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

Episode 621: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Jack Smith ( https://x.com/_jacksmith ) about his under-the-radar biohacking experiments plus 2 $1M dollar business ideas. — Show Notes: (0:00) Is reverse-aging a scam (3:23) The 1% of biohacking (12:28) Business idea: Mobile Dexa Scan (25:30) Business idea: Medical tourism brokers (32:06) Anti-beast mode (39:10) Why smart people have bad ideas (45:40) Hunt for the starving crowd (49:27) AppLovin origin story (54:20) Finding demand that feels like a landmine (56:03) Jack's book recommendation — Links: • Get our business idea database here https://clickhubspot.com/mfm • BodySpec - https://www.bodyspec.com/ • Prenuvo - https://www.prenuvo.com/ • Q Bio - https://www.q.bio/ • Aiwo - https://aiwo.com/ • “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” - https://paulgraham.com/bronze.html • Vungle - https://vungle.com/privacy/ • The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success - https://tinyurl.com/mwyf6spw • Jack on MFM - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVwLEocqK0E — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  For some reason, he's saying that one of the best measures of your aging is like your nighttime erections. So I'm, I'm starting doing this treatment where it's like you shockwave your penis, et cetera. And he's like, I'm going once a month, et cetera. I'm like, dude, I have that machine in my house.

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  Hey, Jack, is this aging stuff, this anti-aging stuff, is this legitimate?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  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 Asprey, et cetera, any credibility? Because how do we know that they're good at anti-aging? They're, they're in their 50s. Dave Asprey can say he wants to live to 140 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 kind of felt it's like saying that someone's a great marathon runner,

• 1:15Speaker 00

  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 the marathon? We'll only know when they're like 100 or something. In comparison, so these are the people we look to as the influencers, even like Dr. Rhonda Patrick for women. She's in her 40s, I think. So they're all middle-aged, Peter Attia, Huberman, they're not 100 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, like you couldn't upload your results, right? But you would be like number one, I think, on there from your thing.

• 1:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Sean, I did the Rejuvenation Olympics. Like, basically the Rejuvenation Olympics, it's this test done by True 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's 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, Sean. 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're like the number three on the

• 2:35Sam Parr?

  rejuvenation Olympics. And the thing is, is like, I'm a 80, 20 type of guy. I do like 80% great. And then I like fuck off for 20%. 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.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  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 only 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's best supplement, right?

• 3:30Shaan Puri?

  So why, 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 cause and effect. We don't know what, what really works, what really doesn't work. You've spent $50,000 in supplements and your submarine was like, I didn't really feel anything. Maybe if you're deficient, you might feel something. But you're a smart guy. Why still spend the time and energy in this space?

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Because actually, I've tried out all these different things, right? And Tony Robbins actually has a book about all the emerging health stuff that he tries out, etc. So 99% of it, I don't notice anything. However, 1%, 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 1% things that are very impactful and like under the radar and stuff.

• 4:36Sam Parr?

  The, the, the 1% stuff, if I had to guess, is just eating mostly plants and animals and lifting heavy weights and like going for walks.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  So actually not for me. But yeah.

• 4:46Sam Parr?

  Oh, well, fuck me then. All right.

• 4:51Sam Parr?

  What is it?

• 4:51Speaker 00

  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, and Dave asked me or someone to be like, okay, this like extract of blueberry, it reduces your aging because it does this, et cetera. Like, and then all here's 50 medical studies, et cetera. 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 $15,000 on this thing. And that's like the low end one is called energy enhancement system.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  And

• 5:33Sam Parr?

  That's my cost sex, my friend. Sarah, is it time for some energy enhancement?

• 5:39Shaan Puri?

  We're gonna have some E E S tonight.

• 5:43Shaan Puri?

  So what is it?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  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 waiting in the waiting room and I'm looking at, I'm like, dude, this is just a normal computer monitor. Like what, what, what's the deal? And they're saying like, oh, these are all, there's like 16 of these computer monitors and computers all laser aligned. And it creates an energy vortex in the middle of the room.

• 6:12Sam Parr?

  Let, let me explain, if you Google this, you're going to see a photo. The photo looks like a doctor's waiting room, except the chairs are literally lawn chairs. We're talking $30 lawn chairs, the type you would bring to like your kid's soccer game. And then the room has eight TVs and the TVs.

• 6:31Shaan Puri?

  This looks like a sports book. You ever go to Vegas and where you can bet on sports and there's 18 different monitors, horse racing over here, basketball over here. And you sit in the shitty chair. That's what this looks like.

• 6:41Sam Parr?

  And like, you know how like, when you're a kid and you, and 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.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  That is it. Yeah.

• 6:50Sam Parr?

  That's what I'm, I want to let you know, that's what I'm looking at. And I want to let you know, this sounds incredibly ridiculous, what you were saying.

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  Jack, I'm open minded. Continue.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  There's also people claiming that this cured their cancer. Like, if you look what this can be used for, they just say, all right, whatever's wrong with you, this will cure it. This cured cancer, this cured AIDS. So 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'd been struggling with that for a year and I tried loads of stuff like ozone therapy, ketamine, like I tried everything. And I actually think that this E E S thing is the only thing that worked. I just went in there and I sat in a lawn chair for an hour, maybe two hours,

• 7:44Speaker 00

  and then just came out and in my stomach, like I can feel my stomach like reorganizing, etc, churning. But not only me, yeah, my wife, it cured her migraines. Her sister came out and then she'd been having trouble sleeping. It like cured her sleeping issues. And then her mom did it as well with us, like it's 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 worked, even though the science, nobody can explain it, it doesn't make any sense.

• 8:24Sam Parr?

  And it also doesn't help that when you 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, not a good look, Jack. Not explaining the science, second listing is the lawsuit that they're facing. This sounds ridiculous.

• 8:48Shaan Puri?

  Where do we go from here? I was 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, if somebody presents something to you, you're quite skeptical by default. Even things that are like consensus, you're, you kind of 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

• 9:31Shaan Puri?

  an entrepreneur, those are things that have served you well. And now, in, in, in your post entrepreneurial career, you're, you're doing the same thing, which I find interesting.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  I think I'm kind of just like if Brian Johnson drank too much coffee and just got ADHD and tried a 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 throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, like, just try out everything. Like, some of the stuff that Brian was trying, like, I was just messaging him on Twitter, I'm like, dude, I was trying that like two years ago, like, um, some of the different emerging stuff, but I was not actually, I just tried some things and then see, all right, does that do anything? Like, he had talked recently about, for some reason, he's saying that one of the best measures of your aging is like your nighttime erections. I

• 10:22Speaker 00

  don't know if you've seen this. So, um, he measures his erections.

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  Looked into it.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm, I'm starting doing this treatment where it's like shockwave therapy, um, that you shockwave your penis, etc. And he's like, I'm going once a month, etc. I'm like, dude, I have that machine in my house.

• 10:45Sam Parr?

  I didn't see that when I visited. You should have let me give it a whirl.

• 10:51Sam Parr?

  Why don't you tell your guest that? I would love to give him that thing a try.

• 10:57Shaan Puri?

  What's the word on that, Jack? Does it do anything?

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Oh, he actually is, uh, yeah. I don't know.

• 11:11Shaan Puri?

  Should we talk about, uh, non, non health stuff for a bit?

• 11:15Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Well, I was gonna tell you, um, if you want, because that bit is like, yeah, thanks again for having me 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 listen to it. And so speaking to some listeners and they said, okay, what we want is like, they said to me like, okay, Sam and Sean, sometimes they just tell stories too much. So we want actionable stuff as well and we want business ideas. So I, one idea that I can share with you.

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  Is that what you got?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  I've got one business idea. 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, um, kind of like doing like the Samwar brothers?

• 11:54Sam Parr?

  By the way, did you, uh, Sean, did you just, he just kind of like, you know, a lot of people are complaining about your podcast because of this, so I'm gonna fix it for you.

• 12:03Shaan Puri?

  The complaint was like, yeah, you guys talk too much. It's like, but the podcast, what are you talking to do?

• 12:08Sam Parr?

  It's like, uh, don't worry, I've, I've got the solution.

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  You know, things that are actionable, specific, useful, insightful, and not that other stuff that they usually do.

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  Go ahead.

• 12:22Shaan Puri?

  The Samwar brothers, what is the idea?

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Like, you know, they cloned Airbnb and brought it to Europe.

• 12:26Sam Parr?

  So the Samwar brothers, wait, we gotta give context. Samwar brothers are, uh, 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 blitzkrieging. They would blitzkrieg the internet. So they would find Amazon and do that in Thailand. They would do Airbnb, but in France, whatever. And oftentimes, they were so hardcore, they made them massive to the point where they couldn't even, like, they tried to build a company to sell to Groupon, but their Groupon competitor got bigger than Groupon.

• 13:10Sam Parr?

  And they're like, shit, no one could buy us. And so they're famous for doing that. Anyway, go ahead.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  So I was thinking you can do something similar, but for just like bootstrapped businesses. Like, it doesn't need to be a tech VC type thing. And just one dumb example is like, in San Francisco, and I think they have in Austin, etc., like, you can get a DEXA scan, D E X A, for like twenty-five, thirty dollars. And it

• 13:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, body spec. It's awesome.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  And the test takes like seven minutes, and they've just got the process down amazingly. They have a van with this DEXA 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 just love it because it's the most, 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 measured 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, it's really accessible. But then in Portugal, for example, just one example, like, you can only do it at a hospital. And in Lisbon, like, it's not anywhere else in the rest of the country, and it costs like two hundred dollars.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  You need to drive there. Body spec was bootstrapped, 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 you just park in their parking lot. You know, so you're like, all right, on Monday, we're gonna be at this CrossFit gym. On Tuesday, we'll be here, etc. So I felt like just cloning that in Portugal. You just buy, you can get a used DEXA scan machine. We went to Mr. Beast's house, and he has one in his office, actually. It was just people coming by, and then everyone thinks it's cool to just do a DEXA scan. Like, he asked, he asked us, like, oh, does anyone want a DEXA scan? I've got one in the office. You can buy it for like

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  It was great, by the way. One guy jumped on the DEXA scan, and we all bet his body fat percentage. It's just like the ultimate, like, you can't do this in society anymore, but we were like, no, no, no, he's for sure, he's for sure eighteen point three. No, no, no way, I'm going under. And then somebody got it right. How much are those machines?

• 15:18Speaker 00

  I knew, I think, like fifty thousand. And that was more affordable than I thought because a whole body MRI scanner, which looks kind of similar, but it's doing an MRI scan, that's a million dollars. And so this, like fifty K, reasonable. And then I saw some used for like fifteen thousand. And then you just put it in a van.

• 15:35Shaan Puri?

  Patrick Campbell, our buddy Patrick just bought one.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Oh, he did?

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  Uh, for, he basically, so he lives in Puerto Rico. And he bought, so he bought a Dexa machine and he put it like, I think in kind of like a community, like he has like a gym and it's a kind of, you made it like a community area. So like anybody in his kind of ex pat neighborhood can come there and like, you know, work out and do it. So he did it as like a, he's interested in it, but also it will attract other health people and like kind of a social thing almost by, by adding this machine.

• 16:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I used to do that as a kid, but we did it with breathalyzers.

• 16:12Sam Parr?

  Like, like, well, you'd buy a breathalyzer, go to a party, we all surround it. And like, try to guess. But doing with the, with the MRI or whatever would be a lot, would be a lot more fun.

• 16:23Shaan Puri?

  So Jack, the idea is to Samwar body spec. So you basically clone the body spec bootstrapped business model in Europe.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you could launch it for like less than fifty thousand dollars. I mean, a van, you can probably buy on finance as well. And this medical machine, just like finance, et cetera. And you just get one van and that could kind of serve all of Portugal even. You know, you would be like, all right, on Monday, I'm in Lisbon. And then on Tuesday, we'll be in this region, on Wednesday, we'll be here. And you book people seven minutes slots. When that's working, just either get another van or just get another van in Spain, in Barcelona or 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?

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Like, I want to see, am I gaining muscle and stuff? So, yeah, that was one idea.

• 17:17Sam Parr?

  That's a cool idea, like that. Have you guys seen a Pre Novo? Have you seen Pre Novo, Sean?

• 17:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, I've done a pretty good scan.

• 17:24Sam Parr?

  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 this, Sean, like I think in 50 or 100 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'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 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 solvable thing.

• 18:07Sam Parr?

  And so they kind of take, they're taking that, that idea and anyone can pay money. It's 3500 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 scans. And I don't know if they're, if they're great or not, but the idea of that is cool. Was it cool, Sean?

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  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 rejiggered traditional MRI machines. Is what they tell you, right? So they say, we've rejiggered 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, that can read it and, and all this stuff. And so I went there, laid down, watched Top Gun and came out and they were like, cool, you don't have cancer. I was like, all right, guess I'll just go back to my day then. And that was that. I thought that's kind of amazing and I love the mission of it. So I love the mission of basically knowing, understanding what's going on in your body,

• 19:08Shaan Puri?

  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 a few hundred dollars to do, and then more people will do them. That's the idea. Now, I must say the counter argument, which is, I was pretty pumped about this, but I'm also a noob. I'm a layman. I don't, I don't know the science behind this stuff. I don't know what's real and what's not. I showed it to a friend of mine who was a, who's a surgeon and I, my best buddy's from college and I was like, hey, I did

• 19:53Shaan Puri?

  this thing. Have you heard about it? He's like, no, let me check it out. And so he's like, cool. Can you say, like, send me the scan? And I was like, oh, you can actually, yeah, you can get the file, like the folder. Here's the zip folder of all my, my images. Cause 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'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 it's 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 him the images and I'm trying to defend it, but I also don't know shit. I'm like, no, 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

• 20:35Shaan Puri?

  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, uh, this many, this many cuts. He's like, look, there's 27 images in here. So where's the images? He's like, secondly, this looks exactly like an image. He's like, thirdly, I could see your penis in this. I was like, oh, god damn it. And he's like, fourth, um, he's like, fourth, you know, the resolution or the ability to see what's actually going on. Like this would not be useful enough to do any kind of diagnosis. And then I was at a dinner with the guy who started Prenevo and I was like, hey, not to be buzzkill, but like, I did a scan, talked to my doctor buddy and he starts laughing

• 21:16Shaan Puri?

  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'm 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 do, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, well, isn't that a bad thing if doctors always say that? He's like, no, no, 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, uh, you know, what would I tell my friend that would have him not believe that I'm, you know, getting Theranos here? And he was like, you need like our software to be able to, we have like, Machine learning and he starts saying some worries that we have special software that reads this. I was like, cool, but I felt kind of like he brushed it off. Now, 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

• 22:00Shaan Puri?

  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 counterpoint. Do your own research and figure it out. But that's kind of where I landed with it, where I thought, well, if somebody can't explain something simply to me and in a way that's convincing, then I, you know, I'll just err on the side of it's probably not miraculous is kind of where I landed.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  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 this scan. She wasn't sure why, just kind of 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 caught this just like a few months later, you actually would either 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 pro that it did catch ahead of time.

• 23:08Shaan Puri?

  And I have heard that also from other people too. And they, when you go in, they say one in 20 scans. So, you know, 5% 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 I have heard anecdotally, other people say, oh yeah, we did go, we did find something. So, you know, it's not nothing. And but even besides that, as a business, this thing is gangbusters, right? They make so much money off of this. They've got, I don't know how many locations, but they just raised like $70 million to expand Prenewo. And I think they're in like, I don't know, 20 cities around the country now.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  So one thing as well to say is like, I've done this thing called Q Bio, which is funded by Google and they're at least 70 million in funding, perhaps more than 100 million. It's kind of a competitor to Prenewo, etc. So I've done that in America and 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 45 minutes instead of four hours, etc. Like yours. Thanks, Sean. I did the same thing in India and got exactly the same results and I was only doing it for 40 minutes. Like, I think they're just Silicon Valley branding.

• 24:14Shaan Puri?

  They're also Google engineers in India. Turns out there's just a lot of Google engineers out there. Google engineer is like the Harvard Extension School graduate, right? It's like, there's a lot of people that have this stamp.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  So one other business idea I did think after going to this retreat, because this retreat, as I said, it was $6,000, but just- What was it called? It's called AIWO is the center. But $6,000 included that MRI that in America, you're paying more than $3,000 for. And that was just like, like a few hours part of it. This was a whole week and including your hotels, et cetera. But then speaking to other people, they were like, you know, many other countries have amazing medical tech, Turkey, Korea, et cetera. The challenge is they have with is branding and also like the printouts might be in Korean or Turkish. So I think what this guy, the AWO place is doing amazing

• 25:07Speaker 00

  is he's targeting people that are interested in biohacking, following Brian Johnson, and then he's getting the influencers. So he just got the guy who's number one, number two on Brian Johnson's leaderboard. 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 6K and I'll give it to you for free. I feel you could just brand a biohacking 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 to the front of

• 25:47Speaker 00

  the queue, you know? So a concierge medical for anti-aging, but you could do that in other countries.

• 25:55Shaan Puri?

  We had a buddy, Jack, I don't know if you remember this, Sean, you met with him too, when we worked out at the Founder's Dojo.

• 26:01Sam Parr?

  They had this crazy business and it 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 want to 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 care is as good, but it's 5% of the price. So instead of, I don't know how much a boob job costs, but let's say instead of $20,000, it's $1,500 or $2,000. And these people had created this business called, it was all on medical tourism, which I didn't know that was a thing. And they got a lot of interested customers, but because they were a startup, they could convince these people to trust them and things like that.

• 26:45Sam Parr?

  But it was actually pretty interesting when they told me this. I was like, there's no way people are gonna do that, but there are a lot of people willing to do that.

• 26:51Shaan Puri?

  I remember that. John Howard was doing that, right?

• 26:53Sam Parr?

  John Howard, yeah. I don't remember why it didn't work out. I guess they just couldn't get people over the line. 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 convince these people to fly to India to get like their.

• 27:07Shaan Puri?

  Get a root canal.

• 27:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, get like a root canal in like Mexico. Like, yeah, you can go on the beach afterwards and just sit there like.

• 27:15Shaan Puri?

  I know a lot of people that actually do this and you know, I think all he missed was it was just a hair transplant to Turkey was all he needed to do that. Like, Jack, you got a beautiful head of hair, but have you looked into, can you explain to me what's going on with the Turkey thing? Why is this seems incredibly popular and also why Turkey?

• 27:31Speaker 00

  I'm not sure why, why Turkey. What they were saying in India is they're just like, hey, we've just got so many people here in India that. He's like, if you in America, if you've got some obscure disease, then none of the doctors have ever come across it before. Whereas in India, like there's like 10 other, they've had 10 other patients that week with the same issue. And it 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 someone and play. 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 transplants and stuff.

• 28:09Shaan Puri?

  All right. I'm gonna do a deep dive on the Turkey hair transplant thing. It's insane. Like I have seen so many people do this. I think it's like basically 10 times less or something than, than in the US. So, you know, I think there's obviously a cost component, but I just don't know why Turkey.

• 28:23Sam Parr?

  There's this funny photo that this guy shared online 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 10 heads that you could tell the the hair had just gotten sewn in. And so I was like, holy shit, this thing is big.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like there's Instagram influencer like transplant daddies that are like the the the Turkish guys and they're just every day. That's the content that they're posting. And it seems like an incredible business for whatever reason.

• 28:54Sam Parr?

  You have this thing on here. We asked you in advance what you want to talk about. You had 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?

• 29:09Speaker 00

  It was funny because at the Camp MFM, I was trying to explain to Mr. Beast, the project that I'm working on now. So I was saying like, you know, people work in tech and then they get burned out and they so I'm building a place for them to detox from technology and recover from burnout. It's like, I literally cannot relate at all to this idea because I just don't get burned out. But he has amazing strategy, but like the thing is 99% of people can't do this, which is he said, I'm either on 100% or I'm off 100%. 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

• 29:50Speaker 00

  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 100. But it could also be that, you know, he's in his 20s, like he's not super old. Like I was speaking to this other Portuguese startup here and they're like, yeah, I don't, I don't know what burnout is either. They're like 23 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 Combinator, Angel Pad, and I've never worked that hard or achieved that much in three months. It's 390 days. I just worked so intensely and we just got amazing stuff done. We raised 2 million in funding. We got a, we came up with a business

• 30:35Speaker 00

  idea. We managed to get a CTO to join our team. We achieved loads of stuff. But for me, That was a 90 day sprint. That's if you're just trying to do that endlessly. It's like telling your 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. It doesn't work like at some point you might feel like it's going. Okay. But at some point I feel like you are going to burn out. So for me, balance is important. And not having tunnel vision to 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 Vungle is we were just playing around with a bunch of different

• 31:18Speaker 00

  mobile apps and we wanted to record a meeting with one of the coaches that we had there. So we're like, hey, is it okay if we just record the meeting to take notes? And so we opened this voice recording app and then it was free. And then it started blaring some video ad on like full volume. And then 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 it's that kind of balance, I think.

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think what you're saying makes a ton of sense. I think about everything in either seasons or gears. There's a words I use a lot, which is, you know, there are seasons of life, seasons where you're going to sprint and focus, seasons where you're going to explore and wander. I find it very useful for myself to label the seasons, know what season I'm in and embrace that season. Cause if you're in the season of wander, it's very easy to feel really anxious that you're not being productive, but you have to remind yourself that's not what this season is. This is a season of sort of exploring, dabbling, whatever. If you're in a season 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 30 days, 60 days, 90 days a year is very useful because you know, okay, this is not forever, but for now this is the right

• 32:39Shaan Puri?

  thing to do. The other thing I talked 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 visualize in my head, like I'm shifting gears now, I'm going to be that other guy. And I want to have a few of these characters that are very useful to me, versions of me that I can say, all right, you're driving now. I'm going to a workout. So it's not silly playful dad. 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 want to have both. I think you want to be able to, when you know what

• 33:24Shaan Puri?

  to do, be able to focus. And when you, when something's not working, be able to zoom out and get, go wider, diverge and dabble and sort of procrastinate and play until you figure out something worth focusing on. Not everything is obviously worth focusing on. So I definitely agree with you there. I also think that the, the stage of life matters a lot, right? When I was, when I first met Sam and I met you, Jack, I was probably 24, 25 years old. I remember that, that year I slept in the office, I think 215 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 was doing other things that I thought might help me be successful because it was really the only thing I cared about at that time was to be successful. Now I'm 36 years

• 34:08Shaan Puri?

  old. 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 vice versa. So, you know, I think I kind of, I agree with pretty much everything you said. I don't think it's at odds with, with the way that I operate at least.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  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 it, Sean, but all of us, I think, did clearly, we knew our North Star, why we're working really hard, right? And Mr. Beast, I told Sam, I was not joking, but Sam was like laughing off, but I was serious. I was like, I think Mr. Beast, if he wanted, he can be president of the US at some point because he just, since the age of 15, has just had one goal and it's not changed for 10, whatever years. He just said, I want to be the number one on YouTube.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, 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 been really bad about this. The reason I get fired up is because I look back at years of my life I spent on the wrong things. And that's a very expensive thing, like years in my twenties are sort of like prime assets. That's the beachfront real estate of my life. And if I spent it on things that I didn't really think through, or actually, in retrospect, were sort of obviously dumb things to work on, that that brought a lot of kind of like lessons learned for me. And I

• 35:56Sam Parr?

  What was that lesson?

• 35:59Shaan Puri?

  Project selection is the most important thing, that amongst talented people, the biggest sort of variable that actually happens, assume you're going to do the table stakes, right? Which is, you're not going to do the thing Jack's talking about, like, you're not going to just not like, take no action on something. Like, I was already past 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 also like, intelligent enough. I'm 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 boat. We were 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

• 36:41Shaan Puri?

  out. So what was the biggest difference in, in like, where 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. It'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 menu or whatever. So it's 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 named me CEO, they give me a blank check and a team full of engineers,

• 37:25Shaan Puri?

  and basically, they funded like fifteen million dollars and a bunch of engineers to running this idea lab, where I could think of any idea I wanted. But the, the one boundary box was, had to be kind of consumer, and then he liked social, and I liked social, whatever he liked social, the, the idea that we could create the next Twitter, next Facebook, that was so sexy. But it was, 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

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  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 want to read you this, this thing, I was reading this essay by Paul Graham, it's called, Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas. He talks about this exact thing, you know, before he started Y Combinator, he did ViaWeb, but before he did ViaWeb, have you guys heard of the startup he did before that?

• 38:28Speaker 00

  No, not that I can remember.

• 38:30Shaan Puri?

  It's something called Artix. And so, basically, it was like nineteen ninety-five, and they have this idea called Artix, 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, art 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, we're 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.

• 39:13Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, basically, we couldn't sell the thing 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 they started Microsoft. They started, you know, Traffo data. And he's like, it was not anywhere near as successful as Microsoft, like same talent, but working on the wrong project. Alex from Ozy 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've made your five gyms successful. He's like, you're like a nine out of 10 execution on a two out of 10 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 10 opportunity. For me, that was sushi restaurants. For him, that was running brick and mortar gyms.

• 39:55Shaan Puri?

  And once he changed what he was doing, like he didn't have to work 10 times harder, but he could get literally 100 times the level of success. So Paul Graham says this thing, he goes, so 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 in New York trying to be a starving artist at the time. The starving part was easy. And he's like, I was looking at art galleries anyways. And when I learned to make website, it seemed natural to mix the two together. He goes, if you're going to 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, this is a constant problem, even in just the world of painting. If you, if you want to go be a still life painter, you would sit down in front of your table with, you know, all your materials.

• 40:39Shaan Puri?

  And you might spend five minutes thinking about what you're going to 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 going to 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 too, uh, that basically founders will pick an idea because it's too uncomfortable to sit in the not knowing. And think about what you actually want to 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, cool, I'll change it later.

• 41:23Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  I think maybe I might have mentioned this on a previous episode, but I can't remember. But actually, Marc Andreessen has something, he says, like, the most important factor in determining if a startup will be successful, like a billion dollar company. He said, most investors think like it's the team or the actual product or idea, like, oh, wow, that's amazing team. And he said, he thinks it's none of those. He thinks the most important factor is the the market, size of the market and growth rate. He's 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 build by the sizes of the market.

• 42:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a there's a funny business school like anecdote where a guy comes in and he's, he's giving this talk and he says, all right, business school, you want to create like a successful like hot dog stand? What's the number one? What's the number one factor of success for a hot dog stand? And, you know, hand goes up, location. So it's not location. They say, uh, you know, ingredients, having the highest quality product. You want to have the best product on the market. Nope. They say, marketing, you got to be able to to get the word out there and spread your your story. Nope. He says, the number one thing to make a successful hot 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, uh,

• 43:09Shaan Puri?

  you know, product, without the best team or execution, you will still succeed. And I, you know, I forgot the the phrase here, but it's like, you know, when a, when a great entrepreneur meets a bad market, uh, 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 even an okay entrepreneur, you will, you will still be successful. It's a very hard lesson to internalize. Um, but it's proven very, you know, true in my life at least.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  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, um, really big companies. But luck a big factor there.

• 43:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I remember you telling a story about Vungle. So Vungle made like video ads for iPhone apps and one of Sean's buddies helped start this thing called AppLovin, which became this huge thing. And it's the same type of company. And I don't know what it was worth, Sean, like 30 or 40 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 $750 million exit. You know, we could 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, or you weren't very technical. Your partner wasn't technical, I don't think

• 44:27Sam Parr?

  at all. And I was at, I'm like, how on earth you do this? Because I think when you had sold, there was some article that said Vungle was making a million dollars a day. So you guys were going to do $360 million the year you sold in revenue. And you were just saying, you're like, dude, people are 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, AppLovin, they were 30 times bigger, or whatever the AppLovin market cap is.

• 45:02Shaan Puri?

  They're a $28 billion company right now.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And they're like, they're literally 30 times bigger. And we only did okay, but we still, you know, made $800 million or whatever. And that kind of like, I learned that lesson from you about picking the right market.

• 45:16Shaan Puri?

  So when Furcon, so Furcon, who's my co-founder at Bebo, he was previously the CTO and co-founder of AppLovin. And so when he joined, AppLovin was doing really well back then, but it wasn't, it didn't look like a $30 billion company. It looked like a $1 billion company. But I was like, 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? So I was like, how did you guys get that idea? And basically what he told me was a 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 co-founder or the CTO. I joined as like an engineer. And he's really good. He's, he's, he's like, obviously amazing. And so right away, they were like, hey,

• 45:57Shaan Puri?

  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 market fit. We just have too many people. Which is a great, like, CEO move.

• 46:05Sam Parr?

  Sean, was the we even, uh, app lovin', or was it some other idea?

• 46:10Shaan Puri?

  They were doing a clothing business. It was like, StylePage. They're, they're, they're trying to make a Pinterest competitor at the time. But that was like, one of the many ideas. So basically, they were, I think they were a dating thing first, and then, then whatever. So there was like, uh, they had like 10 or 12 people he joined. And the CEO, Adam, who's 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 this 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 $30 billion company. Then, now they have like four or five people. So three co-founders, plus Furkan, uh, is the fourth co-founder, and I think maybe one other guy.

• 46:56Shaan Puri?

  And they are like cycling through ideas. And so the founders previously had made like 40 or 50 million bucks doing a, um, I think like a dating, like, it was an ad network, but I think for dating sites. And so that's what they knew. 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 $4 million in to fund the thing. And then they were like, we're gonna create the next Pinterest. They saw Pinterest getting hot, 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 Life360 type of app, and then they created, 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 it?

• 47:36Shaan Puri?

  No, 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, see what happens, 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 20 to 30% of the days, we would just come in, we just weren't inspired and we weren't going to 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? It's like, yeah, we were literally, if we just didn't feel it, like if the idea wasn't solid, that we didn't feel like there was something there. We didn't want to 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.

• 48:18Shaan Puri?

  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, then 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, came home, he's like, forget it, we're doing an ad network, but for mobile phones. He's like, mobile phones are going to 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 going to work. This is the speed that you need to serve the ad in. And if you can't get it under that speed, we got to like figure something else out.

• 48:59Shaan Puri?

  And they just executed like crazy at that point and, uh, and it just took off and they were doing, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars at that time. Very profitably and it was, it was amazing. I'll tell you one other story that, you know, kind of shifted my thinking. So that was one about not occupying yourself, not busying yourself in order to let a good, create some space for maybe a good idea to land. The other thing that stood out was, uh, somewhere along the way, Furkan likes to take these like young engineers under his wing. So like, he met these guys, they were kind of interesting. He's like, you need to move to Silicon Valley, come live on my couch. And, um, he convinced him like, just come sleep on my couch, don't worry too much. Let's just come out here for a few months and, and of course that turned into, they just lived there permanently, uh, in San Francisco.

• 49:40Shaan Puri?

  They ended up getting to Y C and we let them work out of our office and you, you know, you can learn something from anybody. These were 20 year old kids who had never built a business before, but I was talking to them and I learned something really important. They're working on this idea that had started off really strong. What they were doing was. They took Bitcoin miners. So anybody who had a bunch of GPU space and they were like, hey, this machine learning AI thing is going to be big. This was back in like 2016, maybe 2017. They're like, machine learning is going to 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, 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 posted on Reddit, he was like,

• 50:22Shaan Puri?

  hey, if you have excess GPUs, if you're a miner, you have excess GPUs listed on our network and we will get machine learning customers for you to run jobs, almost like an AWS competitor.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 50:33Shaan Puri?

  And overnight, like, they got so much supply of GPUs. It was insane. Like, there was like thousands of submissions. And one day, people were super excited. The 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 few months later, he was kind of down on the idea. And I was like, what happened? He goes, well, the supply side was amazing. It was like I stepped on a landmine. It just blew up. And he's like, but the demand side doesn't have that same effect. He's like, but because I felt it over here, I kind of realized like what true demand looks like. And I remember thinking like, damn, I have never felt that landmine effect. At that time, I had just never felt it. I didn't feel that market

• 51:17Shaan Puri?

  pull that you were talking about. If you don't know it, you kind of talk yourself into like, oh, 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 I wouldn't say you have to have a holy shit, you found something thing right away. But just seeing that in those guys kind of taught me, oh, they're, what I thought was level 10 of what demand looks like for a business, for a new startup, it was actually level six. And level 10 is what these guys experienced, where you have like a half baked Google form, and still people are like prepaying you for the service type of thing. Oh, okay, that's what 10 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

• 52:02Shaan Puri?

  market, which is why I ended up having like a lukewarm, you know, success out of that business.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Really hard to find that 10 out of 10 market, but yeah, that is what we had. And I think is Mark Andreessen says, if you find that 10 out of 10 market, which is kind of a unicorn, right, that the amazing market will pull the right product out of the company. Like, 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, three weeks. We iterated on six different ideas and the right idea, um, the market pulled it out of us.

• 52:44Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's so good. I love hearing these stories. Um, Jack, I love seeing you.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 52:50Sam Parr?

  You look good.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 52:52Shaan Puri?

  Wait, before we go, Jack, do you have a book recommendation for me? Last time you, you came on here, you talked about the guy who unschooled himself or was unschooled as a kid. I thought that was a really cool book. Do you have any, any new book recommendations for me?

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, one I read that, um, it actually, you could read it in like an hour or so. And then thought 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 midlife crisis. They don't know what to work on next. And this book is by Deepak Chopra and it's called, um, The Seven Spiritual Rules 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.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  And everyone has like a unique skill or skills and attributes that they can 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 I thought was really interesting and actually because 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. Because I didn't know this, but Tony then found that he had like a tumor on his brain that has made his body release like loads of human growth hormone. And so basically, that's why he's six foot seven. He has, he's just a massive giant growth spurt, but he also

• 54:28Speaker 00

  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 he uses that to do these 15 hour, whatever, seminars. So that's his thing that's unique to the world. And then he's 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 $10 million to help it get

• 55:13Speaker 00

  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 to 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 so that book I found was interesting and a quick read.

• 55:34Shaan Puri?

  What do you think that is for you?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  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 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 Bali, like 10, they're basically like, dude, this is your second home. Like, you come here so much. So I just 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 kind of helping humanity not profit as number one. So I feel that I kind of just naturally have.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Through reflection and etcetera, arrived at this place. Deepak Chopra said, "The way to find your unique purpose, if you're struggling", he said, "It comes to you in the space between your thoughts." And he said, "Like, which is maybe not hard to action", but he's like, "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 will come to you." But I kind of feel that, yeah, for me, it's kind of organically, I'd been thinking about this for many years and arrived at this place.

• 56:59Shaan Puri?

  That's cool, man. I'll check that book out.

• 57:01Sam Parr?

  Thank you, dude. We appreciate you doing this.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 57:03Sam Parr?

  You're the best. And that's it. That's the pod.