with the first idea that comes in your head you would think but people don't in fact is a constant problem even in just the world of painting if you if you wanna go it'd be a still life painter you would sit down in front of your table with you know all your materials and you might spend five minutes thinking about what you're gonna paint but it's hard to spend more time than that looking at the blank canvas you we get so impatient that we just start painting anything but the problem is painting takes time it could take you know days weeks months to finish a painting you're gonna go back and wish you know halfway through that maybe you had thought about what you actually want to paint but it's too late you've already kicked it off just because you couldn't sit there you know for for an hour thinking about what to work on and basically says that this is the same thing they see in yc two that basically founders will pick an idea because it's too uncomfortable to sit in the not knowing and think about what you actually wanna do and what what actually might be interesting for you what might actually might be a good idea and so we just start and i this is what i was guilty of at the beginning was just starting and it seems like cool i'll change it later but once you start you get wed to it like i remember when we thought about pivoting we only thought about pivoting to other restaurant ideas or other online delivery things it was like we could only think inside this box because anything else felt like admitting failure giving up starting from scratch going back to the bottom of the mountain even though that might have been the right way to do it it mentally was was far too hard to do that i think maybe i might have mentioned this on a previous episode i can't remember but actually mark andre has something he said like the most important factor in determining if a startup will be successful like billion dollar company said most investors think clyde the team or the actual product or idea like oh wow it's an amazing team and he said he thinks it's none of those he thinks the most important factor is the the market size the market and growth rate is saying if you just have a crappy market you can have amazing execution the best team ever but they're inhibited by into how big a company they can be build by the size of the market yeah there's a there's a funny business school like network guy comes in and he's he's given this talk and he says alright business school you wanna create like a successful like hotdog dog stand what's the number one what's the number one factor of success for a hotdog dog stand and you know hand goes up location so it's not location they say you know ingredients having the highest quality product do you wanna have the best product on the market says nope i say marketing you gotta be able to take get the word out there and spread your your story nope he says the number one thing to make a successful hotdog dog stand is a starving crowd and he said just in general as a lesson of entrepreneurship like you should be hunting for starving crowds because if you go to a starving crowd even without the best marketing without the best you know product without the best team or execution you will still succeed and i you know if i forgot the the phrase here but it's like you when a when a great entrepreneur meets a bad market you know only one of them keeps their reputation the bad market keeps their reputation whereas if it's a great market and you're at even an okay entrepreneur you you'll still be successful it's a very hard lesson to internalize but it's proven very you know trade my life at least so it's really hard to pick a great market we were lucky that we did and many other companies in the same industry as us also became really big companies but luck a big factor there yeah i remember you're telling a story about vu so vu made like video ads for iphone apps and one of sean's buddies helped start this thing called app eleven which became this huge thing and it's same type of company and i don't know what it was worth sean like thirty or forty billion like a huge sum and i remember jack i think you i forget exactly how you phrase this but you're like we only did okay and we had a seven hundred fifty million dollar exit you know we could've have been like as big as these other ones because the market just pulled this out of us like people were just begging for this product and like you weren't technical at the time your or you weren't very technical your partner wasn't technical i don't think at all and i was that i'm like how long don't you do this because i think when you had sold there were some article that said v was making a million dollars a day so you guys were gonna do three hundred sixty million dollars the year you sold in revenue and you're just saying you're like two people just begging for this thing and we just got so lucky that we just picked it right when the iphone came out and we got it was just like it just got we got really lucky with that because we didn't do that good our competitors app love they were thirty times bigger or whatever the love and market they're a twenty eight billion dollar company right now yeah and they're like they're literally thirty times bigger and we only did okay but we still you don't made eight hundred million dollars or whatever and that kinda like i learned that lesson from you about picking the right market so so when fe so fe who's my my cofounder at be he was previously the the cto and cofounder of b and so when he joined was doing really well back then but it it wasn't it didn't look like a thirty billion dollar company it look like a one billion dollar company but i was wow this guy built a billion dollar company now he's sitting here next to me and we're working on the next thing from from scratch it's like what can i learn from this guy i was like how did you guys get that idea and basically what he told me was it kinda kind of interesting story jack to your point about procrastination he was like two things happened he's like the first was when i joined i wasn't the cofounder or the cto joined is like an engineer and he's really good he he's he's he's like obviously amazing and so right away they were like hey we think we have the wrong team like we have too many people here it's gonna we don't we don't have product of our fit we just have too many people which is a great like ceo sean was the we even app love or was it some other idea i'm doing a clothing business it was like style page they're they're they're trying to make a pinterest competitor at the time well i was like one of the many ideas so basically they were i think they were dating thing first and then then whatever so there was like they had like ten or twelve people he joined and the ceo adam who proven to be like a pretty like killer guy was like hey like we don't know what we're doing but we do know that is probably not the right team can you just basically like restart this he's like so just anybody who you don't think is like the like hardcore just down to figure this out let's get rid of them and let's go leaner and let's figure this out so first thing they do they fire everybody right it's like not what you would consider to be like the the origin story of a of a thirty billion dollar company then now they have like four or five people so three c founders plus con is the fourth c founder and i think maybe one of their guy and they are like cycling through ideas and so the founders previously had made like forty or fifty million bucks doing a i think like a dating like it was an ad network but i think for dating sites and so that's what they do they knew ad networks but it was like for you know generation one of the web and they had money to fund this i think he put four million dollars into fund the thing and then they were like we're gonna create the next pinterest saw pinterest getting on so they tried to create a pinterest competitor then they're like dude we're just like four like non stylish dudes trying to do this this is not working then they created like this life three sixty type of app and they create they created like eight or nine ideas and i was like so what was it like you were going in there you're brainstorming every day you're doing research like what was no i'm not really like basically one person would come in with some inspiration like hey i saw this this is crushing it or you ever noticed this problem and then we would quickly try to build a prototype take it to market and see what happens and see if it's stuck see if we like got momentum he's like but more often than not he's like honestly like i don't know like twenty to thirty percent of the days we just come in we just weren't inspired and we weren't gonna work on something that we didn't feel inspired by so we would just play fifa for like five hours and then we would all go home i was like what he's like yeah we were literally if we just didn't feel it like if the idea wasn't solid we we didn't feel like there was something there we didn't wanna busy ourselves and like occupy ourselves with a not good idea because then that would at least it's like dating somebody bad and you don't have the door open to meet somebody amazing and so he's like we would just play fifa and he's like while we're playing fifa we would just talk then we would order food that we would talk some more and we're just giving ourselves like relax the brain to try to come up with ideas he's like then adam went to a conference and this was like right when like iphone had like you know take taken off and he's like hey home he's like forget it we're doing an ad network but for mobile phones he's like mobile phones are gonna be big they don't really have good ad networks i know how to do an ad network that's what we're doing and he's like because they knew that business he's like he knew he told me exactly what to build it was like this is a dashboard that i need this is how this product is gonna work this is the speed that you need to serve the ad in and if you can't get it under that speed we gotta like figure something else out and they just executed like crazy at that point and and it it just took off and they were doing you know hundreds of millions of dollars at that time very profit and it was it was amazing i'll tell you one other story that you know kinda shifted my thing that was one about not occupying yourself not busy yourself in order to let a good let get create some space for maybe a good idea to land the other thing that stood out was somewhere along the way for con he likes to take these like young engineers under his wings so like he met these guys they were kinda interesting he's like you need to move to silicon valley come live on my couch and he convinced them like just come to around my couch don't worry too much just come out here for a few months and and of course that turned into they just lived there permanently in san francisco they end up getting into yc and we let them work out of our office and you you know you can learn something from anybody these were twenty year old kids who had never built a business before but i was talking to i mean learned something really important they're working on this idea that had started off really strong what they were doing was they took bitcoin minor so anybody who had a bunch of gpu space and they were like hey this machine learning ai thing is gonna be big this was back in like twenty sixteen maybe twenty seventeen they're like machine learning is gonna be big and these gpus are really good at running machine learning jobs so there's bitcoin miners who have excess capacity because maybe bitcoin price would go down and then they didn't it wasn't profitable to mine or they just bought out extra and they were like wanted something more steady and he was like he posts on reddit he was like hey if you have excess gpus for your miner you have excess gpus listed on our network and we will get machine learning customers for you to to run jobs almost like a aws competitor crazy and overnight like they got like so much supply of gpus it was insane like the the thousands of submissions in one day people were super excited like reddit comments were like oh this is amazing let me know how i can help like calling him finding his phone number and calling him and i was like wow this is kind of incredible and then what happened was a a few months later was kinda down on the idea and i was what happened he goes well the supply side was amazing it was like i stepped on a land mine it just blew up and he's like but the demand side doesn't have that same effect he's but because i felt it over here i kinda realized like what true demand looks like and i remember thinking like damn i have never felt that land mine effect at that time i had just never felt it i didn't feel that market poll that you were talking about if you don't know it you kinda talk yourself into like maybe i have it maybe maybe this is there are signals of demand and there's the difference between like maybe it's there versus holy shit we found something and it i wouldn't say you have to have a holy shit you found something right away but just seeing that in those guys kinda taught me oh there what i thought was level ten of what demand looks like for a business for a new startup it was actually level six and level ten is what these guys experience where you have like a half baked google form and still people are like prep paying you for the service type of thing oh okay that's what ten looks like now at least i know what that looks like that's what a great market looks like and what i have right now is a lukewarm market which is why i ended up having like a lukewarm you know success out of that business really really hard to find that ten hour ten market but yeah that is what we had and i think his mark hen says if you find that ten hour ten market which kind of unicorn right that the amazing market will pull the right product out of the company like right so for us we just identified mobile apps as the market that was amazing but we actually tried out six different business ideas like we created landing pages for each in the space of something like two free weeks we iterate on six of ideas and the right idea the market pulled it out with us dude that's so good i love hearing in these stories jack i love seeing you yeah i'm great to see look good thank you wait before we go jack do you a book recommendation for me last time you you came on here you talked about the guy who un unscrew himself or was un school as a kid i thought that was a really cool book do you have any any new book recommendations for me yeah one that i read that it actually you could we in like an hour or so and then for you guys might find interesting because we just talked about coming out of the business idea right and this i think actually is more helpful at our stage of life where you maybe have one success and many founders who've sold their company have a mid midlife crisis they don't know what to work on next and this book is by deepak chop and it's called the seven spiritual walls of success and i thought was really interesting so it's basically saying that his theory if you like he's saying everyone is put on earth for to fulfill some purpose and everyone has like a unique skill or skills and attributes that they can you uniquely use to kind of serve the rest of society and he's like you have found your goal when you blend your talent with service to others and thought was interesting and actually maybe just you know if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail i had just read tony robbins book but i did actually feel like tony robbins is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of that was i i didn't know this but tony then found that he had like a tumor on his brain that has made his body released like loads of human growth hormone own and so basically that's why he's six foot seven and he has he's just a massive giant growth spurt but he also feels like he has abundant energy and he's kind of using that unique attribute that it's very rare to have this tumor on the brain like the doctor told him dude you should act on this and get rid of it but there's a risk you might then get lower energy it's like dude i'm not i'm not having surgery then because this is my unique thing the abundant energy and it uses that to do these fifteen hour or whatever sentiment are so that's his thing that's unique to the world and in his kind of serving humanity in his own way it seems that he's just really passionate about this meals for america so i don't know if he's hit the goal but he was on track to hit donating a billion meals for this feed america thing and during covid he donated like ten million dollars to help it get through that point so kind of felt like he was a unique embodiment of that and then even with you guys then as well like i think like when i was talking till like ben levy you know sean you're thinking about what attributes are unique to you that you can kind of uniquely serve the world and and so that book i found was interesting in quick read what do you think that is for you well for me i think it is where i've naturally ended up doing this digital detox whatever center place because i have the capital to do it like i'm meeting a lot of people trying to do physical projects and then they just fail because of fundraising raising and capital and stuff so i think i have the capital and i have the experience of experiencing burnout and i'm just uniquely passionate i've been to this place in in bali like ten that they're basically i do this is your second home like you come here so much so i just do have that unique insight about how this can help humanity and that's maybe why i'm driving the project and i'm doing it for kinda helping humanity not profit is number one so i feel that i kind of just naturally have through reflection and etcetera arrived at this place deepak chop said the way to find your purpose if you're struggling he said it comes to you in the space between your thoughts and he said like rich is maybe not hard to action but he's like you if you if you're really struggling to find your purpose etcetera you should spend more time in nature and just in a quiet environment and just feel and it'll it'll will come to you but i kind of feel that yeah for me it's kind of organically i've been thinking about this for many years and arrived at this place that's cool man i'll check that book out thank you dude i'll be able to meet you doing this absolutely the best and that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a goal travel never looking back