Rob Dyrdek returns to MFM to break down how he went from roughly $15-20M in net worth in 2016 to just under $350M today, almost entirely through building and selling companies via his venture studio model. He walks through two detailed case studies — Momentous supplements and Jolie (the Jolie shower filter startup) — plus the $300M sale of Thrill One Media, his approach to real estate, and his obsessive system for time management and health optimization. Sam and Shaan consider this the best episode they’ve ever recorded.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Rob Dyrdek (guest, entrepreneur / founder / professional skateboarder)
Pre-Episode Hype: Sam and Shaan React [00:00:00]
Shaan: Say exactly what you just said to me when we finished our recording with Rob Dyrdek.
Sam: I said I think that was the best episode of MFM we’ve ever done. I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m just on a high right off of it, but I believe so. People can tell in the YouTube comments — they should tell us. To me this was the best episode we’ve done. 400-something episodes. How many have you done, Jonathan? Something like 400 episodes. That was number one. My favorite. The best episode we’ve ever done, from beginning to end. I’m shocked.
Shaan: So you asked him — we started getting along really well — and you said, “Rob, what’s your net worth?” And I was like, damn, is he gonna answer that? And he gave the full answer. We’re not gonna say it now, but it’s somewhere in the middle. He gave the entire answer where he broke it down. He talked about his — I’m just actually shocked that he said most of the things that he said. And it was amazing in a great way.
Sam: Stories of two companies that he’s built, and the stories were phenomenal. We talked about net worth, what he does with his money, how he thinks about investing. We talked about how he kind of went from beginner at business — making all the mistakes — to now being really sophisticated, and how that all happened in a really short amount of time. We talked about his house, the Forever Estate, the dream he’s been building. We hit all the buttons: the inspirational, the tactical, the entertaining, the humorous. It had everything I like in an episode, all in one. I couldn’t be happier right now.
Shaan: If you’re on YouTube, whether you’re listening on podcasts or actually watching us right now, let us know in the comments what you think. Or if you’re not on YouTube, tweet at Sam and I — it’s Shaan VP, like Vice President, and Sam Parr — and add Rob to it. Let us know on Twitter. If you’re a YouTuber, let us know there. I’m very curious what you guys think. Tag Rob if you can, give us a wave of feedback. I’m going to send it all to Rob after the pod to show him the love, because I know people are gonna love this.
Sam: All right, without any further buildup, here’s the episode with Rob Dyrdek.
The Human Un-Optimization Man [00:02:30]
Sam: All right, we’re live. Rob — Shaan, you missed it because you’re late. You’re always late. And that’s Rob’s whole thing: timeliness. He was talking mad shit about you because you were using his face and his time template that he talked about in the last pod.
Shaan: “I am human optimization” was the big line from his last time. That’s been in our trailer now.
Sam: And Rob — if you are human optimization, I am human un-optimization. I am the opposite.
Rob: Hey, look — the beauty of time mastery is also time flexibility and understanding that life is a living experience. But nothing brings me greater joy than to know a man that was using my time data for customer acquisition, and knowing how much I collect my data and how specific I am with mastering my time — that you would be seven minutes late? It makes life more grand, to me, to know that. For you, knowing how much I respect and use my time so thoughtfully, that you’d steal a little bit from me — you know what I mean? It’s very fun.
Shaan: That is well played. I appreciate that, dude.
Sam: We were talking about a bunch of stuff before you hopped in. Rob, you came on, I think, two years ago or a year and a half ago. Everyone — I just reread the comments a minute ago — said the same thing, which was: Rob’s just a skater. He’s smart, does good TV stuff. But we didn’t realize he was just profound. That pod felt like a coming-out moment. I’ve watched you with so many other people now, and you’ve gone more in depth on some of your stuff. Was that like the “artist formerly known as Prince” moment?
Rob: You guys get all the credit. Because let me give you this: you led out trying to talk to me about skating and TV, with no depth of research into seeing what I was up to. Then I went on a 20-minute rant so you could understand the depth of how I operate. The entire conversation changed for an hour. That’s the funniest part of the experience — I said, “Okay, they have no idea who they’re talking to. Let me lay this out real quick.” But again, I’m so thankful the conversation turned, because it was also the first time I’d shared it. I had been collecting the data, using my rhythm of existence, but I’d never shared it before. And then you guys reposting it really began to create the wave.
Rob: Then you guys put out a thing about, “What if Rob wanted to monetize his data? What would he need to charge?” You put out this whole thing about how to build an app. And it really started the wheels in me of realizing: I need to turn this philosophy — first into a usable digital product, something more intuitive than an app, a software that allows people to realize this level of harmony and overall happiness that I’ve created through this system. Which has led to where I’m at today: continually pushing the philosophy forward and ultimately creating software inspired by you guys. We get all the credit.
Shaan: There are actually a couple listeners who, after they heard that, made their own version. They were like, “I don’t know who was talking about this, but I went and made my own version. It’s linked to Google Sheets, kind of a janky version.” You definitely inspired several people to look at how am I treating my time. And some people tried to build their own version of that tracker.
Rob: And again, I think it’s so much more complex than that, right? Because time is alive. Your time, your experience — your present is basically your whole life leading to this present moment. And the energy you feel at this present moment is ultimately the quality of your reality. So time ends up being this much more important aspect of life to learn to manage. And then you’re changing all the time, the world’s changing — you’re selling companies, starting new companies, your kids are growing. So managing your time and how you stay balanced is constantly changing as you change. That’s what’s difficult when somebody makes their own app. There’s a philosophy and a rhythm and a process that I need to create in the software that makes it much more intuitive based off of the type of personality you have, to actually work. Otherwise it just feels like you’re making checklists and data and then it gets too difficult and it’s over.
The Momentous Story: Co-Founding a Supplement Company That Almost Failed [00:09:00]
Sam: Before Shaan joined, Rob and I were talking about Andrew Huberman. Rob’s a skater — obviously a professional skateboarder — and Huberman loves skating. And we were talking about Momentous, one of the main advertisers on the Huberman pod. Andrew says it’s the only protein he likes, so obviously I bought a ton.
Rob: Yeah, I co-founded Momentous not too long ago. Crazy how fast it’s grown because of Huberman’s promotion.
Sam: Wait — what? Rob, you co-founded Momentous protein?
Rob: Yeah. I co-founded it with Matt Wan in 2016. When they brought it to me, he had a vision for creating basically the most premium supplements the market had ever seen — the Ferrari of supplements. It was called Project One at the time. Matt was forgoing his first year at Harvard to build this company. He was 18 years old, and his father, Mark Wan, had been one of the big investors in my professional skateboarding league. So I had a relationship and said I’d do this project with his son.
Rob: First thing we had to do was rebrand it. Create a name and a soul for what is the absolute pinnacle of supplements — Momentous. All the way down to the logo. I even went through the whole process of making it. Rob, is that you in Photoshop, or is this like a creative agency pitching you guys?
Sam: How does that happen?
Rob: This is literally me in Illustrator. The agency sent some logos and I started cutting up the agency’s logo, being like, “No.” There was a circle in the middle — I was like, “No, look, this forms an M and a mountain.” I was literally cut-and-pasting in Illustrator. Love it.
Rob: So we launched that company — and we didn’t sell a thing. We don’t sell a thing. We’ve got the most overpriced protein in the entire industry. It’s 35% above every other protein. Literally nobody buys it.
Rob: And now you’ve got an 18-year-old CEO. This kid doesn’t even — every single day is another thing. If you want to talk about the headwinds of no man’s land and the pain of launching a business with an 18-year-old genius — because he’s brilliant, but he was 18 and didn’t even understand anything about running a company. You can’t advise somebody into running a company. You have to fight the fires and learn the battles.
Rob: Long story short, this business never got off the ground for years. I finally said, “Look, man, you’ve tried everything. You’ve done all different types of partnerships, made all different types of verticals of product. It is the Ferrari of supplements, absolutely the purest and best. You kept it real. But you just can’t find a market for it. You either have to sell it or find somebody to merge with. You can’t spend your life on this — you’re now 23. You learned everything. Go figure out how to take this skill set and apply it to a business that has a faster-growing opportunity.”
Shaan: What were the sales? What were the annual sales when you had that conversation?
Rob: I want to say a few million, and just losing money year over year.
Shaan: How much did you put in to start?
Rob: Not much — like $200,000 at the beginning to get it off the ground. And another hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand, maybe. And I got 30% of the business.
Rob: So now I’m on the board, I’m in board meetings, and nothing is as painful as board meeting after board meeting with no revenue growth, just burning capital, trying to figure out how to tell a story to raise more capital to keep the dream alive. That went on for a significant amount of time. We got incredibly diluted. And then it was just — hey, you’ve got to make a decision on what your life looks like. This kid had foregone going to Harvard to build this company. He’d stepped away from this big education. In the beginning I was like, “This kid’s too smart to go to school, what he should do is start a company.” Eight years later, I’m like, man — I was the bad uncle by advising him not to go to Harvard.
Rob: But diluted all the way down, he went out and found the company that merged with amped — the business Jeff Byers was running at the time, the PR Lotion and the AMP product. I had actually looked at that in 2015 and almost done a deal to own half of it, because of how much I believed in the IP. They merged, became Momentous — and then they locked in the Huberman deal. And the business exploded overnight.
Sam: Overnight?
Rob: Overnight. You know how much it grew? Like 20 times. It just went — it is now poised to make a real run. And I would attribute it to the one-for-one: Andrew Huberman is to Momentous what the right media-to-consumer match can be. We could never find an audience. It didn’t matter how much ad spend we did, where we spent it, deals with NFL teams, MLB teams, all these athletes. But when it finally landed with someone whose core media is their authenticity in the science side of human optimization — and he’s saying, “This is the very best supplements,” and they are in fact the very best supplements — boom, that thing goes.
Rob: What do I have now? I don’t know, like four percent. Nine years later, I’d already given up on the brand. I barely claimed it. Looked at the merger as an exit. Now it’s completely exploded. And yes, I’ll get a return on my $300,000 that would be significant to a regular investor. But in the co-founding game — I looked at selling that business for $100 million in under five years and having 20% of it, back in 2016. Versus selling it eight years later and making a million dollars wherever I end up after dilution. I’ll get like 2.5 times my money. But that’s not why you play the game of venture creation.
Sam: That might be my favorite story that’s ever been shared on this pod. For a couple of reasons: one, you told it great. Two, it had all the drama and elements. And three — you’re very honest. Most people that come on this pod, when we ask how much they put in, they say, “Hand wave, it’s doing well now.” They won’t say that last part: “Yeah, but you know — it’s been eight years, I got diluted, and honestly I’ll make kind of shit all on this.” That is very rare. I really appreciate it.
Should Matt Have Gone to Harvard? Rob on Education [00:20:00]
Shaan: I got two follow-ups. The first — you said you kind of think maybe Matt should have gone to Harvard. I think there’s an interesting question that applies to a lot of people: should I go to college? People who make it are often like, “Ah, you don’t learn it there, you learn in the real world.” It sounds like you were in that camp. But you said maybe you changed your mind as you’ve matured or with your own kids. Was it because the company wasn’t working? Or did you come to appreciate something else about college?
Rob: I think I’ve come to appreciate the value of college above all. As someone who quit high school and started his first company at 17 — but what I never understood, even back then, was: looking at business in a multi-dimensional way. Learning everything about business. Understanding product and supply chain, brand and marketing, customer acquisition, management and hiring, teams. Understanding the financial side. Knowing that all of those have to integrate into a financial model that you’ve got to believe you can execute — because that’s how a business actually becomes successful. When you project what you’re going to do and you actually do it. Not project a fantasy so you can raise money.
Rob: Going to business school, at least you leave with the fundamentals and a general knowledge that when you step out into the real world and try to build a company, you have a foundation. Versus what he did, what I did when I was launching all these companies when I was young — all the way into my 30s — you have such little general knowledge of how it all works. Because you’re such an optimist. Especially when you’re really smart, you can figure things out fast. But there’s just too many things you don’t know when it comes to the complexities of building a business.
Jolie: The Shower Filter That Became a $200M Business [00:24:00]
Shaan: My second follow-up: this is a little nerdy on the protein side, but how did you actually go about creating the cleanest supplement? There’s definitely a market for the highest-quality, purest-grade products. People will pay the extra $20 per bag. But the supplement industry is notoriously dirty — if you test these things, they don’t always turn out well. Did you do anything radical to achieve that result?
Rob: It was first about the people who helped develop it — trainers for the 49ers and the Celtics. Then all the certifications that are very expensive. Informed Sport, things like that. And here’s the thing — what does that do? It just keeps putting pressure on price and margin. There’s a certain point where it’s so expensive that even the people who really care — it’s not making enough of a difference for the absolute premium. We’d find a consumer and then that consumer never showed up until Huberman said to that audience — which converted Sam, and now has Sam talking to Jeff. That level of media authenticity backing up the product is what we never found.
Sam: I think we need to get in the certification business.
Shaan: Cruelty-free certified, Inc.
Sam: We will certify everything for y’all, for the low low price. And by the way — Huberman is like the Oprah but of this kind of doc media game. If the doc says this is clean, he can move a lot of product in a short amount of time. But you think about the depth of how he approaches it — he’s earned that respect. You don’t question whether Nike put maximum effort into a running shoe. You pick the color and which one feels good. You know they’re going to do all the work. Developing that level of authenticity is incredibly difficult. There are a lot of Huberman-esque people who do not have his depth or his process, which doesn’t allow them to carry the same weight.
Shaan: That was probably just a straight cash deal when you guys bought that ad spot?
Rob: I’m not entirely sure about the deal. I wasn’t involved in the company at that point. But whatever it is, he got underpaid. Whatever it was — too little.
Sam: What are some other venture creation things you’ve been up to? That was one amazing story. Do you have any other interesting things you’ve been cooking? And how many have you done?
Rob: I’ve done a bunch. And here’s the beauty of it too: I’ve made so much money that you can play the game more honestly. When I started, I wanted to build 50 to 70 companies, own 25 to 35, and sell them for between $50M and $150M, making $20 to $30M each. But when you sell a company for $200M and get $150M, you’re like, “Well, that’s way more fun. How do I move this number from making $15-30M a deal to $50-200M a deal?” You begin to change as you evolve. You want to do fewer deals. You want to be much more focused on the opportunity and all the lessons learned.
Rob: Would I start a supplement brand with an 18-year-old ever again? I would not. Let me give you an example of the opposite.
Rob: I was approached by a really seasoned CEO who had just built a company and sold it — a footwear brand called Greats.
Sam: I own a pair of those.
Rob: So you understand him as a brand and a brand builder. He had an idea in the beauty space. He essentially presented this concept: filtered shower water is an overlooked cornerstone of your beauty routine. Your water is filled with garbage that dries out your hair, dries out your skin, does all this stuff. Yet for some reason, nobody has approached beauty through filtering the water.
Rob: So now you look at it from a business model. It’s recurring revenue. A single piece of hardware — the filters have to be replaced, so you’ve got this recurring revenue. Now it’s a super-experienced CEO with a depth of knowledge in DTC. It’s not like an experienced retail CEO trying to transition into what they think is an easier model. He had the understanding, the knowledge.
Rob: So we do the research. We look at the entire space of all filtered showerheads. The entire market — tiny. Under a billion dollars. He wants to charge $135 for the unit, $35 for the filters. You can go to Home Depot and get a shower filter for $19. There’s one premium one sold by a beauty company, like chrome, maybe $99 to $100 — but no movement.
Rob: When you look at that opportunity, it’s as clear as can be where it’s like: this is either pure white space with a real opportunity to make this matter in beauty and build a massive business, or it will literally just not work. It is so pure. But the tantalizing side is — boy, if it works — think of the friction it takes to get a shower head in. And man, think of how low the churn will be on the subscription, because there’ll be way more friction to take it completely out and stop your recurring subscription than to just put back your old shower head. That made it a compelling concept.
Sam: And for the listener, this is basically Jolie. They send you a new showerhead, they send you a wrench, you put it on there and put little filter packets in. And I think they smell nice or something. And the premise is that for hardcore health nerds afraid of the chemicals and minerals in city water, this is the solution.
Sam: So did I summarize that correctly? And how were they able to go to $4M? And now this year you know they’ll do close to $40M?
Rob: The way they did all their initial customer acquisition — the water departments have to report all the contaminants in the water. They scraped all that data. You put in your ZIP code and got a complete report of all the stuff in your water. That’s how they did customer acquisition for months before they even had the product out. Then they did pre-orders before it launched.
Rob: What were we all hanging on for? The first quarter of churn. The churn was at like 1.2%. Everything about it worked. Then it was just growth, month over month. They launched at Erewhon. They have a giant display. You can buy them at Erewhon. The entire process of how they did it overnight — because how do you value a business like that? That business is valued at $200M-plus in a year and a half. Because yes, it’s selling hardware month over month, but then it is stacking subscription dollars. It is this extraordinary hardware subscription service that is incredibly rare. That’s what’s made it so valuable overnight.
Rob: He built the company with three people. We’re the primary investor. It’s profitable, and they never raised another dime.
Shaan: What size check did you do on that one?
Rob: I did $800K on that one.
Shaan: I mean, that’s kind of small for an early-stage startup. What’s been the biggest bet — where have you plowed in something like $10M?
Rob: I did that when my professional skateboarding league and production company merged in with Nitro Circus, creating Thrill One Media, and then we sold Thrill One Media — which we called 301 Media — for $300M. We got $200M of that. This was the layering in of my production deal. And the group that bought it — I invested $10M with them to buy me some equity back, plus did a separate deal for a bigger stake in the production company that I sold, my league, and the overall sports property.
Rob: Because I knew during that transaction I was going to negotiate for a bigger television deal. I basically leveraged my ability to go and get a lot of value for the company. I said: if I go sign this deal, how much additional equity will you give me for my $10M? They’re like, “If you go get that deal, we’ll give you 12 extra percent.” Overnight, I made my $10M worth like $60M, underwritten by the deal I’m making hundreds of millions of dollars to do. And at the end of it — through all of this — I work less now than I’ve ever worked.
From $15M to $350M: The Net Worth Breakdown [00:38:00]
Sam: Who are some of your business advisors, mentors, friends that have helped you develop this muscle? You go from white belt to blue belt to black belt. Sounds like when you started you were more of a white belt — like everybody — and now you’re looking at structures, looking at ways to double-dip, thinking about IRR but also gross dollar amounts, fewer deals but bigger deals. Who have you learned from that you respect, either as a friend or mentor on the business side?
Rob: I don’t think anybody plays the game like this that I know in my circle. I think it’s experience, and continually looking at every deal multi-dimensionally. The gift I had early on was that I used to look at media and marketing multi-dimensionally — how are all these ways I can monetize a television show, how do I own the rights of media. I always looked at opportunity multi-dimensionally, but I didn’t understand how to build and create value in business. Once I taught myself how to look at business holistically — how to create and build businesses to sell, creating value — I began to see all the opportunity at all different angles to create the most value for myself, with a lot of times underwritten risk.
Rob: If I didn’t know I was going to sign that mega television deal, I wouldn’t have put in $10M. But then I said, “Well, what if I go sign this deal — how much additional equity will you give me?” Then it’s like, okay — I just made my $10M worth $60M overnight.
Shaan: What do you think you’re worth at this point? You have liquid and illiquid. What’s the net worth? And do you have a goal? Last podcast you said, “I need to be a billionaire — I deserve it.” Where are we at?
Rob: Ha — I was doing a lot. You’ve got to think: between our last call, I hired an amazing CEO who came from a family office structure. I needed somebody who understood business and the dynamics of a family office, but was also young and excited to go on a journey to a billion dollars. So I have modeling for just my cash-flowing assets that takes me to a billion. Forget about any of the venture stuff. I have modeling out to the year 2050, fully integrated, on all asset classes.
Rob: Where do you make the billion? You make it either slowly over time through compounding, or in big chunks. Today, my net worth of all my assets is just under $350M. The pathway — there’s the slow long pathway to a billion that’s easy through compounding. Just seven or eight percent, right? And with the buildings, I’m getting 5 to 6% cash — tax-free cash — but still 7 to 10% equity growth over the long term. Some of those are running 15 to 16% IRRs. A lot of the buildings I’ve sold have ended up at 35 and 42% IRRs. And what do you do with that? You 1031 exchange it, get new buildings. So the real estate side is compounding in a unique way.
Rob: Then with my cash — money markets are giving you close to 5% right now. And I keep a significant amount of liquid dollars in Nuveen high-yield funds that kick off around a blended 10%. That’s not going to grow, but you’re making so much cash off of your cash. And you’re making so much tax-depreciated cash off of your real estate portfolio that — I call it the modern cash flow portfolio — that cash is underwriting the expense of my life and the family office. So when I have big exits, I look at it all through the lens of how much am I actually making post-tax per hour.
Rob: What’s my dollar-per-hour goal? If I do something that saves me $100 — like returning a blender to the store — that wasn’t a savings of $100. That was a loss. I’m looking at a million dollars an hour, for my goal, as it relates to energy and effort that I put in.
Rob: And the more I think about passive income — passive income is not buying a building you’ve got to operate, where you’re constantly trying to keep it rented, things are breaking, you’re making decisions. That’s not passive. Passive income is when you give money to an operator and they give you cash back. That’s when you’re doing nothing. What you have to get good at is evaluating operators, creating principles for the type you’d be willing to deploy capital with, so you know they’ll do what they say. All you’re doing is reading statements and putting a little bit of time to think through future strategy a few times a year. That’s the difference.
The Path to Net Worth: Almost All Created in 4 Years [00:47:00]
Shaan: Based on the last pod, you said into your late 30s you’d screwed a whole bunch of stuff up. I think you were trying to raise money from a VC or PE company and realized your business was losing money. So does that mean the vast majority of your real wealth creation has been in the last 10 years?
Rob: No, in the last few years.
Shaan: But you weren’t — you were broke?
Rob: I would consider myself broke. I would say I started from zero almost in 2016 when I launched the machine. I wouldn’t say broke — I mean, you’re a millionaire. You were worth at least $10M.
Sam: I would say I was probably worth like $15 or $20M at that time. So not broke. But to me I was like, “Bro — to a future billionaire, a millionaire is broke.”
Rob: But the majority of this wealth was all created between 2018 and 2022. Over that four-year period. Right now it’s exponentially scaled. I very conservatively valued the ventures that get me up to the $325M zone. I could easily push those to closer to $400M. But it’s also like, okay — how do I want to continue to create bigger opportunities in the future? I’m always five years into the future.
Rob: The same way I understood in 2016: here’s the strategy. The strategy worked — only it was bigger than I had anticipated. I had the clarity of like, “This is what I was going to do.” But then the universe conspired to create more opportunity that I capitalized on, and got to this scale that I could have never imagined in such a short amount of time. And all it does is make me see further and clearer on how I can get the scale even bigger, which leads me to believe — through compounding — I become a billionaire over time. But I also believe I can create some ventures, including the software, that I’ll be able to monetize at a much higher scale and in a shorter amount of time.
Forever Estates: A $10M Land Gamble and the Family Legacy Plan [00:52:00]
Sam: If you Google your name, you’ll see you went on a bit of a buying spree — buying like four really nice homes in LA. I thought it said you’re not going to live there, that it’s rentals?
Rob: I would never buy a house to rent. This will give you clarity on how much money I had and how dumb I was in 2015. In 2013, I was dumb as dirt. I didn’t understand business, I didn’t understand anything. I hired all the consultants, began to formulate everything I needed to learn, began to understand strategy and where I wanted to invest money. Never even heard of multi-family units in 2014.
Rob: I took all the money I had to my name — in 2015 it was $12M in cash — and moved it all to cash. Here I am with a vision for how I’m going to create a venture studio, the Dyrdek Machine, the whole thing. Just gotten married, looking for a forever home. And I find the most heaven-sent piece of land that God has ever created: in a gated community in Beverly Hills. A private road to a four-acre promontory with unobstructed views of the entire LA basin, Hollywood Sign, everything. The most extraordinary property I’ve ever stepped on in my life.
Rob: Paid $10M cash for it. Then launched this dream with $2M — because I was like, “This is my destiny to build a house and live on this land forever.” It was just land.
Rob: I call it Forever Estates. And I have since bought multiple houses in that neighborhood and remodeled them while I continue to design Forever Estates. I’ve kept it all these years, carrying the cost — $200K a year just to carry it, plus all the architects on an ongoing basis. We had an architecture team I fired. Hired Saota, the best architects in the world out of South Africa. We’ve just been designing and designing and designing.
Rob: I rented a house for three and a half years. Bought a house for $6.5M, sold it for like $9.5M two years later after remodeling. Bought another for $8M and put $2M into it. The house I’m in now is two doors down from the entrance to Forever Estates so that when I begin to build it, in the fall, I can be there every step of the way.
Sam: How long ago are we talking on timeline?
Rob: Eight years.
Sam: Eight years?
Rob: People say to me, “This is crazy.” And I’m like, “I’m going to live there forever. And when I build it, I don’t even want to think about the cost — it’s going to cost me $20M to build. I needed to get to generational-level wealth to even want to think about it.” That’s why I kept buying houses and working on the design.
Rob: Now I’ve gotten to such a scale. The strategy now: I’m putting it into a trust, paying cash to build it, and then I’m going to pay rent to the trust. That will build an endowment so that this home can be in my family forever but be self-operational — it doesn’t have to be tied to a personal estate, it will be run, and there can be family meetings at Forever Estates for hundreds and hundreds of years into the future.
Rob: You can’t even get to that way of thinking unless you have kids, unless you create generational wealth, unless you get to that time. And all of that happened over a five-year period.
Sam: It started with a horrible decision. Ten million dollars in land.
Rob: Look — how much money did I have invested in buildings in 2015? $100,000. I had $100,000 invested in buildings and was making like $7K from that one. And I put $10M straight into a liability. Now I’m carrying the cost — taxes, double homeowners fee because it’s a double lot, $200K a year — plus all these architects on an ongoing basis. Absolutely ludicrous.
Shaan: You’re amazing. Are you taking adoption applications? I think you’re 15 years older than me. You could be my teenage — you’re taking applications?
Rob: Yeah!
Shaan: I want to go to Forever Estates, man. “Forever Estates” for you is going to be more like “Decade Estates” the way it’s taken.
Rob: Oh, that is — hey, even if it lasts forever, what’s a decade? That’s a drop in the bucket. But think about it: it seems to me it’s just another part of seeing my life completely in multi-dimension. It’s my relationship with my wife and kids, the health I have, how every part of my existence has continued to expand and get better. I didn’t get better in just business. I got better in all aspects of my existence on an ongoing basis.
Rob: That house — if I would have built what I designed five years ago, I would have been so bummed. Because every six months I’d get a completely new design, get it in VR, and as I changed and thought about and got clearer on what I wanted the future to look like, how I would want family meetings here in 200 years — it allowed me to keep evolving. And when I finally got to this point, just about to get the final permits, it feels right on time.
Rob: I love that I’m healthy — I’ll be healthier, happier, wealthier, and wiser till the day that I die. And right now, what’s my goal? One million hours of life — 114 years and 54 days. So where am I spending a significant amount of my wealth? Understanding every single aspect of my body and having a very deep longevity plan that allows me to enjoy life and live it at a high level at the ripe old age of 112.
Sam: Somebody get the 114 — just fall off a cliff. Rob, you’re amazing.
Longevity and Peak Top: The Health Obsession Explained [01:03:00]
Sam: I was going to ask you about longevity. A lot of people — when I sold my first business and had my first bite of financial success — I was able to get physically fit. I had more time, I felt more calm. Is this new focus on longevity because you now have financial success and more time? Or did you always have this bug?
Rob: I have been doing it non-stop for 20 years. I got my first blood panel and started optimizing into my blood work in 2012. The big transition was in 2015 — around the same time I found that land. I was in the best shape of my life but my body was always achy. I made a decision to have a doctor come to my house five days a week. All I wanted to do was build a perfectly structured physical system. And what that led to was triangulating a ton of different therapies, which in the process allowed me to learn every muscle in my body — how the fascial system works, what are my neurological deficiencies, what do I need to retrain in my overall system internally — leaky gut, blood-brain barrier, all the things that lead to inflammation that reduce the quality and length of life.
Rob: I’ve been doing this for over a decade. Now the way I approach it is so sophisticated because I know every single aspect of my entire function holistically.
Rob: What happened when I got to this scale of success — I refer to it as Peak Top. It’s the same psychological chaos that happens to a drug addict at rock bottom, where something finally shifts in you and you can’t be a drug addict anymore. I finally got to the other side, where you’ve gotten more and more disciplined and healthy, and then all of a sudden you’re like: why would I ever not just be extraordinarily healthy for the rest of my life?
Rob: And from that point — I have not missed a day of getting up at 5 AM. I have not missed a day in the gym. I have not missed one day meditating, one day eating supplements, eating clean. I have not had a drink. I haven’t had sugar. I haven’t had a snack. Any of that — since I hit that point about nine months ago.
Rob: The data I’ve been sharing with you guys — the quality of my life numbers: how I feel about my life, work, and health, zero to ten. And then my discipline numbers: what percentage did I get up at 5 AM, brain-train, meditate, get in the gym, eat clean, not drink, take my supplements. It is 100% across this entire year. And my qualitative numbers are at the highest they’ve ever been. So every single day I wake up feeling extraordinary.
Rob: I grew into that. And in 2016 when I designed my vision for my business and financial success, I also designed a vision for my life success and my health success. So what happened over the last seven years is I got better and better and better at all of it — which led to this euphoric state where you have an incredible depth of knowledge of your entire reality, your current state and your future state. You’re just continuously predicting the future and creating higher probabilities of being healthier, happier, and wealthier in the future, while living extraordinary in the present.
Shaan: What’s been the 80/20 of that? The things that have made the biggest change on your health?
Rob: Not drinking, not eating sugar, intermittent fasting, and eating a lean protein and vegetable meal. To me that is everything. Because your body begins to clean itself, you feel better about yourself, you make sharper decisions, you go two layers deeper, your emotions are more in check. Things happen inside the family — uncontrollable things — and you’re able to control yourself better. That pure diet alone — avoiding processed foods and alcohol, being committed to that — will absolutely change your life. It gives your mind more depth to execute at a higher level in the limited time you have.
Sam: Have you seen this guy Brian Johnson and what he’s doing?
Rob: I look at Brian Johnson as — this guy’s outrageous, it’s too much. But with all my judgment, if I would have told myself five years ago, “Hey, this is what you’re gonna be doing” — I would have been like, “That guy’s crazy.” So I look at it and feel like Brian Johnson’s crazy, but I’ll probably turn into Brian Johnson in seven or eight years.
Shaan: He’s wild. Brian Johnson just has that look, you know what I mean? He looks like a futuristic amoeba.
Rob: That’s exactly what I was thinking. All he needs to do is tan. If he tans, everybody would be like, “This guy is amazing.” He doesn’t tan and they’re like, “You’re a vampire, bro.” He looks like an AI person. He might not even be real. He’s a Midjourney.
Sam: But I do look at that aspect — because you’ve got to think about anything: it’s knowledge and experience and understanding, and then a continual evolution and growth of understanding the whole. Applying that to my relationship with my wife and family. Applying that to my health. Applying that to business, to investment, to building my family office. All of that way of thinking is based off of gaining knowledge — taking something from not understanding it, feeling difficult, to then making it easier — and then continually optimizing. You’re just incrementally making it all better.
Bugs in the Software: Rob’s Remaining Flaws [01:14:00]
Shaan: I love the way you think and I love the pursuit of greatness and excellence for yourself and having a vision for yourself. I also know it’s inspiring but also hard to relate to perfection. I’m curious what are the current flaws or bugs in your software that you’re still debugging. We all have some bugs. What are some that are still in your system? For me — a nice bag of chips is still a bug in my software. Sometimes when I’m with my wife I’m not as present as I should be. What are some of those for you?
Rob: You know — and this is going to sound extraordinarily —
Sam: Don’t say it. I tried to help you man. I tried to serve you up a way to be vulnerable here.
Rob: No, no — there is still — I still get triggered and I’ll get angry. When my expectations are mismanaged at a high level, I’ll snap. I’m not even kidding you, I am trying to even stop the triggers when I get triggered — to avoid saying something, letting it come out. I still feel the trigger. My goal is to not even let things trigger me at all. But I’ve had to let go of certain people in my life that were doing that to me and continually optimize.
Rob: And this is embedded in my soul: when I feel stuck — when I’m doing deep work and I feel stuck — all I want is pizza and wine. All I want is pizza and wine. It’s not even a matter of acting on it. My soul feels like it needs a glass of wine. Because whenever I get stuck, there’s this psychological thing of: just let it all go. Even though I don’t act on it because I’ve evolved beyond it, the feelings still exist in there.
Rob: And the commitment to 100% health and no alcohol and no sugar — it eliminated me being short with people, eliminated me making rash decisions, not thinking through stuff. I used to say Dyrdek Enterprises is “Money Fearless” — I would invest so recklessly. That reckless “let’s just push it forward, let’s just start it and go for it” is still something I fight. I’ll get excited and energized and be like, “Let’s do it!” — and I have to control that impulse.
Rob: But here’s the thing — I look at it the way Kobe was never relatable to me because of too much discipline, the way Tom Brady — why would you not take the off season off? I used to look at that as an impossible level. And I know I’m reaching this unrelatable, unattainable place. That’s why I put out a podcast earlier this year — the most unrelatable podcast, part one and part two — where I just laid out the depth of actually how I’m operating and what I’ve learned along the way to get to this level.
Rob: I want to be the proof that you can get to a place where you never get angry, you never have a negative thought, where you are completely harmonious and balanced in all your relationships, time, health, and happiness. Where you are happy and filled with gratitude seven days a week, every single day, even under unexpected duress. I’m living in that, and I know it’s possible. I want to continue to be proof that it is, then build the products, services, and tools that other people can use to get to this level and this feeling. Because to me it is heaven on Earth.
Trends: Meat Quality, Backyard Chickens, and What Rob Actually Invests In [01:20:00]
Shaan: Let me run a trend by you guys that I’m seeing. I live part of the time in New York, most of the time in Austin, Texas, and I also own a ranch. What I’m noticing is that in Austin — it’s almost like LA, we have all types of health freaks — my extremely healthy friends are doing something like what a redneck family where I grew up used to do, which is: they buy a cow. You go in with your neighbor, someone slaughters it, and you get the whole cow for the year. I noticed Zuckerberg made a commitment that he was only going to eat what he killed or grew. And I’ve seen a lot of tweets recently where people say, “I’m eating healthy but I still feel bad. But when I go to Europe I feel good.” There’s the difference in how the FDA and EU measure food, the preservatives and things.
Shaan: My prediction is that in the next five to ten years we’re going to see a couple of brands where you can buy meat online — or even revolting against Whole Foods meat. Are you eating just meat off the shelf from Whole Foods, or do you get it from somewhere special?
Rob: My meat is not so special to me. I get meal delivery seven days a week from a local chef — it’s all organic, grass-fed.
Shaan: Yeah, and so that tastes so bad, man.
Rob: Look, that’s my baseline. Then I have breakfast Wednesdays with my wife, Friday night pasta, Sunday night sushi — I have a rhythm of dates I take my wife on. But at this stage, I look at that protein as as much as I’m willing to dedicate to what’s in my body until the data shows me that getting Daisy in the backyard and cutting Daisy up is going to deliver more nutrients and add to a longer, higher-quality life. I would need the data to take me there. Right now that’s enough for my personal capacity.
Sam: I think this is going to be a thing, Shaan. If you don’t know — there’s a company that just raised money from Peter Thiel called Coop, and they’re making the Tesla of chicken coops so normal people could have one in their backyard.
Shaan: That guy is the “I crack” guy, right? Same guy?
Sam: AJ — I’m so fascinated by this. But fundamentally, would you have your own chickens that you slaughtered?
Rob: No — it’s for the eggs. It’s for the eggs.
Sam: Eggs, bro. You just told me a shower head company is going to be worth a billion dollars, and you just bought a $10M piece of land. So, look — you might have an error in your judgment. Things happen.
Rob: Look, for eggs maybe. For the beef, I don’t know. But when you look at trends on an ongoing basis, you refine your lens. The things that were improbable that ended up working — when they’re harder to see, you know what I mean? My lens always ties back to the probability of the unit economics and the recurring revenue aspect. Even when I think about the Coop — if you’re selling a single piece of hardware, now you’ve got an incredibly small customer base in the very beginning. The ultra-healthy. And it’s like a mattress — in the direct-to-consumer mattress game, as soon as they buy one, they don’t need another one for 15 years. It would suffer that same consequence. Versus five years ago, Coop would get a $100M valuation based on, “There’s gonna be coops in every house in the world.” My lens always goes back to how much recurring revenue the idea could create from a long-term value perspective, versus the tough hardware businesses with minimal margin — you sell one and you’re done.
Sam: What trends interest you now? What do you think’s going to be popular in the next five years, and where are you investing?
Rob: I don’t invest in anything. I invest in real estate and businesses that I create. I haven’t invested in a new venture since Jolie. But when I look out into the future, the type of stuff I would do would still be related to biofeedback, health customization, things that help lead you to optimizing your overall health and well-being.
Rob: I do think — those glucose monitors that give you an indication of what your blood sugar is doing when you eat food — they’re going to evolve that to eventually become dopamine and cortisol monitors. It’s going to end up being a cornerstone of how you understand how your life is actually feeling, based off of what your blood is saying in real time. I think that’s going to make a big impact.
Rob: And I want to time into creating the existence management system that helps you manage how all of it fits together — to lead to your present moment and help you optimize for guiding your life toward creating higher-energy present moments that you use with purpose. Whether that’s to be on your phone and watch TV with your wife because you’re tired, or to be ultra-present with your kids, or to design a better future for yourself. It’s really about: how do you become healthy, develop knowledge of yourself, develop ultra-awareness of everything about you, so that you can continually live a consistent state of joy? Because feeling joy over long periods of time is what creates the feeling of happiness.
Production Companies: The Worst Business You Can Get Into [01:30:00]
Sam: I know people in the comments are gonna be like, “Why is that douchebag bringing up me?” I just know they’re gonna flame me in the YouTube comments.
Rob: I already know. Yeah.
Sam: Rob, can you give the two-minute crash course on something I’ve been interested in and know you know very well — production companies? I noticed Reese Witherspoon’s production company sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. I saw Peter Chernin from The Chernin Group is doing a roll-up of production companies, putting a billion dollars to work. And I just look at people who create Netflix shows — like Love Is Blind ranked number one — and I go, “Who created this?” A small production company. Is this like the startup game where you create the next hit show and become a billionaire? Or is it a ruthless business? You sold your production company for $200M and had an offer on the table for $400M that fell apart recently.
Rob: It is the worst business you could ever get in. And I’ll explain why. It’s a “shoot what you kill” game, and the distributors control all of the money. You have a hit show and a flourishing production company — and then the show gets canceled and your company is worth zero. Shows don’t get picked up for long periods of time.
Rob: I have a five-year, 1,680-episode order of television. It is unprecedented in all of production. It does not exist. But why is it hard for me to turn around and sell that? Because it’s one single show. Now they look at it and it’s so expensive because it’s made the production company so profitable.
Rob: Let’s just say that didn’t push you away. A production company is built like this: you’ve got to build the infrastructure — camera equipment, finishing equipment, licensing for music. Then you go and give a budget to a network who’s going to give you $500K for an episode, and you’ve got to figure out how to pull 20 to 30% of that in margin. The only way you can do that is to look at all the different ways to scrape margin out of that budget by owning things vertically integrated.
Rob: A lot of times people have television shows and just get paid an executive producer fee. Someone like Jeff Tremaine — one of the executive producers on Ridiculousness — makes millions off of that show just off his executive producer fee. Nothing else. What we did: we rolled in our executive producer fees, then built out the entire post, finishing, and music division to push our margins up to create a sellable asset. Then we had multiple shows. And the long-term sustainability of Ridiculousness created the value that allowed us to sell it.
Rob: Even if you launch a production company and have Love Is Blind as a hit show — you’re not making that much money off of it. You’re now hoping to stack shows and pull from that margin you get to split. Then you trade on EBITDA. When you sell the business you’re trading at maybe five or six times EBITDA. And a lot of times now they won’t even buy you outright — they’ll partner with you and incentivize a long-term earn-out, because they don’t want to pay five or six times EBITDA and then the show goes away.
Rob: When you think about the big dogs doing it — they’re buying the creative minds that are making new content all the time. When you look at that aggregate, you can have a couple slip and a couple of heroes, and when you see them all together, you can bet it’s gonna generate a ton of cash. The industry is built around being incredibly lean and profitable. The accordion moves: you get a big show and all this stuff, the show goes away, you bring it all the way back down because so many people were under the show itself.
Rob: Is there an opportunity for creatives in this space? Yes, because Endeavor’s doing it, Chernin’s doing it. But it’s extraordinarily difficult. The gatekeepers are the distributors — the Netflixes, the Paramounts. You can attempt to create your own platform, distribute yourself on YouTube, but it’s expensive and difficult to build audiences. And really, those distributors are the gatekeepers to the quality of the asset you’re creating and whether or not someone will decide you’re worth the purchase. All of that is incredibly difficult to make happen.
Wrap-Up and Next Chapter [01:40:00]
Sam: Perfect answer — exactly what I was looking for. Rob, this has been amazing. One last thing — where should people follow up? Where do you want people to go?
Rob: Rob Dyrdek across social, RobDyrdek.com. I got “Building with Rob” the podcast, but really I’m not out pitching nothing — I’m just out trying to figure it out, keep evolving. One day I’m gonna come back on with my software when it’s done. First I’m gonna send it to you guys. And then when the book and the philosophy are out and the software is out, it’s gonna be about how do we convert the listeners into changing their lives from being erratic into harmonious, high-quality existences with the existence operating system. But that’s off in the future.
Rob: Now I’m just glad to reconnect. I’m thankful for you guys for kind of starting the spark of the whole thing. And I’m even thankful for you posting all the data and using the customer acquisition from the stuff that I sent you — you know, you know what happened, Sam.
Sam: Yeah, so basically: he came on, did the Rhythm of Existence, sent us the Excel PDF. We post it on Twitter, it was kind of over. Then about a year later I was thinking about how to build my email list. I wanted the right type of person to subscribe — the like-minded people. And I was like, what would the right type of person be into? And I was like: the Rob Dyrdek time tracker. That’s my type of nerd. So we put it up as a lead magnet. We started spending a bunch of money on it. And Rob emails me like six months ago. He’s like, “Bro, you’re blowing me up with this sheet. It’s all good, but you’ve gotta update the photo — you’re using the wrong photo from a few years ago.” So we updated the photo, and I was like, “Oh man, I feel bad” — we took the whole ad down and started putting something else up. But it was a moment of embarrassment.
Rob: Don’t feel bad. To me it just perpetuates the narrative of the level of discipline, commitment, and data-driven approach. And I was like, they’re preaching my gospel and it makes me look like a badass. You just should have asked me first.
Sam: Yeah, I should have asked you first and I had forgotten to do that. That’s why I felt bad.
Rob: I appreciate it. I thought it was funny. But I was also interested in the data — how many did it convert? I wonder how many, just to understand from my perspective.
Sam: There was nothing to convert to, right? Since you had the DocuSign, it was just views of the PDF. I don’t think it ran for too long. Maybe five to ten thousand hits.
Rob: A good amount. And again — I love that as just another data point. That’s why I was like, “Use the new stuff, make it feel more inviting, more exciting for people to see it.”
Shaan: Rob’s getting triggered now, by the way. This is him working on that trigger of not getting angry.
Rob: Ha. I was talking to somebody yesterday about triggers. They were like, “Man, he just pushes my buttons.” And I was like, “Dude — you’re like a Blackberry. You’re just covered in buttons. The problem is not that he pushed a button. You’ve got so many buttons to push. You want to be an iPhone. No buttons. Nothing to push. What can someone do to you? Now you’re unstoppable.” And it’s possible for everybody to get there.
Sam: Awesome. Well we appreciate this, dude. Last time, video and audio had like half a million views. I have a feeling this is going to crush it. We appreciate you.
Rob: Till we meet again. See you guys.
Sam: See you.