Sam and Shaan reunite for a wide-ranging episode that opens with a deep dive into Brett Taylor — the Stanford/Google/Facebook/Salesforce/OpenAI luminary — as a case study in deliberate self-reinvention and reputation building. They pivot through one-chart business opportunities in homeschooling and micro schools, a hiring question stolen from Dr. Dre, and a long riff on the supplement business: why fiber, creatine, and prebiotics are all billion-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight. The episode closes on “visual kill shots” — the branding language of leaky gut, cleansing, and Trump’s nicknames — as a master class in persuasion.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
One-Chart Businesses — The Setup [00:00:00]
Shaan: Okay, so we’ve talked about one-chart businesses before. The idea is that you could be the midwit in the midwit meme — you’ve got to explain and analyze, give ten reasons why this might be a good idea, the pros and the cons, you’re overanalyzing it. Or you could just be the badass. The Jedi. They just put the one chart up and say, “This is why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
Brett Taylor — The Art of Reinvention [00:00:20]
Sam: All right, we’re back. Just Sam and Shaan. The band’s back together for the first time in a long time. You have a bunch of topics, but I want to kick us off. Can I kick us off?
Shaan: Okay, go.
Sam: Have you ever read the book 48 Laws of Power?
Shaan: I’ve never actually read it, but I’ve read some of the laws.
Sam: It’s a wonderful book. There’s one law — Law Number 25 — and it says something like, “Be able to reinvent yourself.” The author says: Create yourself with a powerful new image that stands out and draws attention rather than letting others define you. Then change your appearance and emotions to suit the occasion, or stage riveting dramas as backdrops for your actions.
I love this book. That’s Law Number 25 — changing your image. There’s a person I’ve recently discovered who has done this excellently, and I think you and I can learn a lot from him.
So there’s a rumor about this guy — they say if you arrange seats like a boardroom, he magically appears. Listen to his background. He graduated from Stanford, then went on to join Google at age 22 as lead product manager, and helped create Google Maps. After that he started this social networking site called FriendFeed, which he sold to Facebook. Facebook incorporated it, and one of the big things they took from it was the Like button. He sold that for about $50 million.
A few years later, he becomes CTO of Facebook. After that he founds a company I can best describe as note-taking for enterprises, and sells that to Salesforce for $750 million. After a couple years he becomes co-CEO of Salesforce — one of the biggest companies in the world. Then he becomes chairman of the board at Twitter, chairman of another large publicly traded company that makes security cameras, on the board at Shopify, and last night he was named chairman of the board of OpenAI.
This guy is amazing. He’s only 43 years old. You know who I’m talking about?
Shaan: The one and only Bret Taylor.
Sam: That’s right. Have you ever spoken to or hung out with this guy?
Shaan: I had a dinner once. He was there, but we were on opposite ends of the table. He was at the far end on one head of the table; I was at the far end on the other. It was like a slope of success — most successful person on that side, least successful person over here. I was at the bottom of the puddle.
He’s a good dude though. Good energy, good jokes. He seemed like a good time, but he also seemed like the guy who could flip a switch and be incredibly serious if he wanted to.
Sam: Here’s the thing — he credits that kind of dinner as one of the reasons he is where he is. Starting at Stanford, then at Facebook, he started attending these dinners. He said Marissa Mayer would go when she was early in her career, Sheryl Sandberg was there, Mark Benioff. All these amazing people would go, and that’s how he got to know Mark Benioff from Salesforce.
I was doing research on this guy and there’s very little stuff about him given how impactful he is. I found this old video, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, of him and Mark Zuckerberg sitting at a table, almost like a post-UFC press conference, announcing the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed. He’s wearing a scruffy t-shirt, hair messy — he looks exactly like you’d expect an early Facebook engineer to look.
Then I see another video on YouTube with him and the Figma founder Dylan at a conference. He’s wearing something like what I’m wearing — looks like a corporate guy but still has charisma. Dylan asks him, “What’s been your biggest learning of your career?” And Bret says, “Well, I was at Facebook, and it just wasn’t working out for some reason. Sheryl Sandberg said something to me that changed my perspective. The next day I said to myself: instead of getting the company to change to me, I’m going to change to do whatever the company or job needs — whether that means how I dress, how I act.”
And what you notice is a shift in his demeanor all the way through — how he dresses. When he’s supposed to be the tech nerd and someone wants engineering advice, you see him dress like an engineer. Then he becomes Salesforce CEO, he starts dressing different — the classic plaid shirt-suit with brown shoes. And later in interviews, this guy just screams poise. You think of the Salesforce CEO type, someone who could chair an important board — he just screams that. He’s got charisma, poise, he’s not vulgar, not crazy emotional, but he smiles at the right times and he dresses the part.
It’s fascinating to see his evolution, and for him to say that at a conference. And I thought it was exactly what Robert Greene talked about — reinventing yourself. A lot of times guys like you and me, or people listening, think clothes don’t matter. You know, “I’m just going to curse and people are going to think I’m real.” I’ve grown to think that’s complete nonsense. The more we deny that we’re playing a political, reputational game, the more we actually need to embrace it.
Shaan: Your takeaway from this whole story — you tell this beautiful story, these amazing points — but the big one that stood out to you was: you gotta dress better? That was the whole thing?
Sam: No. My point is that appearance and demeanor matter, and dress is one attribute of that. When I look at him — first of all, the guy’s a genius. There are stories about how when he launched Google Maps, the code sucked and over a weekend he rewrote it and it was awesome. And the person telling that story is Paul Buchheit — the guy who created Gmail and was one of the co-founders of Y Combinator.
Shaan: For Paul Buchheit to say that, it’s like Picasso saying, “This guy’s handy with a brush.” That means something when it comes from someone who worked side by side with him. I think they co-founded FriendFeed together.
Dinner with Billionaires — What Money People Actually Talk About [00:11:30]
Sam: So he’s a genius — that’s 80% to 90% of this. But he also does a really good job of making big shots like him. There are examples where Mark Benioff was like, “Yeah, I used to attend these dinners with him and he did a great job of asking good questions.” Those dinners are hosted by Michael Birch. Benioff’s in it, Bret Taylor’s in it — that’s how I got to go.
Shaan: Wait, you went to this?
Sam: Yeah, I got to go as a guest. Each time they host there’s like the mainstays — Reed Hoffman, whoever — Marissa Mayer’s in there — and then the host can invite two or three guests, new people, fresh blood. I was one of the fresh bloods that time.
Shaan: Was it awesome?
Sam: Yeah, it was amazing. But here’s the interesting thing — and I think I’ve said this before — if you want to stop making money the priority, hang out with people who have a lot of money. The conversation was not about business, money-making, markets, or investing. Because these guys are post-economic. They’re past that. It’s not that they don’t do those things, it’s that it’s like if somebody brought their to-do list to a dinner. Like, come on, man. We’re here to have a good time.
So all the conversation was about non-financial things. You got status by having non-financially related things to say.
Shaan: Money was low on their hierarchy of needs. You were only addressing the thing that’s already totally satisfied by them.
Sam: Exactly. But if you had a really unique experience — like, “Oh dude, I take this drug, you lick the back of a horned toad and you trip out for four hours” — everyone’s like, “Tell me more.” There was a neuroscientist there who was talking about his lab, the effects of drugs on the brain, these interesting psych studies, and everybody was fascinated. If Huberman was at the dinner, everybody wanted to hear Huberman. They didn’t want to hear about some great private equity deal with a 45% cash-on-cash return. That just doesn’t matter at that table.
To me that was the biggest takeaway — at these things, humor matters, stories matter, different things matter. It’s a good reminder not to get totally wrapped up in just the business side. I am a business nerd, I do like that stuff. But the people who’ve played this game at the highest level — their game is now about a variety of experiences and totally non-financial things.
Shaan: By the way — if we hang out in a group of our peers, how many times is the conversation about content and followers, investments, deals, businesses they’re bootstrapping? We’re kind of like early-30s. These guys were probably closer to 50. In that 20 years, if you’re talking about how this piece of content went viral and got all these followers, you’re literally a loser at that table. At each table there’s a different question of what makes you respected.
What was the minimum net worth at that table?
Sam: Well, I was there, so the minimum was lower than that. But the median was probably $500 million.
Bret Taylor as the Trusted Neutral Third Party [00:17:00]
Shaan: Here’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated by this person. Smart people referred to him, and I imagine that what he does — as chairman of the board — is part therapist. You don’t really need the answer, but you’re good at asking the right questions. And in order to be a good therapist, you have to have an image, a reputation, a track record — like, “This guy somehow helps me get to the right answer. He’s got that sensei vibe.”
I don’t know if he’s particularly smarter than anyone else at that table. Was there something about his energy that stood out?
Sam: He was very poised. He had a booming laugh. And about two hours into the dinner, he was like, “That’s all for me, boys” — jacket on, left. The dinner dragged on for another hour and people trickled out, but he was the one who left on his own terms. He was like, “I’ve had a great dinner, I also have things to do, I own my time and my schedule.” I thought that was a very obvious moment. He’s like, “80% of the meat is off the bone, fantastic.” He bounced.
But again, I was on the other side of the table, I didn’t talk to him too much directly.
Shaan: I’ll say a couple things. I think “reinvent yourself” is actually the right takeaway. This guy has had a prolific career — PM at Google, then startup founder, then CTO of Facebook, then founder again with an enterprise company, sold that to Salesforce, and Benioff was basically grooming him to take it over. The Twitter thing — he wasn’t just a board member. He was the board member that basically forced Elon to stick to his offer. He stood up to Elon and got an amazing deal for Twitter shareholders, whereas Elon was applying a lot of pressure to back out.
And he’s just a trusted neutral third party. In crypto, this happened where there was this one guy — a meme poster — but the whole community trusted him because he’d been in it for a long time and had already gotten rich in crypto, so it didn’t seem like he was trying to make a buck off anybody. He had a podcast so people heard him talk all the time. Whenever somebody needed to make a deal in crypto — like a $10 million bet — they would just wire the $10 million to this guy as a trusted neutral third party. No contract, nothing. Just social reputation.
Is this guy Cobie?
Sam: I’m not going to say anything.
Shaan: I think that’s the Bret Taylor thing. They brought him into OpenAI because he has a social reputation. People find him when they need a voice of reason, a stable third party, a trusted neutral voice. That’s just an interesting job to be done.
Sam: To do the right thing is not terribly challenging, actually. But to carefully craft a reputation like that takes a lot of discipline. Everything matters — whether it’s your dress, your website — it all just is. And I find that to be really challenging. I’m fascinated by these guys who are able to do that.
Josh Kushner and Doing Zero Flexing as the Flex [00:21:30]
Sam: Let me give you a different example. Josh Kushner. A lot of people know the Kushner name because of Jared, but Josh Kushner is another fascinating guy. He started Thrive Capital at 24 or 25 — came from wealth, so it’s not coming from nothing, but he raised money from I think Benchmark or General Catalyst to create the fund. Invested in Instagram. A few years later starts Oscar, which became a multi-billion dollar health tech company. And throughout the OpenAI drama and other stuff, he’s been in the mix.
If you go to Thrive Capital’s website, it says nothing. It literally just says “Thrive Capital.” And here’s the thing — he does zero flexing, which in itself is the flex. In itself, that’s the reputation building.
Both of these guys — Bret Taylor and Kushner — I think are very deliberate. Even if they try to give the image that they’re not trying, that in itself is trying.
TJ Parker and the “Beautiful Game” [00:24:00]
Shaan: Let me give you a different example. Someone very successful who has reinvented himself, and in my opinion this is doing money the right way.
The traditional money path in our world: you start a company, grind it out for seven, eight, ten years, sell it, you’re rich. Take a year off, travel, get interested in health, go on a health kick, spend time with your kids. Then you’re like, “Okay, this is cool but I like this in small doses.” So you start investing — you’re a VC now. The vest appears on top of your chest magically. You’re on boards, writing important checks into groundbreaking companies. You say things like “my founders.” You start using the royal “we” as if you’re involved with those companies.
Here’s an alternative: TJ Parker.
Sam: Who’s that?
Shaan: TJ Parker was the founder of PillPack. He starts PillPack, some sort of online pharmacy type thing, sells it to Amazon for a billion dollars. Stage one complete. Becomes a VC immediately — stage two complete. But then starts doing dope stuff.
If you go to TJ Parker’s website, you can see what he’s up to. He looks cool, first of all — looks more like Wim Hof than Jamie Dimon, so you already know he’s going in the right direction. He’s out in nature, barefoot sometimes. So check out this thing called The Warehouse.
If you’re into cool old-fashioned cars, you need a place to store them. A lot of people do the Jay Leno thing and get an elevator in their garage to stack four or eight cars — this gets tough. Instead, he built a beautiful warehouse to park and store cars, and you can share it with other people. But these are cool people, so “you’ll probably all get along.” It’s not just storage. They’ve got a 2,500-bottle wine cellar — temperature controlled, humidity controlled. Store your cars, store your wine, and come hang out. There’s a cigar bar, art displays, they watch the games together. It’s a car social club. Soho House for dudes with a little grease on their hands.
I love this idea. The photos make it look so badass that I don’t even like cars and I saw these pictures and was like, “I guess I need to go learn how an axle works. I want to be part of this.”
I think this is a brilliant idea that could franchise across the country. Guys need community, friendships, male bonding, but they don’t want to call it that. Guys will start a podcast instead of doing therapy. Guys will get a car hobby and drop $300,000 on cars and join a car club rather than go to a men’s group, and it will function as such.
Sam: Where is this?
Shaan: They don’t say the exact location. It’s in Utah — classic move, picking Utah.
Here’s some of the other projects he’s working on. He’s producing a documentary. He’s got a company that makes really high-quality bags and gear for people going outdoors — he’s holding the quality bar really high. He’s got a 12-acre farm. He’s a gentleman farmer. And then — even better — he has a business that goes to children’s hospitals and transforms them into dope art galleries for the day, so the kids have something awesome to see. He’s like, “You can heal kids through art. Capture their imagination, distract them from the hospital environment.” If you’ve ever been in a hospital environment, it does not pass the vibe check. And the fact that he’s doing popup art exhibits inside children’s hospitals to shift the vibe — I mess with that.
This is a guy who was successful, then used the money and time to craft a dope life around the hobbies he loves. He went the Joe Rogan path versus the Elon Musk “I need to work 95 hours a week, more money, more fame, more power” path. I mess with the TJ Parker path more.
Sam: I’m not saying necessarily that the Bret Taylor path is wrong — I just appreciate people who do the damn thing. I can get as much inspiration from an artist as from a billionaire. People who put their stake in the ground and say, “This is what I am, and I’m doing it.”
How much do you think this guy made? They raised $100 million, sold for a billion. Was he the only founder?
Shaan: I think there were two guys. Wow. Sick, right?
What Shaan Is Actually Searching For [00:31:00]
Shaan: Here’s the thing — one of the things both of us really like to do is something I don’t think we’ve put a name on. If I could say what the number one thing I’m looking for in life is, it’s this: I am searching, long and hard, for people who I think are playing the right game, the right way.
I’m interested in different blueprints. What are people doing with their time and their talent?
Brian Johnson said, “I’m gonna donate my body to science while I’m alive.” He’s trying to reverse age — it’s a badass science experiment mixed with a health kick and investment in himself mixed with picking a project that’s not just another business. I think that’s cool. Not for me.
The Bret Taylor path — you start multiple companies, become a board member, become this respected luminary of Silicon Valley, CEO of a publicly traded company. Cool game. Definitely not for me.
Some guys are like, “I’m gonna tweet every day, be super consistent.” Not for me.
But I’m looking for people who are playing a beautiful game. And the sad thing is, it’s very hard to point to somebody and say, “They’re doing it.” I can’t name more than two or three people whose game I really respect.
Because once you have that blueprint for yourself — like, “Oh, I really like how this person has architected their life. I like what they’re working on, they seem really happy, great mix of family and fun and challenge, doing good in the world in their own way” — that’s the most important thing. And I think that instead of striving for you-know-what money, you should strive for: what is the right game to be playing? What is a great way to use this thing called life? Get inspiration from a bunch of people, then craft your own version.
Sam: And that’s exactly the point I was trying to make. I don’t necessarily want to emulate any of these people, but I emulate people who are making the life they’ve chosen to make. That’s what I consider success.
One thing I’ve learned from hanging out with some of these people I admire — even though it looks amazing on the outside, everyone still has similar issues. Family issues, pressure on this or that. I always like getting to know these people. Everyone’s stuff still stinks once in a while, and that’s always given me a ton of confidence and actually made me happier.
The Dr. Dre Hiring Question [00:36:00]
Sam: All right, I’m going to do a quick one. This is called the Dr. Dre question, and it’s useful when you’re hiring.
I was watching an old Tim Ferriss episode where he interviewed this guy I’d never heard of — Cal Fussman. He’s like a journalist, kind of a man with a very interesting life. He boxed Julio Chavez, did a bunch of interesting things. One of the things he talks about in this episode is the art of asking questions. And I like to study people’s lives, and I’m a collector of questions. A great question is valuable to me.
During the episode, he describes a set of founders who came to him. They said, “We have this problem. We’re super passionate about our business, but when we’re hiring we keep bringing in the wrong people. We can’t seem to find people who are as passionate about our business as we are. We want people at least close to it — people with a lot of passion — but we don’t know how to filter for that, because if you ask someone about their passion they just say yes. What do we do?”
He goes, “That’s easy. Just ask them the Dr. Dre question.” He says: “I was interviewing Dr. Dre as a journalist. I asked him, ‘What’s the longest you’ve ever gone on a project you were passionate about without sleeping?’ And Dre said, ‘Oh man, when I’m really into something I care about, I’m in the zone, I don’t even think about sleep. I forget to sleep. I’ll just keep going until I pass out — could be 20, could be 72 hours.’”
So the question is: just ask a person what’s the longest they’ve ever gone on a project they were passionate about without sleep. Their answer will tell you a lot. Either they’ll struggle to come up with a number — they’ve never had a project they were so passionate about that they became a degenerate, letting other parts of their life go — or it’ll be immediately familiar to them, and you’ll be able to tell. If they say, “You know what, I get eight hours of sleep every night, I function best when I’m fully charged,” you’ll know — okay, they might be right for the CFO role, but maybe not as my head of product while we’re figuring everything out from scratch.
The Dr. Dre question is a wonderful little thing to steal. I’m collecting it. It helps you find people who have that same streak of obsession and degeneracy.
Shaan: What’s your answer?
Sam: 48 hours would be mine. I’ve never done 72, not even close, but 48 hours for sure, multiple times. And the funny thing is it’s on really stupid stuff. I basically did that with the all-in video the other day — I was up all night editing it. I gave myself a day to do it so I was going to work non-stop. That day I was a bad dad, a bad husband, bad at fitness, bad at sleep, bad at eating — but I was amazing at that video.
That’s happened to me many times. When we were doing our first startup, me and my buddy Trevor would stay up — we’d see a cool commercial and be like, “Can we recreate that?” “I don’t know — download Adobe. Let’s find a cracked version on Napster.” Adobe Fireworks was a way you could animate something, and we’d sit there trying to learn it from tutorials. I would pass out after the storytelling part was done, and Trevor would stay up. He taught himself Photoshop and After Effects on maybe four projects — these 72-hour binges — and just knew how to do those tools after that. Now his whole career is like that.
Shaan: 72 hours is three nights?
Sam: Basically — you wake up, work, skip that first night of sleep, work through the next day, skip or barely sleep the next night, finish the next day.
Shaan: That’s insane. I’ve done an all-nighter and then worked the next day, but usually I’ll sleep on the couch in the office from like 4 to 8. It’s hard to go overnight and then keep going the next day. That’s challenging.
Sam: By the way, there’s a version of the Dr. Dre question for everything. There’s a version for partying: “Have you ever blacked out when you drink?” If they say no or once — maybe hang back from this party. But if they’re like, “Oh, dude, embarrassing number of times — there was a phase in my life it happened a lot, now it happens less” — okay, you should come to this party, you’ll have a good time.
There’s a version for parenting: “What’s the grossest thing your kids have ever done?” If they’re like, “Oh, where do I start — when they licked the urinal at the airport, when they rolled around on the floor, when they pooped in my bare hand because I couldn’t find the diaper in time” — that’s a seasoned parent. You can tell a first-time parent from a second-time parent based on the number of stories they have.
In college, when I was a degenerate, my friends and I used to say, “What’s the best way to get through a blackout and manage it effectively?” Practice.
One-Chart Business: The Homeschooling Trend [00:45:30]
Shaan: I’ve got another one. So we’ve talked about one-chart businesses before. The first example we gave was a chart of the percentage of funerals that are cremations — it went from 10% to over 50%. The guy sent us the pitch deck: “Yeah, we made cremation easy, but this one chart is the reason for our business existence. We are going to ride this wave.”
You’ve talked about how Jeff Bezos did that with the internet — he saw it was growing 23,000% a year or something like that, and he’s like, “Nothing grows that fast except bacteria on a Petri dish. I’m going to surf that wave.”
There’s a new one-chart I saw that is legit. It’s the growth in homeschooling. We kind of knew when COVID happened that people created little home schools — you needed to teach your kids, schools were closed. But it’s actually sustained. The 2023 data is out, and homeschooling has grown 40 to 50% year-over-year for three straight years. That’s pretty aggressive. Public schooling is growing at like 0 to 3%, private schooling is like 7%, and then homeschooling is 40 to 50% every year, compounded for three years.
I don’t know if that’s going to continue or not. But let’s assume it might. That means a whole bunch of businesses that were too niche are now perfectly niche.
So there’s this trend of micro schools. Outschool has grown like crazy.
Sam: Is a micro school considered homeschooling?
Shaan: So there’s traditional homeschooling — Jenny’s at home, I’m going to teach her myself, we’re going to print out worksheets, I’m the teacher. Then there’s micro schools. For a variety of reasons — COVID, school shootings, quality of instruction, social peer pressure, bullying — people might want to take their kid out of traditional schools.
A micro school is: six families get together and say, “Hey, for the cost of private school, we can actually just have our own private school.” You hire a teacher — a hired gun. That teacher makes double what they’d make at a public school, so instead of $50,000 a year they make $100,000 a year. You’ll get a great teacher because you’re paying them extremely well. They only have six kids to worry about, so they can get super invested. The teacher-student ratio is one-to-six instead of one-to-25. The kids still have friends and socialize. Same-age children — maybe a slightly broader window, like a year and a half or two years. There’s an indoor-outdoor component: sometimes a dedicated facility, sometimes the backyard, sometimes they rotate through the parents’ backyards. The teacher takes them indoor and outdoor — a better mix than sitting at a desk all day.
This makes all the sense in the world to me. I’m actually super interested in doing this.
Sam: There’s a business called Primer that Ryan Delk started.
Shaan: Yeah, Ryan’s cool, I like Ryan. Are you familiar with his company? Was that the homeschool one?
Sam: I think they pivoted. They started with more traditional homeschool — “what do you do if you’re actually at home?” — and then pivoted in the last year to micro schools. Now it’s basically an operating system. Hey, if you’re a teacher, push this button. Like Stripe Atlas for micro schools. You can spin up a school, be compliant with your state’s regulations, accept school choice vouchers.
Shaan: That’s the other one-chart here — the number of states that do this voucher program has gone up like crazy. As a parent, you get like a $10,000 voucher and you get to shop around. The government instead of just paying the public school pays the family, the family shops around, and picks the school that’s doing the best — or that sells itself the best. So the schools have to earn the funding.
Now thousands of these high-ticket vouchers are out there. If you build a successful school, you can attract these vouchers and basically get Revenue that the government has given the families to pay you.
Sam: So what Primer does is: spin up a school, be compliant, accept vouchers, have your website, your back end, a parent portal, a student portal — everything done for you. They have like three micro schools now, trying to get to six, then 18. Each of these micro schools basically generates like $75K of profit for the owner. Or if you’re the teacher, you might make $75 to $100K on the teacher wage plus another $75 to $100K for your little franchise school. The little Chipotle you built.
Shaan: I think this is a cool trend. Would you invest in this?
Sam: Yeah. Is the team too legit? Is the price going to be too high?
Shaan: They’ve already raised a bunch of money. He’s very well connected in Silicon Valley. I don’t even know the price but I already know it’s too high for me. But I think the idea is actually really great and highly investable because of where the puck is going.
Are you going to consider this for your kids?
Sam: Yeah, definitely. I want to either make my own pod or find a school or a pod around here. My daughter’s about to go to school. She goes to preschool right now a couple days a week — just to get acclimated. And it’s kind of underwhelming when you go. You pick up a toy like, “This is from 1984. Is there new stuff anywhere?” One teacher is supposed to manage all of them — that’s tough. Ten-to-one teacher-student ratio sounds really high.
I’m willing to be sold by a service like this. I’m ready, and I think a lot of people will be.
Private School, All-Boys Schools, and the “Right Kind of Weird” [00:55:00]
Shaan: I went to private school almost my whole life in St. Louis. Private school sounds fancier than I’m describing — my grade school was like $800 a year, and high school was like $10,000 a year. Nowadays a lot of private high schools are like $50,000. But my favorite part was that the teachers could do things that public school teachers couldn’t.
When I was being an idiot in the hallway, I remember one teacher — I was being rude and he kind of pushed me against the locker. He’s like, “What the hell is your problem?” Grabbed me by the collar. I had a little bit of fear. And I thought, “I’d better act right, otherwise there are going to be consequences.”
Whereas my mother was a public school teacher, mostly worked with kids with disabilities. There’d be times where a kid would need help and she’d say, “I can’t do that, I’m not allowed.” The difference in how much they could care, where that line was — it made a big difference to me.
Sam: That would probably not be allowed nowadays.
Shaan: The way I’m describing it is a little more serious than it actually was — it was just a teacher getting in my face and kind of pushing me. Like, “What the hell is your problem?” That type of thing. And there were other times where I got in trouble at home and I had to go to the teacher at the private school and tell them what was up, and they’d help me work through it.
I also went to an all-boys high school, which I freaking love. All-boys schools are awesome. The captain of the football team could also be in a play. When kids came out as gay, at first you’re like, “Oh, we’re going to tease them,” then it’s like — wait, we’re not here to impress any girls. We can all just be homies. There wasn’t as much of a cool-kid club. I loved it.
But the private school environment — they could just do things that my public-school-teacher mother couldn’t do, even though it was incredibly necessary. The rules are different, and I really appreciated that.
Sam: We’re debating at our house — even though we’ve got plenty of time — what we’re going to do with our kids. I would totally do one of these micro schools. I think this is awesome.
The only downside is: are you going to be a weirdo? Are your kids going to be the wrong type of weird?
Shaan: I mean, at least they’re with other kids. It might not be you know — because I remember, a lot of the source of social anxiety when I was a kid was that I just felt like everyone else knew where to go, knew what to say, knew what to do, and I was sort of lost. Have you ever seen Finding Nemo — he’s looking around, all the other fish are swimming, they all know where to go? That’s how I felt most of school. And because it’s so big, it’s easy to be lost in the shuffle. It’s easy to be the quiet kid that teachers just label, “He’s just quiet,” and sort of give up on them.
Whereas if you’re in a school of six to eight kids, even if you’re on the shyer side, I think the teacher and the dynamics allow you to come out of your shell. You can be a big fish in a small pond, and I think that’s really good when you’re trying to get your social legs under you.
Sam: We have a friend whose kid went to an alternative-style school — no homework, guides instead of teachers, all that. And he said his kid was just lacking structure. So he sends him to a Catholic school: you’re there at 8, school ends at 3, you have homework. And the kid needed the structure. He started thriving.
I get nervous because a lot of people need to learn how to follow rules, how to work within the rules, how to master grade school to get into a good high school, master high school to get into a good college, do well in college to get a good job — and then they’re going to work until 55 or 65, retire, have grandkids. For a lot of people, that linear route of discipline is the right decision. I get nervous with some of these schools that they’d skip that.
Of course you and I will always say our kids are going to be different, we’re in a different situation, we’ll figure it out. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. That’s what I get nervous about.
Shaan: But you also wonder how much of it’s self-fulfilling. How much is nature versus nurture? My wife grew up in a family where everybody did business. So even when she had a job, in her head she’s like, “This is the temporary part before I have my own business.” And sure enough, she has her own business.
Whereas I grew up where every single family member — aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, everyone — it was: good school, good college, good job, good salary, work your way up, become a good manager. I knew zero people who did their own business. Now I’m lucky I got off that track through other influences, but eight out of ten times I would have been on the job side just because that’s all I knew. That was normal.
If there’s any takeaway there, it’s: if you have an inkling you want something out of your life, go where that’s normal. That’s why I liked moving to Silicon Valley — it was very normal to start a company with a half-baked idea. That’s what the smart, capable people were doing. Everywhere else I lived, if you’re like, “I quit my job, I’m gonna work on this app for checking into restaurants,” people would think you’re a weirdo who’s off track. But in Silicon Valley, if you took a job at JP Morgan it’s like, “Bro, you better have a side hustle if you’re trying to get any respect around here.”
Moving my body literally moved me in the direction of who I wanted to be. I just moved my body to a place where the norm, the default, the expected was: you’re gonna go create a company. And I think it’s the same with schooling — if you’re in an environment that expects you to be creative, dynamic, working on projects rather than just sitting down and taking tests, that’s going to be self-fulfilling.
Sam: I remember being in San Francisco and meeting people who worked at JP Morgan or had a normal job, but they’d introduce themselves as the founder of some thing. “What is this thing?” “Oh, it’s just a project I’m working on.” And I used to make fun of that — but I kind of like it now. They were kind of cheating on their job. Like a cheating husband: “I work at JP Morgan, but it’s not what it looks like. This is just a temporary thing, there’s no emotional connection. Two years, that’s all, then I’m gonna do the real thing.”
I love that.
The Fiber Supplement Opportunity [01:05:00]
Shaan: You want to wrap up talking about poop?
Sam: Yeah, let’s talk about it.
Thanksgiving — I’m around a lot of family members, like 13 to 14 people in my house. A lot of bathroom time going on. Fiber is everywhere, dude. I think fiber supplements are a little opportunity. People age 36 and up are taking fiber regularly. When I look at these supplements — Metamucil, fiber brands like that — they literally sound like poop, which maybe is intentional. But I think there’s an opportunity to make a fiber supplement that is, you know—
Shaan: —what’s going through that right now is creatine.
The Creatine Gold Rush [01:06:30]
Sam: Creatine. You know what creatine is?
Shaan: Don’t make me flex. Of course I know what creatine is. It’s the most studied supplement of all time. It’s proven to make you stronger and build more muscle mass.
Sam: Historically creatine was powder form. Doesn’t necessarily have a bad taste — mostly neutral — but it’s a little chalky. I take creatine all the time, I love creatine. But when we were kids, creatine was what the jock football players used. It was like, “Is this bad for you? Is it going to mess up your kidney and your liver?” I stayed away from it.
And that’s mostly nonsense. Creatine is basically just like consuming more protein. It should almost be part of a daily routine. It’s a stable thing, you’re not going to get sick — it’s just going to make you stronger and build muscle.
But there’s a guy — what’s his first name, the “Borm” guy? He started a creatine company and basically made it like a Flintstone vitamin for creatine. He shares all his revenue online, and six months after starting the business, he’s doing like $800,000 a month in sales.
I really appreciate what he’s doing. He took an old supplement that’s wonderful but people are afraid of, and that’s not easy to consume — you have to mix it with water — and made it into a Flintstone gummy-bear-style chewable that tastes kind of good.
Shaan: His name is Dan McCormick. Let me pull up his latest update. Three million in all-time revenue. Looks like he’s going to do about three million in the first year. December when he started: $21K. January: $64K. Then it goes 128K, 172K, 244K, and the last two — August and September — were $550K each.
Sam: What he’s doing is taking creatine, making it popular, and making it easier to consume.
Ashwagandha, Kava, and the Supplements Business Case [01:10:00]
Shaan: There’s another supplement I like — ashwagandha. You know what that is?
Sam: Yes.
Shaan: Ashwagandha a lot of people use for anxiety. And there’s kava. I remember drinking kava in Fiji — it looks like a mud, a powder you mix with water, and they sit around a fire and drink it. It makes you a little high, but if you take it in small doses it calms you. And ashwagandha is another one like that.
I like this idea of taking fiber, ashwagandha, kava, or something else that has decades or centuries of proven usage, but isn’t packaged in a way that seems approachable. Years ago people did it with melatonin — it wasn’t very popular, now it’s incredibly popular and accessible. I love when people do that with certain supplements.
Sam: Dude, I have a supplement story that’s going to blow your mind, and I’m not going to tell you now. I’ll tell you like a year from now because it’s playing out right now. I have a very small part in it, but it’s wild to see what a successful supplement company can look like.
Shaan: Can you say what the supplement is?
Sam: I’m not saying anything. That’s how you know it’s good.
Shaan: Are you an investor in it?
Sam: I’m not going to say anything. A year or two from now I’ll tell the story, and it’s going to be unbelievable.
Sam: Once we had Derek from More Plates More Dates on, and he talked about his supplement business. Pretty amazing.
Shaan: Is it Derek? Blink twice.
Sam: I’m not saying anything. I’m saving this from you too because I want to see your reaction when it all plays out. I’m not giving you any hints.
Why Supplements Are a Beautiful Business [01:13:30]
Shaan: Would you go into the supplement business?
Sam: Yes. Where’s my soundboard — the Bezos “hell yes.” That’s how I feel about the supplement industry.
Shaan: From an outside perspective it seems like an overcrowded space that’s really challenging and saturated. But I don’t think it’s a space just anybody can play in — if you’re good, it’s the right type of e-commerce business to be in. If you have the right supplement, the right branding, the right good market, the right advertising — if you can stack those blocks together in the right formation — it’s a beautiful business.
Why supplements? Super high margin. Repeat purchase consumables. They get bought by bigger companies all the time, so the exit market is fantastic and the multiples are good. Supplements can go into retail really well. The inventory is very simple — you only have a limited number of SKUs. Usually made in the United States, so your cycle time is very low, which means you don’t have a bunch of money tied up in inventory. You might even have negative cash conversion. It’s a clear problem-solution so it’s easy to market. And it’s expensive — I probably spend $100 a month on protein powders, creatine, and a few other things.
Sam: For sure. I get a bag from Whole Foods, it’s like $80.
The Sister-in-Law and the “Leaky Gut” Market [01:15:30]
Shaan: So my sister-in-law’s in town. At previous Thanksgivings she was telling me about leaky gut. I was like, “What is that?” She’s like, “Oh my God, you don’t want leaky gut. Imagine a leaky gut — like your sewer lining has a hole in it, you don’t want that getting everywhere. It’s toxic, it’s bad.” And I was like, “How do I know if I have it?” She says, “You probably have it. Everybody has it.” I’m like, “Oh my God, my gut health! I’ve been totally neglecting my gut health. My microbiome is a mess.”
So this Thanksgiving I was like, “Hey, are you still into leaky gut?” She goes, “Scale of 1 to 10? 500. I don’t stop thinking about my gut.” And I literally recorded her on a voice memo describing all of the things. She goes, “This fiber is bad because it has all these extra ingredients, natural flavors, you don’t want that. You want this other one — it’s super clean, Garden of Life, it’s got three different sources of fiber because you get a blend, and when you get the blend of three fibers—” she’s drawing diagrams. Then she’s like, “And then you want to have Living Water.” I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s that?”
I was laughing so hard. And I was like, “If I could take my Facebook pixel and just show it your face, I’d only advertise to this type of woman.” She is spending, I have to imagine, hundreds of dollars a month — for her, for her kids, for her husband.
Sam: Does she consume all of it?
Shaan: She’s like, “I wish I was more on top of it. I’m so busy with life.” So that’s why she does a three-day water fast — as a detox.
That’s what you want. If you’re going to build a product like this, you’re advertising to women across America who are all-in. There’s this demographic of women who will buy all of these products, do the fast, want to alkalize their body. I’m not even saying it’s all BS — maybe it’s all true, maybe it’s not. But they believe it’s true, and as an entrepreneur that’s all that matters. There are people fully bought into a lifestyle, and in that lifestyle you can tack on other angles. Who knew water could be dead or alive? That’s a product positioning play.
Sam: Can you tell the story? Because she basically played back to me all the Facebook ads she’s read, gone down the rabbit hole on, and if you could tell the right story — that’s fantastic. When Craig Clemens was on and he talked about probiotics and creating the probiotics revolution, did you hear that part?
Shaan: No.
Sam: You’ve heard of probiotics — have you heard of prebiotics?
Shaan: Yeah.
Craig Clemens and the Prebiotic Revolution [01:19:00]
Sam: Craig Clemens basically created the prebiotic market. He created this video called “The American Parasite.” Joe Rogan tweeted it out: “This video is freaking me out.” This was 15 years ago now.
The video looks like a TED Talk — TED Talk voice, but a hand is drawing on a whiteboard the whole time, like those animated videos. And Craig described this on the podcast: they started with a long-form sales letter, selling these prebiotics. First day they spent $4 or $5K in ads, made $50K. They did it again. Did it again. Sold out within a week.
So then they made a big bet — they ordered a million dollars of inventory because they believed this thing would sell. When they relaunched and got inventory back in stock, first day they did $500K in sales, second day they did $600K. $1.1 million in two days.
And the video itself — a 30-minute basically documentary talking about how our food supply is messed up, how it creates a bad microbiome in your gut, and how that is “the Great American Parasite.” It’s ruining your health, it’s the reason you can’t control your cravings, it’s the reason you’re gaining weight, it’s the reason for all your problems — and it’s not you, it’s this parasite in your stomach. Isn’t that a convenient explanation that somebody wants to wrap their arms around?
That thing was viewed hundreds of millions of times. People were sharing it everywhere. And Craig says that Coke changed their formula for Diet Coke because of this video — took aspartame out — and Coke sales went down because Coke without aspartame doesn’t taste as good, then they put it back in six to nine months later.
Shaan: What was Craig’s company called?
Sam: Keybiotics. And he kind of popularized or created the prebiotic market in the United States.
Have you heard of Ancient Nutrition?
Shaan: Is that the Liver King guy?
Sam: No, a different company. They’ve raised $100 million — I have to imagine they’re doing hundreds of millions in revenue. It started because this guy named Josh Axe — Dr. Axe — had a blog. The majority of the blog talked about leaky gut, and he sold info products on how to fix the leaky gut. Eventually they were like, “Let’s actually make stuff.” And that’s how Ancient Nutrition started.
The branding of “leaky gut” is brilliant. It’s like when people talk about doing a cleanse, and they act like your blood is a pipe and doing a cleanse is like putting a pipe cleaner through it. I don’t know if arteries work that way, but that image — it makes you believe it.
Visual Kill Shots and the Language of Persuasion [01:24:00]
Shaan: Scott Adams had a concept — I think he called it a “linguistic kill shot,” and then one about visuals. Like a “visual kill shot.” The pipe cleaner, the leaky gut — these are visual kill shots. Words that make you see things you can’t unsee.
And Scott Adams used to say Trump did this constantly. He called Jeb Bush “Low Energy Jeb” right when Jeb was the front-runner. And basically every time you look at Jeb Bush from then on, you’re like, “He does look kind of low energy.” Sleepy Joe. Crooked Hillary — she does look immoral now that you’ve said it. “The Wall” — “it’s gonna be a big, beautiful wall.” He wasn’t saying “better border control policy.” He said, “We’re gonna build a big, beautiful wall, the biggest wall you’ve ever seen.” You have a visual of the border being strong and protected. Trump was kind of a master at this stuff, and Scott Adams described it really well.
Sam: Okay, well — in one year we’re going to play the clip of you saying you’re not going to tell us, because I’m very eager now. You’ve gotten me hooked. I’m so eager to know who it is, to know everything about it.
Shaan: A year or two from now, I’ll tell the story.
Sam: Done.
Shaan: All right, that’s the pod.