and i'm like yeah i can see how this would work if this is working on secure married you know two kids or the third on the way thirty six year old me dude seventeen year old me would be like this app is now my and i think that's what's happening so the the the general trend here is basically that i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a roll chandler never looked notice anything different about me today you're wearing a college shirt do you know what that's called nowadays sam no it's called look maxine have you ever heard this disturb i've seen genius ceo use the phrase look maxine yes okay so i wanna talk to you about l maxine because i saw this app called uma max and so i download it it says are you male or female i say okay male it says one million one million people have done this on you max are you ready and i'm like yeah i'm ready and so then it says take a picture of your face right now and i'm gonna score you on how ugly you are so get boy takes a bed selfie then it's like hey you want your score pay three ninety nine and i'm like gladly sir take my money apple pay three ninety nine and i'm a sixty nine overall sam i just found that out this morning but i'm it's something i've been wondering my whole life really is where am i and i am a sixty nine overall i am better looking than forty nine percent of the people which means the majority of people are better looking than me and then what's interesting about this so wait that math doesn't work out you're not better forty nine percent was there a hundred ten percent of people no i'm better than forty nine fifty one or better than me well why are you a sixty nine then shouldn't you be a fifty one percent no i don't know yeah that that doesn't make yeah sixty nine overall okay so i got a sixty nine but my potential is an eighty three i'm intrigued tell me more app and so the app basically then rates me on my jaw masculinity my grooming my skin quality my that one selfie of you in bed it's ai it's two weeks two do you take a side profile and then you take a front profile do they say about your jawline line you got a good jawline line oh dude jaw sixty nine skin quality sixty eight masculinity eighty two nice your boys a man yeah you know you're a man when you have to use an app to tell you you are a man so what's amazing about this app this app i saw it on twitter somebody tweeted out interview with the founder and he's hanging out on the subreddit and i don't know if you've seen but like on reddit these like here's if you go to the beauty and grooming category so like there can be a bunch of reddit in here number three and number five are both this number three is look max advice and number five is mail grooming with seven hundred forty four thousand numbers and so the these are three of the top five subreddit so he's hanging out in these and basically what people do is they will go post let's grooming just pictures of pub no it's your your hair your beard your face it's your your your your you're that's jeremy all that got it yes k and so you would post a photo of yourself and you would say hey give me some advice how can i look better strangers of reddit you know my family they all just tell me y'all you're beautiful honey don't worry at school i'm too embarrassed to ask you know i don't wanna look like a loser but on reddit we're all losers here it's all good and so they they post a photo and they say what i do better people give advice so what this guy did was he turned that into an app he's like let me sprinkle a little ai on this turn this into app the app does three and a half million downloads he's making six million in arr on this app right now a six million arr run rate the app costs three ninety nine a week when you unlock your thing so i think it's like one of these like you pay to unlock because oh my god i really wanna know and then you forget to un unsubscribe you know probably the the reality but you're supposed to do a daily update as you take the steps they recommend so for example now this part the first part was me doing it for science the second part was me being like you know it's got a point here so i click in and it's like hey you know your first year is says your glow up routine and it says first priority is skincare how are you gonna make your skincare better so i click it and it says easiest way to improve your skin is living your processed foods opt for me it's a natural produce work workout five times a week and wash your face with warm water in the morning evening that's the easy mode this says the best mode is you should clean clean your face in the shower moisturize after the shower ex at two or three times a week and it says products for you and then there's like some wow i'm skincare product and i went and immediately was like buy the shit i bought this twenty dollar thing that it's not like their product it's like just a link to amazon of sara like moisturizer after hours something like that and i'm like yeah i can see how this would work if this is working on secure married you know two kids or a third on the way thirty six year old me dude seventeen year old me would be like this app is now my life and i think that's what's happening so the the the general trend here is basically that guys who are you know guys it's like acceptable to be like how do i how do i look better and normally the answer was just we go to the gym that was like the societal norm was you could become a gym and you're not seeing us doing anything weird or lame or whatever it's like acceptable and now guys are like but what about from the neck up what what am i could do about that and honestly sam this is my greatest fear come true and the greatest fear is for for years decades centuries and millennia men have had a truce and the truce is this beauty is all relative and if you don't try i won't try and while women had to put on makeup and wear heels and do lip fillers and then they started they it became a beauty contest and they all had to continue to keep up with whatever the norms where guys were like i'm not doing shit to my face so like yeah me neither bro i'm not doing nothing yeah it is what it is i take it or leave it as is condition and now as soon as people really start doing this it's gonna become an arms race everybody's gonna have to do it do you do anything for your face nothing dude i not no no moisturizer no skincare routine i've never applied the cream in my life i'm not even really sure what you would do if you put it on like what do were you supposed to i no idea yeah i've never done it either but since i married a black woman i now have tons of like lotions and all this crap like in my house and i'm slowly starting to like learn a little bit about dude you're a mug that stuff oh that's for wizards it doesn't it doesn't work no i've been my eyes have been open to the korean skincare routine i'm like slowly understanding what all this stuff needs that i wanna use it but i've never i've never really gotten into it until recently where i started seeing some wrinkles and i'm like alright i think i can learn now right and the pro the problem is is that like when you see issues like you know you should have done something like five years ago right but this is amazing this guy's is doing it it's one guy yeah i i don't know how many other people but yeah one guy basically saw the trend on reddit and decided to product when he saw people were doing on reddit which i think is just a a great like you know one one common way to do a business is that is you you observe an organic trend and you say cool could i use tech to make this more efficient and could actually like ramp this up when did he launch it this think is pretty new to dude this is like yeah it's not that not that all i don't know exactly when you launch it but it looks pretty pretty fresh it's also such a simple app like when you download this you know that this is built by like a growth person not a care person not an engineers engineer this is built by somebody who was like trying to solve a problem and was like cool big blue buttons one button per screen can't get lost alright i'm gonna take take a picture i'll give you a number alright and then i'm gonna tell you how to make the number go i'm and i'm also gonna give you bigger your potential number which is higher and i'm gonna sell you a product to fill that gap and like they also have like a a chat g so it's like your coach so it's like you know you can go on here and be like how do i lose more body fat and then it just it you don't even type the question you just select from one of the pre preset questions and then it types out some advice for you from there then you can ask it more questions and it's basically like a custom you know chat gp type of interface for you from there and the idea is this is like an overall trend so there's some more more thoughts it but i don't stop there people shared this in my work slack and they were like you know trying to get us use it and i was like this is like asking me to step on the scale a few days after thanksgiving like i'm just not gonna happen ignorance ignorance is bliss i don't wanna know i don't wanna know the the realities but this is awesome i guess i'll i guess i'll use it are you paying three ninety nine oh yeah play three ninety nine aussie i would've have been happy to go to seven ninety nine i'm just saying out loud so i asked a friend i said i said under the under anna anna anonymity i said i he i know i was like i know he knows about this kind of the trend the space is younger he's more into tiktok and stuff like that i was can you give me that you're you're honest reaction what are your thoughts on this and he said he said well to most older guys this movement just seems completely be like what are what are what are your young guys doing nowadays but it makes sense he goes he goes it's a response to men generally being rejected and cast aside we can now take ownership and pride in how we look can you max out your natural genetics and ultimately become a more desirable person you know societal men caring about their looks has been viewed negatively and narcissistic statistically seen as lame or even gay but now the view of the the the narrative is shifting where they just frustrated and they wanna be able to you know to be their most attractive himself i could see this trend continue to grow it's already big in korea with the korean beauty trend basically like in korea i think men's beauty products are like you know on par or closed on par with with women's beauty products and he also pointed out like an interesting thing which is that i don't know if you're not a big sports guy but two of the most famous college athletes not named caitlyn clark the two two most famous male at male college athletes are there is this guy named caleb williams he's the the quarterback at usc so like imagine like the most alpha male position in the country you are the quarterback of usc you know the in la you are the you know you're the guy and he's this big athletic guy but he would paint his nails and and he would get he got criticized for it and people were like oh man don't i wanna like because he's in the draft right now but i don't want my team drafting a quarterback who cares about that stuff and i'm like i want a tough guy and people are other people are like what you talking about why you over react the guy paid the now so what and then the there's a a guard a a duke so the you know duke is probably the number one basketball program in the country and this guy jared mccain built a huge following on tiktok by doing goofy tiktok dances where he's laughing and happy like even if they would lose a game you know a day later he would still do this and he paints his nails and like the opposing teams would would harass them in the crowd every every game calling him all sorts of names he was like dude i'm just doing me i'm fun he's like yeah it's super superficial thing i did it once i had a good game so i decided to keep doing it and he's like i don't know i it it's fun what's the big deal and at first he got like a lot of negative backlash but then over time over the course of the year on tiktok this guy of mask like one or two million tiktok followers i think he was one of the highest paid you know college athletes can get paid now so he's one of the highest paid n athletes because he was getting sponsorships from beauty companies like the nail polish companies are sponsoring him you know paying this guy you know tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands dollars just to post a simple ten second tiktok and so in the end he had the last laugh and and he you know for someone like me i became a huge fan of this guy just because he was so una unrelated to be himself and i that was you know obviously a very that's a very attractive trait in general dude this is amazing by the way i when i was in my like boxing phase my boxing instructor who was like a tough guy and would kick my ass all the time he wore nail polish all the time and i was like why are you doing that and he was twenty five and he was like it's a thing it it's cool it's what people do and i was amazed by that you know i i remember as a kid when you would paint like a finger nail black as a punk rocker but for now it's like it's mainstream i think i think it's cool by the way i just downloaded uma max and i just took my pictures i just clicked the button that says give me the results i yeah i know i know i didn't even wanna do this it's not real this isn't real but you this isn't real this it's not real your jaw is fantastic i could tell you that right now at eighty nine oh my god you are maxed sir wait what my my masculinity is in ninety three my getting quality no it's just good lighting it gave me a ninety four my skin quality is not that good and i'm frankly i should be in this doing that thing that wanna do where you're like no no this little thing i bought oh no this was on sale at target either you're you're immediately going into that mode that's hilarious it said i classic a hot guy thing to do i i dude if i'm hot i mean that's just not the reality overall eighty nine but potential is ninety fives masculinity ninety three jaw ninety cheekbones eighty seven i got some work to do what are you gonna do shave them yeah what do you do i i don't know if with your eyebrows i guess get them plucked i don't know this is this is a good app i'm gonna have to take pictures without good lighting and actually get a a a realistic ratings i just paid my three ninety nine i'm into it kudos to this guy i i have a few spin off business ideas for this so i think that don't know if you've seen about met you know what med spas are these things are booming no what's a med spot meds spas are absolutely booming if you don't know about them we should do a separate segment altogether about them but basically it's like micro bla you know you get your botox you get your lip filler i don't know what what doesn't happen there but stuff like that basically the optional aesthetic glow up type of stuff that you could do that's beyond manic hair pet hair and like you know hair blood dryer or whatever has your wife by the way sean has your wife ever said that she wants to get botox and if she has what has your reaction bid she has said it she's like oh she's like yeah wanna do it someday and i'm like are you just float she's like floats it out there's a little trial balloon just to see how it feels i feel and and i'm like what no you don't need again i just go into mode and i'm but like genuinely like i you i have always told her i i prefer her like completely without makeup i think she looks way better that way and so i've been told her that for like you know a decade but she's she's like i'm not doing it for you you idiot i know you like me like she's like this has nothing to do with you and for man oh every man has had that same response my wife will say too and i go no just age normally you look great just be normal and right so i think every man has said the exact same thing about women in botox it's very funny they get this botox and i think most every man that i've spoke to they're like i don't give a shit just dude just age also it goes like it's not even just like oh you're fine without it it's like actually don't get simon cowell face like if you seen simon cowell yes they all look like cats like s our cats it's weird man they all look the same it's like they they go to the mat too so wax factory and the at some points it's like it look you look fine you look good oh you look better oh my god you look like non human and then they never recover them so there's so there's some stuff there that's like a little scary to me they all look like the ladies on the desperate housewife or whatever it's called like the housewife reality shows i i can't i don't like that look and i think most men do not like that look so that's a psa for the women listening and what was the okay med spas that's cool okay i think influencer content on this niche is gonna become really big so i think that anytime you have a new generation there's a learning curve and there's like a trust gap and there's you know it's a it's a new norm that's being established you need your you need your shepherd that are gonna guide you you need your she that'll take you up the mountain and so i think that anybody who goes all in on this like in terms of their social content you know there's gonna be some you know twenty one year old dude who all the you know fifteen to nineteen year old dudes look up to or even actually fifteen to twenty four old dudes look up to because he's gonna show his before and after and i think that there's gonna be room for and i'm sure this sword exists i'm just i don't i don't even know what up instagram so i'm probably out of the loop on this but i think there's gonna be some really big influencers i can go into the space because they're gonna hold the keys whatever products they recommend whatever procedures they recommend whatever brands they recommend that's where the masses are gonna go because you're in a low trust environment you don't know anything and so you're gonna need that so i think that's an opportunity here more ai driven apps so i think i think another person could create you max right now and get the same exact result i agree i think this app can be cloned in seven days and i think you could just blitz the marketing on it and you will also have a six million arr that's the unfortunate side of it i think that mail nail polish and mail like makeup brands you know it's obviously coming but even like as a gateway i think that somebody could recreate old spice so like what's the deodorant for guys who care about their like the guys who like in gym culture and maybe now even in kinda like hair and grooming culture who is speaking to them like i don't think pro and gamble knows how to speak to them i don't think they have the right influencer strategy i don't think they have the right brand and content strategy and i think somebody could do what native deodorant did for like you know the natural movement and you know native basically built the product that would ride on the wave of natural chemical free aluminum free products and that was where native got built i think somebody can create the axe or old spice of today right now and get bought by pro and gamble or unilever lever whoever for you know two hundred million dollars three hundred million dollars if you you just build a great brand this is insane and in hampton we have this company is called for them and their name is kylo and they have a company that makes clothing that are like unisex and they're killing it and if you would've told me that this company was gonna take off five years ago i would've have been like you're insane they are killing it and they are kind of po on this exact same niche of men who are in you know what i'm saying like this timothy cha my wife said she likes timothy cha and i'm like what really timothy cha that guy like it's these feminine men are kinda having their moment at the at at the moment which i guess they always have right like mick ja is basically that yep prince prince is that you know devin and men i've always kinda killed it in the game but this brand is one of those brands that i didn't think would be a thing and it is and so i'm on board with what you're saying so i'm luke now right i'm mean i'm in i'm in on the train i'm gonna ride this i'm gonna relate to my fellow you know seventeen year olds and and i'm gonna see what happens this is great did good find i can't believe this uma max thing is as big as it is i had coworker workers share it with me today you brought it up it must be like going everywhere then well someone did an interview with the founder and did a good like twitter summary of it so i think it was just like a tweet that like a lot of people saw today god bless god bless america god bless capitalism right i would have thought that this was like some chinese app because was there a chinese app recently that was like here's what you would look like if you were better looking well yeah i thought it when i first downloaded i thought it was gonna be like facet tune i thought it was gonna be you take a picture and make your picture look better this was like no the real face we're gonna try and make a real face look better by the way i we should shout out the person who who did it a at at atp pie i think is i eighty pie i don't know how you say here the the name of the person who did the podcast interview but shout out to them those good good fine good interview by the way the tagline for this app is become hot it just says u max dash become hot this is these guys are just digging a right at every insecurity we have i love it alright let me tell you about a a a trend that's happening as well so this will be like the trends episode eu max is happening right now i wanna tell you about a trend that's happening as we speak before we get to the trend and and this is recent some news just happened but before we get to that trend i need to tell you the background so have you heard of this company called dupont it's a large chemical company so in the nineteen forties they were tasked by the government of coming up with a sealant for atomic bonds so basically atomic bombs needed some type of like sealant for gasket gasket or the parts that put two pipes together so nothing leaks talk about a job you don't wanna fuck up yeah a job you do not wanna fuck up and a job that requires a chemical that is very very very very strong the chemical they eventually created it was one it's one of the strongest bonds in chemistry a very strong chemical and this chemical it's resistant to heat and it's super strong and so the world the war ended and they were like we have this great chemical what do we do with it and they start testing you things but and they go we got a great idea let's make a pan out of this if we make a pan out of this nothing will stick to the pan even if it's burnt food and so they run all these commercials they go we got this new thing called teflon they trade market it and they go this chemical you can burn food on this pan and you could still just wipe it off it's the easiest to clean thing and it takes off this chemical we're gonna call it teflon but it's a it's a long chemical name but it takes off and they trade market it and they make it a huge thing and it's and it's a massive hit starting the forties all the way up until today it's a big hit well what they noticed was that there's this subset of chemicals that when you make teflon called p fast and p fast is basically a broad term that describes like nine thousand different chemicals that are kinda traded when you create teflon but what they noticed is that some other their workers working on the line were getting sick and so they go we should probably like look into this and test this a little bit so they start giving it to rats and the rats started getting enlarged kidneys which is a bad sign then they go well fuck let's give us to monkeys and see what happens with these monkeys it killed the monkeys and then eventually after twenty years of making this chemical we're getting to the seventies now and some of the ladies that are working on this on this in this factory they're having kids that are be being born with weird defects like some kids were born with one nostril or like they had eye issues like it was a massive problem and they tested these kids and they found that they had p fast in their spines and so it was like being passed down from mother to son or mother to to child and they're like alright this is really weird now this is actually becoming a big deal for some reason the fda doesn't call out on it they're still able to produce this now we know teflon is incredibly popular non stick fans answer are are incredibly pop popular but here's a problem with this chemical because it is made for atomic bombs essentially it lasts forever this chemical doesn't get broken down and now we're calling them forever chemicals instead of p ass a lot of times in the media they'll just call it a forever chemical and what they're noticing now is that basically one hundred percent of american of americans have p fast in their bodies because it gets in our water and so it's in all the water in america not only is it in all of our water it's in everything else so for example all your cook wear your non pants that's an easy one however it's in all of your it's in a lot of your clothes clothing so any clothing that kind of feels like plastic like a like a rain jacket or like sports pants or like workout shirts that has p fast in them and it gets even worse it's actually in all of your food packaging and so in order to for your pizza box in order for the grease not to seek through and go through the cardboard it has p fast in it this can soda i believe has p fast in it because it helps make it a little bit more resistant to liquids well this has been a big deal and so recently i think last year dupont lost a billion dollar class action lawsuit where it says that they basically can't be doing what they're doing they the they can't put this in in people's water anymore because they were just dumping it in water or dumping it in the environment and it was getting in our water because the forever chemicals clothes don't go away well last week or two weeks ago i believe the epa which is the environmental protection agency basically just said that this is a big deal and that they're banning a lot of these companies so dupont gore and a few other companies 3m m from putting this into water and that they're gonna demand that local water companies you know the your city water is gonna gonna have to start testing for this and getting this out of the water somehow and so that was like a landmark case and so in my opinion this is a trend that's happening right now and i think that amongst my hippie friends do you have any hippie friends who refused to use non stick pants yes and i never understood it until now i never understood it either they just said it's bad and if you look at your non stick pants what you're gonna notice is that there's chips in it there's like little chips from where you like put your fork or a knife on it and like chip that little piece of teflon and like went into your food you're basically consuming this stuff but it's in plastic water bottles it's into everything and you actually hung out with joe gu recently the founder of airbnb and he said that he only drinks a certain type of water and i looked up that water company what was it called aqua aqua pan was one of the few water companies that did not they did not detect p fast in the water and the implications of this are quite big so have you heard about men having like really low sperm counts right now and that's impacting fertility well one of the hypothesis is is that if your mother consumed this stuff the studies have shown that the men are likely to have lower sperm counts later in life and so there's all these implications where people are getting cancer right now at at super high rates and there's rumbling that maybe this is called from p fast and so the reason bringing this out obviously this is a big deal and it freaked me out as a consumer because by the way the takeaway of this is basically you can't avoid it in your screwed that's basically oh god that's kind of i mean it's in everything it's said floss it's in everything and once it's there it's there and so our generation might just be screwed but the reason why this interests me is there's a common theme of hippie or like french people being interested in something and it becoming mainstream and popular in the next ten fifteen years hip are just innovators they're they really are innovators yeah like bur stocks are cool now i mean like they they they start up early my opinion is right now is a wonderful time to get into this business and i was googling which products are p fast free i couldn't find a decent website there's one website called mama dot com this lady has been blogging about this since two thousand and nine and she does like crazy tests of on like different products so it'll be like which ziploc bags are p fast free and she basically does all this analysis where she sends these plastic bags to the lab and then her conclusion is none non rp peep ass free i don't have any good recommendations for this shout out to her how how long has she be doing this two thousand and nine this is amazing and she has a rabbit fan base for chemicals in contact lenses damn it it's in everything it's in everything and she'll and then she'll do like bottled water and she'll like measures she sends us off to a lab and she like measures all the bottled water and she'll say these are this is the order of least likely to have p fast or she'll do a variety of pro products like jackets or clothing things like that and in my opinion the same way that cold plunge is popular right now the same way that i don't know whatever trends are popular i think p fast free or forever chemical free products are gonna absolutely take off and they're going to be a thing in a in a in a few years we're gonna see remember thrive market thrive market it was like an online marketplace for like organic food we're gonna see thrive market for forever chemical free products i think this is going to be a very popular thing because all of the brands that you and i probably use are are really really heavy in this so for example like you know ten thousand shorts heavier to that brand ten thousand no it's just like an instagram brand of of workout shorts that's basically what this what their product is is like this like plastic liner that are in your shorts but they're in everything they're in everything i to call it ten thousand but they're in everything it's in your food packaging everything and so the epa actually just announced that food packaging starting i think next year can no longer have this so everything that you order from door dash or chinese food cartons everything this has that shipment in it but starting in twenty five it's supposed to not have any of that crap in it of course there's a huge issue here which is the fda has kinda like sat on this for like fifty years and the damage kind of has been done and there's new chemicals that you can kinda get around this stuff that are probably just as bad for you but i still think that this is actually a turning point to make this trend mainstream we've talked about inflection infusions on this podcast now is what i call a regulatory inflection just like when covid happened you can do online therapy and you saw better health and much of other the businesses like that take off this is a a thing that's gonna actually get quite popular in the next five and ten years wow this is this is wild dude it's been raining not only was this a good segment you might have saved my life and many people's lives by bringing this what a story i did i had heard a p fast because i tried to buy a like a kid's bed and i was like how come a check not working i guess her first i was why is this not like purchasing it's oh i contact helps like oh you're in you're in california we can't ship p fast like it it contains p fast to california and i was like oh god how annoying what is that what do you mean we can't take it it can't ship it to california i didn't realize what i was what i was angry at i should have been happy about and why are these in you know i guess why are these beds why what do beds need be why do don't i i sleep in these forever chemicals most of the paint you have in your home have it as well and so it's like a it's a sealant is what it is could we either clip this because i think in in two three years it's gonna be we're gonna see that look i'm looking at these categories like so for example she she's testing you know contact lenses make dental floss toilet paper tampon ons wrappers oils pans active where all these different categories you know that's just like a a a minefield of opportunity to go through and build p fast fee you know alternatives and popularized the story the story that you told the beginning is the story that needs to be told more right i think it's one thing to say has p fast another thing to say do know what that is do you know how bad this is do you want your kid to be born of us with one nostril how many nostrils you want your kid to have right like that's all somebody these needs to say and if you tell that story well that's gonna be incredibly powerful well this is why when i read this i was like obviously this is bad but the the business side of my brain was like this is advertising great yeah like i'm like an hvac guy during a heat wave i'm like this is this is this is gold our version of get in a candy store yeah i'm looking hvac out brainer yeah yeah like it was gold when i read this stuff and the reason being is forever chemicals awesome branding they're already branding it for us that's a great kind i feel like that almost sounds like i don't know it's like a slight positive twin is that good it'll last forever happens are forever great you know like i kinda want it to be a little more dangerous right like a little more off putting well i just think that so there's a lot of research but i think a lot of a lot of people actually when i was reading the research there's some debate over it and i don't know why there's too much debate over i wasn't able to like read all of the research but there's some debate as to how dangerous they are and in which setting but i still think you can this sounds manipulative but you can use fear to be like just don't have any of it and so for example i remember i was pretty nervous about this shit and so i was looking just for cotton only clothing so clothing that is just plain cotton but you look at which what your clothing is like lulu lemon i mean it all has p fast in it and so it's been quite challenging and if you google p fast free products you're basically just gonna come across a bunch of subreddit and so it's still quite niche and grassroots seat there's not like a a good website that refers you to different products there's just mom motivation website but like it's still kind of a messy website and kinda confusing and hard to read they're not telling me what to buy and how to live my life they're kinda telling the science behind it a little bit but i think that there's gonna be a lot of interesting brands that pop up on this trend i know pat is doing it right now they've said that ninety five percent of their clothing is psa free or p free i know that ikea has been on this since two thousand and nine and they try to say that their their furniture doesn't have it and a lot of people are committed to not having it by two thousand twenty five but very interesting movement i think alright i got another trend for you so this is a cool story and i would say this is an example of niches and riches which is a phrase we've said many times and i if there's anything more niche than this i'd love to hear it so here's the story is a guy named josh and josh dunn he his wife is a high school teacher and when he's talking to her and he goes maybe a picture from school he notices kids are doing something outrageous in schools which is that they're coming into schools and they are just blasting each other with water guns and he's like what is going on she's like oh my god i know these kids are obsessed with this game is what's the game the game i don't know if you ever played this when you're in school but it's it's the game assassins and the game assassins is the way it works really simply is you can play one on one or you like free for all or teams or whatever but basically one person is the target and other people have to find them and you have to basically get the target first so you wanna shoot you wanna shoot the target with the water gun first and then after you've got them you get points because you were the assassin who not who got them and then the the target moves and so first of all that that sounds awesome i wish i could have played that game that sounds great i like hey i this is loud right water guns you imagine the mess this is ridiculous but somehow you rather than being annoyed he sees opportunity and so he goes how are they playing this game like how do you know who's it and they're like we have this sheet and this paper and then we have to like keep track of this keep track of the points he's like so he goes home and he builds an app and he builds an app called splash and the splash app is just a way to like run your assassins game and so he messages i don't know how ben found this guy but he's messaging ben and he starts explaining he's like yeah i built this app and i built i just turned the game into something that would just like keep tracking this like replace pen and paper for this he's like it's good because he keep track at the points and it tells you who's it and all this stuff but it's like a very simple app and super super niche initial he would not think this is how somebody gets twelve wealthy so he starts texting ben his revenue numbers and he's like you know week one pretty small week two he's like week three is like forty k what i was wow you paid forty thousand dollars on this thing next week we're like how's is how how's it going did you keep the did you stay at forty k or did it kind of fizz out he goes yeah had ninety three k like like what hundred sixty seven thousand the next week this week two hundred fifty two thousand it is just like week over week it's this thing has gone viral and so he's getting five thousand sign ups per day right now and so in about four in a four weeks span they basically went from no revenue to two hundred fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue on this it's called splash splash let me just let me show you that but you can go to their tiktok every tiktok they post they post three or four times a day each one gets you know ten thousand views or so and then people are posting this and it's also inherently viral so not only do they do well with tiktok organic but like this has something that that michael birch one of my mentors taught me which was playground playground viral vitality which is when when be went viral i asked mike like how did it grow he goes it had playground viral vitality it means like literally on a school playground one kid would be talking about it and all the other kids who were out of the loop had to go home and figure out what the heck this thing was and similarly like if one group of people are playing splash in your your school you're going to have to go get the app to like play or you're left out and so this thing goes super viral on high school on college campuses right now and and their content is really good because they'll start with someone running after someone the video starts first three seconds somebody's running after somebody else spraying them with water and the other person's like oh no and then they're like laughing and it's like what happens this what again know is says what gamer are they playing is the is the hook and says if you've seen random of people running around water guns splash each other and the population of someone splashing someone in a car or someone diving under the bleach somebody like run jumping through a window the trick is to have these videos that like it from a marketing perspective if you watch these and in the first three seconds it shows somebody chasing somebody else splashing them with the water and it says what game are they playing and then it says if you've seen people all over your feed who are you know spraying each other with water and it's just a compilation of crazy and people diving through windows being sprayed with water it says they're playing a game called splash and the way it works is you're assigned a target you see them on a map somebody's targeting you and then blah blah and so that's that's the game and pretty amazing to see this thing going viral and like this also falls into a category of apps that is not sustainable necessarily but who cares but who the hell care yeah it's a summer fling and it's a great summer fling dude you we're kinda gloss over the fact that this guy just messaged ben and he just ben just like what are your sales tell me your revenue and he tells him every week did that that happens to ben like ten times a day it's like in parks and rack where they find out that one of the one of the main characters is a nurse and they start sending her dick pics to like diagnosed so they can get diagnosed with an std and jesus like dude my my inbox is just full of like men's penis asking if they have herpes and i guess that's just ben's inbox it's just all these guys said because he's useful dude like you you people tell him what's going on and then he's like oh you should talk to this person they will solve that one problem you're having and then they're like wow love this guy and then he does it again and like you know because i'll be like a like two people that don't know each other that we know are talking i'm like oh wow how'd they he's like oh yeah i introduce them i'm like how'd do you even think to introduce he's was like well he's every week he tells me like how it's going and then he said he was having this problem so i him about this guy who solves that specific niche problem and now it's like you we're working out great and i was like oh you're like a router he's like a like an like a switch board operator who's able to just like once he knows what you need and he knows when somebody else has to offer he makes connections and he asked for nothing in return and that like you know just works out have you seen a boardwalk empire the show no so the main character amongst other things he's basically a mafia guy he's in the mob and he connects like a capo with this one dis who can make a capo whiskey or whatever and whenever he does that he goes alright where's my cut ed he that's how he bake a living and gets rich off by just making connections or he'll introduce a capo to a politician who's gonna help hide is whatever that's what ben needs to do ben needs we need to stop we need to change because in silicon valley people make these introductions and they don't ask for anything ben should ask for something he should get he goes where's my points he just needs to start asking for points no that ruins that's why guys like you and me don't don't have what he has he just he just happy to be useful and then value just comes back dude there's a there is a business karma value does come back you know a few of these people will be like hey let me cut you a check or hey if there's more like that i'm happy to like incentivize you to to give me more like that he's like okay sure didn't ask for it but people come to him with that because they're like give me more of where that came from and so he's created a lot of value and i think that in general you wanna be like ultra free or ultra premium so it's basically like don't make money on every transaction don't be a gatekeeper who stands in the way of of the traffic flowing and it's like not let ninety nine percent of the cars go through completely free but then on the one where you know there's a bigger opportunity or something like that we get to invest or we get to be a part of it in some way and it pays off for the the ninety nine free things that he did i think he's got the right method how does this guy josh stunning yeah i just looked him monty it looks like a young a real young guy i mean that's pretty impressive these basically kids like coming up with these things that are making very very meaningful traction as one or two people operations well it's also the magic of software right like software is so different than services agency or an e commerce per play we have a physical product right like these software things they build it once it runs forever you know they can have three million that this new match guy three and a half million customers can use his thing this guy signing up five thousand people a day because software scale software is magic that's not the magical part the magical part i think is the psychology behind it and i think you know we have a friend nikita who frankly i don't know what's the reality versus the story but like there's all these people who he claims are coming to him for advice on how to make my app viral and he like says like he he didn't say it but the the story that i kinda glean from it is like beep up boop you just do this this this you change this thing to this thing that's a change just metric to this thing get boop doug like where's my money and i don't know if that's the reality but he's like he's like hey look three of the apps that i advise are now in the top one hundred of most downloaded apps in the in in apple store and it's just like is amazing how there's a little bit of a pattern and i don't entirely understand the patterns because i'm not just describing expertise right yeah but it just seems like more than ever before it's becoming like a playbook and it just it is ridiculous how like i do think that you could take some of these the these this knowledge and apply to five or ten other things and it works almost as well alright hey i wanna take quick break to congratulate our friend tim ferris tim's podcast has crossed one billion downloads billion that is insane especially for a guy who said when he started the pod hey i'm gonna do six steps so just give us a try and see if i like it and if i don't it'll just be six but but if i do maybe i'll keep going and he sure enough kept going tim is amazing at the pod he's a big inspiration for me in fact when i started this podcast i still remember the day i had sold my company i was walking around san francisco i did a four hour walk with my buddy we walked ourselves into a fran and he goes what do you want what do you really wanna do next and i said i think i wanna beat tim ferris i don't wanna beat him ferris i wanna have the impact tim ferris his head i said you know i have listened to so many of his episodes like the the jamie fox one i remember was epic the ones with naval are all killer is ones with arnold sc na were really good you know he's done so many episodes that really stood out to me and and shifted my perspective changed my lens gave me some inspiration he was there when i was doing just boring commute and i wanna thank him for doing the show the world would be a a worst place if he did not do the tim ferris podcast and he's done is now this is his ten year anniversary so happy birthday tim for the ten year anniversary of your pod a billion downloads that is incredible he is still to this day i think one of the best question ask on the planet you probably didn't even think was a skill but it is of course and he his quote about questions has always inspire me he says that questions are like the pickaxe of the brain you can use a question to just unlock information that's what he does he breaks down world class performers by asking them amazing questions so tim congrats on the ten years if anybody's out there your list podcast just hit pause go listen to tim instead you know what i don't mind it is a it is a great move by you you can find the tim ferris show wherever you get your podcast he's also got a newsletter called five bullet friday with two million weekly subscribers you can find that at tim dot blog and you can find the podcast wherever you listen to podcast podcasts so i'm gonna tell a story i don't know if i use the guy's name just because i didn't ask i gonna tell the story but i can tell tell a version of the story so medic guy recently really awesome guy became friends with him and he is like a growth expert not like the you know twitter youtuber you know i i'm a growth expert hire me for five hundred dollars an hour and and i'll i'll be your a growth guy like this guy actually like the big name silicon valley products he was like running the growth team there and so like you know like in the same way that you know cha or javier grew fit you know they were the the lead guy on the facebook growth team and they like they fought those wars or josh elm did this at different companies there's another guy who did this at other companies and so he was describe me he's like yeah he's like i went for a walk with them in silicon valley like the real silicon valley meaning he was walking he's like that's that steve jobs house that's larry paige house that's mark zuckerberg house and they're like i don't know if ever been here by way in palo alto these are like completely una assuming houses by the way they they're not like mega mc mansions they're just like small cottage houses in a cool little neighborhood that's open and in palo alto and he's like yeah the and he was like i was like did you you know get connected was because he telling me about somebody he knew i go how did you get connected with the people and he goes well i had built an expertise around seo he's like i just understood seo i had done it two of my companies i just really i like i feel like i knew seo better than most people and somebody introduced me to to the guy from quo adam dean angela who was like you know cofounder of facebook now was doing cor and cor had cora had a seo problem they're they were heavily depend on seo traffic and then like some google update happened and their their seo traffic was dying or was having trouble for whatever reason and i did a call with them and he's like i he's like on that one call i told him was oh it's this you are getting penalized by google for this you need to change that and it'll fix it he's like and it fixed it and like the growth you know went up and then i told him one other thing after that they did one more call did one other thing and like basically like the cora growth curve was like really impressive afterwards and adam you know called them i was like hey dude like can you can i well you come work here can i hire you as a consultant i'll pay you any number to hire you as a consultant and he's like also how did you do that because that was like my teams are working on this for months and like you just pointed at the thing you're like this is it and he's like well it looks like it was just one thing he's like but actually the the skill is that there's a thousand you know needles yeah there's a thousand straws and a haystack and the trick is just to find the ones straw that matters and it looks like oh man you only had to move one straw but it's like because i knew the ninety nine other things ninety nine percent of things to ignore i knew which which ones were not the answer told me it's gotta be one of these two things and then i pulled that out he's like that's what expertise looks like when it's done well is is not that it's not that you come up with more ideas than anyone else you can quickly eliminate the ninety nine waste of time and try to find a one or two that matter so i love that principle and he said another thing he goes so when he offered you that i was like did you go work there or you take the consulting gig that'd be awesome i i bet they could've paid you a ton or whatever he goes i i had a better deal i told him i'm gonna do this for free for you but when the time comes yeah i know you're super connected to silicon valley and i just moved here i would love for some introductions like you know if if i do come up with something i'd love you to make an introduction and at the time adam's like done easy you know that that's the price amazing i gotta steal here he's like but actually i got way more value out of that trade he's like because then when i cashed in that chip he's like people would say he's like i could get an intro to anybody and the intro come like with extreme vouch of this guy's like the magic man and he's like that and adam doesn't make many intros so as soon as that they would interrupt me the person would say not only did adam vouch for you adam never makes any intros this is the first intro he's ever made because he knows like to the intro me is like you know kind of a high bar so you must be really something and i that was kind of that business karma so bad coming back mean he's like i didn't do it in a manipulative way i just thought that that was a better ask and i was like wow that's a great great story that's awesome that is a really good story wanna get him on i think he's got some he's got some good growth stories and growth advice so i'm gonna try to get him on i'll i'll ask bruce permission i i think today was a ten out of ten i feel hyped i wanna like go and learn about some of the stuff i wanna look up splash i wanna play splash first i need like friends that are immature enough to play a water gun game with me adults we need adults splash throughout austin i guess i gotta go buy a water good but texas you guys just play with real guns yeah we're gonna call it bleed and such that's great is that the pod well we have one more thing well one more thing about expertise and this is also the thrill of the show i was watching one of the podcast podcasts that that i recorded and when i went austin and the guy said something he goes this a guy who's who's joe lo and his claim to fame i think the title of podcast is gonna be the guy who's created more billion dollar companies than anyone else great which is just an incredible claim to fame and an incredible title and so he goes he was saying something he goes he almost paused me while i was saying something he was oh by the way that's always a good idea i was what what is he talking about and he what he's saying was he goes anytime a company that was successful doing one thing had to build internally their own tool that's not their product but they like hired engineers that engineers working on something and they were like that's the tool that like some internal homebrew tool that they used there's was like part of their secret sauce for their success but it wasn't their main product he goes that's always a good idea which is basically too i called this the export framework you export something that was built internally and you make a product that's available to all and so he was talking about this for example with pal he started pal now a fifty billion dollar company calendar you know the genesis of it was he was an internet paypal fighting fraud and so at the time paypal because paypal was getting popular basically what what he said would happen he goes somebody would you know if somebody you know some cashier at a gas station is having a bad day would would kinda steal your credit card number and they could go sell you know fifty of these on the black market to to the russian russians would pay a hundred dollars a pop for these credit cards stolen credit cards and then they would go charge up this thing and then then the customer doing i didn't buy any of this stuff and so they would charge it back is like could paypal was left holding the bag of that charge back and that to the tune of like millions of dollars okay it would have put us out of business it put out most of our competitors went out of business for this one reason and so fighting fraud was like a really important thing and we had to build a set of tools to be able to do like data data detection fraud detection and like fight the bad guys he's like and then when i started pal i was like what if we took all that fight the bad guys stuff and we made it available to the government to be able to fight the bad guys for counter terrorism and stuff because this was after nine eleven and so he was given that example of like anytime you see the homebrew tool that spins out becomes a product that's a successful business well today's sponsor is exactly that and that is bee hive so bee hive was basically or great plug great part oh the show i guarantee you that nobody does ad like i do ad right i'm gonna teach you something to tell you a story and then i'm gonna give you the value to that's a great thrill and i'll give you the shi now the shell part is these guys were inside of morning brew which is probably would you say it's probably the most successful newsletter business outside of right like the most successful mainstream newsletter business nearly a hundred million dollars a year business hundred million dollar business grew really fast you know and both of us have tried building newsletter businesses and these guys built like grew faster than both of both of us we we were successful they were even more successful they grew their news that are about five million subscribers and and the secret sauce of how they grew their news newsletter their growth engine was this internal tool that they built which let them write write a newsletter easily like format it get it all ready to go baked in the growth stuff so like a referrals and you know like recommendation things at the bottom of an email and it's like hey send this to a friend and you can get a free sticker or free mug or free t shirt or whatever that all of those little tools that they built internally this guy tyler basically spun out and created b to do that independently so now anybody like me when i built the mill road i didn't have to build any of that shit mil morning brew has like you know i don't know how many hundreds of employees we didn't need any of that shit literally it was me ben and one other guy and like there three of us built the newsletter that we sold for millions of dollars because we could just use bi off the shelf and so if you're looking to build a newsletter either personally or you wanna start a newsletter business like me and sam did bee behind is the way to go they basically took all the secret sauce that was inside morning brew turned it into a product that you can use off the shelf on day one ten out of ten i was i was thrilled just imagine joe lo sale just holding up his finger to your lips and say just shut up just shut up shut the fuck up be h it's hilarious too because i'm trying to connect with joe a's like this billionaire who's created like you know spy technology for the government fifty billion dollar company you know tools that all the asset wealth managers use at par a three billion dollar company open gov which sold to governments and basically sold for one point eight billion he's he's got a like weapons company that builds like em pulses that will you know knock drones out of the sky war tools and i'm like yeah me too man i'm an entrepreneur too just like you man and you're the same same yeah i built the newsletter company yeah i did it for like kinda of part time for a year and then sold it not for a billion dollars just like a few million it was great though yeah and what else do i got a podcast talk about buddy sam a couple times a week that's pretty dope i'm working hard out here man all while you were wearing your camouflage my dance you and i are doesn't while we were a cold bunch together and i was like also hyper and being like how long do guys like this stand in the cold bunch i think it's longer than i'm used to but i cannot again i'll get out of this plunge until he does i die in high or i live you know with all the glory of this and you're like oh you did a multi multiple billion dollar companies i got sixty nine on you hot so what'd you get so are you in the lip maxine no i didn't think sorry i just want curious that if that was a priority for you that's a that's a typical forty nine per set or bro so check it out b high that's what two i's by the way b r spell h i i v they're i oh yeah that's weird the way they they give they post their revenue i don't know what let me do tyler the ceo for the next time we give the shout out where we'll focus on tyler tyler is a great ceo i thought he was a loose cannon and i think he's sort of is that was just good looking that's what you thought you were like yeah nobody just good looking and cool is gonna be a good operator he actually is he's just he i thought he was just too lu and then i realized that his aggressive miss is actually awesome and i i i did not invest in them and it's one of the things that i'm like oh i should have done that it's so almost didn't invest i did i did end up investing i actually i think i passed the first time and so i what i did was i passed the first time i was like i don't know how big this can get and then we started using it for the milk road and i use it from my personal newsletter so i became a customer first and then i would just see like anytime we'd have a problem they were so fast to fix it and they kept releasing stuff i was like oh okay i called him back i was like i wanna invest was like you you changed my mind you think the market's is bigger i was like no i think the market the same size but you guys are like relentlessly shipping and i'd rather just bet on somebody like that than not bet on them and like you know you know i'm often wrong about market size markets can trick you markets can look small and be bigger but founders or teams that operate like this that's like always a good signal and so i'm like let me just bet on the known versus not bet because of this hypothetical unknown thing but what but i almost didn't because you know i did the call he had a surfboard board behind them and i was like ain't way i'm an investment a ceo who surf regularly enough for the surfboard boards behind him in a in his room but i was wrong next time we talk about them we have like four or five more stories about tyler tyler's is an interesting guy and i i i respect the hell out of them he's a good entrepreneur wanna see what the revenues is at right now so they he tweeted think first twelve million and dude look at this graph we gotta put this up here seven million in arr was february first so two months ago and this graph is literally like shaped like this it's pretty crazy and it i goes this doesn't include some of some revenue from the ad network oh no march nineteenth quickly approaching ten million arr so they're probably just under ten minute ten million arr now yeah there it's an amazing company they've taken off is it just b h dot com or is like a bee h dot com slash no it's just b h dot com go there if you wanna start a newsletter alright is that the pod that's the pod alright that's the pod i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back